Humor

by Stanley Donwood

  Three days later I receive a telephone call from the assistant manager. She enquires about the possibility of my working in the kitchens that evening. I ask her if that means I have got the job, and she answers that we will have to see how things go. This evening’s work will be both a ‘trial period’ and a ‘training session’. I want to know if I will be paid for the work, and she tells me that ‘training periods’ are not paid. In fact, she adds, with something of a giggle in her voice, perhaps I should pay for this training. I laugh sycophantically and put the phone down. The sky outside begins to rain, and I look around my room, as if for the last time.

  The restaurant is very busy. There is a queue outside, and the waiters and waitresses look harassed. I am hustled through the dining area to the kitchen, which I see houses two red-faced, angry chefs, three furious prep staff, and two large unattended sinks piled high with dirty dishes and pans.

  My ‘training session’ involves a great deal of washing up. The clientele of this particular restaurant seem to make a lot of mess, and appear to delight in stubbing cigarettes out in their unwanted burgers, fried eggs, prawn cocktails and pork chops. I am also introduced to The Pig, which isn’t a pig but rather a large metal machine. The Pig is kept in the very back room of the restaurant, along with large empty metal tins that once contained cooking oil and empty cardboard boxes. I pour food scraps scraped from plates into a bucket, which I then tip sloppily into one end of The Pig. I press a green button, and The Pig shakes and emits a terrible noise made of crushing bones and churning matter. When the noise subsides and the food scraps are all gone I press a red button, and The Pig shudders to a halt. Then I return to the sinks and try to catch up with the piles of crockery that have accumulated during my time away.

  By the end of the evening I am very tired, but the assistant manager calls me aside, and she insists that I join her and some of the waiters for what turns out to be four hours of lager and a great many cigarettes. We all agree that the catering business is a tough business that attracts people who are the ‘salt of the earth’. I feel very agreeable when I finally get home, and I fall asleep easily, dreaming only of detergent and the sound The Pig makes as it digests the leftovers.

  In the morning I feel considerably less sanguine. When I remember that I agreed last night to a shift at the restaurant starting at one o’clock I groan loudly and slump back into my bed. I realise that I worked for six hours and have nothing except a headache. Outside the sky is raining again and the seagulls are mocking me.

  At around half past one I walk through the dining area to the room at the back. The assistant manager looks very cross, and tells me that she will be docking my wages because of my lateness. She asks me if I have ‘punctuality issues’. I say that I have not, and ask her how she can dock wages that I don’t have. This is the wrong thing to say.

  Later, when I am called upon to clean out the pork buckets, I realise my headache has subsided. The job in hand is, however, so thoroughly nauseating and dispiriting that I take advantage of a lull in the restaurant’s activity to step outside for some fresh air. The assistant manager joins me and offers me a cigarette. She begins to tell me that she isn’t really a bitch and when she was a little girl she wanted to be a ballerina. Because the fucking manager is ‘off sick’ she has to do all the fucking work and really she wants a quiet life in a cottage in the country. It would be different if she was the manager. For a start she would be able to afford a better car and a better house. I sympathise, and then decide to take advantage of her mood and ask about my wages. She glares furiously at me, asserts that I drank them last night, had the temerity to turn up late on the busiest day of the week, and adds that the only reason she hasn’t sacked me already is because she is a good person and is determined to give me a chance.

  During this interlude both of the sinks have filled with plates and cutlery, and wearily I begin to empty one sink so I can fill it with water and detergent. After scraping the plates free of unwanted food and greasy cigarette butts I take the now-full bucket to The Pig. I press the green button, and feed The Pig with something approaching tenderness. Soon I will be forced to share its diet. I can see myself squirrelling choice leftovers into my pockets to be devoured later, out of sight of the rest of the staff.

  Eventually the last customers leave the restaurant, meaty arms draped around one another. My chores keep me busy for another half an hour, and when I hang up my apron and head for the door I am stopped by the assistant manager and invited to share a table with her and three waiters, one of the chefs and two of the food-preparation staff. I protest, saying that I cannot afford to spend any more of my wages on lager. They look confused, until the assistant manager says something quietly to them, whereupon they burst out laughing. It seems that the assistant manager was only joking with me about that particular matter. The lager is a perk of the job, a fringe benefit. It occurs to me that to have a fringe you ideally need a main event, such as a wage, for the benefit to be attached to. However, I am too tired to mention it, and drink lager for several hours. The assistant manager may have wanted to be a ballerina, but the chef had always dreamt of a career in the army, two of the waiters were actually ‘resting’ between acting jobs, the third intended to be a comedian, and the food preppers both intended to become property developers.

  The night ends in raucous laughter, toasts to the ‘salt of the earth’ (ourselves) and jokes about how ill we will all feel in the morning. I stumble home through the rain, thinking generous thoughts about my co-workers, and eventually fall into a sleep filled with dreams about the glutinous matter that stubbornly adheres to the bottom of the pork buckets.

  I am awoken from my gritty sofa by a determined hammering on the front door. It is my landlord, who wishes to collect the last two weeks’ rent. I clutch at my temples and tell him about my new job. This seems to assuage his incipient fury, as long as I pay him as soon as I get my wages, and he leaves, muttering dark threats about bailiffs. This morning, I realise, will not be productive. I trudge up to bed, anxious to sleep the remaining hours until my one o’clock shift begins.

  I make pains to arrive on time, and the assistant manager nods curtly at me as I don my apron. I know for certain that I am extremely hungry, but the leftovers I scrape into the bucket repel me, coated as they are in cold, coagulated grease and studded with crushed cigarette butts. I ask the chef who wanted to join the army if I can have a burger. He flips one over and passes it to me on a metal spatula, warning me that it will ‘have to come out of my wages’. I am not sure if he is joking or not, and he turns his red face back to the griddle before I can ask him.

  The burger is still pink and raw at its core, but I eat it rapidly, feeling a surge of energy almost immediately. I redouble my vigour with the dishes and pans, and before long the bucket is full of waste food. I go to feed The Pig, and it gurgles as I feed it. I have saved the leftover desserts for last, and The Pig lets out a contented belching sound as I pour in melted Knickerbocker Glories. But then there is a terrible sound of grinding, a shrieking, shearing noise that fills me with alarm. Hastily I press the red button, and The Pig judders on the concrete floor before falling silent. For a minute or two I stand still, the empty bucket in one hand, the other hand hovering a few inches away from The Pig.

  When I tell the chef who wanted to join the army what has happened he too stands motionless for a short time. Then he turns to face me, shaking his head, and says that I’d better go and tell the manager. I remind him that the manager is ‘off sick’. He says that I had better tell the assistant manager, then. Still shaking his head, he returns to the griddle. With trepidation I leave the kitchens and wait in the busy dining area until the assistant manager notices me. She walks rapidly towards me, flicking her finger to remind me of my grease-smeared clothing and generally unkempt appearance, and she mouths unfriendly words. The force of her personality pushes me back through the door into the kitchen, where she stands very close to me and asks me what exactly do I mean by barg
ing into the dining area like that. I explain the dreadful noise that The Pig made, and she marches through to the back room, with me scurrying at her heels. She presses the green button, and again The Pig makes that hideous screaming noise. The assistant manager presses the red button and turns to me, her eyes narrow slits, her face red, her whole body shaking slightly. I find difficult to imagine that this woman could ever have dreamt of tutus and ballet pumps. I picture her in them, and release an involuntary smile with my mouth. This is the wrong thing to do. The screaming that comes from the assistant manager is even worse than that which came from The Pig, which was at least non-verbal. She calls me a great many names, implies that my brain is retarded and that I am impotent, that my penis is smaller than her little finger. It seems that I have inadvertently fed The Pig a piece of cutlery. This will do terrible things to the grinders, she says. She tells me that because she is only the fucking assistant manager she cannot sanction calling in the fucking mechanic. I ask if we can’t telephone the manager and ask him to sanction it, but she spits furiously at me that he. Is. Off. Sick. And then she tells me I now have to empty the buckets of scraps into the empty cooking-oil cans, and she storms off, to get back to some real work and away from fucking imbeciles such as myself. Oh, and the damage to The Pig, when it has been costed, will come out of my wages.

  This is bad. The empty oil cans are quite large, but after three shifts here I know how much waste is fed to The Pig. There are only about twenty of the oil cans in the room, and I calculate that they will be full after the end of this evening. But there is nothing I can do. I am in disgrace in the kitchen. Nobody speaks to me, and I tend to the sinks, washing dishes, drying cutlery and so on until the prepping staff wordlessly push the pork buckets across the floor to me. On my trips to the back room The Pig sits idle while I pour the slops into the cooking-oil cans. The room begins to smell quite abominable, and I worry that the ghastly odour of the intermingled food waste will drift through the dining area, getting me into even more trouble. I wedge open the top window, hoping that the smell will be drawn out into the night air.

  After work I am not invited to drink lager with the others, and make my way home disconsolately through the rain. I have no food at home, and nothing to drink except tap water. I sit for a while looking out of the window, and then suddenly I have an idea.

  I leave the house, and walk briskly. The rain has stopped, and although it is still very windy the sky is clearing, and stars are visible through the orange haze of the city. In the alley which the restaurant backs onto I see that the top window of the back room is still wedged open, as I left it. I find a crate and stand on it, reaching through to unlatch the larger part of the window. Once inside, I close the window and turn on the light. Any hopes I might have had of salvaging something to eat from the oil cans are immediately quashed by the foul state of the mess within them. Then I realise: of course! The kitchen is full of food. I can help myself! Once in the kitchen I help myself to several prawn cocktails, a salad and some of the burger buns. I look longingly at the frozen burgers and decide to try to turn the griddle on. I place several frozen burgers on the bars, figuring that what I cannot eat now I can take home with me.

  Suddenly I feel quite full, and sit outstretched on the floor. Then I begin to feel guilty. If the assistant manager finds out about this I will be quite done for. Not only will I get the sack without even having got paid, I will actually owe money for breaking The Pig. By now the food must be sustaining my mental faculties, for I have another brainwave.

  In the back room I find a spanner, and study The Pig. It looks as if I can remove the side plate, which should reveal the inner workings. I am not of a mechanical bent, but I reason that it should be relatively easy to locate the errant piece of cutlery and extricate it somehow from the grinders. So I kneel to undo the bolts on the side panel and work it free from its housing. And then, in a gusting rush, a tide of revolting slop shoots out of The Pig, drenching me and spreading rapidly in a noisome flood all over the floor. The stench is atrocious, and without being able to stop myself I vomit copiously again and again, desperately crawling backwards through the filth on my hands and knees away from the still-flowing river of macerated burgers, egg, bread, prawns, cigarette butts, pork and various accompanying dishes.

  I reach the wall opposite and haul myself into a standing position. I am now dry retching, and my first meal in some time is mingling with the lake of effluent at my feet. As I try frantically to work out what to do, I hear a roar from the kitchen. The griddle! I wade through the disgusting goo to the kitchen door and push it open, inadvertently allowing the backed-up sludge to pour through. To my horror the entire griddle area under the extraction hood seems to be on fire, my burgers barely visible through the flames. Without hesitating I splash back and grab the bucket, scooping up about half a gallon of slop from the floor, and rush back into the kitchen to fling it at the griddle. To my relief the flames die back a little, so I repeat the exercise several times more until the fire is completely out. I stand there, the empty bucket dangling from my hand, surveying the full horror of the situation. I have never seen anything even remotely as disgusting as the scene before me.

  I tell myself that this is impossible. How can a long-handled teaspoon from a Knickerbocker Glory glass have caused this devastation? The kitchen and back room are flooded with the foulest liquid imaginable, the griddle and the walls adjacent to it are splattered and flecked with the same, the griddle itself is probably beyond repair, and I myself am covered almost head to toe in mashed, rotting leftovers and my own vomit. The smell is horrendous, and I cannot help but notice that the flood is seeping into the dining area under the swing doors that separate it from the kitchen. And, of course, The Pig is still broken.

  I cannot stand it. I am incapable of anything except escape. I leave, slamming the back door behind me. The wind has stopped, and with every step the stench wafts up to my nostrils. Eventually I get home, and with incredible relief turn on the shower, peel off my sodden clothes and stuff them into the bin. I stand under the shower for what could be hours, then dry myself and fall into bed, and then into sleep.

  In the morning it takes a while for the gravity of my predicament to sink in. I cannot decide what to do, and the fact that I am afflicted with a ravenous hunger does not make clear thought any easier. At last I decide to turn up for work at one o’clock as normal, and feign complete ignorance of what has happened to the restaurant.

  When I arrive I am considerably disconcerted to find the premises cordoned off with police incident tape. The staff are huddled outside, talking urgently, and I walk over, and innocently enquire about what has happened. The waiter who intends to become a comedian tells me that the restaurant is now a murder scene. He says that the early shift arrived to find the place in complete disarray, that there had been a fire, and something like a burst sewer pipe had flooded the ground floor. It had been the sanitising contractors who had raised the alarm when they found what they thought were human finger bones in the sewage. The police had arrived, and sealed the building with blue-and-white tape. No one was allowed in.

  Overcome with conflicting emotions I walk a short distance away and sit down on the pavement. Human finger bones? It is all rather too much. After the trauma of the previous night I cannot take this new development in. I have to eat something. I walk back over to my colleagues and broach the subject of our wages, and what is likely to happen now that there will be no work at this establishment for some time, or, more likely, ever. The other chef, the one whose aspirations I am unaware of, tells me that there is little chance of getting paid now. No one has been able to contact the manager, and in any case it is doubtful, even if he were to arrive, that the police would allow access to the safe.

  I’m not feeling very good. I leave, and then remember my friend, the one who recommended that I get a job at this restaurant. I walk over to her house, and she lets me in, looking very concerned and asking if I’m all right. I answer that I’m not,
not really, and recount my awful experiences since I last saw her. And I ask her if she has any food.

  After eating a sandwich and drinking a brandy I’m beginning to feel a little clearer. My friend has heard about the murder/restaurant business on the radio. I ask her if she thinks that I will be a suspect, because I must have left fingerprints all over the place last night. She doesn’t think so; she tells me that all the staff will have done the same. And in any case, she says that the radio said that the police are treating the disappearance of the restaurant’s manager as ‘suspicious’. Apparently he first went ‘off sick’ when she was still working there, and no one has seen him since that time. I ask for another sandwich.

  We listen to the radio, but apart from what the Chief Superintendent calls ‘significant developments’ and an ‘ongoing investigation’ nothing much has happened. The corpse has been partly reassembled and ‘is thought to be a male in his mid-to-late forties’, which my friend tells me fits the description of the manager. I think of The Pig, and those bone-crunching sounds it made. I had almost come to feel affection for it, but now my feelings are more of revulsion. The fact that I have been sprayed with the decomposed and macerated remains of the manager makes me feel quite horrible. We get the brandy out again and I’m afraid that I drink most of it.

  At six we turn on the television set to watch the news, but I am a little too drunk to focus on it properly. I fall into a doze, but my friend wakes me by shaking my shoulder. The television screen swims into view, and I watch with shock as I see the assistant manager, screaming in a most familiar way, being manhandled into the back of a police van, lashing out and spitting at the police. The reporter announces that she has been arrested on suspicion of murder, then tells the viewers how it is alleged that she dismembered the manager and fed him to The Pig, which the reporter refers to as a ‘waste-disposal unit’. It further transpires that she has been raiding his bank accounts to make a deposit on a rural property and to invest in a prestigious ballet academy.