The Worst Case Scenario Cookery Club

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘Come on, John.’ He talked to himself. ‘You’re a big bloke. Sonia wouldn’t be impressed by all this fannying around.’

  He added the coat he was wearing to the other coat on the stand and couldn’t help remembering how he used to get ticked off by the fact that the stand was always toppling over because Sonia used to hang everything on it, including her ridiculously heavy handbags. Now that it only hosted his coats, it never even wobbled but that was somehow worse.

  ‘Oh Sonia.’

  John suddenly sank down to sit on the bottom stair and spoke to the darkness around him.

  ‘I’d give anything to have you back, my love. Anything. You could put your handbags anywhere. You could hang your coats over the bannister. You could drop as many tissues as you wanted.’

  He felt a tear trying to push through. Sonia would have reached into her sleeve and pulled out a handy wodge of toilet roll with which to stop it in its tracks. John had to wipe it away with the back of his hand.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to himself again. ‘Be a man, John. Just bloody get on with it.’

  John went into the kitchen. With all the lights on, he was sure he was already starting to feel a little better. He put the radio on too. He listened to three minutes of a depressing debate about the NHS on Radio 4 before he turned to Classic FM. They were playing a terrible dirge. Eventually John settled on Newbay FM. The DJ was inane but at least he was cheerful, as was the music. John wasn’t really listening anyway.

  He put the curry in the oven according to Alex’s instructions. It wasn’t long before the scent of the spices infused the still, cold air. John got out a dish and waited for his creation to be ready. He cracked open a beer to go with it.

  ‘Look, Sonia,’ he said, as he placed the curry on the kitchen table. ‘I cooked this myself. Maybe I’m not so useless after all.’

  But he still found he had lost his appetite after only half a dozen mouthfuls. John just didn’t like eating alone.

  Bella was always eating alone. She couldn’t believe her luck. Getting called out by the DSCC – the Defence Solicitor Call Centre – to attend a client in the middle of her first cookery class?

  However, the custody sergeant was probably right to have Bella specifically called to the station for this one. Bella walked into the interview room to see a very familiar face. She couldn’t begin to count how many times she had turned out on behalf of Jimmy Cricket.

  ‘Jimmy,’ she sighed.

  That wasn’t his real name. It was the name, nicked from an eighties comedian, that he’d adopted for the streets, which was where he lived for the most part. Whenever the police asked for his address, Jimmy gave, ‘Underneath the Pier. Newbay. Devon,’ as his permanent abode.

  ‘Evening, Miss B,’ Jimmy greeted Bella like the old friend she almost was. ‘I hope I didn’t interrupt Coronation Street.’

  ‘Not tonight, Jimmy. I was at a cookery class.’

  ‘Cooking? What for? Are you looking for a husband?’

  ‘As always,’ Bella played along.

  ‘I don’t know why no one’s snapped you up. I know I would, if I weren’t already promised to Angelina Jolie.’

  He grinned at her, showing all the gaps in his teeth.

  Bella shook her head and smiled. Jimmy was a pain in the proverbial but it was hard not to like him. She had never seen him in a bad mood, though given the way he lived, he’d certainly be entitled to be in one.

  ‘What is it this time?’ she asked him.

  ‘Shoplifting,’ interrupted the police officer – Sergeant Mellor – who had brought Jimmy in. ‘Took a pair of trainers from Sports Shooze in the precinct.’

  ‘I was going to pay for them,’ Jimmy insisted. ‘I was just taking them outside to see the colour in the daylight.’

  ‘It was already dark,’ Sergeant Mellor pointed out.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Bella, knowing that it wasn’t going to be simple. Jimmy was already the proud owner of an ASBO, which meant that every little misdemeanour counted more heavily against him than the last. ‘Let’s get this over with, shall we?’

  Sergeant Mellor went to fetch three cups of tea from the canteen. He came back with a biscuit for Bella. She looked at it longingly. She was hungry. She’d been looking forward to that curry and cooking it had certainly whetted her appetite. But Jimmy was looking at it longingly too and the policeman had not brought one for him.

  ‘I’m not a big fan of custard creams,’ she said. ‘You have it, Jimmy.’

  Poor Jimmy. Over the years she’d been working for Newbay Law, Bella had come to know her client’s life story and she wondered if he’d ever really had a chance. He came from a chaotic home. He’d been taken into care as a seven-year-old and worked his way through eight foster placements and two children’s homes. At sixteen, he decided he would rather fend for himself, which suited the local authority just fine. Except of course he couldn’t fend for himself. Not in any real way. He slept rough and soon got into drugs. Who wouldn’t take drugs when they had to live under Newbay pier for real? Funding his habit naturally led Jimmy into petty crime. The prison system was full of people like him. Sometimes, Bella suspected that Jimmy committed a ridiculous offence for the chance of a hot meal and a clean bed.

  Bella had a clean bed ahead of her but at eleven in the evening – it took that long to sort Jimmy out and get him a place in a hostel for the night – her chances of a hot meal were greatly diminished. Checking her phone as she left the police station, she sighed. Not only had she had to leave her cookery class early, she’d missed the chance to join a couple of old schoolfriends in the pub. It was a wonder they still bothered to ask her to join them. Her mum, too, had texted, asking whether Bella ‘might have time’ to pay a visit that weekend. Bella felt a bubble of frustration and guilt rise in her chest. Her mum had wanted her to get a ‘proper job’ but she didn’t seem to understand the time commitment that went with it.

  Bella had started the day looking forward to feasting on a meal she had made for herself and intending to use the rest of the evening to catch up with the people she actually wanted to spend time with, rather than Jimmy. She ended the day with greatly improved knife skills, another Ginsters’ pasty, and a sense that something about her life really needed to change.

  Chapter Eleven

  While Liz had been at her cookery class, Saskia had been at a meeting of the youth theatre group at the NEWTS. She’d only recently signed up for the acting sessions and Liz suspected her daughter was motivated less by the thought of an acting career than by the fact that the most popular boy in her class was a keen thesp.

  Liz parked up across the road from the converted church theatre where the NEWTS troupe was based. Saskia was one of the last to come out. She was laughing with her best friend Georgia, who had also been struck by the acting bug. As soon as Saskia saw her mother, however, her face was like a slab once again.

  ‘The minute you see me, you look like one of those big stone heads on Easter Island,’ Liz had told her a few weeks earlier. That went down well. Saskia didn’t speak to her for three days.

  ‘Hello, darling!’ Liz trilled. This time she tried to manipulate the atmosphere with a chirpy greeting. Start as you mean to go on.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ said Saskia, as she climbed into the back. The front passenger seat hadn’t quite recovered from Ted’s visit to the vet and Liz hadn’t had time to get it valeted.

  ‘Good acting session?’

  ‘It was all right,’ said Saskia.

  ‘I want to hear all about it,’ said Liz, seizing upon the fact that this was already the longest conversation they’d had since Cakemixgate.

  ‘It’s not that interesting,’ said Saskia.

  ‘Everything you do is interesting to me,’ Liz insisted. She looked at Saskia’s face reflected in the rear-view mirror and was sure she saw a flicker of appreciation.

  ‘I think it’s going OK,’ Saskia admitted. ‘The group leader said she thought I had a good voice.’

 
‘You do have a good voice,’ said Liz. ‘You’ve been a great singer since you were little.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  Then Saskia said, ‘Why does this car smell? I mean other than of dog mess.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Liz. ‘That will be the curry I made at cookery class.’

  ‘You went to a cookery class?’

  ‘Yes. I told you I was going.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure I did.’

  ‘You really didn’t.’

  ‘You must have been on your phone at the time.’

  ‘I was not.’

  Liz quickly recognised the conversation was already taking a turn in the wrong direction. She tried to haul it back.

  ‘Well, I did go to a cookery class tonight and we made a curry.’

  ‘You made a curry?’

  ‘That’s what I just said.’

  Liz hated these exchanges in which Saskia basically repeated whatever Liz had told her in a tone of voice that made Liz sound like an idiot. It wasn’t something Saskia had learned from her. In fact, Liz didn’t think Saskia had ever done it before she met Brittney.

  ‘Curry?’

  ‘Yes. A curry. Chicken curry. Thai style. I made it from scratch. I boned the chicken. I diced the onions. I actually put together the spices. There’s no shop-bought curry powder in there. It is one hundred per cent non-processed. Hashtag healthy eating.’ Since they were at a red light, Liz took her hands off the wheel and made little quote marks in the air.

  ‘Mum. That hashtag thing you do with your fingers really isn’t funny.’

  Liz could tell Saskia was having to make an effort not to smile.

  ‘Well, I hope you don’t think I’m going to eat it,’ Saskia said then.

  ‘That was the general idea.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve become a vegetarian.’

  ‘What? When? When did you become a vegetarian?’

  This was news to Liz. Saskia had definitely eaten bacon on Monday morning when Liz cooked a pre-school fry-up in a desperate attempt to get back into her daughter’s good books.

  ‘This morning,’ Saskia said blithely. ‘Though I’ve been thinking about it for ages. We, like, watched this programme about factory farming in science? And the way they farm chickens is totally the worst. When the chicks have hatched they pick up the male ones and throw them straight into a chipper. And the female chicks that are left have a horrible life, forced to lay fifteen eggs a day until they’re worn out and exhausted and they end up in your curry.’

  ‘Mine was a free-range chicken,’ said Liz. ‘Never laid more than one egg a week.’

  ‘It’s still full of antibiotics.’

  ‘It was organic free-range.’

  ‘How can you even know that? I’m not being funny, Mum, but you really need to start thinking more about what you put into your mouth.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Seriously. I’m only trying to help you. It’s important to me that you stay healthy.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s important to me that you stay healthy too, which is why I joined the cookery class.’

  ‘You could have joined a vegetarian one.’

  ‘Had I known you were going to give up meat by the end of the week, I might have done.’

  ‘And perhaps if you made the effort to eat vegan and organic yourself, you might not look your age,’ Saskia said in a mumble. Maybe Liz wasn’t supposed to hear it. But she did and she almost swerved the Volvo into a tree as a result.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You said I look my age.’

  ‘What I said was that eating organic can keep you looking young.’

  ‘You mean like Brittney.’

  ‘Well … yeah,’ said Saskia, riskily.

  ‘Saskia, Brittney looks younger than I do because she is nearly two decades younger than I am. A fact which can’t have been lost on your father. She’s just twenty-four years old. She could live on chips and Tizer and she’d still only look twenty-five.’

  ‘She’d never touch Tizer,’ said Saskia.

  ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t.’

  Liz had recently begun to notice that Saskia had stopped joining in with her bitching about Brittney and, though grown-up, mature Liz knew it was for the best that Saskia had a cordial relationship with her father’s partner, Liz wasn’t sure she actually liked it. She’d preferred it when Saskia came home railing against Brittney’s stupid food rules. At the next set of lights, Liz turned to her daughter and said, ‘If I look old, it’s because I’ve got you greeting my every utterance with a sigh and telling me I don’t know how to feed you even when I go to the effort to grate a flippin’ nutmeg. That’s enough to make anyone feel ancient.’

  ‘You still can’t make me eat meat.’

  ‘I’m not going to. You can make yourself some mung bean soup when we get home.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘I’ve had a long day. I don’t need this. You don’t want to eat my curry, you’ll have to cater for yourself.’

  ‘You’re being so unfair!’

  Saskia grabbed for the car door handle to make a dramatic statement by flinging herself out onto the road.

  ‘Child lock’s on,’ Liz told her.

  They made the rest of the journey in silence.

  Once they were home, Saskia fled straight to her room, doubtless to log on and tell her schoolfriends what a witch she had for a mother. Liz found she cared less than she probably should. She had been so excited about her cookery course. So proud to come home with something more complicated than rock cakes. She had envisaged how impressed Saskia would be to hear all about the cooking process.

  But she had reckoned without the Saskia who existed in real life, rather than the fantasy child she conjured up when talking about her daughter to other people. Specifically, when trying to hold her own in a conversation at work. Corinne’s two kids were absolute angels. At least, that’s what Corinne said. So Liz had to counter that with a version of Saskia who was thoughtful and studious and well on her way to studying Sanskrit and astrophysics at Oxford. Liz had trotted out the exaggerations so often that sometimes she forgot that particular Saskia didn’t exist.

  Thanks to Saskia, Liz no longer really wanted to eat the curry but she knew that if she didn’t heat it up again right away, it would only languish in the fridge until it needed to be chucked out. So she tipped it out of the metal tray into a proper oven dish and set the heat according to Alex’s instructions.

  When the curry was ready, Liz went at it with a spoon. All the forks were in the dishwasher. Saskia was still upstairs. Ted was at her feet, watching avidly. The curry was OK but it was not as Liz had hoped it would be. Somehow it just didn’t taste as good as it smelled. Liz ate about half of it then pushed it away. Ted, who recognised when Liz had had enough to eat, put a paw on her knee and cocked his head winningly.

  ‘You’re on a diet,’ Liz reminded him.

  He cocked his head further.

  ‘Oh, sod it. I know you’ll appreciate it at least.’

  Liz put the dish containing the remaining curry on the floor. Ted tucked in eagerly, heartily wagging his tail as he did so. Feeling guilty again, Liz retrieved the now empty dish and shoved it in the dishwasher.

  ‘You shouldn’t have had that,’ she told her happy dog. ‘But at least if the spices give you the squits, you’ll have a chance of being on target for Saturday’s weigh-in.’

  Chapter Twelve

  When he got back home to his bedsit that Thursday evening, Alex wolfed down his share of the curry. It had turned out pretty well. He hoped his new students would think the same when they reheated their portions at home.

  The class had gone quite smoothly, he thought in retrospect. The words ‘Can’t cook, won’t cook’ and ‘Please for heaven’s sake, don’t cook’ had come to Alex’s mind when he first saw them practise their knife techniques and there had b
een moments when he thought it was all going to go horribly wrong, such as when John caught the tip of his finger, but in general all three students seemed to be enthusiastic and to enjoy themselves. Alex was happy to imagine the transformation he might make to their cooking skills over the following five weeks.

  Alex was hoping for a transformation of his own in the near future. After he’d washed up his dishes, he sat down in his single armchair with a folder full of paperwork. His ‘dream file’ was what he called it. Inside were cuttings from magazines and newspapers, secret recipes scribbled on postcards and napkins, letters and bank statements. Application forms.

  Sometimes when Alex opened up the file, he felt his heart sink. His dream seemed so far from reality. That night, however, he was buoyed up. It wasn’t that the class had been a huge success – how could it be when only three people had turned up – but it had reminded him he had something to offer the world. People wanted to hear what he had to say. They wanted to taste his food.

  He felt inspired enough to indulge in one of his favourite pastimes – matching a recipe to a face. When he thought about cooking for friends, he often tried to cook to their personalities. Now he tried it with his students. John Barker seemed like a traditionalist. He would be fan of a good Sunday lunch. Roast beef with all the trimmings. Maybe a beef wellington. Nothing nouveau or overly fussy. Liz Chandler, Chopper as she was now known, seemed like she would be more adventurous. She said she was a fan of Thai food. Maybe she was a stir fry. Colourful, full of energy and possibly mixed up. Definitely tasty. Bella was harder to read. Her exterior was smart and neat. Her interior was definitely more complex. He thought of a chocolate-coated ice-cream bombe but that wasn’t right. No, he couldn’t get a handle on Bella.

  In one of the other rooms in the building, someone started to play music. Loudly. It happened most nights. All Alex could do was continue to make his plans to move on. He closed his dream file, put in his ear plugs and went to bed.

  Chapter Thirteen