Hungry

by Grace Dent

  ‘Larry worksh in the patissherie section at Harrodshh,’ I slur, wiping chopped herring off my face, having drunk at least five glasses of cheap white wine at a private gallery viewing. This was before we’d even reached Alphabet Bar on Beak Street and ordered some très à la mode glasses of vodka and cranberry juice.

  ‘Does Harrods even have a patisserie section?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s in the food hall,’ I say airily. ‘He’s a trained pastry chef.’

  I knew this as I’d been to the food hall during one of my first weekends in London, just so I could walk in, like Aunt Frieda, with my shoulders back, feigning that I thought eleven quid for a loaf of bread made with ‘ancient’ grains was normal.

  As Clare sips tea from a polystyrene carton, I begin shoving a piece of apple strudel into my head. The no-nonsense woman behind the counter is slicing a mountain of gelatinous salt beef. In the backroom kitchen, men hurl bags of flour into a giant mixer, chucking in jugs of water, yeast and salt. Soon circular lumps of beigel dough appear, plunge into boiling water, then rest on wooden boards before being shoved in the oven. Sammy Cohen’s shop, at this time of the morning, is full of happy drunks and sad drunks. It’s jampacked with smooching couples, hungry taxi drivers, the Met police night shift and a steady stream of miscellaneous night-time weirdos. I love this about London: things stay open. Sometimes all night long. As Dad always says about Carlisle, ‘It’s a nice place, princess, but you need to be home by seven cos that’s when they take the pavements in for the night.’

  ‘When is Larry ringing?’ says Clare.

  ‘Tuesday,’ I say, flexing my new chic Nokia Aida 8146, rented from the One2One in Wood Green Shopping City.

  A man waiting four entire days before contacting you – by telephoning to speak in person – is completely normal. Sure, my new phone has an option called SMS, which sends and receives text messages, but only an absolute weirdo would send one of those. And this gap between meeting Larry and hearing from Larry will transpire, when I look back on it, to be one of the best parts of the dating game. Human beings didn’t appreciate its pureness at the time. We thought the wait was agony, which it was, but the time between meeting someone in a club and setting eyes on each other was often deliciously long and filled with knowing barely an iota about each other. No texts, no Facebook, no LinkedIn, not even Myspace. You were in an information drought with only your imagination to fill in the gaps. By Sunday night I won’t even be sure what Larry looks like anymore. Meeting up will essentially be a blind date. Nevertheless, this is how people met the loves of their lives.

  For what it’s worth, Larry the artisan baker did not turn out to be the love of my life, but he was incredibly good fun on the three dates we went on – until I pushed him to bring me some of those super-expensive Harrods patisserie treats he was making By Royal Appointment for Her Majesty. Then he became vague. After three weeks of wild passion, Larry went quiet, so, imagining he’d not paid his mobile phone bill, I called the landline number he’d given me for emergencies.

  ‘He’s down Tesco’s,’ his flatmate said.

  ‘OK, tell him I’ll call when he gets back from shopping,’ I said.

  And his mate said, ‘No, he’s not shopping. Larry works in Tesco.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  ‘Oh God,’ the flatmate said.

  So I pushed him a bit further and it turned out Larry was not an artisan baker; he was a shelf-stacker in the big Tesco on the Old Kent Road.

  ‘He’s going to kill me,’ the flatmate said, his voice trailing off.

  I never heard from Larry again. He did not return my calls. He was probably off making imaginary cakes By Royal Appointment to woo other women until he got busted. In absolute fairness, I had another lad in Clapham on the go anyway. And I wasn’t an important contributing editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. We all got away with this kind of thing a lot more in the Nineties. The Internet ruined a lot.

  October 1997

  ‘How’s it going, presh? I’ll get Mam,’ Dad says.

  I can hear A Touch of Frost playing on the TV in the background. Calling home makes me homesick, although not enough to ever want to go home. I’ve not been back for a year.

  ‘Are you OK, Dad?’ I say. ‘Are you sticking to your diet?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he says. ‘Mam’s got me on a regime. Are you looking after yourself? Are you being a good girl?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  The best thing about me and Dad is that we let each other lie.

  In the first twelve months of living in London, along with a small group of female cohorts – Eleanor, Clare, Billie, Lucy, Sophie – I have been anything other than the dictionary definition of good. The previous Friday night we’d been permitted to use the IPC advertising department’s private box at the Albert Hall to see a Geordie kids’ television duo called PJ & Duncan, aka Ant and Dec, who’d had some pop hits and were finishing their tour with a triumphant sell-out London gig. After draining dry the endless free champagne that comes gratis with a posh Albert Hall corporate box and dancing to ‘Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble’, me and my gang of girls infiltrated a small, private friends ’n’ family after party. In a drunken haze, I was caught helping myself to Dec’s mam’s favourite wine and speedily identified as neither Ant’s nor Dec’s cousin and chucked out onto the street by two security guards. Undeterred, I dusted myself off, gathered my troops and cabbed across to the Leopard Lounge in Fulham, where we convinced John Leslie from Blue Peter to throw us a party at his palatial Barnes mansion. Oddly, he complied, and soon we were all in his lounge as he DJ’d for us by playing his CD single of ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos again and again, while I necked shots of tequila and slid down the stairs on the back of a framed poster of Cannon & Ball in panto. I left at 7 a.m., stopping the minicab driver halfway down the drive so I could be sick in John Leslie’s hedge. I did not mention this to Dad. Neither did I tell him about the Friday before when I’d ended up at a Loaded magazine party and made friends with glamour models Jo Guest and Linsey Dawn McKenzie. Or the other Fridays I wound up at Browns nightclub in the West End with my friend, a model called Michelle, chancing my arm at its varying levels of VIP room, each one smaller and more difficult to get into than the last until I reached the top layer, which was just a broom cupboard with Martine McCutcheon and Sophie Atherton drinking bottles of Sol with Mick Hucknall. None of these things did I tell my dad about. And I was especially secretive about the fact that my credit card bill was now somewhere over £6,000. Each time I paid off a lump of the debt via a set of freelance shifts, the credit card company kindly wrote to extend my credit. First to seven grand, then to eight. Wasn’t that nice of them? And ever so handy, as I did not want to ever go home. Life in London felt like starring in Smash Hits, not reading it.

  And there was another important reason why I was never going back: after a year of being in the big city, I knew for sure that until then I’d been missing out on a lot of great food. After twenty years short of heat and colour and joy, I was now living in one of the most delicious cities on earth. Yes, I very often had an empty purse and a nose full of black bogies, but I was also living somewhere where food allowed me to feel the extremities of taste and texture. How could I go back to Carlisle now I’d fallen in love with the slimy pink lox and pungent mashed herring at Sammy Cohen’s all-night beigel shop? Or Korean gochujang sauce over a bowl of bibimbap? Or fierce Scotch Bonnet chilli, hiding in a plate of ackee and saltfish? I loved chow mein, but I also now loved pho, ramen, udon and fideu. I loved spending Sunday afternoons in Chinatown, down Gerrard Street, consuming bowls of dark, wobbly, cloud ear fungus in vinegar, savouring the spongey bittersweet mushroom as it slid down my gullet. I’d begun to see that eating out was every bit as much fun as pubbing or clubbing or partying. It was maybe more fun. I’d started reading the pithy restaurant critic Michael Winner in the Sunday Times each weekend. His life sounded amaz
ing. Winner loved dinner so much he’d made an entire life from it, and that was the name of his column. ‘Winner’s Dinners’ was so well known that angry chefs even put signs in restaurant windows in Covent Garden that read: ‘This is a Michael Winner-free zone.’ The more he snarked, the more readers like me loved him.

  How the hell, I began to wonder, did you become a restaurant critic? In fact, how did you get any of the good jobs in writing? There seemed to be a secret way in which these amazing roles were being handed out.

  ‘So you’re looking after yourself, precious?’ asks Dad.

  ‘Yeah, I’m doing good,’ I said.

  It wasn’t the full story, but neither of us ever told each other that.

  October 1998

  At around 1.15 p.m. each day in the highly unglamorous IPC Magazines staff canteen, four or perhaps five fantastic, confident and deliciously self-important women would appear, and I’d watch them from behind my plate of chips. I was doing shifts covering staff-writing at a women’s weekly called Eva – a sort of semi-ladette version of Woman’s Weekly. I’d been writing a back-page, first-person column called ‘Eva on the Couch’, in which the fictitious Eva talks about her love life and friends. My byline was in a minuscule font and printed vertically, close to the staples on the side of the page. However, I didn’t care, as this was probably the first time since university that I’d written anything that allowed me to be a bit funny. The sub-editors were even leaving in some of my funnier turns of phrase. It was like a lightbulb had switched on in my head.

  Trying to be funny in women’s magazines in the Nineties was hell. Jokes, by their very nature, require a writer to be specific in their use of words. Each cultural reference, turn of phrase or brand name in a punchline is chosen with care. Being funny is a science. A ‘campervan’ isn’t funny, but ‘a Vauxhall Rascal’ is. The phrase ‘I drank until I couldn’t see straight’ is not funny. ‘I drank until I was doing press-ups outside the pub to impress some lads’ is much better. When a woman wrote funny things for magazines in the Nineties, she would often see it trimmed and steamrollered back into ‘house style’. I found it exasperating. Surely there were more women out there like me?

  In the canteen, the gang of tall, glamorous women with small waists would cavort past my table wearing belted trench coats and tweed skirts. These women never seemed to wear make-up; they just had fresh, clean skin, cheekbones and blue eyes. Their tastefully blonde or mousy hair was tucked neatly behind their ears. Their canteen tactic was to commandeer a large table at the back, before approaching the hatch one by one to scan the metal terrines of catering-company-supplied mush. They did this, always, while frowning, as if each lunchbreak was their first time ever seeing macaroni cheese, and each time they were newly appalled.

  Eventually one would return with a plate of dressed chickpeas and a green salad. Then another would venture off and return with a small bowl of the soup of the day and an unbuttered roll. Or perhaps merely a big pile of green runner beans.

  I asked the Eva girls who they were, but the names I was told couldn’t possibly have been true. They sounded a bit like this: ‘I think that’s Taffeta Flinty-Wimslow and Araminta Losely-Glossop, and the one in the cape is Laurence Chevalier-Ducarte.’

  They were the girls from Marie Claire magazine. And they were amazing. I stared at them like a child with her nose up at the sweetshop window. Although Marie Claire was part of the IPC Magazine family, they worked in their own separate building across the road from the high rise. These women were living the dream: they appeared on morning television shows giving their opinions on fashion, beauty, showbusiness or current affairs. I often spotted them getting out of black cabs with teams of assistants rushing to gather their suitcases. Sometimes you’d see them marching down Stanford Street to the office, frequently carrying a huge bunch of flowers or at least three impressive-looking goodie bags.

  All this made me take stock of my life. Winter was coming and I was living in a shared flat in Bounds Green at the end of the Piccadilly Line above a building merchant’s, with dodgy floorboards in the hallway that I had on one occasion fallen through with both feet up to the waist. I was scurrying off to the Piccadilly Line before sunrise most mornings and standing up in rush hour, dangling off a handrail in a fetid broth of builders’ morning farts and hangover breath, and doing the same thing in reverse many evenings, but now with hair that emitted filthy grey grease puddles in the shower. I was dating a guy called Nik – with a k – who was starting his own Internet dot-com firm in Shoreditch and was nice enough but clearly still in love with his ex and also had a latex fetish, which I did not. This did not stop him turning up for dinner at Andrew Edmunds with rubber underpants on under his Moschino trousers, shouting, ‘I have the pants on now!’

  It put me right off my risotto.

  I was also writing for a small free magazine called Girl About Town, which let me do a small profile of a new comedian called Noel Fielding, alongside doing shifts on an outsourced property section for the London Evening Standard. I lived from overdraft to panicked credit-card minimum-amount repayment, so although I read Michael Winner’s column hungrily, my own dinner was often a jar of salty bottle-green pesto with a dusty lid from the corner shop stirred into cheap fusilli.

  It was that sort of pesto, made of oil, dried basil and E-numbers, that stayed put on my thighs for months on end, forming a shimmering layer of trans-fat cellulite. I ate dinners of toast – made with the last of the frozen bread – with Marmite for the main course and lemon curd for the pudding. I ate it on my single bed, avoiding my housemate and his new girlfriend, who were conspiring to move me out and her in. Often after the toast I fell asleep without washing a shirt or in fact doing any laundry again, for the second week running, and would need to go to work without knickers, feeling not like a real woman but more like a feral animal. None of these things happened to the girls from Marie Claire. Their lives were 100 per cent perfect and I was going to become one of them.

  ‘It’s funny,’ says one of the junior writers after I’ve been at Marie Claire on work experience for four weeks – two more weeks than scheduled – my overdraft and credit card groaning and swelling, my rent day looming. ‘Your name is so long and grand,’ she says. ‘And then you actually see you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I laugh, leaving it hanging in the air. ‘And then what happens?’

  ‘Well, you begin talking and you’re, well …’ She pauses to find the word.

  ‘What?’ I say, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘You’re you,’ she says.

  ‘Hahahahaha, yes,’ I laugh. She means common; I let this slide over me.

  I’m pretty sure I only got through the doors at Marie Claire on unpaid work experience due to the use of my middle name, Georgina. Grace Georgina Dent. The Georgina, obviously, after my dad, George. This lengthened the short Northern fishwife grunt of Grace Dent and made it sound posher. I’d fooled them. And now I was in, like knotweed, taking root.

  ‘So there’s an editorial assistant job coming up?’ I say.

  ‘Yah,’ she says as we wait at the fax machine. ‘But they’re still waiting to see if Chris and Lavender Patten’s daughter is coming home from Hong Kong.’

  ‘I see,’ I say.

  I could not afford to work for free. Nor did I give two hoots about Marie Claire’s output, which consisted of serious features like ‘Avon ladies of the Amazon’ and fashion spreads where a fourteen-year-old model from Denmark would be flown to Rio de Janeiro to stand in a favela and model £600 hot pants. But the lifestyle was certainly glamorous. It was intoxicating. I was the envy of everyone I knew from university. They were doing boring graduate training schemes for British Telecom; I was having fun at Marie Claire, doing the lunch run for beauty editors who just that morning had been on breakfast TV discussing armpit Botox. This was the new age of the ridiculously hip artisan sandwich: each day a delicatessen faxed a menu to the Marie Claire offic
e, and I would ferry it back to the editorial floor and read it out loud in my Italian accent that I’d learned mainly from Dolmio adverts.

  ‘Ahem … focaccia al rosmarino, stracciatella and marinated Egyptian luffa, £3.95. Alsatian tarte flambée with leaves, £4. Organic pistou rustique with fougasse, £3.50!’

  After announcing the menu, the assorted editors and sub-editors would wrinkle their noses and say, ‘Ugh, not focaccia, I had my fill of that in Tuscany,’ before stalking off to commandeer their table at the canteen, which they all hated.

  I needed to shapeshift from being an anonymous, loitering, dispensable presence known to staff as ‘the Workie’ into something they saw as a payable human. The Workie – few people in Nineties media bothered to spare Generation X’s feelings with terms like intern or job shadowing.