Chop Chop (17 page)

To our surprise we found it empty. The long table in the center had been set for the occasion and the candles were lit, there were bottles of wine open and glasses half full, but no diners. The dinner bell rested on the floor beside a wide chair of polished wood at one end of the table: the chair of The Fat Man, no doubt. Four other chairs were pulled up around it, two on either side. All had been abandoned. Yet there was in that room a strong, unmistakable sensation of being watched, as if the party had not moved on but was waiting for us to leave. We put the platters of food on the table and retreated to the kitchen. From time to time, if you listened closely at the door, you could hear the clink of glass or cutlery. That was all. No voices. No laughter. A “meal of silence, grandeur and excess” is how Shelley describes the king's feast in Queen Mab, of “unjoyous revelry” and “palled appetites.” “Fucking gay,” is how Dave describes The Fat Man's feast and, coincidentally, how he describes Shelley.

Dave arranged the ortolans across five clay pots and slid them into the oven. They'd take only ten minutes, he said, they were tiny things. And no sooner had ten minutes elapsed than the dinner bell rang again, three times, and it was time to bring the songbirds forth. We arranged the covered pots on two trays and walked slowly into the dining room. What I saw there I shall never forget, and if I had thought about it more at the time I dare say I would have dropped my tray of ortolans and paid a heavy price.

Five figures sat around the table, the head of each one bowed and covered by a sheet of black silk. Their faces were hidden, from god or from us, from both. They neither moved nor spoke. Fun or fulfillment was not their intent. Pleasant company had not brought
them here. Theirs was a grimmer ceremony: of bloodletting, of sin, of guilt and taking away. “For they [the evildoers] eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence,” King Solomon said in the Proverbs. An interesting man, King Solomon, full of esoteric opinion. Among his works is a treatise on the shadows cast by our thoughts. The shadows here in The Fat Man's dining room stretched long about, looping me with dark nooses as I moved around the table.

We placed a pot of ortolans in front of each shrouded figure as we had been instructed. It was easy to tell which one The Fat Man was; of the others' identities we could only guess. They might have been doctors or politicians or criminals. There was no type that ate illegal songbirds. Only one small detail struck me as familiar: the cut and calloused fingers of one of the guests, that livid purple burn on the back of the right hand. It had to be . . . Yes, it was Bob, surely, under the black sheet. After what I had seen between those two huge men, the abject terror of one and the utter contempt of the other, I could not imagine he was here of his own accord. Some debt was being squeezed. Whatever The Fat Man had on him, he was not letting it go.

Part of me—the tweezering, zit-picking part of me, no doubt—wanted to see this ceremony completed. But as long as Dave and I remained in the room none of the figures at the dining table moved. Neither of us dared speak. The silence was thickening into something quite peculiar now. I tried, in vain, not to think too much about the world we had walked into. Where had the songbirds come from? Who were the other guests? What other tastes might The Fat Man have?

After a time the figure at the end of the table spoke. From his circumference, that of a middle-aged oak, it could only have been The Fat Man.

“Here is your money,” he said, pushing forward a stuffed envelope. “Take it and leave.”

Dave leaned forward for the envelope and inspected it quickly. The notes flashed crimson beneath his thumb, far more than either of us had expected, a sweetener for this bitter scene.

At the door of the dining room I turned one final time and looked back at the figures seated around the long table, the black sheets still draped over them. Then we hurried away from that place of death and silence, Dave and I, and looked back no more.

M
y editors, Ramilov and Racist Dave, have reacted quite strongly to this first description of The Fat Man's shadow world. Dave says I am making us look like a bunch of pussies, while Ramilov writes to say we could have warned him before he went careering in there himself. He's right—we should have told him. Things might have ended differently. Of course, at the time we thought any debt incurred by the rancid Gloriana had been expunged. Bob's attendance at The Fat Man's dinner party suggested he was paying in his own way, for that embarrassment or some unknown other. We assumed we had appeased The Fat Man. For those assumptions, Ramilov paid more than anyone.

In recompense, he asks that I write about the waitress at the Christmas party. He is concerned that, the way this story is headed at the moment, people might think him otherwise inclined. Proud as we all are of Ramilov's achievements, I remember the event for another reason, an act of almost unconscionable wonder, a Christmas miracle: Harmony smiled at me. I am prepared for the teasing this admission will provoke in certain quarters, for it is the truth, as plain as the glove on a chicken's head, as my father likes to say. After all those months of working together, she finally showed a warmth toward me. It did not last long, only a moment, but the hope it gave me lingers to this day.

The Christmas party very nearly didn't happen. After the brewery had sacked Bob and granted The Swan a stay of execution, no one expected a party. But obviously they had certain milestones
they felt they could not sacrifice. Perhaps they understood how hard the service industry could be on a person, and how we had to play at being on the other side of the fence now and then if we were to remain sane. Perhaps they felt we deserved it after everything we had been through with Bob. All that wolfish watching, all those sly inflictions. Clearly the staff agreed. The belated Christmas party, finally held in early February, turned out to be a momentous occasion. An explosion of tensions that had been brewing for months. Chefs owe more to alcohol than anyone else does.

On a crisp Monday night, when the kitchen was closed and the footfall was minimal, Camp Charles locked the door and drew the blinds. A sign was put in the window announcing that the pub was closed for a private function. Large bowls of cheap rum and orange juice were engineered. For one night only the bottles of expensive continental beer were removed from the chiller cabinets in favor of supermarket brand lager. At six o'clock the chefs and waitresses began to arrive. The preening, in those few short hours since the end of Sunday service, had been intense. Each girl was scrubbed and sweet-smelling, wearing her newest and very best clothes. The men's hair shone with gel. They tugged at their crisp shirts. Ramilov, suddenly small and unremarkable when removed from his natural habitat, positively quiet when there was no brutality to be had, was trying to counteract the effect by wearing a shirt with two collars. An economics professor making thoughtful sips at an orange juice turned out to be Shahram in spectacles and a dark suit, while Racist Dave was modeling a low-cut T-shirt with sunglasses and a diamanté earring.

“Fuckin' hell, Dave,” said Ramilov. “Did you spend that Fat Man money on earrings?”

“Some of it,” a sheepish Dave replied.

“You boys are on to a nice little earner there, aren't you?” Ramilov said to both of us. “What did you have to do for him, anyway?”

Dave and I looked at each other and then away. We had agreed on the way back from that haunted house that the hooded figures and tiny corpses would remain between us. Dave had also seen Bob and felt the incident bore no repeating. We had agreed we would never go back there again.

“The usual shit,” Dave mumbled. “Bit of offal, bit of game.”

“A nice little earner,” Ramilov said again, shaking his head in appreciation.

“What the fuck is your shirt, Ramilov?” Dave changed the subject.

“This?” said Ramilov. “This is timeless style.”

“It's fuckin' gash. Isn't it, Monocle?”

But I wasn't looking at Ramilov's shirt. In the corner, in a dress of shimmering silver, stood Harmony. No doubt Ramilov and Racist Dave will mock me further for saying this, but her legs, which I had never seen before, reminded me of the banisters in my parents' house, the curve of the calves swooping elegantly into thin, fine ankles. I'd spent a lot of time at those banisters, listening to my mother and father's quiet arguments, so I know what I am talking about. Her hair, no longer hidden beneath a chef's hat, spilled gracefully about her shoulders. It was the color of her eyes.
Inky
was not the word. No, it was like a river at night: looking at it filled you with mystery and sadness. Truly, it was quite painful to look at her. But at least the pain was fresh. Those memories of Rachel Parker had become so dog-eared over time.

“I could go over and fucking talk to her for you,” said Dave. “Ease you in, like.”

He had seen me staring. At this rate I was going to get a
reputation. But even I did not deserve Dave as a wingman. I lied and said I wasn't interested, which provoked loud cackles from my idiotic companions. They spent the next few minutes prodding me in the ribs until Ramilov spotted Shahram in his suit, talking to Darik at the bar.

“Hey, Shahram!” he shouted. “You are looking
sexual
this evening! We are going to have a party, yes? You and me, dancey dance, and then I will pound you in the arse. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Shahram, looking confused. “What time, please?”

“All night,” said Ramilov. “At intervals.”

“Okay,” said Shahram again, turning to Darik for explanation.

“Not Darik though,” Ramilov added. “He like too much. Gay boy.”

Darik raised his big boulder head.

“Hey, I not gay.” His voice was high and nasal and angry.

“That's your secret, isn't it?” taunted Ramilov. “Gay boy?”

“Stop saying I gay!” Darik howled. He tried to grab Ramilov but the chef was too quick for him, shimmying away into the crowd. Some quick thinker put a drink in the big man's hand before he could realize his anguish.

The sight of everyone freed from the prison-regulation blacks and whites threw people somewhat and for a time the only subject of conversation was shop: what a customer had said last night, the panic over a table's missing starter relived. The waitresses formed an excited cluster at the near end of the bar, close to the pass where they had so often waited. They made small movements, keeping their arms close to their sides as if they were still serving. The chefs gathered at the far end to argue over the best way to roast a chicken, the tastiest cut of pork. Someone had heard that Bob was testing meals for the Wetherspoon pub chain and this information was celebrated whether true or not. Cigars were handed round. Ramilov and Racist
Dave made a point of leaning on the counter with exaggerated casualness, blowing smoke at the ceiling, and on occasion one or the other would throw in a raised voice, perhaps an obscene gesture, so they and everybody else knew who the customer was tonight. And there was me, loitering on the edge of it, trying not to look at the girl in the silver dress. Trying to be invisible, and succeeding.

It has always happened, ever since I was a boy. In groups of people I tend to shrink and wither. I do not mark my territory or sound loud like the other animals. I find a corner and fold myself into it, folding inward on myself, aware of how I must look, that scrawny figure with the wide face. I do not possess Ramilov's elemental drive or the plasticity of my father. I cannot sprawl on top of life and smother it with personality. In that sense I have never been a part of it—the anger and loving and fighting and fucking—but standing beside it, apart from it, has its advantages too. What did Nabokov say? “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.”

Racist Dave, his editor's cap on (if askew), says he will personally wound me if I name-drop another author. He observes, with trademark wit, that I am the pube stuck in his teeth and that we must push on to the party, where now the chairs have been pushed aside and the music turned up. A happy scene: the waitresses dancing giddily, throwing themselves around with loose, marionette limbs, cheeks flushed, eyes sparkling; the males of the species reclining, mammalian, like seals waiting for a fish, their warm soft bellies puffed in pride, their mouths wide, a row of dark eyes drinking in the movement of the girls. Yet despite this bravura the men's smiles were shy, for it had been so long, and they had forgotten how this game was played.

From this swelter of music and hormone the Polish KP emerged. Darik looked uncomfortable as he approached the chefs. The sharp-eyed observer might have noticed he wore blue velvet shoes instead
of the usual crusted steel-toed boots. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out. The chefs braced themselves. Finally then, here it was, the awful secret they had all pinned upon him. Scars ran the length of the big man's arms; his head, shaved to the sheer scalp, was an unfinished boulder. Those huge hands of his could have done anything. If he admitted murder, what then? Did you get the man a drink and carry on? Did you try to throw him out? Every man in that kitchen had made mistakes. Most talked about them openly. What had Darik done that inspired such silence?

Standing a little way apart, he arched one foot, cocked a knee and suddenly he was Darik the kitchen porter no longer but a fluid Latino hip merchant, sashaying across the dance floor, taking hold of one waitress at a time with his giant meat hands and spinning them expertly this way and that. Mouths hung open all around him. Ramilov looked pained by the gift he had been given. But slowly his expression twisted from suffering into ecstasy, his mouth yawned wider still, and a hoarse, delirious cry escaped him. Dave joined him with a low animal gurgle and soon we were all howling. The joy! The great collective joy that can wash over a kitchen! Darik beamed with happiness, basking in the music, and we roared back at him, wild, incredulous. Ramilov and Racist Dave, so often cat and dog to each other's philosophies, draped themselves across each other, weeping with delight. I looked at Harmony and saw she was laughing too. And she caught my look and it was like we were both laughing together at something that was ours, at something we had made. Laughing like lovers, or friends at least. Her dark eyes opening up to me, putting a warmth on me that had me jumping out of my skin. The joy!

It did not last, however. Before a sweaty, triumphant Darik could be congratulated and scolded for hiding his talents, Racist Dave started in on the subject of Africans and Ramilov stormed off
in disgust. I found him at the bar, necking the last dregs of rum punch from discarded glasses.

“He's an arsehole,” Ramilov said bluntly. “Wasting perfectly good anger. There's so many things in the world to get angry about. Things that deserve it . . . and that numpty pours all his rage into what bit of soil someone was born on, and if they eat bacon.”

Here Ramilov gave a shifty look right and left, then reached over the bar and poured himself a pint of the expensive German pilsner we were not allowed to drink. He quaffed half of it in one motion, straightened up and continued.

“We're getting shafted from all sides by governments and banks and wars we didn't agree to and religious nutjobs who want us dead and famine and poverty and apathy and selfishness. We're being bled on the altar here, and all he's worried about is someone from another part of the world living next door to him. There's people getting their throats cut”—Ramilov's voice was cracking to be heard over the music—“people getting sold into slavery, people who are too weak to stop the flies eating their eyes, people losing everything, every day, people getting shafted generally. . . . But what does he want to know? What does he care about? Whether they speak fucking English or not . . .”

Not for the first time I sensed there were unknown pools of empathy in wicked Uncle Ramilov. You might almost say compassion. Hidden under many layers, certainly, and only reluctantly exposed. A tidy irony, given his enthusiasm for other kinds of exposure.

“You know,” he began, “I sometimes think . . .”

I leaned in to catch more unexpected wisdoms. But Ramilov had caught sight of the waitress with the button nose and the statement was abandoned in midair, possibly truer than if he had finished it.

“Oh, fuck it,” he said.

He downed the rest of his beer and threw the glass over his shoulder without looking round. Then he was off, shimmying grotesquely toward her. This was not a dance, surely, that he was inflicting on her. An elaborate courting ritual perhaps. It involved vibrating one leg at a time in her direction at a very particular frequency. The rest of the waitresses and Harmony, who had been dancing with them, scattered at his dystonic approach; but the button-nosed girl, by some quirk of nature, was responding to it. Throwing her head back, running her fingers through her pale hair, she glowed provocations, her soft features painted with fire. Ramilov stalked her with his odd little dance, closing in on her, until his zombie chef hands were clawing at her thighs and his nose nestled in her neck.

Harmony, a short distance away, was shooting disapproving glances at this unlikely couple. Of course I could understand her problem with the situation, what with the waitress being her friend and Ramilov an unconscionable pervert, but in that moment it was they who seemed contented and pursuing the right path, not her. She looked a little lonely, I thought, and the idea came to me that I should go over and talk to her, seeing as I was lonely too and such coincidences were ignored at one's peril. I took a few more sips of punch. A little more and I would be ready. I finished the glass. What would I say? Perhaps I should ask Darik for some moves first. I'd get a beer, and then I would go, whether I knew what to say or not. Just launch myself over the dance floor. In my head, pitching over my own thoughts quite uninvited, I could hear the voice of my father.
No balls, have you? An omen of impotence . . .
What was this obsession with potency and balls? Did you have to hump life to get what you wanted? Weren't there other routes to happiness? I tracked round the bar and pulled a beer from the fridge and looked again at Harmony. She had folded her arms in disgust and was prizing the
happy couple apart with her eyes. Even in abhorrence she was worlds above me. I wondered if I could launch myself that far.