Chop Chop (18 page)

As I considered this, a shout went up from the other side of the room and Camp Charles, pouting insanely, steamed onto the dance floor, taking Harmony by the waist and gyrating around her as if she were a totem in a West End musical about savages. She was a totem, to me, but I would never have treated her in such an ungentlemanly way. I could only watch as they danced, pained that I might have missed my one chance, agonizing over whether Camp Charles had been telling the truth when he'd told Ramilov that he'd sucked enough dicks to know he was straight. I have been reliably informed by several parties since that nothing happened between Harmony and Camp Charles, but at the time the worry rendered me quite speechless, and after a few fruitless attempts at conversation with a squiffy Racist Dave I made my excuses and went home. Home to my father, who in my absence had cultivated strong feelings that if there was free booze he should have been told about it. Such was my fate.

—

Ramilov's fate we learned the next morning, when the man himself, with immense, unsavory relish, recounted his adventures to the kitchen.

“Well, now, have I got a story to tell you gentlemen,” he said. “Herculean. Someone should give me a medal.”

“Get on with it, Ramilov,” said Racist Dave. “Did you bang her or what?”

“
Bang
is not the word for such artistry,” Ramilov replied. “No. This was seduction, pure and simple. A big fucking pile up of pheromones. I put the moves on her, and when that happens, few can resist. Before I knew it she was pulling me into the dry store by my
shirt and snogging my face off. She jumped me, boys. Like a beast unchained. Yours truly was caught off guard. Took me a moment to find the appropriate response. But I did find it, and I was going to give it to her right then and there on the flour bin but she said no, not here, let's take our time over this. Who was I to argue? We got a cab back to mine and she was biting my lips and scratching my neck the whole way and I was thinking, Steady, mate, this one might be trouble, you could be out of your depth here. Oh, she was fiending for it. I think that cabbie had a hard-on watching us. I fucking would have. . . .

“So we get back to mine and I tell her to wait in the bedroom while I get us some drinks. Then while I'm in the kitchen I remember my bedroom is a fucking state and she'll probably freak out when she sees it and fucking dry up completely. And so I'm pouring the drinks, cursing my luck that I've lost my first bit of muff in months because of a wank sock or a dog collar”—at this stage in the telling Dave's face clouded with questions—“but when I get back to my room, guess what? She's totally stripped off. Naked in my room, immortal amid ruin. What a sight, boys. What a sight. I know I've sometimes said she looks plain but this was a sight.”

“You said she looked like a potato,” Dave reminded him.

“Well, last night she looked like a sexy potato,” Ramilov continued. “The sexiest potato I've ever seen. Beautiful heavy breasts with these puffy pink nipples. Oh, boys. Her skin was so hot I almost fucking burned myself. And wet as anything. She tasted like chicken stock. . . .”

Wank sock? Chicken stock?
The words were gathering in disturbing juxtaposition. But Ramilov was warming to his theme, and he was not to be stopped.

“I'd barely got my head down there and she was crying out. I was obligated to mount her. Thank god for the booze, that's all I
can say, 'cause I'd have lasted all of two seconds without it. But I was in the zone, comfortably numb, as the song goes, and we were rolling all over the place, her sort of wrestling me and giving me little scratches and bites and growls and I was scratching and biting and growling right back. . . .”

Ramilov, eyes closed, hips grinding, acted out the scratching and biting.

“We were going at it so hard we fell off the bed and smashed the lamp and I thought I'd broken my cock but it turned out it was all right after a bit and we got back to it on the floor, her riding me, holding her hair up while she did it and I thought that was just about the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. . . .”

Ramilov, now in a state of great excitement, mimicked the waitress with the button nose.

“And she was whispering all sorts of filth, telling me how much she wanted it and I thought, fuck it, go for broke, so I flipped her over, licked her Gordon Ramsay and gave her a dose of my Jamie Oliver in there for good measure. . . .”

This final detail was a conflation of metaphors and imagery that no one was happy with. Racist Dave winced. I giggled uncomfortably. From the other side of the kitchen Harmony glared at Ramilov, then at me. I shut up very quickly—that look was enough to turn me inside out. The ancients believed that certain women in Scythia, if angry with a man, could kill him with a single glance.

“Yes,” Ramilov concluded happily. “A wonderful night. I just wish I could remember her name.”

R
amilov never did sleep with the button-nosed waitress again, for reasons he could not fathom. And though he was told her name many times, he never did remember it. She left The Swan soon afterward. This was probably not because of anything Ramilov had said or done; it was simply the nature of things. Waitresses and chefs came and went all the time. The service industry is an eternal circuit of change and renewal. Labor is cheap, and so is drama. Only a few hold grimly on. Restaurant owners regularly shut their places down, then reopen them with a new name or a lick of paint. A waiter who walks out in the middle of Saturday service might be back by Tuesday. And if not him, another like him: hopeful, uncertain, passing through. So it was with only mild surprise that news of Dibden's return was met.

“Reunited at last!” Ramilov cried when he saw Dibden's familiar gangly frame at the back door one morning in late February. “Dibden and I. A classic duo. Morecambe and Wise. Laurel and Hardy. Mice and Men.”

“I read that,” said Dibden entering, still very much haunted. “About the big bloke with the hamster.”

“Think about what you're saying, knobber,” said Ramilov. “The clue's in the title. It's not called
Of Blokes and Hamsters
, is it?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Dibden.

“It's all right, Dibden,” said Ramilov. “You're my colleague again and I won't hear a word said against you.”

Dibden had returned to us! Dibden, with his quaint aristocratic guilt, not so different from my own familial issues. Dibden, with
his hatred of foul language, such a useless, tormenting quality in his chosen profession, so spectacularly uncomfortable for him. The S&M café had fired him for decency, he announced sheepishly, as if the grounds for dismissal had been fair. Always with Dibden it was a question of the world acting upon the man, never the other way around.

Yet with his return, balance in the kitchen was restored. A gentle counterargument to the excessive machismo of Ramilov and Racist Dave. He was still shit, of course, but it was testament to the indomitability of the human spirit that he carried on being shit. And though Ramilov (who was now second in command, god help us all) continued to mimic buggering him with the donkey carrots, it seemed now to be done with a certain fondness—almost, you could say, a gentleness. As a team we had been through much already: Bob's violence and subsequent collapse, the crows in our bellies at Mr. Michael's, the blarney of O'Reillys . . . Nothing like abuse, self or otherwise, to cement a camaraderie. Rubbish though he might have been, Dibden belonged here with us, and I was glad to see him back. When people fall out of your life it tends to leave you lopsided.

The other consequence of Dibden's return was that desserts were once more taken care of and everyone could move up a spot. Ramilov started doing shifts on the sauce section so Racist Dave could stop doing hundred-hour weeks. On quiet days Harmony worked Ramilov's section and I was trained up on the fryer section to take her place. As a result of this reshuffle Harmony and I became a team. She taught me how to prepare the dishes, how the section had to be set up, how to organize the fridges. We left little notes for each other detailing the mise that had to be done on the other person's shift. And though I had always watched her closely, I began to pay even greater attention to the speed and agility, the sheer professionalism, of her thought and movement. When orders were building
up on the fryer section and people were starting to shout I felt defensive toward her; if she strained while lifting a pot off the stove I would strain along with her in sympathy. At changeover we talked, seriously, about how the section was looking for the night ahead and I would try to read her eyes for another sign of the warmth I had seen at the Christmas party. Only once did I see a flash of that other Harmony: at the end of a hectic lunch service I watched her take off her chef's hat and shake her lustrous hair free, then shyly cover it again.

Toward me, however, there was no ostensible heat. Harmony was mostly pissed off with me. I was clumsy with the fryer oil and cack-handed with my plating. I forgot to mention things that were desperately needed for the next service. Every day I failed to get through my mise
list. If there were more than two orders on for the section I went into a tailspin. There was no check grabber on the fryer section and I couldn't understand how you were supposed to remember everything. I had to keep going over to the sauce section to look at the checks, which pissed off Ramilov because I was in his way.

“It's like watching the plane hit the tower in slow motion,” he shouted at me. “Every time I see you. I know what's going to happen but I'm still shocked when it does.”

Where was all the time? Between the squawking of the check machine and the call for the plate on the pass the minutes were stretched absurdly thin. If I had to look for something—a plate, a cloth, a bottle—I got behind. If I deviated in any way from the method, I got behind. If I overthought it, like my father on the golf course, the fluid mechanics became clunky and I fell behind. Kitchen time expected half an hour of work in three minutes that felt like thirty seconds. When it went wrong these different values
of time became more exaggerated still, pulling the here and now in every direction. My experience lagged—I could witness every millisecond of my shame and savor the exact, awful moment my control slipped away. Yet as I failed to deliver, the demands upon me became increasingly frantic. I needed to do more and more with less and less. And soon I could hear nothing but the cries for my missing plates and it seemed whatever I did brought me no closer, I was sweating and whirling in every direction just to tread water. It was then that Racist Dave or Harmony would swing over to bail me out. Before long I would be reduced to putting garnishes on the plates they had made, forgotten, irrelevant. Pinocchio, dreaming of becoming a real boy.

“
How are you so shit?
” Ramilov would shout over the clatter of the stove. “
How is it possible? I would say it is one of the great mysteries of the age.
”

But I was no longer daunted by Ramilov's jibes. I kept at it. Gradually the humiliations lessened. I realized the secret was all in the preparation, and if your section was in order then you were in order. Dibden likes to say that “prior preparation prevents poor performance,” though it is not necessarily advice he follows. I developed little tricks to save me time and got as much ready in advance as I could. It was tactical: every evening a thirty- or fifty- or eighty-headed monster would appear and demand feeding. It was a matter of not getting caught out. I began to get quicker, to know instinctively where everything was and exactly how long it would take me to do it. I was shouted at less. And I felt a change coming over me, because when I stood in front of those fryers I knew I was part of the kitchen, really part of it, directly responsible for things the customers ate. Granted, it was soup and chips mainly, but every element of those dishes was mine, and when the bowls and plates came
back empty to the plonge I could say I had done a good job. Yes, I was very proud. Often I stood at the pass as if I were Racist Dave himself, surveying the happy crowds.

To see them happy made me happy. Could I have said that before, when I lay with my rumbling belly, listening to the revelers in the street below? When I looked in at the Parkway restaurants with melodramatic yearning? Or further back, before I came to London? Was there ever a time when I could have said that and meant it? My emotional career has been a series of small melancholies adding up to a hole. I have wished misery upon Rachel Parker and Tod Brightman, upon my father and countless others. Hell and damnation have been heaped upon those who have slighted me, upon those who have what I want. I have never been generous of spirit, and I have always excused that by saying a man with nothing has nothing to give. Now I felt my bitterness easing off. Let the famous young writers be. Let the girls who have snubbed me sleep with whom they want. Let this rich couple on table 6 feed half the côte de boeuf to their dog. Let this group of Primrose Hill mothers order off menu. Let Ramilov describe me as “a wubbering fucktard” to the fish deliveryman. Let my father wallow and snore. Let them all exist without my harping.

And this was just the beginning. Soon this progress would translate into other areas. There would be a lot of people to thank when I won my first literary award, a lot of things to do. First I would console poor sobbing Tod Brightman in the front row, who had bought a satin trilby especially for the acceptance speech he never got to give. Ramilov would get an honorable mention, for all the dishonorable mentions that made me the man I am today. With the prize money I would ship my father off somewhere warm, somewhere pleasant without mobile phone reception. I would buy a house in Perugia, or Provence, where Harmony and I would summer—good
Harmony, that is; the Harmony I had glimpsed fleetingly at the Christmas party, who had helped the needy beneath my window that night, not the Harmony who wiped my plate decorations clear with a single flick or pushed me aside as the checks mounted. I'd give lectures, the odd interview—or perhaps I'd decline them all and cultivate an air of mystery. . . .

Forgive me, London, for getting carried away with foolish dreams. Deep down I know I am no prodigy. Forgive Ramilov, for his many and terrible transgressions. They are perhaps too much for one man to bear. Forgive Camden Town, for its wickedness and merchandizing and zoetrope of sad stories, older than the hills. Forgive university, for not being all it was cracked up to be. It doesn't bother me so much that I missed out on the tender stuff. Who really knew anything about that, when it came to it? Love, sex—it was all a stab in the dark. Forgive Bob, for raging so hard against the wrong things. Perhaps in the next life, as Montaigne believed, his soul could be assigned a body according to previous conduct: lions for the brave, foxes for the crafty, hares for the cowardly. For Bob, I see an unscrupulous hog. If there is any poetic justice, he will end up stuffed above the bar of a gastropub. Forgive Bob's terrible wife, for being blessed with a trowel for a face. Forgive Rosemary Baby and This Charming Man, for sometimes life isn't so much of a gift at that. Forgive One-Eyed Bruce, who will surely kill me if he gets the chance. Forgive the brewery, for trying to serve lobster in a neighborhood where people shit on your doorstep. Forgive the shitters, for they know not what they do. Forgive The Fat Man, who now stands poised to finish this story. Yes, forgive even him. Forgive us all, for we have sinned. But who among us, if it comes to that, wears sin lightly? And who except Ramilov would take on someone else's? In Ramilov's defense, I would ask you to remember that.

Last, forgive my father. I'm not sure if I should specify what for.
The list is a long one. Forgive him for the way he talks about my mother, her sexual proclivities that I shall not repeat here, the shape of her body—
oh, those hips, you could have rested a pint glass on those hips, et cetera
. Forgive him that he has not worked in so long he cannot countenance the thought of a toilet other than his own. Forgive him for his feet, if that is within your power. Forgive him for his snoring. Forgive him his utter purposelessness that keeps him here with me. His reasoning: “Why should I go somewhere and pay when I can stay with you for nothing?” A gauntlet thrown down, if you like. If I wished my father to leave, I would have to pay for it. So I gave him the money for a room and told him I'd visit very soon. But he was back by the afternoon. “It got spent,” was his response. “You shouldn't have trusted me.” A lesson learned. Who said he taught me nothing?

Forgive him for pitching up at The Swan most days, angling for free booze, joking about me with the front-of-house staff even as he trades on my name. Forgive him for the embarrassing memories he insists on dredging up so publicly: that I was a fat baby, that I wrote a will when I was eight bequeathing my collection of rocks and pebbles to my mother. Forgive his frequent requests for money, which I am too weak to refuse. I worry about him, the lone country lad in the Camden Town bookie's, mixing with the wrong elements. I see the fistfuls of betting slips he pulls from his pockets and fear I am not the only one he asks for money, that he may have found other, less forgiving financial backers.

Forgive him also for whatever part he may or may not have played in the disappearance of the antique silver swan statue that sat above the till of The Swan. Dave has shown all of us the surveillance tapes of that afternoon and, although the camera's view is poor, and the statue too small to be properly seen, my father is the only one at the bar within snatching distance. Besides Camp Charles
and a terrified-looking teenage bar hand, there are few places to point.

“They've asked me what I know about it,” I told my father. “You can't imagine the shame.”

“You shouldn't blame yourself,” was his response. His trademark response to all my woes.

“I'm not blaming myself,” I shouted. “I'm blaming you!”

“Don't even trust your own father,” he grumbled. “Some thanks I get for raising you. You think I'd come to your place of work and put you in that position? You think me so cheap? Well, go on, search my stuff. You'll find nothing. I'll bet money on it.”

I did not like his phrasing. Why not bet he didn't take it instead of whether I would find it? Why not leave the betting out of it altogether? I refused the wager. Truthfully, I did not know what to think. But furtive searches of his possessions revealed nothing, and the missing swan never turned up. I had to go back to Dave and declare the evidence inconclusive.

Forgive him for the shame he has brought upon me, even if he did not steal that silver swan. Forgive him for the smell of home he has brought with him: of wet elderflower bushes and cornflakes, of varnish reapplied. Forgive him for his thin, sad face so like another's, for his occasional bursts of charm. Forgive him for reminding me of my brother.