Chop Chop (3 page)

“There's no bar work going,” he said, “but I need more bodies in the kitchen. People keep leaving.”

He looked at me as if daring me to say something about it. I remained silent.

“What do you know about The Swan?” he asked.

I knew it was a poem by Baudelaire. We had studied it in my modernism class.

. . . its feet

With finny palms on the harsh pavement scraped,

Trailing white plumage on the stony street,

In the dry gutter for fresh water gaped.

But something told me Bob would not appreciate the allusion.

“Not a lot,” I said instead.

Bob dug about in the sheaf of papers and drew up my CV.

“This says you've got an English degree,” he said, studying it briefly, “but it doesn't say anything about kitchen work.”

I agreed. Bob looked at me. He was still unhappy, possibly bored.

“Let me see your hands,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Your hands. Let me see them.”

Slowly I raised my hands to Bob. He looked and I looked with him. And I saw for the first time the soft frowning palms and feckless fingers, the creamy, pampered complexion of the skin. I felt ashamed and a little cheated. Could these really be mine? Bob grunted and held up his hands. They were huge misshapen clods, scorched and scarred by every blade and element known to man. Around the thumb and forefinger of each hand the skin was
calloused and dead, the color and texture of pumice. On his left hand, a livid gash that ran the length of his heart line winked beneath a soggy blue Band-Aid. The tip of the middle finger had been sliced clean off. He turned his hands over leisurely, continuing the show. On the back of his other hand, a purple scar the size of an egg marked some old traumatic burn.

“These are the hands of a chef,” he said. “The hands say everything.”

I was to learn that Bob did not give a spit about a person's accomplishments or curriculum bloody vitae. His preferences were altogether more violent and arcane. Bob wanted soldiers, psychopaths and masochists. He wanted people who would do and suffer anything for him. To each new recruit he would raise his enormous fists, slowly twisting them open and closed, and show off the throng of welts and bruises and scars, scars within scars, that ran across them, as if each one were a medal. As if each wound made him a better man.

Bob had seen my hands and he knew what I was not, but if I could hack it in the kitchen, he said, I could still be of use to him. Fifteen minutes later I stood before him in a knackered T-shirt and a pair of Bob's enormous checkered chef's trousers, the elastic exhausted totally, held up with a plastic wrap belt. The ensemble was completed with a dusty black chef's cap and my hiking boots, last worn for a camping holiday in the Lake District where he (the other arsehole, not Bob) couldn't get the fire lit and drove off to the pub in a strop and we sat there for hours in the cold damp dark, waiting for him to return.

“Just the basics,” Bob told Racist Dave. “He's green.”

Dave looked at me. As if, in that outfit, there could have been any doubt.

“Fucking hell,” he said. “I need backup. I need a chef de partie.”

“I've got one coming in on trial next week,” said Bob. “Russian name. Ramadov or something.”

“So I'm on seven doubles,” said Dave.

“Looks that way,” Bob grinned. “I'll be in the office.”

“You,” Dave turned to me. “Do you know how to wash salad?”

I thought I did. I didn't. I removed too much of the dandelion leaves and too little of the watercress stalks. My hands kept going numb in the water. The salad came out of the spinner too wet and had to be put through again. I thought I knew how to chop onions too. Again, it turned out I did not.

“No,” said Dave, already losing patience. “This is how.”

He cut the onion in half and pulled out the root, then cut through it lengthways, in five-millimeter intervals, without cutting all the way, then drew the blade through horizontally, again not cutting all the way, then turned the onion half ninety degrees and brought the knife down in five-millimeter intervals once more, reducing the onion to a dice. He scrapped the cut onion deftly into a container and returned to his section.

It looked easy enough. I put the knife to the onion and cut downward in intervals. So far, so good. Growing in confidence, I turned the blade on its side and, holding the onion tightly, drew the knife decisively across the onion and straight into my waiting thumb. Dave's knife was very sharp. It sung through my flesh so cleanly that for a moment I thought I had got away with it. Just a nick after all. But then the blood began and no amount of persuasion would stop it. And as the blood drained out of me, the panic poured in. It was the day my brother found the wasps' nest all over again.

“I didn't ask for red onions,” said Dave, looking over. This, I now realize, was very witty for him.

He sent me off to the dry store to look for a bandage, but the
wound would not stop bleeding and the bandages kept slipping off. I have never been good with blood: since my brother, whenever I see the slightest cut I worry that it will not stop. I worry, and I am reminded of things I would rather forget. I was struggling with all of this when the quiet dark-eyed girl came in. She stood in the doorway, legs planted slightly apart, her eyes fixed upon me. They were extraordinarily clear and piercing, those eyes, possessed of a striking light up close. I noticed her nose had a strong Roman accent, not particularly ladylike, but certainly not ugly. The smells of the kitchen, the sweat and grease and smoke, seemed to part around her. She traveled with a lighter scent. Sighing, she extended a hand toward my huddled, bleeding form. I was feeling very wretched and thought this a great kindness.

“Thank you,” I told her.

“Move,” she said curtly. She pushed me aside and pulled a tub of mustard off the shelf. Then she left. A dark moment for the ego. There would be some vigorous tweezering in the mirror later.

A ferocious-looking man came in carrying a stack of pots. He regarded me in silence. Clearly, the look on his face said, You are something that does not belong here, a large and useless thing taking up valuable space, a beach ball in a bomb shelter. He put the pans down in a corner and left. I was left alone again to wonder what I was doing in this kitchen full of hard and hateful people. I didn't even like cooking. But a short while later the big silent man returned and threw me a plastic glove. It clung snugly to my damaged hand and, though it quickly filled with blood to resemble a set of diabolical udders, I found that if I angled my hand downward I could avoid bleeding all over the establishment. I thanked the kitchen porter, whose look had softened to a grim pity, pity for the useless object in the middle of a war.

Eventually I pulled myself together and returned to the kitchen
where the half-chopped onion sat mocking. I finished chopping it and announced to Dave, with some pride, that the job was done. It had been touch and go for a minute, indeed that vegetable had almost destroyed me, but I had won in the end.

“I don't want one onion chopped,” he said. “What am I going to do with one fucking onion? Do the whole bag.”

The whole bag?
It was the size of a turkey. I struggled to lift it. No one in their right mind needed so many onions. That day I realized I knew nothing about food or cooking. Also, more worryingly, nothing about people or communication. Months of fiction in that armchair, and years of studying it before that, had left me dealing with life at reading speed. Conversations passed me by while I was still formulating a response. People here dealt with one another so firmly, with no concerns for the nuances of situation. Violent, ugly scenes were followed by swift resolves. A passage of action Dostoevsky might have covered in thirty pages was done and dusted in thirty seconds.

A strange and terrifying world. A world for my brother, not for me.

—

Later, as I was peeling garlic on the back bench, Dave asked me to step into the yard with him. I was surprised to see it was dark out, and I realized I had lost track of time. While I had been inside, the day had drifted into a cool, starless night. The moment in the dry store aside, I had not thought once about tweezering the spot between my eyebrows until I made it raw. At some point it had rained. The bench and empty oil drums were damp with small archipelagos of water. There were still trays of stew and pots of sauce and boxes of vegetables sitting about, but they were different from the ones that had been there that morning.

“Smoke?” He held out a cigarette. “You will,” he said when I refused.

He lit his cigarette and tugged grimly at it. I had the job if I wanted it, he said. The commis post at The Swan was mine to turn down.

I felt the muscles in my back tightening as they cooled. I felt the arches of my feet dull as lead. I felt my hand on the frame of the kitchen door, gripping it tight, primed to pull myself through it or push myself from it and move in curt, decisive movements, to move like a chef. I looked down at my numbed and scarred hands. Not the same soft and feckless examples I had walked in with that morning. I thought of his face, sneering at the suggestion that I, Mr. Useless Streak of Piss, could get a job when he had never been able or willing to do likewise. I thought of that sneer falling clean off when he heard that not only had I got a job, but a man's job: I was a chef. By
he
, of course, I do not mean Bob. I mean my father.

“I think I will have one of those cigarettes,” I said to Dave.

R
acist Dave was the best chef in the kitchen. He has insisted I mention this prominently in my recounting. In front of the stove he was a master: his sauces never boiled, his toast never burned, his steaks were always just so. He moved faster than the naked eye, and could remember twenty checks at a time. He knew the order in which every element of every dish of every check needed to hit the pan or the water or the oil or the grill for it to be cooked perfectly. All this is true. However—and I can picture his low brow falling even farther as he reads this—there are other things to mention if this is to be a proper introduction to the man. Yes, he worked twelve moves ahead, like a great chess player, but he could barely read or write. He had left school at fourteen to work in kitchens and left the North four years later when he boshed a lot of drugs he was supposed to sell and roused the ire of some unsavory types. They would kill him if he ever went back, he claimed, so he was stuck in the South with all the South's overpriced lager and dry gash and faggy blokes. Dave hated the South and talked, gloomily and often, about how boss the North was by comparison. North till I die, he would say, which was true, but not in the way he meant it.

The only thing Dave liked as much as the North was musicals. He loved the swirling, seamless orchestration, which was how a kitchen should work but never quite did. He loved the colors and the razzmatazz, the voices poised at the edge of flight waiting for the soaring strings to lift them off the ground (my words, not his). He loved the outpouring of emotions, for he was a pretty
phlegmatic sort himself and constantly amazed at how much feeling could be wrung from a simple lyric or a basic chord progression. Only a handful of occasions in life had the passion or the honesty of musicals: football matches, kitchens, certain “political” rallies. Dave loved them all. Being tuneless was no hindrance to him: he sang along to all the big numbers in his low Mancunian drawl no matter how busy the service. He knew he wasn't a poofter, so there. In Manchester his mates had struggled with the idea of a skinhead who quoted
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
; in the South he had no mates to curb his enjoyment of song and dance. Even Bob tolerated it, and had made Dave's CD of the Broadway musical
Wicked
the mandatory soundtrack for Sunday lunches. It was generally agreed that it possessed the right spirit of triumph over adversity. Yet Bob's moods were mercurial, and too much musical grandstanding could make him suddenly furious. To make Dave furious you only had to mention foreigners or get him drunk.

The fucking Pakis are coming through the Channel Tunnel
, he would announce over the third or fourth pint in O'Reillys.
We've got to close it now before we're overrun
.

Dave had a problem with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, with African people and Chinese people, with Muslims and Jews and Indians and Eastern Europeans and French. He had been water-cannoned while trying to destroy a Turkish kebab shop at Euro 96, and had put a brick through the window of the Salford branch of Blacks before he realized it was a camping store. He did not read newspapers as that meant entering a corner shop and that meant giving money to terrorism. He wore his ignorance with pride and could get touchy if people tried to divest him of it.
I know what I know
, he would say if he suspected attempts were being made to educate him.
Prove me wrong
, he'd say, and then not listen. He was conscientious to a fault in his bigotry and inclusive of all minorities
in his hatred. It was for these reasons, and others too numerous to mention, that he was known as Racist Dave.

He might have been an idiot (Dave, confused by this construction, says there is no “might” about it; for once we agree), but he could cook. That Neanderthal forehead held the secret to beautiful, light-as-air brioche and silky risotto. He created immaculate, complicated curries while propounding his theory of compulsory deportation for darkies. He prepared sublime turbot and lobster dishes for a hundred people, then went home, ate Pot Noodle, scratched his balls and watched
Mary Poppins
. Dave was a bundle of contradictions. Bob said he should see a shrink when he got a day off, but it was a throwaway statement since Bob did the rota and did not like giving Dave days off. It meant he had to work more hours himself. When Dave was off the whole place fell apart. Bob destroyed the walk-in looking for things and disappeared upstairs to visit his terrible wife when he should have been doing the mise.

Apart from his visit to Gourmet Burger when he had silently picked holes in every single aspect of their operation, Dave had not had a day off in three weeks by the time I arrived. Dibden, all nerves and Anglepoise articulation, was little help. Ramilov was yet to join us. Dave was, in effect, a slave, albeit one who swaggered into work in sunglasses and a gilet and considered slavery to be a good thing. He worked slave hours because people kept leaving. Bob said it was because these deserters were not true chefs, they couldn't hack it in a real kitchen. Dave, who was a true chef, was inclined to agree. But people kept leaving because Bob was a horrendous arsehole and only Dave was stupid enough (or “talented enough,” as Dave calmly suggests) not to notice it.

So the kitchen struggled on, carried by Dave and the enormous Polish KP and the quiet dark-eyed girl on fryer whom Bob patronized for being a woman but did not bully for the same reason. Other
chefs had come and gone with the seasons, I learned. The good ones never stayed once they saw how the place was run, and so the place was left with the rest. Dave has often told me what sorts these chefs were. Scruffy chefs, alcoholic chefs, agency chefs, arrogant chefs, flamboyant chefs, dull chefs, nervous chefs, troubled chefs, idle chefs, bored chefs, bullshitter chefs, young chefs who didn't know, old chefs who couldn't learn, chefs who spoke only French, chefs who played with knives, chefs who spent all their time trying to diddle the girls or boys behind the bar, chefs who dealt drugs, chefs who stole from the petty cash and sneaked steaks. Dave said that most of them didn't deserve to be called chefs. They were what you would call cooks.

A kitchen always got the workforce it deserved and The Swan, with its dim view of life and food and people, got only Dibdens, sincere but ill-suited, or the journeymen: haggard faces at the back gate inquiring about an ad in the classifieds or a boardinghouse window, oddballs who had come from nowhere and would go to nowhere, who had worked in thirty different places but never more than a couple of months in any one, telling the same war stories and the same old jokes each time, making the same enemies and the same mistakes and leaving in the same huff over some miscommunication or unfair accusation or murky rumor.

These men—the hopeless, slack-jawed cases are always men—form the backbone of the catering industry, though you will never see them on television or grinning from the cover of a cookbook. They are not champions of local produce or heroes of a certain gastronomic movement. They do not believe strongly in freshly ground black pepper or artisan bread. They are guided only by their indifference toward cooking and their antipathy toward everything else. Every year or so they will move to another town or city to “make a new start,” telling anyone who will listen that this time will be
different, that they have always wanted to live in
_____
and never liked
_____
anyway. You may see this type of chef smoking outside a cheap but still overpriced restaurant in, say, Victoria on any given day. A broken individual, leaning against the wall with ugly, lightless eyes and a miserable face that long ago stopped wondering where it all went wrong.

Dave, who has somewhat sniffily approved the chapter thus far (it fell off after the first couple of sentences, in his opinion), claims I had the attitude, if not the experience, of these chefs when I started at The Swan. In those first few months I was ready to quit every day. I hadn't known much about kitchens, and I was shocked that people could treat one another in such a way. From the moment the working day began the abuse was constant. The only way you learned anything in a kitchen, it seemed, was through humiliation, and the only way you asserted yourself was through sniping. The bitching knew no bounds. Not toward the customers, as people imagine—it's not as if anyone came into the kitchen and said,
Those people are a nightmare, spit in their food for me
. That never happened. It was all among the staff: everyone was constantly carping about everyone else. A snatched roll of the eyes when someone wasn't looking, a muttering under the breath when they stuck their heads into their fridges for something. Insults were thrown around openly too, at everyone except Bob and the quiet dark-eyed girl. It was no secret who hated whom.

A special brand of malice, however, had been earmarked for me, the new boy. In French, this position is called the commis. The English do not have their own word for it—“bitch chef” would be the most accurate translation. I was the person at the very bottom who did all the jobs no one else wanted to do. The onion chopping, the lemon squeezing, the garlic peeling, the cheese grating, the mopping, the labeling, the herb picking, the cleaning, the lugging,
the repacking, the fetching, the shit. This chef at the bottom has no rights, no independent thought. I was a machine, turned to whatever use the other chefs wished. Today I was a cheese grater. Tomorrow I would be a potato peeler. Whole days passed when I did nothing except clean the fridges or wash mushrooms. Once, weevils were discovered in the dry store, and I had to go through every container, several hundred of them, sifting through the different flours and grains in search of these microscopic pests. If we received an order of game birds, the chances were that I would be the one sent out to pluck them, the feathers catching in my eyelids, the coldness of the yard impinging on my delicate health.

By the law of the kitchen, all blame lay with the commis. It filtered down: the chef shouted at a section leader who shouted at me and I, having no one beneath me to shout at, was forced to absorb it. And once I had acquired that scapegoat reputation I could do nothing right. Worse, I think I began acting up to their expectations. I made stupid, clumsy mistakes. I became paranoid. When I came back into the kitchen from elsewhere it felt like the other chefs had just finished talking about me—a crazy suspicion, because there was nothing they couldn't, and didn't, say to my face. Not that I ever said anything back. That was the first rule I learned at The Swan: never challenge the person in charge. They could make your life more hellish than you could imagine. This, incidentally, is true of families as well as kitchens.

On bad days I felt as if one more thing would push me over the edge. Most of the time though it was merely a sense of confusion—about how I had ended up in this place, and how I could dig myself out. One thing I knew for certain: chefing was an awful job done by ingrates and arseholes, shit-out-of-luck people unqualified to do anything else. Every part of the job was awful, even the cooking, which was only about 2 percent of it. It was backbreaking, terribly
paid, dangerous, bullying, stressful, ridiculously houred, freezing, scalding, finger-slicing work. Surely this wasn't me. A man who had read the great works, who had spent time in the company of Shakespeare and Joyce. As I reminded Racist Dave, I had an English literature degree.

“Well, it's not making you peel those spuds no faster,” he said.

Potatoes? Double negatives? It wasn't me. I wasn't me. My body smelled of the kitchen: a creamy, rotten vegetable matter smell. My sweat was spicier. Hours after I had left I could feel the heat of the ovens continuing to cook me. In the mornings I felt poisoned when I woke. The skin of my fingertips was so ringed with permanent dirt it looked like wood grain. No matter how much I scrubbed I could not get it clean. In the few waking hours between shifts I would stand at my washbasin in my little bolt-hole room and scrub and scrub like Lady bloody Macbeth. But of all the agonies of being a chef, none are so painful as the legs. You are standing the entire time, for sixteen or seventeen hours straight. I don't know how beefeaters do it, or soldiers outside palaces, but I have never got used to it. When I was not scrubbing or asleep I lay in a torpor upon my bed, my legs buzzing bluntly, watching beadlets of rainwater gather on the electricity wires outside my window, slowly getting fatter until they fell.

The tiredness, and the stress of having to get up and go back regardless, soon eclipsed all else. I lost track of current affairs and the outside world. I barely even noticed the announcement of a new Tod Brightman book. Really, I barely noticed. Who cared that he'd already published his second book, at the age of twenty-three? I was too busy with work to think about that overhyped young nobody, that two-bit Amis whom I, at some unknown juncture, had made my literary nemesis. And those late-night missed calls from my father, they also somehow passed me by.

After two weeks of this I had tried to phone in sick.

“You don't get sick days,” Bob informed me. “Get your fucking arse in here now.”

Many times I imagined telling him I was quitting.

Bob, I am leaving to take up another job offer.

Where? Who would take me?

Bob, I am leaving to concentrate on my blossoming writing career.

My last weeks would be unbearable.

Bob, I am leaving to look after my ailing mother.

But I didn't want to talk about my mother. Let's leave her out of it.

Bob, I am leaving to look after my ailing father.

As if I would. I'd rather stay here with Bob.

Sometimes, while shredding cabbage or cutting carrots into batons, I found myself tracing the corridors of my parents' house in my mind without wishing to or knowing why, visiting each room in turn and looking in, testing little parts of my memory to see how faithful it was. I remembered there were hardly any pictures on the walls although they had lived there since before I was born, and I remembered the damp, unlived-in smell the house always had when you came back from anywhere, like it had been rotting quietly in your absence. I thought the glass on the front door might have been striated. I remembered the large oak tree that towered over the back garden and cast the living room in perpetual darkness. In the kitchen I saw the spot where I had dropped a pint of milk on the floor and he had chased me and cornered me with blows. I felt the carpet between my toes as I made my way up the stairs to the bedrooms. I was cold, remembering, because my father considered heating an unnecessary expense. Betting on the 3.30 horse race at Newmarket, apparently, was another matter.