Chop Chop (4 page)

On the landing I could see the rest of the cul-de-sac, with other
cars parked in front of other drives.
Cul-de-sac
sounds fancy, but it is actually a medical word for a cavity near the rectum. Then I am at the top of the stairs and there is the bathroom off to the left and my brother's room directly in front, untouched ever since. My fingers, reaching for the door handle, feel metal—it is the cool blade of the knife, the face of the mandoline, and I am back in the kitchen once more.

—

However lousy and tired I felt, Racist Dave had it worse. Dibden was barely able to look after his own responsibilities, so Dave had been working seven-day weeks since the last chef de partie's breakdown. Christof had been a decent chef, competent and quick on the checks, and Dave had hoped he was going to last. But something in him was blown: his nerves were shot by years of services and close calls; he coiled in fear every time Bob spoke. He would stand mournfully at the fryer, looking out into the restaurant with such profound sorrow that a few diners complained he was putting them off their food. He was thirty-four, which was too old for a jobbing chef de partie in a pub kitchen. Dave said if you weren't sous or head chef or in a place with a star by the time you hit thirty, something had gone wrong. Maybe it was drugs or prison or that journeyman transience, maybe you just weren't up to scratch. Whatever it had been in Christof's case, he was marked from the start. I didn't meet the man, he was gone three weeks before I arrived, but Bob's hatred of him was well documented.

I never trusted him
, he would say.
Did you see his hands?

Dave had seen Christof's hands, and they were beautiful. Lilac white, with carefully manicured cuticles, as unblemished as Italian meringue. They were, as Mary Poppins would have put it, practically perfect in every way. They were impossible. How could a chef,
in and out of ovens and freezers and brine, in daily commune with knives and graters and mandolines, keep his hands like that? It was witchcraft. Bob could not conceal his disgust. He tried to burn them every chance he got, brushing past him with hot pans or trying to push his hands into the lamps when he was plating up. He covered the inside of Christof's service fridge with pictures, torn from his terrible wife's magazines, of painted nails and feminine fingers. He urged him to chop faster, hoping to push him into an accident with a blade. He worked him like a dog, yet Christof's hands remained annoyingly, agonizingly perfect. Christof's mind was not made of the same stuff, however, and he flipped halfway through a Sunday lunch, storming out of the kitchen when Bob poured boiling gravy on his knuckles in an apparent slip of the hand. Dave found him sitting on the curb halfway down the road, sawing back and forth, glassy-eyed, oblivious to the traffic.

“Don't worry about that fat prick,” he told Christof. “Just push on.”

But Christof did worry. He would work no more at The Swan.

Before Christof there was Nick from the agency who never cleaned down and talked more than he chopped. Before Nick there was Leon, who turned up late and took three sick days in two weeks and had an excuse for everything. Before Leon there was Pavul, who had poured the old fryer oil into the pumpkin soup in an act of either immense stupidity or brilliant sabotage. Before him, no one could remember. There had been so many. And before and after every one there had been Dave pulling hundred-hour weeks, a cart horse, a machine. He acted like a superstar, but he felt like a heel. No matter how mad or bad the soon-to-arrive chef with the Russian name was, Dave had already decided to hire him. Bob wouldn't care. He would run them into the ground regardless. Besides, after The Swan's run of chefs, how much trouble could this new guy be?

T
hings were grim before Ramilov arrived, but it took his turning up for the rest of the kitchen to realize just how grim they were. Ramilov rode in on a storm and brought a reckoning. He welcomed wolves in sheep's clothing and bit sleeping dogs. He picked roses by their thorns. He washed his dirty linen in public. He let butter melt in his mouth. He taught grandmothers to suck eggs and thought it proper. He danced all night but paid no fiddlers. He lay down with beasts and got up with fleas. He dug his own grave. He foamed at the mouth when anyone said “organic.” He built a house for virtue and vice and made them live together. He praised his own broth. He was at war with everybody and everything. And it is now a matter of recorded fact that he was the instigator, if not the architect, of Bob's demise. Ramilov, in those letters where he seeks to alter and correct these pages, has confirmed as much to me.

Before Ramilov, Bob was unruffled and unconquerable. Untouchable. He pulled the wings off flies like us for fun. When Ramilov arrived Bob tortured him too, as was his custom, but Ramilov made him do it to keep order, not for recreation. Ramilov got under his skin. (This, Ramilov writes, is one thing I've not messed up in the telling so far. He is keen for the world to know his gift for chaos and dissent.)

I had been at The Swan only a week when Ramilov came for his trial. My salad washing was not much improved. I was holding my hands under the hot tap to bring the feeling back when who should appear at the back door but this dark and stocky stranger, our hero.
He slid seedily through the fly chain and stood watching us with a grin pasted across his face, like he had just transgressed in some way and greatly enjoyed it. Without doubt he was a strange-looking creature. His bulbous head flared outward at his shaved temples and bulged off the back. His arms hung limply at his sides like a decommissioned robot. His jaw jutted in some secret mischief. He looked like a skull. He said nothing.

“You must be Ramilov,” said Dave.

The stranger kept up his silent grinning act. An optimist might have said he seemed “engaged in contemplation.” Crazy was more like it.

“You all right?” asked Dave.

The stranger looked at him with pinprick pupils set in eyes that never blinked.

“I'm all right,” he said finally. “It's the others, isn't it?”

“What others?” said Dave.

“Yeah,” said Ramilov. “What others. Good one.”

Racist Dave looked confused.

“I'm Dibden,” said Dibden, leaning over to shake his hand.

“You look a bit like the bloke from Coldplay,” said Ramilov.

“Really?” said Dibden, flattered.

“Yeah,” said Ramilov. “You've got the same kind of dickhead face.”

“I like him already,” Bob announced from the pass. And he liked Ramilov even more when he saw his hands.

“Fucking horrible,” he told the rest of the kitchen later. “And his eyes? He looked as if he was going to kick off any minute.”

Ramilov was the chef Bob had been waiting for: a dyed-in-the-wool psycho, a universal soldier. At this stage in my recounting Dave thinks I'm building Ramilov up too much. Perhaps—the man had his faults, and I'm not condoning what he did—but it's true
that at the time Bob thought Ramilov was the answer to his prayers. He should have been more careful what he wished for.

—

Actually, the storm took a while to muster. Ramilov was the great white hope when he started at The Swan in the second week of October and it wasn't until he was locked in the walk-in with the lobsters in late November that his fall from grace was complete. In those intervening weeks I did not see much of our new champion. The kitchen was too small for a five-man brigade to do mise en place, there were only four work surfaces, so on busy shifts when there was a full team I was sent to work in the plonge until I was needed for service.

The plonge, or dish pit, is the twilight hovel of the kitchen porters. It is a small square grotto of pots and pans and plastic containers. Its ceiling is dark with grease and elaborate blossoms of mold. Its walls are lachrymose. In the middle of this cave, cloaked in a swelter of steam and spray, one or both of the KPs work tirelessly, hacking at the caked char on the bottom of the pans, scraping the stockpot sump, blasting cutlery with the high-powered jet that hangs in coils above the two stainless steel sinks, hauling great trays of washing up to and from the industrial cleaner, sorting plates into giddy, groaning stacks. The Swan plonge adjoins the kitchen, down two steps that are usually taken in a single frantic bound, with no door or screen between. Everything that happens in the plonge can be heard in the kitchen. It is obvious when Shahram is chanting or when the enormous Polish KP laughs his unnerving piggy laugh. But in the plonge the noise of the kitchen is a muddle. The KPs know only that for every moment they breathe there are dirty pans and plates building up and that they must work faster, always faster.

The enormous Polish KP was called Darik. His biceps were
bigger than a man's head. He had a trick of crushing a potato while he looked at you that gave everyone the willies except Shahram, who was terrified and confused by everybody in the kitchen except Darik. The two men communicated via some pidgin language only they understood, Shahram jiving around the bigger man with his goggling eyes and skittish, edgy dance while Darik threw his massive head back and squealed, huge and delighted like a hippo being cleaned by an oxpecker bird. The chefs believed that Darik harbored an awful secret. He had never mentioned he had a secret, and the kitchen had decided, collectively, that this proved he had one. Dibden, who trumped everyone else for sheer terror of life, said Darik had murdered a man in Poland. This rumor quickly spread, with accessories. Bob heard he had killed a drunk in a bar brawl by breaking his skull with his bare hands like it was a potato. Dave was certain he had pushed the woman he loved from a bridge when he found out she was sleeping with a black man. Ramilov claimed Darik was a pastry boy who murdered nothing except Gloria Gaynor songs.

“
Can you give me this wishywashyback, Darik
,” he'd singsong in a lousy Baltic accent as he slung pots into the plonge, “
or are you maybe too much gay?”

Ramilov, we would learn, was very much taken with homosexuality and its abuses. He fondled everyone in the kitchen except the quiet dark-eyed girl, whom he judged correctly was not a man and would stab him if he tried. He cupped his hand to each man's arse as he passed or rubbed their earlobes between his thumb and forefinger when they were trying to tell him what to do. The ultimate prize for Ramilov, however, was “the gooch,” the line of folded skin between a man's balls and his anus, and he would sneak up behind the working chefs and porters and try to reach in between the forest of legs to stroke this rare treasure whenever he could.

“Its medical name is the perineum,” he informed Dibden as Dibden shied away from his molesting hand. “Its sensuality is renowned in many cultures.”

Dibden was not interested in its sensual renown.

“He's trying to violate my bum hole,” he complained to Bob.

“You whine like a little fag, Dibden,” replied Bob, who at this stage was still in love with Ramilov.

Poor Dibden, the lowest of the low before I arrived, recipient of all abuse. My appearance had moved him up in the world—away from drab commis tasks, to the glamour of pastry and larder—though it had done little to change people's attitudes toward him.

Every day Ramilov was in the kitchen his confidence grew. He was a Molotov cocktail of filth and kink who was actually from Albania, via Birmingham, and not Russian at all. There was no man in the brigade with whom he would not simulate buggery, no waitress he did not try to flash. His hoarse, delirious crowing carried over the hubbub into the plonge where I labored; an excitable bragging about what ladyboys could do with their cervixes and the collective term for waitresses and how many drugs you had to take to shit yourself. His motto was “It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” His speech was peppered with strange slang and snatches of rap.

Man dun' know, I'm straight cake.

Bitch give brain, work hard at the ramp shop.

This was what I knew of Ramilov in the first few weeks. Tall claims and short bursts of obscenity, grammatical anomalies and promises of sodomy.

No doubt this confession will delight Ramilov, but here it is: in those early days I resented him. No one questioned his place in the
kitchen. He had the swagger and bluster of a chef. I worked hard, I stroked no gooches, yet my approval rating was a solid zero. And though I had been there longer and could spell pigeon correctly on the prep labels, Ramilov instantly asserted himself as my superior and tormentor. He called me “Bumfuck” even after I had explained that that was not my name. When I prepped vegetables he made jokes about a family reunion. Once he sent me to the dry store for “a long wait” and would have had me looking in there all night if Bob had not needed me to grate horseradish. Worst of all, he accused me of being useless on purpose.

“Just leave if you don't give a shit,” he told me in the walk-in one morning, less than a month after his arrival.

That I, who had sweated so much for this place, should be told I didn't care by a clown who spent his days groping arses: it was almost more than I could stomach. And the other chefs would chuckle as he ordered me to chop flour and fillet whitebait. Would they be laughing, I wondered, if I suffered some hideous accident? If I lost my hand in the meat slicer, that would shut them up. Then they would be sorry for all the things they had said and done to me. They would have to cut their own chips and work overtime and they would see how much I had done for them and they would say, “That Monocle, he really was something after all, and we were too blind to see it.” And the tears would run down their faces at the injustice of life.

That's what would happen: I would be cutting ham one day and one of them—Ramilov, no doubt—would come by with a shout of “
Behind you with a knife!”
and prod me with his finger, another favorite joke of his, and I would leap forward in shock and somehow bring my wrist into contact with the exposed whirling blade and it would slice clean through, squealing as it found the bone. My poor hand would be hanging on by a flap of skin, blood spurting
everywhere, the gray tendons inside pulsing and flailing like headless snakes. Such senseless tragedy. And I so young and promising. Rachel Parker, the girl who had spurned me at university (who had by chance walked into The Swan that very moment) would see the error of her ways and throw herself upon me in grief. Dibden would faint. Ramilov would for once be silent, and as white as a sheet. I would be stoic, of course, and refuse to blame anyone for the misfortune. In certain versions of this fantasy I finished slicing the ham one-handed, to rounds of rapturous applause.

These were the noble tragedies I dreamed of when I was sent to chop carrot batons and blitz parsnips in the plonge where the walls wept and the air was muggy with bad spores and the floorboards of the first-floor restaurant buckled above your head as fat full diners shuffled in their seats, where there was no quiet dark-eyed girl to look at, where the pipes kept on with an almighty whistling like they were about to explode while Darik and Shahram cooed at each other in their strange nonsense tongue.
Backpleez. No you backs. Backpleez. No you backs.

Ramilov was invincible in those early days, and if he had limited himself to tormenting me and Dibden and the KPs he might have remained so. But Ramilov had no notion of the lines he should not cross. This was demonstrated by his shameless carry-on with Bob's terrible wife and his friendship with the tramp who was Bob's sworn enemy.

If Ramilov were here now he would tell you that a restaurant's regulars are its best customers. If Bob were here, however, he would say a fellow can show up at a restaurant with straw in his pockets and a powerful urge to release his bowels as often as he pleases but until he buys something he is not a customer. (The Fat Man, with his “give me one of everything” attitude, was Bob's idea of a model customer, extravagant in his tastes, generous with his tips, ceaseless
in his appetite. Though ill rumors surrounded him, and all who had served him shuddered at his name, his money was the right color.) But the tramp came every day to groom his reflection with a gap-toothed plastic pocket comb in the darkened glass of the restaurant windows while the diners inside tried to ignore him, and he liked to use the public alleyway at the back of the premises as his personal toilet. Bob had been chasing the tramp away since the restaurant opened. Ramilov committed the cardinal sin of supplying him with napkins.

Bob's wife, who lived with Bob above The Swan, was another matter. She didn't have a job because she had enough things to worry about, like why did the Internet sometimes not work in their flat and when was Bob, whom she called Booboo, going to come upstairs and cuddle and where had her yappy Chihuahua, which she also called Booboo, got to now. Several times a day she would clomp into the kitchen in her heels to ask the whereabouts of her Booboo, meaning either the dog or her husband. The dog was an evil-tempered midget that sowed misery far and wide in its relentless pursuit of food. It broke out of the flat at any opportunity and made its way down the stairs on its stubby little legs to snap at scraps in the plonge or nibble at the edges of trays left out in the yard. It destroyed the mise and snarled most ungraciously when anyone except Bob's terrible wife came close to it. It was a pest and every chef in the place wished for its demise. “The rude fiend who so yells on souls,” Dante said of a similar hound. “Someone should shoot the fucking thing,” said Racist Dave.

Each time it got out, Booboo's reign of terror ended only when Bob's wife found it and pressed it to her enormous breasts and administered a blithe, affectionate scolding in the middle of the kitchen while the chefs desperately ducked and twisted around her trying to keep the whole show afloat.