In the Kitchen (48 page)

'Well,' said Jenny.

'Wait! Michael Harrison's tattoo parlour, do you know the name of it? Thought I might try to track him down, sink a couple of pints, you know, for old times' sake.'

'Be easy enough to find him,' said Jenny, 'but you might have to make do with a brew. Bev heard it off Mrs Tisdale who got it off Sandra Sharples who's going out with—'

'Jenny!'

'Keep your hair on, Gabe. Plenty of time, he's not going nowhere. He's in Warrington, got eight years for assaulting a police officer, aggravated something or other and GBH.'

'But you said ...'

'I know, but that was ages ago. So anyway, looks like you won't be going for that pint.'

'What happened? What went ...'

'... wrong? I don't know. But, tell the truth, I'm not surprised. I mean, I was shocked, of course, it's terrible, but when you think what his dad was like. It was the drink, probably, for both of them. Alcoholic, you know.'

'Such a ...'

'... shame, and he was such a bonny lad,' she said, sighing, as if this was what was lost. 'Don't suppose you'd have that much in common, though, not after all this time. Even if he weren't banged up.'

'No,' said Gabriel. 'Probably not.'

'Right,' said Jenny, 'we'll expect you soon.'

'That's right.' He cast about desperately for a way to keep Jenny talking. It was like fishing in a dried-up well, he couldn't dredge anything up. Oh, there was that time, Jenny would love this, at the top of Twistle Tower and Bev was there ... or was it Jackie? It'd come back to him if he closed his eyes.

'I'll tell Dad,' said Jenny, 'but you better call him too. See you, Gabe.

Bye-bye, then. Cheerio for now.'

When she saw him at the kitchen table, Lena started. She put a hand to her chest. 'It's you,' she said, and smiled.

'Yes,' said Gabriel, 'who else? Who else would it be?'

'I make tea,' said Lena. 'You want I make for you?'

'I mean,' said Gabe, 'you wouldn't be expecting anyone, any visitors? Nothing like that.'

She was filling the kettle and humming her tuneless hum. 'I have hear,' she said, laughing, twisting her cat-like back, 'I have hear something funny today.'

She spoke and he listened and he thought he had seen this before; it wasn't happening, it was something remembered, yes, it had been just like this. There was music, that's right, she'd put the radio on and she was swaying and giggling, even dancing a few pretty steps. Such simple things fill a heart.

Telling him how a man had been locked in a public toilet for two days. He laughed because she laughed, and her hair which she had plaited swung behind her shoulders and she had a bright dress on.

What happened now? Did he go to her? Did he take her in his arms?

'Where did you hear it?' he heard himself say.

Lena looked in the breadbin. 'I make toast.'

'Who told you? Lena, who?'

'Is news,' she said.

He got up and moved closer. His shadow fell across her.

'You don't watch the news. You don't read newspapers. Where did you go today?'

She turned away from him. 'I go out.'

'Yes. Where? Where did you go? Look at me, Lena. I said, where.'

She whipped round. 'Why you ask like this?'

The scene went bad from here, as he remembered. What could he do? He felt sick. He was sweating. All he had to do was keep his mouth closed.

'It's a reasonable question,' he said.

'You keep me here like ... like prison. Like animal in cage.'

He could see what he was doing wrong. He looked at himself with a mixture of pity and disgust. What a sap. What a fool. Would he never learn?

'Do I lock you in? Do I beat you?' He should know better than to shout. He did know better. But here we go again. 'Don't I give you everything you ask for and more?'

'You promise,' said Lena, attacking her fingernail, 'but you don't give.'

'What?' he said, the poor fool. 'What don't I give?'

'You say you look for Pasha. You say you pay someone. But I don't believe.'

The idiot stood with his hands on his hips, attempting to be affronted by the idea. Anyone could see what he was like. Wake up and smell the coffee, buddy boy.

'I can prove to you ...'

'You say you give me money. How long I wait for it?'

He was watching her twist the end of her plait around her finger. He was looking into her glazed blue eyes, trying to make them focus on him. He was thinking a thousand thoughts and none of them was right.

'I didn't find that money. Nikolai took it and sent it to Yuri's family. It was Yuri's all along, wasn't it, the money wasn't yours.'

Oh no, no. Stop looking. Don't hear any more.

'I have earn that money. I have earn it. Here, with you, is not for free. Why you don't pay me? Pay me what you owe.'

*

He took Nikolai down to dry goods to help with the stock check. The shelves laddered up each wall, bustling with bottles and boxes, jars and packets, containers and cans, shouty labels, eye-test print, cloudy canisters, glinting glass, nasty tin. The floor, an obstacle course of sacks and cardboard cartons, begrudged Gabe's presence, always trying to trip him up. It was a madman's bunker down here. And still they would order more.

'Fava beans, haricot beans,' said Gabriel. 'Arborio rice.' He watched Nikolai writing on his prescription pad. 'Tell me something,' he said. 'Are you happy?

Being a commis, it's not what you expected to do.'

Nikolai made a gesture of indifference with his hands.

'I suppose,' continued Gabe, 'a lot of people aren't.'

Nikolai nodded, still assessing the patient, perhaps.

'I mean,' said Gabe, 'even if they're rich and successful and all the rest, they feel unhappy, they get depressed.' Last night he'd smoked cigarette after cigarette, walking round the block. Lena could not feel anything, was incapable. It was that client who had made her like this. If he ever saw the man he would kill him with his bare hands.

'It's normal,' said Nikolai.

'I don't mean me. I'm all right. On the whole.' Gabe, staring at a hessian sack, wished he could curl up on it and sleep. But if he went to sleep he would have the dream he didn't want to have.

'In my home town,' said Nikolai, his long white fingers caressing the pen, 'when I was a boy we had a Happiness Day Parade. Everyone had to go. We mocked it, of course. We were ordered to be happy and so, to be subversive, we went out of our way to be miserable, and nothing could have made us happier than this forbidden misery.'

'Did you have to march through the town?'

'With banners,' said Nikolai. He paused. He was preparing to give his diagnosis, Gabe could tell by the look on his face. 'Crude ideology, easy to laugh at it. Yours is more sophisticated and so dominant that it has been internalized and it works much better that way. Unhappiness is normal but if we are unhappy we think that we have failed. Every day in this country is a Happiness Day Parade, but we don't march shoulder to shoulder, each must march alone.'

Gabe sat down on a packing crate. 'You know, if I could get a good night's sleep I'd be happy. I'd be ecstatic, in fact. It's this bloody dream.'

'The dream,' said Nikolai. 'You told me.'

Why didn't he say anything? Why did he look like he knew more than he chose to say? 'What does it mean?' Gabriel burst out. 'It must mean something. It's doing my head in.'

'The interpretation of dreams,' said Nikolai, 'a subject close to Freud's heart. Personally I find this part of his work less satisfactory, and I know you are not a big fan of his. There are people who claim to read dreams much as they read tea leaves or palms.'

'Why do I keep having it? Over and over again. It might mean,' he said, wildly, 'something significant, like Yuri's death was no accident. It might mean that the dream won't stop until the killer is caught.'

Nikolai looked at him with his rodent eyes. 'You mean,' he said, in his precise little way, 'that Yuri's ghost is haunting you?'

'No, of course not, no. Christ. It's just the same thing, over and over, so I'm down here in the catacombs somewhere and there's this horrible light, it ... it beats, sort of pulses like a heart or something, and it's kind of pulling me along. Or sometimes it's chasing me, I don't know, and I think it's going to – it sounds stupid – drown me. And, anyway, I always end up in the same place, with Yuri's body and – did I tell you about this? I told you – I have to kind of crawl around and examine it and then there's the food ...'

'The food. Do you eat it?'

'Yes. No. I used to but now it's full of maggots and stuff. Or maybe it's not rotten any more, I don't eat it, I just try to stop it burying me alive.'

'So the dream doesn't stay the same, it changes.'

'Sort of, but basically it's the same.'

'I see,' said Nikolai. 'And this light you mention, what happens when you stop by Yuri's body, does it catch up with you?'

Gabe scratched his head two-handed. His elbows flapped. 'No, there's no light then.'

'So how do you see the body? How do you examine it?'

'It's not dark, it's normal, you know, I don't know, it doesn't all make sense, it's a dream.'

'But you want to find meaning in this thing which doesn't make sense?'

Gabriel laughed. 'Think I'm losing it. Can't get a grip on myself. Never mind.

Let's get on. What's up at the top there? I can't see. Is that where the flour is?'

Nikolai stood on tiptoe on a twenty-litre drum of Frymax. 'Dried fruits, sugars, nuts.' He turned round. 'But what is this self you are losing? You mean a kind of soul?'

It was pointless, thought Gabe, to have these conversations with Nikolai. He wouldn't allow himself to be sucked in. 'I only mean what ordinary people mean when they talk about themselves.'

'Ah,' said Nikolai, 'but that's going round in circles.'

Gabriel raised his hand as if to ward Nikolai off. 'It's pretty obvious to everybody. Everybody except you.'

'Scientifically speaking ...'

'Oh, stuff your scientific speaking,' Gabriel barked. Nikolai said he was a doctor. A likely story. You don't go around believing every story you hear.

'I understand,' said Nikolai gently. 'After all, it seems that we are biologically programmed to have what we might call a sense of self.'

Look at him, thought Gabriel, standing on his soap box, his oil can, about to address a meeting. He wasn't a scientist, he was a politician, always trying for another convert. He looked like he lived in a cellar, like he'd never seen the light of day, a little albino revolutionary stirring it up from underground. 'Oh, whatever,' he said.

They continued with the stock check. Gabe kept looking at Nikolai. They counted bottles and tins. Nikolai found mouse droppings at the back of a shelf.

'No,' said Gabe. 'No, those are old. That problem's been sorted out. OK?'

'OK,' said Nikolai.

They carried on.

'Know what your problem is,' said Gabriel.

Nikolai waited patiently.

'No, I can't be bothered to tell you.'

They worked on, calling product names and numbers, sliding boxes and hefting sacks.

'I'll tell you what your problem is,' said Gabe. 'You go on about science, you think you know everything, but you don't know about people at all.'

'My ex-wife would agree with you.'

'Science tells us this, science tells us that,' said Gabe, his voice rising, 'we're machines, we have no free will. Well, bloody science doesn't tell me anything about how I bloody well feel.' And that, he decided, had always been his problem. As a chef as much as anything. His marvellous scientific approach. He'd even given Oona a lecture on the molecular structure of custard. For God's sake! Who needed to know that? What you needed to know, standing there stirring, was exactly how it felt as it was all about to thicken.

'Perhaps you're right,' said Nikolai, remaining damnably calm.

'Go on,' Gabe urged, 'go on, talk, don't treat me like an idiot.'

'Perhaps,' said Nikolai slowly, 'it would be interesting to look at it from another point of view. Leave science aside. Let's say you are reading a novel, and this novel is about a man's life. It begins with his childhood and follows him through various events until, maybe, a crisis somewhere in middle age.'

Nikolai paused and Gabriel instantly became incensed. 'Well,' he cried, 'get on with it. Don't make a speech. Just talk.'

'All right. Let's say it is a decent novel and you believe in this character, you begin to understand him. Now, as you read, the character is always making decisions, choices, about his life, thinking, vacillating, about which way he will go.'

'Yes! Exactly! That's how it is. That's how people are.'

Nikolai gazed out steadily from beneath his combustible stack of hair. 'But if we have got to know him, his make-up, his circumstances, then we know how he will act. It is these books which take on authority, inevitability, because we feel they are true to life. The protagonist cannot be otherwise, cannot do otherwise, and yet he is condemned to behave – as we all must – as if he were free.'

'Oh, bullshit,' said Gabriel hotly. 'How boring is that? How boring is a book without twists and turns? What about characters who act on impulse, without any reason, without even knowing why they're doing something?'

'Of course. That too,' said Nikolai, soothingly. 'But if they are controlled by impulse and act without reason, that is also an argument against the existence of free will.'

'That's only ...' said Gabriel. Nikolai thought he was so clever and see where his cleverness got him. A commis, no more, no less. Gabe would explain to him clearly how false his argument was. 'What you don't ...' he began again and faltered. His mind whirred like an electric whisk, beating in an empty bowl.

He had to speak. 'It's you who goes round in circles. You twist everything to fit one idea. You think you're proving something but it's just your opinion, your belief. For God's sake, you're like a true believer,' he said, shaking with anger. 'It's like a religion with you.'

When he'd finished the stock-take, Gabriel told Suleiman to come outside with him for a moment. He needed a cigarette.