The Little Christmas Kitchen (13 page)

Ella rolled her eyes.

‘We married up at the church on the hill, see it… just up there.’ He pointed behind them and Ella twisted round to see the top of a castellated white bell tower, the big brass bell glinting in the sun. She didn’t want to tell him that she had analysed his wedding photographs like some sort of CSI, that she knew exactly where he got married and when.

‘I thought she was beautiful, Ella. Absolutely beautiful. And do you know her best trait?’ Dimitri didn’t pause for an answer. ‘She could pull me out of a really bad mood.’ he said, smirking to himself.

Ella was starting to feel envious and hating herself for it. He had lost something so precious. Yet he had had it in the first place.

Had she had that with Max? Would she be able to tell a similar story? What would she say? He was the best looking boy on campus, she had helped him with his English essays, and that even though she’d lost weight, had learnt how to be a little bit cooler and was actually quite funny at times, he had always looked straight through her. But then she had spent a month with her dad and Veronica in Paris and when she’d asked for help, Veronica had helped her. She had shown her how to be who she wanted to be. To take her out of the shadows. She had whisked her to Galeries Lafayette and paid for a make-over – watched as they slicked on foundation, lined her lashes with brown – not black, never black, far too harsh – tinted cheekbones she never knew she had with liquid rouge, plucked her eyebrows into pencil thin lines, pierced her ears, curled her hair, died it from mousy to chestnut dark, shaped her ratty nails into perfect ovals and lacquered them with Chanel Rouge. And then they had shopped. My god they had shopped. Veronica had skimmed through rails laconically holding designer outfits up against her with a scowl or the occasional smile. And Ella had been kitted out from top to bottom. Her feet had been slipped into Louis Vuitton ballet pumps while the sales assistants had unfolded jumpers in the softest angora and jeans that stopped mid-calf like Audrey Hepburn.

‘
Et voila
…’ Veronica had smiled. ‘Ella she has come of age, finally.’ When she smiled, her bright red lips spread right across her face and her eyes sparkled, showing exactly why her modelling days had been so successful. ‘I look at you and I think she is like my own daughter. And I am glad that I can help you.’

Veronica had stepped forward, draped her arm around Ella’s shoulders and pulled her close into her side. Ella, who rarely let anyone touch her – a leftover hang-up from her crippling self-consciousness, haunted by the memory of Dimitri’s hand grasping the soft folds of her tummy – had stood rigid to begin with, uncomfortable. But as the image of them side by side was reflected in one of the full-length mirrors she saw in herself finally someone she was happy with, happy to be. And she allowed her arm to lift, wrapping it around Veronica’s waist and gradually leaned in until her head rested against her shoulder.

‘You are a lovely girl, Ella.’ Veronica whispered into Ella’s hair, ‘You are lovely even without these things, remember that,
oui
? These are just…’ she paused, ‘I do not know the word. In French it is
glacage
.’

Ella pulled back from the hug and shook her head, she didn’t know what it meant. Veronica turned to one of the sales assistants and asked her what it meant in English.

The girl shrugged.

Veronica huffed out a breath. ‘The cake, it is the top of the cake.
Oui
?’

‘The icing?’ Ella asked, unsure.

‘Ah, yes, that is it. The icing.’

Dimitri ran his hand through his hair, smearing a line of grease across his forehead. Ella pointed to it but when he tried to wipe it away he missed so she leant forward and swiped it off with her thumb. His skin felt softer than she had expected. And she berated herself for the inappropriate rush of feeling that touching him had provoked.

He rubbed his forehead again, as if making sure the mark had gone, then looking back out to sea said, ‘Do you know, we had three of the most brilliant years of my life. Then she got cancer and she died very quickly. Just like that she arrived and just like that she went.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘But–’ he turned to look at Ella, ‘I loved her very much and I would not swap it for the world.’

Ella rubbed her temple. She wanted Dimitri’s story to go away. She wanted not to have been told it. She wanted it not to shine so clearly on her own relationship and see the many flaws reflected back.

The icing
, she thought as she sat there in Maddy’s holey jumper and barely any make-up. She had been warned but she hadn’t listened. Instead she had seen the way Max’s eyes changed when he sat down next to her in the library after she returned from Paris, how when he got up, bored, mid-way through and bought himself a Coke he got her one too. How when one of his gang sauntered over he introduced her, rather than slinging his rucksack over his shoulder and disappearing with a vague wave. How suddenly she was invited to the parties. As long as, it seemed to Ella, her lips stayed glossed with Dior and her clothes remained the envy of the girls who trailed behind Max like he was the Pied Piper, she became someone worthy of his gaze. And under that gaze she had shone. She had become Ella. Striking, poised, award-winning. And he had become Max, no longer a loafer in the city who visited his hateful parents once a month, but someone who sailed at seven in the morning on a Sunday, started his own business, did an MBA. They had made each other more. But, she wondered as she glanced out across the sea, had that come at the expense of being themselves?

‘Your turn.’ Dimitri said with a glint in his eye.

Luckily, before Ella had the chance to think of a reasonable excuse not to tell her story there was a violent movement on the fishing line that had Dimitri jumping up, whooping with excitement. ‘You’re saved.’ he said, glancing back at her as he untied the line and started reeling it towards him, ‘By a bloody great fish.’

CHAPTER 16

MADDY

Maddy had been into every bar and club in the area. Her shoes pinched, her back ached, her eyes were sore from holding back tears and one of her hands was constantly frozen because she’d dropped a glove somewhere between Dean Street and the Choccywoccydoodah shop and she was alternating with the one she had left. After a spate of brusque rejections she’d had to go into Liberty to look at beautiful things while she warmed up. But after circulating the stationery department a number of times she started to get suspect looks as if she was a shoplifter and left, stepping out into Carnaby Street where even the lavish Christmas lights couldn’t cheer her up.

Deciding to cut her losses and go back to Ella’s and open one of the bottles of Bollinger, she started to schlep her way back through the slushy snow. This time she didn’t see the picture-postcard views of snow-capped London but instead noticed the pile of rubbish dusted with white outside the shop where she bought a soggy cheese and tomato sandwich, the half-frozen overflowing manhole of a burst water main, a tramp with a dog shivering from the cold who thanked her with big pale eyes as she handed him half her lunch.

Morose, tired and now hungry, she took a wrong turn and found herself down one of the seedier Soho streets. She hurried past girls standing in doorways, nervous and out of her depth, but then paused because there on the corner was one bar she hadn’t tried.

The name
Big Mack’s
flickered in neon. Maybe it was fate, Maddy thought as she looked up at the sign and remembered every New Year’s day her dad bundling her and Ella into the car and taking them to McDonalds. Her mum thought it was a horrendous tradition and refused any part of it, but her dad had a soft spot for a Big Mac, Ella adored filet-o-fish and Maddy would have chicken nuggets and a vanilla milkshake. Only ever at New Year though, his once yearly treat to mop up a raging hangover. They’d eat it in the car, parked so they could look over the river and her dad would put on his
White Christmas
soundtrack, turn Bing Crosby right up and say ‘Just one more time, and then I’ll admit that Christmas is over.’ And they’d sit eating their McDonalds, watching the swans and the ducks, and sometimes the snow, and listen to the last song of Christmas.

She put her hands on the high window sill and pulled herself up a touch to see inside. From what she could see it was an old American-style piano bar. Maddy pressed her nose against the darkened window and saw amongst the faded posters on the wall and the dark velvet booth seats, a small baby grand and a dilapidated stage.

She jumped down and stood for a minute, contemplating whether to go inside. She watched a businessman head into the massage parlour adjacent to the bar. Saw a group of teenagers huddling round their cigarettes scuffing the snow with their boots. Then a man across the street shouted, ‘What d’you think you’re looking at?’ And startled and a little afraid, Maddy found herself backing into
Big Mack’s
, the wooden door swinging open much easier than she’d imagined, causing her to stumble and making her entrance much less demure than she’d hoped.

It didn’t matter. She could have skidded inside and done a little dance and no one would have batted an eyelid. As it was there was one guy mopping the floor and a girl wiping down the bottles that sat four deep behind a mirrored wall on the bar and neither glanced up at her arrival.

Maddy took a couple of steps forward. Inside it smelt of dirty washing up water, Lynx and stale beer. Some obscure Bluegrass played softly out of two wall mounted speakers and a TV screen flickered with an old black and white movie. The only light was from a couple of overhead spots and one of a pair of gold sconces, she wondered if it was because all the other bulbs had blown. A rather forlorn poinsettia sat on the brass bar and strands of coloured beads hung haphazardly from the three pillars that seemed to separate the bar area from the stage.

‘Hi there. Hi. Excuse me.’ She took another couple of steps forward into the murky shadow of the bar.

The guy mopping the floor looked up.

Maddy took another step inside. ‘I’m actually looking for work. Just over Christmas. I’m–’ she paused as the guy looked back down at the floor. The girl behind the bar moved on from the whiskeys to the vodkas. Maddy sucked in her bottom lip, wondered whether she should leave but then she heard someone, she thought the guy, mumble, ‘You need to see Mack then.’

She watched as he squeezed out his mop and kicked the bucket over to behind the bar, swept some keys off the shiny surface and disappeared through swing doors at the back.

Maddy wondered if she was meant to follow. And when nothing happened she backed up a couple of paces thinking it might be better to cut her losses.

But what then?

Another season on the boats. Another winter in the garage. Another year of sitting on a chair in the corner of Dimitri’s bar with her guitar as everyone she knew chatted amongst themselves while she provided the backing track.

She looked over to the corner of the room, to the tiny stage with two spotlights on the ground pointing up towards a microphone and a ripped velvet star curtain, the fairy lights that worked twinkling.

‘You need a job.’ She heard a man say as he pushed open the swing doors and strolled over to the bar, mid-fifties trying to look younger, receding hair quiffed back, collar of his pink shirt turned up. He pressed a button on the till and started counting the notes.

Maddy watched, biting her lip, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Yeah. Yeah I do.’

‘What can you do?’ he said, sifting through the notes, one after the other and turning them so they all faced the same way.

The girl dusting the bottles paused and turned her head slightly to look Maddy’s way, sizing her up like a hyena.

‘I can sing.’ Maddy said, doing a half-hearted point towards the stage. ‘I’m pretty ok at singing.’

The man, who she presumed was Mack, kept on turning the notes without looking up and said, ‘Pretty ok is no good to me.’

‘Well. Actually I’m pretty good.’ She started to walk forward towards the bar. ‘I’m really good, I hope. You know, it’s hard to judge your own talent.’ She did a little laugh. Mack glanced up, stony-faced.

‘Ever done any bar work?’ he said, going back to the notes.

Maddy realised if she was going to get anywhere she had to change tack. She rolled her lips together, straightened her shoulders, ran her hand through her snow-damp hair and pulled her confidence back up from where it was draining out through her toes. ‘My mum owns a restaurant back home, my best friend has a bar, I’ve worked in both. I can make most cocktails, I can pour three pints at once, I can carry a table’s worth of food and I can sing brilliantly.’

She saw the corner of Mack’s mouth curl up as he slammed the till shut, rolled up the notes and shoved them into his back pocket. ‘I can’t help you I’m afraid.’

Maddy watched him pick up a spreadsheet on a tatty piece of paper and peruse what she assumed were the shifts his staff were working. He glanced up after a second and seemed surprised still to see her standing there.

‘Yes you can.’ she said. Thinking about everything it had taken to get here. ‘You have to.’

Mack laughed almost as if taken by surprise, a deep rumbling that echoed around the empty room. He put his elbows on the bar and leaned forward, watching her, his chin resting on the knuckles of one fist. ‘Where’s back home?’ he said after a second.

‘It’s a little Greek island. Tiny. You’ve probably never heard of it–’ she rambled, awkward under the spotlight of his stare.

‘Yeah you’re probably right.’ he said, standing up straight again. ‘I’ve been to Kavos, twice, years ago. Don’t remember any of it. I was plastered from the moment the plane touched down.’ He rubbed his hand over his forehead. ‘Bad days.’ he said, then stared at her again silently.

Maddy didn’t say anything. He seemed to be deciding what to do with her.

‘Ok. I’m a man down tomorrow night.’ He straightened up, ran his hand up and down his neck beneath his upturned collar. ‘I’ll see what you’re like.’

Maddy pressed her lips together to hold in her smile.