Chop Chop (5 page)

“I envy that dog,” Ramilov told her the first time he saw her burying the dog's face in her cleavage. “I can get lost too you know.”

Bob's wife flushed and arched her neck indignantly. Her eyes, however, flashed with excitement. She did not come down to the kitchen in boob tubes and wedges just to catch dogs. Bob's wife had a face like a garden trowel, a stupid mouth and spongy, necrotic skin. She was vain and whingeing and fiercely possessive of Bob, and her jealousy toward the waitresses was magisterial and absolute. Bob was her Booboo, her meal ticket, and she would claw out the bright little eyes of anyone who thought Bob could be their Booboo. And yet she saw no irony in coming down to the kitchen in her tiny Lycra outfits and flaunting herself in front of every other man there. Whenever she appeared, Ramilov would howl and paw at the floor and generally act up in a way that was shameful to witness. When she asked if Booboo was ready to come upstairs Ramilov would say yes, thank you, he was always ready for a fine creature like her.

Bob was confused by Ramilov's behavior at first, because his wife was anything but fine. No man had ever expressed an interest before—even Racist Dave, who was joyfully unburdened by standards when it came to women, secretly described her as “Predator with Tits”—and this made Bob suspicious. He began to think Ramilov was taking the piss.

“He should be a gentleman about it,” he told Dave gloomily, “and shag her or shut up.”

“You should be a gentleman about it and shag her,” Dave told Ramilov in O'Reillys, “or you should shut up.” It was early November and Ramilov's tempestuous streak was becoming dangerously apparent.

“I can't shag her,” said Ramilov, swilling his mouth with bitter. “She looks like a trowel.”

“Bob's getting pissy about it,” said Dave. “He asked me for reasons to lock you in the fridge.”

“I'm not sexually aroused by garden implements,” said Ramilov. “Ask Dibden.”

“What?” said Dibden, who was trying to pat down a cowlick in his hair and was not listening.

“You've got to shag Bob's missus,” Ramilov told him.

Dibden looked worried.

“Does Bob know about this?”

“It was his idea,” said Ramilov.

“Oh.”

Dibden looked as if he were trying to imagine it: what he and Bob's terrible wife would do by way of small talk, how the seduction would unfold, whether there would be music playing or Bob standing over them and shouting for him to hurry up. He shuddered.

“I can't,” he said.

“Go on.” Ramilov flicked bitter at him.

“Why me?” Dibden asked. “Why not Monocle?”

“Monocle would take too damn long,” said Ramilov, “and he might hurt his massive face. You look like Coldplay. You've got to take what you can get.”

“If you don't want her, why do you keep fucking howling at her?” Dave asked Ramilov.

Ramilov shrugged without interest and looked around the pub. O'Reillys was the only place open when the chefs finished work. It was an Irish bar that Nora, the cross-eyed matron of the house, ran like a hostel for inebriates, which was more or less what it was. At the back, where the chefs usually sat, there was a dartboard positioned to test the wits of those visiting the toilets, a few low tables and a jukebox full of folk music from the old country. The bar and Nora stood in the middle of the room where a cross-eye could be kept on
the rowdier customers, which was most of them. Toward the front was a raggedy pool table that played to a slant on one corner pocket, beneath a chandelier no one could explain. The pictures, insofar as they fit that description, were covered with cellophane instead of glass so they could not be smashed over people's heads satisfactorily. Every so often one of the regulars would stagger over to the jukebox and pick a song and start to dance and sing. Sometimes they would notice the tired bunch of chefs huddled in the corner and become incensed by the lack of patriotism on show.

Jig, you bastards! Jig!
they would cry, or words to that effect, and Nora would tell them to hush the feck up.

“Whose round is it?” asked Ramilov.

“Yours,” said Dave.

“Same again?” Ramilov said. “Isn't it past your bedtime, Monocle?”

I did not immediately reply. The talk of Bob's wife had set my mind off in another direction, toward the quiet dark-eyed girl. In the kitchen I could not stop looking at her, out of it I could not stop thinking of her. I had not forgotten how she had pushed me aside in the dry store while I was bleeding, or the profile of her nose up close. No, there was nothing sophisticated about her. Yet something about the way she held herself in this world of men transfixed me. The gravity of bigger planets like Bob did not affect her. Ordinary, forgettable acts seemed important when she did them. Small details stayed with me. That brisk, high voice above the male grunt, so far beyond me, so removed from the earthly concerns of Ramilov and Racist Dave. The cool skin of an upper arm glimpsed beyond a rolled sleeve. (Well, I imagined it would be cool.) A slight sigh as she pulled a pan from the shelf above the stove. Minute feminine betrayals. I wondered how I could possibly approach her.

“Monocle?”

“He's fallen into a fucking coma,” I heard Ramilov say.

“I'm not tired,” I said. I was, but I did not want any of them to know it, least of all him. I would have liked nothing more than to take my daydreams of the quiet dark-eyed girl back to my shabby room and hold the thought of her, but these chefs thought I could not hack it, so I would show them otherwise. It's been a quirk of mine since childhood. When people talk down to me, I stick my neck out further. When they express their irritation, I buzz louder. When someone suggests they know what's best for me, I do the opposite. Perhaps that's why I never quit in those first horrible weeks at The Swan. I would not give those bastards the satisfaction. It's contrary, I know. It has not always served me well, but I learned it at my father's knee and the habit has stuck. Now I sat upright in my chair and tried to look like my colleagues, awake but dispirited.

“All right,” said Ramilov. “A nightcap for Monocle.”

He sidled up to the bar, where Nora watched him with experienced disapproval.

“Nora, my dear, we'll have the same again.”

She lined up four glasses of slopping amber liquid and pertly took his outstretched money.

“And Jesus Christ,” said Ramilov, returning to the table, “why isn't Bob shagging his missus? Why should I or numbnuts here do his work for him? On top of the hours we're already putting in? Treat the worker like a dog and he'll work like a dog, is that it? I'm sick of that shit. That's not man's nature. We did not come into this dark place crying for a shovel or a fucking briefcase! No! We cried out and looked for the nearest breast to clamp ourselves to and by god that's all we would have done ever since if not for the burden of money”—here he sipped emphatically—“the where to find it and the how to get it. . . . We're ruled by the bloody coin, breaking our backs for it. . . . That's the real shitter. That's our curse. I'm already
poisoning the choicest days of my life for that fat prick and now he wants me to fuck his wife into the fucking bargain! Fuck!”

The table mulled it over in silence.

“Stop howling at her, then,” Dave said at last.

“I'll howl at whoever I damn well want,” said Ramilov. “It's a free country.”

And soon the beer was gone and it was late and the cross-eyed landlady let us out into the night, calling after us, “
Safe home. Safe home
.”

It might have been a free country, but The Swan was not a free state, and Ramilov's luck finally ran out a few weeks later when Gavin, The Swan's meat supplier, sent Bob the calendar.

Gavin was Bob's comrade in cruelty: his idea of a joke was giving chicken bones to dogs to watch them choke, while Bob liked burning people with spoons. When he came by to deliver something in person or settle an invoice, he and Bob would call Shahram out from the plonge and command him to bring them impossible things. “
Pig eggs now!”
“
More left-handed spoons!”
“
Chicken lips!”
It was rumored that the two men had killed a cow together with a bronze mantelpiece clock belonging to Gavin's mother-in-law. Secretly, Gavin thought Bob was a lousy chef and Bob thought Gavin uncultured. Both men liked to talk about it when the other wasn't around. But each man's sense of superiority over the other seemed only to strengthen their friendship. Men are odd like that.

The calendar, an inauspicious gift, was in the kitchen less than a day, but in that time it managed to almost wreck Bob's marriage and succeeded in destroying what was left of Ramilov's good name (even before peluches or button-nosed waitresses came into the equation). Entitled “The Girls of Upfront Meat,” it featured a series of nubile beauties in pornographic poses beside loins of pork and ribs of beef. Bob loved it. He told the kitchen he might have
been wrong about Gavin being uncultured after all. Miss July was his favorite: a, quote, filthy-looking blonde with a gash like a cheeseburger. Until the beginning of that evening's dinner service Miss July hung in pride of place on the pastry rack next to Dibden, who didn't know where to look. No one could ask Bob anything until he had picked his favorite girl from the calendar and discussed the shape of her genitals. At seven
P.M.
, when Bob had to write the rota for next week, he took the calendar downstairs with him. Four hours later he had not emerged.

Shortly after eleven Bob's terrible wife clip-clopped into the kitchen demanding her Booboo. Her nostrils flared with suspicion. Ramilov, unable to resist, directed her to the office under the stairs.

“Go quietly, my love,” he told her. “I think he's working.”

The ensuing ruckus confirmed that Predator had found the filthy cheeseburger. For a moment the chefs stopped their cleaning down and their bluster and listened, rapt, as the banshee cries of Bob's terrible wife rose up the stairs. It seemed to pierce the very walls; it was the sweetest music. Racist Dave's heavy eyes flickered. Dibden looked about to cry. Ramilov turned the radio off so that no accusation or groveling defense was lost to human ears. But the happiness was short-lived. After Bob's wife had clomped back upstairs, Bob climbed the stairs alone. His look was murderous.

“Who told her?” he asked quietly.

“Little joke, chef,” Ramilov said.

Bob nodded.

“No harm done,” he said, forcing an unpleasant grin. He moved over to the pass and asked Ramilov, quite politely, to fetch him some beef jus from the walk-in. As soon as Ramilov stepped inside Bob rushed over and locked him tight within. No word of explanation. He'd made up his mind about Ramilov and his intentions.

From that day on Ramilov's goose was ringed. When he put
something on the stove—a parsley sauce, slivers of almonds to toast—Bob would turn the heat up on it when he wasn't looking, then shout at him when it burned. He sent Ramilov's plates back, saying they looked like shit, when they looked the same as they always had. Any chance he got after that he would lock Ramilov in the fridge, including, but by no means limited to, the occasion with the lobsters in late November where this story began. At first Ramilov was confused and muttered how it was a dirty fucking stitch, but slowly the clouds of 'wilderment parted and he saw how it truly was. Then he stopped muttering and started plotting.

D
on't shit a shitter.
One of the many nuggets of wisdom Ramilov was fond of sharing with the kitchen, now repeated in his latest letter. Apparently it is not enough for these opening chapters to set the scene or take us beyond where we began. I am hiding something, Ramilov writes. Something personal. As someone who has made a career of obscuring his past, he can sense when others are at it. Hence his advice not to shit a shitter. He wants to know what I am not telling. He wants to know, he says, about home.

Home. There's a hard concept to put a finger on. London is not my home. I am not used to its volume, its noise creeping in from all corners. The strains of Mrs. Molina's telenovelas trickling through the ceiling. “
O senhor!
Meu coração!”
At night, the drunks in the street below infuriate me. Those boorish fools, resonating on a wavelength I do not understand. I am from a quiet place, a place where learner drivers come to reverse park, where small tangles of wasteland hide beneath the flyovers and pavements run out abruptly. A place of golf courses and other manicured turfs. Proximity to those links appealed to my father, I think. His dream was always to be a pro in the golf world.

It would have happened
, he used to say,
if your brother hadn't taken ill the way he did
.

A convenient excuse, though if we are being honest his career had already dried up by the time Sam got sick. Not that I ever challenged him on this point. My father has insulated himself in many layers of denial. Also he is spiteful, with a long memory for acts of
treason against him. It is a very tough thing to accept that your dreams did not happen because you were not good enough. And even though he has become a sort of nemesis to me (he sits on the list with Tod Brightman, that disgustingly young novelist), when it comes down to it, a sympathetic urge stops me from picking apart all his fabrications.

My father was a born winner who worked his way down. Great-grandfather Charles, a cattle auctioneer, made a fortune when the railways arrived. The business expanded. Randall's, the Midlands'
quality supplier. Ten thousand head of cattle through the door every week. Millionaires with shit on their boots. In his ruddy cheeks and lumbering stride you could see my father's country stock, though he was of the greens, not the fields. A natural with the stick. Single-figure player from the age of ten. A consistent par-frightener. As a cadet, he hit drives so cleanly he did not disturb the tee. His swing was effortless, or so he tells it. At nineteen, when he met my mother at a country ball, he was already amateur county champion. Why should she be impressed? Golf meant nothing to her. But the potential coursing through him was obvious to all. Such people seem to shimmer, like water about to boil.

But grandmother didn't want heat and light. She wanted some security for her only daughter. “A game for idlers,” was how she put it. “You can't eat trophies.” She sulked through the wedding. The band was too loud. The icing was margarine. He was a dubious character in her eyes, not much in the way of a provider. How did she know this then, of a young man with the easy confidence of one who believes it's all coming to him? A young man, ostensibly, of means: his own car, roofless but roadworthy; his own lodgings, restricted but respectable. To my mother he always behaved the gentleman. When Sam was born my father moved the family out of the bedsit to the new development at Silver Hills. Sponsorship deals
took care of half, and there would be more in time to pay off the mortgage. They were so young; they had not had time to accumulate things, or to cultivate their own tastes. So they bought the show home. Right down to the doormat. They used to joke about the photo of the woman that had come with the picture frame on my father's side of the bed. He would kiss the picture good night and my mother would scold him happily.

The neighbors liked them at the beginning, my mother claims. Jean next door was a keen gardener, and she and my mother became quite competitive as to whose borders were the straightest, whose begonias bloomed first. Over the fence they traded cuttings and tips. Jean explained what sort of thing was proper in Silver Hills. The lawn in the center of our garden was always trimmed short and watered every evening. My father began teaching Sam to putt out there when my brother wasn't much taller than the golf club. He never bothered to teach me though. I was left to help mother with her gardening.
Nasturtium. Rhododendron. Love lies bleeding. Chrysanthemum.
She taught me the names. She intoxicated me with language first. Her pruning away at the clematis while I watched father and Sam. A happy scene, from the outside.

But Grandma had a hunch about my father. His easy confidence pinched her.

“See who's laughing when the checks stop,” she said, running her hand along the hem of a bedroom curtain.

“Look how he eats,” she'd say loudly across the dinner table as my father wolfed down helping after helping. At which Mother would shush her crossly and Father would grin, because there was plenty, and what did it matter what the old woman thought?

But Grandma was proved right. A horrible type of validation, at her daughter's expense. She could take no joy from it. Seven years after the wedding, top three finish on the cards at The Open, a
comfortable half million predicted in sponsorship deals that year alone, and my father forgot how to play golf. Forgot, or perhaps remembered too much. Applied too much focus, monitored those delicate, implicit sporting movements too closely. The familiar suddenly became unfamiliar. A misfiring of neurons somewhere in his brain stopped him from converting thought into action. He locked up. Hooked a shot off the tee on the eighteenth. Dropped another shot in the bunker. Then couldn't putt a two-footer to close it. The damn club would not connect with the ball. His impulses denied. Eventually he dragged it wide. A spectacular choke. My father preferred to say he had lost his rhythm. A one-off, he told his young family, but the touch never returned. Even in training his swing was labored; even when it meant nothing he played as if it meant everything. He tried the overlap grip, changed his posture, but his thinking had become too rational, too analytical. Too sensitive. Who'd have thought that would be my father's tragedy?

As he fell down the rankings, the tournaments stopped calling. He ceased playing professionally. For a while he poured his ambitions into my brother and dragged him round the holes, but his expectations were too high; there was anger on both sides.
A Randall never quits
, he would shout at Sam, though that was exactly what he had done. Unable to face his colleagues at the club, he canceled his membership and looked to sell up. But the jerry-built homes of Silver Hills had paled next to newer, slicker developments and my father could not afford to take the loss. So beside the golf course we remained, its cool expansive greens looking in, mocking quietly. Sometimes the sliced shots landed in our garden: a bright white ball sitting in judgment on the lawn. These my brother and I hid. Well, my brother hid them. I watched. I was always watching him, waiting for his lead. Sam had that effect over all the neighborhood children: they fell in line behind my brother, those kids I toiled after.

Weeds came up. Jean stopped talking about what was proper in Silver Hills, started talking about what wasn't. My brother changed to a school where you didn't wear a cap. In the scrublands next to the golf course, previously unanimous decisions about water fights or bike races met with mumbles of dissent. Some gang members suddenly became studious, and could not be extracted from their homes. Our TV got smaller, our family unfamiliar.

My mother, who had believed in my father even more than he had, was forced to take a job at a nearby nursing home. Her girlish mannerisms became tired and prim. She watched the bitterness growing inside my father. His ruddy cheeks blotched and scowling, those athletic limbs setting thickly. That exuberant appetite now selfish, parasitic. The mother's daughter, observing. She watched him become the man he is today. Lying on the sofa eating dry cereal with a bent pound shop spoon (miserly with the shopping yet prodigal at the bookmaker's), cutting his toenails (still oddly vain, my father, though disheveled in spirit), muttering at The Masters on TV, unwilling to find work since that short stint as a double-glazing salesman when people kept asking if they had seen him somewhere before. You could call it a tragedy. But let's be clear: it's not the tragedy of how things change. It's the tragedy of those little parts that stay the same. How what we took for emblems now look tawdry, now spell shame.