Chop Chop (11 page)

“Hotel chefing is the last insult to the human spirit,” said Ramilov. “You can cut my dick off before I become a banquet chef.”

“It requires skill and organization,” said Dibden, “which you know nothing about. How do you get a hundred and fifty soufflés to the table before a single one collapses? How do you keep the ice cream frozen in the middle of two hundred Baked Alaskas? This is beyond your comprehension.”

“If it was so good,” said Ramilov, “why did you leave?”

“The new head chef was different,” said Dibden. “He didn't care as much as I did.”

“And flamingos stand on one leg to prove they're not drunk,” said Ramilov. He downed his pint, stood unsteadily on one leg to demonstrate his point and fell face-first into the lap of an angry Irish pensioner on the next table.

“Dibden!” he called from the floor. “I have fallen! What an amateur I am! How did you sink so gracefully, like the sack that is filled with shit?”

Picking himself up without another word, he strode off to the bar for more beer. I thought it prudent to go over and help him with the drinks. Besides, it was depressing listening to Dibden lie about his glory days.

At the bar, two regulars conversed with the cross-eyed proprietress.

“He's a wrong 'un,” one of the men was telling the other. “Owes so many people money he can't walk down the high street. Has to go all the back routes.”

“He's another George,” said the second man.

“You know the worst thing about George?” said Nora. “He'll be out soon.”

“Christ, it's true,” said the second man. “How many was it?”

“A pair of 'em,” said the first man. “But in the eyes of the law it's only destruction of private property. Park wardens were steaming.”

“Christ,” said his colleague again.

“You'd get worse for stealing a sofa,” said the first man. “In the eyes of the law.”

“I was up at that park the other week,” said the second man, “and there were hundreds of Canada geese.”

“Well, they migrate here, don't they?” said his friend.

“There's a shitload there now.”

“Gaggle,” said Ramilov, who was waiting to be served.

The two men looked at him suspiciously.

“What?” said the man who had seen the geese.

“It's a gaggle of geese, not a shitload,” Ramilov explained woozily.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the man asked Ramilov in a less than friendly manner.

“And it's a skein of geese if they're in the sky,” Ramilov added helpfully. I would venture the word
skein
had never been heard in O'Reillys before that night, and I was secretly impressed.

“Are you taking the fucking piss?” said the first man.

“Abs'lutely not,” Ramilov slurred, looking grievously offended. “I never joke about collective nouns.”

“Who is this cunt?” the other man asked Nora.

“Now you.” Nora rounded on Ramilov in cross-eyed fury.

“Ah, Nora, I was just telling these gentlemen about collective nouns.”

“I don't give a feck,” said Nora. “We'll have less of it.”

Ramilov could not understand why anyone would want less of collective nouns.

“It's an effective description of types,” he explained indignantly.
“For instance, Nora, were you aware it's a
blarney
of bartenders? Blarney is Irish for nonsense or bollocks . . .”

“Stop talking, man!” cried Nora.

“You seem a little stressed, Nora,” Ramilov observed with blurry but genuine concern, wagging a finger at the lady of the house. “I think your work-life balance might be out of sync.”

“
Right!
” shouted Nora. “
I've had enough of your lip for one evening. Get out and take your poxy friends with you.
”

“Nice one, Ramilov,” said Dave when we were turned out in the rain and shivering like wet dogs. “We'll never get another pint in at this hour.”

“Let's go see Mr. Michael,” Ramilov said.

W
e were in need of cheering up, Ramilov shouted at us through the rain as he led us to the modest lodgings of Mr. Michael, the neighborhood drug dealer. Between my wounded hand and my more general melancholy, I agreed with that much of what he said. Mr. Michael was regarded as a most obliging sort by one and all, Ramilov went on, leaping a puddle with surprising grace, as long as you did not owe him money. Since none of us apart from Ramilov had met Mr. Michael before, or even heard of him, we were quietly confident that we were square on this account. Our confidence proved unfounded.

“Aha!” came the cry as the door opened. “You owe me money, you owe me money, you owe me money!” Mr. Michael pointed at me, then Racist Dave, and then, possibly correctly, at Ramilov. “And you,” he said, spotting Dibden hiding at the back, “owe me lots of money.”

“I don't think this is a good idea,” Dibden whispered to Ramilov as Mr. Michael led us inside. The same idea had occurred to me also.

Ramilov was shocked.

“Come on, Dibden,” he said. “What else are you going to do?”

“Sleep?”

Ramilov dismissed this suggestion with contempt.

“What's the chef's motto, Dibden?” he asked.

“Hurry up?” said Dibden.

“No,” said Ramilov. “It's ‘
Here for a good time, not a long time.'
”

The corridor opened into a sparse kitchen and living room. At
the far end, a very small and shriveled man was curled up in a fetal position on a large leather sofa, his eyes shut tight. Mr. Michael sat down beside the man without paying him any attention and busied himself undoing an ingeniously knotted plastic bag on the coffee table in front of him. He sat with a very upright posture, a short fellow with a head too large for his body. The features of his face were set in a friendly expression, though still a little scary at that.

“What brings you gentlemen calling at such an hour?” he asked magnanimously.

“We've had a shit day,” said Ramilov bluntly. “We need cheering up.”

“This I can facilitate,” Mr. Michael proclaimed happily. His pronunciation was glottal, particular.

Ramilov and Mr. Michael proceeded to discuss the particulars with occasional suggestions or haggles from Racist Dave, who it turned out was something of a connoisseur when it came to narcotics.

“We shouldn't be doing this,” Dibden moaned to me. “We've got work tomorrow and I'm already in the sugar before the day has started.”

This last part was certainly true and I felt very sorry for Dibden, since it was entirely his fault that he was useless and he did not have a soul in the world to blame for his misfortunes. And I too was somewhat skeptical about the wisdom of starting on a drugs bender at midnight with work the next day. What I really wanted, above all else, was to go back to my room and lie on my bed with my pulsing hand wrapped in a cold damp flannel and let my mind wander into forbidden thoughts about Harmony, tracing scars, lulled by the creaks of the radiator as it cooled and the casual cries of violence from the street below, not so different from the kitchen sounds perhaps but turned down a few notches, until sleep ran up on me.
Sleep was a friend I seldom saw. I had no business with these pills and powders and you-owe-me-money types. Was I now a drug fiend like those lost souls beneath my window? Was this, like the whole process of moving to Camden, another petty act of rebellion?

Ramilov, perhaps sensing my trepidation, was shooting long, measured stares in my direction as he negotiated the finer points of business with Mr. Michael and Dave. It felt very much like I was being sounded out, as if this were a marker or test of some sort. Not whether I was a man, but maybe whether I was a chef, whether I had that love of self-destruction, that willful pursuit of sensation and oblivion, that natural inclination to the path of most resistance, that appetite, insatiable and pestilential in its scope, which overrode everything. And I realized I wanted to pass Ramilov's test, to impress him, more than I ever had my father. From Ramilov I had learned the praising of waitresses, the giving of oracles, the taming of men. From my father, what had I learned? The ignoring of phone calls, the squeezing of spots, the passing of blame.

“So it's decided,” said Ramilov at last. “Those two cunts over there will have a pill each and Dave and I will take four between us and we'll split a gram of that horrible mersh for a nudge in the right direction.”

“You are doubly in luck then,” said Mr. Michael, “as I am currently running a buy-four-get-one-free promotion on pills, which makes the tally five for you two.”

“Grand,” said Ramilov. He looked at the shriveled comatose man in the corner of the sofa. “What's up with him?”

“Rossi,” said Mr. Michael, “shall not be partaking of any more delicacies tonight.”

“Rossi?” said Ramilov, then leaned toward the shriveled man and shouted at him. “
Va bene, ragazzo? Tutti apposto?”

“
I wouldn't bovver with that, mate,” said Mr. Michael with disinterest. “Rossi does not speak Italian. Rossi does not speak much.”

The shriveled Rossi opened his eyes a fraction and looked forlornly at Mr. Michael, then Ramilov, who grinned and gave him the thumbs-up. This seemed to make Rossi even more anxious, and he swiftly squeezed his eyes shut again.

While Mr. Michael weighed and sorted the drugs, Ramilov collected the money from the rest of us. Dibden was still making a fuss but Ramilov explained that Mr. Michael's drugs were quite shit and would wear off in a couple of hours. Mr. Michael took exception to this argument and Dibden did not seem much convinced by it either but in the end the chef handed over money and the dealer handed over delicacies and we all partook.

As I remember it, the waiting was the longest part of that night, sitting in a strange flat with a drug dealer and a comatose Italian who did not speak Italian, waiting for it all to seem like a normal, even pleasant, thing; for this quite awkward situation to change from within. While we waited, Mr. Michael informed us of the harem he was cultivating, an exercise pitched somewhere in the middle of Ramilov's suggested work-life balance. The harem was keeping Mr. Michael very busy. The women were doing his bloody nut, he explained, and when they did that you had to give them a bit of time to cool off, then they were happy to see you again. Ramilov nodded vigorously in agreement.

“Do you gentlemen know any girls?” Mr. Michael asked.

Ramilov thought about this and replied with another question.

“Would we be here if we did?” he asked.

Mr. Michael shook his head. There were a number of good brothels he could recommend, all quite reasonable. Not as many as there used to be, of course. Whoring was not as recession-proof as
you might think. Likewise with dealing. He'd had to adapt his business model. Hence the coke for thirty pounds a gram—“the mersh,” as he called it, the commercial stuff. Sure, it was shit, cut to buggery, but people wanted a budget option. He was also doing an eighty-pound gram, for the luxury market.

“It's like how you used to have Mars bars and that was it,” he explained. “Now you've got fun size, king size, twin pack, miniatures, Mars drinks, Mars dark, Mars ice cream, Mars Planets, and
then
your Mars bar. These days you've got to give the consumer choice across the board or you're dead in the water.”

He spoke of the rival business in Camden. A Mr. Big character had flooded the streets with some disgracefully bad product.

“Should be ashamed to call himself a dealer,” he declared. “Brings the whole profession into disrepute. But I welcome the competition. That's the free market, innit.” He paused to accept a joint from Ramilov before adding darkly, “Plus he's only got one eye. Visually he's in trouble. He's got blind spots.”

As he spoke, I felt the rush begin. Not the dinner service sort of rush exactly but a relation of it, a cavernous cousin, a sickly lightness, a blur in the edges of vision. My stomach was in turmoil, as if I had eaten a crow. Its sharp bones folded and unfolded in the recesses of my gut. Its soft dry feathers against my insides made my senses bristle. I realized it was trying to spread its wings. In the darkness its black beak opened and shut. The air about me seemed to be concentrating with special, intoxicating powers; I was excited just to breathe it. Then my pupils started to breathe the air too, to see what they'd been missing, and it was so strong, that air, so fresh. . . . Before long I was chain-smoking Ramilov's Marlboros and telling Racist Dave about love.

“We have to satisfy ourselves with the idea of love, you know?
Not loving things—we might not even care about the things—but loving the loving of things.”

Dave said he did not know what I was talking about.

“Some writer said it,” I told him. “I can't remember who. Love must be the object of our love.”

“Monocle, I will give you ten pounds if you shut the fuck up right now,” said Dave, who had ingested a not insignificant amount of drugs and was looking somewhat peaky.

“Take me, for instance,” I said. “I love loving love. Love loves loving, you know?”

“Please shut up,” Dave groaned.

“What I'm saying,” I explained, “is that our love for things is not so great as our love for our love for things.”

“Make him stop,” cried Dave, rolling his eyes into the back of his head and trying to crawl inside the sofa.

“
Oi!
” shouted Ramilov. “Don't talk bollocks to Racist Dave when his brain is cake. Use your English lit degree for good, not evil.”

“My parents never showed me any love,” Dibden exclaimed with big moon eyes. “They never gave a . . . a sugar.”

Wincing at the mention of that scorching word, I thought not of Bob but of my father, with his own very particular brand of affection. And even through the pills and their talk of love's loves I could not disregard his rare ability to disparage. But at least I had escaped and found other people to mock me and be disparaging, people who were not supposed to love me in the first place and had built no such intricate fencing around the concept.

“I think I'm going to call you ‘Sugar Tits' from now on, Dibden,” said Ramilov, “because it's ruder in your language than in mine.”

“Thanks, mate,” said Dibden fondly.

“Don't call me mate, Sugar Tits,” replied Ramilov. “Our relationship and this drug binge are purely professional.”

“Not for much longer it won't be,” said Dibden. “I'm going to quit.”

This comment prompted much groaning and general ill feeling toward Dibden.

“
Are Subway hiring?
” Ramilov shouted, even though Dibden was sitting right next to him.

Dibden explained it was nothing personal against any of us, just that kitchens did not have to be run this way and we all deserved better. Ramilov grew quiet at that and muttered that Bob would get his soon enough, but the crows in our bellies were in full flight now and hardly had the subject of Bob's crimes been raised than someone shouted for music and there was a collective surge for Mr. Michael's computer, where a series of increasingly frantic numbers were found and played until they lost their punch somewhere around the minute mark, at which time they were abandoned in favor of something else that absolutely had to be played this instant, and so forth, with bodies rising or falling according to musical preference and Mr. Michael's oversized head grinning along at the madness he had sown, occasionally nudging poor Rossi into consciousness to witness one chef or another making a fool out of himself.

Scarcely had the dancing begun, it seemed, than Ramilov cried out for booze and cigarettes and on prosthetic legs we skidded down the stairs and out into the streets where the air was alive and the lights held conversations with our eyes and here now was a wrinkled street busker, strumming “Wonderwall,” whom Ramilov snarled at and accused of “trying to kill him with his fucking oboe.” The fellow was aggrieved and pointed out that he was playing a guitar but this denial only made Ramilov more suspicious and he was
suggesting that Carlos Sultana was a smart arse when we dragged him down the street away from danger. And soon we were in the late-night supermarket and the dark South Asian faces were watching us with fear and fascination and the juice cartons were a wall of colors in my eyes, the brightest reds and pinks and purpley blues and yellowy greens, and this was so wonderful to me that I did not know how to express it, there were not words enough to tell it, though I thought I must try.

“My soul is overwrought with petals of wonderment,” I told Ramilov.

Ramilov made his face into a wall of teeth and glanced left and right in great concern.

“Please don't talk like that,” he said. “Someone might hear you.”

The next thing anyone knew we were back at Mr. Michael's and dancing once more and then the music had grown old again and we were talking, gabbling long excited stanzas, and again the subject turned to love and Dave, much recovered, widened his ink-blot pupils as he declared undying ardor for a girl back in Manchester whom he had had to leave behind when he boshed all the drugs he was supposed to sell and thereby chafed the criminal element.

“That was five years ago,” he explained sadly. “We don't talk anymore, but I still think about her all the time. I fucking loved her.”

To which Ramilov, Mr. Compassion, replied thoughtfully that five years was a lot of sex.

Dave began to cry at that, which was a departure for him emotionally, and Ramilov pulled his mouth into a wince and rubbed his eyeball socket with the palm of his hand and said, “Don't cry, mate, don't cry,” but that did not seem to have any effect on Dave who was really going for it with long wracking sobs. Dave, reviewing this chapter, disputes this account, but I have found that despite his
hard exterior Dave can be quite inclined to the sentimental when the mood takes him. Soft elements live about him; others will break your hand. I suppose no one is quite the right balance. Ramilov put out his cigarette and leaned over and gave him a hug, then he shouted that everyone should be hugging Racist Dave, which seemed like a good idea so we all came over and hugged Dave who smelled strongly of Lynx and gum and he told us how grateful he was to have such a good group of friends around him. That was what chefs had to do, he said. They had to stick together. They were family.