Chop Chop (12 page)

This comment, from the mouth of Racist Dave, no less, should have filled me with horror. Yet for some reason it felt, and continues to feel, true. This was my family now.

I
don't regret what happened next, Bob got what was coming to him, but at the time it seemed like very bad luck that everything came together the way it did. “A huge shitstorm” is how Racist Dave describes it. Though I do not often agree with Dave's choice of vocabulary, it being somewhat limited, I am inclined to concur with him on this occasion.

Bob's demise was brought about by many factors, of which he was one, but it will forever be symbolized by the Gloriana. What, you may ask, is a Gloriana? Picture one of those Russian dolls with another smaller doll inside it, and another inside that and so on. Well, a Gloriana is a Russian doll made with birds. A quail inside a guinea fowl inside a duck inside a chicken inside a turkey or some such. You've got to bone each bird and splay it open to wrap the next smallest bird within. Then you cook the whole monstrous thing and some poor devil tries to eat it.

According to Dave, Bob had read about the Gloriana in a book, one with leather binding and color pictures and a name like
Great Dishes of Antiquity
or
The Taste of Luxurious Yesteryear
. Dave says he saw this book and it was like another world. Everything was set in jelly and the potatoes were as smooth and white as eggs. There were recipes for animals he'd never heard of. The one that got Bob dribbling was called the Rôti Sans Pareil, a type of Gloriana made for a French king with bustard, pheasant, teal, woodcock, plover, lapwing, linnet, lark, and a garden warbler; seventeen birds in all. He got his head chopped off, the king, but I think that was for something else.

Dave says that Bob was beside himself grieving when Gavin at Upfront Meat informed him that half the species in the recipe were as good as extinct. Bob was desperate to cause a sensation at The Fat Man's Christmas feast, and he had got it into his head that only a Gloriana would do. Gavin saw how tearful Bob was about his Gloriana and said he would see what he could rustle up.

So the day before the grand dinner, as I washed salad in the back sink, The Mark of Bob shimmering darkly beneath the water like some rare fish, Gavin and one of his meat lackeys came puffing into the kitchen with a large package wrapped in greaseproof paper. Ordinarily Bob let the commis bear the weight of the deliveries, but on this occasion he insisted on helping haul it onto the tabletop.

“Right,” Gavin said to Bob when they got it up onto the counter. “There she is, then.”

“She doesn't look too bad either.” Bob was peering through a hole in the bag like a cheap pornographer.

“She's a beauty, all right,” said Gavin. “You know what she needs?”

“Course I do,” said Bob. “Nothing to it.”

This Frankenstein's monster took up so much space in the oven that Bob decided to cook it halfway through on the Friday and finish it off ahead of the dinner on Saturday. As much as I hated Bob, I freely admit that when he removed the Gloriana from the oven that Friday evening, with the juices spitting and sizzling, it was a thing of beauty. We were all called over to admire it. Then Bob's wife emerged and demanded her Booboo come upstairs and he hurried off, leaving instructions for the Gloriana to go in the fridge and to make sure everything was ready for tomorrow.

When the clean down was finished Ramilov said he needed to catch up on some mise before the big dinner. He could lock up, he told Dave. Ramilov had been somewhat taciturn since he had been
locked in the fridge with the lobsters and since Bob had put his mark upon me, so the offer came as a surprise. But as Dave has helpfully explained, he wasn't going to wait around for Ramilov to finish when he had
Fiddler on the Roof
waiting for him at home, so he handed over the keys.

—

The next morning Ramilov was in before the rest of the kitchen, working studiously on the menu preparations. Again this was odd: it was as unusual for Ramilov to be early as it was for him to volunteer for extra work. Yet everything seemed to be in place and the Gloriana in the fridge looked golden and succulent. That afternoon Bob put it back in the oven to warm through and resumed his bragging.

You could tell it meant a lot to him. He even gave the staff a predinner talk, front and back of house gathered together, to impress upon us all the importance of the event.

“This is the biggest night of the year,” he said. “Some powerful people are going to be here, and it's vital we show them a good time. I mean really vital. Life or death . . . But we get this right and we're free.”

I was less than sure about the phrasing, or how much this speech was for us. It seemed as if Bob had gone into himself a bit. Perhaps he sensed this, for his next words were quite consciously for our benefit.

“I know you've all worked hard, and I know you're tired. And we are so nearly there. This is the last push before we go off to spend time with our families. . . .”

This part of Bob's little speech elicited snorts of merriment from some of the restaurant staff. I suppose they were snorting at the suggestion that getting Christmas Day and Boxing Day off counted as
a holiday, but they might equally well have been snorting at the idea of Bob modeling a scarf his mother had knitted him or Bob and Trowelface watching the Queen's Speech, for the thought of the man spending time with his family was like envisioning a dog trying to walk on its hind legs—the humanity it conferred was preposterous. I snorted for another reason altogether. I snorted at the idea of family.

“If we get this right, we'll put this place on the map,” said Bob. “And what's good for The Swan is good for every single one of you. . . .”

On he went, making a big deal of how this dinner was going to lift all our fortunes and change our lives and so forth. The amount of significance he had placed on that Frankenstein bird was almost touching. An unpleasant individual, certainly, but also a hopeful one. He did want things to be better, and that was worth something.

Dibden was also buoyed by Bob's optimism, and as the meeting adjourned he approached with a suggested improvement to the great dinner.

“Chef, how about some apple crisps for the Christmas pudding?” he asked.

Bob must have had other things on his mind because he told Dibden he was going to cut his balls off and hang them on the Christmas tree if he mentioned apple crisps again.

Camp Charles also had a query for Bob: “Chef, there's the small matter of that
filthy
fox
.” The maître d' was always trying to get rid of the molting fox above the bar. He felt it spoiled the ambience of the establishment.

Bob groaned. He had bought the fox at a flea market and now it had moths. There was a cheap irony for you.

Camp Charles stood awaiting an answer.

“It's
crawling
with
beasts
,” he explained.

“Then put it in the freezer to kill the eggs, gaylord,” Bob said at last. “Why do I have to think of everything?”

So Camp Charles took Bob's advice and lugged the skanky creature down to the chest freezers in the basement and cleared a space for it in one of them. After fitting it in among the jowls of beef and solid gray ox tails he must have looked again at the wretched beast, its teeth permanently bared, and decided it would not do for the restaurant staff to come across it unannounced. Those of a nervous disposition might not appreciate it. So he wrote a note in bold black marker:
BEWARE! FOX INSIDE
.

The next part is now the stuff of legend, told by chefs who like to scare other chefs with bogeyman stories of crime and punishment. If you don't watch out, they say, you could make this place another Swan. Any chef who gets a kick out of another kitchen's misery repeats this story, so it's told a lot.

About an hour before dinner, an awful smell started to creep out from beneath the oven doors as The Fat Man's guests gathered in the bar. We noticed it first—an acrid yellow stink crawling into the nostrils.

“What is that?” I asked Dave.

He gave me a strange look and said nothing.

“Shouldn't we tell Bob?” I asked.

“Leave it alone, Monocle,” was all he said.

Dave, my personal revisionist, denies this exchange. He says if he spoke to me it was because I was talking again when I should have been working. He says he smelled nothing. Bob, running back and forth between his minions in the kitchen and his new friends in the bar, did not seem to catch it either. Nor, it seemed, did The Fat Man's guests. They made their way up the back staircase, chattering about the surprise in store while the fog gathered in the near room.
Bob was shouting at all of us over the kitchen swelter now. I think he was anxious too: The Fat Man seemed to bring it out in him.

In the midst of this excitement, a small and inconspicuous man appeared at the back door of the kitchen. I'm trying to remember what the man was wearing or what he looked like but I can't. He was sort of hard to focus on, like the patterns on the seats in public transport. You got bored if you looked at him too long. When he walked into the room it felt like someone had just left. None of the other chefs seemed to notice the man, for he walked unchecked into the frantic gangway and was caught smack in the chest by Harmony, spinning round from the back sink to chuck a hotel tray into the plonge.

“
Say ‘
Backs!
'” she shouted, glowering at the man. “Always say ‘
Backs!
'”

“Or you could watch where you're going,” said the little man smartly. “It's not a good way to start an inspection.”

“What?” said Harmony.

“I am the restaurant inspector,” announced the man.

Harmony flushed a deep red. I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy seeing her squirm a little.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really.”

“
Chef!
” Harmony turned her neck and yelled to Bob, who was gauging the suitability of some nibbles at the pass.

“
What?
” Bob shouted back, mouth full.

“
There's a man here. . . . A restaurant inspector!
”

From round the corner Bob appeared, swallowing hard and wiping his hands on his apron.

“Really?” he said. “Now?”

“Yes,” said the inspector. His quick eyes appraised Bob. “Now.”

“It's just we've got a massive party upstairs, we're serving up any
minute,” Bob explained, his voice caught halfway between kitchen bully and whining Booboo. “Can't you come back another time?”

“We've had a tip-off about this place,” said the inspector. “We like to act on these things as fast as possible.”

“A tip-off?” Bob scoffed. “I think there's been some mistake. We're at the top of our game. Look at this. . . .”

He gave Dave a nod and together they pulled down the oven door. The miraculous bird was brought forth shining like the Ark of the Covenant.

“You won't find any problems here,” Bob informed the inspector. The power was creeping back into his voice again, drop by drop.

“It smells odd,” said the inspector, and wrote something down on his clipboard.

Bob flashed him a patronizing grin.

“You come upstairs,” he said. “See how they lap it up.”

It took four of us to carry the Gloriana upstairs, all in great ceremony with Bob following behind with a silly new tall hat on, the nondescript inspector behind him, slight and precise in his movements, full of animal intelligence. The room, I noticed, was strangely quiet for a party of thirty or so guests, though a general gasp still went up when the bird came in. No one had ever seen such a thing. Was it real? Had the dodo been rediscovered? Could it be eaten? I also noticed—it was hard not to—The Fat Man's threatening circumference at the head of the table. Even he looked impressed. We set the bird down in front of him and fanned out along the walls, hands behind our backs. The inspector stood in the corner in his drab suit, his drab little eyes blinking in the glamour of the occasion. The Fat Man rose from his seat and cleared his throat to speak. Immediately, the room fell silent.

“Well, well,” he said. “Here we all are. So glad you could all make it. So nice to see everyone without sheets over their heads.”

A few of the rich guests smiled uncomfortably. Others looked away. At the time I don't think any of us chefs paid much attention to The Fat Man's speech, or to the anxiety he seemed to instill in his supposed friends. Not that it would have made much difference. When you are already in the web, it does not help to have it pointed out to you.

“Your donations have been most generous,” The Fat Man continued. “Wonderful how charitable people can be given the right incentive. . . . But it's not about that tonight. No. Tonight we're all friends. That stuff is forgotten. So don't look so nervous! This isn't one of
those
dinners. Enjoy yourselves! Eat! Drink! Take full advantage of the hospitality of Bob here, who's cooked this fantastic creature for us. . . . Isn't that right, Bobby?”

Bob's face, which had paled slightly as The Fat Man spoke, resumed its impersonation of a proud plum. All those rich and privileged eyes, on him! He took his place next to The Fat Man and stood over the enormous beast, carving knife raised. Poised in anticipation, he was. He never looked more gluttonous.

“That's right,” he said.

“Tell us, then, Bobby,” said The Fat Man, taking his seat. “What's this treat you've made for us?”

I remember Bob's next words so clearly. The hubris makes my toes curl even now.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, clearing his throat for effect. “It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce my pride and joy, a creation of my own devising . . .
the Gloriana
.” There was a pause, in which Bob looked slyly at the inspector, then at The Fat Man. “If I might say something else?”

“Of course,” said The Fat Man. “Help yourself.”