Chop Chop (16 page)

F
ood never meant anything to me. There are no Proustian trip wires in my past. Mother was a lousy cook and father ate what was put in front of him. The man could argue with his shadow, but as far as food went he had no complaints. My mother, back from the day shift at the care home, would always serve. Beans and chips. Sausage and mash. Egg and hash browns. This chore caused the lines about her mouth to deepen, her classical beauty giving way to a barmaid's hatchet face.
Protean
is the word. Her eyes trained on the plates. In her pale blue work tunic, she shoveled potato derivatives for my father and me. I have quiet memories of those days, the sound turned right down. I wish I could turn these recollections off altogether, but if I have learned anything from the later events of this story—the blood, the confessions, the police holding cell—it is that history has a way of seeping through the gaps.

After Sam, I remember expecting change. Steps would have to be taken so the same thing did not happen to me. There would be commands to stay away from roads and bigger boys, rules enforced. Perhaps Mother would suggest I play only in the garden from now on and panic if I made the slightest sniffle. Good. I was scared of the traffic and tired of being pushed around by the bigger boys. But instead, to my great outrage, I was left to roam free. My thoughtless parents let me do whatever I pleased—even encouraged me to go out and play with my “friends.” Appalled by their negligence, I contrived various ways (that reckless inclination toward fantasy even then!) that I might endanger myself: to run away, to climb the huge
garden oak, to stand out on the ring road, to find another wasps' nest. Then we would see what they held dear. I never went through with it, however. What if they did not try to save me? Greater than my outrage was the fear it might be justified.

My father's attitude could be even more extreme. His face darkened if I came back in clean or carrying a book—I should have been grubby from roughhousing and adventure. He wondered pointedly why I didn't have any friends, why I couldn't fix my own bike. Time and again he implied, in a variety of sly and petty ways, that I had failed to meet his expectations. He wanted me to lead the neighborhood boys through the backwaters, to take my brother's risks. But I was not that person. I did not understand the roughhousing, when it was serious and when it was play. I am sure my father knew, on some level, that I could never be like my brother, but he was a proud man, never accountable for his errors of judgment. Caught in that pride, he raged against his callous and uncaring family, against his straggling son.

Father made me a substitute, mother made me a ghost. Her love for me I could not question, but after Sam she seemed to pull some part of it away, to abstract it in order to protect it from further harm. Children had proved they could not be trusted with love. They were too fragile, and their fragility broke hearts. And though she slipped me sweets and told me not to worry about my father, though she held me every night in her arms, she performed these acts with a new sense of caution. Despite my best efforts I could not get her to commit the same focus to me anymore. When she pressed me to her it was tentative, as if I were a life form fallen from the sky, who at any time might choose to go back.

What else trickles in from that time? Thoughts of Grandmother, stirring trouble. She would bring news of my mother's old suitors: how well so-and-so was doing in the steel business, what's his name's
latest car. She recounted these details loudly, projecting them toward the sofa where my father lay. Her eyes milky, nearly blind, shifty despite their attempts at innocence. And Mother, though she said nothing, absorbed it all. She had been much admired. If she had not married my father, who could say where she might be now. One of those new villas with the columns on the other side of the ring road perhaps. No care home drudgery. Private health care when it might have made a difference. Grandmother hypothesizing, eyes sly.

Slowly, I think, my mother came to see her marriage as a trap. She had been young and impressionable. She had been tricked. Now, between the care home and the show home, between the family she had and the family she'd lost, she was a prisoner. Her outward bitterness toward my father grew. He had known only one thing and now he did not even know that. When I think back I see her wiping those poor catatonic mouths and try to imagine how she felt. She did not do it, surely, to keep the family together, but perhaps to keep a dream intact, of a life she once had. Even though Silver Hills had lost its sheen and the bland quirk of the show home furnishings no longer comforted or amused, she was determined not to give these things up. They were links to a happier time. Thus principles will cloud a person's mind, and part stands in for the whole, and folk will fight tooth and nail for something they did not really want in the first place.

Not that it was ever as simple as that. She had fallen so heavily for my father, once upon a time. I'll admit I don't know much about romance—I have never burned a letter or argued tearfully in a railway station—but I imagine those feelings don't disappear overnight. What had happened with my brother, that was a tragedy for both of them. She knew how much it had torn my father up. She appreciated also the personal catastrophe he had suffered with his golf. Like him, she mourned for the personality she had first met;
she looked with sorrow on the couch-bound figure before her, the toothless crocodile, the clean rat, its impulses denied. Was she really going to pull away from him now, after he had already lost so much?
Because
he had lost so much?

Yes, I think this was my mother's dilemma. She felt for the man she loved . . . had loved. Her dramatic face, prone to its sudden weather pattern shifts, was impossible to read. Wars came and went in our house. Battle lines changed fast. There was the night I stumbled upon her and my father's tangled limbs, their half-secret lovemaking. I was not trying to look, but the door was ajar and I could not sleep. At the time my nine-year-old brain could not understand it. Not the physics, but the narrative arc. They'd been frosty with each other for weeks. Another time I found the blond woman's picture that had come with the house, the picture my father used to kiss good night, in the kitchen bin. What did it mean, after more than a decade of looking at that photo of another woman, laughing about it, to throw it away now? Certainly my mother was conflicted.

The truth is I do not know exactly how my parents felt back then. It was not one of those homes where everyone was constantly weeping and flinching at revelations. The arguments, when they happened, were mostly hushed affairs, considerately started after I was supposed to be asleep. And though my father could be cruel, and sensitive to any perceived slight (certain topics—gambling, golf, employment—were off-limits), he still displayed fleeting moments of charm. An unexpected gift for my mother that we could not afford, a roguish smile, a trip to the bookie's for his awkward young son—don't tell Mum. Even as I resented him I craved his attention. Even as my mother toiled and fretted she let him whittle away the days polishing his silverware.

Nor is it fair to say it was only a time of turmoil. There were times when our three-wheeled vehicle was happy, and no one was
left out. That whole week before the camping holiday, for instance, when my father bristled with excitement, telling us what to do in a hurricane, what berries you could eat and how to make smoke signals. Beneath the oak tree in the back garden the three of us pitched a tent and drank soup from kitchen cups, laughing at the impracticality of it all, at the pretense of survival. My father's enthusiasm was infectious right up until we got to the Lake District proper and he failed to get the fire lit on the first night and drove off to the pub in a huff.

Usually, however, I could feel life tearing whether my parents felt it or not; I could read the signs. The details were overtaking us. The creaks in the floorboards, the oak tree slowly blocking out the light, the kitchen table wobbling as my parents hunched over the bills—this was the sum of our existence. The fading show home, decorated with someone else's taste, grafted onto us. Sometimes the bodies of transplant patients reject their new parts. The unknown liver dies, the impostor hand turns gray, and the host goes into toxic shock.

Yes, it was a time heavy with vague, suggested meaning. The loose bathroom taps leaked symbolism. The front door jammed with feeling. Our neighbors ignored us passionately. Oh, our Silver Hills community was exclusive, all right. The other kids used to run when they saw me, as if czarist blood and sporting blunders were contagious.

I remember spending a lot of my time in front of my mother's hinged mirror, reflecting and being reflected. Pulling the wing mirrors around me, it was possible to make an endless hall of mirrors with my little listing face at the center of each one, a kaleidoscope of me. I would stand there for hours, transfixed, moving the side mirrors in and out, watching as I multiplied and divided. I felt sure that each version of myself was subtly different from the next; whichever
one was in the corner of my vision always seemed to be making a different expression to the face I was looking straight at. When I changed my focus to the one I had seen obliquely, its expression seemed to change again. But I could never tell whether this was because I had to angle my head differently to see this other version, or whether there was some deeper magic at work.

I found other versions of life in books. I fought rats the size of mastiffs with Gulliver; I despised that vengeful court dwarf. I swam in the language of the Mississippi with Tom Sawyer, though I could not chew long blades of grass as he did, they gave me a rash. In
To Kill a Mockingbird
I saw a strong and noble father, a concept more alien to me than any science fiction. But the book I loved most as a child, which I read until the spine broke and the pages came away in my hands, was
Pinocchio
. The story of a wooden boy who undertook a campaign of impudence against his father, who ran about the country as he pleased, refusing to obey, throwing himself into scrapes and always managing to slip out of them. It is possible, I now accept, that I took the wrong message from this tale.

Reading was not an escape, you understand. I did not dream of fantastical worlds or get misty-eyed with wild possibilities. It was an embroidering, an embossing, an overlaying of the life already there. A lesson. Books taught me how to feel. They gave me words and showed me company. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I do not know Geppetto personally, that I have never had a conversation with Huckleberry Finn.

Alas, books have never taught me how to be among people. Sometimes they have been downright misleading in this regard. When one of those oily neighbor children taunted me about my father I felt time stretching itself very thin and my anger building slowly, piece by piece, almost in sentences, as a character grows irate in a novel. I thought it perfectly normal to huff and puff myself
gradually into a rage like this, just as I thought it quite normal to do what I did next: I whacked the oily neighbor child over the head with a spade. When Pinocchio hit the talking cricket with a hammer he was chatting again in no time. To my disappointment, the oily neighbor child was not so forgiving. He told on me and my parents were duly informed. I told them it was only roughhousing. Apparently it was not the correct sort of roughhousing. My father marched me round to the neighbor's house and apologized for me.
He apologized for me.
For a better example of my craven, sad-sack father, you need look no further.

“It's been hard for the boy,” he explained. “He was alone with him when it happened, you see, when Sam took so sudden.”

I remember looking past the neighbor into the house behind him and seeing its layout, exactly the same as ours except in mirror image. Exactly the same, but not quite. They had no tree blocking the light into their living room, no father on the sofa eating cornflakes, no empty bedroom at the top of the stairs with peeling posters. It was not our life after all.

“No major harm done,” the father of the other boy kept saying.
No major harm done
. He wanted us off his doorstep. But my father, swept up in his noble bit, did not notice. Every second he stood there mumbling his apologies my respect for him faded further. He offered no strength, no pluck. So I spent more time staring into books and mirrors, looking for other teachers. He drove me to fiction. You could say he drove me further still, to a life beyond it, to the kitchen and its teachers: Racist Dave, who for all his bigotry and bad grammar leads us forward with a steady hand; and Ramilov, who, though he raked the fire under his own pot in more ways than one, also taught me the meaning of sacrifice.

Yet my father is still in the picture whether I wish him to be or not. Still lying, on my floor or otherwise; still standing, now at the
bar of The Swan, panhandling for beer. For all the man's faults, I cannot deny his tenacity. If I lose my temper with him he tells me he knows how I feel, that we shouldn't blame ourselves for Sam. He lumps me in with him and puts Sam up on high, looking down on us, the source of all our love and joy when he was among us, all our frustrations and troubles now he's gone. My father will tell some version of that to anyone who will listen. By now, every diner and drinker in The Swan has heard of Sam. Stand at the bar for two minutes and you'll have my brother's entire life story. My father knows how much this annoys me. What he doesn't know is why. I do blame myself for what happened to Sam, and with good reason.

I
, we, just wanted to escape the past, to step out of the hollows worn by other souls. But there were those who didn't want the same as us, those who wished to harness us once more, and they were worming out of the shadows again, pouring their poison in our ears, confounding our intents. My father, of course: his mention in this company is deserved. But now another, greater shadow is rising up. The flies are beginning to swarm, a black and glittering mass, a sickening drone. What exactly is it they cover? What is the rottenness at the heart of this story? We are getting to it, I promise. We are getting to the dark heart. Ramilov says I know what I must say: “the greater truth,” as he puts it in his letters, the one all of us went with. He says it is not so bad where he is now—and no one there is as bad as Bob.

Bob will always be the yardstick for this restaurant. His bellowing laughter when he burned someone, his sneer of contempt at the plates of food offered up to him, that sense of being stalked by his shiny eyes. In those early days and weeks after the fall, Bob was on our minds constantly. Sure, there was happiness now, but where was the center of gravity? Without Bob's weight we threatened to float away. People became emboldened, brazen; they acted the fool. With both Booboos gone our mise was left untouched. The
clipclop
of Bob's terrible wife no longer turned our backbones to jelly. It was a time of uncertainty, of self-doubt. Without suffering, how could we be sure we were still alive? Without a master, who else might subjugate us? Had Bob, in all his petty, weaselly majesty, protected us from something worse?

Less than a month after The Swan's reopening, these questions were answered. Who should sail in but The Fat Man, fatter than ever, his gut a few seconds in front of the rest of him, his bored and diabolical face prepared to inflict new miseries upon Camp Charles and the button-nosed waitress and whoever was unfortunate enough to serve him. He took a spot at the bar while the front-of-house staff frantically prepared his table. My father, swaying slightly on his stool (it had been a long afternoon), looked up at the source of the great shadow now cast upon him and made some observation I was glad I could not hear. They exchanged a few words, and I saw my father point in my direction and offer some explanation. What was he saying? It was not beyond him to dive straight into the murk and guilt of our family with a complete stranger. But was The Fat Man a complete stranger? It was hard to tell from the way they spoke to each other. At the pass I watched helplessly as these two worlds collided. The Fat Man looked over at me but I could not tell what was in his eyes. At last Camp Charles came over and led the great brute to his table, away from my affairs.

Here was his order: one of every starter, no salad leaves on anything, the steak blue, the steak walking, by god, a duck with extra skin, a side of pork belly, chips by the bucketload, extra vinegar on the red cabbage, six oysters while he waited, and a bowl of the crab linguine.

“Would you like a small or large portion of the linguine?” Camp Charles, very suave and deadpan this evening, later relayed this joke to the chefs, to much merriment.

The Fat Man had glared at him with impatience. Only one of those choices existed in his universe, and you had only to look at him to know which one that was. Rich and corpulent, smothered by excess, The Fat Man had no choice at all. To watch him eat those starters was the pinnacle of misery for a chef, for he smashed
apart the artfully presented plates of food without even looking at them, his sloppy, slick-lipped mouth churning the delicate flavor combinations and balances of texture into one homogenous pulp, a hateful battle between him and it, a war of consumption. If the mouth of the wicked conceals violence, The Fat Man's was not doing such a good job of hiding it. That massive hole turned wine into water and made five thousand fish look like an hors d'oeuvre. The Fat Man was the anti-Christ. Ramilov, watching in horror from the pass, complained it was like watching a body make shit in front of your eyes.

“What would happen if you put a baby in front of him?” he wondered.

Mains were dispatched in the same manner. With animal violence The Fat Man hooked his broad jaw around the steak and tore off great hunks, slurping the blood through his teeth and grinding the half-chewed lumps in that gruesome gob, “his charnel of maw,” as Melville said of the Maldive shark. Even with the knowledge that The Fat Man was paying full price for this meat, it seemed an undignified end to a creature's life. And when he had gorged himself on every kind of creature on the menu and dismissed Camp Charles's offer of ice cream with disgust, when the blood and animal fat stained his collar and his eyes were dull with feeding, The Fat Man raised his tremendous weight from the chair and moved hugely over to the pass for a word with Racist Dave.

“A little dinner party,” I heard him saying. “A few friends of mine, prominent figures in the community, cash in hand. So disappointing for us all what happened with the Gloriana. . . . Be good to set things straight. Bob proved he couldn't hack it, but a man of your skill, it'll be easy.”

I thought The Fat Man was flattering to deceive but Racist Dave was not so educated in this manner and I could see him preening at
the words. He pointed over at me and I knew I was being appraised. Dave was asking if he could bring me as his commis. The Fat Man looked at me for the second time that evening. He nodded.

—

The Swan had no bodies to spare on its days of business, so it was on a Monday, when the kitchen in the era After Bob was closed, that Dave and I made our way to The Fat Man's house. That afternoon my father had moaned when I told him I was cooking for a “private function.” Not out of any patriarchal concern—apparently I had promised to buy him dinner. I did not recollect that particular promise; moreover, I resented having to explain myself to my father at all. This parental opprobrium was entirely undeserved for a man living on my floor. The questions, the waiting up or the two
A.M.
minefield where I crept around sleeping limbs: all that was what I had moved here to avoid.

The address was a large and sober town house on a wide avenue lined with London planes, a short walk from the restaurant. The ghost of a once sprawling wisteria haunted the building's façade, otherwise there were no distinguishing features. No indication of the horrors that lurked inside, no forewarning. Dave would like me to make it clear here that he was never scared; he was from the north, after all, and The Fat Man wouldn't have lasted two seconds on Moss Side. I am not so sure. Even as he rang the bell that first time, Dave looked more than somewhat uncomfortable.

The Fat Man seemed pleased to see us.

“Chefs, welcome,” he said, opening the door. We may have murmured in reply. Being face to face with such enormity took your breath away. Your thoughts turned to oxygen supplies and planetary resources. How could his appetite be doubted? He had built a monument of flesh. He sat at the top of a mountain of himself.

It was dark inside the house and what little light there was sloped awkwardly toward the walls, as if to avoid any confrontation with its occupants. The effect was veiled, menacing. Low voices could be heard behind a closed door at the other end of the hallway, but The Fat Man did not lead us there. Instead he took us through into the dining room, laid out in preparation, which led in turn to the kitchen, a vast room of stainless steel and black marble. It was bigger than the kitchen at The Swan. Everything in it looked new. Cold, sharp instruments were lined neatly across the wall. State-of-the-art gadgetry gleamed on the counters. Dave whistled with delight. But all these machines and devices only reminded me of the savagery of cooking, of the violence implicit in the act.

“Toys,” The Fat Man said as Dave examined them. “Use whatever you like. I have a jaded palette and I like to be surprised.”

“What are we cooking?” Dave wanted to know.

The Fat Man smiled.

“A special something, my boys. A special something.” He leaned in, eyes wide. “Have you ever heard of the ortolan?”

We had not.

“It's a tiny, rare songbird,” The Fat Man explained. “You drown them in brandy and roast them in a clay pot. They're so little you can crunch the bones.” He went over to a side door and began unlocking it with a large set of keys. “Before they banned them the French considered them a great delicacy, but a sinful one. . . . A man was only allowed to eat one bird at a sitting. He had to cover his head with a cloth so God couldn't see him eating it.”

At this The Fat Man opened the door and disappeared inside for a moment. When he returned he was carrying something covered in a sheet of black silk. Talking about sin seemed to have put him in a good mood.

“There's a famous story about the old French prime minister Mitterrand,” he went on. “A story told to show how wicked he was. They say, at his last meal, that he ate an ortolan and asked for seconds. Well, we have no such scruples here, so I bought extra. . . .”

With a swift flick he threw the sheet off to reveal a fine wire cage full of minuscule birds. There must have been at least twenty of them in that cage, all packed in on top of one another, jostling each other with their little wings. When the light of the kitchen hit them they began to chirrup loudly. The sound of birdsong washed over the kitchen, beautiful and terrible; the birds had mistaken The Fat Man's dungeon for daylight, and the two were not the same.

“If I were you,” The Fat Man said, “I wouldn't bother trying to drown them one by one. They're lively little buggers. Just fill the sink up with brandy and lower the cage in.”

Dave was wearing his swagger and saying, “No problem, I do this sort of thing all the time,” but I knew he was perturbed also. Then The Fat Man looked over at me and winked. Not in a friendly way, exactly, but familiar. Why would he do that? I recalled the conversation I'd seen him having with my father in the pub. Not exactly friendly either, but familiar.

“Just make sure everything's perfect,” he continued. “These people have paid a lot for this meal. More than you could imagine.”

He went off, quote, to entertain his guests. Dave and I were alone in the kitchen with the songbirds.

“Go on then, chef,” he said. “Drown 'em.”

As much as I respected Dave as a chef I would not, I could not, drown the birds and in the end Dave gave up trying to make me and prepared to do it himself.

“Big pussy,” he said as he filled the sink with liter after liter of The Fat Man's brandy. “There's nothing to it.”

He picked the cage up with both his hands and hesitated for a moment.

“It's just like killing a lobster, or opening an oyster, or boiling a langoustine,” he muttered through gritted teeth. Dave says he was talking to me when he said this, but it sounded to me like he was talking to himself. Then a cold, dead expression came into his eyes and he plunged the cage of birds downward into the liquor and their little wings beat and thrashed about in the brandy, foaming it, discoloring it, and their agitated squawks grew submerged, turned to bubbles, fell silent. Dave held the cage down long after the liquid was still again, his face dark and clenched. When he pulled it dripping from the sink there was only a pile of small, feathered corpses where the songbirds had been, and the cage looked suddenly heavy in his hands.

“Pluck these,” he said angrily. “I've got shit to do.”

—

Of all the chapters in my life I do believe that this day, when I stood over a garbage bag with the tiny lifeless creatures in my hands, their feathers sticking to my fingers like guilt, this day is among the lowest. And let me tell you there has been some competition, Sam's final hours aside. The day my father took me fishing, for example, which had started so well, the two of us sitting on the riverbank as he told me how herrings started to glow when they died, or how the trout forced their weakest out to sea to spawn, only for the exiled to return as sea trout, bigger and stronger than their relatives. We were both excited, I think. But as the day wore on and the fish failed to bite my father began to drink and the sun got lower and the riverbank colder, and then he began throwing stones at someone's skiff and tried to make me bet he couldn't sink it, and when I wouldn't join in he said I had no balls, that I was, quote, an omen of
impotence and no wonder we hadn't caught any fish. A day of ugly recriminations in the end. It had caused a breach between us.

Or at university, when the girls in my halls guessed the unplucked root of my shyness and made an announcement over the PA system in the student bar and Sally Danzig—big, lewd, loose-hipped Sally Danzig, whom all the boys called Dirty Danzig—walked straight up to me and offered to sort me out then and there on the pool table. A black day certainly, but those mortifications were at least limited to me and me alone. I could live with them. Such assaults only strengthened my defenses. With a squint of vision, a positive could be extracted from such experiences. But I had seen the way The Fat Man ate and the emptiness in his eyes and I knew those little songbirds had died for nothing. I held their tiny limp bodies in my hands. I plucked their feathers downward so I didn't break their skin. I plucked them out in tight bunches that turned suddenly into down in my fingers, blowing loosely and lightly all over the room, sticking in the sink or rising to the ceiling. There was no clean way.

Dinner was to be served at eight as per The Fat Man's instructions, and Dave was spinning around the kitchen like a whirling dervish preparing the other items requested: steak tartare with quail's eggs, deviled kidneys on toast, deep-fried sweetbreads—the thymus gland, Dave explained—spears of white asparagus and a gargantuan tray of Pommes Anna cooked in duck fat. The Fat Man wanted the ortolans served last of all, when he rang the bell three times. We worked quickly and quietly, the creaks and murmurs of the house seeming to swell and multiply around us as our concentration increased. In the stillness of my thoughts it seemed now as if the house were whispering through the walls to pluck faster, to not let myself get sentimental. And though the occasion was unpleasant there was so much to prepare that the appointed hour
struck sooner than expected—a single mournful note from the dinner bell. Since there were no waiters or waitresses in this hateful place it was Dave and I who carried the food into the dining room.