In the Kitchen (32 page)

She rested her brow on his shoulder and snuffled about for a bit. Then she lifted her head and looked him straight in the eye. 'You think you know someone,' she began, before her voice cracked. 'You think you know someone ...' She took his hand and placed something in it and pressed his fingers closed. 'I hope you do help her. She sounds like she needs it. Don't make things worse for her.'

She backed away from him, her hands in her pockets, and she looked magnificent, backlit by the streetlights, her coat cinched tight at the waist, the deep burnish in her hair. Gabriel gripped the ring. It seemed important not to lose it, not to give up like that. 'Wait,' he called. 'We need to talk about it. There are things you don't understand.'

'I understand enough, Gabriel. The question is, do you?' She turned then and left him and before she was out of sight he lit up a cigarette and started planning what he needed to do to get her back.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GABE WATCHED ERNIE AND OONA SCUTTLE AND SHUFFLE TOWARDS THE prefab from opposite ends of the loading bay. Oona had a low centre of gravity; any lower and she'd be rooted permanently to the ground. Ernie looked distressed and distracted, which was how he always looked on the move. He needed a pillar to lurk beside, a rock to duck behind, a shadow in which to rest. It was a perpetual hazard of his porter's job that no sooner had he reached a place of relative safety than he was forced to break cover again. Perhaps it would be kinder to put him out of his misery, effect the 'restructure and redundancy initiative' outlined in Mr James's sickly little memo yesterday.

In swift light strides Gabe passed his executive sous-chef.

'Good Lord,' said Oona, as if Gabe had spread his wings and flown.

'Morning,' said Gabe, hurdling a packing crate. He jumped into the back of the cheese van.

'Hernie need a little bitta help,' called Oona, sing-song.

Gabe watched the pair converge at Ernie's hut. He owed Oona an apology. He'd filled out the wrong details for that birthday party and then given Oona a formal warning about it. Ernie and Oona both stepped into the doorway at once and became, momentarily, wedged in the frame.

Gabe turned away laughing and groaning. 'Crack troops,' he said under his breath. 'Top team.'

He picked up a Vacherin du Terroir and lifted the lid. He put it to one side.

He examined the Roqueforts next and they failed to inspire. It had been a week since he'd seen Charlie and he hadn't called her yet. The plan was to call her today. Give her a week to cool off and then ring her when she'd given up expecting him to call. Maybe she'd still be furious. Maybe he should have run after her straight away.

He used his penknife to slice a piece of Demi Pont l'Évęque. He held it under his nose. Why had he told her? This was the question he could not answer. He'd decided (hadn't he?) not to tell her. And then he told her. Just like that. He did it without thinking. But that was only an expression (wasn't it?), a manner of speaking. I did it without thinking. You dodge a fist without thinking. You step around a pothole without thinking. You breathe without thinking. You don't tell your girlfriend you fucked someone else without thinking. Anyway, he'd considered it, played the angles, rejected it as an option. Then he spoke and somehow it all came out.

It must have been in his mind to do it, to tell her. You can't speak the words without the thought. The thought comes first and the words give it shape. They follow along, however infinitesimally small the delay. So he'd decided to tell her. Why? He'd had that thought. Tell her, he'd thought. It was my thought.

But where did it come from? It wasn't my idea to think something stupid like that.

He was going round and round in circles. What did it matter? Whatever way it had happened it was done. But he could not let the subject rest. What he wanted to know was this: did he produce the thought or was the thought something that happened to him? It just popped into my mind. People said that, didn't they? But if he wasn't responsible for his thoughts, then what was 'he'? Was there a 'he' that was separate from the bit of him that thought? He didn't think so. How could he know? And what was the point of all these questions? They just turned in and in on themselves in one big tangled mess.

I said it without thinking. Maybe it made more sense that way. The thought followed the words. Subconscious, that was it. Deep down he wanted to break it off with Charlie, wanted to destroy the relationship. He groaned at this marvellous insight. It made no sense, that he'd want to fuck everything up. It all went round and round. He could scarcely pick out one thought from the next.

He jumped out of the van and the cheese man was waiting. 'Sorry,' said Gabe, 'but I don't really want anything today.'

A giant bullfrog in a tuxedo had been positioned strategically across the entrance to Dusty's. It moved aside to allow a couple of girls dressed in two or three sequins to trip fawn-like down the stairs. Gabe looked at Nikolai.

'There's never been a bouncer before.'

A gaggle of girls brushed past them and the bouncer unclipped the red velvet rope. Gabe glanced at the girls' legs. They looked like they might snap. The knees were the widest part. It certainly wasn't the usual Dusty's crowd.

'Members?' said the bouncer, his hooded eyes swivelling between Nikolai and Gabe. He didn't wait for a reply. Pointing up at the sign he said, 'Members only now.'

'Ruby in the Dust,' said Gabriel. 'Where's Dusty? What's he done to this place?'

'Who? Never 'eard of him. You're not getting in.'

Nikolai put a hand on Gabriel's arm. 'Plenty more places. Come on.'

'Look,' said Gabe, 'I've been drinking here for ...'

'Not any more, mate.'

'Fuck's sake,' said Gabe. 'Do you think I want to go in there?'

'I don't know what you want, mate. All I know is you're still hanging around.

And you ain't getting in.'

Gabriel flew up to the red velvet rope. He was eye to eye with the bouncer. He could almost feel the fat throb of his neck. 'You,' he said, spitting the words, 'are not very civilized. I asked you about Dusty. This used to be Dusty's place.'

'Chef,' said Nikolai, 'this gentleman is not in the mood for conversation.

Let's find another establishment.'

Gabe allowed Nikolai to steer him away.

'I can't believe it,' said Gabe, though he believed it only too well, property prices being what they were. 'Dusty's has always been there.'

They tried a couple of pubs but there was nowhere to sit, a bar at which they were (politely) refused at the door, and another in which the music was intolerable and the clientele unbearably loud and young.

'I have a bottle of vodka,' said Nikolai. 'In my locker.'

Gabriel did not want to drink vodka at work with Nikolai. He did not want to sit in this bar. He did not want to traipse any longer around these streets.

He did not want to go home to Lena. The only thing he did want was to call Charlie, and that he could not manage yet. 'Let's go, then,' he said.

Though it was strictly against regulations they smoked in the locker room.

They drank Nikolai's cheap vodka from plastic water-cooler cups. Little spots of colour appeared in Nikolai's dead-white cheeks. He could almost be albino, Nikolai, with his white eyelashes and brows. He had the eyes of a mouse. But his hair was ginger and nutmeg, to keep you guessing, as Nikolai always did.

'What shall we drink to?' said Gabriel, topping up the cups.

Nikolai smiled but did not speak.

'To Yuri?' said Gabe.

'If you like,' said Nikolai.

'There's a dream I keep having,' said Gabe.

Nikolai nodded.

Gabriel sat on his right hand to keep it from flinging up again to his head.

He clutched the plastic cup in his left and tossed the vodka down.

'Why do they call you Doc?' Nikolai's English was barely accented. He was clearly educated. What was he doing, chopping onions all day? 'Ah,' said Nikolai.

'You don't say much.'

'I got out of the habit,' said Nikolai.

'Don't let me force you,' said Gabe.

Nikolai smiled. Gabe looked around the locker room. It seemed the right place to be drinking with Nikolai. It matched his austerity. There was something Soviet in the strip lighting, the metal lockers, the two that gaped open utterly bare. Though Russia, of course, was totally different now. Moscow was all glitz and glam, what he'd seen in the supplements, gangsters and molls, the Wild West gone east. But that wasn't Nikolai. Nikolai was cheap vodka, bread queues, empty shelves.

Nikolai liked to make himself an enigma. Well, Gabe wasn't playing the game.

He wouldn't ask him anything. They'd sit here in the bowels of the Imperial and listen to the rumble and whine in the walls. Might as well drink vodka in silence with Nikolai as do anything else he did not want to do.

'Drink to the year ahead,' said Nikolai. 'May it be full of joy.' He saluted with his cup.

'My girlfriend left me,' said Gabe. 'We were engaged.'

'A beauty,' said Nikolai, as if that explained it all.

'Oh,' said Gabe, 'you saw her. That time at the club.'

Nikolai lit a cigarette and offered it to Gabe, who slid his hand out from under his bum. When he was smoking his arm behaved itself.

'She's a cracker,' said Gabe, like some no-hope punter. 'I fucked up.'

'You were together long?'

'Three years. Three years and a bit.'

'And before? You were married before?'

Gabe shook his head. 'Waiting for, you know ... the right time.'

Nikolai crossed his legs. He drank off another shot. His eyes were pretty much pink.

Gabe matched him with another drink. He needed a few drinks tonight. All this stress. He needed to relax. 'The thing about Charlie is, she's very independent. She likes her freedom. Likes to do her own thing.'

Nikolai poured again.

'But she can be very needy. Biological clock, all of that. You know how women are.'

Nikolai assented with a slow blink.

'She'll look in the mirror, see all kinds of faults with herself. She knows it's daft.'

'Ah,' said Nikolai.

They drank.

'She's not stupid, though. She sees through all that magazine stuff. Botox, implants – she'd never go there. I don't think so, anyway.'

Gabe ground a cigarette butt beneath his heel. 'She's pretty serious, interested in politics, culture ... and music, she's serious about that.

Although sometimes she says she's not.' She sounded pretty unstable the way he was describing her, but he hadn't said anything about her that wasn't true.

She was changeable, that was the thing. Be one way and then another.

Contradict herself. Hadn't she said to him, I'm only going to ask this one time – and then she asked him again. Forced him to say yes, I slept with her, like it was exactly what she wanted to hear.

'When I was growing up—' said Nikolai. He broke off to deal with the bottle again.

Gabe spilled a little vodka down his chin. God, I'm drunk. But not so drunk I don't realize how drunk I am. He determined to rectify this situation and emptied the rest of the cup down his throat. What he wanted to be was drunk and oblivious. He did not want to think about degrees of drunkenness.

'When I was growing up, in the Soviet Union,' said Nikolai, 'femininity was a simple thing. A woman was a worker. A woman was a mother. A woman was a wife.

My mother, she worked in a factory. In the factory she wore blue overalls, like a worker. When she came home, she wore an apron, like a mother. And once a month she went out with my father to listen to music and drink a little vodka, and she wore lipstick. It was bright red.' When Nikolai did talk, the talk turned into a speech. He spoke in his usual modest, precise tones but the cadence drew you in. His authority was like an undertow sucking you gently away from shore.

Gabriel closed his eyes. There was a pleasant kind of swimming in his head.

'On those nights they made a lot of noise when they came home. There was only a curtain across the room. We slept on one side and my parents on the other.

Even with my head beneath the pillow I heard everything.'

Gabe opened his eyes again. There were things about Charlie that irritated him. The way she got into bed. She folded one leg under her and swung the other one in. There was nothing wrong with it. But it was always exactly the same. If they got married he'd have thirty, forty, years of it, watching her get into bed, and always precisely, exactly the same.

Nikolai passed him another cigarette. His hand was as white as a surgical glove.

'But now,' said Nikolai, 'what does femininity mean?'

'Search me,' said Gabriel, leaning back rather faster than he'd intended and cracking his head against a locker door. The thing about Charlie was ... no, it was gone.

'My mother had one lipstick,' said Nikolai. 'We all knew what it meant. How many lipsticks does your girlfriend have?'

'Charlie? Oh, dozens. I don't know. Every shade.' She never closed the door when she went for a pee. Now that was annoying. And he'd never mentioned it.

'This is like a metaphor for women today,' said Nikolai. He seemed remarkably sober, or Gabriel was, at last, remarkably drunk.

'Women,' said Gabe. 'Lipshtick.'

'My mother had only one lipstick. It was bright red. We all knew what it meant.' Nikolai had said all this before. Perhaps he was pissed as a fart.

'But now a woman has many shades. She might wear them all in one day. It depends on her moods. It is very confusing for men.'

Gabe reached for the bottle. It was empty. 'Let's borrow one from the bar.'

'And we'll drink to Yuri,' said Nikolai.

'To Yuri,' said Gabe with a wild laugh.

'A good man.' Nikolai burped loudly as though in tribute. 'He saved his money for his girls. Every couple of months he sent it home. Lucky I knew his hiding place. There was money waiting there and I sent it to his family. The coroner's office gave me the address. Very lucky for them, or this money would be rotting still inside the wall.'

In the couple of weeks since he'd returned from Blantwistle, he had fallen into a routine of sorts with Lena. When he returned from work they'd get a takeaway or a pizza delivery or have a bit of bread and cheese in front of the TV. Sometimes they didn't bother to eat. Lena's monumental capacity for indifference extended, of course, to food. And sometimes Gabe could not bear to think of food again after a day in the kitchen, or he was simply not hungry, or he was hungry but too tired to care. Today, though, Lena had broken the routine and cooked a meal.