Chop Chop

1. Peluche

Ramilov was in the fridge and he would stay there until he knew better.

‘I want everyone to know,’ said Bob, dragging one fat sausage finger across the room, ‘that people will be punished for their lifestyle choices here.’

‘You can’t ban love, chef,’ Ramilov said from inside the walk-in.

‘I fucking can,’ said Bob.

And in that moment I personally believed, yes, Bob could ban love, he could do anything he pleased. Because when he said it, standing at the pass with a clutch of checks in his sweaty fist, in a pause between the demands for ravioli or onglet or potted prawns right fucking now and the constant haranguing and the whole ‘Generalissimo Bob marshalling the troops’ act, Bob was the most powerful thing in the world. He was a giant, a blue whale, a Leviathan. On his colossal flanks we were mere flies. Bob was king of the universe. Thou shalt have no other god but Bob.

I say was, because even kings can topple. Even gods fade away. And as surely as one falls, another rises in its place.

Get to the point, Monocle. We don’t want your fucking life story.

This was Racist Dave’s warning, or literary suggestion, when he heard I intended to write about what happened to us: how we suffered under Bob, how we were drawn past him into that cruel and shadowy world, how we made the mistakes we did. Dave said he didn’t trust me to ‘make a beeline for the blood and gash’, that I yakked on too much. It is true that I am different from my fellow chefs, one who is not afraid to employ words like ‘Leviathan’ if the situation demands it. Apparently Dave considers this a stain on my character, for he has appointed himself as a sort of editor to me. I didn’t mind showing him the drafts, I said, but let me handle the grammar. Dave said he didn’t care about that stuff anyway. He just wanted to make sure I didn’t get carried away with things, a continuation of a long-standing kitchen policy towards me. For many months, my mouth was barely open before the rebukes started flying: You speak like an arsehole, it has been observed. Stop babbling or I will stab you in the face – that was another one. Monocle is always so fucking proper. Well, pardon me if that is a crime.

‘Monocle’ was Dave’s idea after Bob, with unconcealed glee, informed the kitchen of my English Lit degree.

‘Fucking university,’ said Dave. ‘That explains it.’

Dave was proud of the nickname without good reason. Students do not wear monocles. I suggested he was thinking of a mortarboard. He suggested he was thinking of unspeakable acts with my mother. A rude man, Racist Dave, and an obtuse one. Whatever its origin, Dave used the nickname a lot, often several times in the same sentence, and with his sponsorship ‘Monocle’ soon passed into the kitchen’s common parlance. Only Ramilov was reluctant to use it. He was angling for either ‘An Unsuitable Boy’ or ‘An Extraordinary Cunt’. He was unhappy about a chiffonade of mint I had done that had bits of stalk in it. Ramilov was also unhappy about how much I talked, which he said, quote, was unbecoming in so shit a chef. And he was unhappy, like they all were, about my speed.

‘If you were moving any slower,’ he said, ‘you would be going backwards through time.’

In his recent correspondence, Ramilov seconds Dave’s support for the project I have undertaken. He too wants a little light on the dark heart. Often he asks that I tell this story with ‘the greater truth in mind’ and reminds me of a promise I made under some duress. I have not forgotten it. But how can we ever hope to explain what we did without retracing our steps back to Bob? Without Bob there would be no Fat Man, perhaps no Ramilov either. Bob brought us all together. Without his tremendous cruelty, what would I be? He made me grow up fast. He forged my resolve. Here, in these early memories of The Swan, I can see all the markers for our decline and resurrection, our past and future trials; all the creases of character and thought that brought us to a single moment in time.

Ramilov was in the walk-in now because of a peluche, or the lack of a peluche. Bob had a grouse on order for 38 and it was customary, essential even, for there to be a peluche of watercress, or failing that some sprig of dressed greenery at the very least, in a salad bowl on the pass in front of Bob but not wilting under the lights when all else was plated up and ready to go. Bob called for it late and sometimes he did not call for it at all, but it was Ramilov’s duty to know when a peluche was required and to have it standing by, and it was Ramilov’s fault if it was not.

‘Peluche!’ came the cry for the grouse on 38 as the jus was sliding round the plate and the steam was rising into the hot lamps. No answer. No ‘Oui, chef!’Not a sniff.

‘Peluche!’ Again the cry. But only silence in reply. Everyone in the kitchen looked over to Ramilov’s section because all cresses and leaves and salad gubbins were his responsibility, all cold starters and some of the hot ones too, but Ramilov had vanished.

Service hung in mid-air. The crashing and twisting and shouting and rushing and searing and flicking, the whole carnival, seemed to freeze. Every man there – and the quiet dark-eyed girl in the corner too – drew in his breath. The burners and ceiling vents and clamour of the KPs all faded into the background. Boorish laughter and snatches of conversation carried from the tables, it was so deathly still. Voices of people who were not chefs could be heard in the kitchen, and that is the worst sound in the world.

‘Maybe he’s in the dry store, chef,’ offered Dave.

‘Or the yard, chef,’ suggested Dibden.

But Ramilov was not in the dry store or the yard. Nor was he in the wine cellar or the downstairs office, and the game of ‘Where’s Ramilov?’ only ended at the bar, where Bob found him talking to the waitress with the button nose, halfway through his joke about how to dance to lift muzak. Bob was displeased, you could say, and expressed his displeasure to Ramilov in language that made the waitress’s little nose turn white. Ramilov maintained that dinner services would come and go while this thing he had with what’s-her-name here would last forever. He clicked his fingers and smiled at the girl.

‘Really, though,’ he said. ‘What is your name?’

Alas, he did not hear her reply. Bob had hooked a finger into his collar and was yanking him back through into the kitchen, outlining his intentions to injure him severely and telling him he was in for it now, by god. Ramilov was protesting all the while and even when the walk-in door was shut and the lock was turned you could still hear him arguing dimly about free will and the tortuous odyssey of the heart, though the words were mostly lost to everyone but himself.

Dave had sent the grouse to 38 before Bob could come back and make him plate it again out of spite, and Dibden had jumped from desserts over to Ramilov’s section and was banging out plates to keep on top of the checks piling up on the grabber above the pass. From time to time he glanced anxiously at the fridge where Ramilov was trapped. It was not so pleasant being locked in there, 4 degrees Celsius in the pitch dark, trying not to knock over anyone’s mise or you’d be in more trouble when you got out and might have to go straight back in again. Bob liked to call it his isolation tank or, if he was in a straight penal mood, the cooler. In the six weeks Ramilov had been in the kitchen he had made that fridge his own.

‘I should be charging that cunt rent,’ Bob muttered, returning to the pass to make his announcement about lifestyle choices being punished.

Dibden was starting to look increasingly nervous. Those dolorous features, always suggestive of struggle, darkened as the pressure grew. His long hands were fumbling and his movements were becoming leathery and he was saying ‘Sugar … sugar …’ under his breath like a nervous twitch. Dibden was of the opinion that cuss words made Mary Magdalene cry and it was wrong to make any woman cry, especially a woman as nice as Mary Magdalene.

‘What is it, chef?’ Bob had noticed his unrest and was glowering at him from the pass.

‘I’m out … I’m out of lemon halves, chef,’ he replied.

The lemons were in the fridge with wicked Uncle Ramilov.

‘Monocle,’ Bob said, ‘stick your massive face into that walk-in and ask him to pass out some lemons. Don’t talk to the cunt or you’ll be in there with him.’

‘Yes, chef.’

I didn’t know how to ask Ramilov for lemons without talking to him so I knocked on the door and kept my mouth shut.

‘I know,’ said the voice of Ramilov. ‘Lemons.’

I unlocked the door and opened it a fraction and a sinewy hand poked out with four lemons in it. Truly, it was the ugliest hand you ever saw. The kind of hand that comes up out of a grave at the end of a zombie film to claw dumbly at the sky. Every scar and welt and burn on it stood out against the whiteness of the skin. It was a crazed stump of hair and damaged tissue. Next to those smooth lemons it looked ridiculous. I held my cloth out like a hammock and the ugly hand dropped the lemons into it.

‘Treats for fatty,’ Ramilov said in a sinister whisper only I was close enough to hear.

The hand disappeared. Ramilov was referring to Bob, of course. Bob was not just a giant in his power over us, he was an actual giant. Six foot four and wide as a cheese trolley side-on, with blubber tight all around him like his body had started to melt and then decided halfway through to cool and set instead. Bob had worked hard on that fat, gorging himself on anything that he could get his hands on, his sausage fingers never far from a tasty morsel on an outgoing plate, always slick with the saliva from his greasy, slobbering mouth. His face was permanently red, as complexions of his standing and blood pressure often are. It looked like the swollen heart of an ox.

‘Check on! Two chaka, one bass, one rav! Mains away!’

‘Oui, chef!’

Bob turned and rigged the new check on the grabber in front of Dave, who was on sauce. With heavy-lidded eyes Dave studied the run of checks. The effort for him was in the reading, not the cooking.

‘Five minutes on those two chaka, yeah?’ he asked the quiet dark-eyed girl in his Northern drone.

‘Yeah,’ she said briskly, pulling two plates off a shelf above her head and dropping breaded cubes of pig’s head terrine into the deep-fat fryer.

‘Coming up on that rav same time yeah, Dibden?’

‘Yeah.’ Dibden was rooting around in the service fridge. ‘Where does Ramilov keep everything in here? There’s no order.’

‘Four and a half,’ said Dave. He banged a skillet on a burner.

The machinery was whirring again. Dibden huffed and puffed about Ramilov’s set-up, it wasn’t human, no one could work like this, where was the remoulade anyway, why didn’t he keep the gribiche out.

‘Because it will spoil, you prick,’ Ramilov said from the walk-in.

It was just past eight on a Wednesday evening in late November. A reasonable time to lock Ramilov in the fridge. Several days of piercing winds and slushy rain, the kind of weather that turns Camden Town into a very low and uncaring sort of neighbourhood, had put people off going out. The dining room of The Swan was half full; upstairs was shut. No office parties tonight. Forty on the books. A handful of walk-ins at most. But at some point in the next hour the dessert checks would start coming in from the early tables while the late tables were still ordering starters and mains, and Dibden, doing the splits between Ramilov’s section and his own, would find himself greatly inconvenienced. ‘To sink like a sack of shit’ is the correct terminology for this phenomenon, as Racist Dave often reminds me. Everyone was praying that Bob would change his mind about Ramilov and release him before the evening turned unpleasant.

‘Fuck!’ shouted Ramilov. ‘Something just bit me in here.’

Bob grinned evilly from the pass.

‘You found my little Christmas present, chef.’

‘Booboo?’

‘Guess again.’

‘What is that?’ shouted Ramilov.

‘I let the lobsters out,’ said Bob. ‘And I took the bands off their claws.’

He chuckled at the thought of Ramilov locked in a box with the lobsters angry and liberated, snapping at his ankles in the dark.

‘If you damage any of them, chef, it’s coming out of your wages.’

Ramilov’s response was brief but heartfelt.

Whatever you say about Bob (and many things have been said), he was a master of cruelty. The man had an appreciation for a wide variety of punishments – spoons left on the burner until they were white hot pressed into flesh, dish cloths soaked and twisted for whipping – though his favourites were the ones that messed with the mind, the psychological tortures. He would let a finished plate fall from his fingers and smash on the floor if he didn’t like one aspect of the ensemble and sometimes for no reason at all, except presumably to teach us that life was as arbitrary as it was cruel. The fridge was quite a custom of Bob’s. By forcing the other chefs to cover for HE WHO HAD SINNED, also known as Ramilov, it skewed the emotions and allegiances of the entire brigade. When the prisoner finally emerged, shivering and blinking into the fluorescent light, sympathy was in short supply. The sentence proved the crime. The lobsters were a new touch, but that was Bob: the man had an exquisite grasp of suffering; he was an innovator of pain. It was a rare genius that unleashed the lobsters before looking for the victim.

Aside from Dibden, who bore The Mark of Bob upon his hand and who, despite that, still defended him when the insults were swarming over pints in O’Reilly’s, there was not one man or quiet dark-eyed girl or kitchen porter in the place who did not hate Chef Bob. No one fought with him as Ramilov did, but I knew how they felt even if they never told a soul, because I am the commis. In the kitchen the commis is everywhere. Like a fly, he sees things that no one else sees, things he is not supposed to see. It is his job to buzz this way and that, from fridge to section to dry store to pass to wine cellar, fetching and prepping and chopping things the other chefs do not have time to fetch and prep and chop. I am the one beside the chef whom Bob is bollocking, topping up their herb bundles. I am the one sweeping the yard, unnoticed, when plots are being hatched over cigarette breaks. I am the one in the dry store trying to pull a fifteen-kilo sack of flour over your weeping body. I am the third who walks always beside you.

You are the one with the puckered arsehole – I can hear Racist Dave now – fucking hurry up and tell the story.

The bass was on the pass. The two charcuterie boards were up. Dibden, who had found the ravioli, scooped them from the chauffant of swirling jade water and slid them into a pan of butter browning with fried sage, tossing gently.

‘Where’s that fucking rav?’

‘Ten seconds, chef,’ he shouted, still tossing.

‘If you toss that again, Dibden,’ said Bob, ‘I’ll toss you.’

Dibden stopped tossing and swivelled round with the pan to plate up, straight into Shahram the KP, hunched over the pot bin looking for washing-up.

‘Backpleez!’ Shahram cried in fear and pain.

‘Sugar!’ Dibden shouted, managing to steady the pan. ‘Say “Backs”, Sharon! Always say “Backs”!’

‘Fucking “Chaud behind”, yeah, Sharon?’ said Dave.

‘Backpleez,’ said Shahram again. He was terrified, dancing nervously from one leg to the other like he needed to piss, eyes goggling out of his skull, face twisted with incomprehension. Shahram’s English was very respectable as far as it went – chauffant, moulis, ramekin, gastro, small spoons, more black pans, potato, backpleez, fucking chaud – only it did not go so far. He knew what a chinois was but not a chair.

Camp Charles, the maître d’, stuck his head around the door.

‘Table of eight just entered, chef.’

This prompted roars of disapproval from the chefs, who had figured on a quiet service, a quick clean-down and an early night. Curses were extended in the direction of Camp Charles.

‘Out of my kitchen, gaylord,’ said Bob.

Camp Charles gasped in mock indignation.

‘So forceful,’ he mouthed. In the dining room he was charm itself, infinitely accommodating, always discreet. Away from the front of house he spoke entirely in sexual suggestion. Everything out of diners’ earshot sounded like the purest filth. He could make the word ‘plate’ sound so nasty you wouldn’t have one in the house, let alone eat off it. ‘Give me two beef, darling,’ he would deadpan from the other side of the pass. ‘Where’s my meat, you bitch?’

Now the ticket machine squawked.

‘Ça marche desserts! Two pear, two claf, one ganache! On and away!’

‘Oui, chef,’ Dibden answered forlornly. It had started sooner than expected.

‘What’s the matter, chef?’ sneered Bob.

‘Nothing, chef!’

‘Monocle! More plate wipes!’

‘Parsnip purée top-up! In my tall!’

‘Drop chips for an onglet!’

‘Little shit!’ Ramilov cried in pain from the fridge.

The ticket machine exploded into a fit of squawks, refusing to be silent.

‘The big ’un from Wigan,’ said Dave.

‘Ça marche! One chaka, one fish board, three rav, two bass, one onglet, one eel, ONE LOBSTER! All together, on and away!’

‘Oui, chef!’

‘Monocle,’ said Dave, ‘ask Ramilov for a lobster. Now.’

I knocked on the fridge door.

‘I know,’ said the voice of Ramilov. ‘Lobster.’

I cracked open the door and the sinewy zombie hand emerged again. Its index finger was extended, a little accusingly I thought, in my direction. A large midnight blue lobster was hanging from the second knuckle by a pincer.

‘Take this one,’ Ramilov said in a tired voice.

The lobster had a good grip. As I struggled to prise it free, Ramilov called me many dark and impossible things. Then the door was shut and he was heard no more. Ramilov should have blamed Bob for his misfortune, or the lobster at a push, but who is it that gets the blame? The commis receives a lot of grief that is not deserved.

‘Coming up on the big ’un in seven!’ Dave shouted.

‘Oui!’

Dibden was sweating now, heating sugar for a caramelized pear dish in one pan while he poured clafoutis batter into two floured ramekins and slid them into the combi oven. He pushed aside Dave’s confit Jerusalem artichokes.

‘Desserts on top,’ he said. ‘That’s the rule.’

‘Such a pastry boy,’ said Dave.

Dibden ignored him and leaned across his section for the unsalted butter. He threw a few cubes into the pan of sugar and shook it, then turned again and grabbed three pears from his service fridge, quartered and cored them and chucked them into the pan with the caramel. One piece fell on the floor.

‘Do another one, chef.’ Bob was watching from the pass, a wolf outside a pig’s house.

Dibden rushed back to his service fridge, scrabbled for another pear, cut one quarter out of it and cored it sloppily, then threw it into the pan with the others. Now he was behind. He spun back to Ramilov’s section, searching madly for the smoked-eel mix, couldn’t find it, cried out, then saw it, tore the cling film from the top of it, grabbed two spoons and a clean plate from the rack beside him and began quenelling furiously, scraping the edge of one spoon into the hollow of the other, moulding the mixture into a smooth oval. His hands were starting to shake. The kitchen watched him silently. Bob’s eyes were hungry and sly.

‘Your pears,’ said Dave.

Dibden ran to the stove and caught the caramel as it started to smoke, strained a glug of brandy into it and shook again, then swung over to the combi, tried to fit the pan on top but couldn’t because of Dave’s artichokes, muttered something under his breath and slammed them in below. Someone on the big table told a joke and there was a sudden burst of laughter, trailed by other subsidiary jokes and eddies of mirth. You couldn’t hear what the jokes were in the kitchen, and you couldn’t see the kitchen from where the table was, but the merriment seemed somehow, indisputably, directed at Dibden and his current misfortune.

‘Dibden,’ said Bob, ‘that’s not the plate for the eel.’

Dibden looked about wildly.

‘What is the plate for the eel, chef?’

‘You should know that, chef,’ said Bob.

Please, everyone was thinking, please let Ramilov out.

‘The square one,’ said Dave.

Dibden scraped the eel mix off the round plate and back into the container and started quenelling again. His hands shook so bad the mix was flying off the spoons, spilling all over the worktop.

‘Three minutes on the big ’un.’

Dibden remembered something and dropped the spoons and ducked back into the service fridge and pulled out a gastro of ravioli.

‘How many rav was it?’ he asked weakly.

‘Three,’ said Dave. ‘In three minutes.’

Dibden peeled nine raviolis from the gastro and ran over to the chauffant, where he dropped them into a waiting spaghetti basket. The scuzzy water swallowed. In the fifth circle of hell, sighs of the sullen frothed the vile broth. Then he slid back to Ramilov’s section and started quenelling again.

‘Don’t forget that ganache, Dibden,’ said Bob. ‘I want everything looking fucking soigné.’

Even a much-maligned commis such as myself could see by the way Dibden was comporting himself that things were going to end badly for all concerned. I was praying for Ramilov to be released. But you could not beg Bob, he was not a merciful man. You would have been handing the axe to the executioner, so to speak. Sometimes my hatred for Bob burned so fierce I feared he would see the flame and decide to stub me out once and for all. But Bob was so big and I was so small it seemed he did not notice me, and so I kept on with my bowing and scraping and burning and plotting, waiting for my moment, dreaming of a way that we, the chefs, might end him.

‘Check on! One rav, one pigeon, THREE EEL! That’s four rav and four eel all day! And there’s another dessert check on and away!’

‘Having fun, chef?’ Bob asked Dibden.

‘Oui, chef,’ replied Dibden, who was not.

‘How long on these first fucking desserts?’

‘Two … Four minutes, chef.’

‘Four minutes?’ Bob snarled. ‘You all right over there, chef?’

‘Yes, chef.’

‘You look like you’re going down.’

‘No, chef,’ said Dibden. You could never admit you were going down.

‘D’you want I defrost the Russian?’

‘If you want, chef,’ said Dibden, desperate.

Bob sighed and made a flick at some crumbs on the pass. He toyed with the idea, letting the kitchen squirm.

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Let the cunt out.’

I went straight over to the walk-in, unlocking it as fast as I could. Ramilov had been unnaturally quiet since the lobster. He was only in chef’s whites in there – perhaps the cold had got to him. It was hard to know exactly how long he had been inside; time in the kitchen was like time nowhere else, no law governed its leaps and crawls. For a moment I thought I would find him curled up in the corner, a poor lump with lobsters feeding on his eyes. I opened the door, just a wedge at first. There was only darkness. No sound. No sign of life. Had Bob finally done it? Had he made good on his promise and killed Ramilov? I pulled the door open further and the light clicked on and Ramilov pushed past me and out into the bright swelter of the kitchen looking almost all right, as almost all right as he ever looked, his arms outstretched like a homecoming hero, triumphant.

‘Hello, bitches,’ he said. ‘Did you miss me?’

Simon Wroe

CHOP CHOP

VIKING

Contents

Heads

I

TO START

1. Peluche