In the Kitchen (20 page)

'True,' said Gabriel. He'd spent two more nights with Lena. Last night she'd had an orgasm. He thought so, anyway.

'They say if you get ill by smoking it costs money for the state,' Fazal said, stretching his wings again. 'But what about junk food? What about alcohol?

Those things are worse. Why not ban them as well?'

Gabriel sucked on the mouthpiece and watched the bubbles chase through the water, the smoke puffs gathering like a miniature storm above the silver bowl.

Charlie sipped her coffee.

'Taken up smoking,' she said. 'What else is new? What else have I missed?' She unbuttoned her coat. Gabriel pressed his knee against hers. He told her about work, about Ivan and Gleeson, and she wrinkled her nose, confirming something wasn't right. She asked about Yuri, but there was nothing much more to tell.

The workplace Health and Safety people had been. There was a notice in the basement, past the dry-goods section, saying NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. Yuri hadn't been authorized, of course. Such a shame, said Charlie, such a waste of a life. He had to lie to her after that about the launch party, pretending it had been on the day after she got back. He almost came unstuck when she asked about last night's banquet, forgetting the lie he had told, but managed to recover and surprised himself by how easily he could speak about something that had never happened, as though recalling rather than imagining the event.

By the time he had finished the memory seemed lodged in his mind.

Charlie was a good listener. The way she listened, the intelligent light in her clear green eyes, invested his words with meaning, with depth. He was lucky to have her. Of this he was sure.

This thing with Lena. He drew on the pipe and coughed.

'Are you really enjoying that?' said Charl
ie.

He'd given himself a couple of days to get things sorted out, thinking Lena would be gone by then. But the kitchen had nearly been outflanked by a number of large bookings, had only just held the line, and he hadn't managed to get to the bank.

Charlie told him about snorkelling in the Red Sea, the astonishing electric colours of the fish.

This thing with Lena. One point of clarity – it reinforced what he had with Charlie, a perfect fit.

Fazal swooped down with a coffee pot and topped up their cups. 'Let the smokers smoke together,' he said. 'What is wrong with that? If they have to smoke at home, where the wives and children are, how does it make things better? Better leave things be.'

Gabriel nodded, without knowing whether he agreed. Maybe he had needed that: to test his relationship with Charlie, to see how solid it was.

'People can choose,' Fazal continued. 'In this country, you're supposed to choose for yourself. Is this a free country or not?'

Or – wasn't this more like it? – he had been tightly wound and she offered him a release. If someone passes you a plate you take it automatically, before you realize your hand has moved.

There had to be a better explanation. Lena, after all, was no femme fatale.

She was too skinny. She was rude and petulant. Last night they'd sat on the sofa for three hours in front of the television and she'd hardly said a word.

They were only using each other. But what, really, was he using her for?

'Is the Pimlico site settled?' said Charl
ie.

'Wrangling over the rent,' said Gabe. He wasn't a monster. He felt something for Lena. More than she felt for him.

When he'd got back from work yesterday, Lena was in the bedroom. She hadn't heard him come in. In a cast of amber lamplight she knelt on the floor beside the contents of a ransacked drawer. Mouth drying, he shrank back in the doorway and watched. Lena bent to her task. She lifted a pair of his boxer shorts, shook and folded them in one neat movement and placed them in the drawer. Then she was rummaging, obviously looking for something, money, jewels, documents, anything she could sell. She held up two socks, discarded one and held up another, measuring them against each other, toe to toe. They matched. The search began again. When everything was back in the drawer, she reached up and pulled out another and tipped the contents out – vests, Tshirts, sweatshirts, all crammed in anyhow. She worked quickly, smoothing and folding and putting away. If she didn't want him to know she'd raided his drawers, why not leave them as they were?

Lena held up a blue sweatshirt. She pressed it against her chest, flicked the sleeves around to the front and, gathering them in one hand, began to stretch them out, pulling harder and harder as though she would like to tear them off.

After a few moments she sagged again. Her head drooped to one side. She sat back on her heels and looked across the room at the mirror. Gabriel drew back further though the mirror was angled away from him. Wraith-like she rose from the floor and drifted, not walking but disintegrating, her slender black figure reassembling in front of the looking glass. She was held there, hypnotized, staring, dissolving into the reflection, and then she snapped her shoulders back, filled her tiny chest with air and spat at the mirror. A string of saliva hung from her lip.

He'd crept back to the kitchen then, waited a few minutes and started rattling about. When she came through she was stretching and yawning as if she'd just taken a nap.

'We should make a move,' said Charl
ie.

'I want you to think about something. I'll need someone for front of house.'

'Me? Is that what you're asking? And give up my promising career?'

Gabe went to the counter to pay the bill and Fazal clucked and fussed about how he should be relaxing in his seat. The other customers sat talking quietly or simply sat as if they might never move again. There was never much time for relaxing, not in Gabe's life, not yet. On a website Gabriel had heard about you could choose an avatar and live a virtual other life. You could pretend to be whatever you wanted to be, get what you wanted, good looks, wealth, women, a fast car. Might as well sit here and puff these magic dragons, dreaming dreams. If you wanted another life you had to stop the dreaming and make a proper plan.

The mansion block, off the Edgware Road, was four storeys of Victorian pomposity painted an inexplicable house-of-horrors red. Charlie's attic flat had sloping ceilings and porthole windows and was decorated with the kind of casual chic that described Charlie so well. Fifties film posters hung above Moroccan leather floor cushions, a Murano glass light fitting over a salvage-yard chair, effortlessly gathered in a pick'n'mix assembly that mysteriously became a unified whole.

Charlie waltzed out of her shoes and into the living room and put some music on. After a couple of bars she changed the CD. Turning to Gabriel, she pulled a face and shook her head. 'No,' she said, 'not this.' She changed the track and then the CD again.

She turned the stereo off.

'I'm not really a musician, am I? Not really a singer. Don't even know what I want to listen to.'

'Know what you really are?' He pulled her to him. 'Bloody gorgeous, that's what you are.'

She kissed him on the lips and then broke free. 'Gorgeous and gagging for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.'

They settled in the kitchen. He rubbed her instep through her sock and she wiggled her toes.

'I saw a rag-and-bone man. A couple of days ago, Parliament Square.'

'In some sort of parade?'

'No.' The question annoyed him.

'OK,' she said, giving him time.

'That's it. The bus went past.'

'And it made you think of ... ?'

'I don't know. Nothing. I saw it, that's all. Didn't know they existed any more.'

She switched feet, offering him the other one to massage.

'Sometimes,' she said, 'I just want silence. I want the music to stop. Then I think, but there's something wrong here, music is supposed to be my life.'

'I don't want to eat all the time. I don't always want to cook.'

'You said your mum hated cooking. Is that why you started? You wanted to help her out?'

'Didn't cook at home, hardly ever. I wasn't allowed.'

'Some amazing meal, then, in a restaurant, on holiday?'

'When I turned up at catering college, I'd never tasted a fresh herb. I thought gammon with a pineapple ring was haute cuisine.'

'Oh,' she said, 'it isn't?' She pressed her foot into his groin.

'Hope you're going to finish what you've started here.' He leaned back with his hands behind his head.

'Right,' she said, laughing, 'you hope away.' She got up and went to the fridge and returned with a dish of olives. 'Something turned you on to it, to being a chef.'

'Lured by the glamour, the easy money, easy waitresses ...'

'No, seriously.'

'Seriously,' said Gabe, 'I'm not sure. In those days you didn't have all the celebrity chefs. It wasn't the thing to do, not really, not at all. But something always appealed to me – you take a piece of dead animal, some plant leaves, some other vegetation and extracts and you change them. You transform them into something else. It's the process. I like the process, the science of it. And then there's seduction, of course. If you can cook you can always get laid.'

'Very funny,' said Charl
ie.
'You're a funny guy.'

'Oh, you think I'm joking?' said Gabriel.

'Hadn't really started, had it, back then? Chefs on the gossip pages, all the shows, the channels, the competitions, the photospreads.'

'But more people cooked back then. Now it's the microwave and ready meals and takeaways. People don't actually cook.'

'They like to watch the shows and buy the books and the magazines. People like to look, they get off on it, there's more and more of that stuff.'

'Food porn,' said Gabriel. 'Right. And they wouldn't last a day in a kitchen, a real kitchen. They wouldn't last a minute, you know.'

'What's it all about then? Why? And who is cooking – the immigrants? Or are they just washing up?'

'Look at the other stuff in magazines, all the beautiful clothes – but then look at people walking around.'

'Who ends up in the kitchen, Gabe?'

'Have we finished that bottle already?' He poured out the dregs. 'Misfits,' he said, 'psychos, migrants, culinary artists, and people who just need a job.'

'Ah. Which one are you?'

'Dad thought I was mad, of course. Or stupid, anyway.'

'Bet he's proud of you now.'

'Charlie,' he said, 'my father ... When I was a little boy, do you know what he used to test me on?'

She shuffled her chair a little closer and searched his face. Maybe it was the sweater she was wearing, but her eyes seemed greener than ever.

'He'd bring a sample home from the mill and lay it on the kitchen table.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Go on.'

He'd bring a faulty sample home, knock the crumbs off the oilskin cloth with the back of his hand, and lay it on the kitchen table. Gabriel would hazard a guess. 'Weaving over,' he'd say, kneeling up on the chair. 'Double end?'

After work, before he'd been for his bath, you could smell the mill on Dad, a hot metal smell, like he'd just been pressed out of a machine. 'With a double end you'd get a thicker line. This un's got an end drawn wrong. See?' He would trace the fault with an oil-blacked finger, and Gabe would say yes, Dad, thanks, and run upstairs with the cloth and stow it carefully in the box file under his bed.

It must have been his second or third visit to Rileys when Dad led him through the trembling air of the Sulzer sheds to Maureen's domain.

'Maureen's a cloth looker,' said Ted, pulling Gabe up on a stool so he could see what she had on the dressing frame.

'Used to be a proper looker in my time,' said Maureen, winking at Gabriel.

'Showing the lad around,' said Ted.

'Oh aye,' said Maureen, 'why not?' She pointed to a felt board to which a dozen or more pieces of cloth had been nailed. 'These is what I look for. This one here with the loose thread that's weaving over, that's a double end, there's a mis-lift, and that one's where the 'ook's gone down. See that – easy to spot, in't it – weaving without weft where you've just got the thread goin'

one way. 'Ave yer had enough? No? Short broken pick, contaminated end, tailing and tufting and give yer three guesses what's up wi' this.'

Gabriel looked up at the overhead pulley that lifted the rolls of fabric, the rubber belts and big metal hooks. He thought he knew the answer but it seemed too easy. Dad never told him there'd be a test. Screwing up his courage he said, 'It's dirty.'

They both laughed but Dad put a hand on the back of his neck and said, 'That's right. There's oil in the warp.'

'You've to put in for the outin' now, Ted, don't forget,' said Maureen. When she wasn't speaking, Maureen's bottom lip covered her top one, like a bulldog.

She had to stand at the dressing frame all day, keeping watch, that was probably what made her like that.

'I've put in for the Illuminations,' said Ted. 'How many's goin' this year?'

'No,' said Maureen, 'it's fer the panto, fer t' kiddies. Yer comin' in't yer, Gabe? You and your little Jen?'

*

Charlie, standing with her back to the kitchen counter, dug her hands into her jeans pockets. Her sweater, samphire green, showcased her curves. Once he had said to her she should be on a tailfin, a mascot for our brave boys as they went to 'liberate' whichever godforsaken country they were sent to next. You mean I've got World War Two hips, she said. He knew, by then, that she said these things as a parody of female insecurity and also because she was insecure. He said nothing because, confirm or deny, either way it would be taken as an attempt to patronize.

'Did he want you to follow in the Lightfoot tradition? Did he expect you to go into the mill?'

'No future in it. He said that even then. Thought I should train as some sort of engineer.'

'He knew you liked sciences. At school.'

'My grades were pretty good.'

'Gabe,' she said, curling a piece of hair around a finger, 'I've been thinking. You know, I'm not really getting anywhere. I'm thirty-eight. I might have to do something else.'

'I told you – I need someone. You could manage the place after a while.'