Billingsgate at ten to six on a Monday smells of ice and diesel and money changing hands fast, and Kenny Furlong had put four boxes of line-caught mackerel aside for me and was already telling me why I couldn’t have them.
“The telly’s had them.”
“The telly is me, Kenny.”
“The telly is a woman called Sadie who rang me Friday with a list and a purchase order and no idea what a day boat is.” He had his hand flat on the box lid, enjoying himself enormously. “She’s ordered sixty kilo of mackerel for a Tuesday.”
“Sixty.”
“Sixty. For sixty covers, she says. I said, love, that is a kilo of mackerel a head, what are they, hungry? She said the production schedule says sixty.” He lifted the lid. The fish were stiff and bright and smelled of nothing at all, which is the only thing you want a mackerel to smell of. “So I’ve got sixty kilo on a pallet with a telly company’s name on it, and I’ve got four boxes here with yours on it, and you can tell me which of those two is the actual order.”
Deja had already got her phone out. “Eighteen kilo,” she said. “Twelve plus a third for wastage and a bit for staff. She’s added a nought somewhere and nobody’s checked it.”
“There it is,” said Kenny.
I took the four boxes and stood in the wet with my hood up and rewrote the production company’s fish order on the back of Kenny’s docket, and while I was doing it my phone went with a number I did not know.
“Chef, it’s Nadia Sharpe, series producer, we met on Thursday for about nine seconds.” Brisk, tired, apologetic in advance, which in my experience means the ask is coming in about two sentences. “Is this a terrible moment?”
“I’m at a fish market.”
“That’s not a no.” Paper moved somewhere. “I need forty minutes off you on Wednesday for the title sequence. It’s the thing that opens every episode, so it’s the thing the most people see and the thing we have the least time to get right. I want to build it around the review.”
Deja, four feet away, stopped writing.
“Around the review.”
“Around you reading it,” said Nadia. “Out loud. To camera. The whole piece is three hundred and forty words, we’d use maybe forty of them, and what it buys us is that we say the thing on the record in episode one instead of letting it sit under the series like a floorboard for six weeks. Everybody watching already knows. This way we’re not pretending.”
“No.”
“May I have the reason? I’ll take the no, I’d just rather have the reason with it, because the reason usually tells me what the actual programme is.”
I thought about that for longer than I meant to, standing in a puddle with eighteen kilos of mackerel and a docket going soft in the rain, because it was a better answer than I had expected from a person whose job I had already decided to have contempt for.
“Because you’d be filming my face while I read it,” I said. “Not his. And whatever I did with my face would be the thing, and I’d spend six weeks watching a version of myself who is only interesting because of what somebody did to her.”
Silence, of the kind where a person is actually listening.
“That’s a fair note,” said Nadia. “Can I have a counter-offer, or is it a flat no?”
“You can have a counter-offer.” I shifted the boxes onto my hip. “He stands next to me and he reads the second half. I read the first. One take, one camera, no coverage, and you use it or you don’t but you don’t cut between us, because the second you cut between us you’ve made it a fight and I’ll have handed you a fight for free.”
“That’s — “ Nadia stopped. I heard her write something down. “That’s better than mine.”
“It’s cheaper than yours as well.”
“It’s considerably cheaper than mine, which is how I’ll sell it upstairs. Wednesday, half four?”
“Wednesday, half four.”
—
We opened at half six that evening and did thirty-four covers with four of us on, which is the number Ilé has done five nights a week for four years.
There is no tasting menu. There is a board by the door with six words on it and a price, and whatever came in that morning is what you get, and if you don’t want the pig’s cheek you should have said so when you booked. Table nine sent back a plate of grilled hispi and black garlic because a man wanted to know where the protein was, and I sent it back out with a note on the pass ticket in Deja’s handwriting that said tell him it’s a vegetable, in a nice voice, and he ate it and asked for the recipe.
At half past ten I stood at my own pass with the tickets down and the room emptying and thought about a railway arch in Bermondsey with two banks of induction in it and a pass four steps from the first table.
Then I wiped down and went home.
—
We did it in the arch on Wednesday at half past four, in the dead hour before the crew came back from their break, with the house lights on and one camera on sticks and nothing else. No coverage. No reaction shots. No second angle to cut to when somebody’s mouth did something. One take.
I read the first half. He read the second.
I had not seen him since Thursday. He came in in a grey jumper with his sleeves already pushed up, which is a thing cooks do without noticing and writers do not, and Nadia handed him a printout and his face did something complicated and then stopped doing it.
“You’ve read this before,” I said.
“I wrote it.”
“That isn’t an answer to the question I asked.”
“No,” he agreed. “I haven’t read it since the Saturday it ran.”
“Six years.”
“Six years.” He folded the sheet in half, and then unfolded it again, and set it on the bench. “I’d like to say something before we start and then I’ll say nothing else for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Say it.”
“If at any point you want to stop, stop, and I’ll wear whatever that costs with the network. I have more room to be difficult than you do and I’ve had more practice.”
Which was, I am obliged to record, an entirely decent thing to say. It also did not help, because what I wanted from him was to be worse than this.
Nadia called it. Wes rolled. I read.
The room at Sorrel is handsome and the service is warm and the bread is very good indeed. What arrives after the bread is a performance of ambition by a cook of undoubted technical command, executed with precision, and it is — I am sorry to say it of a first restaurant by a chef of twenty-four — technically proficient and entirely soulless.
I had thought it would be like touching a burn. It was not. It was like reading out a school report about somebody I used to know: flat, oddly formal, embarrassing chiefly in its fondness for the semicolon. I got through my half and found that my voice had not done anything at all, and that I was slightly disappointed in it.
Then he read his.
He got four sentences in before he reached the one Casswell wrote, and I watched him not know what to do with his mouth.
Here is a chef borrowing a grandmother she does not have.
He read it. He did not soften it, or lean on it, or do the thing an actor would do. He read it in exactly the voice he had read the rest of it in, which was somehow much worse, and then he finished the paragraph and put the sheet down and said, “That’s the end of the page,” and Nadia said, “Cut.”
Nobody moved for a moment.
“That’s the title sequence,” said Nadia. “That’s it, that’s the whole thing, thank you both, I’m going outside.”
Wes took the camera off the sticks. Sadie came in with a tray of teas that nobody had asked for and put it down and went out again at speed, and I understood from her face that she had been standing behind the door the entire time.
Simon stayed where he was.
“You said you’d say nothing else,” I said.
“I’m not going to.” He had his hands on the bench, arms straight, head down, the exact posture of a man on a service that has got away from him. “I’m aware there are four things I could say right now and that all four of them are for my benefit and not yours, so I’m going to go and check a delivery instead, and I’d be grateful if you’d let me.”
“Go and check the delivery.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s sixty kilos of mackerel,” I said, “because your runner put a nought on the end. I fixed it at six this morning. That’s not a criticism, it’s information, and you should know that the person who ordered it is twenty-three and terrified, so when you find out, find out quietly.”
He stopped at the door.
“Understood,” he said, and went.
—
At home that night I sat on the floor of my kitchen with a bowl of rice and the last of Sunday’s stew and did the thing I had been circling since ten to six on Monday morning.
The review was in my phone. It had been in my phone through two handsets and a factory reset, transferred each time with everything else, sitting in a folder of saved articles between a piece about induction efficiency and a recipe for salt cod I have never once made.
I opened it. Under the headline, in small grey type, my phone told me when I had last read it.
Twelve days ago.
Not six years ago, or the night it ran, or some defensible anniversary. A Tuesday in September, for no reason at all, probably in bed, probably after a service that had gone well, because that is when I do it — not when things are bad. When things are good. I read it when things are good, to make sure I remember that good can be taken off you by a man at a table you were pleased to see filled.
I looked at that for a while.
Then I deleted it, and emptied the folder it was in, and then went into the account where the paper’s archive sits and cancelled the subscription I had been paying four pounds a month for since I was twenty-four, which took six minutes and two security questions and a survey asking me why I was leaving.
There were nine reasons offered and none of them was the reason, so I ticked cost and pressed the button, and the paper thanked me for six years of readership and offered me three months at half price to stay.
I put the phone face down on the floor and finished the stew.
I did not forgive him. I am putting it plainly because it would be tidier if the two things had happened on the same evening and they did not.
I just stopped paying to keep it.