Chapter 22
22
She used the short walk across the road to Rory’s shop to try and learn a fraction more about him. Not that she really knew much to start with.
‘So, you run both these places?’ she asked, as they waited for a break in the traffic. ‘That must be a lot of pressure.’
‘Not really. They complement each other. Besides, it gives me the chance of a bit of respite now and then. If the café is driving me mad, I can always change the rota and do a couple of days behind the till in the shop. Although I do have a pretty good team. They make the job a lot easier than it might be. Most of the time anyway.’
‘And your flat?’
‘Is above the shop.’
‘Very convenient.’
‘Isn’t it just?’ He grinned. They crossed the road side by side, her head whirring with preconceptions. With his long hair and currently ripped clothing, she felt anything could be awaiting her. Marijuana plants. That one sprung straight to mind. She contemplated it for a moment. It had been a long while since she’d been stoned – before meeting Stephen, even. But it was hardly going to make her week any more bizarre. Perhaps it was what she needed, in fact. There would likely be lots of hand-made rugs and throws around the place too. Batik patterns, or else tie-dyes that he’d collected on his journey around Asia. He certainly looked like the type of person who went travelling as opposed to holidaying.
‘Okay, just let me grab some stuff from here.’ He unlocked the door and held it open for her to step through. ‘Then we’ll go upstairs.’
After a minute selecting things from the shelves, he led her through a door at the back and up a staircase.
‘Next floor I’m afraid,’ he said on the first landing. ‘This one’s all stock.’
When he reached the top, he turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.
‘So, welcome to the man cave,’ he said.
The apartment that she entered was about as far from a man cave as she could possibly have imagined. So much so that she could barely stop herself from staring.
‘You live here?’ she asked.
‘I do indeed.’
With the grin of someone who knew he had made an impression, Rory closed the door and took her coat. ‘Come on. I’ll give you the tour. Although there’s really not that much to it.’
It was both the complete truth and an utter lie. She stared around her, mesmerised. With its minimalistic style, it reminded her of the entrance to the Marine Life and Conservation Institute, although it felt much warmer than that. Far from cold and uninviting, as such an open space should be, she found herself immersed in the glow of pink-tinted sunlight diffusing through the windows, causing everything it touched to shimmer slightly.
‘I’ll be honest,’ he said, leading her into the combined kitchen and living area. ‘It’s been a long time getting here. Sourcing this glass for the windows was an absolute nightmare for a start and the Council delayed approving it for ages, but I think it’s worth it.’
‘You designed this?’ she said, moving past a worktop to look through an entire wall of glass. The view was of rooftops, hundreds of them, and tiled terraces. It reminded her of a scene from Mary Poppins : a whole secret world that no one down below knew about, stretching out for miles.
‘I would say I had the vision,’ he replied, in answer to her question. ‘It was a genius architect friend who designed it. Drink?’
She nodded. A minute later, a glass appeared. Breaking her gaze for the first time since she’d arrived, she turned to thank him. He grinned sheepishly.
‘What?’ she asked, feeling that she’d missed out on a joke somehow. His smile broadened. ‘What?’
‘You haven’t even seen the best bit yet.’
‘You have an allotment!’ She found herself amazed yet again. ‘You have an actual allotment on your roof!’
‘I do.’
‘And you can grow things here?’
‘It certainly appears that way.’
She had seen plenty of roof gardens in her time. Some of her friends from the golf club days had lovely balconies which they decorated with planters and fairy lights. Even her mother, in the flat she’d lived in before she went into the home, had always had begonias and pansies on her terrace. But this wasn’t a few terracotta pots or ornamental roses. By the look of it, nothing was ornamental.
‘I’m going to be honest. It’s taken a lot of patience to get it this way. And I started a fair-few things off in the greenhouse at the café first.’
‘The café has a greenhouse?’
He shook his head and laughed. ‘Did you not read anything about the place before you came?’ He picked a leaf from one of the herbs and rubbed it between his fingers, inhaling the scent. ‘Lemon balm,’ he said, holding his hands out to her. The citrus aroma filled the air between them.
‘So, what have you got up here? Tomatoes, right? What else?’
‘Yeah, the tomatoes have been great this year, so have the carrots. Courgettes are always a winner, although my potatoes have turned out a bit lacklustre. Not sure why. Need to look into it.’
‘And you use all this down in the shop? This is what you sell?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I take down some herbs occasionally, when we’re running a bit short but, mainly, this is just for me. My little indulgence.’
‘It’s hardly little.’
He looked at her pointedly, raising his eyebrows.
‘Really?’ She slapped him on the shoulder and shot him a look that caused him to erupt into laughter.
‘Right, I’m starving. You okay to grab me some salad bits while I sort out what’s in the fridge?’
Without waiting for an answer, he disappeared back into the flat, leaving her alone on the roof top, apparently with a job to do.
It was hardly the first time she had picked food straight from a plant. When Joseph was younger, they would often head out in the summer to a pick-your-own place. She’d never found it the most practical use of her time. Not to mention the fact that they could get all the food they needed, chopped and freshly prepared, thanks to Stephen’s job at Alton Foods. Still, picking strawberries and raspberries was something Joseph had enjoyed, and she had indulged him. Salad was a whole other matter.
‘How do I know if it’s edible?’ she called into the flat, her hand around what she thought was a lettuce, but could just as easily have been a variety of poison ivy. She would have had no idea either way.
‘If it’s out there, we can eat it,’ he shouted back. ‘Except the Monkshood.’
‘How do I know which that is?’ she asked, quickly letting go of the bundle of leaves.
A burst of laughter was followed by his head appearing through one of the glass doors. ‘I’m pulling your leg. Everything’s fine. The rocket is in that one.’ He pointed to a wooden planter on the edge of the terrace. ‘And there are mustard leaves in the next one along. Just grab a couple of tomatoes. I’ve got a few things from the café that need using up too, so that should do us just fine.’
Until the comment about the café, and that fact that she was about to eat food that had come from it, she had forgotten all about the menu with dumpster-diving credentials. She swallowed nervously as she gathered the rest of the things and headed back inside.
‘When you say from the café,’ she said, placing the items in the colander waiting in the sink, ‘are you talking about leftover food, in the sense that it’s perfectly fresh, but unwanted? Or are you talking leftovers in a past-their-sell-by-date-and-pulled-out-of-Tesco’s-rubbish-bin-probably-going-to-give-me-food-poisoning kind of way? I feel I should be warned first.’
On the hob, a pan sizzled with oil. Turning the dial down, Rory looked at her.
‘Okay, if you and I are going to be friends then we need to get a few things cleared up first, because you obviously have a bee in your bonnet about this whole waste-food thing.’
‘I just don’t want to be eating something dodgy, that’s all. And who said anything about becoming friends?’
This time, the hob went off entirely.
‘Right, sit down,’ he said.
‘But—’
‘Sit down. You are going to have a lesson, right now.’
Pouting at the assumption that she needed lessons in anything, particularly from a man who looked like he probably still owned a skateboard, she placed her hands on her hips.
‘Hold o?—’
‘And there’s to be no interrupting?—’
‘But—’
‘I mean it. No interrupting. You can speak when I ask you a question. Or you can wait for me to finish. But I mean it. You need to listen. God knows I listened to you enough yesterday.’
Her mouth fell open and then snapped shut. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But if I don’t like what I hear, I’m not going to eat.’
‘I don’t expect you to like what you hear, and if you don’t want to eat my food, just don’t expect a second invitation.’
While she sank down onto the grey sofa – feeling remarkably like a child who’d been scolded at school for merely speaking their mind – Rory busied himself in the kitchen.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked when, two minutes later, he was still bustling away, pulling items out of the fridge and placing them onto plates. ‘I thought you were going to give me a lesson?’
‘I am. Right now. So come and sit at the table,’ he told her.
An audible growl came from her stomach as she crossed the room to what wasn’t exactly what she would consider a dining-room table, by any stretch, more like a small piece of patio furniture. Although there wasn’t really room for much else and it did suit the place, in its own unique way.
‘Okay,’ he said, pulling out a seat and indicating for her to do the same. ‘Your personal lesson in waste food. Now, first, I want you to take a look at one of those peaches,’ he indicated four sitting in a small bowl, ‘and I want you to tell me what’s wrong with them.’
‘There’s something wrong with them?’
‘That’s what I want you to tell me.’
Sensing there was more to this game than he was letting on, she ignored the one on the top and instead went for one that was tucked away underneath.
‘Okay, what’s wrong with it?’ he asked.
Trying to pay no mind to the grumbling in her stomach, she turned the peach over in her hand, absorbing the smell that rose from it. Her mother had always adored peaches. Whenever they came into season, she would buy them by the dozen. In fact, when Fiona had moved out, she determined never to eat one again. Now, as the soft flesh yielded beneath her fingers and her mouth watered at the aroma, she wondered why on earth she would have done such a stupid thing.
‘So, have you spotted what’s wrong with it?’
Drifting back from her daydream, she studied the fruit in her hand. It was certainly a perfect peach colour. There were no bruises or anything that she could see, but then she couldn’t tell what the inside was like.
‘Here,’ he said, taking it from her and twisting it over. ‘See that mark?’ He pointed to a rougher area of skin, no bigger than a centimetre in length, that she hadn’t even noticed.
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
‘Mean? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But supermarkets won’t take it, because it’s not perfect.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘I’m absolutely serious. And these…’ he put the first one back and picked another two out, ‘…were too big.’
‘Too big?’
‘Yup, you know those little trays that the fruit sit in, at the supermarket? It’s shipped in them too. That means if a piece of fruit is even a tiny bit too big, they can’t pack it properly with all the rest. Which means they can’t sell it, which means in most cases it gets discarded.’
‘You’re kidding me?’
‘I’m not. And we’re not talking about throwing out one or two items here. We’re talking two or three tonnes.
‘Okay, how about this?’ He handed her a pack of blueberries.
A familiar uneasiness crept in at the sight of their plastic container. Perhaps she’d developed an allergic reaction, she thought. Was that even possible? She sniffed and focused on the new specimen.
‘Well, it’s not the date. That looks fine.’
‘Good, so you’re happy enough that I’m not going to serve you rotten food.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
His grin returned. ‘Okay, come on then. What is it?’
Having lost on the peaches, she was determined to spot this one. She turned the package over and over, hoping for a clue.
‘The weight?’ she asked. It felt fairly light. ‘Maybe it doesn’t have enough in it.’
He cocked his head to the side, seeming impressed with her powers of deduction. ‘Good try. I like it. But, no, you’re wrong,’ he said, dashing her short-lived hopes.
‘Okay then, what is it?’
‘It’s the label,’ he said. ‘Notice how the ink’s not clear on one side?’
‘People would throw out food because of that?’
‘Big companies do.’
‘But surely you could just peel it off. Stick another label on.’
‘You’d think, right? But it takes too much time. Time is money ,’ he intoned. ‘I’ve got eight whole boxes of organic chocolate in the pantry at the café. That’s a hundred and sixty bars, all thrown in the back of a dumpster because they forgot to translate the ingredients into English.’
‘You’re making this up.’
‘I wish I was. It’s horrendous. Like, crazy. I swear, you wouldn’t believe the scale of some of it.’
‘But, why don’t people do something?’
‘Who? Either people don’t know, or they do know but ignore it, because it’s too much hassle.’
She shook her head. Anger was building inside her. Plastic. Food waste. Everywhere she turned, it felt like people were determined to find another way to screw the planet. And she’d been one of them.
‘So, this is where you get your food from, then? From companies who’ve messed up the labels?’
‘Occasionally. Mostly, it comes from supermarkets and other restaurants. When new stock comes in and they’re out of space, they clear the older stuff out. Or when one of the big restaurants overorders on something.’
‘You just ring them up and ask?’
‘I used to. Now I just drive around in the mornings. As places are opening up. They usually have stuff ready and waiting for me. Then I head back to the café and sort out the menu, depending on what I get.’
‘What if you don’t get anything?’ She envisioned a menu board offering nothing but bars of organic chocolate.
He laughed at the irony of her question.
‘Trust me, that never happens. Anyway.’ He stood up, bundling the fruit from the table. ‘We need to get eating. I’m starving.’