Chapter 18
London, 2009
‘ MAGGIE , TOILETS . GO NOW .’
Maggie briefly closed her eyes. She’d already cleaned the bathrooms three times that day. But saying no to Angel was futile because she’d only find a way to take it out on Maggie later. She’d cut her tips, or make her wash the restaurant floor, or put her on early shift the next morning.
‘Can you get someone to take out the soup?’
‘Yes, yes, yes, where is Jamie?’ Angel’s voice was like a machine gun; words came out hard and fast.
‘Not sure,’ Maggie lied. He was outside the kitchen door having a cigarette but she didn’t want to drop him in it. They’d only known each other for four months but he was her ally at Tasty Thai.
‘Go toilets now!’ Angel repeated, pointing a scarlet fingernail at the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the dining room.
Maggie reluctantly headed towards the customer bathrooms wishing, as she did around fifty or sixty times a day, that Angel would pay for a cleaner instead of making the kitchen staff clear up after incontinent punters.
Before coming to work here, she would never have dreamt that people could behave so disgustingly in restaurant bathrooms. But she’d learned a lot in the past four months. She’d learned that customers often ate so much at the ￡6.99 all-you-can-eat Asian buffet (drinks not included, service extra) that they threw up. Alternatively, because they’d eaten a plate of food piled high with spring rolls, noodles, crab claws and spicy ribs, they had to waddle to the bathroom before they soiled themselves. She’d learned that clearing up sick was preferable to clearing up diarrhoea (the smell was, fractionally, less revolting). She’d also learned that, after one of these episodes, many people went straight back to their table and started gorging all over again.
It started at 11 a.m., when the restaurant opened and office workers started coming through the door for early lunches. From midday until early afternoon it was tourists, hungry after a morning pounding the pavements, then a brief lull until the pre-theatre lot rolled in, before young people on cheap dates who – foolishly – hadn’t googled the restaurant’s reviews. After them, the post-pub drunks looking to absorb five or six pints with five or six plates of glutinous Pad Thai. It wouldn’t help the hangover, Maggie often wanted to warn them; it would make it ten times worse.
She inhaled and pushed open the ladies’ bathroom door. It smelt of drains but it always smelt of drains in the damp, Soho basement. Spilled paper hand towels covered the tiled floor and someone had left a used tampon on the back of a cistern. Next door, in the gents, the smell was even worse – like rotting meat – and a customer had tried to hide their bowel explosion with reams and reams of loo roll so that it had formed an enormous, soggy clump. Maggie flushed three times, praying the clump would disappear before she had to stick her hand in the water. Fortunately, after the fourth flush, it did.
It wasn’t entirely the customers’ fault, she reminded herself, climbing the stairs back up to the dining room. Every morning, steel dishes of buffet food were reheated and put back out in the restaurant window, designed to entice the hungry in: sweet-and-sour fish that was starting to smell; mussels that were turning grey; chicken that had been fried and served, then deep-fried and served, then fried and served again before its final reincarnation as soup; lumps of something that might once have been a carrot but were now unrecognizable. You’d need the stomach of a wolf to digest most of what Tasty Thai served, but it was a job in a kitchen and Maggie knew she had to stick at it until something better came along.
Long shifts there paid the rent – just – on her single room in a Kentish Town flat share, which was as far away from Fulham as she could envisage. Her parents had come in once before going to the theatre (Peter Meriwether had complained loudly that there wasn’t a wine list), and been so horrified by the restaurant – the cheap, greasy buffet, the punters, the sticky linoleum floor – that they’d subsequently fibbed to their friends that Maggie was working for a new restaurant in Hackney, safe in the knowledge that none of them would ever go there.
They deeply disapproved of Maggie’s career choice, wishing instead that she did something more middle-class and respectable where she’d be more likely to find a nice banker or accountant boyfriend. She had one day off a week, when she’d occasionally go home to have dinner with her parents and was often subjected to her mother’s updates about her friends’ daughters. ‘I saw Mary last week, and she said that Imogen’s started seeing a lovely solicitor called Henry,’ Veronica would say while overcooking the carrots. Maggie tried to ignore these barbs, but on the bus back to Kentish Town they’d linger and irritate like a stone in her shoe. She didn’t want to date a boring solicitor called Henry. She wanted to cook.
Not that she did much of that at Tasty Thai.
‘Bathrooms are done,’ she told Angel, before returning to the hob where the wonton soup, the colour of boiled socks, was still simmering. Maggie had tried to improve what they served customers. She’d tried to insist they make stock from chicken carcasses, and fresh stir-fries every morning with real garlic instead of the powdered stuff from plastic catering tubs. But Angel and Derek, the couple who’d run Tasty Thai since they met on a Phuket beach a decade earlier, weren’t much interested in the quality of food, only the amount of it they could flog.
‘No need to panic, I’m back,’ came Jamie’s voice, as he flung open the kitchen door and stood there with his hands on his hips.
‘Jamie! You have break already! Today, no more break!’ Angel screeched.
‘It wasn’t a break, I was in the toilet.’
Angel’s eyes swivelled to Maggie’s face. ‘Was he in bathroom?’
‘Yes,’ she replied quickly.
Angel looked between them uncertainly, but they were saved by the swing doors re-opening.
‘Table nine says there’s a hair in the duck and table five want the service off their bill,’ announced Johnny, a drama student with floppy hair who worked at Tasty Thai between classes. Maggie had a vague crush on him and suspected he might like her too, but it was quite hard to tell because Johnny slept with all female members of staff aged between eighteen and fifty. And after her shifts, by the time she got home on the Northern Line and took a twenty-minute shower to wash the smell of cooking oil from her hair, she was mostly too tired to even think about sex.
Angel’s eyes narrowed again. ‘What is problem?’
‘No idea.’ Like all employees, Johnny had learned that if a customer had a complaint it was safer to send Angel out rather than deal with it himself. Very unwise to engage with someone who’d found a pubic hair in their pork or one of Angel’s nails in their noodles. Both of these incidents had happened at Tasty Thai in the past week.
Angel swept out.
‘Thanks, babe. Right, shall I make another batch of salmonella?’ Jamie nodded at a bowl of chicken wings.
‘We need more beef broccoli,’ said Johnny. ‘And we’re low on prawn toasts and chicken nuggets.’
‘I’ll do the beef, you do the toast.’ Maggie grinned at Johnny then hid her pink cheeks in the fridge as she looked for the large plastic Tupperware marked ‘BB’.
Jamie opened the chest freezer and pulled out a bag of frozen prawn toasts. ‘Fuck me, I’ve got to get out of here. I swear that woman is counting the number of times I go for a slash.’
Maggie lifted the Tupperware lid and sniffed: faintly metallic.
‘Witch,’ added Jamie, as he arranged the toasts on a baking tray. ‘What you doing this weekend, babe?’
‘Hanging with my aunt.’
‘Nice. You close?’
‘Yeah, but she lives in France so I don’t see her that much. She has a hotel there.’
‘Cool. Where?’
‘In the south. Like, an hour from Nice. I worked there last summer, in the kitchen.’
‘Oh, I see .’
Maggie looked up from the pot. She hadn’t told Jamie the name of her aunt’s hotel, or that it was famous, because she didn’t want to sound like a dick. Kitchens, she already understood, were brutal training grounds where you were likely to be ridiculed for your background. Any background, really, but especially her background: a sheltered, West London girl who’d never struggled for anything and had a supermodel-turned-chef for an aunt. ‘What?’ she replied.
‘You’ve got experience, babe. That’s why you can cook and I can only make toast.’
She smiled, relieved that was all he meant. ‘Heating up old beef? I wouldn’t call that cooking.’
Maggie hadn’t returned to Le Figuier since working there the previous summer. Nor had she seen Phil. After three months in the hotel kitchen, she’d left to go travelling – to Athens, and then Bangkok, before backpacking through Cambodia and Vietnam. Phil had sent various emails – she missed her, Audrey was off with bunions, she was ‘beyond proud’ of her for getting a job in a kitchen – and while Maggie had replied to them all telling her mostly about what she’d eaten (cheese pies in Athens; sticky rice wrapped in papaya leaves in Phnom Penh; the softest baguette of her life in Hanoi), for the first time ever, she also felt grateful for the distance from her aunt. Although no night had been as dramatic as the one where Phil cut her fingers, after three months of watching her drinking, Maggie had needed a break.
‘You’re absolutely right. Cooking is when you put two or more ingredients together to make them taste better . What we do here is a war crime. But that reminds me …’ Jamie paused to push the baking tray under the grill.
‘Mmm?’
‘My mate Spider’s just started work at Olivier Gérard’s new place and says they’re looking for a commis. Interested?’
Maggie looked up, her eyes wide. ‘At La Pêche?’
La Pêche was the newest, hottest, most over-booked restaurant in London, situated in an old bottle factory just off Hoxton Square, and Olivier Gérard was its star. He was a young French chef, only a decade older than Maggie, but who’d abandoned Paris and decided to build his reputation in London, working for Gordon and Marco before branching out by himself. Only the week before, he’d been on the cover of Time Out – hair slicked back, smoking in his chef’s whites – and the interview inside had mentioned that he wanted to go straight for two stars instead of just one.
‘Yep.’
‘I mean, obviously yes!’ she replied, before tilting her head at him, suspicious. ‘You don’t want it yourself?’
‘Nah. I’m gonna try this writing gig for a bit. Got a review in Time Out next week. Only small. But I’m not cut out for the kitchen, or at least not this kitchen. These are done, chuck us a plate.’
Maggie reached for the shelf above the cooker to pull down a steel platter, greasy under her fingers, and passed it over.
Jamie wiped it with the hem of his apron, slid the prawn toasts off the baking tray and shouted over his shoulder. ‘Johnny?’
‘But … La Pêche,’ Maggie murmured, giving the beef a final stir, feeling a piece of broccoli disintegrate under the spatula. The mere idea of working there made her giddy, and she could escape Tasty Thai. Then she had an awful thought. ‘Could I even go somewhere like that after here? Like, would they not look at my CV and laugh?’
‘Think they’re just looking for young and willing, babe. Johnny?’ Jamie shouted again, before turning back to Maggie. ‘Delighted to help you escape the fire-breathing dragon. Hiya, Angel. We were just talking about you.’
‘No talking!’ screamed Angel, eyes narrowing as she reappeared through the swing doors. ‘These toasts, they need to go out.’
‘I know, I was shouting for John— Here he is. Johnny, can you take out these toasts?’
‘Hang on, and this.’ Maggie tried not to think about the customer bathrooms as she tipped the beef gloop into another catering dish.
‘Sure thing but Angel?’ said Johnny, turning to their boss. ‘That old lady’s back with her cat again and she’s feeding him fish sticks at the table.’
Maggie dropped the dirty pot in the sink and murmured quietly to Jamie, ‘Can you send me his details? Your mate? I’m desperate.’