3. Freya
Freya
Ihadn't meant to cook. I want that said plainly, because everything after grew straight out of it.
None of it was a decision. It was a relapse.
Three mornings home, and the idleness had got into me like damp into a wall. I'd taken to coming down to the shop before it opened, on the pretext of helping with the prep.
Helping with the prep lasts about as long as it takes Sian Bevan to tell me I'm doing it wrong.
"You're peeling them wrong," she said, on cue, not turning from the range.
"They're potatoes, Mum. There's one way."
"There's my way, and there's the way that costs me a kilo in waste. Go and sit before you bankrupt me."
I didn't sit. I went through to the back kitchen to be out from under her.
That was my first mistake. The back kitchen has a window onto the harbour, and the harbour that morning was busy looking like the start of something. Cold and bright. The light coming off the water in hard little coins.
The boats were in.
I stood there with a tea towel I had no use for and watched the slipway.
You watch anyone good at a thing they've done ten thousand times the same way. Without meaning to. Then without being able to stop.
Hudson was passing crates up from the deck to Miles on the wall, the two of them in a working rhythm you can't fake. Further along, Rhys had his head bent over a fouled length of rope, bare to the wind. Taking his time. He takes his time over everything.
I watched a beat too long. He glanced up.
Straight at me, the way I was learning that sometimes alpha did. As though I'd said his name across the whole width of the harbour.
I found sudden, pressing business reorganising the back kitchen.
Then the bell went, and the morning was decided for me.
"We come bearing tribute." Miles shouldered through the door with a crate against one hip. "Tell your mother the mackerel are flinging themselves into the boat purely to be nearer to her."
"Tell her yourself. She's ten feet away."
"She frightens me. You only mildly terrify me, which I can work with." He set the crate on the steel counter in front of me.
And there it was. A dozen mackerel and more, still sea-bright. That blue-green-silver that doesn't last long out of the water. The smell came up off them clean and cold and faintly of the deep.
My hands were moving before I'd agreed to anything.
There's a knowing that lives in the hands rather than the head. Mine had it about fish before they had it about much else worth keeping. I had a knife out of the block and the first one slit and boned before I'd finished telling myself I wasn't going to.
The work ran quick and clean. Straight out of my hands' own memory. The one quiet I have ever properly trusted.
I reached for the salt without looking. I knew the good pan would be on its hook where it had hung twenty years. I knew where Mum kept the decent oil, hidden behind the cheap oil she puts out for show.
Behind me, Miles had stopped talking. That never happens.
That was how I knew I'd given myself away.
I should have stopped at feeding the four of them. I didn't. Once the pan was going there was no sense in it standing half empty.
I sent Miles for bread. I set Hudson to slicing tomatoes with a reverence they hadn't earned. I crisped the mackerel hard, skin gone to lace. I made the quick sharp sauce you throw together when there's no time. Lemon, whatever the windowsill herbs would give, far too much black pepper.
I toasted the bread in the fish fat. Anything else would have been a waste and close to a sin.
By the time the first plate went down in front of Hudson, the back kitchen had filled. Kitchens do that when something good is happening in them. Dilys from two doors up put her head round. Mum left her precious fryer to lean in the doorway with her arms folded, saying not one word.
From Sian Bevan, that's a standing ovation.
They ate the way you can only eat food made by someone who meant it.
Miles made a noise on his first mouthful that I'm fairly sure is illegal on licensed premises. He announced through it that he'd marry me on the spot. Or the mackerel. He wasn't fussy which.
Hudson said nothing. He cleared his plate, set down his fork, looked at me with something steady and pleased, and got up for more. From him, that was the longer speech of the two.
Rhys ate slowly. Like a man being careful with something breakable, eyes down. When he was done he didn't reach for seconds or make a show of it. He only said, low, not looking up, "You always could."
Three words. And the warm green of him crossed the little kitchen under all the fish and lemon. Sage gone soft in the heat of the pans.
It landed somewhere behind my breastbone. It paid no regard to the tea towel over my shoulder, or the city's worth of armour I had on under it.
I turned back to the stove so none of them would catch my face doing whatever it had decided to do.
The trouble was that I was happy. Plainly, stupidly happy. Sleeves shoved up. A burn already coming red on my wrist where the fat had caught me.
Happier than I'd been in longer than I cared to add up.
And right at the back of the happiness came the other thing. The way a shadow walks behind you when the sun's low.
In the city I'd cooked two hundred covers a night under a man who threw plates when the tickets backed up. Somewhere across those years, food had quietly stopped being this. It had become output. Counts, tickets, the line.
The grind you fed with your hands and your sleep and, in the end, the whole of yourself. Until there was nothing left of me to feed it. And it closed all the same.
I'd learned, at considerable expense, that loving the work was exactly how the work got its hooks in you.
So I let myself have the warm crowded kitchen for the length of one good breath. Then the old wariness came and shut the window on it.
Wanting this was the dangerous part. Wanting it was how the city had got hold of me the first time.
Still. Somewhere in all those years of output, I'd forgotten that food could be a gift. That you could put a plate in front of a person and watch it land like a kindness.
I'd forgotten it more or less on purpose. Remembering was the kind of thing that kept you somewhere.
I scraped the pan down and told myself, firmly, that none of it meant a thing.