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with lumps of goat heart, fatty lamb still on the bone or fish that scowled
back from the plate.
"Swordfish three."
"Got it," said Raf and reached for a dish, realizing suddenly that it was
empty. "I'm . . ."
"Fucking amateur," said a dark boy, dumping a pile of swordfish by Raf's
station. He was wearing check trousers and clogs, a white jacket and a scarf
to keep curling hair out of his eyes; only his grin removed sting from the
words. "Next time, call me before you get eighty-six." They both knew the boy
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should have got there first.
A quick flick with a blade to free a steak from the frozen stack and Raf
rattled it, still hard, onto the griddle, following it with a second and a
third. Ninety seconds later the fish was seared.
"Chicken, fire five." Antonio grabbed a ticket from a teller he felt was
working too slowly and shouted out the orders, hanging each yellow slip from a
peg when the list was done.
"Come on," he howled at Raf. "What are you waiting for?"
Fallout from the oil that hissed in his pan worried Raf not at all. He'd
assigned the pain to colours, running the rainbow according to intensity and
length. Most of his double shifts sped by in a low-level intensity of blue
with the occasional flashes of purple.
Already his wrists were freckled with tiny burns and his first finger raw from
pressing down on a knife.
There would be real calluses later, Isabeau had explained to Raf the day
before, turning over her own hands. Somehow he'd felt the need to check and
then, holding her hands, had not known how to give them back.
Which, obviously enough, was the point Hassan slammed into the cold locker.
And the sudden snatch of her fingers had looked like guilt to all of them.
"Chicken," Raf shouted and scooped blackened breasts onto kitchen paper,
rolled them over, then dumped them into a heated dish. Someone else would
dress the plates. Glancing over to the hatch to see what other orders were
headed his way Raf found the teller leaning against the wall, a cigarette
ready for lighting.
A redheaded Australian waitress with a flour handprint on her behind was
scowling as she dusted the ghostly fingers from black jeans. Raf looked round
for anybody with an answering print on their face but all he got was Hassan
looking smug.
The last order had just been served. Wind-down could begin.
Café Antonio had a shower room in the basement. This saved the staff from
having to climb five flights to their dorm in the attic. Unfortunately there
was only one shower and both sexes worked the kitchen, so it alternated as to
who got to use it first.
But today that didn't matter because Isabeau was doing a morning shift at
Maison Hafsid, the Australian waitress refused to wash at all, something about
natural oils and the Bosnian dishwasher and the one who wore tights but no
knickers had resigned yesterday, shortly after Raf was promoted to work the
broiler instead of her.
"Call for you," said a pearl diver, soap suds still gloved down both wrists.
He held the dripping phone in one hand, a plate in the other and was looking
at Idries.
"Tell them to fuck off," Antonio ordered. "We're going drinking."
"I think you should take it," the boy said to Idries, very carefully not
looking at the chef.
"It won't take a minute," Idries promised as Antonio scowled.
Afternoon sessions were banned unless the chef suggested them. In the three
days he'd been working double shifts Raf had discovered a dozen such rules.
Spoken and unspoken. Along with a web of loyalties, pragmatic friendships and
alliances, feuds that simmered below the surface and a few that didn't.
All institutions were the same and few places came more institutional than a
restaurant kitchen.
Small wonder Raf felt at home.
Over at the vidphone Idries was talking intently. His body hunched around the
phone in his hand.
"Time's up," said Antonio. His voice hard. A tumbler of cooking brandy away
from developing a dangerous edge.
"It's Isabeau," Idries said over his shoulder. "She needs to talk to Raf."
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"You like snakes?" Isabeau's voice was neutral. All the same Raf knew it was a
loaded question because
he'd sensed her distance grow as he went from one dirty window to the next,
matching labels to the reptiles inside. By the time they'd reached the third
row she barely bothered to glance into the cases at all.
She was lost somewhere inside herself. Arms folded across her front. Shoulders
hunched as she walked beside him. Dressed in what looked like new jeans and a
pink T-shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves.
A blue scarf hid her face.
If Raf hadn't known better he'd have said she was afraid.
Maybe he was meant to have reacted more to her news. That strange men were
searching for him. At least, they were searching for someone. A soldier on the
run. Only, Raf knew there was no soldier, was there . . .
Or if there was it wasn't him.
"Put it this way," said Raf. "Snakes remind me of my childhood."
Absentmindedly sliding his hand into the pocket of his own jeans to touch the
memento Eugenie had given him, Raf added, "You could call it a family
interest."
His mother had once shot a series in the Amazon with the working title
Good Snakes Gone Bad
, probably for the Discovery Channel. It became
Renegade Reptiles and paid less than zilch and took eight months out of her
life. She came back with dysentery, ringworm, different colour hair and a
brooding Brazilian boy who lasted two months in New York before demanding a
ticket home.
Before this was footage for Channel5 involving a python and a naked baby,
taken using a table-mounted
Sanyo with remote control, so she could also be in shot. A thin woman in her
early twenties, bare-breasted and with hennaed toes on a Berber rug beside the
snake and child. Because she showed no fear of the reptile, the infant showed
no fear and because the infant lacked fear it yanked happily at the sleepy
python, digging small fingers into snake flesh and pushing the python around
like a toy.
When this didn't elicit a response, the child dragged a heavy coil to its
mouth and tried to chew its leatherlike skin. Finally the infant got bored and
crawled out of shot, leaving the woman smiling into the camera.
A fifteen-second snip later got used for a campaign selling life insurance.
It was years before Raf realized the child was he.
"But do you like them?" Isabeau insisted.
Raf shook his head.
"Then why suggest we meet here?"
"You wanted to talk . . ."
She would age, Raf realized as he watched her frown. Her compact body would
fill out and her face acquire lines. That residual puppy fat on her arms would
become less puppyish, more obvious, her looks would go and breasts lose their
battle with gravity. She would put on weight and grow old, something the fox
once promised would never happen to him.
"Sometimes," said Raf. "I get voices that tell me what to do . . ."
Or maybe that was invent
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