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Kitchen Inconsequential Part 3:
SPOONS

by George Vincent

You open the dishwasher and there’s a blast of foisty steam which engulfs and smothers your greasy face. The dishes are red hot, the upside-down ramekins still covered in stubborn aioli residue your sprayer could not remove. The boards are stacked up to your shoulder on the edge of the sink and no one is coming for them. Gaz and Jack are clapping and dancing to radio 6 and doing mocking ponce impressions of Giles Peterson. You’re not behind but you’re not ahead. Next load to go through is a tray of cutlery. 7 o’clock is crunch time, the first load of covers just leaving, the second wave currently being seated. The back door is constantly on a swing, like in an old-timey cowboy saloon. More boards, more cutters, more plates. When the trolley is cleared momentarily you have time to sneak a rollie in the back lane. You stroll up and down, soaked and cold under the black sky, past the backs of the Indian takeaways where someone is always out sitting on a bucket peeling potatoes out of a 10kg sack. The buzz from the baccy makes you shaky and weak and when you get back in the trolley is fully loaded and now you’ve lost the flow. It will be an upstream swim until 10 o’clock and then a final hour of hell when the front kitchen sends its shit through. But that bottle of beer at 9 will help things along nicely, the second bottle will eliminate what there was left of your nervousness, and the third will fill you with the gusto to call Barry a cunt behind his back when he dumps the gastros on the trolly and tells you like he’s your boss that it’s a ‘fucking mess in here like’.

Zaza texted me when she wanted me in and I said yes to every shift offered. Wednesday through to Saturday I’d work my balls off, finishing after midnight and bonking off sixth form the next day if I was too tired. My tutor expressed his concern about my attendance, reminding me that if it dropped below 70% I wouldn’t be allowed to attend the end of year ‘prom’. That was no kick up the arse. I didn’t care about prom. I knew I could coast through the rest of my studies and come out with good grades. I was book-smart alright. Shove enough books up your ass trying to impress the ladies and your intellectual development naturally flourishes.

It was the thick of winter. Dark at 4pm., black licorice sky, stars like icicles dangling from the roofs of Arctic caverns. After finishing work everyone flocked toward the local Wetherspoons, the Firestation. Whitley Bay is a curious location. On the one hand, there is hoighty-toighty, good n’ proper middle-class affluence in the area. Nuclear families living in detached houses on streets which lead to the seaside; on the other hand, the town centre has been in decline since the turn of the century and attracts all manner of human detritus. The archetypal UK high-street. No hope or opportunity, no one coming along to sort the problems out. The ubiquitous array of shops for poor folk: Cash Convertors, B&M bargains, Iceland. The kebab takeaways and Turkish barbers, the crystal gift shops which pop up and then close in the same year. The odd trendy IPA bar, the rough pubs, the Filipino nail-parlour, Vapeworld, BubbleT; a right mish-mash, gaudy-coloured carnival of vacuous capitalism.

There are a number of halfway houses dotted around the outskirts of the centre and, come nightfall, their inhabitants roam the streets freely, a frightful rabble of addicts, murders, the abused and the vagabonded; dumper-hunting, scoring, screaming, loitering; zombified, vilified, parasitic and syphilitic; tracksuited, snout-mouthed and snap-backed. An ugly sight, but most of them too junked up and slow to pose an immediate threat.

In the pubs, the stench of violence is pungent as the gut-rot beers they serve on tap. Bodies jostle against each other at the bar, bald headed and flab, survival of the fittest gets the first pint. Weekend offenders coked-up to the nines, ready for war, rape, any form of seedy, sensory buzz sure to light up the adrenal system like a pigeon crammed with dynamite. In such environments, you either had to pretend you were something harder than you were and put on a pantomime of confidence and swagger, which could at any moment be exposed in the face of confrontation with an actual hard cunt, or accept your fate as small fry in the river of shit.

Lee had made pals with the chefs. He was more outgoing than I was. Jo and him were particularly good chums. I’d go along with them so I could drink pints and would have to sit and listen to Jo chat shit about his band, PORTO.

Jo was still living at home at 23, with a home studio set-up in his bedroom where he recorded and mixed all his band’s tracks. His band was pretty successful in the local circuits, with promises of a European tour in the coming Spring. I dabbled in music and playing guitar so we had a bit to talk about, but it was hard to get a word in edgeways without him directing the conversation back to himself and his endeavours. He was always on coke, and the craic dribbled from his mouth like hot diarrhea.

Most of the waitresses went to the same art college up the town. There was Isla, Layla, Kendra, Neve and Chloe. All young beauties with brains already turning to mush from too much dope and political alignment with the Jeremy Corbyn Left of 2016. Layla was seeing Frankie, AKA Dopey, and Chloe was with Barry, the beady-eyed cunt. Frankie went to the art college too, and he was a pretty good artist, in a spray-paint, Banksy kind of way. Barry just worked, skateboarded, tagged metros, and verbally abused anyone in his line of sight for kicks.

I brought Clara along to meet everyone. She got on well with the other lasses. Even when we were in the group, we’d always sit next to each other. We were joint-at-the-hip, like an old, doting married couple. All the E we took had us convinced we were more in love than we actually were. It had developed into a doomed psychopathology, which would all too predictably end in heartbreak and hatred.

Presently, Clara needed a job, having been sacked from the park at the end of the Summer same as I. I didn’t mind the prospect of working with her again, then I’d never have to be apart from my sweetheart. I mentioned it to Zaza. She said,

‘Awww, let’s get her in. I bet she wears the pants, doesn’t she?’

‘We’re a good team.’

‘We’ll get her on the dishes with you then, speed you up a bit!’’

I thought she’d want her as another waitress, but no. I didn’t mind, neither did Clara. She was very shy, like me, and being out the way in the back is preferable to the chaos out front when you’re built that way.

So it was like that until Christmas. Me and Clara washing dishes together. We were fast, we listened to music, drank after the work was done, and then walked back home. It was all so painfully cute. She cracked my tooth on her second or third shift. I’d gone and got us a couple of pints towards the end of the night. As I was taking a gulp, she swung the dish tray out of the washer above her head in a full 360 motion. I was standing behind her and the tray hit the bottom of my glass, knocking it back into my front tooth. It fell out on the dirty floor. I was laughing my head off. Clara was frantically apologetic. It felt weird and nervy when I tongued it for a couple of days, then it just felt normal. Every one I showed it to said, ‘Well, it adds character!’

New years there was a big party at one of Jo’s mates’. Everyone from work went. Clara was meeting me there. It was ridiculously busy in the restaurant that night and I got left to do the dishes on my own. I didn’t get out till after midnight. At the party Clara was on a pill, buzzing off her tits. She had given half of my pill to one of her mates. I scranned the remaining half and it instantly went to my arse. There was a queue of people waiting for the toilet, everyone in there either shitting up their guts or racking lines. I dropped an atom bomb of my own and joined the action.

There was a fat lad with a blonde quiff doing his best Morrissey impression on a karaoke machine. People in the kitchen smoking joints, listening to London rap. I wasn’t in the mood. I sat on a sofa covered in Aztec patterned blankets, waiting for the pill come-up which never came. I was bored, felt out of place and wanted to leave. Jo stumbled into the room, drink spilled down his t-shirt, wet with sweat.

‘CLOOOONEY! YAREEET MATE!’

He plonked down next to me and put his stinking arm around my neck.

‘You fucked mate?’

‘Aye, aye.’

‘HA! KNEW IT! I’m off me chops me man! Here, Clooney, you’re mint you.’

‘Thanks, mate.’

‘Reckon you’d want to work in the kitchen in the new year? I think I’m leaving.’

‘Why you leaving?’

‘The band’s going on tour, mate, and Zaza isn’t letting me have the time off, so I’m gonna bail.’

‘Fair enough. I dunno, I’m happy washing dishes me.’

‘Kitchen is good craic. Whatever you do though, don’t let Barry mug you. Just stand up to him. He’s a wind-up, but don’t give him anything to work on or he will.’

‘Aye.’

‘Anyway, love you man, in a bit.’

Clara was dancing, her jaw up to her eyelids. She came over and sat on my lap and put her hands all over my face like I was a baby.

‘I love you so much, George.’

‘Love you too.’

‘You having a good time? You up?’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘See him and her over there?’

She pointed to the fat quiff lad and a girl with green hair and silver spikes and hoops all over her face and ears.

‘They’re in an open relationship. Isn’t that cool?’

‘Not really.’

‘I’d never have the confidence for that.’

‘I should hope not!’

‘It must feel good though, to be that free.’

From where I was sitting it looked pretty tragic.

‘You want to leave?’

‘Soon, aye.’

‘Aw, okay. Get up and dance with me?’

I got up and moved my arms around, just like I always did. Going along with it. Always there but not really there at all. Watching, observing, but never an active participant. Why do people do anything? What is it inside them which gives them the impulse to behave contrary to who they really are? Or maybe they are that way and I’m just not. Fuck knows. Chef, dishwasher, student. It didn’t matter. At least I had Clara. She was my anchor, the only structure I had in an otherwise empty life. The fat lad approached me.

‘Want to sing?’

‘Sure.’

He switched on Love Cats by the Cure on the machine. I didn’t need the prompts on the screen, I already knew the words by heart. I belted them out like a sick man reciting a prayer.