dressed by Henry Holland.
He put an arm around me in a friendly way as Jess took our picture together on her phone.
It was unusual for Jess to rave about anyone; normally she treated people and events with a healthy scepticism.
The McCleishes had been a big hit with all concerned. Damn, I thought, Justin even smelt good. I had just finished a busy service in the forty-degree heat of the kitchen and I suspected that I exuded an aroma of sweat, strain, and food.
I consoled myself with the thought that Justin probably couldn’t do a hundred slow, consecutive press-ups like I had that morning after getting out of bed. But why would he want to? He doubtless had someone who could do that for him.
I think I was coming off poorly in the comparison stakes.
‘I enjoyed my lamb,’ he said, encouragingly. He had quite a strong accent. I should have known this from TV but it had never occurred to me he would actually talk like that. ‘And the bavarois was excellent.’
Thank God I hadn’t known it was destined for him when I had originally made it, I thought. There is something very unnerving about cooking for a celebrity chef or a food critic. You feel every little thing is going to be inspected to the nth degree. Graeme Strickland would have laughed at my nervousness, but I wasn’t an insanely overconfident megalomaniac like he was, nor was I as good a chef. Strickland was touched with the hand of genius.
But, I thought smugly to myself, Justin McCleish wasn’t in his restaurant. He was here.
I smiled confidently, or tried to anyway. My lips twitched.
Justin (as I would now come to think of him) gave my kitchen a cursory glance. I was very proud of it, but a kitchen is a kitchen. What was I going to say?
‘Could we, erm, have a quiet word somewhere?’ Justin said, nodding his head to the side.
That was a harder question to answer than it sounded.
The downstairs of the Old Forge Café was taken up by the kitchen, dry store (a glorified cupboard) and the restaurant. Upstairs was my accommodation. To say it was spartan was to oversell it. There was virtually nothing up there at all.
Virtually, though, was a massive leap from nothing at all.
I had bought a bed, a huge step up from sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and the sizeable living room did have a TV balanced on a beer crate and a secondary beer crate (or IT suite as I liked to call it) where my laptop sat. Justin might think I was merely eccentric. He might think that I viewed the accumulation of material objects, like furniture, with scorn. Or he might realise the truth – that I was embarrassingly poor and that all my money had gone into kitchen equipment.
I wasn’t going to have him know that.
So, upstairs was out of the question. It was embarrassing. No one likes revealing how poor they are. Downstairs was equally impossible – no privacy.
‘Let’s go outside and I’ll show you my walk-in fridge,’ I suggested. ‘It’s new!’ I added proudly, instantly regretting it. Justin wouldn’t have boasted about his fridge; the company would have given him one for free and then paid him a fortune to endorse it.
Justin brightened. ‘Good idea!’ he said.
We crossed the little yard at the back of the kitchen.
We walked out of the kitchen into the little yard, which, luckily, I keep immaculate. I’ve even started growing herbs in large terracotta pots, which seems to be working well. Justin nodded his approval and then we disappeared into the walk-in. I pulled the door to behind us and said with a polite gesture, ‘Take a seat …’
Justin looked around the fridge, about the length of a shipping container with racking inside. He sat down on a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes and looked up at me. I leaned against the fridge door, smiling politely. I wondered what this was all about. You don’t go and have a conversation in an industrial fridge to make idle chit-chat.
Justin looked up at me and brushed his long hair back from his face. He was very brown and there was a smattering of designer stubble on his upper lip and chin.
‘I was talking to Danny Ward, the head chef at the Cloisters – remember him?’
I nodded. Danny – a tubby, lecherous Scot with a look of infinite cunning, pebble-thick glasses, balding red hair and a whiney Fife accent – was the proud possessor of a Michelin star (Strickland was extremely jealous) and I’d worked for him as a chef de partie in charge of his sauces.
The restaurant was in St Albans and the kitchen fronted on to the staff car park that was covered in pea shingle. What really stuck in my mind wasn’t the food but Danny’s personal life. Danny was having an affair with a married woman, and her husband, who was a roofer as solidly built as St Albans Cathedral but slightly larger (according to Danny), had vowed bloody revenge.
One of my jobs, aside from the sauces, was to check every time we heard the scrunch of tyres in the car park, that it wasn’t the jealous roofer hellbent on GBH. Whenever a car or a van arrived, Danny would go and find something to do in the cellar until I told him the coast was clear.
‘He told me about you and the builder …’ Justin said, looking at me expectantly.
‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. I had hoped Danny would have praised me for my exceptional saucier abilities, not for dealing with some psychotic workman.
‘He said that you beat him up.’
I shook my head. ‘No, well, I reasoned with him.’
I remembered the incident well. One day the builder had actually arrived. I was beginning to think that maybe he was a figment of Danny’s imagination.
I’d marched into the car park when I saw his van pulling in. Danny had shrieked, ‘It’s him, it’s him, I’m dead …’ and gone to hide. The builder was short, stocky, aggrieved, and wearing a plaid shirt. What is it with builders and plaid shirts?
‘I’m sorry,’ I had said politely, ‘this car park is reserved for staff.’
He ignored my parking advice.
‘Where’s the Scottish bastard!’ he demanded.
‘Hiding’ would have sounded disloyal. I told him he couldn’t go into the kitchen (a health and safety issue, I’d said) and to go away, and he took a swing at me.
I ducked the punch and, as I straightened up, I hit him with a solid left hook to his body and a right cross that snapped his head back. He was unconscious as he hit the ground. I was worried that I’d hit him too hard if truth be told. I thought I might have seriously injured him, but thankfully he came to almost immediately.
He’d sworn at me, got back into his van and driven off, and that was the end of it. The affair fizzled out, my contract ended – I was covering for someone who came back – and we went our separate ways. I’d all but forgotten about it until today.
‘Well, whatever,’ said Justin, clearly disbelieving my statement about reasoning with him. He made a mildly Italian gesture with his hands to indicate this.
He carried
