Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (15 page)

Best Kept Secret

If it was true that food could become suffused with the atmosphere of the kitchen in which it was prepared, then Alison hoped the diners' tastes ran towards the tart. To the usual cocktail of heat, insufficient ventilation, unchecked egotism, petty animosities, lack of space and pressure of time had been added a form of performance anxiety resulting from the all-round raised stakes of the debut UML weekend. Mathieson was like an entity composed only of nervous energy and knives, pinballing around the stations all afternoon, interfering and interjecting compulsively, whether it be over the desired width of julienned courgettes (margin of error in millimetres, apparently) or the colour of the double cream (almost magnolia, he claimed, and this down to sabotage, he was sure, oblivious in his paranoia to the blown lightbulb directly above the fridge). And all this without Lady Jane being within three hundred miles of the place.

His salvos of indistinct instruction and abuse were punctuated by mutterings about him being the one who was 'saving all you useless fuckers' jobs', to remind them of his selfless motivation in harnessing his genius to their common cause, only for it to be impeded at every turn by their worthlessness and incompetence. 'If it wasn't for me, what fucking chance do you think we'd have making an impression here today, and yet here you all are trying to drag me down with you.' Etcetera. Mutter mutter mutter. But what passion, what commitment, what perfectionism. And none of it at all related to him having heard there was a journalist from
The Saltire
in the house and therefore a chance of British cuisine's best-kept secret, unsung hero and star of the future finally getting his name in the paper.

She felt a little disloyal admitting it, but her ally Ger had been less than blameless in ratcheting up the tension, doing his bit to quietly stoke the flames then stepping back to watch the growing insanity from behind his personal force field. It seemed that he hadn't been entirely kidding about avenging himself once the chef had nothing left to teach him, as there could be no other explanation for actions, on this most sensitive of days, that seemed likely and intended to induce spontaneous combustion before dessert. Though Alison could appreciate that Ger had been tactically judicious in choosing this vul85

nerable time to strike, she was more than a little peeved at his lack of concern over collateral damage and civilian casualties.

His choice of weapons had been music. Music had often been an area of strife in the kitchen; perhaps not itself the cause of war, but a frequent site of battles. When Mathieson was in his domain, he literally called the tunes, exercising the right of rank as much for its own sake as for what it delivered. This was of course merely Alison's impression, but it was backed up by her belief that he didn't have any real enthusiasm for music, and even occasionally insisted on none being played rather than let anyone else have a shout. In fact, she suspected that he not only had little enthusiasm for music, but was strangely wary of those who did, and found it comforting - even gratifying -

to deny them.

Alison naturally expected older guys' musical tastes to make her feel frivolously youthful. Mathieson's made her feel like she ought to be subscribing to
Mojo
. She'd never considered herself someone who took music in any way seriously (she was two testicles short for that), but half an hour of his compilation CDs was usually enough to convince her she belonged among the cognoscenti by comparison. His taste wasn't just naff; it was passe naff. (Had nobody the heart to tell him how long it had been since Boyzone were a going concern?) Unless, of course, he was simply ahead of the game for when all this dreck had retro-ironic-cool status conferred upon it a few years hence. But his playlists aside, Alison's suspicion was mainly borne of the unsolicited pronouncements he tended to make, as though in defence of his selections. These were never offered in reply to anything anyone had said, but to what he obviously believed them to be thinking.

'I think it's pathetic when All Saints get lumped in with so-called girl bands. They're what you used to call a female vocal group. Nobody would lump The Supremes in with Atomic Kitten, would they? And All Saints are more than that, because the Appletons are songwriters in their own right. Their music's a lot more sophisticated than the cynics give them credit for. This is the stuff that's going to endure, too, not all that obscure, self-indulgent weird-for-thesake-of-it crap.'

Meaning music that made him feel intellectually inadequate, like Sum 41. Or try this:

'It's like the emperor's new clothes. People just make out they're into certain music in order to seem cool or "alternative". But they don't really like it - how could they? It's like saying you'd rather eat a raw skinned rabbit you caught in a rusty snare than sit down to a Michelin-starred meal. It's just a pose. Nobody wants to admit they like Robbie Williams because it's not
cooool
. But they're just posturing. Who wouldn't rather listen to
Angels
and
Millennium
and all those songs than some clever-clever arty-farty racket.' Meaning anything with 86

lyrics that weren't about girls/boys or dancing.

'They said Robbie had no talent, he was just a boy-band dancer. Well, now he's playing stadiums. Shows how much they know.'

Ger, throughout these rants, never said a word, nor was it easy to even catch his eye at such moments, mainly because both parties knew it would provoke mutual bouts of hard-to-suppress sniggering. Alison initially thought this was down to a shared scorn for Mathieson's conspicuously insecure opinionating, but that was before Ger decided to avail her of all the facts. Their beloved chef, she learned, had been in a prototype boy band himself, back in the late Eighties, around the time of Big Fun and Brother Beyond. Just too early, in other words. It was pre-Take That, pre-East Seventeen, when the anonymous conspiracy of music-hating evil geniuses was still trying to perfect its formula for production-line teen-pop Frankensteins that would stomp in synchronised choreography across the face of the charts throughout the Nineties and relentlessly beyond. They were called Three-D, the gimmick being that D was what each of their first names started with, Mathieson pretending to be named 'Danny' for the short-lived duration of the enterprise. They released two singles. The first,
(You Make Me Feel) So Funky!
, got them to number twenty-eight in the charts and earned them an appearance on
Top
of the Pops
. The second Ger didn't know the title of, 'because it sank with nary a splash and took all hands down with it, leaving only three identical triple-D-embossed baseball caps bobbing on the waves'. This revelation, in tandem with Spinmeister Mathieson's hot selections, confirmed Alison's suspicion that you really had to have no taste or respect for music to be in a 'male vocal group' as the chef referred to them. It was difficult (and rather horrifying) to imagine that there was an entire generation of teen males in their bedrooms right now pretending to be doing choreographed dance routines on
SMTV
instead of fiery axe-licks at Donnington. With all of this in mind, Ger had lit a slow-burning fuse and watched in quiet amusement as it smouldered throughout the afternoon, edging nearer to the pile of ACME dynamite it was ultimately intended to detonate. Mathieson's dinner preparations having begun from just south of high doh, it did nothing to restore his composure that each of his chosen CDs kept jumping, skating and repeating until he was forced to switch off the machine in frustration. This minor and far from serendipitous technical hitch was more than tangentially connected to Ger having smeared pork fat liberally around the CD player's laser lens earlier in the morning, ensuring that only random, staccato snatches of the chef's music were played. It would be the first time that anything by Craig David sounded avant-garde.

With the chef's stereo out of commission, Ger had taken the 'opportunity'

to play his own, normally only switched on when the boss wasn't present. 87

At first, Mathieson was too distracted by his own efforts to achieve perfection/acclaim/meltdown to even notice that Ger's machine was playing, and had sufficient other outlets for his inner toddler that he didn't feel the need to demand silence or attempt to commandeer his assistant's stereo (which on any other day Alison would have loved to see). Instead he seemed to forget that it was an aspect of his environment that he normally controlled, and restricted his reactions to the occasional scornful rant about whatever happened to be playing.

It was almost disturbing to see such transparent hangups made manifest in an adult human being, especially one who was otherwise on the way to making a decent success of himself. Perhaps it was a kind of transference: haunted by his previous failed bid for the limelight, he had to convince himself he had been robbed by wrong and unjust forces in order to bolster his belief in his own worth. Or maybe he was just a wank.

'Listen to that nonsense. You're telling me [who's telling you, Peter?]
that's
supposed to be "intelligent" music? It's about a guy plugging in an electric heater, for fuck's sake. How banal is that?'

Ger just carried on with his work, silently smiling that little smile that suggested other people's tantrums were a paradoxical source of his own inner calm.

As ever, with twilight bringing dining time closer, the temperature in the kitchen rose, literally as well as figuratively. The ovens and burners drove up the heat while Mathieson, as conductor, cranked up the tempo. In seamless (but hardly unobtrusive) synthesis, Ger's soundtrack matched the growing pace, volume and overall discordance. System Of A Down was not music to soothe the savage beast, and nor, did she suspect, was that Ger's intention. Alison was roughly one Armenian-speed-metal-polka beat away from hitting the Stop button herself when Mathieson finally cracked and commanded Ger to 'turn that fucking shit off before I take that stereo and beat somebody to death with it'.

'Nae bother,' Ger said, cutting the cacophony. 'Sorry, got a bit caught up in myself. Need somethin' a bit cheerier, eh?' he asked, reaching for a blank CD-R case.

Alison heard a burst of primitive beatbox snare followed by a few bars of era-distinct, sub-Stock-Aitken-and-Waterman synthesised brass and 'same beat suits all' syncopation. The chef looked up accusingly, automatically suspecting Ger to be taking the piss by putting on what he considered Mathieson's kind of music, but as the intro could have been any one of a hundred identical singles of its time, he failed to recognise it - and therefore the
true
extent to which Ger was taking the piss.

88

Well, we're movin' to the beat,

And the word is on the street,

That there's somethin' crazy happenin' toni-ight.

All the boys are on the town,

And the girls are gettin' down,

And the way you move is makin' me feel right, right, right - oooooh
Baybay! You make me feel so funkay!

I wanna take it to the--'

Click.

There was a Wild West bar-room kind of silence after Mathieson hit the Stop button, just the sound of a few bubbling pots and the hum of the labouring extractors to be heard. Charlotte, who had just come in the door, stood stock still, instantly detecting that the tension was far greater than usual. Ger looked up from the saucepan he was stirring towards where Mathieson stood next to the CD player, near catatonic with sheer, incredulous dismay. It was safe to assume he hadn't been aware that anyone present knew of his place in the annals of rock 'n' roll, but what was really going to saute his ego was not knowing how many or for how long.

The silence drew on, Mathieson eyeing the three of them in turn, trying to read how much they knew, almost willing a reaction. The situation - and indeed the tension generally - could be instantly defused if he chose to laugh it off, but only in the same way the Arab-Israeli conflict could be averted if both sides chose to accept their share of the blame and attempt to see the other's point of view.

'Sorry,' Ger eventually said. 'Did you want System Of A Down back on?'

Mathieson remained silent for a moment longer, then a shudder visibly ran through him, heralding the moment when the fuse reached that pile of ACME

dynamite. He grabbed the CD player, yanking it from the worktop, leaving the lead still plugged into the wall, then jammed it into the dishwasher and rotated the dial to On with an angry flick of the wrist. Ger shook his head and grinned, then got back to stirring his pot. This did little to douse Mathieson's ire. He wanted to say something, shout something, scream something, but seemed so backed up with competing furious emotions that nothing could get through the bottleneck. In his frustration, he rounded on Alison, who had stalled en route from the crockery cupboard when the Three-D song got hooked.

'What you fucking looking at?' he demanded, shoving her away with both hands. She toppled back and thumped into the wall, but retained her grip on the half-dozen plates she'd been carrying.

89

'Cool the jets, man,' Ger said quietly, a note of intent warning in his voice.

'If there's a problem, talk tae me.'

'Yeah, you're all right, Alison,' Mathieson spat. 'Your big, brave knight in shining prison fatigues is coming to the rescue. Question is, what's he getting from you, eh? Protection's not cheap from the criminal fraternity, but then maybe you're paying in kind, eh?'

'Leave it,' Ger warned again.

Mathieson put his hands up. 'Leave it? I wouldn't touch it. Frigid little bitch. You go ahead if you fancy your chances, Papillon. But I'd warn you, you've got some competition. You all know she's a lezza, don't you: Lady Jane, I mean? Her and Sir Lachlan is just one of those upper-crust marriage of convenience things. She's a muff-muncher, mark my words,' He turned to Alison again, looking her up and down, eyes blazing with rage. 'You better watch out, girl. She likes you for those perky little tits of yours, and your yesma'am, no-ma'am routine. Fuels her sordid
Upstairs Downstairs
S and M sex fantasies. She'll be trying it on soon enough. And when that happens, you're either gonna be eating pussy or out of a job.'