Ten-minute break

A commercial kitchen is a well-trained monster. Each breath it takes is warm, humid and scented. One moment it’s charred with scaled skin, then in the next, it’s sweet and floral. A romantic might say there’s a certain musicality too: banging pots, drumming chops, dah, dah, dah, sizzling, shouts from waiters to chefs, chefs to cooks, then like a boomerang, those shouts turn and swing back again. But it isn’t music; it’s industry. The trick is presenting it as art. If you were to square all the finely curved edges and lines of a Ferrari, it would just be another car. A good kitchen turns a shapeless body into something you’ll drool over.

“Three seabreams and one risotto, table seven.”

“Yes, Chef.”

It doesn’t take long before time picks up speed. It’s as if every metallic bang and crisp chop adds an ounce of pressure to the accelerator. Before you know it, you’re travelling a hundred miles an hour. When you least expect it, you feel a tap on your shoulder.

“Fag?” You don’t have to ask me twice.

“Sure.”

The night is cruising into darkness, which takes a little longer as the months drag into summer. The sky is almost that navy hue that lets you fall asleep peacefully. But that hue is a trick. It’s not that late yet. The air is still thick with life. Scents and sounds escape every corner. Sporadic screams of children, one chasing another, riotous bursts of laughter catapulted into the sky from behind garden fences, chiming church bells, perfectly in tune after hundreds of years, the slow whoosh of cars calling it a day, burning coals and sizzling meat drifting from the ajar door behind us.

“How’s it been going?” Dan asks, pulling on his half-finished Marlboro. His second is waiting behind his ear.

“Same as usual. You?”

“You know… I might go on that trip soon.” He threatens this mystical trip every week. Both of us know he’ll never buy a ticket. He isn’t the type. He’s a man of routine. Life to him is excellent just the way it is; full of complaints, long hours, late nights, laying in until noon, chopping vegetables into perfect cubes and inhaling Marlboros one after another as he leans against the wall on his ten-minute break.

“Really? Where are you going?” I ask. If I could buy him a ticket and push him on the plane, I would. But even if I got him to the airport, he’d invent an excuse. Imagination isn’t something he lacks, I’ll give him that. And he’s as slippery as a fresh fillet of sea bass.

“I saw this video on TikTok this morning about Vietnam. Looks pretty cool.”

“Oh yeah, it is. I went a few years ago with my ex.”

“Marie?” He asks

“Who’s Marie?”

“Brunette, great arse, green eyes. She always had red lipstick on.” I told you. He’s a pen away from being a poet.

“That’s Annie.”

“Oh yeah… she was fit. Crazy, but man, she was good to…” He trails off, I think, lost in his imagination. His thick black eyebrows raise. A sign he’s seen something interesting behind me. I glance over my shoulder, and there it is, that interesting something. Clinging to her skin, a little black dress, backless with a slit up the left side. Her cream heels cut through the thick, humid air like Dan’s knife through a stubborn carrot, and her freshly curled hair bounces with every step.

“Want one?” He’s pocking me with a Marlboro, bending the end against my hip.

“Nah, I quit.”

“Since when?”

“Today. I realised I’m becoming too much like you.”

“Wow, and people think I’m the rude one.”

“I know, it isn’t fair, is it? Shall we get back to it?”

“I guess,” he says, throwing the butt of his third down the drain by our feet. It hisses as it lands in the murky water.

I pause at the threshold, warm air wafting in my face and the cold tickling my neck. In front of me: organised chaos, behind a blackening sky, the scent of tobacco, the distant clip-clop of high heels and a few feet of space where time slows down.

Like my style? By my debut novel Love, Loss & the View from My Window

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