The Dish (23 page)

I shake my head.

‘Not Albanian?’

‘You can ask him yourself,’ I say, as Adam pulls up outside, parks his bike and enters the café.

‘This place is great,’ says Adam, ‘I had no idea it was here – it’s like a little secret.’

‘Adam – this is Fabrizio – he just used the
word Madonna to describe your pastries; he normally only uses that word when describing Monica Bellucci.’

‘Is beautiful,’ says Fabrizio, shaking his hand warmly. ‘But you make me break my diet.’ He pats his small paunch, currently ensconced in a bright green Joe T-shirt. Fabrizio wears a T-shirt that says Joe on it at least once a week, and then gets the hump when people don’t realise Joe is
slang for coffee and make the mistake of thinking Joe might actually be his name. ‘What can I get you, filter or espresso?’

‘What’s good?’ says Adam, looking at the specials on the blackboard.

‘Everything! I give you one Nyeri and a Yirgacheffe,’ he says, as he measures out two sets of beans and pours them into the grinder.

‘That’s a labour of love,’ says Adam, as he watches Fab trickle boiling
water from his swan-necked kettle on to the filter paper. Fab takes an average of three minutes to pour a single coffee – unless he’s taken exception to you (possibly about his T-shirt) in which case he’ll rush it in two.

‘I’ve brought you some new samples,’ says Adam, taking his rucksack off and removing a plastic container. ‘I’ve tweaked the recipe since Sunday, let me know what you think.’

I point to Fabrizio.

‘Yes, of course!’ he says, placing two on a napkin for him.

‘Fab – if you want to steal a march on the Albanian, you should start selling these.’

Fab finally finishes his pour with a flourish and hands the cups to us proudly. ‘On the house – is a fair exchange!’ he says, whisking the napkin with the pastries off the counter and sinking his teeth into one.

I lead Adam through
the curtain to the back room and he takes his jacket off and settles into a chair. ‘What a perfect place to hide!’ he says, stretching his arms over his head.

‘What are you hiding from today?’

‘Usual chaos, we’re a man down, idiot chef de partie nearly severed his finger at lunch.’

‘Not much blood at my place. Well, actually there’s plenty but it’s all turkeys’. Sandra pretty much physically
blocked me from entering Roger’s office earlier – I was only bringing them drinks; sometimes I’m tempted to jack it all in and come and work here.’

‘You used to work in coffee, didn’t you?’ says Adam.

‘For nearly ten years.’

‘OK: I drink at least three cups a day.’ He stops, takes a sip. ‘This is delicious, but it seems like that whole world of posh coffee is all a bit Emperor’s New Clothes.’

I smile. ‘People often say that about things they don’t understand.’

‘May I?’ He takes my cup from my hand and sips it. ‘That tastes not dissimilar to the one I’m drinking.’

‘Do
not
let Fabrizio hear you say that, your bromance will be dead in its tracks.’

‘They
are
similar!’

‘About as similar as chicken korma and fish fingers.’

‘You can taste a dramatic difference?’

‘Yours has blackberry
and vanilla notes, mine’s very floral; if you tasted them cold brewed, you’d easily tell them apart,’ I say, as his eyes narrow in scepticism. ‘Doug, my old boss can blind-taste a hundred cups and tell you how close to the equator the beans were grown, that season’s rainfall, and how many minutes the roast was.’

He takes a sip of his, goes back for another of mine, tipping his head to one side
as if really trying to taste the difference.

‘Growing and processing the beans properly is one thing,’ I say. ‘But what you really need is a skilled barista to make it.’

‘Baristas
totally
piss me off. They make you feel stupid if you don’t speak their language.’

‘That’s why I loved Bean To Cup – it wasn’t pretentious. We had friendly, passionate staff who wanted to give our customers the best
possible start to their day – the perfect cup. And coffee’s such a vast universe, it has more varietals than wine, thousands of flavours, and every time you do a roast and make a cup you have a chance to start afresh.’

‘You make it sound romantic,’ he says, smiling, then rapidly scrunching his face into a frown. ‘We’ve got a ludicrous coffee menu, and the other day I found out we’re charging
a tenner for a cup that’s listed as “rare micro-estate blah-blah-blah a Vietnamese weasel shat it out”, but the bar guys forgot to re-order so they were passing off instant as the real thing. Good job our customers are so pissed by the end of a meal no one’s noticed the difference. But I went mental – I mean, that’s practically stealing, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘No wonder our gross profit’s
so high; Laura, you look like you’re glazing over.’

‘I’m listening!’ And trying not to listen at the same time: physically rather challenging.

‘Anyway, we’ve re-ordered now but that really bothered me. Sorry, rant over. So why did you leave?’

‘I left Union Roasters because I loved the way Doug worked; Bean To Cup was all about traceability, integrity, Fairtrade – knowing the farmers have been
given the fairest price. It just felt like a very honest way of doing business.’

‘No, I meant why did you leave Doug’s? You obviously love coffee.’

‘Well . . . You know I was married? Basically my husband had an affair with a friend of mine . . .’

If Jess were sitting here now she’d wrestle me to the ground to stop me telling the truth about Tom:
Why would you ever tell anyone that someone’s
treated you badly? They’ll assume you like that sort of thing and then they’ll treat you badly too.
If that’s all it takes to make someone be cruel, they’re probably cruel in the first place.

‘You don’t have to talk about it,’ he says. ‘If it makes you feel uncomfortable.’

‘No, it’s fine. But I was desperate to escape Manchester. I couldn’t afford to wait for a perfect job in coffee to come
along, so I applied to Roger as a temporary move, because I liked his paper. I admired its ethos – truth, honesty – if that doesn’t sound too wanky.’

‘Nice to be able to afford to admire an ethos . . .’

‘I didn’t care about money. I felt bruised. I wanted to be somewhere people weren’t lying. And I think it made me feel closer to Mum . . .’

‘Your mum?’

‘She used to work with Roger.’

‘She
was his secretary?’

‘She was an investigative journalist. Corporate bullying, any instance where someone was abusing their power.’

‘Didn’t you ever want to become a journalist?’

‘I’m nowhere near as smart as Mum was, nor as fearless.’

‘I think you’d be a great writer, the way you describe food is so interesting.’

‘Your mum was lovely.’

‘Huh?’

‘Your mum. On Sunday. I really liked her.’

‘She liked you, too,’ he says, looking thoughtful. He’s about to say something, then stops himself.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘Your ex-husband; was that why you asked me whether I was seeing another woman?’

‘What?’

‘It just felt a bit . . . like, when we were on the doorstep – you seemed to think I might be some sort of two-timing love rat. I wasn’t sure why you’d formed
that opinion of me.’

‘Oh,’ I say, feeling foolish all over again. ‘Well, you’re a little elusive. And I guess I do have a bit of an issue about trust.’

‘That’s fair enough,’ he says. ‘If someone cheats on you, it must be hard getting over that.’

‘It wasn’t just the Tom thing, it was the fact he cheated with a friend. And also it came not long after the whole Mum thing, where my entire family
lied to me. Anyway . . .’ I say, waving the rest of the sentence away.

‘What did your family lie to you about?’

‘Er, well, my mum wasn’t well, and they didn’t tell me when they should have.’

‘They kept it a secret?’

‘Yes. Well – yes, it’s such a long story . . .’ I shake my head.

‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to – but I’d like to know if it’s important to you.’

‘Well . . . My mother
had found another lump . . .’ I say, as I feel the familiar throb of pain flare up inside me. ‘She found it two weeks before my wedding day but she refused to have the operation before.’

‘Presumably she wouldn’t have waited if the doctors had said not to?’

‘They said it was urgent but not an “emergency” – so she delayed it until the week after the wedding.’

‘That sounds like what a lot of parents
would do, in the situation.’

‘Yes, but her, my dad and my sister didn’t tell me.’

‘Right – but that sounds like they were being unselfish. They didn’t want to ruin your big day.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘They were trying to protect you, out of love.’

‘I know that too. But it should have been up to me to decide. I wasn’t a child.’

‘But you’ll always be their child.’

I’ve been through all of
this countless times before with Dad and Jess. ‘But they didn’t even tell me before I went on honeymoon, so there I was in Sicily, having the time of my life and she was having her operation and I didn’t know.’ I take a deep breath. ‘And the operation itself went fine, she was recovering in Intensive Care, doing well apparently – breathing on her own, talking . . .’ I pause, as a terrible jag of memory
pierces my brain. ‘And at that point I knew nothing about it because all three of them were
still
thinking it was the “right” thing not to tell me. And then – the day before I came back, she crashed. She’d caught an infection which spiralled and by the time I’d landed they’d put her in an induced coma.’ The memory of that missed phone call tries yet again to push above the surface and I struggle
to keep it as far from me as I can.

Adam moves his chair closer to me and takes my hand. ‘It’s OK, you don’t need to talk about it, I shouldn’t have asked you to.’

‘No, it’s absolutely fine,’ I say, biting my lip just hard enough for the pain to keep me on track. ‘So yes – Dad met us at Gatwick, drove us to St Mary’s, they said things were stable, and, you know, it’s pretty common to have complications
. . . And then we sat there and watched for a month and two days – as every part of her stopped working and started being run by machines and drugs, a huge plastic ventilator forced down her throat, a central line here,’ I say, touching the side of my neck, remembering with horror how savage that looked. ‘Six different tubes in and out, pumping her full of blood and drugs and fluids, a
machine behind her bed doing the job her kidneys were meant to do for her . . .’

Adam shakes his head in sorrow.

‘And I sat and watched her. I talked to her every day. I told her all about the honeymoon, how much fun we’d had – the beach we’d found, water so blue it seemed lit from the bottom of the ocean bed; the tiny trattoria that served wild red prawns; the dessert wine that tasted like
liquid honey. We’d brought her and Dad back a bottle and I promised we’d drink it together as soon as she was home again.’ I shake my head. ‘And I stroked my mum’s hair and I played her favourite music for her – and I watched the person I loved most in the world fade away.’

Adam looks down at the floor. ‘If something like that was happening to my mum, I don’t know what I’d do.’

‘But that’s the
thing, Adam – you’re helpless. There’s nothing you can do . . .’

‘Laura,’ he says, gently squeezing my finger. ‘I’m so sorry. That sounds grim.’

‘The thing is, she’d had a good life,’ I say. ‘I know there are far greater tragedies than a fifty-two-year-old woman dying, surrounded by the people who loved her – I can accept that.’

I take a deep breath and struggle to compose myself as he hands
me a paper napkin.

‘But say what you like about my family doing the right thing, you will never convince me it’s true – because the last conversation I had with Mum was a rushed phone call in a minicab on the way to Gatwick, when she was nagging me about buying more suncream at the airport.’

I stop short of saying the rest out loud.

But what I mean to say is that I never got around to telling
her how very much I loved her. How sorry I was for all the times I was difficult, or mean, or short with her. I never told her how lucky I felt to have had her as my mum – to have been loved by her every day of my life. How much I’d bloody miss her, how I’ve thought about her every day since she’s been gone. What I can’t accept – and I’ve tried to and I do try – is that I never had a proper chance
to say goodbye.

Sophie and I are in Selfridges’ food hall after work. She’s come to see what the competition are up to; I’m here because I need something comforting after this afternoon’s little meltdown.

‘I think I put a suitable downer on the date,’ I say, as she picks up a packet of glittery cupcakes.

‘Six pounds for four? They look like a deranged Barbie made them,’ she says. ‘Laura, you
don’t have to be “fun” all the time, you know. He’s not going to judge you for having a wobble.’

‘I should never have brought it up though. I feel stupid getting emotional about it now.’

Sophie puts down the cupcakes. ‘Laura – it’s your mum. I still get upset about my dad sometimes, and that was nearly thirty years ago.’

‘And by the time I’d finished crying, I had proper panda eyes. Adam said
he was going to ask Fabrizio to play some Alice Cooper so I’d feel less self-conscious.’

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s treat ourselves to a posh chicken, yellow legs or black legs or whatever – one that costs twice as much as you actually want to pay for a chicken.’

‘The turkey stuff’s putting me right off poultry. I could do a steak though. Hold on a minute . . .’ I say, reaching into my bag
for my phone, then showing her the caller ID.

‘Are you OK?’ says Adam. ‘Did you find some eye make-up remover?’

‘Kiki had some in her drawer. Thanks for being so sweet earlier.’

‘Don’t mention it. Listen, I have a quick question for you.’

‘And I have one for you – I’m about to buy a rib-eye – do I oil the meat or the pan?’