The Hope (13 page)

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THE RAIN MAN

Hey, you. Got any spare change? No? Got a minute, then? Let me tell you about the Rain Man.

No, wait, hear me out. I’ve got all the time in the world; haven’t you? I wasn’t always a stopper, you know, although I’ve stopped here now and I quite like it. I once had a good job. I worked hard. In the kitchens, yeah. I was a chef and a damn good one too. Head chef. People used to come into the kitchens after a meal sometimes and they’d thank me like I’d worked a miracle or something. It’s very confusing if you do your job well and people come in and act like you’re a new messiah or whatever. Food of the gods, they’d say. Manna from heaven.

Well, I began believing my press, so to speak. I began to think there was more to it than a thousand and one things to do with fish, maybe God had smiled on me and said, “Thou art the best thing in cooking since sliced bread and thou shalt cook the most divine meals ever.” I was on a mission from God.

There was this man used to hang around the kitchens every so often, asking for food, leftovers, bit like I do now, so it’s a sort of poetic justice, isn’t it? Because I treated him like dirt and told him to piss off and take all the crusts he could and never come back, only he did come back every so often, and I sent him packing each time with enough food for a bird to survive on … just. He was an odd-looking sort, bony, bent, old floppy hat and always so sad, a big runny nose and big bags under his eyes, like he was about to cry any minute.

One time he came back and he had a bag under his coat. I had gone out the back to throw out some rubbish and the seagulls were hovering overhead waiting and the flies were pretty bad because it was a warm day after a wet night, and he came up and showed me the bag.

“Special fish,” he said, and I’ve only heard that sort of excitement in children’s voices when they’re about to get a present. You know, “Pleeeeease, pleeeeease”.

“What’s so special about it?” I asked. I was thinking about chicken Parisienne, wine sauce, melons from the greenhouse ripe to perfection, so ripe they crushed cool on your tongue, was thinking about anything except this moron’s special fish.

“Tastes like heaven,” he beamed, “and it’s all yours. To thank you for being kind to me.”

“But I haven’t…” I began, then decided I hadn’t anything to lose so I took the bag from him and gave him the sack of rubbish to sort through. Fair exchange, no robbery.

“Take what you want,” I said, feeling generous. The seagulls were dead pissed off.

I left him and went back into the kitchen and laid those fish out on a slab and they were like no other fish I’d seen in my life. I don’t want to know where he got them from. There were two of them and they were bright orange and they were fish-shaped, and after that any resemblance to fish was purely coincidental. They had bits sticking out here and bits sticking out there, stalks and fins with no obvious purpose, as if nature had had a laughing fit the day she threw them together or else she’d been playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey blindfold thirty times on each fish and missed every time.

I set to work with my gutting knife and took off all the bits until I had a small pile of them and I thought they would make a nice garnish, then I slit both fish open, and guess what? No guts, no organs, no stomach, nothing. Just a white flesh and even raw that flesh looked delicious. It was so white it glowed.

What’s this got to do with the Rain Man? Everything and nothing. Let me tell you about me before I tell you about him, OK?

It was getting near rush hour and I had to decide what I was going to do with Mr and Mrs Fish. You ever been in the kitchens? Let me tell you about it. The rush hour starts just before dinnertime. There’s steam everywhere, the ovens are blazing so hot they singe your eyebrows if you stand too near, cauldrons of food all come to the boil at once. The entire kitchen is a seething mass of cooks running backward and forward like crazy to get things done, because it’s the most important people on the boat eating out there – they’re the only ones who can afford that kind of food, unless the Captain’s treating some of the less well-off at his table and when was the last time that happened? – and they’re eating what we make for them. That’s power, I can tell you. In the kitchens we get into this state of panic because it’s the only way we can operate. Four hours pass like four minutes.

I was getting wound up in it myself and I was desperate to serve up these fish, since I’d never seen anything like them, and I was sure no one had ever eaten anything like them. I went for grilling them lightly, butter on one side (they still have a mountain of butter down the stores) and maybe chestnut sauce. I had some chestnut sauce left over somewhere.

Sorry. Thinking about food like that makes me come over all funny. I sliced Mr and Mrs Fish finer than fine so that as many people as possible could get a taste and I grilled the slices lightly. They went this brown-gold colour that made my saliva spit into my mouth just looking at it. I was tempted to try a piece then and there, but that selfsame moment the two Portuguese who work there got into an argument about whose turn it was to stir the soup. They speak perfectly good English but they pretend not to because they’re a lazy, shiftless lot. If you ask them to do something, it’s “Don’ unnerstan, don’ unnerstan”.

And then the diners started filing into the dining-hall and I didn’t have the leisure as all the junior chefs were asking me questions at the same time.

“Should I take the parsnips off now?”

“Do we want aubergines in the ratatouille?”

“The chicken’s nearly ready!”

“No salt, no salt!”

“We’ve got courgettes instead of aubergines.”

“Chicken’s ready!”

“Have you written the menu yet?”

“Actually, I don’t like aubergines myself.”

“Chicken’s burning!”

I really believe they couldn’t take a dump unless I told them just where to do it, how to take their trousers down, how to sit, don’t make too much noise.

I called the fish “
Poisson specialité de bateau
” on the menu. Everything sounds better in French, don’t you think? I keep a pocket French dictionary in the kitchens for just that purpose. I can make dogshit sound like a new brand of caviar.

Twenty-three portions I made. Every one was ordered. I suppose people like a surprise. They certainly got one.

How was I to know it was lethal? I mean, take the puffer fish, that’s in my recipe book as a delicacy, only it’s got to be prepared exactly right or it’ll kill you dead. I don’t know if there was a correct way of preparing Mr and Mrs Fish, but if there was I hadn’t found it. I sometimes wonder why I never tried it myself. I wouldn’t be here talking at you if I had, and maybe I’d be better off.

I’ll give you some idea of how lethal that fish was. One of the waiters nicked a tiny piece off one of the dishes as he took it into the dining-hall, a piece no bigger than a coin. He came back in and told the junior chef how it tasted amazing, slightly scented and it sort of crumbled in your mouth. Nectar, he called it. We found him out the back three hours later, his face black and swollen like he’d been hit a hundred times and blood all down his shirtfront and the legs of his trousers. Just crawled out back, lay down and died. The seagulls had started in on him already.

The Captain sent me his compliments. He didn’t have the fish himself because he doesn’t eat fish. Isn’t that peculiar – a ship’s captain who can’t eat fish? But so many people had said how wonderful it was that he sent his compliments, told me to come out so’s he could congratulate me personally. Well, I went out and they all clapped and I felt better than a miracle-worker. I felt like God.

And three hours later twenty-three of those people who’d applauded me turned black and died.

It started towards the end of the meal. A couple said they weren’t feeling well. A woman fainted. Dr Chamberlain was called, which was about as much use as calling an arsonist to put out a fire. He said something about swollen glands, not much he could do, but he would prescribe some pills if they came to see him in the morning.

I knew something was wrong and it was something to do with Mr and Mrs Fish and I was scared, dead scared. Going out back and finding that waiter, that nearly blew my head. I went from being God to being a murderer in the space of a few hours. The juniors, they didn’t know what had happened, but they knew something had gone wrong and they thought I’d done it on purpose, put rat poison on the fish or something, and the way they looked at me, I couldn’t stand it! Even the Portuguese! They looked at me like I was a mad animal, slobbering and growling, and in the interests of public safety I should be kicked and shot dead.

Well, I saved them the trouble. I put on my coat and I got out of there. I’d been up at the top, right up, so the only way left to go was down. I spent that first night huddled up on Z deck or even lower, if you can get lower than Z deck, just crying and shivering and too scared to show my face in case anyone saw me and said, “Hey! There’s that psycho chef who murdered twenty-four people!” Crazy, of course, because no one on the lower decks gives a toss what happens on the upper decks. A few of them die, so what? It’s the same the other way round too. But I didn’t know that then, so I wandered from place to place down here, crawling over rubbish tips by day, sleeping under walkways by night. It always rains down here and it’s always dark, you noticed that? Don’t see how you can’t notice.

I wasn’t too good at getting food, though, and I was on my way to starving to death when I met Money. Yeah, that was his name, Money. He hadn’t got any, of course. It was a joke. I think. He’d wink and say, “I’m called Money so that if I’m raped, the guy who rapes me can say he’s come into Money”, and he’d wheeze like mad because that was how he laughed. Wheeze, wheeze. He wore about six layers of clothing, you know, vest, shirt, another shirt, jumper, cardigan, this great big coat, and he never took any of them off. I hated to think what he might have growing under his armpits. Me, I try to wash now and again, but you tell me where a stopper can take a bath. I usually waited for a rainstorm, then I’d strip off and run out starkers and dance around freezing my nuts but getting clean. Well, less dirty. Don’t do that so much nowadays.

Money found me when I was on the point of jumping off the side of the ship, or on the point of thinking about jumping off the side of the ship. I’m a coward, really. If I’d had any guts I’d have jumped overboard when those twenty-four people turned black and started spewing blood. That would have been the decent thing to do but I had too much self-respect then and not enough later. Either way, I would never have got round to topping myself. I’d simply have sat and starved, waiting for my bowels to pack up and all sorts of gross diseases to set in.

Money sat down beside me and offered me his bottle. God knows what it was, though I can tell you now that rumour about us drinking distilled engine oil, that’s all crap. We would if we could figure out how to distil it, but as it is, we make do with what we can steal from the stores or beg from passers-by. Like yourself. You sure you’ve nothing to drink on you? Ah well, never mind.

I pulled on that bottle like it was my mother’s tit and he had to grab it off me, else I’d have drained it.

“Gimme that!” he said. “Do a man a favour and he’ll take another ten. I’m Money. Pleased to meet you. You’re new to the stopping game, aren’t you?”

“How’d you tell?”

“Clean. You don’t smell bad enough. And your clothes are still white. Hey, were you a doctor?”

“Chef.”

“Chef? Wild! Not much chefing to do around here, is there?”

I had to smile. The man was as crazy as a cage full of lobsters.

“Not a lot. Pleased to meet you too.”

We sat together for a bit in silence and finished off the bottle. I tell you, that booze was the finest thing I’d ever drunk. Mind you, I threw up half an hour later, but you tend to do that on an empty stomach.

“Need something to eat?” Money asked, as if he couldn’t tell.

“Ten steaks would go down fine.”

“And when was the last time you saw a steak, eh?”

I forgot that a lot of the recipes in my book you just can’t make on the
Hope
any more. We ran out of red meat years ago, though the fishery will keep on going for ever. I think.

“Never mind. Anything. I’d eat anything. I’d eat my own crap if I could do any.”

“Got you. Can you walk?”

“If there’s food at the end, I could run all the way.”

“Good man. Come with me.”

Money took me up to this place he called Bart’s. It’s a shop, kind of pawnbroker’s, only it was shut so we had to bang on the door for ages until this guy Bart came out. Crabby old sod on crutches, but he’s got a heart of gold somewhere inside, so rumour has it.

“Money, Money!” he yelled. “Long time. Got anything for me?”

“Let’s get this straight, legless. You owe
me
a favour, right? All I want is dinner for me and the Chef here.”

Bart looked confused, as if it was impossible he could owe anyone a favour, but he signalled for us to come in. He can’t go very fast. You have to shuffle to follow him, otherwise it would look rude.

The shop’s full of junk, all covered in dust, things I can’t see why people brought on board – dolls with cracked faces, ludicrous teapots like Arabian castles, some books probably lifted from the library, a wind-up tin monkey, an ugly statue of an ugly cat, a bowl of wax fruit. But Bart knows what’s valuable, what sells, what the upper deck people want when they’ve got too much money. He goes up once a month, sets up a stall and cleans up. He hardly ever comes back with anything except a pocketful of profit.

Anyhow, he took us round the counter, his crutches thumping on the floor, and we went into a back room. He’d laid out dinner for one and asked me if I’d fetch another couple of plates from a cupboard. While I did, he and Money talked. Bart still couldn’t believe he owed anything but Money convinced him. Something about stored-up credit. I think Bart had given way already since I was getting the plates out, wasn’t I? Finally he said to me: “So you’re a chef, right? OK, cook us a meal.”