Chapter 10

New York
Autumn 2001

BECAUSE HE SMOKED heroin and avoided injecting, Mitch told himself that he wasn’t really a user. He was one of the lucky ones who would be able to stay in control. To demonstrate this, he only allowed himself to smoke heroin occasionally, when he felt like he really deserved it. It gave him the sense of staying on top, and he needed that.

‘I don’t want to end up like junkie shit!’ he told himself sternly. The longer he lived in New York, the more he saw it: people reduced to dope-addicted wrecks, their veins collapsed, their money all spent on heroin or crack or whatever their drug of choice was. People disappeared out of the world of restaurants and kitchens as quickly as they entered it, falling away and forgotten before the night was out. There was always someone to replace them. When Mitch was made second-in-command in his kitchen, he soon started avoiding giving jobs to anyone who looked like they were using. Drinking was OK as long as it was confined to the hours outside the kitchen – and, hell, they were all drunks as soon they stepped out of the door – but the druggies were totally unreliable and as dishonest as they came. Mitch found he preferred hiring immigrants, who had no interest in drugs at all. They expected to work hard and uncomplainingly for little money, and put their backs into their jobs. He knew their wages were supporting families or being sent back to wherever they came from, and that pleased him even if it made him a hypocrite for investing a sizeable portion of his own pay in bags of dope.

Little by little, his addiction began to grow. He found it harder and harder to resist the lure of a smoke after work, the delightful comedown that melted away all his tensions and removed every care he had in the world. He had a girlfriend for a while, a sweet, pretty girl called Vanna who was a student at NYCU, but as his dalliance with heroin grew ever more serious, her love for him waned.

‘You’re an asshole when you’re using this shit,’ she shouted at him. ‘I hate you when you’re doing this!’

She had just discovered that he’d emptied her purse of money because he needed some cash for a fix and couldn’t wait a second longer.

‘You stole it!’ cried Vanna, her green eyes flashing with anger.

‘I’ll pay you back,’ he said, affronted.

‘Yeah, right! Anyway, it’s not the point. You went through my purse and took my money.’

‘Ah, fuck off,’ Mitch drawled, happy when she’d slammed out of the apartment, knowing he could now be alone with the substance that was fast becoming the love of his life.

‘Why do you do it, Mitch?’ she’d asked later, when she’d come back and they’d made up with a short but intense fuck, and were lying in each other’s arms on his futon. ‘What’s the appeal?’

‘It’s hard to explain. It’s like … getting high is like having sex, great sex, while simultaneously soaking in a delicious hot bath and eating the most sublime food in the world,’ Mitch had replied, but she’d just stared at him, uncomprehending. She was still a creature of the real world, a normal girl with a normal job, who preferred real sex to dopamine-induced ecstasy. But then, she wasn’t part of the kitchen world, with its nocturnal rhythms and craving for escape.

When Vanna dumped him the following week, he didn’t even worry about all the sex he’d be missing out on: his addiction was replacing any physical desire he’d once had.

He still loved to cook, though. That passion was the only thing that heroin didn’t touch. He could do anything outside the kitchen: fuck the waitresses, buy shit from pushers, chase his little dragons all night long (one smoke wasn’t enough now, it didn’t produce the required effect any longer), but when he was back at his station or at the pass, running the kitchen when Chef was absent, he was wholly and entirely focused on creating wonderful food from his rack of ingredients. When he was in the kitchen his world shrank to the metre or so of stainless steel that was his bench, and the shelves with his carefully prepped tray of seasonings and ingredients, and his knife.

Mitch wasn’t working on the day the Twin Towers fell. He was shaken awake by Herbie who was grey-faced and sweating.

‘Huh? What is it?’ grumbled Mitch, rolling back into his sheets. ‘Why’re you up so early?’

‘I ain’t been to bed. There’s some crazy shit going on, man! A plane’s smashed into the World Trade Centre! You gotta wake up.’

‘What?’ Mitch scrambled out of bed and they switched on the television. The screen showed the towers alight, great billows of grey smoke sailing up into the brilliant blue sky. ‘Holy fuck!’ he breathed, dazed. Was it real? He ran to the window of their apartment, and saw the huge columns of smoke to the south, climbing upwards, bigger, denser and blacker than they looked on the TV. The air around the towers was shimmering with the clouds of debris floating downwards, clouds of office paper fluttering like falling leaves. The gashes that had been torn into the towers glowed orange where the fires burned. Fear rushed through him. What did it mean? Was the whole city under attack?

‘What should we do, man?’ Herbie said, his hands shaking and his eyes wild.

‘I dunno. Stay here, I guess.’

Herbie looked agonised. ‘My pal Bobby’s in the North tower. He’s working at Windows on the World, and so’s his wife, Maria. Look, the whole place is on fire right underneath them. How’re they gonna get down?’

Mitch went back to the television. He could see people at the windows of the upper floors, waving desperately, pleading for help. Then he saw that some were falling or jumping, small black stick figures floating downwards. ‘He’ll be OK,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘The whole city fire department is there, and the police. They’ll get ’em all out, I know they will. Those guys know what they’re doing. Oh, Christ. I can’t believe it.’

‘I wanna get out of here,’ Herbie said, panicking. Sweat glistened all over his face. ‘They’re trying to fuckin’ kill us!’

I gotta keep him calm. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. Hey, let’s have a smoke and take the edge off this thing. There’s nothing we can do.’ Mitch went to a drawer and took out a pouch of powder and his drug gear.

‘Yeah,’ Herbie said, looking relieved, ‘we’ll have a smoke. That’s what we’ll do.’

By the time the first tower fell, they were so stoned they didn’t even feel the ground shaking or the massive rumble as the hundreds of tons of concrete, steel and glass collapsed. As the second tower went, they were still anaesthetising, chasing another flame across the hot tin foil. When they came to, it was to a strange deathly quiet and an apartment covered in thick grey dust. It was all over.

In the aftermath, Herbie and Mitch were both out of a job. Their restaurant closed, first because it was choked with filth and dust from the nearby site of destruction; then because, when the restaurants began to open again, no one wanted to eat out.

Herbie said he was going to leave, go home, move to the sea, just escape the ruptured city with its atmosphere of grief and mourning. He was shaken by the way Bobby and Maria had died, trapped at the top of the burning building with no way out, waiting for help that never came and then pulverised in the mighty collapse. But Mitch wasn’t ready to give up on New York yet. I’m gonna stick it out, he decided. He felt in an obscure way that the city needed him to keep going, keep working, that he owed it to the place to stay focused and act as normal. He persuaded Herbie to stay on with him, they found some temporary work in the kitchens of a big hotel, and gradually the dust and debris were cleared away, and the city began to recover.

The restaurant trade started up again, and they moved to a new place and then another.

If we can survive this, we can survive anything, Mitch told himself. But he could only face it with the help of his little bags of medicine.