Art: Jessica Good
I’m a line cook. This is how I became a spy:
I come from a binary solar system. We don’t have what other beings might call day and night. Nor do we measure days like they measure days, or years like they measure years. I can’t tell you how old I am, not in a way that would satisfy you. All I can say is, the first time I saw the dark – the real, deep dark – was the first time I left home. I looked out at the obsidian void from the window of the ship, and knew I was gone and never going back. Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye, Papa.
The job was waiting for me: Barkbere’s Bistro. The restaurant was in an old ship which had landed by the bay, disgorging the first inhabitants of Nilvur. These were Barkbere’s ancestors. I don’t know how long ago this was, but it was Barkbere senior who advertised the job and Barkbere junior who was running the place when I arrived.
He was a well-dressed crustacean who lived in his office, the former captain’s quarters. When we finally met, he looked at me as if he wanted to run his feelers over my skin. “A humie,” he said. His throat clicked as he spoke. “I’ve never hired a humie before. Dad must have had his reasons.”
I started to expound on my resumé, but he held up a claw for silence. I dry swallowed my words, my memorised and polished speech on craft, passion and teamwork going down like a half-chewed hunk of meat.
“A trial,” he said, nodding. His eyelids flickered. With that, I was sent to the kitchen. I passed through the dining room, still carrying my backpack with all my worldly belongings inside – a second suit and a set of knives. Empty for now, it was a great, saucer-shaped room lit by glowing insects stuffed into jars that hung from the ceiling. There were seats and tables shaped to accommodate all kinds of customers. Beings travelled far to eat at Barkbere’s, even from offworld.
The restaurant might have been empty, but the kitchen was already clanking and churning and howling away. I could hear it before I pushed through the swing doors. When I did, nobody looked up, nobody stopped working, nobody noticed. The closest I got to a greeting was a huge hammerhead screeching “Back!” at me as he passed carrying a tank of slithering eels, which flickered and sparked their annoyance at being sloshed around. They would be more annoyed later when they were tipped, still alive, into the fryolator.
“Excuse me,” I shouted, “where is the chef?”
“Chef’s right here,” a voice said behind me. Chef was a vigintipede. His whites looked like bandages wrapped around his insect body. A missing limb in his top half was conspicuous. There were many rumours about how Chef came to lose that arm, from bar fights to kitchen accidents, but nobody knew the truth, probably because nobody asked him. Chef had the eyes of a murderer, but his voice, when he wasn’t calling out orders, was soft and malicious, like a pillow pressed over your face. You didn’t ask Chef to repeat an order, and you didn’t ask Chef about his missing arm.
“I’m Grith,” I said, “I’m here for the line cook job.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Sorry?”
“The pot wash is over here.” Three arms pointed the way.
That’s how I started out at Barkbere’s: in the pot wash. Barkbere was right, it was a trial. Scrubbing out burnt pots with sand and steel wool is hard work, never mind scraping the dried gunk off plates stacked up way over your head. In those early days, I didn’t sleep. The only food I ate was the ‘family meal’ – trays of whatever was going off were roasted in the pressure oven, and left out to congeal and go cold for whoever was hungry enough to eat it.
There were staff quarters in the bistro – former dorms of the colonists – in the outer carousel of the ship. I spent most of my little free time there. One night I heard a knock at the door and opened it to find Scully the broilerman outside. “You like fishing?” he asked.
“I’ve never tried,” I said.
It was twilight, the single sun casting an orange and pink glow over everything. “Best to fish when it gets dark,” Scully said. We tramped out the delivery entrance and down towards the beach. The sand was silver and smooth, and felt nearly indistinguishable from the seawater when I ran my fingers through it.
Across the bay, I could see winking lights among the trees that grew brighter as the sunlight died. “Is that the Hideaway?” I asked.
Scully answered with a single word: “Bastards.”
The Hideaway was as famous as Barkbere’s, maybe more so. It attracted the same intergalactic clientele, and had a similar menu of classic Nilvurian dishes tuned up to fine-dining standard. Both fished out of the same bay, staring each other out from opposite banks across the calm quicksilver expanse of the sea. The Hideaway was a common topic of conversation in the Barkbere kitchen during prep time. The cooks wished infestations on them and hatched plans to drive them out of business, or at least embarrass them. They think they’re better than us, was the general mentality.
“Is there a boat?” I asked.
Scully, an octosapian from Orion’s orbit, laughed, stripped off his whites, and waded into the water until he was up to his waist. I undressed and followed him in. The water was cold, but that wasn’t what gave me discomfort. It was the prickling sensation that worried me. It felt like the burnished, grey water was eating me.
“Watch,” Scully said, as the sun dropped behind the trees and the sky went fully dark. I still wasn’t used to that. You can see the stars when it’s dark. You look up and you see outer space. It made me dizzy.
The sea switched on, the metal sheen now glowing with ethereal turquoise light. “Bioluminescence – that’s why we wait till dark to catch the fish,” Scully said. My eyes were getting used to the sudden, dazzling glow of the sea, and I began to make out the shapes moving under the surface, the stripes of eerie, glowing light on the sides of the lake creatures as they darted in the water.
“How do we catch them?” I asked.
“Like so,” Scully said. A tentacle lashed out into the water, causing sluggish waves that turned into a simmering churn as the tentacle wrapped itself around a flashing fish and hoisted it out. He tossed it onto a bedsheet that he’d spread out on the beach. The lights on the fish went out.
I had a shot. I waited for the shining blue stripes to stray close, and then dove in with both hands, the water splashing in my eyes and stinging. Spluttering and soaking, I came up empty. Scully laughed and I tried again. And I missed and missed and thrashed around in the water.
“You go for a swim,” Scully said, “I’ll tend to business.” It was fun. I got my fingers around something that slipped out as if I’d clapped my hands on a stick of butter. That was the closest I got to a catch, meanwhile Scully had piled up a slithering, tangling mass of scaled bodies with fins and pincers and dead, jelly eyes. He pulled up three or four fish at a time, his tentacles moving independently of each other.
When we had enough, I helped him haul the catch back to the kitchen. My skin and hair were covered in a grey crust that peeled off in the shower. I felt grit in my teeth for days afterwards.
There were two defining moments for me that first season. The first was the stock pot incident. Back home, I could lift a big pot by myself, but on Nilvur, the gravity is stronger, a factor I forgot to account for, and sent a whole pot of crab stock crashing over the floor in a fragrant, orange wave. Scully screamed at me. June the fryer screamed at me. Krik, the hammerhead and sauce expert, swung a cleaver at my head. Chef just stared, and that was the worst. I swept the stock into the drains that ran along the foot of each station, and kept my head down for several shifts. Any time an order came through for lake-tarantula bisque, shame turned my stomach.
The second came not longer after. Having four tentacles as arms made Scully an ideal broilerman. He worked on a huge range with twelve burners, his left tentacles whipping out to shake pans and stir pots while his right ones dove into the low-boy fridges or swept the speed shelves above his head for seasonings. I was bringing him a clean pan when a jumping jack, true to its name, leapt from the roasting pan and fell between the burning rings. A tentacle went after it in a reflex motion, and Scully howled as the searing heat burned his suckers. I put the clean pan down at the station and reached in between the green flames of the gas burners, grabbing hold of the jumping jack with my bare hand. Then I put it back into the pan and strolled back to the pot wash without a word, feeling the eyes – including both of Krik’s – on my back. Beings where I come from – with two suns and no night-time and no winter season – are pretty much heat-proof. The pain was minimal, but I didn’t tell them that.
Not long after, I was bumped up to prep cook, and then, by the start of next season, I was a line cook, making cold starters. However, it was decided that this was a waste of my individual attributes, and I became Scully’s assistant at the broiler station. Barkbere was so impressed by his first humie that he hired another to replace me in the pot wash. This one was as white as I am black, with a shock of orange hair on his head, and spots all over his face and arms. He spoke the local language with an odd accent, but often reverted to whatever it was his kind spoke whenever he was under pressure. It came out in a jagged, nasal burr that sounded something like, “Yefuk’nbas’trtyeabsylootprikyefuk’nmoovyererce…” All in all, he was a disagreeable man, but he’d been working on a nearby planet and was available at short notice.
Around this time, a media war was brewing between us and them across the bay. We were both courting tables of critics – vultures who picked and pecked at their dishes with painted beaks, and left piles of clay droppings on the floor behind them. Barkbere took to storming into the kitchen and berating us when there were fewer and fewer guests – important guests, that is, guests who mattered – to schmooze with front of house.
“We’re losing,” Barkbere said, the red of his carapace turning redder. “Why are we losing?”
“Scrafulax,” Chef said, in his deathly quiet voice, placid as the reservoir that lures you in on a hot day only to tangle you up in the weeds hidden beneath and drown you.
Chef was right. Scrafulax was the hot thing, the dish you needed to be serving. Scrafulax was a mollusc found in the deep oceans of Nilvur, dredged by squids – although Scully claimed an octosapian like himself could do it too. It looked unassuming enough, a gooey, kidney-shaped white blob covered with a see-through silky membrane inside a craggy, rock-like shell. The problem was that they were poisonous. Deadly poisonous, with a kill-rate of something like one in four. And yet, the Hideaway had them on the menu. They must have found a way to make scrafulax safe. It was destroying us. The vultures stopped coming.
Barkbere took me into his office. Chef was there too. They looked like they were going to snuff me. Barkbere clicked his pincers. His feelers were trained on me. “You’ve been doing a great job here, Grith,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“How are you enjoying working on the line?”
“I love it, sir, the opportunity to – ”
Chef held up a couple of hands to shut me up.
“Good, that’s good,” Barkbere said, clacking away, “but I have another job for you. Over at the Hideaway.”
“What?”
Chef held up his hands again.
“They’ve heard about your … special talent…” – again I felt like his feelers wanted to explore my skin – “…and want to poach you from me. We’re going to let them.”
There was plenty about this plan that I didn’t like. It had been hard enough to prove myself to the hardcore of the Barkbere cooks, and now I’d be back to the start with a whole new crew of tyrannical maniacs who thought little of humies and even less of former Barkbere employees. Also, I wasn’t lying when I told the old lobster that I was enjoying my work on the line. Sure, I had been bullied and intimidated: I spent every morning cleaning and dehorning saltwater cacti that squirted a rank-smelling oil over you if sliced wrong. Yes, I was cut and bruised and worked half to death, and the hours were still long and the shifts still manic, but I finally felt at home. I was having fun. Masochistic fun, of course, but fun all the same. And when the team were on, we were really on. It was like a dance, the way we moved, the way we coordinated. Me and Scully were two parts of the same cook. The food we turned out was something to be proud of, scrafulax or no scrafulax.
There were moral problems too, but…
I put on my first suit, folded my second suit, put it and my knives into my backpack, and took the water taxi across the bay. Scully suggested that I swim.
The Hideaway was a large, bowl-shaped terrace suspended from the trees. The kitchen itself was buried under the ground below the hanging basket of the dining room, and a dumbwaiter connected the two, sending up food and returning dirty dishes. The guests ascended to the open deck by much grander lifts that looked something like vintage rocket ships, the kind of deadly things humies from Sol’s orbit used to build. Probably still do, judging from Barkbere’s backwards dishwasher. He was from that part of the galaxy.
The elevator man pointed me to the kitchen entrance, which was dug into the ground. The structure of tunnels underneath was made from hard-wearing plastic, and the whole thing looked like a field kitchen that a military unit might use.
“It doesn’t have to look impressive, it just has to be clean,” my new chef said. He was a big Jacintha slug called Ruis who was always smiling. He was waiting for me inside the tunnel. “You’re Barkbere’s fireproof humie, right?” he said, laughing. I noticed a pale stick of a being hovering around behind him with a wide mop.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I’m Grith.”
“Well, Grith, before I show you to your quarters, there’s something I want you to do – this way.” Chef Ruis turned his huge body and slid down the tunnel. I realised then what the mop man was for.
We entered a utilitarian and spotless kitchen.
“Everyone listen up,” Ruis’s voice boomed. Many eyes turned to us, although pincers, fingers and tentacles continued to work. “This is Grith, our new line cook.” He handed me a blowtorch and gently pushed me forward.
I waved at them, then, keeping my hand aloft, brought the searing flame of the blowtorch up to meet it, smiling all the while. For a second, they stopped working, just for a second, then they cheered…
…and went back to work. I joined them. It was different here. There was no shouting, no cajoling, no threatening. Even in the thick of a four-hundred-cover night, there was calm in the Hideaway kitchen as Ruis called out the orders in his cheerful boom.
I worked alongside a polite broilerman called Twitch – the title just a formality since his race are hermaphrodites – and although they only had two hands, they worked as if they had four. Twitch was covered in a fine, slick fur, wore a kind of netting rather than whites, and had a rare elegance compared to the brutes and briny cranks I’d been working with.
“Watch and jump in when you can,” Twitch said on my first shift. “That trick of yours will come in handy.” During prep, they drew my attention to a voice-activated projector attached to the extractor hood, which cast out a recipe when given the name of a dish. I was familiar with a lot of them – glazed boater with mashed fatroots and truffles, griddled jumping jack and popping grain, fried saddle of elka, slow-cooked rockfruit – but there were slight differences to the way things were done. One dish involved capturing the fragrance of the stinking cactus oil, and serving it in a fog that wafted over the dining table. Apparently the vultures loved it.
At the end of a shift, I was sweating, breathless and glowing, but with nowhere to direct my energy. The cooks were happy with a shift well done and cleaned up to go. There was none of the high-spirited, wine-enabled messing around when Chef left that marked Barkbere’s. It struck me that nobody mentioned Barkbere’s, not even to me. They didn’t think that they were better than us, they just didn’t think about us at all.
I didn’t say any of this to Barkbere or Chef when I made my first report. The three of us were crammed into the back of a delivery truck parked some distance from the coast, knees too close together, Barkbere’s feelers in touching range, Chef’s eyes lasering through me. There wasn’t much to report. I’d seen orders of scrafulax go out, but all I knew was how it was plated – three half-shells on a plain board with a pile of grey salt from the bay on the side. Chef snorted and said nothing, arms and legs folded, except for the one without a counterpart. I’d tried looking scrafulax up in the recipe projector, but I was rarely alone in the kitchen and had to keep switching it to something else.
My other task was more successful. I borrowed the keys for the delivery entrance and the walk-in fridge from Ruis under the pretext of doing a stock check, and while I was hidden in the depths of the walk-in, I took moulds of them to give to Barkbere.
I decided to ask Twitch about scrafulax. “Dangerous, isn’t it?” was my opening gambit.
“Is it?” Twitch replied with a smile.
“I heard it was poisonous.”
“Salt is poisonous to a slug,” they said.
I dropped it; I was too busy to talk anyway. The orders poured in and I stacked them up in my head, which was full of cooking times and a triaged to-do list. Arms, fingers, legs, tentacles and pincers moved and clicked like the parts of some great machine. Clean, efficient, elegant, we turned out the next dish and the next one, and the next. Communication was done in single words, clear and succinct over the kitchen noise, but never yelled. The kitchen and the restaurant were joined by more than just the umbilicus that took the finished dishes up to the diners. The atmosphere and attitude carried from one place to the other, from the ground to the sky and back.
Grassing to Barkbere was making me ill. I’d return to the restaurant from these meetings unable to look at anybody. Nevertheless, I continued to do my best to uncover the scrafulax secret. I helped the porter unpack deliveries of the rocky shells, and pumped him for anything he knew, which was little. I expressed interest in them to Chef Ruis: “I’ve never eaten one before, I heard they were really poisonous.” I wheedled Twitch some more, and the other cooks too, and even the stick-like mop man, when he wasn’t trailing behind Ruis.
After another fruitless clandestine meeting – Chef was seething, although he said nothing, as usual – Barkbere growled, “Scully misses you. He’s looking forward to you coming back.” Coming back. Was I really coming back? What for? As if I’d said this aloud, Barkbere added: “Chef needs a new underboss. The position is open, for now.”
I went back to the Hideaway in a foul mood. My insides were churning. Underboss … that was the fast track to becoming a chef. But studying under that whispering psycho, could I manage that? I did miss Scully. I missed going fishing. But working on the line of the Hideaway was satisfying in a wholly different way, if I could bring that back with me … but I knew this wasn’t possible. I was sick of the darkness – I woke up and it was dark, I worked in the false light of the kitchen all day, and when I was done, it was dark again. How do beings live like this?
I was making myself queasy, stirring all this inside my head, when Ruis called me over. “Hey, fireman, come here a minute, I’ve got something for you!” In the palm of his hand was a scrafulax, opened up, the organ gently beating inside its skin. “Tried one of these before?”
I shook my head and tried not to show how tense I was. “Is it safe?”
Ruis took the lid off a tub containing a fine, colourless powder and sprinkled it over the top. The flecks sat on the surface of the membrane then melted in. “It is now,” he said, and handed it over. “Go on.”
“What did you put on it?”
“My ‘special dust’.” He smiled. “Down in one.”
I was scared of it. I looked up at the slug’s smiling face and swallowed the scrafulax. It was tangy, salty, bitter. I gagged and swallowed a second time, forcing it down my throat. I felt it move in there and I choked again, my eyes watering. Ruis clapped me on the back. “Awful, aren’t they?” He was laughing.
I didn’t go to sleep after service. I lay awake in bed. When the noise from the bar had died, I got up, put on my suit, and bundled my second suit and knives into my backpack. Outside, it was dark again. I could see space yawning above my head, and saw the twinkle of stars millions of light years away. Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye, Papa.
I let myself into the kitchen using the set of keys that Barkbere had fabbed for me, and took a box of scrafulax from the fridge and the tub of Ruis’s ‘special dust’. Then I walked all the way round the coast to Barkbere’s Bistro.
Barkbere woke the whole crew when I showed up. We assembled in the kitchen. Chef pried open the scrafulax and set them on the pass. I handed over the tub.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“I don’t know. He called it his ‘special dust’.”
The vigintipede looked like he wanted to slap me with several hands at once. “Special dust?”
“It works,” I said. “I’ve already tried it.”
“How much?”
“Just a pinch.”
Chef prepared them and handed them out. We stood in a loose circle: me, Barkbere, Chef, Scully, Krik, June and the other line cooks. Even the red-headed humie dishwasher was there. Barkbere obviously felt he needed to say a few words, but all he managed was, “To the future of Barkbere’s Bistro!”
We swallowed them. There was a lot of choking and hacking. Even Chef couldn’t keep the disgust from his face. I was prepared, and forced mine down in one great gulp, my teeth together and mouth clamped shut, an awful taste on my tongue and a strangling sensation in my throat.
“Delicious!” Barkbere cried. His beady, flickering eyes were watering, his feelers twitching in distress. “Delicious!” He clapped me on the back with one of his great claws. “You’ve done it, lad, you’ve –”
The dishwasher vomited on the ground.
“Really,” Barkbere started, “that’s a terrible waste, that is one of Nilvur’s, if not the galaxy’s, finest delicacies and…” He trailed off as the pale, spotted humie continued to vomit and grow even paler. He heaved until blood came up and then collapsed on the floor in a pile of his own viscera.
“Is this some kind of humie thing?” Krik suggested, just before he began to puke.
“What have you done?” Chef asked. He was reaching for a knife before he too dropped, holding his guts. Barkbere was next.
The remaining cooks were looking at each other, stricken with horror. I started to back away before any of them had the sense to pick up where Chef left off. Scully was watching me. He was still standing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.” Then I turned and ran.
I had only the clothes on my back when I arrived at the Hideaway. My suit was splashed with blood and bile. The look on Scully’s face had followed me all the way. What had happened? Why hadn’t the dust worked? My stomach was doing flip-flops, but it didn’t have anything to do with the scrafulax.
Ruis was waiting for me. “You’re back!” he said, jovial as ever. “How was the tasting session?” His eyes winked at the blood on my shoes.
“What happened? What did you do?”
“Nothing at all. Scrafulax is lethal in about one in four cases. I thought you knew that.”
“But the dust … the special dust.” I realised then how truly lame that sounded.
“Ground lice pepper. Just for flavour.”
“But – but you serve it here!”
“You want to know the real secret of scrafulax, kid? The real reason beings flock to the Hideaway to try it? The risk. The thrill of it. One in four – d’you like those odds? You’ve eaten two already – you should be a gambling man, you’ve got the luck.”
“Customers die here?”
“It happens, yeah, but it keeps the vultures coming back. Anyway, Barkbere’s might be closed for a bit while they restaff—”
“Barkbere is dead.”
“He has sons. As I was saying, you’re a good line cook – Twitch agrees – and I could use you here, if you still want the job?”
I looked up at the sky: open space above the treetops, no suns, just darkness and those far-off white pinpricks that might mean life or might mean nothing at all. It was a long way home.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
* * *
Callum McSorley is a writer based in Glasgow. His short stories have appeared in Gutter, New Writing Scotland, and Shoreline of Infinity. His debut novel Squeaky Clean is out now from Pushkin Press.
@CallumMcsorley
This story was first published in Shoreline of Infinity 15