‘Patrick, I really don’t think that anyone is going to notice whether the extractor fan filter is clean.’
He gave me a withering look, scrubbing harder with what looked suspiciously like an old pair of his underpants. ‘I’m not doing it for the show – I’ve been meaning to do it for ages.’
This statement didn’t have a lot of credibility coming from a man who vacuumed his bedroom about twice a year.
It was a week since my partnership prospects had disappeared. Thankfully Maggie had talked me out of my first impulse, which had been to march around to Gavin’s office and confront him with the huge injustice that had been done to me. The anger that had fuelled this idea disappeared before lunch and I finally figured out that what I felt most was hurt.
Jennings Walker was a business. It was there to serve its clients and make money. But I’d worked myself inside out for years and knew I was well thought of. Somehow I’d thought that gave me some kind of credit to work with. For the first time, however, I realised that I was just one of a legion of young lawyers who’d passed through the place. No one would remember my name in a year’s time if I left tomorrow.
I’d gone through the motions the last week or so, flicked a few files to other lawyers, and my workload was slowly coming back under control. Without the incentive of moving to the next level, everything looked pretty dreary and I felt as though I was just putting one foot in front of the other. I knew I had to fire myself up again if promotion next year was really going to be a possibility, but I couldn’t muster the energy.
In stark contrast, Patrick was as excited as I’d seen him since he’d confessed Jennifer had seduced him in the work kitchenette.
Tony had called him yesterday to say that the woman who’d agreed to have the first cooking show in her kitchen had cancelled. He’d asked if Patrick would be interested in taking her place – with the show to be shot in our kitchen today. Far from being insulted that he was a last-minute ring-in, Patrick had accepted enthusiastically. I suspected he was still harbouring dreams of fame.
I’d arrived home last night to find whimsical sketches of coffee cups propped at the back of the counter and a new Alessi juicer that looked like an alien space ship off to one side. There was also a full set of gleaming saucepans, a marble chopping board and a chef ’s knife. More worryingly, there were two new vases, each filled with what Patrick claimed were native flowers.
‘I thought the whole idea was to shoot the segment in a real kitchen. I wouldn’t even recognise this place as ours.’
Despite Tony having told Patrick that the ‘normal people’ on the show were simply a way of making the chef look good, Patrick was on tenterhooks.
‘Well, if you’re going to be on TV, you have to make a bit of an effort.’ He’d finished with the extractor fan and had moved on to the fridge, which he’d only cleaned yesterday.
‘This must have cost you a fortune. How did you afford it all?’
Patrick looked uncomfortable. ‘Same as everything else – credit.’
Patrick was so nervous, he hadn’t even eaten and had barely said two words, even to Jack, all day. Despite Jack’s best efforts, the entire house was still spotless at lunchtime and I was under strict instructions to make sure it stayed that way.
This whole thing was so out of character that I was starting to worry about how much being unemployed was weighing on Patrick. In the two weeks since he’d been fired, he’d been knocked back by the other three major accounting firms in town. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it except to voice his conviction that Jennifer was using her influence to prevent him finding another job in the industry.
Patrick wasn’t the only one flustered – Tony’s call had unsettled me as well. Another week had gone by with no word from him and here he was turning up again. Sure, it was Patrick he’d called, not me. But if he really didn’t want to see me again, would he have arranged to shoot the show in my house?
The truth was he probably hadn’t even given it any thought.
‘So do you know who the chef is?’ I asked as I blew on a party sausage before handing it to Jack. Unfortunately, his love of Carla’s meatballs hadn’t ushered in a new approach to food and a worrying amount of his diet still came from the frozen food section at the supermarket.
‘Some guy called David Green. He’s head chef at a restaurant in town.’
‘Do you know if he’s been on television before?’
Patrick shook his head. ‘I hope so though. I’ve just remembered how uncomfortable I am whenever anyone produces a video camera. Can you tell me what on earth made me think I’d be any good at this?’
‘This is totally different to amateur stuff. You’ll be great,’ I assured him with as much conviction as I could muster.
‘You think so?’ he asked desperately.
‘Absolutely.’ I nodded sagely.
‘What time are they coming?’
He looked nervously at his watch. ‘In half an hour.’
We both looked at Jack, who was jumping around the room astride the broom, making horse noises and crashing into every available surface.
‘Don’t suppose you have a playgroup to go to this afternoon?’
‘’Fraid not.’
He looked at me pleadingly.
I’d been keen to see what happened, but it was clear that a television shoot and Jack couldn’t coexist in this small house.
‘Okay,’ I relented, ‘I’ll take him swimming.’
‘Thank you,’ Patrick sighed with relief.
I’d taken Jack to the local pool earlier in the week. My expectations of our outings were becoming more realistic – I figured that if I expected total catastrophe, anything else was a bonus. As neither of us had drowned, I’d deemed the expedition a success.
Now, after two hours of unsuccessfully trying to convince Jack that splashing harmlessly in the baby pool was way more exciting than throwing himself into three metres of water, I was exhausted.
We returned home to find a van and a couple of cars parked outside and the house crowded. For a low-budget half-hour show, there certainly seemed to be a lot of people in the kitchen and spread around the deck.
I took Jack straight to his room and put him down for a sleep, blessing the fact that he was so tired he couldn’t muster the energy to put up a fight.
My swimming costume had soaked through my T-shirt and shorts, making very undignified-looking patterns, and I decided to change before venturing into the kitchen.
‘Hi Julia.’
I heard the familiar voice behind me as I was quietly pulling Jack’s door shut. I turned and saw Tony standing in the doorway. I couldn’t help the lurch in my stomach at the sight of him.
I glanced down at my front, trying to gauge how bad the watermarks looked. Bad.
‘Over here, Tony,’ someone called from the kitchen, and with an apologetic wave he was gone.
I escaped to my bedroom with relief and threw on a dry singlet top and trousers. With so many people already involved, the last thing I wanted to do was get in the way. Trying to convince myself I wasn’t avoiding Tony, I went into the study and closed the door.
Other than a couple of shattering crashes, which I hoped weren’t Patrick’s new vases, and a few teeth-jarring scrapes along the floor, there wasn’t too much noise coming from the kitchen, but I still couldn’t concentrate. After about half an hour I stopped pretending to work and looked in on the filming.
Despite the fact that the crew had been there for over three hours, it didn’t seem as though much cooking had been done. I perched on the back of the sofa, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Patrick and another man, who I assumed to be David Green, were standing in front of the bench, each with identical knives and chopping boards. David was instructing Patrick on the proper way to dice an onion.
‘No, no, no. That’s not finely diced, that’s massacred. Here, try again,’ he was saying in a deep voice.
He scraped the irregular chunks of onion into the sink and handed Patrick another.
‘You need to work with the grain of the onion – don’t fight it,’ he coached.
I could see why they thought this guy would work on TV and wondered whether they hadn’t chosen him more for his looks than his cooking skills. For some reason I’d been expecting someone French and small, with a neat little moustache. David looked more like a footballer than a chef.
Although Patrick was well over six feet, he looked short in comparison. On the back of one of David’s hands was a tattoo that I couldn’t quite make out, but it looked like some sort of spider. His face was handsome in a beaten-up sort of way, as though he’d survived his fair share of bar brawls.
As I watched, the camera focused on Patrick, who started to painfully cut up his onion into rough, irregular cubes. Beside him, David’s knife flew and within five seconds he had a perfectly diced onion. With Patrick still labouring away, he turned to the stove.
Boredom had clearly overcome Patrick’s nerves and casting a glance over his shoulder, he waved a tea towel in front of the camera while swapping chopping boards. ‘Ta da,’ he announced, looking proud. ‘Just a little trick I picked up in chef school.’
He quickly turned and dropped the perfectly cut onion into his pan on the stove.
David turned back to find himself left with the huge chunks of onion. ‘Right. So it’s going to be like that, is it?’
Tony, who had been standing off to one side, spotted me and came over. ‘How’s it going?’ I asked as he leaned on the wall next to me.
He shook his head. ‘We’re running way behind schedule. The lights blew one of the fuses, so we had no power for an hour. I’m afraid your kitchen will be out of action for a while yet.’
I waved my hand. ‘Gives me the perfect excuse not to cook. You can stay all week if you want.’ As soon as I spoke, I realised how much like an invitation that sounded. ‘I mean . . . the crew can . . .’ I decided to cut my losses and change the subject. ‘How’s Patrick going?’
‘Well, I think. He was nervous when we started, but because he has been in front of the camera for so long, he’s pretty much forgotten about it. He and David seem to have hit it off, which is good.’
‘Are you taping this?’
‘Yeah. We rehearsed it a few times without the food and then got some pretty good stuff doing it properly. We’ve got a heap of food though, so I told them to play around with the script a bit. We might be able to edit some of the impromptu bits in if they work.’
Having salvaged the onion and set it cooking on the stove, David was talking to the camera again. Patrick spotted me and smiled slightly.
‘Fresh ripe tomatoes are the key to this dish. The first step is to remove the skins.’
One of the crew appeared with two steaming bowls filled with tomatoes and hot water.
‘All you need to do is gently pull the skins off each one.’ David plunged his hands in.
Patrick copied him, slipping his hands into the water, and instantly let out a howl. ‘Shit!’ He rushed over to the tap and turned on the cold water, running his injured hands underneath. ‘Mate, that’s not natural. That water must be close to boiling.’
David laughed as he placed each skinned tomato on the board.
Hands still under the tap, Patrick turned to face the camera. Putting on a David Attenborough voice, he whispered as though trying not to disturb some elusive jungle creature.
‘Now, one of the wonderfully unique things about chefs is that they are stark raving mad. Although able to withstand high temperatures, they are remarkably out of touch with the rest of the world, as evidenced by the fact that they have not yet discovered the modern invention of tinned tomatoes.’
David stepped in front of the camera. Using the same voice, he mimicked Patrick. ‘Another truly bizarre species that lives in this habitat is the unemployed accountant.’
I looked nervously at Patrick, but he was smiling and seemed to be enjoying himself.
‘This species believe they are able to do away with the traditional skills of hunting, gathering and cooking, relying instead on takeaway pizza and the local Indian restaurant. However, they are suddenly left floundering in a frightening world of fresh vegetables and uncooked meat when their income is removed.’
Patrick threw his head back and laughed.
‘Now, if we could get back to the cooking?’ David arched his eyebrows at Patrick. ‘It is important to make sure that the onion is only sweating, not frying.’
‘Okay, yes. Sweating good. Frying bad.’ Patrick pointed at his pan. ‘Perfect.’
‘No Patrick, that is definitely frying. This is sweating.’ David pointed at his own pan.
‘Oh, right. Sorry.’ Patrick adjusted the flame under his pan and made a face at the camera.
‘Now pour some balsamic vinegar over it.’
Two identical bottles appeared on the counter. This was my kind of cooking, I thought.
David gripped the neck of the bottle in his fingers, turning it on the side. He slurped an amount into the pan, stoppered it with his thumb and then added another bit.
Patrick watched him. ‘How much was that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ David replied airily. ‘A good couple of slurps, until it colours nicely.’
‘Okay,’ Patrick said uncertainly.
Copying David, he turned the bottle on its side and awkwardly tipped it. The vinegar poured out in a rush. In a panic Patrick tried to use his thumb to stop it and somehow dropped the whole bottle in the pan with a resounding crash.
David picked the bottle out of the pan calmly. ‘See,’ he said to the camera. ‘Beautiful colour.
‘You can just pour it normally,’ he said to Patrick, rather kindly I thought.
‘No way – it looks too cool. I wouldn’t even have to cook to impress the girls if I could do that. Just offer to put the dressing on the salad and they’d think I was a cooking legend.’
‘Dressing that you’d made earlier of course?’ David clarified.
‘Make dressing? No way! Haven’t you tried the ready-made ones they’ve got in the supermarket?’ He looked serious but I could see a trace of a smile around his mouth.
David didn’t seem to notice he was being wound up. ‘Patrick, Patrick, Patrick. If there is one thing you will learn before I leave today, it is how to make a proper dressing. You simply must not buy one of those terrible concoctions.
‘Now.’ David drew a deep breath. ‘Where were we?’
‘Onion a-sweating.’ Patrick opened the oven door and a waft of cooking meat came out. ‘Meat a-cooking. We just need some mashed spuds and tomato sauce, right?’
‘Where have you been for the last five years? You never, ever call it mashed potato – it is mash, as in potato mash, or sweet potato mash. Don’t they let you accountants out at night?’
Patrick shook his head in mock sadness. ‘Well, they let us out. It’s just that no one invites us anywhere. Social death to be seen talking in public to an accountant, you know . . . It’s why accountants intermarry. Lawyers are about the only other lot that’ll have us, and even they feel they’re doing us a favour.’
The banter continued throughout the making of a tomato relish, which Patrick insisted, to David’s obvious irritation, on calling a sauce. David showed Patrick how to ‘plate’ the food and finally Tony interrupted.
‘All right, you two, I think that’s enough. Thank you.’
‘Tony, mate, you’re going to have to do something about the quality of the students you send me.’ David smiled. ‘Got to admit, though, that was more fun than I thought it would be. You’re not going to use that last one, are you?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll wait and see how it looks, but I thought it was pretty entertaining. You pair work together well.’
The crew was already packing up and wheeling large items down the hallway.
‘What happens now?’ Patrick asked.
‘We’ll edit this over the next couple of days. If it looks good, we’ll take it to a management meeting and see if they like it enough to produce a series.’
‘Do you want to stay for a drink?’ Patrick asked. ‘Celebrate the end of filming?’
I promised myself I’d be extra nice to Patrick for ever more.
David answered first. ‘Afraid not – I need to get back to the restaurant and prep for tonight’s session.’
Patrick turned to Tony expectantly.
‘Sorry, mate, got to get back to the studio and look at this stuff.’ And with a brief goodbye, he was gone.
All right. There was now absolutely no doubt that I had imagined Tony kissing me after the movie – and quite possibly the whole date. He’d hardly spoken to me since and certainly shown very little interest. It had obviously been a desperate fantasy that was the product of a sleep- and sex-deprived mind. I was clearly a very sad person.
At least now the show was finished, I wouldn’t have to see him any more. That was good news.