white was black’s boss at the time. they became equal partners later. gosh, that’s not very clear, is it?
Novel Treatments / JACK SHIT 1.1 Openings (Analysis)
This morning is like any other morning. This is morning and there is mourning and there is Black in his blacks and fifteen floors stare, unflinching, back. Fifteen stone of flaws, fifteen stone floors up, Fraser Black weighs up whether or not to jump: his grace-fall. Relentless gravity.
Last night, someone rose up between Black and home: some kid, some alleyway-artist, shadowed and sallow and done up blacker than Black.
‘The bag, chief.’
‘What? This bag?’
‘You fucking deaf, chief? The bag.’
I see, thought Black, and talked back – tousling the talk now, though. Let’s demote that dialogue, let’s democratise: let’s get demotic.
‘Come on: you aren’t even sixteen. You aren’t old enough to be frightening. You aren’t old enough to be fighting. You aren’t even black.’ This kid wouldn’t ever do: too white and too nice. The self-respecting hustlers, the artful, the dodgers, the boys with the perpetually coiled swagger and the trick teeth, the patois from Kingston-via-Peckham – they could do this in daylight, in dream-time. A hot voice down the neck, and a handwarm handgun snug in the guts. Watch, wallet, keys, phone: the mental checklist you leave the house with is marked off in seconds. To anyone looking, it is a mere stumble, a brief collision; in a way, it is, but you leave a lifetime lighter. This kid – white, unarmed, patently non-dangerous, wasn’t even on the same page. The eyes had it. The mouth opened and closed and said nothing, but the eyes said: I’m doing this because I’m desperate – which was no good. What he needed was a set of those rheumy, blank eyes that got handed out with the pimp-roll and the year-round black gloves: eyes that didn’t care why, eyes that said they were doing this because they could.
‘Fuck off, sunshine,’ said Black. The kid flinched and sagged, punched down like dough. Black stepped around him and carried on home to a sad flat: sixteen walls to hold him in.
These things, they are cyclical. They come back around. Let us, then, come back around to Black as he stands back from the edge of the ledge and flicks his spent cigarette over the precipice, and does not follow it down. Turning, his eyes pass over flat swathes of granite and steel. Outside, the Saturday sun struggles, climbing sad steps up the sky – but it is not responsible for the palpable heat already filling the room. No: that comes from the massed ranks of heavy machinery down the long wall: a stack of electric ovens, a six-burner, a solid-top with the top popped for lighting, a four-foot char grill that puts out four hundred degrees all day and all night, gas ovens and plate warmers running beneath all these, a nest of fryers and bains marie, and finally a split-level pizza oven that must weigh a quarter of a ton. In a corner stoops a kind of robot pirate, stirring primordial soup with a giant, hooked hand. To the forty-quart bowl, Black adds flour in patient increments until a wet dough is formed, yeasty and smoothly elastic. It is nine o’clock. By twelve, when the restaurant and the rack begin to fill up with dupes, he will have formed, proved and baked sixty loaves: slash-top boules, blackened sourdough monoliths, buttery foccaccia and much besides. Now flour and water and yeast and salt have combined, and already the thing is alive, being snapped around its bowl by the Hobart’s hook like an old-fashioned top. Behind Black’s back a bell rings and there is the shuddering of lift doors. He spins as they part to reveal last night’s failed assailant, clothed in celestial white, bloodied from neck to knee.
This is an odd situation, but Black is on safe ground. He knows every corner and crevice of this kitchen, can lay his hand on six ways to kill in a second, from caustic soda to blowtorches to cast-iron skillets to the prosaic-but-still-threatening chef’s knife unconsciously plugged into his right fist. The air twinges and crackles, alive with static and double-takes. Black takes a step towards the doors, the yobs at the shallow of his gene-pool cracking their knuckles and cricking their necks. Marshalling mind and mouth, they make him say,
‘I thought I told you to fuck off.’ The kid is expecting this: his eyes shift about and he clears his throat before speaking.
‘Meat delivery, chef.’
To the right of this delicate dialogue, the double doors swell that divide the face of the restaurant from its guts: pregnant, portentous, the air-bulge that precedes the shoulder-barge that heralds the arrival of Black’s crew, swaying under last night’s drunken ballast, unshaven and with bruised eyes and the fluorescent jaundice that comes from years of sweating out colour and soul under heat lights and over sweltering ranges. But let’s not, eh? Let us not dive into the bowels of this place from the off. Let us instead sidle smartly through the lobby, relieved of outer garments by the fragrant coat check girl with the expensive cheekbones and upturned slick of ice-blonde hair. Let us take a seat at the bar and survey. Things are being prepared, made ready.
_________
Chess – for that is the name – is a joint venture, in which Black and White are equal partners. White opened, of course, but when, a harrowed handful of tax years ago, Black awoke to find his life had slipped out in the night, and wasn’t coming back, he remortgaged his marriage and sank the lot into Chess – all those tumbling zeroes. Two hundred feet above London’s hurrying streets, Chess is a monochrome miasma of retro-ironic kitsch: the twenties, aped by the eighties, re-animated by the strung-out magpie mores of the twenty-first century. The tabletops are black granite, punctuated by designer eating irons in white gold. The bar is a glittering obsidian expanse. Archly panelled and knowingly inset, the walls showcase a rainforest of exotic woods: wenge, bubinga, white oak, bleached ash. The floor, conceived and installed at breathtaking expense by a speechless Japanese, is a trickily holographic rendition of the sixty-four square field of play: the colour shifts bewilderingly according to one’s point of view, collapsing depth-perception entirely. The queasy sensation of placelessness this evokes on the part of the unwisely drunken diner has resulted in the occasional elbow-crunching tumble from some minor Russian oligarch, and a clutch of unresolved lawsuits from inelegant moneyed Sloanes, furious at the sucker-punch dealt to their already dwindling social stock by swerving off their stilettos, undone by one too many White Russians.
The food – which comes, naturally, on twelve-inch-square white plates – is what the Michelin men call ‘modern European’: the post-modernist’s nouvelle cuisine. Principally French, it nonetheless incorporates enough sous vide cooking, finicky emulsions and witty nods to the great gastronomic smorgasbord of Europe to merit a modified moniker. And it is deeply, uncontrollably fashionable: Zagat’s calls it ‘dazzling’; puce-complected celluloid failure Peter Loser, in his resurrected capacity as a Sunday newspaper’s in-house bon viveur and restaurant critic, garlands it with cloyingly purple superlatives; Michelin are rumoured to be waiting in the wings, stars poised. Chess has even begun, lately, to play host to the monosyllabic, monobrowed world of professional football: masters of the conjoining of pigskin and onion-bag, on a hundred grand a week and a nagging rape charge. This, really, is the true barometer of success. This, and the puddles of bulimic puke and lines of forgotten coke racked out in the unisex toilets after the steaming, sweat-blinded, four-hour thrash of Saturday night service, in which Chess can turn its sixty-four tables over three or four times: testaments to the kind of success that keeps White laughing all the way to the bank.
Given all this, it is perhaps difficult to see why, every morning, as Black ends his life slowly with the first of a required three packets of cigarettes, he has to fight down the urge to end it quickly by leaning forward, pivoting at the waist to perform a balletic one-eighty flip-flop into a fifteen-floor free-fall, where there is no safety net. Well, there are reasons, and they are to do with what Black has and has not – the credit and debit columns of life’s terrible ledger. Black is in the black, true – but it is a long time since he was in the pink. He has ended up somewhere he never really wanted to be, never planned, never coveted: indeed, most of the things that spring immediately to mind about his life are things he would have avoided at all costs at twenty. Picture Black at twenty, with a hairstyle and hope in his heart (and her, too – but we’ll come to that), coming across the newspaper profile that marked his thirty-sixth birthday: ‘Rising chef Fraser Black, divorced, turns thirty-six today. We talk to him about Michelin stars, the importance of seasonality and what it’s like working with genius restaurateur Midas White. Black also talks for the first time about his ex-wife Paige Keller, and his estranged daughter…’ At twenty, this would have provoked a tut, perhaps a ‘tosser’, and a turned page. At thirty-six, Black would tell you without reservation that he certainly wasn’t wishing on Michelin, that he didn’t care a fuck for seasonality, and that Midas White was a cocaine-shrivelled psychopath careening rapidly beyond anyone’s control, at the bad end of a twenty-year career in cocaine, eyes ablaze with frenzied mantras: ‘Everyfink I touch, Fray. Everyfink I touch.’ Yeah, thinks Black: everything you touch disappears. It doesn’t turn to gold: it turns to dust. Don’t touch me. I’m already disappearing, and I’m all I’ve got. Everyone else has already disappeared.
Fraser Black: thirty-six, six foot four, fifteen stone, divorced, daughterless and nearly done. Start near the end, Vonnegut said. Start as close to the end as possible. Well, Black is as close to the end as possible. Nearly done. Any day now…
_________
How she left: slowly, and because he made her. When Black moved up the food chain to rule the roost at Chess, he became invisible to his wife. A ghost in the marital bed, a ship in the night, Black worked eighty hours a week and slept on the Sabbath. Stumbling, blurry, redolent of garlic and cigarettes, he would jack-knife into the sheets at two and unfold himself from them again at seven. He learnt the almost unbearable poignancy of another’s somnolence, the clasped hands and choux pastry smell of her sleep; the tender sorry mornings, her eyes sluiced with tears that he might as well have wrung out of her or put in himself, with an eyedropper. After two years of this, of a marriage that felt like an airport departure lounge, red-eyed, jet-lagged, Paige decided enough was enough and did the worst thing possible. Not leaving, no. She went straight out and fucked Midas White. This, on a human scale, was beyond nuclear – this was Paige spurning irreparable, skipping nuclear and going straight to supernova.
As an action, demanding equal and opposite reaction, it was difficult to ignore. Black did not ignore it; no, he took it very deeply and studiedly and settled on the easiest but perhaps the worst course of action. He disappeared on a six-day drunk and returned with the ‘cut here’ dotted imprint of White’s upper incisors on his knuckles. He maintained studied silence and deliberate difficulty at all times.
‘It’s nothing to do with him,’ she said.
‘I think talking might help, Fray,’ she said. ‘Given that two years of not talking got us here.’
When, on a compassionate midweek day off, he turned up to collect Jay from school so drunk he could barely see, sunk in the seat of the listing Fiat like a sulking crab, Paige yanked him over the threshold and propped him against the breakfast bar in their yellow kitchen. He shielded his eyes.
‘Are you going to stop?’ she said.
‘Stop what?’
‘This, Fray.’ She flailed her hands in furious semaphore. ‘Where are you going with this?’
‘“Where are you going with this?”’ he mocked. ‘Whose voice is that, Paige? It isn’t yours. Where’d you get that – some sitcom?’
‘Oh? And who have you come as? You disappear drunk for days, and punch your boss’s teeth out. Very masculine, Fray – but it’s not very you, is it? And it’s not very helpful.’
‘This isn’t a think-piece. This isn’t running under your bloody by-line. I don’t see why you sleeping with someone else shouldn’t make something happen to me.’
‘It’s the other way around. Cause and effect.’
Fraser Black thought hard about that and took a deep breath and looked Paige in the eye and said,
‘Fuck it.’
She left the room: a literal prolepsis. When she’d left, her words still whirling in her wake, Jay came in, and sat, and silently channel-surfed. Jay was ten and Fray was thirty-one, but it wasn’t those two decades that served to divide them. More than that, it was speed, it was process. MTV had been souped-up, tuned to the mental pitch of the mercurial young. Watching the ray-tube’s flick and scroll, idly, one-eyed, Black found he could no longer subtend connections. What was there to connect? Whither the bigger picture?
On a chart or graph or timeline of cause and effect, Jay comes first. Not right at the start, no: love came first, love caused all this. But she is the word made flesh. Picture Paige and Fraser at twenty each (yes, and here we go again), likeably ensconced, fondly enfolded, uncomplicatedly in love. Three months later, Paige was three months late. The fondness stayed, but the world had to be reshaped to fit. Black walked into the first line that would take him. Those two, those girls – he had shaped the world to fit them in. He would do anything to keep them. He would do everything to keep them. Jesus – those shifts.
That night, there, then, that room: Black didn’t move an inch, stayed propped at the bar like a butterfly on a pin. Such a mess to be in! Then, at ten, Paige came back again, packed and resolute, and said,
‘I can’t even see you anymore. You’ve disappeared, Fray – so I might as well.’
She was right, of course. She was right. Shifts, oppositions. He wasn’t wrong, but he was left.
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Joho reviewed Version 3 -
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j_cafesin reviewed Version 3 -
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I didn’t continue the read because I kept losing the string of the story and having to go back and read it again.
Clearly, you are a skilled, crafted writer. And you are well read and have a lot of literary and otherwise references, but most are too obsure for my simple mind. I love your opening, but even in the first line you do it—too verbose, flurid, much. I want to be with the guy on the roof but you keep me out of scene too long, then take me out again after the telling line it should open with:
-fifteen stone floors up, Fraser Black weighs up whether or not to jump: his grace-fall. Relentless gravity.
Your prose are beautiful, poetic, truly, but there are just too many, too often. I need more story string and less poetry to keep me with it, especially if you are going back and forth in time and expect the reader to keep up. This could be an amazing work but I feel it needs to be tighter. Your voice is really strong and I’m sure it will still come through if you focus on story more.
J. Cafesin
www.jcafesin.com
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DCAllen reviewed Version 3 -
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On the first page, I already have twenty things I want to say, but they all boil down to you have so much talent. Pick anything (the word play in the first paragraph, the whiplash dialogue, Black’s deadpan interior monologue) and it’s all quite good.
Second page: I’m impressed by the sensuous rhythm of your prose. The relentless listing of ovens and warmers and fryers, and then the punctuation of “It is nine o’clock.” And then the listing again. This is excellent writing.
This is breathless prose, not for the faint at heart. After having read the whole text, my impression is that you’ll have a lot of readers scratching their heads. Oh well and so what. This was incredibly rich.
Giving the snippet of White’s (Working class East London?) dialect helps me place him much better. I wish there had been a bit more of this.
“and punch your boss’s teeth out.” White is Black’s boss? I thought they were equal partners. Did I miss something?
like a butterfly on a pin. Very nice simile.
Why no rating criteria? I wanted so badly to give this 10s.
sixfingeredman reviewed Version 3 -
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my so- called critique:
what can I say? The allegorical semblance of chance as it relates to chess players may have been more that a match for the reader; myself, whomerely wishes to understand “the bag” from the white-faced dough boy who is a cross between Vinalla Ice and Loni Anderson.
I pwersonally enjoy the inner narratives in between the context of the events though a bit more refinement in the working of black could’ve done a little bit more for me to relate to.
Imeasn, should I side with black merely because of the racial implications? Of course not- I side with black because he works his ass off and his girlie is frolicking with “white?”
Your culinary terms were easy to understand and deliver a style of some nubian time-freeze, that is to say that these situations dropped a landscape of dark, shady lounge with the occasional clink of dry martini glasses and fishnet stockings on white alabaster.
I wouldn’t correct anything other that reduce the setting to a staging of thing that are happening or have happened. Then focus on black’s apparent lack of assertiveness though his equality to “black” remains.
Sorry, this all comes out like Dr. Phil
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