In Part One, he came up out of the Underground with one suitcase, one folded CV and a one way ticket. He gave away 250 copies of that CV and waited for a call that did not come. Every message that told the truth, he deleted. Every message that said all ok, he sent. Then, one morning, the phone rang: a kitchen in Soho, a chef to meet at four. He began to type the good news to his mother, and stopped. Let me get the job first, he thought.
⁂
He never made that call home. By the evening, there was nothing left to tell.
The restaurant was ten minutes from the exchange shop, and he walked there as if he were going to collect a prize. He noticed everything on the way: the wet shine of the pavements, the delivery vans double parked, a man in a white apron smoking in a doorway. Someone else might have said it was only a kitchen job. For him it was the first door in the whole city that had opened, and he wanted to remember the walk towards it.
Inside, the restaurant was empty and half dark, chairs still up on some of the tables. A manager came towards him, already shaking his head.
‘We’re closed. We open at six.’
‘I’m here for the job. In the kitchen.’
‘Ah.’ The manager looked him up and down. ‘Ok. Downstairs.’
He followed him through a door at the back and into a narrow corridor. Then metal stairs, old and steep, ringing under their feet. The light got dimmer the further down they went, and the noise got louder: shouting, the crash of trays, pans hitting steel, someone swearing in a language he did not know. Heat came up the stairwell to meet them, and with it a cloud of steam rolling out of an arch at the bottom. They turned left, and there was the kitchen.
It was low and bright and furious. Five men moving at speed between steel counters, none of them looking up. At the centre of it stood the chef, a big man with his sleeves pushed above the elbows, chopping without looking at his knife.
‘What do you want?’ he said, to the manager, not to him.
‘The young gentleman is here for the job.’
The chef glanced at him for less than a second. ‘Give him a uniform. Let him do a trial.’
In a small room across the corridor, among boxes and folded tablecloths, the manager handed him a white jacket.
‘Medium should be ok. Put it on and go in. The chef is your boss. You stay a few hours, and he tells you if you pass.’ He paused in the doorway, and for a moment his face softened. ‘Good luck.’
The jacket was stiff and smelled of other people’s work. He did up every button, wiped his palms on his trousers, and walked into the kitchen.
‘Chef. I’m here.’
The chef did not answer him. He turned to one of the others. ‘Let him wash the trays. Then he helps you with the potatoes.’
Someone pointed him to a deep sink and a tower of greasy trays. He turned on the tap and began to scrub, carefully, the way he would have done at home, rinsing each one until it shone.
Two minutes later the chef was beside him. He reached past him, turned off the tap, and took the tray out of his hands.
‘You’re wasting all the water. You’re no good at washing. Go and help with the potatoes.’ He was already walking away. ‘I don’t think you will stay with us.’
The potatoes were in a sack by the back wall, and a young cook was already working through them at a speed that did not seem possible. Nobody showed him how they did it here. Nobody told him how thin to peel, or where the finished ones went. He picked up a peeler and started, and tried to copy what he saw.
Ten minutes later the chef was back, standing so close that he could feel the heat of him.
‘Too slow! Look at this. Look!’ He held up a potato, half peeled. ‘If you want this job, you must be fast. Fast!’
The whole kitchen kept moving. Nobody looked. That was the worst part. Nobody even looked.
He put the peeler down on the counter.
He stood up, took off the white jacket, folded it neatly, and left it on the small metal table by the door.
‘Thank you for the opportunity, chef,’ he said. His voice came out steadier than he expected. ‘But I’m leaving.’
He was halfway up the metal stairs when the chef’s voice came after him, loud enough for everyone to hear.
‘With your English and no experience, you’ll go back to where you came from! You won’t find a job!’
He did not turn round.
At the top, the manager was waiting by the bar. ‘So?’
‘Sorry. It’s not for me.’ He held out his hand, and the manager, surprised, shook it. ‘Thank you for your time. And for the opportunity.’
He pushed the door and stepped out into the street, and the cold air hit his face, and after that basement it felt like paradise. He stood there and breathed, the way he had breathed in the smell of the park on his first evening.
Then he walked, without knowing where. He needed to talk to someone. Anyone. He took out the phone.
Hello, just wanted to say hi. I got a job today in a kitchen but I left because the chef
His thumb stopped.
He thought of his mother reading that. A job, and then no job, in the same sentence. A chef shouting at her son.
Not worth it, he thought. Why make them worry.
He held down the key until the screen was empty, and went down into the Underground. All the way home, rocking in the warm carriage between strangers, the chef’s words went round and round in his head like the train itself.
You won’t find a job. You’ll go back to where you came from.
For two more weeks, every morning was the same. Up early, out before the house woke, into the centre. Door after door. A smile, a CV, a polite no. And every evening the long ride home, and the wallet a little thinner, and the chef’s voice a little louder.
One morning he sat in a café on a quiet square in the West End, with plane trees and a little garden in the middle, and for once he typed something hopeful.
Hi all, all ok here. I’m really happy, I learned a lot these last weeks. Let’s see, in a few days I feel I will find a job.
Before he could send it, he heard the voices at the next table. Three young men in black trousers and polished black shoes, the uniform of people who worked in restaurants. They were complaining. Too busy. Too tired. Double shifts every day, and still not enough people. They could not wait for their manager to hire someone, anyone.
Anyone.
He deleted the message and turned round in his chair before he could lose his nerve.
‘Sorry to bother you. I heard what you said. I’m looking for a job. Any job. Can I give you my CV, for your boss?’
They looked at each other and laughed, but it was a kind laugh.
‘There’s no boss to give it to, mate. Just go. Turn the corner, it’s the restaurant with the big dark windows. Ask for the manager at reception.’
‘Can I go now?’
‘Go now. Before service starts.’
He left his coffee on the table, half drunk, and ran.
The windows were exactly as they had said, tall and dark, like sunglasses on a face. A doorman in a long coat stepped in front of him.
‘We’re closed.’
‘I only want to see the manager. To give my CV. Please.’
The doorman looked at him for a long second. Then, without a word, he opened the door.
Inside, it was another world. The light was low and warm, falling in small pools onto dark wood and polished glass. Candles stood ready on every table, not yet lit. The air smelled of something sweet and smoky that he could not name. Staff moved through the room in uniforms more beautiful than anything he had ever owned, laying cutlery with a precision that looked like a dance. It was like walking onto a film set. He stood in the middle of it with his mouth slightly open, forgetting why he had come.
A man in a dark suit stopped beside him. ‘Can I help you?’
He remembered. ‘I’m looking for a job. Here is my CV. Any job. Kitchen, cleaning, anything. Any job.’
The man did not take it.
‘We’re not looking for anyone at the moment. Sorry. Try again in a few months.’
Outside, the doorman did not look at him. He walked back to the square, bought another coffee he could not afford, and sat on a bench under the trees with the cup going cold in his hands.
Why, he thought. They needed people. He had heard them say it. Three of them, at the next table, saying it.
He sat there for a long time, watching the light change on the buildings. Thinking about the chef. About the 250 CVs. About the return ticket money folded in his wallet, and what it would mean to use it.
Then he stood up and walked back.
This time the doorman was not there. He pushed the heavy door himself, and almost walked straight into a man coming out, a bag over his shoulder, keys in his hand. The man stopped and looked at him.
‘What do you need? We open in thirty minutes.’
He had no speech ready. Everything he had came out at once.
‘I’m desperate for a job. Any job. Please. I need help.’
The man looked at him a moment longer than anyone in London had looked at him yet.
‘Friday,’ he said. ‘Five o’clock. Be here shaved. Black trousers, black shoes, black T shirt. You have a job. I’m one of the managers.’
He could not believe his ears. ‘Sure, sir? I have a job?’ He heard how foolish it sounded, and did not care. ‘What job?’
‘Runner.’
‘Runner?’ He had never heard the word used like that. ‘What is runner?’
The man almost smiled. ‘Come on Friday and you’ll find out. Ask for the duty manager. I’ll tell them you’re coming. And give me a CV, if you have one.’
He opened his bag and handed one over with both hands, as if it were something precious.
He walked through the evening streets as if he had won the lottery. The shop windows were lighting up, the pavements were full of people going home, and he moved among them like one of them now. Someone with a job. Someone with a Friday.
Then he took out the phone.
Hey, all good here. I have a job. On the way home, will call you soon.
And this time, he sent it.
On the bus, by some small miracle of the city, he saw one of the three waiters from the café, swaying near the doors.
‘I got the job!’ he told him. ‘I start Friday. As a runner.’ Then, lower: ‘What is a runner, by the way?’
The waiter laughed out loud. ‘You take the food from the kitchen to the tables. You help everybody. Congratulations, man.’
‘I went twice, you know. The first time a manager said no. But you said they need people, so I went back.’
‘Good,’ the waiter said. ‘That’s how you do it here.’
When they got off, he walked away into the crowd, then turned and shouted back across the pavement.
‘Hey! Congrats again!’
And he was gone.
That night, in the garden, his mum, his dad and his brother were all on speaker, all talking at once.
‘I got a job. I’m so happy.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘Long story. I was in the right place at the right moment. Some strangers sent me to the place where they work, and, you know. All ok.’
‘Do you need anything? How is the house?’
‘All ok here. Nothing to worry about. The house is nice, and now I have a job. All ok.’
For once, almost all of it was true.
In the morning he told one of the flatmates. ‘Well done, man,’ the flatmate said, pulling on his coat. ‘You need a National Insurance number. Book an appointment at the job centre.’ And he was gone, late for college, the front door banging behind him.
He stood alone in the kitchen, saying the words to himself. National Insurance. Job centre. What was this now.
He borrowed the laptop again, found the website, and read the same page five times, slowly, with a dictionary open in another window, until he understood what it wanted from him. Then he called, and spelled his name three times, and got an appointment for the next day.
The job centre was a long room of plastic chairs and numbered screens. He waited a long time. When his number came up, a man behind a desk took his details, typing with two fingers.
‘And what brings you to the UK?’
He sat up straighter. ‘I have a job,’ he said, and he could not keep the pride out of his voice. ‘And I always wanted to come here. Now I have a job, I can become a pilot.’
The man stopped typing. ‘A pilot?’
‘Yes. A pilot.’
‘Well.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ll need a lot of money for that, son. But well done. Good luck with whatever you want to do.’
He had wanted it for as long as he could remember.
As a boy, he spent whole days with his face turned up to the sky, searching for the long white lines that aeroplanes leave behind them. He could tell them apart by their shape before he could tell most of his classmates apart by name. His bedroom held almost nothing else: aviation magazines stacked against the walls, model planes hanging from the ceiling on threads, his favourite of all a 747. Notebooks full of how to fly, copied out in his own careful handwriting.
And in the corner, the cockpit.
He had made it himself from a big sheet of cardboard. Buttons and dials drawn in marker. The windows cut out by hand, so he could see the wall behind them and pretend it was sky. He would pull his chair up in front of it and sit there for hours, his hands on an imaginary yoke, flying for a great airline he had only ever seen in photographs, taking hundreds of sleeping strangers across the night.
Dreams are only dreams. Everybody told him so. But here he was, 26 years old, sitting in a job centre in London, still dreaming it.
‘You’ll get a letter with your number,’ the man was saying. ‘And when you have your contract, you’ll need a bank account. Any bank.’ He smiled, and it was not an unkind smile. ‘You need money to become a pilot, son.’
Then he called the next number.
On Friday he arrived two hours early. He walked round and round the block with his uniform in his bag, past the dark windows again and again, until it was finally five o’clock.
After the forms and the contract, someone led him downstairs to the kitchen pass, and he stood there trying not to be in anyone’s way. Everything was new. Before service, the place was strangely calm. Silent, organised people waiting for the briefing. Out on the floor, managers and waiters moving between the tables, adjusting a glass by a centimetre, turning a plate so the logo faced the chair. Attention in every detail.
Then the manager who had turned him away appeared at the pass. He stopped when he saw him. His face showed surprise, and not much happiness.
‘You made it,’ he said. ‘You got the job.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and stood there awkwardly, as if he had done something wrong.
The manager looked at him for a moment.
‘Well done. Now go out and learn every table number, both floors. You have fifteen minutes. Then I come and test you.’
Out on the floor, a head waitress was already waiting for him with a floor plan. Dozens of tables, different sections, numbers that seemed to follow no logic at all. He walked it table by table, touching each one, saying the numbers under his breath like a prayer. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Upstairs, a hundred and one, a hundred and two. Down again. Up again.
Fifteen minutes later the manager came and pointed.
‘This one?’
‘Sixty two.’
‘That one?’
‘Forty two, sir.’
Upstairs, downstairs, table after table. He did not miss one.
‘Ok,’ said the manager at last. ‘Go to the pass and be fast. We are busy tonight. Over four hundred guests, and the doors open in a few minutes.’
He went down the stairs as proudly as if he had been made captain.
At the pass, the voice of the man calling the orders cut through everything.
‘Table forty one, please.’
He took the tray and went. The waiter served. He brought the empty tray back.
‘Sixty five, please.’
And again. And again. Up and down the stairs, through the doors, into the warm low light and back, hundreds of times, until his legs burned and his shirt stuck to his back and the night was over, and he realised that he had not once thought about money, or the landlord, or going home.
The months went by. He grew more comfortable. After every shift, however late, he went home and made a tea and sat at the kitchen table studying English for hours, the dictionary open, the words written out again and again in a notebook. Slowly, the city began to open up to him. He started having real conversations with strangers at work. He could help a guest with a question. He could understand a joke, and sometimes even make one.
One morning he decided he could not share a room with three strangers any more. A few of his colleagues were looking for a place too. Together they found a flat on the nineteenth floor of a tall building, with windows that looked out over half the city. He had his own room for the first time since he arrived. At night he stood at that window and watched the lights, and the planes moving slowly across the dark, and he thought: life is getting better.
One evening at work, he went up to one of the managers.
‘I want to become like you,’ he said. ‘A manager.’
The manager smiled. ‘You can. But it’s a long way. First you learn the menu. The service. You become a waiter. Then head waiter, then supervisor, then assistant manager. Step by step.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll sign you up for the food training. You study, you practise. Ok?’
‘Ok,’ he said.
After eleven months, he flew home for eight days.
He was proud the whole way there. Proud walking out of the airport, proud at the door. His mother held him for a long time, and his father, who never held anyone for long, held him for longer than usual.
In the evenings, after his dad came home from work, they sat around the table the way they always had, the food passing from hand to hand, the television murmuring in the next room.
‘So tell us,’ his mum said. ‘How is everything? Did you struggle?’
He thought of the four beds. The 250 CVs. The chef’s voice coming up the metal stairs. The bench under the trees, and the money for the ticket home folded in his wallet.
He looked at her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Everything was fine.’
Back in London, the first shift felt like any other. The next day, the training began.
It was held in a small room upstairs: a manager, a chef, a long table, and plates arriving one by one. He tasted everything. He wrote it all down, every ingredient, every sauce, every word he did not know, to look up later at the kitchen table. He had never been taught anything like this before. He loved it.
That same evening, at the briefing, the manager announced that one of the cashiers was leaving. Did anyone know how to use Excel?
The room was silent. He heard his own voice before he had decided to speak.
‘I know Excel. And I’m very good with numbers.’
After the briefing, the manager took him into the office and showed him the files the restaurant used. He looked at the screen for a while. They were so simple that he almost laughed.
‘I can make these better,’ he said.
He did. He worked on them in every spare hour, and turned them into real tools: numbers that showed the managers what was happening before it happened, where the money went, where it leaked away. They were glad. Then they were more than glad. Waiter at night, cashier by day, and soon they trusted him with more: the accounts, the costs, the numbers of the sister restaurants too. The man who a year before could barely order a coffee in English was now the one people came to with questions.
He never forgot the sky.
On his days off he took the Tube out to the airport and stood by the fence, watching the planes come in, one every minute or two, wheels down, so low he could read the letters on their sides. He found a community of pilots and went to their meetings and stood at the edge of the circle, listening to every word. He found a part time aviation course, the only one he could afford, and for a while he lived three lives at once: the restaurant at night, the numbers in the day, and the sky in whatever hours were left, studying until his eyes closed over the page.
It could not last. The course cost more every month. The shifts got longer. Something had to give, and in the end it was the money. One month there was simply not enough.
He put his notes and the course folder in a drawer, and closed it, and did not open it again.
That night he typed to his dad.
Dad, I stopped the course. I couldn’t pay it any more and
He deleted it before the sentence was finished.
When he travelled, it was never for joy. Paris, Rome, Istanbul, and more. Always for experience: the best restaurants, the way they served, the way they ran, what he could learn and bring back. Even his holidays were work.
One day he realised he was calling home less and less. The weeks were full. Double shifts. The numbers until midnight. He had become a busy man, and still it was not enough. He wanted to grow, and he grew. His name began to mean something in the business. He was promoted, and praised, and given more.
Not everyone liked it.
It began with small things. Conversations that stopped when he walked into a room. Plans made out loud in front of him, plans he was not part of. After service, the others pulling on their coats together, laughing, heading out into the night, and nobody turning at the door to ask if he was coming.
He told himself it did not matter. He told himself he was used to it.
And he was. Because he had lived it before.
Seven years of school. Seven years of being the boy the others pushed, mocked, ignored. He was thin, and he was always frightened, and he learned very early that the safest thing was to make himself small and say nothing at all. The teachers looked at the silent boy at the back of the class and decided he was a bad student, and stopped looking. He was not a bad student. He was only afraid to speak.
He hated every single day of it. And every single day, when he came home and his mother asked him how school was, he said fine.
Fine. All ok. The same words, all his life.
That night, after the others had gone, he stood alone in the empty restaurant. The chairs were up on the tables. The candles were out. The only sound was the hum of the fridges in the kitchen below. He held the phone in his hand and thought about calling home, and about what he would say if he did.
He put the phone back in his pocket.
He had never told them about school, either.
⁂
Next, in Part Three: a knock at the door early one morning, and a sofa in someone else’s living room. A new job that is not the job he was promised. A bench in a square, and the white lines in the sky. And a girl who arrives with one suitcase and the same dream he has: to fly.