Kristin never speaks to Meredith.
I volunteered to do Special Requests. Paul read them out. A cheese salad sandwich. A bowl of stewed fruit and yoghurt. A plate of toast and margarine.
‘Chicken salad it is,’ I said.
Rob grinned. And Tony. But Paul didn’t get it. Then he saw Meredith heaving.
‘Cheese salad, Elisabeth, I said cheese.’
‘We’re out of chicken, Beth,’ Rob said.
‘Slip of the tongue, Paul, sorry.’
‘Fowl slip.’ Tony laughed.
Paul hates this jokey stuff. He assigned me to veg and salad as a punishment. He doesn’t know I love chopping. I love getting inside things, right into a squeaky lettuce heart, or the bloody pulp of a big salad tomato. I love that odd rubberiness broccoli has when you pull the twigs apart. I adore putting the big saucepan on the floor between my ankles and using all my weight to ram down the masher into boiled spuds and milk. Mum would be amazed. ‘You never did a stroke at home, Elisabeth.’ But really she liked to do everything herself. Otherwise how could she have felt exploited? At the Dasgupta I’ve learned to love the way a carrot bends a bit then snaps clean. I love using the big chopper to slam right through a head of crisp cabbage. The green halves fall apart and you see the crinkly layers whitening to the core. It’s so simple and mysterious. I never have any problem blessing a cabbage.
Today we’ve got celeriac, swede, turnip, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, onions. There are peeling knives and chopping knives and sinks and boards and basins. The swedes are really small with shiny dark- and yellow-green stripes. Maybe they’re squashes, or pumpkins. I’m not sure. They glow on the work surface under fluorescent light. But it’s frustrating peeling them. There’s more peel than pulp. When you gouge out the seeds and slime they cling on by sticky threads. You scrape and scrape and they’re still there.
‘Place the cubing disc in processor R302.’
Reading the recipe book I can hear Vikram’s voice. He’s explaining to an idiot in idiot-proof formulas.
‘But which is the cubing disc?’ Meredith asks, pulling them all off the wall and checking blades and perforations.
‘There are labels under the hooks, sweetheart.’
Now she doesn’t know which disc she took from where.
We go at it for an hour on the long surface with the three sinks. The stuff mounts up under the grinder. Celeriac is filthy when you plunge it in the water, the rind is gnarled and grizzled. I use the biggest knife to slice it off. Inside it’s like white marble with twisty brown imperfections, then creamy and sticky when it’s cubed. The orange of the carrots clashes with the orange of the swedes. The grinder clatters. Sometimes it jams.
‘Parsneep, turneep, pumkeen.’
Stephanie’s practising her vegetables.
There are always foreigners serving at the Dasgupta. They treat it as a kind of language school, which is funny for a place that sets such store on silence.
Meredith’s giggling again. She’s discovered her parents’ flat in Paris is only a block away from Stephanie’s home.
‘With a swede’ — I pull one from the sack — ‘you can breed.’
Stephanie did her puzzled look. Like Ralph’s, but with freckles. She’s studying acupuncture somewhere.
‘What sort of vegetable is Paul?’ I ask Meredith. Her hair is escaping her hat. She won’t use anything but a small peeler, for fear of cutting her fingers again.
‘Well, not a carrot.’
The carrots we’ve got look like they’ve been in the ground a thousand years. They’re gnarled and knobbly.
‘Not a cucumber,’ says Stephanie.
Meredith’s voice is squeaky and Stephanie’s deep. The opposite of what you’d think looking at them.
‘Or a leek,’ I agreed
‘Ralph is a carrot,’ Meredith announces.
‘Maybe. The neat garden-salady kind. Perky and pink. And Tony is an old turnip.’
I’ve played this game before. The grinder roars. The peelings are heaping up. Thoughts are peelings maybe. Scraped from the mind’s surface and chucked. Think of all the thoughts in all your life. You are the fruit beneath. You peel and peel, every moment a thought scraped away, and never get there. No self, only thoughts peeling off.
Is that what anatta means?
‘Let’s make it easier: between a leek and a cabbage, Paul is?’
‘A cabbage!’ says Stephanie.
‘My turn,’ Meredith shouts. ‘Between a broccoli and an onion, Mrs Harper is?’
‘Mrs Harper is an aubergine. That’s obvious. Sorry, two aubergines.’
I pretended I was holding them just above the stomach. Meredith cracked up.
‘And Mi Nu is an asparagus. The kind so white you can almost see through it.’
‘That make your pee stink.’
We’re all giggling when Mrs Harper says, ‘Is this Right Speech, girls?’
She’s standing behind us, smiling sadly. I hope she didn’t hear the stuff about the aubergines. Meredith apologizes in a posh voice. ‘Sorree,’ Stephanie says.
On second thoughts, I hope she did hear.
Mrs Harper says: ‘The wise man does not speak unless his words bring benefit. His speech is full of mindfulness.’
She’s saying this for me, not the others. She doesn’t give a damn about the others.
I stay bent over the celeriac. ‘We’re not men, though, are we, Mrs Harper? We’re girls.’
She studies me. ‘But you do want to be wise, Elisabeth.’
‘Is that something a person can choose?’
‘You have already chosen, Elisabeth. You know that.’ She smiles. ‘Actually, I came to suggest you take Marcia to hear the Server’s Discourse at six. Always assuming you’ve got over your little problem.’
What’s she talking about?
‘The problem that obliged you to leave Strong Determination in such a hurry.’
She always has that generous smile.
‘Oh, right.’
I start on the onions. Ten big onions. Sliding off the crackly brown skin, I wait for my eyes to water. There’s no question of an onion being just a product you move from plastic pack to pot. An onion goes on the attack. You chop it up, but at a price. Jonathan was an onion. Slithery inside, with so many layers. I never got to the heart. Carl was a baked potato. With melted butter. Now I’m smiling through onion tears. Whatever Mum and Dad were, it’s long past its sell-by date.
When Mrs Harper is well gone, Stephanie whispers, ‘And you, Beth?’
‘Me what?’
‘What vegetable are you?’
I laughed. ‘I’m a beetroot, of course.’
You stain everything red, Beth, Jonathan said. You really do. You stain the whole world red.
Noble Truths
THINGS ARE COMING to a head. Why? Are they? I’m so excited. So frantic. I’m trapped in something. Not a cage. A process. My diarist’s words. Midnight, one, two o’clock, three. Day four now. In the female servers’ room, the kitchen, the dining hall. In the male servers’ room. Why not? Hunting for paper. The men have a tin of chocolate biscuits. How did that get there? Writing on the back of server admission forms. Rota sheets. The kitchen hygiene protocol. Leftovers can be heated once and once only. Couldn’t agree more. And drinking Rooibos. I hate Rooibos. I love chocolate biscuits. Yum. They’ll never suspect one of the girls. I remember Zoë saying that. ‘Nobody’ll suspect it’s a girl, Beth.’ Jonathan had bitten my neck. I told Carl it was Zoë. ‘You know how nutty she is. She just grabbed me, kissed and bit.’ Jonathan couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re a genius, Beth.’ I mean, he couldn’t believe Carl believed it. ‘You don’t know Zoë,’ I told him. ‘I wish I did,’ he said. And I wish I could be free from this, free from this, free from this. This crap clinging, these seeds and slime that won’t scrape out.