Service E-Book

Sarah Gilmartin

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 386

Beschreibung

'The exhausting and exhilarating life of a high-end restaurant is beautifully recreated in this masterful novel… A writer correctly confident in her recipe' Irish Independent 'A hugely gripping literary page-turner. Sharp, visceral and shocking' Claire Powell When Hannah learns that star chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she's thrown back to her summer waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant. A glamorous world of talent and testosterone, where attention from Daniel morphed into something darker… Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of the courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains. Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, their three voices reveal a story of power, complicity and the courage that it takes to face the truth. ________________ 'A book guaranteed to get people talking… both chewy and meaty fare, rare and well done' Irish Times 'Coolly furious' Marie Claire 'A sharp, compelling drama' Good Housekeeping 'Every pages fizzes with energy and observation… A masterful novel' Rebecca Wait 'A delicious, scandalous glimpse behind the veil of a famous chef's ego and talent' Sunday Business Post 'Powerful and compelling' Joseph O'Connor 'Perfectly controlled, to the very last page. Superb' Lucy Caldwell 'Smart, stylish and darkly funny' Aingeala Flannery

Leseprobe

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Praise

“This coolly furious dissection of sexual assault and its aftermath is as carefully constructed as anything served up in the Michelin-starred restaurant run by the chef whose alleged behaviour sets the novel in motion”

MarieClaire,BestBooksof2023

“In clear, clinical prose, Gilmartin lays bare both the power imbalances generated in a hothouse, hierarchical environment, and the schism between women’s rights in the wake of MeToo and a country still in thrall to the old patriarchal order”

DailyMail

“Sarah Gilmartin’s second novel is consummately done. The prose is clean, crisp, perfectly-filleted; the pace and tension perfectly controlled, to the very last page. Superb”

Lucy Caldwell

“Skilfully told, teasing out the layers of truth and denial that give texture to a toxic history… Gilmartin gets it absolutely right”

Kathleen MacMahon

“One of the most darkly addictive novels you’re likely to read this year… a delicious, scandalous glimpse behind the veil of a famous chef’s ego and talent”

Sunday Business Post

“I gorged on every page of Sarah Gilmartin’s Service, a compelling and brilliant account of power dynamics and sexual politics in the heat of a Dublin kitchen. Her prose is as sharp as a chef’s best knife”

Victoria Kennefick

SERVICE

SARAH GILMARTIN

PUSHKIN PRESS

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEEPIGRAPHHANNAHDANIELJULIEHANNAHDANIELJULIEHANNAHDANIELJULIEDANIELHANNAHJULIEHANNAHDANIELJULIEHANNAHDANIELJULIEAUTHOR’S NOTEACKNOWLEDGEMENTSABOUT THE AUTHORALSO BY SARAH GILMARTINCOPYRIGHT

5

SERVICE6

7

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

LadyLazarus, Sylvia Plath8

9

HANNAH

I’ve never felt as alive as I did that summer. Alive, needed, run off my feet. Every evening we were queued out the door, we had bookings a year in advance. It was the kind of place people of a certain age called hip, while the rest of us rolled our eyes, discreetly, not wanting to jeopardize our tips.

Back then, when the country still thought it was rich, there was always some brash, impossible customer demanding a table from the hostess just as the dinner rush took hold. These arguments added to the atmosphere, the heat, the energy that ripped around the establishment and kept us going six out of seven nights a week.

The restaurant, let’s call it T, was in a large, ivy-covered building two streets over from the Dáil. We served businessmen, politicians, lobbyists, the type of men who liked a side order of banter with their steak and old world red. We learnt quickly to talk nonsense about the property market and the boom, though we didn’t really have a clue, we just knew that the wages were decent, the customers wore suits, and the tips were sometimes obscene.

We only employ college students.

Don’t be brainless.

Don’tbenosy.

Betactful.

Be knowledgeable.

Your Châteauneuffrom your Côtes du Rhône.

Your bouillon from your bouillabaisse.10

Your? As if. We got the same pasta tray-bake and soggy salad every day before service. It was delicious—it was free.

I remember the heat of the kitchens, the huge flat pans with slabs of butter sizzling from midday, though I was fortunate to mostly work dinner, when the bigger tables came in. You’llgetcocktailsandeveningsforsure,Flynn the bartender told me with a homicidal grin, then he muttered some quip that ended in assto his sniggering colleague. That was the Ireland of the day, asses replacing bottoms, cocktails replacing pints, quick deals and easy money, opportunities that had taken decades—centuries—to filter down.

The kitchens were so hot that summer you could feel the burn on your blouse in the throughway, the small space off the main dining room that joined front of house with back. This was the nucleus of the restaurant, where we fired orders on computers, gossiped about customers and complained about the bar staff who’d let our drink orders back up while busy working their own tips. Double doors would flap open to the kitchens as a runner passed through with four plates—the maximum number permitted—and the heat would come at us in short, magnificent bursts that were often accompanied by shouts from the chefs, which would remind us who was really in charge and send us running once more onto the floor. Yes,sir,No,sir,mayItellyou,sir.It was like a show. It had the buzz of live performance.

The customers were a who’s-who of boomtime Dublin, the men in suits and open-necked shirts, the women in stiff dresses and blow-dries. With our clipped ponytails and rubber-soled pumps, we could not compare. And yet, we did not go unnoticed.

Some of the restaurant staff were famous themselves. Everyone knew the manager Christopher, his high-boned London face, and the easy charm that was just the right side of fawning. Christopher-call-me-Chris, who was lovely to work for, clear and very funny, unless you were obviously hungover or in the habit of being late. 11Unless you offended a customer. It was the number one rule in the restaurant, in every good restaurant around the world: the customer is always right.

They came to T for the atmosphere, and for the cooking, certainly, though they never saw the reality behind the double doors, vaunted men in white with unnatural concentration, hot faces and drenched hairlines when they took off their caps at the end of the shift. The only women in the kitchen were the Polish dishwashers who doubled as baristas when the bar was mobbed and who refused to speak English to the waiters they disliked.

Most of the customers came for the head chef Daniel Costello, who was so good at cooking that he didn’t need stars (though shortly after I left he got his first, which nearly killed me). He had two sous chefs who hated each other but stuck it out to work with him, then the rest of the team—nine or ten men, largely in their twenties—who each had their own station along the stainless steel counters that ran the length of the kitchen. They prepped and cooked, shouted and swore. They plated dainty meals in a matter of seconds. They listened to classic hits on the radio, or played loud music on the prehistoric stereo above the sinks. They drank vats of Coke from plastic cups with ice that melted in minutes. One of us waiters would do a refill round whenever we caught a lull. We looked after them and they looked after us. That was the theory. But really we stayed out of their way, and out of the kitchen unless we were buzzed. Theirs was a different world. You could smell it the moment you went back there, through the spices and sauces and the bins full of leftovers. Talent and testosterone. You hadn’t a chance. You were a minnow in a pond—a help, a hindrance, a nothing.

The serving staff were at the end of the chain, attractive bartenders and waiters hired to make the customers feel good about themselves so they’d spend more money. Easyontheeye. That was the phrase used by the owners, a consortium of rich men who treated 12the restaurant like a fancy canteen where they came and went as they pleased. Easyontheeye.It was literally part of the advertising policy. Everyone in the industry knew—you didn’t apply unless you had a certain figure or face. They’d turned away a waitress in her thirties, one with years of Michelin experience. They told her she wouldn’t be able to keep pace. Not in this restaurant, this so-hot-right-now restaurant.

So I suppose it is fair to say that when I went for the job, I had an idea that I was not uneasy on the eye. But it wasn’t something I thought about all that much. And then after that summer, when I no longer worked there, which is to say when I was fired, I did not want to think about it at all.

Even before I got the job, I knew that T would be a fun place to work. There were rumours about town. A generosity with shift drinks, a runner who doubled as a dealer, people having sex in the bathrooms, the odd private party with DJ such-and-such. We all thought it was exciting. For Ireland, we thought it was insane.

My interview took place in the middle of the restaurant, at Table Four as I would later learn, and lasted around ten minutes. While two middle-aged men scanned my CV and body—it was as blatant as those machines at the airport—I watched waitresses fold napkins at the bar. A stocky bartender was teasing a girl who looked younger than me, pretending to knock over her pile of cloth triangles with his tattooed arm. The messing broke off suddenly when Daniel Costello himself approached with a bowl of chips and some dip they all appeared to love. I found it hard not to follow his movements, that uncanniness of seeing a celebrity in real life. He was tall, almost hulkish, with formidable arms and unruly hair. The air in the room seemed thinner with him in it, the low roof gave a little bounce.13

On the way back, he stopped at our table and I avoided his eyes, dark and roving, and not particularly interested in me. I stared at the immaculately white, double-breasted coat, the grandfather collar neat at his neck, which was tanned and thick. ‘Ever more canaries,’ he said to the owners. They laughed, then considered me in silence for a moment. I felt like I might melt. ‘Take it easy on her,’ Daniel said, walking away.

After a few cursory questions (Tipperary, twenty-one, business studies), one of the owners offered me the job on the spot and I said yes without asking about the pay, which caused the other one to laugh and hit the table with his hand and promise to teach me a thing or two about the real world.

I started the following Tuesday on a trail shift, shadowing a real waiter, helping with whatever small tasks they might entrust to a newbie. For five hours, I ran after Tracy, a slim, sharp-tongued redhead from Drogheda. I didn’t leave her side all night. It was tricky work, trying to make a note of everything she did, without distracting her tables. From the beginning I loved it, the sense of belonging the uniform gave me, the snug blouse and tailored skirt, the neat black aprons we tied around our waists, buzzers clipped on the back.

I felt privileged to work in a place that was so obviously luxurious. People, I mean ordinary people, came to the restaurant once or twice a year for special occasions, whereas I was lucky enough to be there six nights a week. The place was so fancy it almost seemed holy. This was back when restaurants made an effort, when bare bulbs and exposed brickwork were only seen by the builders. Everything was plush and radiant. Stained-glass windows in the bathrooms, velvet-roped elitism for the upper floors. Customers were always commenting on the varnished floor in reception, the shine, the remarkablecherry wood. I learnt to tell them it was antique, over a hundred years old, part of the original building, a former 14merchant bank, which meant that they were not just having dinner but dining out on history.

In the main room that stretched over two levels, ground and mezzanine, there was soft grey carpet, beautiful to look at and a nightmare for carrying cocktails. The walls were a lighter shade of grey and had original paintings by Irish artists I’d never heard of—Nano Reid, Robert Ballagh, a huge canvas of blocky autumnal colours by Sean Scully, which everyone said was a masterpiece. I knew nothing about art. Though I’d spent three years at college in Dublin, at heart I was still from Thurles, a midlands town whose only museum was a glorified tourist centre that told a fine story about the Famine. I used to eavesdrop on the customers’ conversation. I liked to hear the different reactions from the rich business types who seemed to view art as a challenge. WehaveaScullyintheveranda, they might say. IfoundastunningLeBrocquyatauction. You could always predict what people like that would order—some part of a cow and a bottle with Grand in the title. The kind of customer who cared about the origins of the produce, but didn’t give a damn about the staff.

The walnut bar was another talking point, glasses and bottles backlit in cool pink, a vast tinted mirror that gave an illusory depth to the room. On the upper floors, there were smaller spaces, similar in style to the dining room, grey carpets, linen cloths, banquet seating for the tables near the wall. I loved the way the rooms changed as the restaurant filled, the afternoon slid into evening, the low hum of prep that would gradually give way until you were right in the centre of it—in the weeds, we called it—and the noise and rush was incredible.

Service!

Behind you!

Coming through!

Fire seven!15

Clear two!

Turn ten!

Every day, in the break between lunch and dinner, we had a team meeting. Half four sharp, front and back of house, all the waitstaff standing to attention. Depending on Daniel’s mood, it could be a wine-tasting, a specials run-through, a fierce interrogation about various items on the menu. Which of the starters contain nuts? How many oysters in the seafood platter? What’s the difference between a langoustine and a prawn? Between jus and velouté? An artichoke and a chayote? Answer, a pass or a bollicking.

For the initial meetings as a lowly backwaiter I stayed under the radar, but by Saturday afternoon of my second week, I no longer felt secure. Lunch service had been chaotic. Tables were slow to finish, the ticket machine jammed, a bottle of Montepulciano smashed on the bar. Daniel ranted, looked everyone in the eye as he spoke, seeking out ignorance. The waiters aren’t selling, he said. A T-bone. A fine cut. A treat. What was wrong with us? He glared our way and only Mel, the elegant head waitress, held his gaze with her clear, expressive eyes.

‘It’s too big,’ she said, when he’d worn himself out.

Daniel turned to face her. He was in a polo shirt, muscular forearms crossed over each other. His fist clenched as Mel continued, the skin tightening at his bicep.

‘No one wants a sixteen ounce steak,’ she said. ‘You’d be better off doing it for two.’

‘Are you a chef now?’ Daniel said. ‘Will we put her in whites, Christopher?’ And then to the gallery, his underlings who were huddled by the archway to the throughway, ready to run back to their prep, to the real business of the restaurant, ‘She’d look good in white, wouldn’t she, fellas?’

There was some mild hooting that died out quickly as Mel eyeballed them. 16

‘Whatever, Daniel,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you. But you’re right—it’s not selling. Not even to that table of bankers. They all went for the fillet.’

‘Well,’ Christopher said, ‘we could slash the price.’

‘No fucking way!’ said Daniel. ‘Are you mad? That cut. That beautiful piece.’ His eyes flashed again. His melty-browneyes, as Tracy had called them the previous night, four or five wines in. With another waitress, Eve, we’d gone drinking after the shift to some dive on Montague Lane that had a back-door policy for industry workers. I’d woken up dying right before work, hadn’t even had time to shower.

Christopher raised his palms.

‘Just sell, girls,’ Daniel said, with mild asperity. ‘Sell like your job depends on it.’

‘How many to shift?’ said Christopher.

‘Eight. And they need to go tonight. OK?’ Daniel tipped his head respectfully at Mel.

She nodded and we followed suit.

Daniel turned to the chalkboard to go through the rest of the specials. He was saying something about depth and sauce and milkfed veal, when my legs started to shake. All I wanted was a seat, the comfort of the staff meal that followed team meetings—the creamy pasta sauce, the salt.

‘You,’ Daniel said. ‘Sell me the veal.’

It took me more than a moment to realize that I was the unfortunate ‘you’. I looked at the carpet, hoping he’d move on. I wasn’t even a waitress yet. I couldn’t sell to anyone.

‘You!’ His hands were waving in the air.

I felt a swell of vomit between my ribs.

‘Veal,’ I said uselessly.

‘And?’

Everyone was watching. Christopher didn’t seem remotely like he might save me. Tracy shrugged and examined her nails.17

‘The depth,’ I said. ‘In the sauce.’

‘What in the fucking fuck?’ Daniel exploded, a long line of expletives that were impressive in their own right, but not when they were firing like pellets towards your face.

‘All right, Daniel, we get it. All right.’ Mel moved in front of me.

Daniel stormed off to the kitchen, his crew trailing after him.

‘Thanks,’ I said to Mel. ‘Thank you.’

She shook her head and pointed to the bathroom. ‘Clean yourself up,’ she said.

There were fun times in that restaurant—it isn’t fair to pretend otherwise now—and there were plenty of good people.

Mel, my saviour, with her knowing eyes and long black hair. For reasons I couldn’t quite grasp, she had huge sway with Christopher-Chris, freedom to say what she pleased. It seemed to go beyond her seniority, a cryptic code between them that she occasionally deployed to defuse the stresses and tense exchanges of service.

Rashini the hostess, a former model from Sri Lanka who spoke four languages and never stopped smiling. She was making her way through some list of classic novels, which she used to hide in the gilded stand in reception, until a customer shouted at her one night, when she was slow to get his coat, that if he wanted a librarian he’d go to the damn—he was so drunk, he didn’t finish the sentence.

Vincent the sarcastic sommelier, who hated the expression teammeeting, because it was business jargon and we should call it what it really was, a daily dressing-down in front of everyone for the previous evening’s mistakes.

There was Jack, my favourite bartender, a Corkman who always had the drinks ready on time, who handled our incredibly urgent demands with droll humour and phlegmatic grace. He told lame jokes in a sing-song voice and flirted outrageously 18with the older female customers, though he was terrifically and emphatically gay.

Thiago, the Brazilian bar-back who’d moved from São Paulo to Gort, then from Gort to Dublin when his girlfriend had twins. They gave them Irish names so that they’d fit in with their future schoolmates, and no one had the heart to tell him that this was 2007, that Máire and Gráinne would probably not thank him when they grew up in a swarm of Chloes, Nicoles and Isabelles.

Tracy and Eve, Trinity students like me, all of us about to go into fourth year, similarly dazzled by the garish adult world of the restaurant. We were a cohort. Blow-ins. Tracy from Drogheda, Eve from Galway. We paid rigorous attention in team meetings, nodding along to dishes and drinks we’d never heard of, before escaping to the alley beside the restaurant to chain-smoke Marlboro Lights and look up words like beluga and tempranillo on Eve’s fancy phone. Nearly all the restaurant staff smoked, even the people who thought they didn’t. A cigarette was like a magic rod absorbing the tensions of a shift, a break from the madness and the heat.

And there was Daniel, of course, we all loved Daniel. The skill, the swagger, the hair, even the naff red bandana that he sometimes wore during prep. We were in awe of him, of the fact that he didn’t seem to care about anything except the food. Serious cooking and good times, that was the dream we sold at T, over and over again.

Three to dress!

Service!

Fire the mains!

Daniel was a human exclamation mark.

Service!

Probe!

Fifty-fucking-eight!

A conveyor belt of curse words.

Fuckwit!19

Service!

Wench!

Fucking wench!

The word fuckwas said so many times over the course of each service that it was almost devoid of meaning. (See also: sorry,sweetheart,heatofthemoment). It was his kitchen. He could say or do just about anything, though I don’t think I fully understood this until the end.

On week nights the service would start early, older couples and culture heads for the pre-theatre menus, which ended at half six sharp and not six thirty-four, as we all discovered the evening Daniel threw a plate of sautéed spinach at Eve’s head. (She ducked in time—quick reflexes are an industry must.) The tables would peter out around half nine or ten, with Christopher a godsend in this regard, gently dropping a bill as he enquired about their welfare, using the authority we lacked to boot them out the door, saving our tips in the process.

Weekends were the opposite, a lull for the early hours—the odd table of two, a late lunch nursing their coffees and drinks—and then so many people arriving at once that you wouldn’t look at your watch for hours.

One trick was to stagger them, each table a little later than the last, so that no one needed you at the same time, but this never worked out in practice—people need things all of the time, and it was our job to say yes without question. I learnt quickly that having them on the same courses worked best. Fewer trips to the kitchen, to the computer, even to the bar if you’d mastered the trays. I had a steady hand and good balance. I never spilled a drink in my time there, not even those fiddly sunset-coloured cocktails. At the weekends, the drinks flowed and the food came fast from the kitchen, plate after plate, like a ballet when it worked well. Five adrenalin-filled hours and when it was over, you counted your tips 20and divvied your tip-outs, a chunky twenty per cent split between runners, dishwashers and bartenders. You went to the alley for a much needed cigarette, then you sat at the bar with your heels out of your pumps and knocked back your shift drink like it was water.

Our only day off was Monday, when the restaurant closed. Lights out, teal blue shutters down, which usually meant a session after work on Sundays. Pilfering house spirits until Christopher kicked us out, heading to the dive on Montague Lane, drinking and dancing into the early hours, scoring inebriated men whose names we’d forget by morning. Blurry memories of sausage rolls and Lucozade and long, light-filled afternoons sprawled across the couch in my student digs in Islandbridge. My flatmates would come home from their summer internships and find me in pyjamas watching the repeat episode of Neighbours, able to quote lines verbatim for their amusement.

No matter how mad the weekend had been, we were always ready for a new week come Tuesday. That was the best thing about the restaurant. You could reset your tables, your tips, your mistakes. You could reset the splotch of marinara sauce on your blouse. You could reset the blisters on your feet. You could reset your life. Everything that happened the previous week was over. Nobody remembered anything. It was just too busy, there was too much going on.

* * *

Since I got the call from Mel—her voice, cool and enquiring, unaltered by time—my senses have awakened, just as they did that summer. Everything is heightened. The undertones of coffee, the smell of grass in the rain, the throb of my finger catching in the bathroom cabinet this morning, the shout I let out to the empty house.21

It makes me wonder if I’ve been living my life on mute for a decade. It is not an unfamiliar thought. My ex-husband Sam, though he wasn’t capable of phrasing things so benignly, used to ask me this, ever more frequently as we drew towards the end. Why did I never want anything? Though really what he meant was, why did I never want him? We broke up last November after three years of marriage. For the most part, I’ve stopped feeling guilty. We’re in our thirties, enough time to start over. There are no children, which is either a blessing or the reason we split, depending on who you talk to.

On my way to meet Mel in the café last week, I was acutely aware of all the things my life lacked, in that skin-peeling, school-reunion kind of way where you’re expecting to have to account for large chunks of time.

I walked quickly from Harold’s Cross, from our lovingly refurbished cottage that will soon be on the market because neither of us can afford to buy the other out. As I berated myself for the mess I’d made of things, the sky darkened under the tall trees of the canal and I zipped my puffa against the breeze.

I knew why Mel wanted to meet—she hadn’t said it on the phone, but there could be no doubt, it was all over social media—and I knew I wouldn’t be able to help her, that I still lacked whatever essential qualities were needed to do the right thing, just as I had that summer. I would disappoint her all over again.

When I got to Portobello harbour, I blended into a group of Spanish students and pretended to watch a swan that was rising angelically out of the water. At the café by the bridge, Mel was sitting at an outside table. A bright pink beret, her hair still black, but shorter.

She stood as I neared the café so that I guessed she’d seen me too. From afar I probably looked the same—the same pale face and dirty blonde hair—even my clothes were like the ones I would have worn after service. I wished I’d come in heels, ankle boots, 22loafers, anything but the scuffed Converse that now seemed such an obvious sign of how little I’d grown.

I waved as I neared the table.

‘Hannah,’ she said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

We embraced in a clumsy half-hug. She sat, drew her coffee cup closer. I was surprised by how well I remembered her features, the stark beauty of her facial lines.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Do you want coffee? Cake?’ She pointed to a menu in the window.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me the specials?’

We laughed.

‘You joke,’ she said. ‘But I’m still in the game.’

‘Seriously?’

She signalled through the window to the guy behind the counter.

The wait for the coffees was endless, full of stilted conversation about inconsequential matters. I told her I did the accounts for a marketing company in town, that I was freelance and mainly worked from home. She seemed to think it was a great job and I didn’t have it in me to tell her that it wasn’t.

‘What about you?’ I said.

‘Between things.’

‘Right.’

‘I was at The Glasshouse, manager for two years.’ She shrugged. ‘You know how it is.’

I did, but now I was thinking of Christopher. She looked towards the bridge, and I thought that maybe she was picturing him too. I didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to be the one to bring up the restaurant.

The coffees arrived and we thanked the guy.

‘Remember Chris?’ said Mel.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Christopher-call-me-Chris.’ 23

‘He’s back in London. Runs Claridge’s now.’

‘Well,’ I smiled. ‘He was always up himself.’

She snorted into her latte, dots of froth landing on her lip. Wiping them with a napkin, she resurfaced with serious eyes and took a newspaper from her bag. Before she even opened the thing, I knew what was coming. The IrishDailyMail, whose front page had a narrow right-hand column about a rape trial beginning next month in the Central Criminal Court. The main story was about hospital waiting lists. SHAME, it said, in fat black letters that were so oddly and immediately upsetting.

‘Oh, Hannah,’ said Mel. ‘I’m sorry. I know this must be really hard.’

‘It’s nothing to do with me.’ I clutched the mug.

‘That’s not true,’ she said gently.

She spoke in a low, measured way for as long as it took me to finish the coffee. She kept talking about the case, details I’d no interest in hearing. How they’d scared away other witnesses, how it was just this one woman on her own, up against him. Upagainsthim. I went right back to the restaurant then—to the morgue-like cold room with its sticky floors and meathooks.

‘Hannah’—Her hand touched mine—‘are you OK?’

I nodded. ‘Mel, I can’t help you. Or her. Tell her I’m sorry, I just can’t.’

‘I haven’t asked you to do anything yet.’ She sat back and gave me a look I remembered, the dead-eyed, flinty one that could silence the richest of bankers.

‘The fact is,’ she said, ‘he’ll probably get off, Hannah. His lawyers will destroy her. It’s what they do. They take photos from Facebook. They dig up dirt from friends. They find exes with grievances.’ She mentioned the case of a girl I’d never heard of. ‘They described her underwear in court and said she was hammered. They made her out to be a whore.’24

The word bounced from our table into the dull water of the canal.

‘That’s awful,’ I said.

She waited.

I said, ‘Look, Mel, it’s too late. It was ten years ago. They wouldn’t listen to me now.’

And what I didn’t say: I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to be reduced to half an hour on a stand where all anyone remembers are the accusations of loose behaviour, drink and drugs. Because if you say yes to one thing, you must be game for everything.

‘Please, Hannah,’ she said, ‘just think about it. They need to know what it was like.’

* * *

How could you explain the restaurant to a jury? How could you explain it to yourself? The hostess Rashini got the worst of the harassment from customers. Groups of men, after a few pints from O’Donoghue’s or Doheny’s, ready to tuck in, ready to be mammied, and to be loved. Takemycoat?Gorgeous,youcantakethewholelot.The way they would giggle like schoolboys as she walked off. The way they would slap each other on the back for some lewd, boring line she’d have heard a hundred times before. The way they would use drink to justify their actions. It might be a birthday, a big deal-celebration, a quarter-end lunch. There was a calendar full of excuses available to these types of men, whose privilege was to live however they liked, without scrutiny.

And the bartenders would enable them, as was their job. Around,fellas,whiletheysetupyourtable?I once had to read the menu out loud to a secretary general who couldn’t get past the soups. The worst of the bartenders—Flynn and Paulie—would encourage them. They would wink at us and pretend we worked for them, when it was, 25in fact, the other way round. Mel had her steely look that could shut them up without alerting the customers, but myself and the girls were at a loss. We just took it, really, we were too busy to start a fight. To make a thing of it. We couldn’t afford our drink orders to back up and Flynn was spiteful like that—he kept ‘forgetting’ Eve’s tickets after a complaint to Christopher.

While in retrospect so much of what happened at the restaurant seems wrong, at the time it felt OK, bearable, too diffuse to be a worry. On any evening, you could have customers calling you a grand girl, a looker, a brainy looker, when they nosed about your life and discovered you were in college. Businessstudies!Myword,we’ll have to watch our backs. Har-har-har. It ranged from harmless to challenging, to aggression, if you tried, in a most courteous manner that always had one eye on the tip, to rebuff their advances.

A girl like you.

It could be said in many different ways.

After three rounds of dessert wine one night, when the rest of the place was empty, Eve asked her table of investment bankers if she could get them anything else. Maybe she was polite about it. Maybe there was an undertone of impatience. Maybe she was sarky, as Christopher decided later, but whatever it was, she did not deserve the response, Youcansuckmydick. Eve, my friend, who had short blonde curls and an awkward gait that the bartenders loved to imitate. She was five foot two. She looked like someone’s little sister.

Of course there were nice customers too—plenty of them, serious people who were considerate, who wanted to eat and drink and get on with their lives, who treated you like a human being—but they’re not the ones I remember now. Instead, the man who licked his lips between sentences, who always left the empty bread basket on the far side of the table. The man who asked me to sing for my tip. The man who patted my behind, his friends who watched and said nothing.26

I will never forget the big bear of a man who rose from his chair one busy Saturday night—my third weekend, when I’d just started getting tables of my own—to tell me I was lovely and kiss me on the lips.

You’re only lovely.

His warm hands gripped either side of my face in a fleshy clamp. The whole thing was done with great comic bravado and barely lasted a few seconds, but if I had to pick one moment in my time at T, a before and after, a leave-now-or-rue-the-day, that kiss is it. So brutally clear, all these years later: I had been invisible, then I was seen.

What happened next? Nothing. I didn’t storm out. I didn’t quit. I didn’t even ask for an apology. I could hear laughter from nearby tables when he let go. That pinned me to the spot, humiliation radiating, before Christopher magically appeared, did his thing and led me away.

It was only afterwards, when the tables started to clear, that I felt aggrieved. Collecting a tray of espresso martinis from the bar, I must have looked morose because Flynn told me to cheer up. I snapped at him to mind his own business and he said, I remember his exact words, Stop acting like you’ve been raped. The ugly rose tattoo on his left forearm gleamed with liquid residue. I slid the tray with the martini glasses off the counter and carried it trembling across the restaurant to Banquette Six. A woman in a bright blue dress asked if I was all right and I knew that if I looked again at her kind face, I would spill every drop from my tray, the creamy heads and dark liquor would go flying over the customers, tablecloth, the fancy carpet, maybe as far as the walls. The damage would be incalculable. I’mfine, I said, concentrating on my tray. When the drinks were served and the table wanted nothing more, I went to the bathrooms, locked myself in a cubicle, slumped on the ground and let the subway tiles cool my back.27

Later that evening, when I was sitting at the bar with my free shift drink, Flynn attempted an apology. You’restillnewhere, he said, that’sjusthowitgoes. Youhavetoearnyourtips.He leant across the walnut counter and whispered to me, as if we were confidants, that it would be worse if the customers didn’t like me, and he made a face behind Mel’s back, poor, beautiful Mel, who was, he seemed to think, getting a little too old.

More than anyone in the restaurant, I wished that Mel had seen the kiss, but none of the waitresses had (or none of them admitted it), and although they commiserated with me when the shift was over—how gross, how awful, etc.—they didn’t really understand.

The following day Mel raised it in the team meeting and Christopher agreed that it was out of order. Thoseguys, he said, shaking his head. He told Flynn to watch it when he wolf-whistled, and he told me that he’d try and make sure it didn’t happen again. My face turned some hot colour and I mumbled a thank you, ignored the smirking chefs in their snowy huddle. I saw the salad guy wink at Daniel, who in turn made curves with his hands. Christopher saw it too but this time he said nothing.

When the meeting was over, I didn’t follow the others to the kitchen for the staff meal. Instead I took the napkins to Table Thirteen and began to fold triangles, seeking comfort in the repetitive task.

I was halfway through the pile when Daniel appeared in front of me. I looked up quickly, still unused to such proximity, even if the wattage had by now somewhat dimmed. His face was defiantly set, an iron intensity that waited for me to notice what he was holding in his hands.

‘Is that?’ I said.

‘For you.’ He slid a plate with a glossy chocolate torte across the table. There was never dessert at these meals and I understood it as an apology, of sorts.28

‘Now cheer up,’ he said.

I beamed at him, pushed the napkins away and lifted a fork. Because back then, I was a very amenable kind of girl.

29

DANIEL

Broadly speaking, there are three types of chef—workaday, artist, junkie—the best of us a perfect fusion. We dread the day the adrenalin will end. We keep going until we burn out. We stay in the industry until we’re old enough that our bodies no longer need the fix. Until we are old men, which I am not yet.

What should I do with myself now?

Where should I go?

What will become of me?

Julie hasn’t kicked me out—she was always calm and pliant in a crisis—but she leaves a room when I enter, and she takes the boys with her wherever she goes. I sit in my recliner in the living room, Roman blinds at half-mast, and I listen to the wheels of her Jeep on the pebbles, taking my family out of this house that no longer feels like their own.

A four-bed in Dalkey, overlooking the sea, refurbished a few years ago after a throwaway comment from Julie’s mother on the cleanliness of our carpets. Her mother, who has lived in a council flat on Bishop Street for decades, and who only visits to find fault with her daughter’s life. Well, I suppose I have finally given her cause.

Julie didn’t mention her mother when she suggested we redothe house. She said she was bored and wanted a project, that the boys no longer needed her like they used to. It is true that the older they get, the less they seem to trust us. For advice, for help, for 30anything, except money. Fifteen and thirteen, though it is hard to see the difference, and I worry that Oscar is growing up before his time. I was that way myself, pretending that I was into girls, just to impress my brothers.

Kevin isn’t speaking to me now. He heard about the charges before we had a chance to tell him. To explain. That this hashtag lark is American bullshit, that it will never catch on here among ordinary, decent folk. He came in from school on a Friday afternoon, dropped his Spurs bag on the ground and called me a rapist. I will never be able to explain how that feels. Once I’d started to breathe again, once the pain lessened in my chest, I sat at the kitchen table and tried to reason with him. But what do you say to a teenage boy? I suppose he’ll learn the truth soon enough, if he doesn’t already know—since time immemorial, women have been attracted to powerful men.

While I explained this, Julie was at the sink, stiff and unrelenting as she stared out the window at the sea.

This morning I met my solicitor Roland at his offices on Fitzwilliam Square, where he introduced the barrister we’ll be using for the trial, a Ms Claire Crosby, who is younger than I would like—cropped hair and a slight, ungenerous body—but apparently this will play well for us in court. Roland is all about the optics. It was he who suggested I keep the restaurant open, that business should carry on, that I should continue to serve my clientele as Dublin’s finest chef. He expects me to man the fort, to ignore the looks and smirks and comments that have already come my way. Well, suffice to say, that Roland Kinsella & Sons knows nothing about running a restaurant. Our reservation book is like an essay by the school dunce, page after page of cross-outs and cancellations. Since the rumours appeared on social media, more than eighty per cent of the clientele has disappeared. There was one gentleman from a 31hedge fund, whose name I will omit out of consideration for the many thousands the company has spent at my restaurant, who asked if he could postpone his reservation for four months. Playing the odds. One could almost view it as an endorsement.

This morning I told Roland that the restaurant was officially shut. Phone to voicemail that no one will check, fridges cleared, machinery stored, knives whetted one final time, shutters down.

Roland paused as he took in the news, folded his hands in his priestly way and tilted his chair to look out over the locked gardens of the square. A cold March day, dense clouds shifting quickly. The room was draughty with it, the high ceilings bitterly ornate.

‘Dan, I rather think you should keep the place open,’ he said. ‘I could bring a table in this weekend. Four, maybe six?’

There followed some stern advice, the folds of his ageing face drooping with the seriousness of it all. I found myself switching off as the adenoidal drone went on. For a while I watched the girl, the Claire woman, the swipe of her fringe, expensive suit, the alert posture in the uncomfortable visitor chairs. A solid seven, perhaps an eight when relaxed. As my gaze shifted upwards, she caught me looking, her eyes flashing with some injured emotion before she recovered. A tight smile on the small mouth.

After observing the watercolours on the back wall, the gratifying neatness of Roland’s desk, the glowy green lampshade, I became distracted by his shoes. Rather alarmingly, they reminded me of my father, who I hadn’t thought about in years. He only had one pair of good shoes—black brogues that he’d worn to weddings and funerals, including his own. I remembered searching for them after he’d died and feeling foolish for not realizing, until my brother Rory told me, that the shoes were gone with him, to wherever that might be. The rest of his clothes remained in the wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom in our cramped terrace, and in the months after his death they no longer smelled of him but weirdly of my grandfather—my mother’s 32father—which made no sense at all. I was ten when my father died, and no one spoke to me about it except to say that he was gone to the angels, to a better place, but somehow I knew, in a way that made me hate my own home, that he had chosen this better place himself because it was the only way to improve on what we had. I didn’t learn for years, not until I was in my late teens, how he actually did it, and by then all the wondering and reasoning of my younger self seemed futile. Sometimes a man dies because he wants to.

‘I agree with Roland,’ said the woman. ‘For what it’s worth.’ Her voice brought me back to the room. She had beguiling eyebrows, naturally fair and arched.

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But we’re haemorrhaging money. We had two tables last Friday. You can’t pay suppliers and staff on that.’ And you can’t pay extortionate lawyer fees either.

‘What about tourists?’ she said. ‘You know—foodies?’

I shook my head and scowled. I knew I was coming across as contrary, but I couldn’t stop myself. It didn’t matter if the clientele were from Ranelagh or Reykjavik, all a person had to do was google the restaurant, for a booking, an address, a review, whatever, and some filth popped up on social media, punishing me for changing the name. RestaurantDanielCostello. I should have listened to Julie all those years ago and left it at T.

‘It isn’t good,’ said Claire.

‘Don’t I know it. This whole thing is a farce. Also,’ I pointed a finger at her, ‘aren’t you supposed to be sorting injunctions?’

‘We have,’ Roland said quickly. ‘But you can’t catch everything. Not these days.’

‘Once the information is out there,’ Claire said.

‘The false information,’ I interjected.

‘In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The allegation is in the public domain, and if they’re not coming to your restaurant, it’s indicative of opinion.’ She clicked her pen peevishly.33

‘Now hold on a second,’ Roland said. ‘It’s indicative of the fact that Irish people are sheep. A few cancellations and everyone jumps ship.’

It was some image, hundreds of sheep jumping off the deck.

‘There’s nothing funny about it, Mr Costello.’ Claire opened a folder, ran her finger down a sheet with nasty bullet points. ‘We have to turn things around before the trial,’ she said. ‘I need to know everything about you. Your life story. The background. You’re from the Mansions,’ she said. ‘That’s good. I want it all. Your career trajectory.’