The back up man, p.5
The Back Up Man, page 5
‘I’ll buy you a bed, Anya,’ Paddy said flatly. She had lied and said the frame was too expensive.
‘No!’ A pause. ‘I don’t want a single bed anyway. It’s like accepting I’m a single person.’
Paddy had made a pointed expression.
‘I’ll be fine with just the mattress. Can you help me lift it into the trolley, please?’
For a while, Anya tried lying on her side and ignoring her roaring thoughts, listening to the creaks and groans of a house at rest. Eventually, she conceded – with a grumble – that Tasha’s words had got to her.
She was right, of course. About everything, usually, but especially about work. Recruitment was never what Anya had wanted to do. If she squinted, leaving Berners Bilton was virtually good news – especially by recent standards – as long as she ignored the fairly urgent need to find a new source of income.
She unfurled herself and sat up. This was not quite as momentous as she’d hoped: her single mattress was rather thin and she could feel her bum nudging the floor. Nonetheless, she struggled to her feet, and stepped towards the boxes of cookbooks in the corner. Anya Eats T0o Much: could she really turn it into something bigger? The thought made her feel both thrilled and slightly irritated. Bloody Tasha, making the world feel open and possible.
She took several books from the top of the box and then sat down on the floor, rifling through the first at random, a rustic Tuscan tome spattered with oil and tomato paste, and her own scribbled notes in the margin (‘use passata instead!!’; ‘good with conchiglie – holds sauce well’).
Anya had never done any formal training (unless you counted a Standard Grade in Home Economics), but she’d studied her craft, in her own informal, unorthodox way. Food had always been a big part of her life at home, when friends, neighbours, waifs and strays would gather at their big wooden kitchen table for bountiful meals from her mother’s fairly conventional repertoire (meat, sauces, potatoes and bakes, always with a side salad and always followed by a dessert). Anya knew even then that food held power: the power to soothe and settle quarrels, to make life a little more cheerful, even temporarily – especially if something frothy like tiramisu was involved. When Paddy’s parents had been getting divorced, he’d come for dinner almost every evening for six months and although they never talked about it, Anya knew that these meals had helped. But it wasn’t until she was sixteen and had started working weekend shifts as a waitress doing silver service at plush events held on glass-plated office floors and in secret rooms of museums and galleries, ferrying plate after plate of perfect food to waiting tables, that she had become obsessed with the artistry of cooking.
This food was unlike anything she’d seen before. It was fascinating; silly and frilly with garnish; and looked insubstantial in the middle of huge dinner plates that made Anya’s arms ache as she snaked between the tables. Sometimes she’d have to pour a sauce on to a starter and she’d try to do this with a flourish, like the chef had shown her. When she collected the plates, she examined which meals had gone down the best, and which ones people had ignored or picked at, and she wondered if he minded. (As an adult amateur chef, Anya always did – she couldn’t help it.)
She started reading cookbooks in her spare time, beginning with her mother’s ones – traditional Good Housekeeping volumes and Delia Smiths – and then graduating on to more exciting ones bought from bookshops with her waitressing earnings. In Glasgow in the late noughties, exciting cuisine mainly meant anything that wasn’t centred on a carbohydrate, and she’d study these thrilling dishes, with their endless steps, and imagine serving them up on one of the huge white dinner plates she carried at work.
At the weekends, Anya started to attempt recipes, bribing Georgie to be her sous-chef with the promise that she could eat what they made. When Anya had made her first roast lamb with homemade mint sauce, Georgie had insisted their mother take a picture of it using the family camera usually reserved for sports days and Christmas (mortifyingly, this picture was still stuck to the fridge in her parents’ house in Balfron. The years had not been kind to it). When Anya went to university, people in her halls watched in awe as she managed to conjure proper meals – soupy ramens and salmon gravlax and lemony pasta – using the rudimentary kitchen facilities. Anya spent any cash she wasn’t spending on nights out on more cookbooks and flashy utensils, and often, in between lectures, she’d mooch up Byres Road and go to a gift shop whose ground floor was devoted to expensive kitchenware, which is where she discovered the existence of Le Creuset. She asked for and received one of the big casserole dishes for Christmas in her second year and when it wasn’t in use, she kept it wrapped up inside two woollen jumpers in her wardrobe and checked on it regularly.
In her twenties, as Glasgow’s food scene underwent a transformation, she treated trips to new restaurants as recon missions, often flagging down a harried waiter or waitress to ask about herbs and ingredients. ‘Are you allergic?’ asked one horrified waitress, when she asked what was in the risotto. ‘No, she’s just being a geek,’ Connor replied, cautioning Anya with a look.
So, she’d had a training of sorts. And she really could cook everything – from the traditional to the elaborate to the experimental. Anya wasn’t very brilliant at anything, but she was good at food.
Could she spin Anya Eats Too Much into a living? A proper food blog or a catering company … or something? The idea seemed ambitious and complicated and nebulous, and it would need work and strategy and money. And possibly a FaceTime with Tasha, and several good nights of deep, unbroken sleep. But it was possible – or certainly not impossible.
She reached for her phone. The seaweed and spinach soup had clocked up 3,456 likes. Before that, the last post had been a lemony, paprika-y paella, smoky yet sweet thanks to the plump red bell peppers she’d bought from the market stall near the Subway (run by a leathery charmer who’d been there since the mid-eighties; the stall was a bit of a locals’ cult favourite). The picture – like most of them – had been taken in Connor’s kitchen, but she tried to focus on the food, not the gnarled wooden kitchen table they’d sat at almost every day for so many years. Scroll, scroll: there was the miso-roasted squash she’d made on a dispiritingly chilly day in July, a portion shot in her prized shallow turquoise bowl (2,032 likes), Connor grumbling to eat as she dithered over getting the picture right. She scrolled to the gooey brownies that she hadn’t got quite right, not quite enough salt; and the baked cod that – try as she had – hadn’t been very photogenic, but had tasted perfect: flaky and lemony, the cayenne pepper adding just the right amount of spice.
There was something reassuring about seeing all these dishes; they made her feel anchored to something, and a little peckish. Although he’d loved eating the food, Connor had always found the account a little silly. ‘Wow, just like Gordon Ramsay,’ had been his assessment after she hit 5k followers. She’d laughed it off – it was silly – but it had stung a little. Perhaps – just perhaps – she could show him.
But she would have to hold this thought because her mother was ringing.
Anya’s mother had in fact already called – four times last night – but Anya had felt too raw to face the inevitable inquisition about what precisely had happened at Berners Bilton. There had also been a number of texts, which had started gentle (‘Are you OK? Please call’) but evolved quickly to snippy (‘Anya. Call us please’) and shrill (‘Anya????’). Anya had not replied to a single one of these either. Inevitably, there had also been messages of ‘concern’ ferried via Georgie, who had WhatsApped just as Anya had finished cleaning up after dinner (the only sanctuary in the whole of Claire’s place was the kitchen, which had windows and shiny surfaces and every appliance Anya could dream of).
Georgie
Anya I’m sorry but please can you call Mum??
She won’t stop messaging me
She’s doing my head in
Anya blinked fast, feeling immediately hunted.
Anya
I’ll call them when I’m ready
Also: thanks for telling her I’d quit my job
!!
Georgie
Sorry
I was worried!
And now Mum’s worried you’re having a breakdown
Anya
Well I am
She was, probably.
Georgie
You aren’t
Just give them a ring
Please
They just want to check you’re OK xx
Anya
FINE
I’ll do it tomorrow
Despite Georgie’s assurances, Anya was very worried about what they’d say. Their parents were practical, west of Scotland stock – the Calvinist sort who didn’t believe in fripperies like ‘gap years’ or ‘dream jobs’ – who had, until their partial retirement two years ago, been in gainful employment since their early teens. Anya’s mother’s first job was as a Saturday cashier at a dry cleaners in Clydebank (‘and don’t think it was fun, Anya,’ she’d said, more than once. ‘Don’t think being around all those coats was some sort of treat’). Anya’s rash decision to quit, with no plan, flew in the face of the life they’d made and the type of life they believed in.
But she could only run for so long, and her mother was no quitter. Frankly, there was a good chance that she was already on her way over to Claire’s, grinding her teeth like she always did when she drove. Heart sinking, Anya picked up the phone.
‘Hi Mum.’
‘Anya! Finally! You’re alive!’
‘Of course I’m alive, Mum—’
‘Now bear with me one second, I’m just parked up outside the post office and I’m trying to fiddle with that little handle on the seat. Your father always has it pushed so far back from the wheel.’
There was some kerfuffle in the background and Anya heard her mother utter an ‘ooft’.
‘OK, that’s better. I could barely reach the pedals.’
‘Mum, you shouldn’t be on the phone while you’re driving, especially if you can’t reach the pedals—’
‘Now listen here.’ Her mother’s tone was business-like now. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you and you know it. What’s all this about you quitting your job?’
‘It was time for a change,’ Anya attempted stiffly. ‘You know I hated that job.’
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, still surrounded by the cookbooks. From the other end of the line, her mother made a clucking noise.
‘Now, pet, I know you hated it. But it’s unwise to quit a job unless you have another to go to.’
Anya wished people could stop saying things she didn’t want to hear.
‘Not to mention, what are you going to do for money?’
‘I have some saved up,’ Anya muttered. This was true. She had about a thousand pounds in an ISA, but she’d be paid again at the end of the month – although not much because she mainly worked on commission. Suddenly, things felt scary and sad. Even over the phone, her mother sensed the clouds descending.
‘Now, it’s just awful about Connor, love. I’m so sorry.’
Anya wished she wouldn’t. Now she was definitely going to cry.
‘Your father is furious,’ she continued. ‘Just a few weekends ago he was promising to drive out here to take a look at the lawnmower.’
‘Well, isn’t that the real tragedy.’
About four years ago, Irene and Stephen – now pushing the end of their mid-sixties – had relocated to Balfron, a genteel village about 45 minutes drive from Glasgow, where everyone knew everyone’s business and talked about it in the queue at the Bank of Scotland on the high street. Her father was a doctor, who now worked part-time at the village practice, and her mother was a mostly retired music teacher, who still did the odd lesson. Anya blamed her for making her play the trumpet from the age of eight right up until the last day of sixth form, and therefore dooming her to be the object of unsophisticated jokes about sucking and blowing. To this day, Paddy still teased her about the assembly in which she’d played a solo in front of the whole school and turned purple, out of a combination of embarrassment and oxygen deprivation.
As they meandered through their last decade before full-time retirement, her parents were – as per the normal course of things – growing more interested in gardening and pottering, though her mother was also plugging the gaps of gainful full-time employment by inserting herself into the mechanics of the village’s local politics, both formal and informal. A few months ago, her father had phoned and revealed, in a dark whisper, that he was concerned that ‘your mother might be considering standing for the council’.
‘Have you spoken to Connor at all?’
‘No.’ She wished her mother wouldn’t say his name. ‘He doesn’t want to speak right now.’
‘Right-o.’ Irene swallowed. ‘Well, Georgie says you’re getting on very well at Claire’s. Lovely house, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ This came out as a hiss.
‘Maybe you could come out and see us next weekend?’
‘I’ll probably be going out with Paddy next weekend,’ she lied automatically and almost instantly felt guilty.
‘Oh, lovely!’ Her mother loved Paddy. Whenever he joined Anya in Balfron, they’d barely be through the door before Irene was bustling him into the best armchair – the one that reclined – and bringing him a massive drink and demanding ‘all his news’. He called her ‘Reeny’, which Anya hated. He knew this, which was at least partly why he did it.
‘Maybe I could come up next week though. I mean, I don’t have anywhere else to be.’
‘Oh, Anya—’
‘Well, I don’t. No job. No boyfriend. Paddy and Georgie and everyone else I know are all at work in the daytime.’
This was a mistake: Irene didn’t believe in self-pity.
‘Less of that, Anya – plenty of people would love what you have. Why don’t you come down one day next week.’
‘OK. I’ll see.’
‘Good.’ Business-like again. ‘And Anya, you make sure you’re looking for another job, will you? Maybe you could hand your CV around, for a start. The West End has so many new places. It’s so different even from when we lived there a few years ago.’
‘Well, I’ve had an idea actually—’
‘And,’ her mother was on a roll now, and wasn’t listening, ‘I’ll ask the ladies up here if they know of anything going. Something to tide you over, at least.’
Irene was gripped by many unshakeable misapprehensions about how the world worked (emails cost money; central heating actually made you colder). Obviously, Anya would not find a hot tip for a new career off the back of one of Irene’s conversations in the queue at the post office (why did their generation always have so many things to post?), but it would be pointless to attempt to explain this. Still, she was feeling self-destructive enough to try.
‘That’s not how the world works anymore, Mum.’ She heard how snappy she sounded and felt mean. ‘But thank you,’ she added sulkily.
‘You know Anya, you underestimate Balfron. It has a way of making things happen.’ Irene had quite the mystic streak for a good Scottish protestant woman.
‘I’m sure. And while you’re at it, maybe you could also ask someone in Balfron if they’ve got a million pounds behind the sofa cushions.’
Anya knew it was a mark of quite how pitiful she had become that her mother did not rise to this.
‘Anyway, pet,’ Irene sounded brisk now. ‘I must dash. I have errands to do. But look, your Dad and I will send you a bit of money to keep you going, all right? Just ’til you get back on your feet.’
Anya considered refusing this and then realized she couldn’t afford to.
‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘Lots of love.’
‘I love you too.’
5
Three hours. Three hours was all it had taken Anya’s mother to find her a new job.
Hi Anya. Have spoken to Fiona Morton who I bumped into at the post office and I have some good news. Her granddaughters Rosie and Rachel need a babysitter for a few hours after school, Monday to Friday. They’re up in one of the grand houses near Park Circus! She’s going to call you. They need someone ASAP. Looking forward to seeing you in Balfron next week. Love, Mum. X
As she read the message, Anya could feel something rising in her throat – fear? Fury? – and then realized it was the atom-deep humiliation of having her mother ask around to secure her an after-school babysitting job. She could vaguely remember the outline of Fiona Morton, a large-bosomed, though otherwise compact, woman who Anya was fairly certain was a member of her mother’s gardening club.
Resuming the foetal position – Anya had been for a brisk walk around the park but was back in her bedroom now – she began tapping back a response (Thanks Mum, not sure that’s the—) when her phone interrupted. It was an 01360 number, which would mean her parents, except she had their number saved. Oh, God. Already?
In a split second, Anya processed her options. She could ignore the call, but this was not really a solution. Women like her mother were persistent and time-rich. Fiona Morton probably didn’t have much else to do for the next few hours except make sure that Anya received this call – and possibly return to the post office – and if she did not pick up, Fiona Morton would not hesitate to deploy Anya’s mother. A two-pronged attack was more than Anya could bear.
Sitting up, she leaned her back against the wall and pressed the green phone button.
‘Hello?’
‘Is this Anya Mackie?’
The voice on the other end of the phone was polite but commanding, and Anya sat up a little straighter.
‘Speaking.’
‘Lovely. I’m Fiona Morton – I’m a friend of your mother’s. I live out in Balfron, just up the road from The Willows.’
