Seedling 20:  The China Syndrome


“I haven’t even eaten there, but this is some bullshit”.

    I could hear Charlie chomping crisps on the other end of the line, paging up and down the Examiner’s review on her tablet.

    ‘I mean, what kind of misogynistic crap is this?  Best days behind her?  I mean, get the fuck out”.

    ‘Yeah, that was pretty bad”.

    “How old is Melody, anyways?”

    This was a mystery among staff.  Renee told me not to trust Wikipedia on this one, nor Melody, herself.  Which nobody had to worry about, because I certainly wasn’t going to walk up to Melody Williams and ask, hey, how old are you?’

    I’m not Cosmo.

    ‘I don’t know.  Maybe around fifty-four?’

    ‘Damn, she looks pretty hot for fifty-four.  Let’s see…’

    Charlie’s munching was punctuated by her heavy-handed tapping on the screen.

    ‘…so yeah, a little botox.  Looks like she’s done her lips up a bit.  But, you know, all in all, looking legit.  Who is this reviewer, Leslie Hunt?  Guy or a girl?’

    I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure.  ‘Not one-hundred percent but I think female’.

    ‘Figures,’ she responded, ‘woman are always such cunts to each other.  ONCE celebrated.  My God.  You know you’ll never read a review of a male chef in his fifties with this garbage.  What a misogynistic fuck’.

    Charlie was right.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about Melody Williams but I was sure how I felt about this restaurant reviewer, male, female or non-binary.  OK, so the review was pretty good in the end and four out of five stars is nothing to sneeze at.  But there were enough pot shots at Melody to suggest a personal grudge.  And, yeah, none of them would have been leveled at a guy.

    On the other hand, I had very high hopes the criticism of the uniforms would lead to some sort of change in the same way acorn squash met a hasty demise and lemons appeared as a desperate homage to ‘nature’.  Mike’s smiley demeanour at briefing made a bit more sense, in retrospect.  How much you wanna bet he was relishing Melody’s invariable fury that he had gotten accolades and she’d been thrown chump change.  If Hannah was right about their mutual animosity, Mike was having a good week.  Eoin, by contrast, was not.  When I saw him the next day, he bitched incessantly not only about the ‘emasculated’ line but about being mistaken for a server.

    ‘Stupid fecking uniform.  Server?  How am I expected to do my job and be taken seriously?’

    Eoin and Kamil had this in common - very wounded macho pride over how they looked and how they were perceived in the job.  Cosmo and I didn’t dwell on it.  But, as the weeks were going by, I was starting to see that Eoin and Kamil were not only closer in personality than I realised, but just closer in general.  They often shared inside jokes and went out for drinks after dinner shifts - revisiting their late night hijinks in low voices and ribbing by the somm station, the next day.  I wasn’t included in the camaraderie, and wasn’t offended.  Really, the only time I heard any details was when Eoin was having a ‘windy’ day.

    We’d be wiping down the wine lists at the front of the bar or re-stocking in the red wine cellar and the ripe stench would bleed out of his canvas pantaloon pants.  

    ‘Sorry lad.  Had a Chinese, last night’.  

    Apparently a lot of late nights in London ended in Chinatown, one of the few places where you could get a bite after last Tube.  And, apparently, it gave Eoin gas.  We’d only worked together a few weeks, but if I thought I smelled something off I would simply ask Eoin, ‘you have a Chinese, last night?’  This would lead to some talk of he and The Sniper’s night out.  According to the Irish somm, he and Kamil would run into people Kamil knew from the wine world and they’d get invited to share some special bottle or end up drinking whisky with a conveniently globe-trotting winemaker.  Eoin would recount stories of Kamil’s prowess in choosing ‘unicorn’ bottles, but it sounded more like he was recounting Kamil’s recounting than any of his own thoughts.  Usually the story ended with Eoin reassuring me, once more - ‘you know, he’s really a good guy deep down inside’.  Why he felt the need to convince me of Kamil’s innate virtues was a mystery.  Kamil couldn’t care less about my opinions, so what was this angle?

    ‘Kamil says you’re full of shit’.  

    This is what Cosmo had to tell me one day.

    ‘Oh yeah?’

    1D was all wide-eyed and innocent, as if this was a completely normal conversation.  

    ‘Yeah, he says you don’t really know anything about wine and he doesn’t know how you fooled Mike into hiring you’.

    I let out a small laugh.  Kamil knew better.  He had ‘corrected’ our little pop quizzes and knows I have a leg up on Cosmo and Eoin - by a country mile, actually - but that was probably what prompted his planting this idea in One Direction’s head in the first place.  This tack was revealing something new about Kamil; something I’d begun to notice - that The Sniper’s sabotage attempts were shifting from schoolyard thuggery to something altogether more serious.  Kamil felt threatened by me.  He was trying to undermine me with other members of the team, including this junior somm I’m supposed to outrank.  But, since Cosmo didn’t quite kneel at the altar of Kamil, the assistant head somm had revealed a weak and petty instinct instead of degrading the young Italian’s view of the ‘forty-year old’ American.  

    ‘When do you leave for Ireland?’  

     Charlie’s question snapped me out of my daydreaming.  I looked over at the half-packed suitcase sitting on my desk.  The Cru Beaujolais I planned on taking with me was now open, a glass in hand.

    ‘Tomorrow morning, actually’.

    ‘Where is your Mum, again?  Dublin?’

    This was normal.  Any one who hasn’t been to Ireland assumes that wherever you’re going on the island, it had to be Dublin.  Any one who lived on the island must be in Dublin.  I mean, Ireland is small, but it’s not that small.

    ‘No, she’s in Donegal.  About six hours from Dublin.  I fly into the North’.

    ‘Ah, right, right.  I knew that.  I knew that, didn’t I?’

    ‘Maybe, I dunno.  When do you go to Chelmsford?’

    ‘Babes, I’m in Chelmsford’.

    ‘You’re in Chelmsford, right now?’

    ‘Yes, Babes.  Why do you think I’m locked in my old bedroom chatting on the phone to you?  I’ve already had enough of the brood.  Fucking animals.  Downstairs mixing Echo Falls rosé and lemonade, watching reruns of Pop Idol.  Spare me.’

    ‘Well, listen - have a happy Christmas, anyways, and we’ll go out when I’m back’.

    ‘Oh my God, yes, please.  Hey, let’s have dinner at “Seedling”!!’

    ‘No.’



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