‘Are you mad?’ he said, laughing with an edge to it, the way you do when confronted with an insult of some sort. ‘Nia, what do you take me for? Bounty hunter, marking out my place in heaven type of thing? Scalps hanging from a satchel as I’m walking into the sunset? Really? What about your Hindu blood, can’t you mainline some more of that into your veins at least? When you come from so much, why would you look elsewhere?’
It made her smile. There was something undeniably funny about this, even though he did mean what he was saying. Something to do with ‘Hindu’ sounding so exotic, the way he pronounced it with his questioning twang. And that it was directed at someone who looked like Nia. ‘An affront’ was how her mother had described her relationship to her skin. She wasn’t far wrong – it was no secret that Nia wished for more of her father’s colouring. People around the restaurant mostly mistook her for Italian with her permanent bisque tan and dark hair. In fact, she was quite sure that was one of the reasons Tuli hired her.
‘Where are you from?’ he’d asked at that very first meeting, minutes after she’d swung through the door to ask for a job.
‘I grew up in Newport,’ she said. ‘Welsh mother, Indian father. Mostly Welsh mother without Indian father.’
‘Ah,’ he said, as though he understood everything necessary from that clutch of sentences. ‘Got it. Come.’ Pulling out a chair in front of the bar. ‘Please, do sit down.’
Often Tuli would come back from the nightly rounds with a single oddball of choice – an unshaven man in thready denim with a smell to match and a bag of loud opinions, or more of a smarter guy in a white shirt – someone clocking off from a shift stacking shelves at Tesco, say, or even the red-eyed halal butcher from two doors down. One regular, a white guy in a battered brown suit and brogues, a hovering impatience in his face, was a pimp apparently. Tuli had revealed this to Nia after the man had left, mainly because she asked him the question directly.
By this time she had figured out that although Tuli operated on a need-to-know basis, he didn’t lie; this seemed to be part of his personal code, a pact he had made with himself. She had the idea that she could find things out, providing he was in the mood to respond rather than evade. It was all about coming up with the right question, the correct code to unlock the safe. And she was very curious about all of it.
He’d sit them down, these finds of his, at the front of Vesuvio where they’d smoke and talk while Nia was spraying the counters or polishing the bevelled glass at the front of the bar with newspaper, and she’d bring them a free pizza of some kind usually, but also leftovers to nibble with him – bruschetta with tomatoes and garlic, or sticky giant olives rolled in a blood chilli sauce. She was attractive to a certain kind of man, and she’d often get a nod of approval, maybe a grunt of acknowledgement for the bust and hips in front of them, their eyes lingering at her waist, cinched in with an apron. She, in turn, wasn’t sure if they expected her to giggle like a naughty milkmaid in response, but she took it in her stride, it was no big deal. Sometimes these stragglers would play chess – by candlelight, no less, with Tuli always making a point to put Bach on the stereo – and there would be something almost regal, timeless, about the two faces in concentration when set against that music, seemingly blissful in shadow as they moved those wooden pieces to oblivion.
Every now and then he would disappear to the back to check the freezer contents in the kitchen for the next day, eye up the pizza oven or get that pale serpentine bottle labelled ‘Martini’ from upstairs, a huge carton of Marlboro Lights to go with it. Sometimes, it was just some cash from the plastic bag that was always hanging behind the counter. While he was gone, his guests would stare at the theatrical masks on the walls, try to make sense of the framed gondolas sliding through pastel sunsets, the strangely erotic quadrants of lace that he had pinned up too, in the name of building ‘character’ into the place.
One of Nia’s long-term jobs was to conceive of a cosmetic makeover for Vesuvio, sort the decor out. Although it grieved Tuli to admit it, he knew it didn’t quite work and she knew he wanted to give her a project that might prove satisfying. The dee-cor she would call it, only knowing this word from books she had read. It was an unexpected tic, to have these aberrations in fluency, even though she’d grown up with books around her, a tic that fascinated him. And he was usually ruthless in response.
‘Sorry, but just checking, Nia – when I interviewed you, I had a sense that English was your first language, lah?’ he said once, ramping his accent up the ladder of South East Asia with this emphasizing word he liked – ‘lah!’ – whenever she stubbed her toe on one of these boulders.
‘Yes, but I didn’t grow up with ponces.’
‘You grew up with whom exactly? The salt of the Welsh and Bengali earth?’ A pitying look for her predicament.
‘The former.’
‘And you got yourself to Oxford by your bootstraps.’
‘Yes, good, you’ve got the picture.’
‘Because it’s not easy being a nurse’s daughter. Too busy keeping it real in the green grass of Wales?’
‘I’d have thought you wouldn’t be obsessed with pronunciation like British people. Did they bother with that sort of thing when you were growing up in Singapore?’
‘Oooh. Oooh!’ And then with naked joy, ‘Trying to analyse me, is it? Aren’t we fancy when we get on our high horse!’
And he got out this teddy bear he kept behind the bar – big beige nylon-furred thing the length of his forearm – and made it dance on the worktop while he hummed a melody for it.
Always, in these exchanges, Nia would throw something at him at this point: a scrunched-up crimson napkin, her ballpoint pen with the nib extended like a dart, or the whole notepad she used for taking orders, while his shoulders shook with silent laughter, hand over his heart as though, dear Lord, there was no way to contain it.
Shan
‘He has become obsessed with Jesus Christ,’ says Ava, presenting her phone to Shan. ‘He love him. I say, look Theo, you are just five years, when you are older I will answer your questions then. He say no, answer me now, why did Jesus Christ have such bad friends that they kill him? What am I to say then?’
Shan smiles and shrugs sympathetically. Ava looks after this child for just two afternoons a week, when she is not working at the restaurant, but she has clearly become very attached to him. There is something endearing about her when she describes his tics, something in the indulgent tone of her voice.
‘His parents, they really don’t like God,’ she continues, ‘they don’t like all this Jesus talk, really the father is main one, he wants everything to be exactly how he says. But I can’t control him, Theo, he love Jesus Christ, whenever he see a picture of Jesus or a book about it or the cross, anything, he go to it, and he just stand there, staring at it, with this big eyes, I tell you, is crazy! I say don’t ask me all this now, wait until you are older and then we can talk about it, OK?’
Shan takes the phone from Ava and looks at the picture, begins composing an appropriate response to this pious child. He likes it when she bashes the parents, it is oddly relaxing, a kind of balm of mundane patter that smooths itself right over him. Instead of an image of devotion he sees a small brown-haired boy holding a fluorescent toy gun, making a fierce face at the camera. Shan frowns instinctively, takes a sip of his coffee, distracts himself by looking up at the watercolour scenes adorning the walls, the tearful clown puppets and ridged, lacy fans. He relishes these morning moments at the restaurant, with the other cooks yet to swarm in, soaking the air with their assertions and accusations.