I’d found the designation amusing ever since a client told me the sous-chef was the person in charge of gravy. The joke might have sounded merely mean, but she laughed and said, ‘I’d like to have my own restaurant one day. The Lady of Shallot. You heard it here first.’
She tipped the Lemon Leaf book back into its slot and leaned over an old black-bound exercise book opened on a fretwork reading stand like a museum exhibit.
‘That’s more my style,’ I said. ‘I’m the one-pot specialist. You won’t catch Leora cooking out of there.’ It was a home-made cookery book, full of handwritten recipes and yellowed cuttings from newspapers and magazines, splashed with the ingredients listed in its pages, seasoned by use. ‘It belonged to my mother. She gave it to me a couple of years ago when she stopped cooking for herself.’
‘Some of these are ancient,’ she said. ‘Charlie’s chicken marinade. My God, it’s got condensed milk in it. Cheese straws. Rum baba. Lamb chops jubilee.’
‘Half the recipes were passed on by someone after a dinner or a tea party or whatever. If you could piece it all together, you’d have a memoir. And a family tree.’ I joined her as she leafed through the book, stopping occasionally to laugh at something — ‘Baked Alaska!’ — or look at the pictures. ‘It’s a bit of social anthropology too. The eating habits of the white middle class … under apartheid. You could make a study of it. Chuck-wagon chowder. That was a big favourite when I was a strapping lad of ten.’
‘This must be your mom’s handwriting, the copperplate.’
‘One of the lasting benefits of a convent education. Can you believe she learned to write with a dipping pen? She’s a very precise woman. If it says 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, that’s what you use, and if it’s a flat teaspoon, you smooth off the excess with the back of a knife. She doesn’t appreciate the theatrical style of cooking promoted by domestic goddesses and scooter drivers. A good glug of olive oil, slap it in the fuckin’ mortar, bash it around a bit. What’s that about?’
‘Food hall hooliganism,’ she said distractedly and went on paging. ‘Do you actually use these?’
‘I hardly need to: I’ve known a few of them by heart since I was a kid. But sometimes I look in the book anyway. The food tastes better when the ghosts adjust the seasoning.’
She sat down at the dinner table and unpacked the utensils for an interview from various zippered pockets: translucent pens with a skinny vein of ink in them like the thread in a thermometer, pinstriped erasers, for some reason a plastic ruler. Chattering away all the time. A trio of notebooks in the primary colours labelled in a tiny hand I couldn’t read upside down.
‘It would make a yummy cookery show. Celebrity sons and their not-so-famous mothers cook the family favourites. Fathers and daughters too, famous or not-so-famous or famous-until-teatime. With lots of wine between the paring and dicing so we learn all about their special relationship. Virtuoso demonstrations of the mezzaluna. Think Take Home Chef meets Prodigal Son.’
She was a talker. Good. It relieved me of the burden. Talk talk talk. And quick movements of her hands to put a word in quotes — ‘celebrity’ — or italicize an aside. Cheese straws? I don’t think so.
I put the juice and a rack of toast on the table and sat down. She’d flipped the fruit bowl over to make a podium for her recorder, leaving the displaced apples and oranges arranged on the table top like a platitude. Good thing Leora was out. She was fussy about the bowl, which was the one acknowledged masterpiece from an otherwise undistinguished pottery class.
‘Shall we start?’
‘Please.’
‘Cool. It’s April the whatever 2009. This is Jane Amanpour reporting live from Somewhere Dangerous. Can you see me under this thing? No seriously, I’m with Neville Lister at his home in Kensington, Johannesburg. Just to fill you in, you’re part of a work-in-progress series — we call it Riding Shotgun, not my idea — so I’d like to focus on what you’re up to now. But seeing that people won’t necessarily have heard of you, I thought we could start with some basic stuff about your background. I googled you but I didn’t find much. You seem to have sprung to life in this group show at the Switch Box last year.’
‘I’m a late starter.’
‘Cool. Then you’re ready to be discovered.’
She tweaked the recorder and looked at me through her fringe, which was styled to fall over her eyes without obscuring her vision. ‘Fire away.’
I did the potted biog, including my misspent youth — ‘Is it really possible to misspend your youth in Bramley?’ — and my inglorious academic career. The London chapter came down to a line. When Leora reads a novel, she skips the boring descriptions and concentrates on the dialogue, and that’s how I feel about my other life. I’d rather not go into detail.
‘How long were you in exile?’
‘No, no, that is a political fate I never had to suffer.’
‘You left the country though.’
‘I went away, yes, and after some time I came back again.’
‘Why?’
‘Why did I leave? To avoid the army and other unpleasantness. We had conscription then and I didn’t feel like going to the border. The killing never appealed, to say nothing of the dying.’
‘Did you think about becoming a conscientious objector?’
‘For five minutes. I didn’t have the stomach for it. Religious objectors like the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a very rough time. Objecting on political grounds was practically unheard of. Once the ECC was formed it became more of an option, but that was after I left.’
‘ECC?’
‘End Conscription Campaign. Even with their support, I should tell you, you had to be a tough customer to make a stand. Most objectors just left.’
‘What did you do in London?’
I told her how I worked as a waiter, not very patiently, until I fell into photography — ‘without a splash.’ I had been interviewed only once before in my life (for the Remarkable Residents series in the local knock-and-drop) and already I was repeating things I’d said then. Quoting myself. ‘Out of the firing line into the frying pan.’ For crying in a casserole. Give me a bit of time and I’d work the quotable quotes up into a routine.
She turned to the second half of her question: ‘Why did you come back?’
‘I wanted to be part of the new South Africa.’
Glib but true. In all the years I was away, I felt interrupted. Despite my resolve to look in the other direction, the life I might have been leading flickered in the corner of my eye. In another place, unfazed, a potential me was going about his business as if I’d never cut him short. Once apartheid fell — or sat down, as Leora likes to say — I could finally look squarely at this phantom who was living under my name. And then I got used to the idea that we could change places. A clean swap: your elsewhere for mine.
How I envy people who float around the world, resting their roots lightly on whatever soil they happen to be hovering above, dividing their time, and then dividing it again, until it’s so thin they can see through it. The global citizens. Epiphytes.
Giving an account of my first years back home was harder. Grafting memory to experience had turned out to be painful. There was so much to be recovered, yet so little felt familiar, and the scraps that did had become resistant. A gap had opened up between me and the known world. When I approached the places and people I thought I knew, they took a step back, recoiling as if I meant to do them harm. It’s no wonder I did not feel like touching a camera in the beginning. Nothing would keep still.
Eventually the world stopped fidgeting. The gap was still there but I gave up trying to bridge it, and then everything steadied itself sufficiently for me to get on with my life.