The Chef
The restaurant was the kind of place Clive had reviewed three times over fifteen years — once to
make it, once to confirm it, once to bury it. Tonight he was neither critic nor executioner. Tonight he
was simply a man at dinner with his girlfriend, and the lamb cutlets in front of him were, he had just
decided, the finest he had eaten all year.
“You've got that face,” Louisa said.
“What face?”
“The face where you're not actually here anymore. You're writing.”
“I'm not writing.” He cut into the lamb again. “I'm eating. There's a difference.”
“There isn't, with you.”
He smiled and lifted the fork to his lips, the tender lamb oozing with jus.
Then it was on the tablecloth.
He had no memory of dropping it. He looked at his hand resting beside the fork, open, palm up,
entirely still. He told it to pick the fork up. It did not.
“Clive?”
He turned to Louisa and opened his mouth and said — he was certain he said — I can't feel my
hand. What came out was something else entirely. The words arrived in the wrong order, or perhaps
they were not words at all. Louisa’s expression shifted from amusement to something he did not
want to name.
“Clive.” She was standing now. “Something is wrong with your face.”
He was aware, distantly, that the table to his left had gone quiet. Then the table behind. The room
was reorganising itself around him, the warm noise of a full restaurant pulling back like a tide. He
could still smell the lamb. There was that, at least.
Then Louisa had her phone out and was talking to someone, her voice very controlled, and the
maître d' was crouching beside him saying something, and Clive sat very straight in his chair and
watched the candle in the centre of the table and concentrated on the smell of the lamb because it
was the last normal thing and he wanted to hold onto it for as long as he could.
—
The neurologists called it a rare encephaltic event. He had an inflammation in a specific region of
his brain responsible for sensory processing, taste and smell. The damage, they explained, was
significant. All his motor functions were intact, his cognition was undamaged, but his sense of taste
was gone in any meaningful sense. He might retain the ability to distinguish between broad
categories — sweet, salty, bitter — but the nuance, the complexity, was simply no longer there.
“But I’m a chef!”, Clive cried desperately. “What am I supposed to do?”The doctors exchanged looks and he waited expectantly, a sliver of hope, that there was a cure.
They continued to remain silent.
—
When Clive arrived back at his apartment, his first instinct was to make himself a quick meal of
crab toast. After buttering, toasting and seasoning the crab paste, he sat himself down.
Five minutes past and he hadn’t taken a bite.
In front of him was the Schrödinger’s cat of the culinary world — currently, two states of Clive
were simultaneously existing : the version where he had retained his brilliantly refined palette, and
the version where his entire identity had been stripped away from him. The moment he ate, one of
them would cease to exist.
“Fuck it.”, Clive said aloud. The knife cut, the fork dug, and the crab entered his mouth.
He felt the slippery sensation of the butter, the hard, crusty texture of the baked bread, the filaments
of crab dispersing against his tongue as it flattened against the roof of his mouth. Yet, no flavours
registered in his mind.
Something heavy began to pulse in his chest, as though he had swallowed a hot stone. Pushing the
plate of crab toast away, he moved towards the fridge, thrusting his hand into the cold recklessly,
grabbing and groping at everything. There had to be something, anything that would trigger a
reaction in his tastebuds. Hugging an assortment of fruit, vegetable, condiments and sauces, he
emptied them onto the massive kitchen island. Some glasses rolled off and shattered on the floor. He
didn’t care.
He grabbed the knife and wedged open a tin of caviar, plunging the metal into the bed of eggs.
Nothing.
He slashed at a pear, sweet juice spilling across the counter.
Nothing.
The knife broke into a packet of smoked salmon, fibres of fish collecting at the end of the blade.
Nothing.
Now in a frenzy, Clive began to ransack his own kitchen. Cabinets emptied, spice jars opened and
upended, tins of preserved food were prised apart and masticated and discarded. Dried fruit turned
to mush between his teeth. Rice crunched like sand. Somewhere in the blur he registered that he
was crying, though he couldn't have said when it started.
Snot and tears mingled as Clive stumbled across the room, his hands breaking into any packaging
he could find, tearing through the plastic wrapper of raw ground beef, squishing it between his
fingers, shoving it into his mouth, his teeth released saturated blood from spongy tissue to drip
down his throat —
He stopped.
There was a flavour. It was actual and complex, iron-rich and heavy and layered in a way he had
almost forgotten flavour could be. His brain lit up like a room with the lights suddenly on.“Oh, God.”
This was it. He lowered himself slowly to the kitchen floor, back against the island, and buried his
face in the package of meat, now eating slowly, tentatively, letting the cold blood wash against his
tongue like a liquid salvation. He continued to replenish himself, sucking down on every stray drop
of juice until his tongue lapped against the styrofoam backing.
Oh, God…
—
The butcher’s shop was the best in town, and Clive was a regular. Before the incident, he hadn't
given much thought to the specific properties of the raw selection — it would all be transformed in
the end, altered by heat and acid and seasoning into something categorically different from what it
began as. The rawness had always been merely a starting point. But now it was the destination.
Louisa was coming at seven. He had been rehearsing on how he might explain it to her.
My palate has changed was too vague. I can only taste raw meat was too blunt. He hadn't landed on
the right phrasing yet. But Louisa was not easily unsettled — she had always ordered the carpaccio
without hesitation, and had once eaten sea urchin straight from the shell on a beach in Palermo and
declared it the best thing she'd ever tasted. If anyone would understand, it was Louisa.
He hoped it was Louisa.
“Hey Clive,” said the butcher, broad and pink-cheeked behind the glass counter. “What can I get for
you today?”
Clive studied the display with the same focused attention he had once given to a wine list. He was
looking for specific things now — fat content, freshness, the particular darkness of the meat that
indicated iron-rich blood still present in the tissue.
“The beef shin,” he said. “The whole piece. And the bone marrow — both of them.” He moved
along the counter. “Lamb kidneys, if they came in today. The ox heart. That piece of skirt steak at
the back — yes, that one. The pork collar, the veal breast.” He paused. “Do you have anything that
came in this morning?”
The butcher raised an eyebrow. “Going to a lot of trouble for your guests.”
“Just one guest,” Clive said. And then, because it felt important to say it out loud to someone :
“Someone I'd like to impress.”
The butcher wrapped everything without further comment. Clive carried while walking home.
She's always liked carpaccio. It was going to be fine.
It was probably going to be fine.
—He unwrapped the parcels one by one and laid everything across the island. The beef shin. The ox
heart. The lamb kidneys. The skirt steak, dark and gleaming.
He started with the steak, slicing a thin piece the way he would for a carpaccio. He placed it on his
tongue and waited. It was cold, faintly mineral. A vague iron note flickered at the edge of perception
before vanishing. It was bland.
“What the hell?”, he said with a mouth full.
He tried the kidney, then the heart, then the shin, working through the selection with increasing
desperation, giving each piece time to register before moving on, until he was standing there,
surrounded by opened parcels and used plates and had nothing to show for any of it.
He couldn’t serve any of this to Louisa. It was all terrible, all of it. He picked up the knife again and
began to sloppily mash up the globs of meat on the table, more out of restless frustration than
purpose. He wasn’t paying attention. The knife slipped as it caught on a piece of bone and sliced his
index finger, blood pattering onto the counter.
He brought his finger to his mouth instinctively. He wasn’t sure if it was relief or horror when he
realised what meat would be suitable for their dinner.
—
Louisa arrived five minutes after seven with a bottle of Barolo and her hair still damp from
showering. The first thing she did when she entered his apartment was tilt her head to the ceiling
and breathe.
“Clive, it smells divine in here. I’m so happy you’re cooking.”
“I prepared,” he said carefully. “There's a distinction.”
She smiled and moved over to the counter while he plated, and he watched her settle in the way she
always did — coat off, wine poured, elbows on the marble, entirely at home — and thought that this
was either going to go very well or very badly and that he genuinely could not predict which.
He served her and she used her knife carefully, taking the meat to her mouth before letting out a
sigh of satisfaction.
“This is lovely,” she said. “What’s the dressing?”
“Lemon. A little salt.” He paused. “It's carpaccio, essentially.:
“I know what carpaccio is.” She smiled. “I just mean you've seasoned it perfectly. Your palate must
be coming back.”
“Not exactly.” He set down his glass. “That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”
She looked up.
He told her about the raw meat first. The first time, then the butcher's, the careful selection, the way
he had worked through the cuts, then the disappointment. He kept his voice measured and precise,
the way he would describe a dish, because it was the only register he trusted himself in right now.He watched her expression move from attention to uncertainty to something quieter and more
careful.
“You—“ She stopped. Started again. “Raw meat, Clive. Uncooked.”
“I know what raw means.”
“That's not—“ She set her fork down. “That's not healthy. You could make yourself seriously ill.”
“I know.” He looked at the table. “There's more.”
She waited. He told her about his finger, the taste, delivering it carefully, slowly, like a doctor trying
to be absolutely neutral. He watched the colour shift in her face. She had stopped looking at her
plate.
“Your own blood,” she said.
“Yes.”
The silence that followed was a particular kind, the kind that has weight and shape, that fills a room
the way water fills a vessel, finding every corner.
Louisa looked at him for while. Then she looked down at her plate.
“Clive,” she said slowly. “What did you give me to eat tonight?”
He didn't answer immediately. He stepped back from the counter.
Her eyes went to his leg.
Even with the bandages in the way, Louisa could see that a horrific amount of thigh had been taken
off. Crimson stained the white cloth, and the bandage work was so sloppy that it seemed like a
single movement would cause the entire structure to unravel. Her eyes trailed down from thigh to
knee to shin, following a thin sheet of blood that travelled from his feet to the floor.
“Louisa—”
“You fed me—“ She couldn't finish the sentence.
“You said it was wonderful,” he said quietly. It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it as it left his
mouth.
She made a sound he had never heard before, something quiet, aching, like a wail trying to surface.
Then she was moving, away from the counter and away from him, putting the length of the kitchen
between them, her back against the wall, staring at him with an expression he understood he would
not be able to undo.
“Clive— What the hell is wrong with you?”
She spun towards door, her shoulder catching the doorframe as she turned into the hallway, and then
she was gone — heels loud and fast against the corridor floor, getting quieter, not stopping.
“Louisa.” He followed. “Louisa, wait — just let me explain—“One hand on the doorframe, then the wall, then the next stretch of wall — moving in stages, his leg
dragging slightly, leaving what he didn't want to think about in the hallway. She was at the elevator,
her back to him, hitting the button with the flat of her palm in rapid succession.
“Louisa.” His voice echoed badly in the corridor. “Louisa, please — just stop. Just for a moment.”
She turned.
He stopped moving.
Her expression hit him somewhere he didn't have a word for — it was withered and pitying and
frightened all at once, the face of someone looking at a thing they once loved and no longer
recognise.
“Get away from me,” she said.
“I just want to—“
“Get away from me, Clive.”
He took a step forward. He didn't mean to — or he meant to and couldn't justify why. Her eyes went
wide and she looked once at the elevator doors, still closed, and made a rush to the stairs.
She travelled quickly down the first flight, her steps slowly increasing, her heels clanging against
the metal grills, then suddenly — a misstep.
She lurched forward, a small yelp escaping her lips before she tumbled. Her head hit the wall at the
end of the stairs with a sharp smack, and then she fell to the floor with a thump. A thin line of red
trailed down from where she hit her head.
At first, Clive felt nothing. Louisa was just lying there, quiet, bloody.
Then, slowly, the scene began to register, but in all the wrong ways. Not the way a man looks at
someone he loves crumpled at the bottom of a stairwell. The part of him that should have felt terror
and grief was silent. Instead, it was replaced with something more familiar.
The dark line on the wall. The smell of it, tantalising almost, and its stark red freshness. The way
the light caught the wetness of it. His brain, that rewired and treacherous organ, began doing what it
now always did — cataloguing, assessing, responding with a slow spreading warmth that had
nothing to do with love and everything to do with hunger.
He gripped the railing.
This is Louisa, he told himself. This is Louisa and she is hurt and you need to call someone.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he brought himself down the stairs, took her leg and pulled her up, slowly, watching that
thin trail of blood streak the stairs. In the stairwell, Louisa was his brush and he was the painter. But
in his apartment, in the kitchen, Louisa would be something far different. She’d provide for a
different type of palette.