By Richard Al Ledger

Steam emanating from my red nose in the bitter early morning freeze, the glacial dew in my nostril hairs, lining stubble gravel, pooling the dimples, awful winter cold. Plummeting temperatures stepping from the first train of the day empty lanes past the To Let signs and the betting shop door shutters and the sleeping bags. In front of me a small group congregates not up to much else but to keep warm.

Avenues of sunshine creeping over the very far distant jags of terrace housing and catholic steeples on the horizon, lighting the sky with a gush of pure white upward brushstrokes against the mass of painted black directly overhead where the stars still show glimmer like pinpricks into the forever and beyond that even. The December moon up on high excited and bright and not budging for the remainder of the winter.

The white chef's jacket over the grey bed t-shirt and buttoned, warming hands and finger ends freezing in the lavatory sized cloak room, brass coat hooks next to metal bars over windows. The security camera pointed straight at me for my own benefit, good to know someone watches me pick my butthole.

Fill the cooking pot with cold water under the prep sink tap, below lined with yesterdays grot spread thinly and concentrated around the circumference of the plug hole, filled just enough not to overspill when boiling.

Turn the gas hob on, spark and a licked flame, sustained with propane and oxygen and then a steady fire on the ring brings a blue warmth through familiar hiss.

The pot goes on the heat, a handful of salt – the fingertips dash forwards and back again in quick motion, open palmed watch the salt dissolve adding a murky hew to the broth, already beginning to warm from the underbelly.

Add the cold pork shoulder to the liquid from the fridge at the knees, Tuesday day dot, now Thursday but who's to care. A thick smell, a grey rind, disposable plastic blue glove over dirtied fingernails, clasp the meat like a good thigh and in you go. Prod and play with an unnecessarily long handled wooden spoon, move, toss swim drown, doing nothing and then left alone to simmer.

The fruit and veg delivery boy arrives through the front door bringing with his person the cold. Placing the box of produce on the tiled floor next to the kitchen, invoice floating free atop the coriander plant, a few now overdue in red circles to highlight the debt. Not quite sure on the name of the boy yet as he returns bringing in several packs of stacked blue rolls. Only known him the three years - sharing pleasantries around the holidays along with a printed card from management, taken in with minimal eye contact. Always good natured conversation from the boy, always brief but not enough for me. Talk of the weather maybe, then the inevitable weekend updates, sometimes talks of holiday plans which start up again when mid November rolls around, and then gone again. I have to make something up. He knows my name and calls me by it correctly every morning which I somehow find unsettling. Great eyes, a nice smile, good hands for his line of work, big and strong with thick wrists makes his watch face look impressively small. I'm sure he's got a great family, a beautiful wife if rough around the edges, a Cathleen type maybe. I hope she loves him, he deserves love.

I scoop a handful of leathery bacon bits from the pass section then sprinkle them in my mouth like candy, brushing my fingers across my apron, greasy filmed fingertips, a hardened patch from yesterdays batter mishap discovered on the cotton. I hear vibration and hiss, the water begins to boil in the sturdy pork pan and I look down at the veg delivery and wonder what time the apprentice chef gets in and if he's already late, a nice quiet Iranian boy from the cooking college named Abbas, he isn't late of course but the morning is long already.

Cigarette break up the stone step located at the back of the kitchen next to the used cooking oil drums, creeping the fire door handle bar at a slight and letting the crisp early air in. Bleached new morning light causing a dilution only dawn prep shifts allow, everything washed in a bright watercolour as the world shows trails and breath, dressed in an optimism amongst the high angular shadows and rays. The back door leading out into a crooked back street used only for refuge and lonely quiet moments for chefs down the line to think about their misgivings and ruined marriages and brief electric relationships whilst smoking tea. The end of the street opening up onto the high street where the light somehow thicker and the stone floors washed by council hands.

Lighting the cigarette and letting the smoke usher, the orange glow, a warmth that will never get old floods the chest and down into the belly. Tingled fingers, bellows of smoke and steam through the mouth and through the nose, a lick of lip looking when over the overflowing bins not collected again, a phone call later to an old lady who has long since cared. A glance down the street, mostly empty, grey concrete strewn with weekend litter, a recognisable odd man walks past in conversation with his own hand, the mornings often more peculiar than the late nights amongst the sleeping bags.

A troupe of misfits, a gaggle darkened, drifting aimlessly, and always in a rush but with nowhere to go, little understanding of the structure of a day, lost in a endless fog. The undiagnosed, the mentally ill, the scumbags and the sordid, the nasty ones. The really nasty ones take lead, scabs on faces and eyelids and eyes that glare at you and nothing. And they never sleep. Just keep drifting from location to location, even rats have a home, but not these lot — possibly not even human anymore — just organisms made up similarly to humans but yet somehow not, chemically manufactured. Not sure if the heart beats or the blood just somehow passes through claggy rubber veins, how can it beat the same as mine and yet not be like mine at all.

Inspecting through the tops of bins looking for treasures of not sure what, glancing over and with yellowed skin on tips of toes at pace, yearning for my cigarette unblinking stares and whispers, I look back passively and blow smoke through their faces as they progress through on to the next street and the next, a forever loop ending in the understanding of what is to come for them all, demise and pain not in that order, an unfortunate end for a lost child but too many to care for so nobody cares at all. The junky army driving forward unrelenting with no finish and I do pity them but quickly forget what they look like.

After finishing my cigarette I return to the kitchen and turn my meat.

Turning down the hob as the furious boiling water rattles the pork joint around the confines of the pot like a depraved drunk enclosed in a metal cell. I reach over to the white wall phone, a direct link to the restaurant managers and supervisors on shift, grubby finger marks all down the shaft, crusty layers of flour and buttermilk and onion powders remain from the numerous hands belonging to numerous chefs on numerous Saturday shifts calling front of house frantically warning them of the recently sold out special someone just ordered, that Bobby just walked out mid shift, that they can go fuck themselves — royally.

I call through and watch the pork shoulder settle into the water losing its boiling point. I look over over to the fruit and vegetable delivery still on the floor, noticing the coriander plant already starting to wilt under the weight of the paper invoice.

“Yeah?” A voice from the other side. Female, croaky, not at all in a happy place.

“Hey it's me.” Said me.

“Morning, you alright?”

“Yeah, sure, I'm alright.” Why did you ask me that you phoney. “You want the 86'd list?”

86 is a term used within the restaurant industry to indicate when something is no longer available on the menu. A good idea to let the staff on shift know before they start taking orders. Say you're out of the crab cakes and don't plan on making any more today? Don't have the time? Don't have the crab? Have but don't want? Time to 86 it.

“Is there a lot?” I can hear the trepidation. My cause is to give her and those on the front line a bad shift and I know it and she knows it.

I look around the kitchen. The pork shoulder simmering in the pan. The half box of chicken breasts I'd been portioning out first thing sat in a steel gastronome on a yellow chopping board because we never replaced the red one after the fire. The onion on the side, the carrot on the side, scattered lemongrass whole, a clove of garlic, maybe two. There's a glass by the sink I'm pretty sure has beer in it half way.

“Yeah there's a lot.” I reply.

“For fuck sake.” I hear that exactly or something of that ilk. A derogatory term aimed both not at me but at me absolutely. Poorly disguised under her breath through the cackle of mid static and a background noise of cutlery wiped and plates stacked which I still find strangely satisfying even now. “OK no worries let me just go grab a pen.”

Waiting my mind wanders back to ones since long gone, other ones. Others, voices, persons that became friends, best friends and sometimes even awkward lovers. The ones in the past, the ones who managed to escape. Those who were perfect in this life of ours, in the bubble, content with the mayhem and comfortable with the pain, a collective pain, our pain, those perfect with their perfect voices with perfectly fine temperaments but chose a lifetime away from its grips.

“Start at the appetisers.”

So I do.

Sat on the back step sometime later. Watching my breath disperse into the world all at once, thats it! All connected in some oblivious way we don't even take time to comprehend. I look at the cigarette burning between my fingers and tap the remaining ash crown onto the floor below, taking my blue glove off in the process, forget it was there all along, I toss it.

The sun now projecting different angles than earlier in the morning, causing radical new effect on the fabric of this old back street I've looked upon so many damn times. A sharp, bright jaunt on the window across the way curtain closed, then all the way down onto the graffiti'd wall like lightning until drastically pivoted some 45 degrees against the large drum bins overflowing and cutting right through, hitting directly to the floor almost with weight and racing away then down the alley. I follow the source until it bleeds into the opening at the end towards the high street where it merges with an open sky and disperses into a more general form of daylight.

More people passing now than before, along with electric cars, commuters in leather bottomed loafers and young dog walkers. I think about the man talking to his hand and how his day will pan out. I look at the palm of my own left hand and observe the burns and the pricks and the callouses in amongst the wrapped rough skin and during that moment I hear a voice not my own.

“S'cuse me.” I turn with a jolt, I was captivated for a moment. Indeed I thought my own hand had discovered its own voice as well.

Look at the scruffy huddled man stood directly in front of me, no concerns for personal space here, a deep odour of brownish infiltrates my nostrils, the smell of brown junk. A large open sore on the bridge of his nose like a bullseye and I can hardly see the whites of his eyes around the heavy lines and bags and sad creases gathered around his face, one of the non sleepers wearing nothing but bad rags.

“What do you want?” I ask with a disdain I don't hide.

“Just a moment of your time and a cigarette.”

“Well you can have a cigarette old man.”

I look at the old bum, about the same age in time I bet, his clock hastened by medicine and the harsh winters outdoors. I pull out a single stick of white cigarette and hand it over, surprisingly he owns his own flame.

“Okay. That's it.” I waft him away only leaving his lingering smell.

He wanders off to rejoin the pack down the road and no doubt I'll see him and them again soon on the loop, he will not remember my face either.

I look at my left hand open once again, find urge to say something anything but that urge has dissipated and my appendage is muted, my digits move but in quiet, just a plain old serviceable hand attached securely to the wrist again, and so I guess that's that.

I use on the steel railing to propel myself forward and up back to my feet, a boil on my left ankle rubbing against the elastic of my white sock, the green paint flakey under finger on the old metal. I dust my ass and flick the remainder of a cigarette into the tomato can ashtray deep with filtrated mush, leaving a sordid smell, almost volcanic.

A black bird, no! A blue bird squarks overhead. I look up at the opening between the slanted roof tiles and drain pipes, beyond the cloudless pale blue cold clear sky I see nothing but the vast entire universe in front. Perhaps I imagined it.

END