‘You might have told me she was going through the change,’ Maxwell says to Lorraine, stubbing out his fag and blowing kisses into the phone simultaneously.
A copper bottomed saucepan nearly hits the ground.
‘Kidding,’ he says, grabbing it just in time. ‘You lookfab-u-lous, Lorraine,’ he adds, ‘as ever, and you look lovely, Sweetums. Love thesea-green shirt. Very now. Did Delicious Dan leave that out for you to wear?’
‘No, I dress myself,’ I lie. ‘And keep your paws off Dan. He is not interested in what you have in your Levis, Maxwell.’
Maxwell roars with amusement, admiring his reflection in the lift door. ‘Levis! As if. These exquisite jeans are Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme! Now, I’ve been up and the photographer has been struck with an appalling stomach bug so today we’re stuck with a second tier snapper who looks about fourteen, and doesn’t“do food,normally”. His assistant isn’t fourteen – he’s twelve.’
Lorraine and I groan.
‘Suck it up,’ Maxwell advises. ‘We’re going to be here for hours so let’s smile and hope we get to go home before midnight.’
‘I can’t be here for hours, I’ve got children,’ I mutter.
‘You might be home in time for university,’ Maxwell laughs.
Because the RTÉGuidetrusts us, we do not have someone from the magazine overseeing it all. I need to keep uson-theme. It’s what I’m good at: gauging what is needed and delivering it.
As one review said: ‘Freya Abalone knows what I want before I do,’ a line Dan mischievously quotes to me quite often when we are in bed. He’s even threatened to have a tattoo of it inked on his lower abdomen.
‘Yeah, and what’s that going to look like when you need to get your appendix out,’ I joked back. ‘Perv.’
Three hours later, Lorraine and I having laboured over four winter warming soups, I regretfully turn the gas off the pumpkin risotto and go out to photography central where Lorraine and Maxwell are fighting with the photographer, who thinks we should do some moody shots. He’s turned the lights way down and I almost stumble across a cable.
Moody is not what we have in mind today.
I know this because I have sold a lot of cookbooks and people like to be able to see what they are going to cook. They do not appreciate the camera focusing on the burnished steel of an exoticbone-handled soup spoon instead of on the actual soup.
Lorraine and Maxwell turn as I come in.
They both know me well enough to know that my approach to the photographer, who has been behaving as if a food shoot is beneath him, will be to gently cajole him into some normal shots before allowing him to have a little play with hisbone-handled shenanigans. You catch more flies with honey and this has always been my way.
But I am weary. So weary that I have actually cut my forefinger, which is bound up with blue kitchen plaster, and I am cross about this because I normally have fabulous knife skills. I have a headache because the photographer’s loud techno/pulse/headache-inducing mood music is set to eleven, and the oven is so temperamental, it is hard to know how long the lamb shanks will take to actually be done or if they’ll be cremated. It could go either way.
‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ the photographer is saying to my team. ‘I know what I’m doing.’ His assistant, who is at the computer looking at shots, nods in agreement.
Something pings inside me in a dangerous way.
‘No. You. Don’t,’ I say, hurling the words at him with fury.
Nobody is more surprised than me.
Lorraine’s eyes widen, if possible, and Maxwell briefly stops looking fabulous to look astonished.
‘This is my shoot, we’re on a tight schedule here and if you want to work forWallpapermagazine, go do it but today, we are taking pictures of food. Food that people need to actually see, not imagine from a distant, hazy outline. We are already running late. I know what the magazine wants. I know what I want. So cut the crap and take the shot.’
I sense I might be looking fearsome now. Dan says I can do that on occasion.
‘You put your hands on your hips and your eyes – they glow. Don’t know how you do it, Freya, but you can. Very sexy,’ he adds.
Nobody is thinking I am sexy today. I, Freya Abalone, nice woman of the cooking industry who has been mocked – yes, mocked – for being twee because she’s so nice, has lost her temper.
‘B-b ... but,’ starts the photographer gamely.
‘No!’ I hold a hand out. ‘Butnothing. Get the shot. The risotto is coming in ten minutes. Got that, everyone? Plus, we need more lighting. This is not cooking in somegrittily-lit northern palace inGame of Thrones. And. Turn. That. Music. Off.’
The assistant jumps first. The music stops. Lights come up.
