By now, a couple other students have wandered over, watching Mebel with amused looks on their faces. Mebel vaguely recognizes them as Adam and a brunette girl with striking golden eyes named Bella.
“You can do this, Gran,” Adam says.
“Adam!” Bella snaps. “You can’t call her that.”
Adam shrugs, looking sheepish.
Mebel is torn between having Adam call her by an honorific and that honorific being “Gran.” She meets Gemma’s eye, and Gemma glares at her meaningfully, which makes Mebel go, “Ah, yes, you can call me Mebel.”
“Cool,” Adam says with another shrug. “Go on then, Mebel.”
“It helps if you wrap a towel around the lobster so you can grip it tight,” Bella says.
Mebel does so, and is grateful for the tip because it does help to make this whole business feel less grisly.
“Lay it down on the board,” Gemma says, “yes, just likethat. Place your knife here, in the center of the head, there you go. And now chop down.”
Mebel shuts her eyes, thinks better of chopping down with her eyes shut, and forces them back open. Then, before she can chicken out, she plunges the tip of her knife. Her knife blade crunches into the lobster head, slicing it in half neatly. The lobster stops moving.
Adam and Bella clap politely.
“Great job, Mebs! C’mere and gimme a hip bump!” Gemma says, sticking her hip up.
Mebel blinks at Gemma, then she lifts the (now very dead) lobster and bumps it to Gemma’s hip.
“All right, not the best hip bump, but we’ll work on it,” Gemma says with a wink.
“Good job, Mebel,” Adam says, before he and Bella return to their respective workstations.
Mebel goes back to working on her lobster. Now that she’s managed to get past the worst part, something seems to have come over her. Adrenaline rushes through her, and as she gazes down at the lobster, Mebel is overcome by a sensation. She can do anything. She can do everything. She is a glorious warrior. It takes her no time at all to take apart the lobster just as Chef Clarke has shown them, and what surprises Mebel the most is the sense of peace that comes over her as she works. It’s something novel, something that comes from putting her hands to work. Something about it eases her mind, allowing the usual cacophony of noises in it to come to a resting place where there is, for once, blessed silence.
After the lobster, they move on to mussels, and again, Mebel doesn’t allow herself time to get squeamish. She doesn’t letherself think of how disgusting it is to have to scrape away the “beard” of the mussels, and how dangerous it is to shuck oysters, and how much of a scallop has to be thrown away. She hyperfocuses on each task, and her hands move like—well, not like an oiled machine, but like an old machine that has suddenly realized that it has more to do in life than lie still.
At the end of the session, they all arrange their seafood on a large plate and then stand at attention with their hands behind their backs as Chef Clarke comes to their workstations and examines their handiwork. He’s satisfied with a few and less so with others, telling them in his clipped British accent that they’ve “nicked the scallop meat here” or “left a bit of digestive tract there.” When he finally arrives at Mebel’s table, she squares her shoulders and looks somewhere an inch to the left of Chef Clarke’s ear because she can’t bear to meet his eye. She braces herself for the inevitable reprimand, and maybe this time, Chef Clarke won’t bother with a private talk, maybe he’ll just tell her in front of the whole class that she doesn’t belong here.
“Ah,” he says, and there is a note of pleasant surprise in his voice that makes Mebel’s ears prick up. He lifts the lobster head, which has been sliced in half, and studies it closely. “This is quite neatly done.”
Quite neatly done, Mebel thinks.That sounds like a good thing, right?
He moves on to her scallop. “You’ve cleaned it well while preserving its shape.” He prods at the mussels and the oysters, and then says, “That is sufficient.” He moves on to the next table.
As Mebel stares after him in shock, she catches sight of Gemma, who is grinning at her and giving her a thumbs-up. Joy sparkles through Mebel’s body like champagne. She grins andnods at Gemma. Adam turns around and mutters, “Yo, good job, Mebs.”
“Thank you,” Mebel says.And you know what?she thinks to the stuffy voice in her head.I kind of like being called Mebs.
Maybe.
The next class, they learnhow to butcher a chicken, and though everything inside Mebel rebels against her picking up the slimy chicken carcass, once again, she manages to bulldoze through it. At the end of the day, Mebel is tired but also strangely energized. Who would’ve known how empowering culinary school would be? She feels so empowered, in fact, that she decides that tonight she is not going to eat dinner at the school’s cafeteria. No, tonight, Mebel Tanadi is going to dress up and go into town for dinner.
Except that, hours later, when Mebel finally arrives at the heart of Cowley, all dressed in Ferragamo, she realizes that there isn’t a single restaurant in Cowley that is worthy of her fabulous outfit. The downtown street, very creatively called “Cowley Road,” is full of what one might generously call “take-out places” or, if one weren’t feeling generous, “dives.” Mebel walks past a Chinese take-out place in which she’s pretty sure two patrons are having a fist fight, then a culturally confused place that serves both “authentic Japanese ramen” and “authentic pad Thai,” then a Tesco, followed by a convenience store, before she loses hope of finding a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Two men spill out of a nearby pub, talking in low voices, and when they spot Mebel, something in their leers makes her pause. She wraps her coat around her tightly.
“Didja see that fancy bint?” one of the men says loudly.
“Heya, luv, where are you headed?” his friend, who sports a large beard, calls out.
Back in Jakarta, Mebel was chauffeured everywhere, from home straight to fancy restaurants, and so running into two spirited strangers who are now talking to her is a newfound experience that she doesn’t quite understand, but is nevertheless filling her with both fear and also, bafflingly, excitement. She wonders if this would be an appropriate time to put her keys in between her fingers before throwing her meanest punch, but just as she’s about to rummage for her keys in her purse, Beard goes, “Ow!”
