Girl on the Block Page 13

  My second abattoir visit, more recent, was on a trip to an extremely high-end processing plant with my colleagues Jamie and Lynsey. The abattoir was as nice as they come (if that’s possible), supplying an upmarket grocery chain with their meat. It looked more like a country club than a kill plant, with manicured lawns and oak trees shading a glass building and the wooden-fronted factory behind. This time I followed them on some of the tour but couldn’t bring myself to go into the kill room. I watched the huge skinning room from afar, caught a glimpse between metal machinery of limp hooves and a head dangling two feet from the floor. But then our tour guide gave us an out: if we didn’t want to see the cutting and sticking, we could wait outside for the rest of the group. I couldn’t do it. My legs had started to shake, and as we made our way through the packing room, the boning room, and the cooling fridges, the closer we got, the sicker I felt. I ended my tour early and waded out through a vat of bleached water to clean my borrowed Wellies. A few men in hard hats and earplugs scurried in and out, some stopping to speak.

  And yet, a mere three days later, I found myself sharing a phenomenal T-bone, dry-aged to thirty-five days, over sides of beef-dripping fries and creamed spinach, with Hattie. Truly it was delicious. Perhaps it seems surprising that it took me only three days to separate the animal I’d seen slaughtered from the steak in front of me. But as I thought more about the experience, and after confronting this necessary yet gruesome part of the meat industry, I chose to accept the reality and to continue on with my carnivorous lifestyle. With that said, I have decided that as I continue to eat meat and to work in the industry, it’s much better to educate myself and others, to refuse to turn a blind eye to the origin of the meat on my plate.

  Perhaps another piece of it is that as humans, when we’re confronted with a violent or disturbing scene, the horror of it fades over time. It’s human nature, a survival instinct, it seems. We become hardened to the grisly details. Like watching a scary movie, one that really affects us: certain details and scenes may haunt us for days and weeks afterward, we may have trouble being home alone at night, and we may sleep with the light on for a while, but eventually we stop thinking about the blood and the gore and the ghosts, and the memory fades. It’s in our interest to block the images out of sight until something crops up to remind us.

  Although few of us have actually witnessed a slaughter, most meat eaters have some sense of what’s involved. We may find the details disturbing, but at the same time they’re all too easy to ignore. We find safety in numbers. If the majority of the population is okay with eating meat, and the way that it is produced, then it must be okay.

  After my first visit to the slaughterhouse, I felt as though I’d passed my meat industry probation. I couldn’t just tell you where your meat came from, I’d been there and I could describe it. Something in me had changed. Once I got back to work, to my manager’s horror, chatting with each customer about provenance, about killing practices, and even about the future of the meat industry became my preferred way of spending the day behind the counter. My time at the Ginger Pig was done, that much I’d decided.

  I began reaching out to other butchers around London, ones that specialized in well-sourced, heritage breed meats and ethical practices. What I really wanted was a marketing job. I was twenty-three, with seven years at the counter behind me, and I was ready for a fresh challenge. My first reply came from the co-owners of another London butcher shop, two of the most influential and powerful people in the meat industry and on the UK food scene. The first, Ollie, ran a family-owned wholesale company that supplied meat to restaurants across London and farther afield throughout the country. The other, Simon, was a renowned chef and cookbook author, involved in some of the top meat-focused restaurants in London. If you asked someone where to find the best steak in the city, regardless of what they told you, chances are that either Ollie or Simon would have had a hand in the menu, the supply, or the overseeing.

  I first met Ollie, along with their third partner in the business, Will, in a sandwich shop opposite a big department store. The meeting had been set up for midday, but I was there at eleven thirty. All I had to go on was a Google image of the both of them and a bottle of water to calm my nerves. At ten past twelve, I spotted the two men sitting on stools by the counter. They looked my way and nodded, motioning “one minute” as they finished up chatting with a gangly-looking bloke in a denim shirt and work boots.

  It suddenly dawned on me that this interview might be more serious than I’d anticipated. I’d chosen a boxy lilac cotton top and black jeans and loafers, trying to look casual, but Will and Ollie were well-groomed and dressed impeccably. I subtly attempted to reapply my eyeliner in the screen of my iPhone as I waited for them to finish their conversation. I hadn’t brought a CV with me—they hadn’t asked me to. Their email reply had simply said, “Free for a coffee?” Had I gotten the wrong end of the stick? Suddenly I began to panic.

  Ollie walked over first, Will trailing close on his heels. He shook my hand, even though his iPhone was still glued to his grip, which made things rather awkward, and pulled out a leather notebook from his satchel. It was late March and he had on a soft knitted jumper beneath a blue tweed blazer and expensive jeans. Around his neck, a cashmere scarf—not Burberry, but surely not far off—was tied in a knot below his pointed chin. The skin around his face was taut, stretched over defined cheekbones, and suntanned. His eyes flicked manically around the room. On his fingers, tapping away at his phone as we spoke, a couple of thick silver rings and a gold wedding band gave way to muscular hands and skinny wrists.

  Both men were in their late forties, but Will gave off a very different vibe. I remember thinking how cool he seemed. With faded red hair and a short beard, he wore a plain black T-shirt beneath a brown leather aviator jacket and blue Levis; equally put together but less flashy. Unlike Ollie, he leaned forward into the conversation, seemed interested in what I had to say, and was probably there to help keep the meeting on track.

  They outlined what they were looking for in their new employee. Their small company had just taken over the meat counter in a fancy department store food hall, selling product and paying rent to the store in return for getting their name out there. Their goal was to grow their brand and their name recognition, and they wanted someone to work with an outside PR firm on events and social media. There was a lot of overlap with the office work I’d done at the Ginger Pig, and the rest I could learn to do in time. They seemed impressed by my past experience, and I played up to it.

  “By hiring me, you’d have a marketing manager who’s been in the industry for nearly seven years. I can cut meat, I know meat, I know the processes.”

  They seemed to buy it, and I left ready to hand in my notice at the Ginger Pig. A week passed before I heard from them again. I’d emailed Ollie with some second-rate ideas I had for promoting their brand, to show him that I was already thinking about how to do the job. He replied in a conversational tone, a world away from Sophie’s overly curt, formal emails. There was no “Dear Jess”; it was more “Sure thing—are you around next week?” This time, he wanted Simon to join the meeting.

  The prospect thrilled me. Simon was a bit of an idol to me. He represented everything that I thought I wanted in the industry. He wrote a column for a food magazine, and in my weekly media roundup for Sophie, I’d often seen him in party photos and quoted in articles on the industry. I’d eaten at some of his restaurants, and you might say that for the meat industry he was about as glamorous as things were going to get. Simon had absolutely no idea who I was and seemed skeptical of me from the beginning.

  He was late for our meeting, for a start. In the short time I’d known Ollie, I had gathered that he could be erratic, emailing me at odd hours and taking days to reply. It was a surprise, then, that Ollie was on time and Simon was late, strolling in twenty minutes after we’d sat down with a cup of coffee. Simon was tallish, stocky, with a permanently aggressive expression. He kept on his waterproof ja
cket through the meeting, which was zipped all the way up to his chin. His baggy jeans were wet at the cuffs from the rain that had gathered on the pavement outside.

  He sat down in the chair opposite me without offering his hand or asking for my name. He had a strange presence, a kind of power that made you sit up and pay attention. Ollie greeted him quietly, still staring into his phone, and we waited in awkward silence as he finished an email.

  “Simon, this is Jess. Will and I have been talking to her about coming on board. She worked for the Ginger Pig. She’s a butcher.”

  I’d hoped that he might be impressed, or surprised, or even amused, but his expression didn’t change.

  “Jess, this is Simon, the other half of the business.”

  In some strange and desperate ploy to get him to like me, I’d cooked up a batch of pork skin the night before in my shitty Whitechapel kitchen. The stench was still there in the morning—burnt fat and oil—and despite my best efforts to keep the thing contained, boiling hot pork lard had leaked all over the oven. I’d had messages from my flatmates about it already that day: the kitchen smelled like dead animals and the oven needed to be cleaned immediately. Rather sheepishly, I pulled out my Tupperware container full of pork crackling and set it on the table.

  “Is that a bribe?” he asked.

  “It can be,” I said, before lying through my teeth. “I’m meeting my dad later and thought I’d make him some crackling.”

  Ollie had stayed silent throughout this exchange, eyes still glued to the screen of his phone, tapping away. He must have emailed and texted fifteen people since we’d sat down, flicking from Outlook, to WhatsApp, back to his messages again. Whenever Simon spoke, Ollie’s eyes darted to the ceiling or to his phone. The two of them didn’t look at each other once, not even when the conversation involved all three of us. Simon’s little sarcastic remarks that followed everything Ollie said made me understand that there was a strange tension here.

  Barely ten minutes after we’d sat down, a pay rate was decided (by Ollie; Simon had no opinion on the matter), a start date, and a notice period for the Ginger Pig. Once we had finished, Simon got to his feet, checked the time on the screen of his phone, and bid us farewell. He had an important meeting to get to in Soho, and he was already late. I don’t think I saw him for another two months after that.

  When I handed in my notice at the Ginger Pig, there was a kind of relief and understanding in Lynsey’s eyes that made me think she had known I was on my way out the whole time. It was a few days before my birthday; I would finish at GP on the Saturday, take a few days off to celebrate, and start the new job the following Wednesday. On my last day at GP, the bakers who made our pastries made an enormous beef pie, with small pastry lettering that read WE WILL MISS YOU JESS, along with little pastry stars and hearts adorning the crimped edging. Erika cried, I cried, and then we all trekked down to the Inn on the Park in Hackney for some serious outdoor drinking. I drank so much that I spent the next morning, the day before my birthday, throwing up as my parents, who had driven down from Derbyshire, attempted to make me open my birthday presents. We ate some of the pie for breakfast. It lasted for six days with one serving for dinner and the other for supper each day, and I still had to throw some in the bin a week later. I even took in a slice to warm up for my lunch on my first day at the new job.

  On Wednesday morning, in a blue shirtdress and pumps, I walked the short distance from Whitechapel to Shoreditch, grabbing a coffee on the way from one of the countless independent cafés that had sprung up around the area. I was to meet Will at his office space, just behind Old Street station, at nine thirty. I carried my laptop, a new notebook filled on the first page with a list of marketing ideas, and some more pork crackling. The walk was pleasant, right through Spitalfields market, an old and now more gentrified clothing and bric-a-brac market lined with a circumference of trendy bars and restaurants. For the first time in years, I felt as though London was mine. I was a marketing manager, I was going to have real responsibility and authority, and I was going to have a desk of my own on which to work. It was a nine-to-five job, meaning that I would finally be able to see my friends after work and go out on weekends. This was what I’d been waiting for. In my mind, this was the dream, combining butchery with a desk job. Things couldn’t have been more perfect.

  I arrived and buzzed for Will as I’d been instructed to. The building was nestled into a row of other similar office spaces on a quiet road in Shoreditch. Inside things were surprisingly busy, with a line of ten people waiting for the small lift that traveled up and down the central column of the building. I opted to make my way up the six flights of stairs, damp on my back and thighs beginning to chafe, and found the door. It wasn’t the sort of traditional office I’d imagined—instead, the door opened on a huge open space with six or seven clumps of desks, each separated slightly from one another. There were two meeting rooms with glass walls and double doors, one by the kitchen in the corner and the other in the middle of the room on the right-hand side. Both were occupied by employees who sat facing a shared video screen, their laptops in front of them open and running.

  I wandered around a little aimlessly, discovering the bathroom, a shower, and the fridge, before a man approached from a nearby desk and asked me if my name was Jess. Slender and balding, he introduced himself as George and sat me down at a desk opposite him, in front of a giant Mac desktop and a stack of unsorted mail. I was told that Will was running late, and that it would be another half hour before he even got into London. I decided to keep busy until he arrived. While still at the Ginger Pig, and before Sophie had signed me out of the company Dropbox, I had managed to copy some useful files onto my computer, including our media calendar with important industry dates and events and that awful Excel document full of journalists’ names and contact info. With nothing to do until Will arrived, I worked on the media calendar, customizing it to look less Ginger Pig. After about an hour, when I was close to having exhausted the task, Will stormed in, looking flustered.

  “Morning, Jess,” he said, throwing his bag on his chair and scuttling off around the corner to the kitchen. There were a few clangs and scrapes and the sound of a kettle boiling before he returned with a huge mug of coffee. He sat down at his desk across from me, logged in to his computer, and spent the next hour scrolling intently and typing away with his two index fingers in the way that only middle-aged men do, and swearing occasionally when he saw an email he didn’t like. I sat there on the edge of my chair, waiting for instructions, and moved on to updating my journalist Excel document, slowing down the nearer I got to finishing, and drafting a couple of emails I had no intention of sending. It must have been near midday when he finally came over to my desk.

  He sat down close, pulling his desk chair right over until he was inches away. I prayed that my breath didn’t smell and talked him through the media calendar and the ideas that I had for promoting the company. They had a much smaller following than the Ginger Pig, so not all of it would work, but I hoped Will thought it was ambitious. When I had run through January and February on the calendar, he turned to me.

  “That’s very impressive, Jess,” he said with a smile. “But what’s that?”

  He was pointing at my shoulder, and it took a moment for me to understand what he was asking. When I looked down, I saw a coffee stain running from just over my shoulder on my back, right down to the top of my left breast. Mixed with the pale blue, the fancy coffee I’d decided to buy that morning had turned a good section of my blouse khaki green.

  “I—I—don’t know how I did that,” I said, and truly I didn’t. How could someone spill coffee over their shoulder and down their back without noticing?

  “Don’t worry—happens to the best of us,” Will said, and got back up. He was finished with my calendar, and he had work to do. March onward was left unread. I sent it to him in an email, but never got a response.

  I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how the company ran. They
had three outlets: the shop in north London, the department store counter on Oxford Street, and their online delivery service. It was a far smaller company than the Ginger Pig, where operations ranged from the farm, main bakery, and butchery up in Yorkshire to the head office and all of the shops down in London. Thinking back to the mistakes I’d seen Sophie and Naomi make, I decided that I would spend my second day visiting the north London store and the counter and introducing myself to everyone. When I told Will about my plans, he frowned but gave me the okay. He clearly thought it was a waste of time.

  On my walk home, it began to rain. It was June, and no one had been expecting the foul weather. Men in shorts and women in summer dresses scattered and took refuge beneath the awnings of the cafés and bars around Spitalfields market. Eventually it began to pour, and without an umbrella my pale blue dress turned see-through. There was no point in seeking shelter, so I walked all the way home drenched to the bone, feet in soaking wet sandals. Once I hit Whitechapel, which tended to be filled with letchy men, I sped up to a jog. When I finally got home, before peeling off my dress to shower, I checked the coffee stain on my shoulder. The rain had washed it away.

  I HAD BY THEN LEARNED THAT LONDONERS ARE NEVER PREPARED FOR the weather, whether it’s heavy rain, thick snow, or oppressive heat. And that summer, I guess I’d become a true Londoner. The city endured a seemingly endless heat wave, with high temperatures between 28 and 34°C (82 and 93°F). I’d wake up on weekday mornings covered in sweat to find the sun beaming through my venetian blinds, grumbling that every supermarket and electricity shop in the city had run out of fans due to the heavy demand.