Girl on the Block Page 16

  As background, you should probably know that barbecuers are a very particular breed of foodie. They are the enthusiasts of the meat world, spending twelve to twenty-four hours over a weekend smoking a piece of brisket on equipment that cost them thousands of pounds, buying enormous cuts of pork to cook low and slow, reading up on the science of cooking with live fire, and trawling through forums for advice on cooking the very best pulled pork of their lives. They’re heavily influenced by the traditions of Texas and Southern barbecue, and Simon and Ollie seemed to understand their exact needs. They had taken to labeling barbecue cuts on our website with the American names: pork butt, point and flat brisket, prime rib. By doing so, they had single-handedly captured the barbecue audience in the UK before any of their competitors.

  The next day, shortly after I’d sent the customer our response and the courier had collected the guy’s new short ribs for delivery, he emailed again asking if we’d sent him short ribs with enough fat. Now sober and panicking and having forgotten overnight about the complaint, Ollie jumped back in and got involved. He emailed me asking whether I had personally checked the new short ribs to make sure they were fatty enough and whether they would be to this customer’s satisfaction. I admitted that I hadn’t. I’d simply had another order sent to him from the same batch, as instructed. I waited a little while for Ollie to respond, wondering if I’d done the wrong thing. It turned out that I had. He launched into an expletive-filled tirade. He couldn’t believe that I’d sent out the new order without checking the meat. He thought I’d have had the fucking sense, apparently.

  I hated feeling that I’d disappointed someone, perhaps another by-product of being an only child. My ever-supportive parents would have said they were proud of me if I was spending my days scrubbing vomit from toilets, and the only time I can remember disappointing my mother was when she found a condom in the bathroom bin when I was almost fifteen. The look on her face broke me, and I tried my damnedest to never disappoint my parents again. I did fail a few years later at seventeen, when I got mortifyingly drunk at a party in Sheffield and threw up all over my dad’s car, but his disappointment soon turned to sympathy when he looked into my bloodshot eyes the next day.

  This time the stakes were higher. I wasn’t a kid anymore and this was a real job. I’d messed up, and I probably deserved the bollocking that I was getting from Ollie. Every thirty seconds or so, Will, who was sitting at the desk across from me, peeked around his computer screen to look at me. My view of him was blurry from trying to hold back tears, and I pulled my chair out from the desk and staggered to the bathroom, where I wept quietly for five minutes. Eventually I wiped the running mascara from my face and walked back out into the office. Will watched me sit back down, chewed awkwardly on the inside of his lip, and then hastily went back to typing with his index fingers, pushing the mouse idly around his desk until he found what he was looking for.

  I read and reread Ollie’s emails to myself in a low whisper, hearing his harsh Essex accent that made the profanities sound like regular words. I imagined him sitting in the office of his wholesale company, poring over his MacBook, telling everyone that Jess was incompetent. I slid down into my chair and hid behind the screen of my computer until Will went out for lunch. He didn’t say anything to me as he left, only shrugged a little, grabbed his keys and jacket, and scurried off to the stairwell.

  I was certain that I was going to lose my job. I thought about it through lunch, two cigarette breaks, and a walk that afternoon to get coffee from the store across the street. I needed regular intervals of fresh air to stop myself from having a panic attack. Will had been out for meetings all afternoon, and I considered packing up what little “stuff” I’d acquired and calling it a day. When I sat back down at my desk, fourth coffee of the day in hand, I had an unread email from Simon.

  Now, now. No need for all that, Ollie.

  Minutes later, while I was still gawping at my screen, another email from Ollie came in. He was sorry that he’d overreacted.

  I still felt like crying, but now it was purely from relief. I silently thanked God, wherever he was, and threw the coffee in the bin. My nerves, having already suffered enough, were to have a rest. We never heard from the short rib guy again.

  But, not long after the short rib incident, I began to see sides of Ollie that made me nervous. He would text me in the evening after work hours, just occasionally at first, and then more often, and on Saturdays during my shifts at the department store. He would begin by asking me how things were, how I was feeling, and then he would ask me to chase something for him. A lot of the time, due to the nature of online business, there had been a problem with a courier or someone hadn’t gotten their delivery and I needed to deal with it. At first I didn’t mind. James, my boyfriend of two years by then, was living with me in the shitty, mouse-ridden Whitechapel house and we were looking for a new flat. I was usually glad for the distraction from my nightly ritual of trawling through the flat-hunting websites for a spare room.

  Eventually the texts and emails from Ollie were coming almost every single night, asking me to chase something, to check up on this, to give this customer a call to apologize. It didn’t stop. On my mother’s birthday, a Saturday that I had booked off weeks in advance, I picked up my phone at one point to see seven missed calls and twenty or so emails from Ollie. The more I ignored Ollie, the more frequent his calls became. In the end, I gave in. Standing in the middle of the Natural History Museum gift shop, I drafted an email while my exasperated family picked through a pile of stuffed animals waiting for me to finish.

  I couldn’t relax. Each time I left work, I made a conscious effort to turn my phone on silent and avoid all emails, but it didn’t matter. If I didn’t reply to an email from Ollie, you could bet there’d be a text from him a few moments later asking me to check in. My mother and father told me to just ignore it, to switch off completely or bill Ollie for extra hours, but I was afraid to go that far. I worried constantly about losing my job or angering these three people who I thought could literally make or break my career. In person, Ollie was always kind and funny; it wasn’t until he began to type that his unpleasant side came out.

  James, who had been working at a beer stall in Borough Market after I’d put in a good word for him while still at the Ginger Pig, supported me, until he didn’t. He became fed up that I couldn’t bring myself to switch off. Halfway through watching a movie together, a notification would spring up in the corner of my laptop screen—a new email—and I’d have to take a break to answer. If I needed to make a phone call while we were seeing a movie in the theater, I would leave and take it in the bathroom, returning only to realize I’d missed the best part of the film. We spent a week in Italy together that autumn, and I promised that there would be no work. I stuck to my word, but when I came back, I’d been looped in to every single conversation that the guys had had for the last seven days and had more than three hundred emails to trawl through.

  Simon seemed to know how to disconnect, but both Will and Ollie ran other businesses and had investments in at least a few other companies, and there simply weren’t enough hours in the day for them to get everything done. Because of this, they were switched on all the time, and they expected me to be, too. Going out for drinks with friends after work became impossible and something I started to dread, mainly because it was inevitable that I’d end up on the phone to our courier company chasing one of the thirty-odd orders that had gone out that day. On top of that, there might be an email flying around about a meeting, a complaint, or perhaps an idea that Ollie had had while out at an event that night. We were in the process of building a new website for the company. The project had started with a lot of enthusiasm from all parties, but six months later it still hadn’t gotten off the ground. This was a huge cause for late-night emailing, as was the mounting stress from our accounts department about our takings and how we could increase them. If I didn’t chime in on those emails, chances were that I wouldn’t know what was g
oing on in the office the following day or that I’d be cut out of the conversation.

  During the daytime, though, when I was actually in the office, I barely heard from Ollie, or even Will. Although we sat opposite each other, Will had other, more pressing matters to attend to than a butchery that was barely breaking even and a new website that was costing us a hundred thousand pounds to set up. Ollie was caught up in constant business meetings, with more exciting prospects, and I eventually came to the view that the butchery was just a way for him to get his name out there and ride Simon’s coattails. During the day, I was left to it and learned to only disturb them or seek advice when it was urgent.

  Nine months into the job, in the spring of 2016, I was starting to miss life on the block. Whenever we were short-staffed at the department store or the north London shop, I was called in to cover, and I began to look forward to these breaks from the office. During a particularly busy period, I ended up working for a solid month behind the counter in the department store, before switching halfway through the day and traveling north to close up the shop. I was, of course, still expected to carry on my marketing manager duties, but in all honesty, I immersed myself in butchery again and would do nothing but cut meat all day and ignore my email.

  I craved those times. Alone at the counter or in the shop with few customers, I could spend the whole day working on a lamb or a pig or a forequarter of beef. There was no one to stop me from working on more expensive pieces of meat or to complain about the waste. I taught myself more in those days of cutting alone than I’d learned in either of my previous jobs. I was free to experiment and to try cutting new things. I loved everything about it. I came to treasure my time alone with a carcass or piece of meat, and to really take my time and make every cut perfect.

  My evenings at home weren’t nearly as idyllic. Often, once the day was finished, I’d drink a bottle of wine with James, sometimes even two, just to unwind. Then I’d hit bed as early as I could manage in order to be up again at five thirty the next day. Toward the end of that summer, I began to suspect that James was depressed. He would stay after hours at the beer shop and drink four or five pints before returning home, then shut himself in our bathroom for half an hour before joining me in the bedroom to begin an almighty argument that almost always ended with both of us crying and going to sleep angry.

  My suspicions were confirmed when he sat me down and told me that he was, in fact, struggling with alcoholism and depression. I understood how tough things were for him: his job in the market paid very little, and he felt as though he had lost himself. On weekends I would pay for whatever we did, in addition to paying three-quarters of our rent just so he could get by at the end of the month. We had originally met on Tinder, and after a year of doing long distance he had moved to London from a neighboring county so that we could be together. When he’d picked up and moved to London to be with me, he had thought that life would be full of independence and excitement, but in actual fact he was dependent on me and his job was dull. He would go home for a few weeks at a time to try to sort out his head, and he tried writing about his feelings and his drinking problem, but nothing worked. This period was truly hellish for me. I would come home from work every night shattered and exhausted to make him dinner and, honestly, to ensure that he wouldn’t try to kill himself. He was drunk every single night, we barely spoke, and I would be emailing late into the night trying to keep up with Ollie and Will and Simon’s grand ideas. James and I took a week’s holiday in Barcelona that September and we managed to find some kind of happiness away from London on the trip, but once we returned home our arguments were worse than ever, sometimes turning physical. We ended our relationship in late October just before Halloween, having completely fallen out of love, and James moved out.

  I was happier for a while. I threw myself into work and gladly answered emails after hours in the room that I now lived in alone. But feelings of inadequacy that I’d been carrying around with me since I was a teenager had taken hold. For years I had struggled with self-confidence and body image issues, hating the way that I looked to the point that in my younger years I had sometimes refused to leave the house. Now, as an adult, all of this manifested itself in buying new clothes to make myself feel better, immediately sleeping with anyone I dated, and searching for gratification in places where I knew there was none. My friends supported me to no end, but I couldn’t bring myself to fix the problem. Like James, I was addicted to making myself feel bad. Soon after our breakup, I realized that I too was depressed. When I looked in the mirror, I hated what I saw. I was lonely, and I hadn’t been able to hold down a boyfriend. How would I ever find someone to love me like this? It was a daily struggle, and sometimes I could hardly bear to drag myself out of bed and into the working world.

  I took Ollie and Will aside and told them that I was struggling with my mental health, and that I needed my own time. They seemed to understand, and for a moment it seemed as though they finally recognized the problems and were going to do something about them. My workload became more reasonable—Ollie agreed to keep my job within the hours I was contracted for. From there I focused on building and perfecting our new website with a hired design agency, writing copy for our products, and trying to build our social media following during my workday. My efforts seemed to be paying off, and our profits were up. Sean, the butcher in the north London store, had moved away from the shop to work full-time as quality manager at Ollie’s wholesale operation, and in his place we hired Harry, whom I knew from the Ginger Pig, as a new manager for the shop.

  Harry was enthusiastic, had been in the trade for years, and had some great, fresh ideas for the shop. He fit in aesthetically, with hipster-style sleeve tattoos, a shaved head, and a long, well-kept beard. We also hired his girlfriend, Emily, a chef-turned-butcher who had worked in a couple of places I was familiar with, and the two of them gave the shop an overhaul to the point where, besides the décor, it was all brand new. Harry sought out new farms to supply our beef and pork, came up with loyalty schemes to increase foot traffic, and made the counter look grand and full and better than it ever had before. He spotted problems, brought them straight to Ollie, and Ollie resolved them with a renewed sense of excitement.

  But some problems weren’t as easy to fix, including one that stemmed from the growing demand for rare and native-breed meats among our customers. This was a trend in both the meat industry and the restaurant industry. Chefs and butchers increasingly wanted to know exactly where their meat was coming from so that they could add this detail about provenance to their counter information and menus. Of course, this was a good thing, but native and rare breeds are rare for a reason, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for the commercial meat industry to keep up. Most steak restaurants worth knowing will have the breed of their beef listed at the bottom of their menu, and if they’re worth going back to this breed will change often, because no one breed can meet the demands of a quality restaurant using prime cuts for more than a few weeks.

  In the UK, the demand for more information on the origins of our meat really ramped up in 2013, when the now infamous “horsemeat scandal” rocked the news. Consumers buying meat from supermarkets like Tesco were shocked to find that fresh meat products advertised as beef were found to contain a large percentage of horsemeat and pork. Out of twenty-seven beef products tested by a selected government committee, 37 percent tested positive for horse DNA and 85 percent for pork. The presence of horsemeat was of course the hardest to stomach, but there was also outcry from Muslim and Jewish communities who had purchased the products under the impression that they did not contain forbidden pork. Several food processing plants across Europe were thrown into the spotlight, among them Silvercrest in Yorkshire, which supplied beef to Burger King with almost five hundred outlets throughout the country, and ABP’s Tipperary plant, which supplied the supermarket giants with cooked products. By March 2013, ten huge food processing firms with outlets numbering in the millions across Europe had come f
orward to say that they had found horsemeat in their products. The source of the horsemeat in question was traced back to Romania and Poland, where slaughter of horses was both legal and incredibly common, with the meat having been relabeled somewhere on its journey to processing plants across Europe and the UK. Ultimately Tesco’s market value decreased by more than 350 million euros, sales in frozen meats in the UK dropped by 43 percent, and the UK consumer’s confidence in supermarket meats was shattered. A report by the Guardian newspaper in the spring of 2013 revealed that independent butchers had seen a 30 percent rise in profits.

  Due to incidents like this one and an increasing focus on health, meat eaters have become more discerning, with many developing a need to be reassured by the words rare breed stamped on their meat. The pressures of big business and marketing also play a role. The popularity of Aberdeen Angus beef in the UK is a perfect example of this trend, with some misleading results. Originally a small Scottish breed of beef cattle, Aberdeen Angus was named the UK’s most popular breed in a 2014 poll, and until recently meat eaters around the world regarded Aberdeen Angus as some of the best beef money could buy, though few could tell you why. In the US a sub-breed, Black Angus, is the most popular breed of cattle to be bred for meat, though in this case it’s not a rare breed, and the marbling of meat from Black Angus cattle tends to be inferior to many other breeds.

  In the early 2000s, various fast-food chains throughout the US began multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns promoting “certified” Aberdeen Angus beef in their burgers. McDonald’s even put a special Angus beef burger on menus in many US locations and in Australia. The hype around Angus beef continued, with customers looking for this breed as they came to believe that it was far superior to anything else. Supermarkets soon caught on, and now Aberdeen Angus (UK) and Black Angus (US) meat is sold at meat counters across the globe. The trouble is that Angus cattle are also considered to be “easy calvers,” and as a result they are often crossbred over other breeds for that trait alone. A recent study by the American Angus Association showed that the Angus breed accounted for 70 percent or more of the genetics of the commercial beef in the US, meaning that other pure bloodlines are slowly dying out. Consumers are being duped into believing that Black Angus is a superior rare breed, when it’s actually the most common in the US.