Girl on the Block Page 18

  But to his detriment, Harry did not work well under stress (a trait that I also recognized in myself). His MO was to work countless hours, neglecting his outside relationships and taking his stress out on those around him (again, sounded familiar). Close to Christmas of 2016, he sent me a series of angry texts on a day I’d taken off to finish part of my master’s thesis. Somewhere during the eighty hours I’d worked the week before, I’d mistakenly entered an online customer’s billing address as their delivery address. He’d caught it before the order went out and thus the customer’s Christmas dinner wasn’t ruined, but not before he’d sent me a series of irate texts asking how many other fuckups I’d made.

  In the early months of 2017, I graduated with my master’s degree in creative writing. It had been a long slog, with plenty of late nights working on a novel to hand in as my dissertation. Looking back, I’ll admit that in my haste to finish the novel, I’d clearly stolen a handful of plotlines from Peaky Blinders. My plan all along had been to carry on with the novel after graduation while working for Ollie and Simon full-time, spending my evenings on the book. Only I was twenty-four, single, and more focused on boozing, dating, and shagging than writing. University had deadlines, course material, and teachers to chase and praise you. Without this kind of structure, I struggled to write anything at all and couldn’t motivate myself to finish my pseudo-plagiarized novel. Instead I racked up an impressive dating CV, going on two or three dates a week, and not one of them ended well.

  The novel clearly wasn’t going anywhere, so I decided to try something different. I pushed my fiction writing to the side and decided that clearly, there were enough writers in the world with an authority on heartbreak. I would write about what I knew and pen a short piece of creative nonfiction about the meat fridge at work. I submitted it to Lena Dunham’s now-defunct feminist newsletter, the Lenny Letter, of which I was a fan, and waited to hear back. Two weeks went by with no response. I passed the time cutting meat and attempting to organize the company by day, drinking and stuffing my face with some kind of Asian food by night. I really started to doubt myself—perhaps my tutors and peers at university who’d told me they liked my writing were just being kind. Perhaps my parents had even lied about how much they enjoyed reading my stuff.

  And then, at last, an email back. This editor was interested in my point of view and my voice, but she wanted something more concrete from me. She asked me to write about what it was like butchering my very first animal, and so I sat and made notes about the farm shop, about that first lamb, about driving home after the experience, and then I began to write. The memories came rushing back, and I produced a new piece that was published three months later, going out to the newsletter’s nearly four hundred thousand subscribers.

  This was a big step for me, both as a butcher and a writer. A few weeks later, a couple of newspapers reached out about doing some features, as did the hot sauce brand Tabasco. They wanted a butcher for their summer campaign, which was centered on developing the nation’s barbecuing skills.

  It caused friction between Harry and me. He’d been in the industry his entire life, and yes, he was a much quicker and altogether better butcher than I was. I’m sure that he resented me for that. I knew that he didn’t want me to do interviews or photo shoots in the shop while he was there, so I volunteered to open and work the shop for him, giving him some days off. This way, instead of awkwardly giving interviews or having photos taken of me with Harry in the background watching, I was completely at ease.

  A videographer named Amy who worked for BBC Channel 4 also got in touch about making a short film about butchery with me. She came in on a Monday when Harry and Emily were off, and we managed to shoot the whole thing within a day, plus an interview afterward. We ordered burgers for lunch and sat outside the shop on the small benches out front talking about life and the meat industry, and every time a customer walked through the front door I’d have to run in after them and dash behind the counter to tie up my hair and put on my apron. I’d never had someone take such an interest in what I did. A few weeks later, Amy contacted me to say that the interview part of the film hadn’t saved properly on her hard drive and was completely distorted. I knew full well that Harry would be reluctant to let me do any more filming that month (he generally needed three to four weeks in between my little projects to forget about the last one and stop being angry), and so the interview never made it into the final piece. When Amy sent me a link to the completed film, I was initially too excited to notice that with “Lady Meat” as the title, I was far more likely to show up on porn search results than in anything having to do with butchery.

  My newfound “fame” had pissed Harry off, but there were bigger, more personal things that were about to drive a further wedge between us. Harry, in a stroke of genius, had hired one of our regular customers, Paul, as a Saturday assistant, paying him for his help in the form of a hefty “meat allowance.” Paul was a fanatical cook with too much money. He worked for a historic London events space as their head of marketing, and he came in every weekend to spend about two hundred pounds on meat that he was terribly picky about. Paul had always rubbed me the wrong way when he came into the shop on weekends. Whenever I saw him approach the shop, his girlfriend and tiny dog in tow, I’d turn the other way and skip down the stairs to sit on the loo for five minutes. He was rude when anyone other than Harry served him at the counter, and he tended to dress in flowery shirts, Doc Marten boots, and Ray-Bans. Still, Paul wanted to learn about butchery, and Harry needed an extra pair of hands, so the two of them struck a deal.

  Paul kept out of my way for a long time, instead fawning over Harry and Emily at work and afterward at drinks. He was constantly asking questions, eagerly scribbling things down in a notebook that he kept in the office. But in the typical butcher tradition, Harry didn’t want to teach him. He and Emily took holidays whenever they could, and as a result Paul and I were often left to cover the shop together. Paul seemed so eager, and eventually I began to sympathize with his predicament—after all, I’d been through the same thing in my earlier years. He was grateful for anything I could tell him, any fact or tidbit he could learn, and so I taught him the best I could, and we struck up a friendship.

  Only it wasn’t just friendly. For a girl in her early twenties with body image issues so significant that she was going to therapy once a week, the attention was like catnip. When Harry and Emily returned, Paul and I barely spoke, as though we had an understanding that the flirting was our little secret. In truth, we did a pretty good job of pretending that we hated each other.

  Harry and Emily went away again in March, and it was just the two of us on our own for a couple of days. The first day we spent time breaking down lamb and pork and then trimming onglet (hanger) steak for a wholesale customer.

  We decided that the next day we’d go for drinks after work together. I brought a dress with me to work that day that I knew was flattering, and I saw that he’d also brought a change of clothes that he stuffed into his locker before work. We spent the whole day laughing, joking, and being overly familiar with each other, and when the day ended, I locked up and we wandered up to the nearby high street. It was a date. It felt like a date, and we both acted like it was a date. I knew we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing—this man had a girlfriend he lived and co-owned a dog with—but there was something about him that excited me. I felt safe, and wanted, a feeling I hadn’t had in years. We stayed at the pub for five or six rounds.

  This was a particularly reckless and wanton time in my life. Before long I told Emily about the encounter in confidence, foolishly believing that she wouldn’t tell Harry, but of course she did. Harry refused to speak to me for a week, and when he finally did, he accused me of abusing my position and making a fool of myself. I was convinced that he was wrong. Paul and I carried on our affair behind everyone’s backs, going on secret dates, texting almost all day. Then the weekend would roll around and we would pretend to hate the sight of each other at
work. As far as Harry and Emily were concerned, Paul and I had called it off. This went on for a month or two, until Paul messaged me one morning when I was on my way to the shop to say that he’d told his girlfriend about us, after she’d asked why he hadn’t come home the night before. He said that he wanted to work things out with his girlfriend and that it was over. The moment that our conversation ended, I stormed through the door of the shop and before I’d even taken off my bag I had told everything to a rather bewildered Harry, who had been in since six thirty in the morning. He seemed to take pity on me, and he vowed never to have Paul back in the shop.

  But, of course, it didn’t end there. Paul did come back, and I had to negotiate my way around him in the least awkward way possible. Over the months that we’d seen each other, he’d made me feel special. Stupidly, I knew that I was falling for him, and it didn’t take long for us to gravitate back toward each other.

  The worst of it came when one summer evening, Paul invited me to come by the house that he and his girlfriend shared in West London while she was away. The day had been hot, and I caught the bus over from Baker Street station, sitting on the damp seat until the back of my shirt was almost soaked through, praying for some kind of breeze whenever the door opened. My nerves were in tatters, and when I finally did get to his house, I was a sweating mess, made worse by how awful I felt about what we were doing. I smoked three cigarettes in a row in the small park opposite his front door and then went inside.

  We greeted each other awkwardly, and despite the fact he had already warned me, I leapt and ran to hide when the doorbell rang. It was only the dog sitter. Hiding in his room, I flicked through his girlfriend’s clothes, which hung on a rail in the back of the bedroom, and I wondered whether they would fit me. When all was clear, we drank gin in the sunshine, played with his dog in the small patio garden filled with his expensive barbecue equipment out back, and smoked roll-up cigarettes until our throats hurt.

  Later, as we lay there in the bed they both shared, the gin took hold. I sat up, looked him directly in the face, and asked when he was going to split up with his girlfriend. He said nothing. I asked again, putting on my underwear in a tear-filled haze. He only answered when I threatened to leave, and of course it was the answer I’d known all along: he wasn’t going to, things between them were good, and the only thing that wasn’t was their sex life. That’s where I came in. That’s also where a lot of other girls, including sex workers, had come in over the last few years. There was nothing to be done except to put on my bravest face.

  I gathered my things and went to shower in their tiny bathroom. I stood under cold water, crying, and then sat on the toilet for fifteen minutes while the shower still ran, frantically pulling out loose strands of my hair to leave dusted around the place. I took off one of my cheap Topshop rings and put it in her makeup bag, hoping she might find it when she got home, and I tossed an earring as far as I could underneath their bed. He’d found both of them before I’d even gotten into my taxi.

  Afterward I met Hattie for a drink. I told her what had happened, defiantly ignoring my sadness and pretending to be absolutely fine with it. Inside I was broken, and Hattie could tell. At work the next day I couldn’t stop myself from crying and took regular bathroom breaks just to sit inside the stall and weep. I felt ashamed, as though I had been used and had allowed myself to be used. That same night, Hattie and I went out for dinner and she took out her phone, texted Paul, and told him to stay away from me once and for all.

  The very last time Paul and I saw each other was the following Saturday. I had prayed that he wouldn’t come in for his shift, but he did. I felt a strange sense of relief that nothing was going on between us anymore, that the uncertainty had been taken away, but he kept on saying that we needed to go for a drink. Closure, he called it.

  After work, we left separately and met at the pub down the road from the shop. He had clearly rehearsed his speech, telling me that I had led him on and had known what I was doing all along, and blaming me for pulling him back in after the first time we had called it quits. I completely lost it and let loose on him. I stood up, flailed my arms, screamed. I told him that my heart was breaking and that he was the one who knew exactly what he’d been doing. I left abruptly and got a taxi to see Hattie, and we went out dancing until the early hours. The only time I paused was to send a lengthy text message to Paul, detailing that he should stop hurting his girlfriend and get his shit together. Then I blocked his number.

  Paul didn’t come back to the shop after that Saturday, and I told Harry and Emily the whole story. They weren’t angry. Far from it; they treated me with kindness, and Harry again swore he would never have Paul back in the shop (though this changed not long after I left the company). He encouraged me to take some time off from dating and to concentrate on myself, to take my therapy more seriously, and that’s what I ended up doing. Harry knew that I had given Paul nothing but a story; in his own words, Paul was the fanatical foodie who had managed to bed a female butcher.

  I was twenty-four, and suddenly the immaturity of my behavior hit home. I needed to get my act together, rather than struggling with my mental health in a job that I was again beginning to hate. Harry said they could manage without me in the shop, and I went back to the office to work Monday through Friday. But as it turned out, a nine-to-five desk job wasn’t what I wanted either. It was pleasant for a while, but I began to crave the block again, and I found myself spending time cutting meat on my own again, which relaxed me. Meanwhile, work in the office felt repetitive. I became more and more frustrated with the false promises that Ollie, Will, and Simon had made over the years about the big things we were going to do with the company. None of it had ever materialized. I was left with a sour taste in my mouth.

  Eventually I got back in touch with Lynsey from the Ginger Pig, who had recently been made a director. We met for coffee, but she didn’t have a job for me. She said they could take me on, but there wouldn’t be the chance for a permanent role until nearer to Christmas. Sophie had also moved on from the company at this point, and I knew that if they could find the right job for me, I would be happy there. But the timing wasn’t quite there. I thought of the advice that my dad had always given me: “Keep your powder dry, Jess.” So I stuck it out with Ollie, Will, and Simon for a bit longer. At times, things weren’t all that bad. I had been helping Simon proofread his new book that was due to come out in the New Year, and I was enjoying it. By this point Will was an actual friend I could confide in, and he always promised me that things would get better. But when I say that Ollie was the most difficult person I’ve ever worked for, I mean it.

  In September 2017, three months after we’d originally met for coffee, Lynsey called me at the office. She wanted to meet for a pint. I didn’t think it was for anything more than a catch-up—it had been so long since we’d spoken, and after the last time we’d met for coffee, we’d ended up getting Lebanese food and horrifically hammered. We met at a bar close to the office straight after work. She was waiting with a beer on the table in front of her. The bar was quiet, and I kept looking around nervously, just in case Will or one of his office buddies decided to come in for a drink after work, too.

  We exchanged pleasantries, and Lynsey told me that she’d recently bought her flat in Hackney with her wonderful graphic designer partner. Then she spent ten minutes flicking through her phone to show me videos of their adorable pug, Julio. I was convinced that this was nothing more than a friendly catch-up, and then Lynsey offered me a job. It was for the new role of online operations manager at the Ginger Pig. To keep up with the times, GP was developing an online delivery business like many other butchers throughout the UK. Supermarkets had gotten there first, and butchers were catching on, as it was more convenient for consumers to have everything delivered rather than having to go out to the local shop.

  For the Ginger Pig, this was a completely new area, but to me it was old hat. I would help build their new website and take control of the projec
t—everything from the cutting of the meat to the packaging to the delivery. Every so often, they might need me to help out in the shops, too. They were about to open their first branch outside of London, in Loughton, Essex, and for the first two weeks I was to be on the ground helping the shop get on its feet. That meant knife work, it meant butchery, and it meant a larger, more operational role, too.

  “When can I start?”

  “I’d have had you back last month if I could,” she said.

  And so we celebrated with burgers from a hip barbecue joint in Shoreditch and carried on drinking. We talked about how long it had been and how I’d always wanted to come back, and then I called my mum and dad to tell them the good news. I also sent an email to Will, out of courtesy, letting him know that I would hand in my notice the next day.

  I got an email response from Ollie, not Will. It was gentler than I’d expected, but he didn’t try to change my mind. The next morning, I gave them my notice with pure glee. Will and I went for a pint at lunchtime. From our conversation, it was clear that Ollie and he had been talking. Will made it clear that they both assumed the new job wouldn’t be what I wanted, and that I’d be back in a few months’ time. He also made it plain that when that happened, they might not have a job for me. I could imagine the conversation he’d had with Ollie about my departure:

  WILL: Jess says she’s leaving.

  OLLIE: What the f? We’d sorted out some plans for the future, no?

  W: She’s got a job with the Ginger Pig. Apparently they offered her one she “can’t refuse.”

  O: Pfft, whatever. She goes, but she’s not coming back. Bent over backward for her.

  W: Cool, will tell her tomorrow.

  Though Ollie was a terrible boss, I understood his mentality. He was intelligent, and every move that he made was calculated and for a specific reason. Although his beginnings were rooted in humble old Smithfield, Ollie had managed to recognize gaps in the market and had seized them for opportunity. He was creative and ambitious, and he always had his finger on the pulse of the industry. Unfortunately, his dedication sometimes bordered on the obsessive, and I couldn’t work for him any longer.