The air seemed to get thicker during the dinner rush. My breathing became asthmatic, with each lungful of hot air only becoming more strained as the night progressed. The temperature inside the kitchen probably rose a few degrees as stoves and hotplates were ignited, their flames dancing erratically under boiling concoctions. Armed with wire brushes, the plongeurs scrubbed massive pots the size of dog-kennels in the sinks, where steam billowed up volcanically around them. Sweat flew off moving bodies with every sharp turn of a head, spraying droplets that glittered cosmically in the air under the harsh lighting. My hands whirred for hours over half-shucked oysters and bowls of hot consommé. The last order of the night eventually rolled through – salmon. The steps had been drilled into me: crank the stove to a high flame, let the cast iron absorb the heat, add oil till it’s so hot that it distorts the air above, like heat waves on sweltering country roads.
The salmon is usually placed skin-side down in the middle of the pan for a few blistering seconds, but as I loomed over it, beads of sweat rolled off the tip of my nose, sizzling in the pan before being vapourised. I wiped my face with the underside of my apron, a temporary fix. Finally, I guided the fish down with two hands, conscious of my shirt clinging to me in the humidity. The seasoned fish skin made contact, but my fingers touched down first and were caught between the pan and the salmon. Hundreds of degrees of heat were being fired into my fingertips all at once, and for a moment I caressed the surface of the sun. This was enough to cripple any amateur, but I wrestled with instinct, and my fingers did not waver until the fish was placed perfectly in the centre. I inspected my hands, which should have been horrifically blistered pieces of flesh, but I hadn’t felt any heat at all, and I found only the pale ten digits that I woke up with that morning. Each surface thick with calluses, evidence of my work over the years.
The kitchen continued to swirl with hot, bustling energy behind me. I could feel the bodies of the other chefs racing back and forth, but I just stood at my section, idle with contemplation. A tethered buoy in the middle of a raging sea. The salmon crackled away in the pan. My sense of instinct had left me while the memories of all the burns, every scalding mistake, came flooding in. Residual heat from the stoves, oven mittens with holes in the wrong places, drips of oil splashing over exposed knuckles. Years of this abuse. But eventually, burning my hands didn’t feel as harsh as it once did. In time they became tolerant, as if they had been beaten into obedience, no longer daring to cause a fuss. The human body is insistent in its need to adapt. After a while, I was able to carry steaming pans over to the sink with ease and test the firmness of sizzling duck with my bare fingers. It was uncanny to me that these were the same hands that I started with. It would have made more sense if I had been assigned a new, tougher pair every few years, but these were the originals, they were mine. I ran my coarse fingertips over each other, as if in distracted prayer, and thought of my early years at the restaurant. I remembered it viscerally – my first day at Le Augustine’s.
I was a young, arrogant chef, already with bold tattoos to match my attitude, arriving in a new city that I was determined to conquer. I had convinced myself I was above it all, above all the Michelin stars and any upstart who would dare compare themselves to me. But French kitchens aren’t kind to strangers. I tried to move quicker than the pace of the kitchen, tried to bully the world into revolving around me. Before I knew it, I had lost track of myself. My hands were working eight steps ahead of my brain and the kitchen swirled, knives became blunt, and I touched a piping hot pan a whole moment before realising. Instinctively, I ripped my hand away, but my fingerprints stayed behind. My whole body writhed in agony. In the pan, smoke rose from the charred pieces of tissue like incense. The scent of burning flesh lingered for three days afterwards.
I didn’t go home that night. Defeated, I drove straight to my mother’s house. I had to grip the wheel with my wrist, I thought I might pass out from the pain of steering with my hand. After parking half on the lawn, I fumbled with her front door handle. She heard my clumsy entrance during the early hours of the morning and discovered me in the kitchen. My injured hand was wrapped in a sweaty apron, the other gripped tightly to a half-finished bottle of a dark liquid that smelled of alcohol and cinnamon. The remnants of a sandwich that I had tried to construct one-handed sprawled pathetically on the tiled floor. Neither of us spoke as she took off my makeshift bandage. I felt pieces of my left hand being torn apart where the fabric had fused with my bubbling skin. Eventually, my exposed fingers gleamed in the dull light, red and raw like the hand of a newborn, and I held back tears.
The glass bottle was pulled from my other hand gently. I didn’t resist. It was replaced by Mum’s hand, the familiar folds of skin and arthritic knuckles held tightly to mine. This had always been our mutual signal, our secret language. It tethered a mother to her son long after the umbilical cord had been severed. We would have entire conversations just through feeling the heat of the other person’s palm. Each gentle squeeze of the fingers, the minute pulsations of veins carrying messages via warm blood to the fingers. In the stillness, I could feel our clashing heartbeats, the way they fought to unify their rhythms. It seemed to drown out the other sounds, the eerie calls of failure and dread that whispered in my ear – maybe carpentry is more your speed.
The next morning, she dropped me back to the restaurant with fresh bandages and a packed lunch. As I turned to leave the car, she grabbed hold of me once more, her eyes smiling with kindness. She squeezed my hand as if to pump new blood into my system. We hadn’t talked about what happened the night before out loud. While I rarely burnt myself that severely again in the years that followed, it was not the last time I was found in my mother’s kitchen, hopelessly lost, during the early hours of the morning. She would remind me that the Earth was not folding in on itself, that I was not being punished, that I was not born apart from the rest of the world. She did this every time without fail, and without ever needing to say a word.
A hand on my shoulder jolted me from my reverie. I turned sharply to find my concerned sous chef saying something that I heard, but wasn’t listening to. She pointed to the salmon still in front of me, and the sounds of the kitchen returned as I waved her back to her section. I took the fish out of the pan and plated it surgically with fondant potatoes and sautéed asparagus. The golden skin faced upwards, steaming beneath caviar and whisps of dill. A waiter appeared, but he didn’t take the plate.
“She’s on Table 9,” he said cautiously, studying my expression.
I hesitated for a moment, something that is trained out of young chefs, but eventually replied, “I’ll take it to her, merci Louis.”
After wiping my hands with a cloth, I rolled down my sleeves slightly, concealing the tapestry of mismatched inkwork wrapping around my forearms. I was unable to hide the letters tattooed across the deformed skin on my left knuckles. They read B-U-R-N in black, gothic font.
I carried the dish out to my mother in the restaurant. Emerging from the perpetual hot breath that formed the kitchen air, I was hit with the icy climate of the dining area. She sat alone, rising the second she spotted me. Setting the dish on the tablecloth, I bent down to welcome her embrace. My arms wrapped around her, a cold string of pearls resting on the side of my neck. She felt more frail than last time.
“Have you been well, Mum?” I prodded.
“I can’t complain darling, life is a gift.”
I saw the vein in her neck strain as she sat down. A wrinkly upturned palm was placed on the tabletop for me to take. We were among the last ones in the restaurant, and the atmosphere felt tired, like an empty stadium after a concert. I took her hand, but this time was different, something was off. Her hand felt numb, like I was holding a dead weight. I squeezed her fragile fingers tighter, but they still felt far away, inanimate. I was worried I might break her brittle hand. My nerves weren’t responding to her body’s heat, and the room suddenly felt quieter. My hand trembled as the air felt arctic. I longed for the familiar heat of the kitchen. The table between us grew infinitely longer, and my mother’s shrinking image receded into the distance. I could have been holding hands with a stranger. She released a sigh so deep that she could have been mouthing the word disappointment – or was she just tired? The lines around her eyebrows furrowed slightly, but unable to feel her warmth, I couldn’t read the thought behind them.
Our language was extinct. So long amongst the heat and sweaty violence of the kitchen, I had finally lost all feeling in my hands. My nerve endings had abandoned me. I couldn’t even feel the gentle touch of my own mother anymore. Our connection, now one-sided, would force us to converse like regular people, like acquaintances or colleagues making small talk of the weather. Her soul was now a flame set behind bulletproof glass, its heat concealed from me indefinitely, and with it, the only family I ever had. We just sat there in silence. The usual echo of clinking silverware around us seemed to die down. It was the kind of silence found by astronauts, and now my tether had snapped, leaving me to drift away into the black sterility of space. Had I flown too close to the sun, been too uncareful over the years?
The black letters on my left knuckles glared up at me. I wanted to brand them off, scrape them away with a hot knife, but I realised, hopelessly, that that would no longer work on me. My hands would resist the heat the way they had been trained to do. I stared into the brown eyes that had given me mine, but I was unable to ask for help.
Her gaze was inquisitive as she asked, “And how are you, darling?”
“Fine,” I replied.
