Tim Parks - The Server

Fine chopping celeriac.

Fine mashing potatoes with soya milk.

Fine spraying crap off dishes.

Writing, I push myself against a hard place, without getting anywhere, but without really suffering either.

Does that make sense?

Maybe I mean, without any chance of dying.

I stood up, went through the kitchen and switched on the lights. They hadn’t cleaned up very well. My throat was raw from the cigarettes. And I was getting sticky. There was a bowl of chopped cabbage that should have gone in the cold room. The tea-towel covering it was filthy. Vikram would go ballistic. I put on a clean tea-towel and moved it. Imagine getting locked in the cold room. You’re someone else’s leftovers, freezing to death.

I loaded a trolley and took plates and bowls and cutlery into the dining halls for breakfast. The female hall. The male hall. I turned all the lights on. I checked the cereals, the spreads, the milk, the marge, the butter, the honey, and replenished them. I could do these things in my sleep. I don’t need to make a decision to check if there’s soya and dairy, sesame seeds and ground nuts. I don’t need to be someone. The Rooibos has run out on the men’s side, the hummus on the women’s. If only there was more to do. If only I could serve and serve and serve. Serve and serve. Night after night. Day after day. A nobody. If I could wash someone’s clothes, polish someone’s shoes, cut someone’s hair, cook someone’s meal, iron someone’s shirts. Like Mum did for Dad, not loving, just serving. ‘Like hell I’ll iron your shirts,’ I told Carl. I couldn’t love him. I did try. Maybe I didn’t. What do words like ‘try’ mean around words like ‘love’? ‘I don’t do laundry,’ I told him. ‘I don’t do meals. I definitely don’t do ironing. When we’re famous we’ll live in a hotel. We’ll be waited on hand and foot.’ Why did I stay with a boy I didn’t love? That’s the weird thing. For years. Why did I treat him so badly? The pleasure of serving people at the Dasgupta is precisely that you don’t know them, like hotel guests. This person is not your father. He’s not Jonathan. He’s not Carl. Not a mother or a girlfriend or a sister. You expect nothing back. You don’t feel resentful. Their being nobody becomes your being nobody. Not knowing them you don’t know yourself. You’re a server serving. Serving mankind, serving yourself. Being nobody is serving yourself.

I put the trays for the dirty dishes on the table by the door. Then the plastic bucket for the cutlery. First the women’s side, then the men’s. It’s good there are two sides to serve. Twice the work. The first days as a server I kept doing kindnesses for everyone. I’d run off and get a clean knife for someone who had dropped hers. I’d fetch a heavy blanket for a meditator who was shivering. It was a sort of show. Very Beth. I wanted to make myself known, to say, Here’s Beth, serving you! Big grin on my face. Here’s Beth, helping you to meditate! That makes me laugh now. That isn’t service. Service is doing only what is required, facelessly, no more, nothing personal. Let the woman eating go to the tray and get herself a clean knife. Let the meditator go to the back of the room and get herself the blankets she needs. Personal is poison. Personal distracts. Invites relationships. I wish I could serve more and more and more, in the dead of night, always in the dead of night, in complete silence, unheard, unseen, unpraised, unloved. Serving. I don’t want to be loved. I mustn’t be loved. I don’t want to fail to love the person who loves me. I don’t want anything.

May all beings visible and invisible be free from all attachment.

May all beings be liberated, liberated, liberated.

I want to be one of the invisible beings.

Mi Nu is becoming invisible. One day we will see right through her. She won’t be there.

I put out breadknives and crackers. I measured the oats for the men’s porridge and the women’s porridge. I love to smell the oats on my fingers. I put prunes and lemon slices in a pan to warm. If only there’d been more to do, I would have gone on for hours. I wasn’t tired. It was like setting up for a concert when you’ve arrived too early. Take it slowly. The drums the amps the mikes the leads the wah wah. I loved setting up with Zoë. We bumped into each other and giggled. Sex was so childish with Zoë. I was so childish.

Now I remembered the serving spoons for the cereals, for the stewed fruit. I made up bowls of oranges and apples. The apples were a deep waxy green. I took them one by one from the box in the cold room, rinsed them and dried them at the sink. I even polished them with a clean tea-towel. They looked good. And the oranges glowed beside them. The orange of the oranges made the green of the apples greener. How healthy fruit is. After concerts we ate crap. We rushed to whatever crap place would fill us with junk and booze. What do you expect? But now I was bleeding like a pig. I was uncomfortable with sodden wads of TP between my legs. I must go to the main loos and get some tampons. You’re an unclean woman, Betsy M. They should segregate you.

Jonathan was the only guy I ever knew who didn’t mind blood on his dick. Nothing fazed him. Nothing changed him. Not blood, not passion. There was nothing doing with Carl on menstrual days. If only the Red Army had invaded France that week. No sex, but he’d go all concerned and caring. ‘How are you feeling, Beth? Will you be able to sing, Beth?’ Carl liked a girl to be weak, he loved me fragile. A fragile Beth with puppies and baby rabbits to look after. Jesus. I went to the loo which still smelt smoky. If only I had another pack. If only you could chain smoke for eternity. Chain smoke, chain drink, chain fuck. Why not? If it has to be dukkha , go the whole hog.

I went back to the kitchen and looked for the recipe book. Time was passing. A month away will pass in a blink, Jonathan said. He actually smiled. I found it on the small fridge, then made a cup of chai instead. I rinsed a pot, filled it from the kitchen boiler, stirred in ginger, cloves, cinnamon. I’d never have dreamed of drinking this brew before I came to the Dasgupta. No fennel seeds, though. Someone must have put them away in the wrong place. We were in a pub in Edinburgh and one of the bands invited me on stage. Someone had recognized me. We did a pepped-up cover of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’. The crowd was stomping. I was weeping as I sang. I was laughing. My voice was booming. I cupped the mike, ‘“Oh-o-oh-o-oh. When the working day is done, girls just wanna have fun.”’ It wasn’t true. I wanted Jonathan. ‘Just looking in your eyes now …’ he scribbled on his beer mat. He was ecstatic. People couldn’t believe I was with such an old guy. The next night, back in London, he was in bed before eleven for an early start.

‘I have other fish to fry,’ I told him.

Vikram’s Vipassana Cookbook. Food for Meditation. Cool Cooking for Cool Karma. The servers always made jokes about the folder with the recipes. We imagined a cover illustration with Vikram sitting cross-legged in the bratt pan.

I turned to day nine. Tofu and broccoli stir-fry, steamed kale, mashed potatoes, a mixed salad, soya mayonnaise, two dressings. I went into the cold room to see if anything had been prepared yet. The spuds. There were two plastic boxes with peeled potatoes in cold water. Nothing else. I went to the fresh-supplies shelves, found a box of broccoli and dragged it out to the counter.

It’s incredible how tightly they pack broccoli, how good it looks in the box. There’s a layer with heads down and stalks up and a layer with heads up and stalks down. Looking in the box, you see the heads in rows and between each foursome of heads a fat stalk poking up from the layer beneath. It all fits so neatly it looks like a jigsaw. You can’t lift one out without pulling them all up. They’re locked there. To move them you have to break one, at least one.