Chapter One

‘Take some change with you, son.’

I’ll be fine, thought Ken, they’re a business too. As if they won’t be able to produce the right amount of money from the till. He half-heartedly scooped up the small white bag from the shelf and undid the latch beneath the counter in order to escape the premises.

Cars had begun to park along the high street now that controlled hours had come and gone, leaving a trail of choking fumes.

Ken looked right and waited for several lorries to pass then left, shielding his eyes from the waning glares of the sun. At last, an opening allowed him to jog across the road.

There was something about the flashing red sign outside this salon that made Ken uneasy whenever he set foot in here. It was humid inside and the sudden change in temperature caused a mist to shroud his vision. The dark orange walls repelled the ceiling lights, making him feel as though the interior was about to cave in on him.

An extravagantly permed lady in her forties from the Caribbean greeted him with a casual flick of her head. 

‘My delivery?’

‘Yes.’

‘Over here,’ she said, leaving the flank of her sole customer – a woman who appeared even more carefree than Ken, to walk to the till. In her cropped glittery top and stiletto heels, one could easily have mistaken the place for a rather different institution, particularly with a name like Golden Babes. 

Ken followed her reluctantly and placed the delivery on top of the counter. 

‘Pass me it,’ said the hairdresser.

‘Excuse me?’ Ken asked, a little confused as the lady’s food was easily within arm’s reach.

‘Pass me it,’ she repeated with a slower but more demanding tone.

Ken hesitated then obliged.

The hairdresser tapped the top of the foil container inside the bag as if asking someone to sit on it. How Ken wished he could. In fact, in his world, he would grab the box, throw it on the floor and stamp on it. See how she’d like the taste of her food then!

‘No spoon?’

‘I thought -’

‘Go get me a spoon, boy.’

Ken sighed before rushing back across the road and into the takeaway. He stooped under the counter, picked up a disposable plastic spoon and darted back outside without his parents knowing he had returned at all.

The temptation to give the spoon a quick spit-shine was almost insurmountable as he handed it to the hairdresser. No wonder the oceans were drowning in plastic. How does this woman not have any cutlery at the back? She did live here, didn’t she?

It came as a shock that he received any verbal gratitude for the significant detour he had taken but the damage to his morale had already been dealt and worse was yet to come.

‘How much?’

‘Four pounds thirty, please.’

The hairdresser tutted as she opened the till, as if everything else she possessed came at no cost whatsoever.

It must have been a quiet day as the till was as empty as Ken’s stomach; he had yet to eat his own dinner which remained unintentionally neglected back in the takeaway, cooling down with every passing second. 

The lady plucked out several pound coins and placed them one at a time on the counter pausing after each in the chance that Ken might lose patience and say: ‘That will do.’

At the target number of four pound coins, she then counted out two five-pence pieces, leaving her till completely empty. The customer did not have enough money. 

Perhaps she will ask to owe the outstanding amount, or knowing his father, he would just agree to turn a blind eye to it – after all so many other customers had taken advantage of his unwarranted generosity.

But before Ken wondered how this brief standoff would be settled, the hairdresser produced a wad of cash from the inside of her bra.

‘Have change for a twenty?’ 

Ken’s heart sank, and not because of where the cash had been sourced from. ‘No,’ he replied before adding, ‘have you not got the exact cash?’ He really did not want to make a third trip for what after all, was just one puny item on the menu.

As if the hairdresser had deciphered his expression, her eyes flickered around the salon and arrived at an unpleasant solution.

‘Over there,’ she told him.

Ken tracked her frighteningly long false nails. 

There, half-buried amongst tufts of hair, lay a twenty-pence coin. Surely, she was not being serious? 

But she was.

‘Go on,’ she said, sweeping the rest of the coins on the counter towards him.

Ken winced, collected the money off the counter then walked dejectedly over to pick up the outstanding value off the floor. I hate my life, he thought as he yanked the door open and stormed out of the salon without a second glance back.

‘What took so long?’ asked Ken’s father.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ replied Ken. He offloaded the petty change into the till then ran his chapped hands under the tap.

Customers were of course what kept the business afloat. Although the takeaway life meant that an uninterrupted dinner was a rarity for Ken, without customers, he would not have food on his plate at all. But customers were the bane of Ken’s life. The customer is always right? Not a chance, from Ken’s first-hand experience.

On this occasion however, Ken was relieved when a customer strolled in; even if it did lead to his dinner cooling by yet another five degrees; at least it cut short any additional interrogation from his father that risked leading to an ‘I told you so,’ expression.

It was a Thursday evening. Canton Kitchen was situated on Lee High Road at a point equidistant between the two south-eastern towns of Lewisham and Lee. Despite being only three miles apart, they could not have been more different. Lee was quaint, full of expensive houses inhabited by the middle class who listened to the songs of birds, whilst Lewisham was a jigsaw puzzle of local authority housing and rather questionable mobile-phone unlocking outlets, decorated by the calls of marketeers.

‘Good evening,’ said the man. He wore a navy suit, oddly complemented by a motorbike helmet, which he opted to keep on.

Ken returned the greeting and folded away the Biology exercise book that had been sunbathing underneath the counter. He wasn’t interested in the subject anyway.

The man was ordering a feast for his family, which made Ken’s innards turn inside out. Why was it so difficult for him to just eat his own dinner? He pushed away the frustrating thoughts and proceeded to totalling up the customer’s bill.

‘Hi Paul!’ Ken’s father said suddenly, emerging from behind the squealing cowboy doors.

‘Frank, how are you?’

‘Good thanks. Just finished work?’

‘Yes indeed,’ he replied before adding: ‘Your son’s very quick with numbers, isn’t he?’

Ken’s father shrugged and replied: ‘I don’t know. Is he?’ But Ken sensed his father’s pride, snapping at its leash.

‘That will be twenty-one-pounds-fifty please,’ Ken said.

‘Just twenty will be fine, Paul.’

Ken rolled his eyes. Each day, his father must have nonchalantly waved away at least five pounds from this unnecessary strategy.

‘Thanks Frank. Much appreciated,’ the customer replied. He dropped his leather gloves on the counter, opened his wallet and handed the note to the teenager. Plastic had not displaced cash yet.

‘It will be about ten minutes,’ his father said.

‘I’ll come back for it then. See you in ten.’

With the takeaway now empty, Ken finally had a chance to eat… and do his homework. 

Ken Jin would not be free from manning the counter until midnight when the fading sign was switched from Open to Closed but that was by no means the end of the shift for him. Almost on autopilot, he swept the floor then mopped it clean before his least favourite job: emptying the bins. He detested this largely because the kitchen bin was home to many things that were not particularly recognisable but horribly squelchy if touched. It was hard to believe that the food his parents served and customers ate, at some point in their origins, had been physically attached to these stringy innards.

His parents in the meantime would pack all remaining stock away and clean every surface that wasn’t the floor. Only then, sometimes over an hour after the official closing time would Ken finally be able to head upstairs, shower and sleep. Living above the takeaway was anything but fun, but at least it was convenient. 

Ken’s father had no intention of allowing his only son to takeover the business in the future. He migrated to England in 1970 as Fung Jin, a lively teenager and studied briefly in south London. He came from poverty-stricken farms in Hong Kong, selling glutinous rice at the local market and grew up having to share the floor of a single room along with his three siblings.

The language proved a serious barrier to his education and he left school without any worthwhile qualifications, as did many of his siblings although he did believe having an English name would help him settle better – so Frank came along – after the singer of his favourite song, My Way. 

Frank was soon treading the path of the fast-food industry; first delivering supplies to various takeaways before helping a friend in a Chinese takeaway in London. During this period, he attended a cousin’s wedding in Hong Kong where he met his future wife, Kan. He named her Katie, although this was instead, a demonstration of initiative; her initials were K and T after all.

Frank was a fast learner and he soon mastered the trade – along with posh sounding phrases such as Hors D’oeuvres and even though he did not know the literal translation, he at least knew that the words usually appeared at the top of the menu.

He did things differently to his competitors and so developed his perhaps unorthodox philosophy of Chinese cuisine, which was fitting given the name of his favourite song. The number of takeaways had exploded with time, a phenomenon driven by more convenient travel and a skewed perception of profit margins. His rivals often sought to throw in the cheapest ingredients and re-use vegetable oils until the tarred batter of Cantonese style chicken (equivalent to Chinese popcorn chicken) proceeded to a finishing look comparable with charcoal rocks and concealed only by the furious lava-pit of sweet and sour sauce.

Frank meanwhile, placed great pride on his cooking, seeing it as an opportunity to showcase the food of the then little-known Cantonese-speaking regions of the world. Frank used the best albeit dearer ingredients around, as long as it meant serving the tastiest meals and ones that were as healthy as a takeaway dinner could imaginably be.

He married Katie in the early eighties after a whirlwind six-month romance. She too had come from a poor background, which rather hypocritically caused a near palpable tension between her and her mother-in-law. 

Katie, for many reasons, endured a torrid start to life in England but the breakthrough came when Frank’s employer at the time spotted his air of diligence and offered him Canton Kitchen for a cut-price fee. He secured a bank loan and moved back down to London and shortly after, Ken was born. It was by no means a planned pregnancy and for the first seven months, Frank and Katie were forced to debate whether they would even be able to rear children at all in their current financial climate. Sending him to Hong Kong where Katie’s sister lived became a genuine consideration before Frank decided otherwise – exactly one month prior to Katie’s labour.

Canton Kitchen was a derelict site at first such that Frank and Katie had bin-liners acting as curtains and scrunched up balls of newspaper were used to fill gaping cracks within the walls. But through years of hard work the couple managed to furnish their home and bring up Ken in more adequate surroundings.

Katie did not agree with many things that Frank did but he certainly made the executive decisions. For starters, she believed there was a happy medium with regards to balancing profits and good food that should have been explored. She certainly did not agree with his gambling habit, which she considered was his main flaw. Then for afters, she was not wholly keen on the contentious decision to spend nearly all their profits to channel Ken through private education from the age of six.

‘Whatever happens, our son must be given chances that I never had,’ Frank argued, ‘chances that will help him one day to break free from this life of the takeaway.’

‘But it is a huge gamble and at our own cost. We don’t even know what he will end up doing. This isn’t Hong Kong, Frank. We’re not still on the farms where we need lots of children in the hope they survive, to eventually help us with the manual labour on the paddy fields.’

‘It will be a family business nonetheless so when he is old enough, he can help us – and we will need all the help we can get as we age… until he achieves his own legacy.’

‘Yes, but if he doesn’t go to private school, we have more profit in our hands, so we will be able to retire comfortably and have enough money to look after Ken should a state school fail him.’

‘And let our son down? I would never forgive myself.’

‘Children who go to state schools can still succeed in life you know, and not every privately schooled child becomes a millionaire.’

‘If Ken can achieve great things then one day, he will be able to look after us. We should do everything we can to push him to do so.’

But Ken had never been expelled from his mother’s womb into this world asking to be put through private education. To Ken, this was his parents’ mistake to make and that could not have rung truer as he sat the following afternoon in the abandoned classroom during lunch break trying to overcome of his homework whilst his peers enjoyed the spring weather playing his beloved sport, football. 

‘Come on; join us,’ said Chris, through the classroom window.

Ken didn’t have a best mate but had he a gun to his head, Chris Horns would have earned that title.

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not? You in detention or something?’

‘No, I need to try and sort some of this homework out.’

‘From when?’

‘First period – Maths.’

Chris’ jaw dropped. ‘First period? You’ve got the whole weekend, man. What are you doing?’

‘Correction: you have the whole weekend. I’ve got to work and it’s a Friday so absolutely no rest for me tonight. If I don’t get this done now, I’m never getting this done.’

Chris did not seem impressed. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘but we have odd numbers out here and could do with another player.’

‘I’ll see how I get on,’ he replied. Ken twiddled his pen as he tackled question five. He scratched his neck and looked out of the window, sliding his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He saw his friends playing in the distance. Watching them made him feel as square as the lenses embedded in his spectacles. He looked at the textbook pages: there were still twenty-five questions to get through and half an hour of break-time left.