Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Where were his parents? 

Ken reassessed the door but there was no Be Right Back sign or statement giving a clue as to their whereabouts. 

Then the phone broke the silence, making him jump.

‘Hello, Canton Kitchen?’ he uttered.

‘Son?’

‘Dad.’

‘Your mother is in hospital.’

‘What? What happened? Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine. The doctors have checked her over and we’ll be back soon.’

‘Okay. Can I speak to her?’

There was a pause. 

‘She’s just having this needle thing taken out of her arm right now. We will be back soon. Start frying the rice.’

‘Wait: we’re still opening?’

‘Yes, your mother is fine and being discharged any moment. We will just have to open an hour later. Can you start frying the rice? See you shortly.’

Ken put the receiver down. He could not quite believe his ears; his mother had been taken ill to hospital and still his father would not consider shutting the takeaway… not even for one blasted evening; what would it have to take for him to do so?

‘Money-obsessed idiot,’ Ken grumbled.

He threw his schoolbag underneath the counter. The force of its landing nudged the solitary button loose. Out spilled a couple of textbooks along with a biology revision guide. Ken kicked the books back inside the bag and ignited the gas fires.

As far as Ken was concerned, his mother was the innocent party in all of this. She had probably moved to England with the dream of a better life. Instead, she had wound up stuck in a kitchen, too busy to learn the language or how to drive. Her family were all in Hong Kong, leaving her isolated. Travelling around London was hardly easy without being able to read station names let alone the comforts of watching television programmes. His mother’s only enjoyment came from the one-hour Cantonese radio broadcast between six and seven every evening.

His father returned to the takeaway with his mother, an hour after their communication via telephone.

‘Mum! What happened?’

‘I’m okay, son. I just had a nasty pain in my chest. I’ve been checked out now and everything is okay, but I will need to go back for an appointment with the Cardiologist in a few weeks.’

‘Cardiologist? That sounds serious.’

‘They said it’s nothing to worry about though I will need a couple more tests.’

‘Are you sure you can actually work tonight?’ he asked when he knew his father was within earshot.

‘Of course.’

With his mother’s response, it was now Ken’s turn to experience chest pains.

‘Come on now, son,’ his father added, ‘it’s five-thirty already. Let’s aim to open at six. The place across the road have long opened.’

The place across the road was Lucky Star, a Chinese takeaway almost directly opposite Canton Kitchen. Ken had no idea which smart Alec had decided to align two takeaways in both site and cuisine, nor did he know which takeaway was here first but Darwin’s law hypothesised that eventually only one of them would survive – and Ken certainly hoped it would not be Canton Kitchen.

Ken’s father possessed a competitive character, enough for Ken to regularly question whether he truly was his offspring. Dish for dish, prices at Canton Kitchen were dearer than Lucky Star’s but his father used finer ingredients and conscientiously turning over raw materials such as vegetable oil sooner.

This meant prices simply had to exceed Lucky Star’s. Even then however, Ken’s father made sure the mark-up was the minimum possible, though that proved no barrier to customers comparing prices – a habit which only confused Ken. After all, this was not like comparing the cost of an identical mass-produced chocolate bar between two neighbouring corner shops, where the taste and quality of the bar should in theory be indistinguishable from one another. This was comparing two takeaways that served the same dish by name but could be totally different both by the ingredient and to the palate. 

That day, when his mother should have been recovering but was instead toiling in front of the ferocious fires beneath the woks, Ken wondered why his father couldn’t just hire someone, but in truth, the teenager would have been too young to remember the consequences when his parents had previously tried to.

A black Mercedes pulled up outside, reflecting the warm sunlight in all directions. Top Gear was playing on the miniscule twenty-four-inch television; it was as if the show had come alive. A slender man wearing a rather fitting suit and a unilateral earpiece stepped out and with the click of a button, the car’s lights flashed twice.

His arrival had attracted some attention, not least from the Golden Babes hairdresser who opened her door wide and leaned provocatively against the frame. She did not receive the response she longed for. Perhaps she needed to flaunt her figure a little more, or maybe she had just completely missed the point – this man was bald after all and in no need of a hair appointment today.

The man strode into the counter confidently. He removed his sunglasses and slid them into his jacket pocket then rested his phone – the latest IPhone – on top of the counter. The takeaway had been open for just over an hour, which meant that Lucky Star had been welcoming customers for just over two. That advantage was clearly playing on his father’s mind; it was obvious from the way he had been chopping and the extra frequent trespasses into the counter to scour the roads for business… until this first customer.

Ken could almost see the woks being lifted off his father’s shoulders when this man entered.

‘Chicken fried rice,’ he said. This man knew what he wanted in life – it showed in his behaviour, his entrance and his aftershave.

‘One chicken fried -’

‘No don’t write anything down yet,’ he snapped. He clicked his fingers and asked: ‘How much?’

‘Three pounds eighty,’ Ken replied directing the man to number twenty-seven on the menu with his tattered biro; such a well-off man surely should be literate enough to locate the names of dishes on a menu?

‘Three pounds eighty?’ he exclaimed with a wild gesture. ‘It’s three-fifty across the road.’

Ken bit his tongue as his neck bent backwards to engage eye-contact with the towering customer. ‘Well people tend to prefer our food because we use different ingredients,’ he replied.

‘You’re too expensive man. I’m going across the road,’ the customer said, shaking his head.

‘What’s wrong?’ Ken’s father said, appearing suddenly as if by magic.

‘Nothing,’ Ken replied immediately.

‘Your food is too expensive so I’m going across the road.’

Don’t, Ken thought. Don’t give in… please, Dad.

‘Then today is your lucky day,’ his father said. ‘You’re our first customer so this time we’ll match their price for you.’

‘That’s more like it! I like your style,’ said the customer revealing a set of pristine white teeth.

‘Thank you,’ his father replied, returning the grin. ‘I like yours too!’

‘I’ll take one.’

Listen to yourself, Ken thought, you’re driving a new Mercedes and arguing over thirty pence mate. Putting a crown on a tramp didn’t make one a king…

What hurt Ken more than anything, however, was that this was another victory for the customer and a further inch of respect for his cheap father had just evaporated into thin air.

‘We had to,’ Ken’s father said as he stooped back into the kitchen, leaving Ken to retrieve the silver from the counter.

We? thought Ken. We didn’t have to do anything.

#

‘One day Mum, I’m going to buy a Mercedes for myself and drive you around in it.’

His mother laughed. 

It was later that evening and judging from the fact that the total number of customers were countable on one hand, it was going to be a quiet one. To Ken’s father, this was his worst nightmare, but Ken on the contrary, could not have been happier. Not only could he finally do most of his homework tonight, more importantly, his mother was getting a serendipitous chance to rest after her eventful day.

But the workload never truly ended, even during such times. Instead, here his mother perched, upon a tiny children’s stool in the next room beyond the kitchen. The four walls were tiled with crimson squares which had most likely arisen opportunistically from an excess of floor tiles when the place had first been decorated. This utility room was armed with an enormous fridge and an even larger double sink. Slabs of frozen prawns were actively defrosting under the glare of the cold tap. 

Once fully defrosted, the prawns had to be peeled and gutted. That was what Ken’s mother was doing now.

‘Son, if ever you get the chance to buy a Mercedes one day, I would be delighted if you were the only one who got to sit in it. Don’t worry about me.’

For the last few years, his mother had struggled with musculoskeletal pains affecting her shoulders and back but most severely her left elbow. She had visited multiple doctors encompassing a broad spectrum of western and Chinese medical therapies but ultimately without the chance to rest, she was never going to get better.

One doctor described her condition as, ‘imagine you went on a three-mile jog one afternoon, having not previously jogged before. The next day your muscles would ache as one might expect. But then imagine having to jog three miles that day and the next and the next…’ Eventually, Ken coined his own label for his mother’s condition: wok elbow.

So, as his mother sat on the red stool, hunched over a chopping board that was elevated by a platform made from empty egg cartons, depositing peeled prawn after peeled prawn into a metal bowl, Ken gave her an improvised shoulder massage. 

‘Well, that’s not going to happen,’ he said defiantly. ‘I’m going to buy a nice car so that nobody will be condescending towards us and then take you to see the world!’

Besides Hong Kong and England, Ken’s parents had never visited another country. In fact, they had barely explored London. Holidays required a period of closure and that risked customers trying alternative takeaways and losing them… permanently.

‘I hope you will fulfil that dream son, but to do so you need to work hard at school and get a good education – unlike me and your Dad.’

‘How would that help with anything?’

‘You want the power to pick and choose your job so you could get yourself into a profession which pays well and doesn’t involve backbreaking manual labour for instance, or one that has a better work-life balance and earns you far more respect in society. Or better still, a job which has all of those things.’

‘I don’t want to be a banker,’ groaned Ken.

‘There are a million and one jobs out there, son. It doesn’t have to be in banking. Don’t forget, you want a job where you can be useful to people as well, because those are the ones with better prospects.’

‘Son! Customer!’ his father shouted suddenly. That served a timely reminder not just to the existence of his irritating father but more vitally, of the forthcoming exams.