Holy stickers Batman. These things have hit Toronto, New York, Halifax… everywhere.

Now they’ve reportedly crossed the pond. They’re going up in the UK now.

Move over Banksy. Or whatever. I have no idea what this means.

I used to go for church picnics on Bowen Island when I was a kid growing up in Whytecliff / Horseshoe Bay. Great to be going back.

From the Write on Bowen Blog

Award-winning and bestselling writer Timothy Taylor is the first author out of the starting gate for the next annual Write on Bowen festival.

Taylor, author of Stanley Park, Silent Cruise and Story House, will open the Write On Bowen festival on Friday, July 8 along with another key presenter. He will also host a two-hour workshop on Saturday, July 9.

Taylor’s new novel The Blue Light Project tracks three days in the life of a North American city gripped by a hostage taking in a television studio. It’s due to published in the spring of 2011.

To read more about Taylor, visit Quill & Quire’s piece Habits of a Highly Effective Writer. More details about the festival to come.

Cillian Foley greeting Jeremy at the door to his den, after Jeremy had been shown down a labyrinth of halls by the Foley house manager. Martine’s father, it was clear even before Jeremy arrived, had serious matters in mind. That much Jeremy gleaned from Martine’s manner in setting up the meeting up in the first place. A seemingly spontaneous idea, although Jeremy realized it had been much more deeply considered. In this case, she’d woken up that morning after the news of Jeremy’s father’s death, and the idea of a summit meeting between the chef and his lords was fully planned in her mind, something necessary before he left and dealt with things back in Canada. But as soon as she said it, her head leaned in close to him, her morning smell reaching him – fabric softener, peppermint, organic fair trade medium roasted Columbian beans – Jeremy knew the idea had gone to sleep with her and taken shape, her mind gently at work as her slender hands lay weightless on the light blue sheets.

She wasn’t the first woman of this kind to enter Jeremy’s life. That is, women with plans for him, or at least energy and vision more forceful than Jeremy himself typically revealed. He wasn’t blind to his tendency although, in any objective survey of the past, he had to allow that things hadn’t gone badly for him. He had money in the bank. He’d been on television. He had a decent enough name in the foodie world that someone at Food and Wine had written him up and described his undertaking – that is, the sum of his professional life to that point – as a “surprising, looping, evolving brand development strategy, delicious at every stage”. The brand descriptors, the writer said, were: “canny, artful, innovative and always tasty.”

The article didn’t mention the women, although with a bit more research maybe they would have seen through to this one. Jeremy went with the strongest women around. That was his gravitational pull. Only even knowing – the way, for example, that Martine aligned herself with his last girlfriend in Vancouver, Benny, and with Jules too, with whom things had never been official, always potential, and even Margaret whom he had loved so openly so long ago – even seeing that didn’t change Jeremy’s sense that Martine was different than all of these other women too. Because they were always different. They were always, specifically, in his mind, epically more sensible and grounded then himself. Even if they weren’t.

So, Martine. She was gentler. She was less planned. Less calculated. She carried herself with a natural ease that could have been the product of having so much money, certainly. Jeremy had known a lot of rich people over the years with this quality. This was one of the cursed blessings of early 21^st century food entertainment: you were invariably stretching yourself to keep up with the people who admired you most, trying to look as naturally at ease as the people around you always seemed to look.

Jeremy had handled it without going bankrupt, which was something given he’d been bankrupt twice before. But he only wised up after leasing one of the new hybrid-fuel Range Rovers a few months after settling in at the Wilde Room. At that point, even Jeremy could see that some madness had infected him. Cillian Foley had a Range Rover, the conventional gas-chewing kind. Jeremy’s new vehicle fit well into Foley country. Yet it appealed very much to Martine as well. So that’s what he’d been doing, and stretching himself to the dangerous limit in the meantime.

Then, as it played out, Martine was herself what saved him from the situation. At first she scolded him, saying it was much too expensive, but also that he looked good in it. Later then, between courses at dinner at one of their favorite places to eat together – Peploe’s which was a different type of restaurants than the Wilde Room, more comfortably old fashioned, more prone to chatty waiters who knew Martine – she then quietly convinced Jeremy to let her treat the new leased vehicle as her own since she had a car allowance that she wasn’t using anyway. So Jeremy was saved. Martine saved him. A caring person did that, phrasing it in the delicate way she had, Jeremy thought.

That morning then, she held him in bed and whispered comfort to him, asked him gently how he felt, but did not press. And while she made coffee he told her a story about his father that he’d dreamed in a confused way: a dinner they’d had once, deep in a city park where the Professor had been doing research. The flavors of that meal had been coming back to Jeremy since the news. And here he sat on the side of Martine’s bed and thought of it while she poured coffee and carried it over. He didn’t want to be anywhere else, he realized. He didn’t want to go home at all. Martine’s Labrador retriever, who was the deep brown chocolate kind and endlessly loving himself, was ecstatic in the morning, every morning, to see Jeremy. So while Martine rested her cheek on his shoulder, the dog wriggled and writhed at his feet, rubbing his snout against the side of the bed and licking Jeremy’s toes.

He should meet with her father before he left, she said. It was the right thing to do. You had big meetings in the face of big changes. And Jeremy could feel that much in the air, the swirl of the new, the tragic, the maybe.

Cillian met him at the door of the den. The house smelled of oak and floor wax, heavy fabric, canvas, rich oils, more dog smells, towels and rubber boots. Cillian Foley met his chef and took his right hand in his, a firm slow handshake, his left hand forward to hold Jeremy’s elbow. To hold them together. Eamon wasn’t here it seemed, meaning this was going to be more personal.

Cillian said: “Come in lad. Come in. Sad news. Now it’s time we talk. Because after the sad news comes the new idea. It’s always that way. Coffee? Tea? Brandy? I have something to ask you.”

And Jeremy wondered immediately how he felt about this development, since Cillian appeared to be holding a bulky envelope in one hand.

“So what’d he want?” asked Ollie, his mouth full of bread.

They had hugged. Which was rare. They had found a corner alcove at the back of Peploe’s, just down the street from the Wilde Room. When Jeremy had come in earlier, the maitre d’ had gone eyes wide and clasped his hands in front of his chest in pleasure. Then, since Jeremy had made no reservation, the man made a few scribbles in the book and bumped whoever was in the alcove out into the main dining room. Jeremy tried to object but it was out of their hands by then. The maitre d’ wouldn’t hear of it.

“He had a message for someone,” Jeremy said to Ollie. “Or package. Message package.”

“A message package. What the fuck is a message package.”

“Truth?”

“Go,” Ollie said.

“I can’t tell you.”

“That’s your truth,” Ollie said. “Your truth is you have to conceal the truth. Fucking your buddy, nice.”

“I am not fucking my buddy. I’m protecting a confidence.”

Ollie said: “Answer me this Jay Jay.”

Jeremy ate bread and indicated with a muffled sound and a motion of the shoulders that he would answer Ollie whatever it was, if he could.

Olli’s eyes were still off in the dining room somewhere. He said: “Do you not seriously think she’s hot?”

Then she arrived and of course Jeremy’s answer was not something he felt comfortable giving.

Dani was her name. She was narrow shouldered, with dark hair tied back in a black band. Small nose, amused eyes. Dani and Ollie were flirting, although she addressed Jeremy in all the official transactions. More water? Something else? She was Lithuanian, and when Ollie spoke to her the smile never left his lips. They bantered back and forth. The after dinner drinks they didn’t need arrived (Jamesons for Jeremy, Rowan’s Creek for Ollie). Dani talked to Jeremy, the chef friend of the chef who ran this place. But she smiled at Ollie. Which was different. And Jeremy was forced to ask himself again the question he had asked himself many times over the many years before, as far back as their time in university together. Why was Jeremy always in some tortured relationship or another, while Ollie was the one that women seemed to fundamentally like better? It wasn’t looks, he was fairly certain about that.

“How was everything, chef?” Dani asked Jeremy.

Jeremy loved Peploe’s. Rabbit osso bucco, lamb kidneys in grainy mustard sauce, asparagus with a soft boiled duck egg and (undeniably) a better gratin Dauphinouse than Ethan ever made.

“Spectacular,” he said. But Dani was listening already to something Ollie was saying. And when she left, with her stacks of plate up each arm, Ollie’s eyes followed her, resting in the concavity of her lower back, just above her butt, snagged in the wool pleat of her slate grey cardigan.

“Boyfriend,” Jeremy said. “Just saying.”

Ollie turned back to look at his friend. He blew his breath out to shoot stray sandy bits of hair out of his eyes. He said: “What’s a boyfriend?”

Jeremy sipped his scotch.

“Like forever? Like till next week? Till tomorrow? You see what I’m saying. It’s all provisional, contingent. Living between knowing and guessing, being and appearing.”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows. Ollie had philosophy. When they were in university together, he’d been able to express himself only in terms of music. Later, he could speak philosophically only when discussing the principles of business. Having sold his company and left his family and embarked on this spotless future of his, this confounding mixture of self-abuse and success, while Jeremy had enjoyed his own measure of renown, he did not exactly thrive philosophically. Jeremy did not find himself in possession of a new world view, even if the cooking had changed. But for Ollie, something had flourished, a weed growing in the gap between Ollie and every woman alive in the world.

Now Jeremy’s friend said, on this exact note: “Margaret took Trout away from me, that’s the truth.”

Jeremy kept his gaze steady. Whatever fuck-you-anyway impulse fluxed through him just then, he didn’t want Ollie to know about it. Anger. And sure, a measure of jealousy.

Ollie said: “I’m not saying I wasn’t responsible for what happened. I’m just saying this is the net effect of all that happened. Things are stripped away from you. So you arrive at a more fundamental world view. This.”

Jeremy said. “Peploe’s. Dani. Coming to visit me out of the blue.”

Olli said: “A new resolve.”

“Resolve,” Jeremy said, sipping again. “You have a new resolve.”

“You find that remarkable, because resolve in your own life has slipped ,” Ollie said. “Which is something I’ve been meaning to speak with you about. Your life was once greatly resolved. Now you are mixed up in this Martine and Cillian business. And you’ve lost your taste for booze. What’s up with that?”

“I haven’t lost my taste. You get older,” Jeremy said.

“You get older.”

“You don’t get older?” Jeremy asked him.

And now Ollie squared himself in what Jeremy found to be a vaguely familiar way. Who did that? Who settled into the chair a fraction, as if to be more immovable than they were a second before? In their smooth-sheened suit of very high grade, with sharp corners and clean lines. Bespoke, Jeremy guessed. He might not have had the eye to pick out the surgeon’s cuff with the last of the button left tellingly open, or the watch pocket canted just so above the waist, but he did have the eye to pick the movement of a man in a suit in which he stood for many cumulative hours while it was assembled. People who had their suits made this way didn’t wear them, they lived in them. Which Jeremy didn’t, still, in the jeans and t-shirts and cowboy boots he continued to wear after all these years.

Now Ollie was speaking to him on the topic of resolve, and Jeremy had to marvel at the sudden realization. Ollie reminded him a bit of Dante, all of a sudden. A self-indulgent, self-abusive variety of his long ago partner.

Jeremy said: “Stop though. This Martine and Cillian business. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ollie gestured around himself. He waved his arms in an encompassing motion. At the ends of his smoothly tailored pant legs, Jeremy noticed, their emerged leather shoes the color of a light-toasted hazelnut which brought to mind a nut flavored sauce Jeremy favored with certain small game tenderloins.

“Ollie is indicating the room around him,” Jeremy said. “The rest of us are waiting to know what this means. The Martine and Cillian business specifically. Like Ollie knows something. Although I doubt he does.”

“Yes well,” Ollie said, “My point here being less a point, per se, than a kind of suggestion. A friendly suggestion. Based not solely on my situation vis-à-vis my family and Trout in particular, and women in general. Or Margaret, who is a bitch but who I still love, for that matter. This suggestion is based instead on my assessment of your situation, on the other side of the table, in Dublin, with Martine and her family who are known to be a little… you know. Everyone knows. If you don’t know, I’m very worried about you.”

Jeremy said: “Ol, another second of prologue and I’m fucking out of here.”

Ollie said: “Going home. Bringing it all back home.”

“I’m going to a funeral.”

“Yes, well that’s my point. And I’m going with you.”

And then they both just breathed for awhile and considered how that sounded.

Ollie was smiling evenly. Pleased at the surprise punchline he had provided.

Jeremy was thinking: fucking hell. Not that.

Shrewsbury Road

Ollie called Monday of the following week. Jeremy’s oldest friend in the world had turned his own life upside down since those long ago Vancouver days. Sold his company and started the fund. Let his marriage dissolve. Relapsed hard into booze as best Jeremy could make out. Now, among all those many other things, Ollie seemed unable to phone at anything other than a bad time. Ollie thought of Jeremy whenever there was no deal left to be done, or no guests left awake. He called whenever the action had temporarily subsided wherever he happened to be, and these were always straining, in-between times.

So here the came the familiar digits. Still a Canadian number although Ollie was always in agitated motion at that point in his life, rushing off to get to the next thing, meeting, opening night, private box party or whatever it was. He did this at sufficient pace that, from Jeremy’s end of the phone, he actually did seem to exist in several places at once. A molecular particle whose location and speed could not simultaneously be known.

And where was Jeremy? Well, as always, Ollie’s invisible motion made Jeremy himself feel very stationary indeed. He was sitting in the back seat of a taxi in the driveway of Martine’s father’s large house on Shrewsbury Road, in fact, scraping coins together to pay the fair. Steadying himself for the audience that had been called.

“Ollie man,” Jeremy said. “You wouldn’t believe how bad a time this is.”

“The girlfriend’s father,” Ollie drawled, when Jeremy had explained. “He’ll wait. It’s me. Now tell me honestly, you all right? Talk to me, Jay Jay.”

The old nickname. The old life. They shared this space, Ollie and Jeremy. They lived uncomfortably in a number of contiguous pasts. So Jeremy heard all the versions of Ollie in his every sentence, which was no always easy. He heard his easy-going college pal, the guy who played bass in the long ago rockabilly band they’d started, The Decoders. But Jeremy also heard the sober Ollie that followed, the one who married Margaret, the one prone to speeches about responsibility and work ethic. The one with the tailored shirts and suits and a seat on the Vancouver Art Gallery board. He heard the father of his godson Trout, who was 16 now and no longer spoke to his father. Oliver newly rich and newly debauched. Oliver who had given up on so many things but still clung to Jeremy, for reasons opaque and convoluted. Oliver who even spoke differently, his voice gone raspy and low, full of hard new experience about the world and people to which he seemed always interested in drawing Jeremy’s attention.

“Well it’s been a bad couple of days,” Jeremy said.

Ollie said: “Sorry about that. I mean it. Terrible thing your dad. His heart?”

“They say?”

“They say?”

“Dante told me.”

“Mr. Beale,” Ollie laughed, who was not impressed by any of the other people who might serve as inspiration in Jeremy’s life.

“Where’d you hear Oll? From Margaret?” Jeremy asked, waving at one of the Foley’s gardeners, who’d come around the corner of the five car garage, expression quizzical. When he saw Jeremy he waved back and pointed over his shoulder. Foley was waiting.

Margaret, yes, Ollie said. Which meant he was communicating with his ex-wife in some fashion at least. Perhaps she was now reading the emails he sent. Jeremy doubted Margaret would have the patience to hear this new voice on the phone, close in her own ear where there had once been such a different version of this man, a version she’d loved.

But Ollie didn’t want to talk about any of that, of course. He called, always, with an immediate point of decision. Some thing that needed settling, some pressing question.

Today, specifically, dinner. “As in, tonight,” Ollie said. “As in us. You working?”

Jeremy wasn’t working, in fact, having successfully tracked down his sous-chef Ethan through his always connected Polish friend Kanopka. Having successfully negotiated Ethan back from his week break in Donegal with promises and cajoling. Having covered The Wilde Room for his unexpected trip back to Canada, leaving the very next morning.

But that wasn’t what had Jeremy thinking now. It was the sound of Olli’s voice. A strange sense of proximity. Of course, Olli had been known to fly places on impulse before. Jeremy had taken calls from Dubai and Delhi, only to find the Ollie had flown there to buy a shirt, or watch the soccer team purchased recently by a friend. He’d taken several calls from London over the past three years, Ollie calling him out to dinner, with an airline ticket for Jeremy and reservations at Petrus all arranged. Ollie did this sort of thing now, exercised impulse on a hemispheric scale. And he had a BA frequent flyer rank of some obscurely high level as a result, giving him access to lounges and facilities in airports, to cabins in actual commercial jets that many passengers don’t even know exist. To secret flights for only the rich. The Cloud Club. The Meridien Lounge. The Sultan’s Tent. But none of this made sense measured against the fact that Ollie was supposed to be working back in North America again, leading one of those deep, black, cold pools of equity that had been re-gathered in the wake of financial turmoil. Oliver was a fund king now, that’s apparently what he did. This was a job definition with no specific focus. Jeremy only understood that everything for sale was of potential interest to Ollie if it could turn billions into fractionally more. But flying into London from San Francisco, which is the last place where Jeremy knew Ollie had been, scoping out companies that made a particular kind of fuel cell, well that would surely be too long a flight for dinner even by Ollie’s standards.

Then Jeremy heard a familiar sound. The sharp and repeated ring of a streetcar in the background, behind Ollie’s voice. A streetcar. A Dublin streetcar.

Jeremy said: “Where the hell are you?”

Ollie said: “Surprise. Sucking a long neck Bud in Temple Bar, baby. Why isn’t your place down here? Place is hopping.”

“In Dublin why?” Jeremy asked.

“Jay Jay,” Ollie said. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

Jeremy pinched the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. And he didn’t have to say much for Ollie to know all that he was thinking just that moment. They’d been friends for 25 years. It had been that long a time since they first picked each other out of the crowd for whatever mutual and reassuring reasons. That’s how it worked at the beginning, Jeremy knew. You picked each other on the strength of resemblance. Later, things became more complicated.

“Al l right,” Ollie said. “Easy now. It’s a bad time. I know. So go on in. Talk to the old man.”

Just go on in, he continued. A calm coach for just those moments. Go on in and you’ll be fine. Straight shoulders and walk in there now and fuck it anyway, am I right?

“Am I right?” asked Ollie. Never in doubt, of course. Never for a moment in doubt that he was right.

Jeremy went in.  And when he’d been walked back through the big house, he came face to face with Martine’s father at the door to his den. And Cillian Foley took his right hand in his, and gripped Jeremy’s elbow in his left, holding them firmly together, so that they rocked briefly in place, as if they were a single structure leaned into the same wind.

Cillian Foley said: “Come in lad. Come in. Sad news. Now we talk. Because after the sad news, there’s always a moment for talk. Coffee? Tea? Brandy? Have the brandy. We have important matters to discuss.”

Jeremy took brandy and coffee, an equivocation he wished he had suppressed in the presence of this gravely serious man. Once big in the government. Once big in a lot of things. Troubled now, it occurred to Jeremy. Troubled and needing to talk to Jeremy.

Important matters, he said with a smile, splashing brandy into the Wexford crystal.

And Jeremy – who was thinking of Martine just then, her smooth hip in the warm morning, the unlikely olive tone of her satin skin – Jeremy leaned forward to listen. Carefully.

The Signature Dish

In the preceding chapters:

Just before service in Chef Jeremy’s Dublin restaurant The Wilde Room, he gets a phone call. It’s Dante, a former business partner, calling from Jeremy’s long-ago hometown of Vancouver. Sad news about Jeremy’s father. The man everyone knew as “the Professor”, with whom Jeremy had difficulties over the years, has died. Cardiac arrest apparently, althogh Jeremy wonders. During service, Jeremy drifts on memories of his father, old friends, and the life left behind. And as if sensing Jeremy doing so, that old life then breathes again, from very close.

****

Dante signed off with kind words. He said: “We need you here. Your family needs you here.”

Jeremy said: “What family?”

And Dante didn’t come back with anything maudlin or inappropriate. He didn’t proclaim himself to be a surrogate father, or any of the stupid things Jeremy remembered him being very good at saying in difficult moments. He didn’t mention their brief joint effort, the upscale Gerriamos, which Dante had sponsored and which Jeremy had nearly destroyed. Dante didn’t say: Jeremy we became like family that night you cooked for me and a few hundred of my closest friends and produced a meal made with wildlife harvested from Stanley Park just to make your point about whatever the fuck it is you were making your point about.

No, none of that. Perhaps Dante had changed, become warmer and more forgiving. Which was an odd thing to imagine because Jeremy knew that there had been a certain attraction between them from the beginning. Jeremy certainly had something Dante wanted, a freshness and media-readiness (oh, how long ago). But Dante had something that Jeremy wanted as well. Way back then, when he’d accepted Dante’s offer of assistance and fired his own best friend Jules. (Oh god, that one still hurt, still brought him to his knees. The kernel of bad truth there. Bad faith.) Jeremy had wanted something, wanted it enough to lose her, of all people, the person in his life who’d been quietly and unfailingly nearest to him. Jules, Jules. And now, the Professor would not even be around to try to balance the way Dante upended things in him. The Professor’s relentless pestering, that quest of his to put things right in his son, to straighten a path which to Jeremy remained forever invisible anyway.

Last words from Dante on the phone. He said: “Come home. Your father’s affairs will need attending to. There’s the house. There will be other things. You do these jobs when you’re the only one left.”

So Jeremy tumbled into service forced to think again about Dante in the Brioni suit and the Gulfstream and the cellar full of wine bought by an oenological consultant. Dante of the polymorphous good taste, every facet of which had been artfully polished to exquisite gloss. Jeremy was forced to bend to the reality that this man was right again. And Jeremy would indeed have to go home.

Easier said than done, of course. At The Wilde Room – which Jeremy himself had made into something of a surprise success, time to give himself a little credit, he thought – service was charging down, as it always was.  The reservations would begin to arrive within the hour and they wouldn’t stop until midnight, when the bar would fill up and stay full until 2 AM although Jeremy would be thankfully long gone by then. As it stood at the moment – service in 60, in 55 minutes – prep was done, hydrocolloids cooked and in the hopper. Locust bean gums and sodium alginates bubbling and popping in their beakers over low flame. The assembly line of white-clad apprentices and line cooks standing to, the back-aroma of stocks and roasting organic proteins never allowing the clean room sensation of kitchen to lose its grounding.

His thoughts spilling. He was numb, cold with knowing.  Cardiac arrest, Jeremy thought, walking slowing from the front phone over to the bar, where he rapped a knuckle on the long varnished sheet of oak, the color of carmelized sugar. His chest ached. He felt his heart and thought of its specifications and tolerances, all unknown. So his father had taken his heart to the limits, or so the story had been told by Dante. But why did he doubt this? Because his father was too tough to die of a heart attack? Because he lived out doors, eschewing the comfort of his perfectly good house in the West Vancouver burbs? That or maybe because his father had never been the kind of person to over-strain his heart. Aloof and disapproving. These were heart-light functions. A man too busy to phone Dublin even once. Or perhaps it had been just once, twice at the most. But that was in five years. Jeremy pushed away a mini-wash of resentment, keeping his mind on that impending service that didn’t stop for anyone. Service, Jeremy thought with some relief, was a beast with knowledge of its own. It continued with or without you.

Two people approached. His twin Wilde Room angels. Jeremy in his Dublin restaurant directly under the mounted stag’s head that had been shot in Norway by the owner’s brother.

“Yeah?” said the first angel, who was also The Wilde Room bartender. And he made a shape with his fingers to suggest the rocks glass of Fernet Branca that might nestle there. Jeremy gave him the short nod required and off that first angel went.

The second was Martine. At his elbow now. Lean Martine. Mean Martine. He called her this, but she was neither of those things really. She was slender and capable of kindness. Beautiful by global standards. Jeremy was occasionally in awe. One of the legendary Dublin Foley’s here. And Jeremy shared her bed three days a week, sometimes four. Martine just now creasing a linen napkin between long fingers and leaning in towards him. Lychee and citrus, a hint of mineral, pebble, stream bed. As Jeremy was absorbed into the floral ambit of her attentions, it occurred to him that without Martine touching a drop of alcohol, ever, she yet exuded faintly the classic un-oaked essence of Chablis.

Martine said: “You’ll have to go home, of course, Jer. Don’t worry though, we’ll get Ethan in for a week.”

“Have you reached him?” Jeremy asked as the Fernet Branca appeared, whispering onto the bar in front of him.

Their sous chef was out in Donegal visiting his mother, who was 94 and still drank a half pint of Guinness a day and had no phone. Martine shook her head and said that Ethan wasn’t picking up his mobile either.

“Put a call into Kanopka, would you?” Jeremy asked her. “He’ll know who to call out there.” And so off she went, a willow wand disturbance of the air. Grey skirt. Toned calves and ankles. She worked out at a gym called Paddy’s. Boxed apparently. Jeremy was scared to go in the place which was, of course, owned by the same uncle who shot the hovering stag.

40 minutes to service. Make that 30 minutes. Jeremy went back and tasted a cube of pea soup solidified with guava extract. He watched one of the new kids make Cashel blue cheese potato ice cream to be served with hasselback potato crisps. Hot and cold. Each crisp singed with a mark made by a category IV laser fired through a die cut with the restaurant logo.

The wild Wilde Room. Jeremy’s great idea, pitched to wary Irishmen with scotch tumblers and shadowy associations. Cillian and Eamon Foley in the sheet glass expanse of their offices north of the Liffey. Smoke and the odor of old and valuable books from custom made shelves. Skepticism turned to enthusiasm when Jeremy laid out what was to become their most popular dish, their signature, right there at the intersection of new and old school. He had notebooks with scribbled recipes to show them. These were flattened out on Eamon’s leather desk top and sprinkled with cigar ash as he spoke.

Roast chicken with pig’s trotter reduction served over apple-infused pork broth macaroni noodles.

“Pork broth fucking macaroni noodles,” said Cillian. But this was appetite and imagination swirling, not criticism. They didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but they thought they liked it. Jeremy explained and they liked it more.

So it was that Wilde Room began to shift acres of this sort of thing to the men who soon would colonize the restaurant and the WAGs who came along with them. Old school, new school. Who knew that the just-then waning Celtic Tiger would be so easy to read? The enshrined old. The ever-potential new.

So: a roasted capon, a pig’s foot. A lot of pig’s feet in fact. And then some magic dreamed up in a laboratory where you turned pungent pork stock into firm little noodles. Gellan powder was the trick, added and boiled into the stock. Cooled to make it a pliable, opaque solid. Sliced by mandolin into thin sheets, which were then spooled by hand over lengths of PVC piping to make the shape of a tubular noodle which you snipped into macaroni with shears. Terroire via the laboratory. Magical and earthy at the same time. And no paradox in that mix either, especially if you were from Ireland. What was more magical, after all, to the Irish, than the peaty depths, the broom-swept lichened expanses of their own soil?

Deep in service now. Thoughts of this and his father who once lost himself deep in the magic of a different soil.  A man who cooked duck over an open fire. Remember that? Jeremy remembered the duck. He thought the Professor had been ripping a page out of his book, for a long time. The simple bistro phase. But Jeremy knew he might as well have been copying the Professor. A man whose forest contained the ghosts and the bodies of many who had come before. Lakes with water lilies. Trees with nests in them. People moving in the undergrowth. The Professor took notes and registered the magic that would never leave the soil alone.

Of course, Jeremy was deep into it with Dante by the time he learned any of this about his father.

The Professor, for his part did not criticize. He only asked: “And Jules? What ever happened to the lovely Jules?”

In Dublin, after the news, after the service that followed the news, after the walk home with Martine that followed the service that followed the news: Jeremy woke in a sweat at two in the morning, at three in the morning. When he jolted back to consciousness at four o’clock he could hear it raining. The trees in the courtyard were alive with falling water. The sound of it was on the roof. The running of it was in the eaves and the down spouts, in the gutters below. The world alive with running water. Martine, who was the best sleeper Jeremy had ever known, did not wake up when he slipped out of her bed and crossed the long dark boards of her apartment, out into the living room and across to the big front window with its view down the quays. Martine didn’t hear him pull the blinds aside, the whispering length of them. She didn’t hear him crack the balcony door and stick his head out into the cool and still-dark air. Martine was deep in her own dreams when Jeremy put his bare feet to the cold slab, slid the door shut behind him. And stood to find the stars shimmering in blackness above. No rain at all. The air completely dry.

He turned sharply again. A voice. A movement at the periphery of vision. Invisible and silent rain now flowing not in the world but in him. Sheets of it in his eyes, obscuring his view of the Liffey, the beacons at its mouth. One a slender tower at the top of which the U2 studios could be found. Glittering bulbs now blurred and running.

A breath. A sense of something close. Somebody.

Jeremy’s heart was pounding. He was imagining these things, of course. People do not transmit energy across the world. They do not connect remotely to one another even when, Jeremy thought, there were times when you wish they would.

He heard himself say it. A wet word in dry air. He said: “Jules?”

My best friend’s name was Sten, as in Stendhal. As in Stendhal Beauregard-Vincent, his father having been important at one point in France. Then he (Sten’s father) had decided to grow a beard, become a boat designer and move to West Van. He designed sailboats for quite a few famous people, including the catamaran that song writer was later found dead in, floating off Passage Island. The one the ferry hit. (That was the same guy who wrote the song Michael Jackson recorded. I can never remember the name, but the tune stays with me. Ba ba, baaa.. etc)

Sten and I, in school and around our street, were known as the Hostile Thinkies. I have theories where the name came from, but no real solid proof. It was from my brothers probably.

Sten’s family lived directly across the street from mine and their house was much more interesting than our house, where my two older brothers, Rob and Scott, and my younger sister Shelly, combined to keep me permanently deprived of space. Sten’s house was all about space. They had a living room the size of a hangar. They had the largest plate glass windows I’ve ever seen in a house. And, bonus, every bathroom (six? seven?) had these sunken bathtubs you could sleep in. We never slept in them but we played cards in the one on the main floor. And Ouiji board once with Sten’s younger sister Mathilda, who had ice blue eyes and could bend her thumb all the way down to touch her wrist.

Despite loving Sten’s house, I have to admit that on several occasions – a statistically anomolous number of occasions, I now realize – we were directly involved in events that nearly destroyed it. I stress that neither Sten nor I ever wanted this to happen. The house was made of almost entirely of cedar. If we’d wanted to destroy it, we could have held a match to one corner. And matches, in my childhood, were like Pez candy. I can’t recall ever being without them. But no, while fire would have been obvious and easy, our methods were always both more involved and weirdly flukey.

One time, to give an example, Sten and I were practicing driving in my front driveway using my mother’s new Volkswagen Beetle. Fire engine red, loved that car. We had a gravel drive at that time, which stretched from the house at the back of the property, down to the street. Sten’s house, which sat low in the trees on the lot across the street, was pretty much in line with the drive.

My mother was always trying to make us eat. Sten was skinny. I wasn’t. But my mother was always calling me in from the woods or from down on the street where, every weekend, weather permitting, there would be a day long game of road hockey going on.

That day, there was a game of road hockey going on, but Sten and I were boycotting on account of one of the big kids who’d threatened to punch Sten’s lights out over one thing or the other. The big kid’s name was Andy, and you’ll hear more about him. Andy thought he was heading to the NHL, among other things. To conclude this from a wicked slapshot in road hockey, which in our case involved a ragged tennis ball and hockey sticks whittled down to rapiers by the pavement, was… well Andy wasn’t bright, even though he was big. And twelve years old.

So we were driving the car up and down. My dad was at work, which he often was on the weekends. And Shelly was at piano. And neither Rob nor Scott had figured out what Sten and I were doing, or they probably would have come out and ruined everything. But as it was, we were taking turns driving the car up to the top of the drive, near the garage, then back it down to the street. Then back up. And at the garage, we would switch. And Sten would come over to the drivers side, and I would walk around the front and climb in the passengers side.

We did this five or six times. Nothing dramatic. We were going slow. Reverse to the bottom. Forward to the top. Switch. One time going up I popped the clutch and the car threw a bunch of gravel backwards, which skipped and pinged down the road, and Andy sent one of his hench-kids up to tell us we were going to get in trouble. But we were on my property. So we ignored him. And I started the car again and popped the clutch a second time, spraying more gravel down the street, and up we went.

Then my mother called from the front door because she had sweet rolls just out of the oven. So in we went to eat these amazing things, which were like cinamon rolls except made with raspberry jam and walnuts. And we spread butter on these and ate them on the deck in the back.. And then we went out front and the car was gone, but a crowd had formed across the street and the police cars were there already.

Nobody saw my mother’s new Volkswagen Beetle roll down the drive. Nobody saw it cross the street at speed. Nobody got creamed. Not Andy or any of the kids playing road hockey. Not Mathilda, who often played with her Barbies in the front yard, right on the far side of the street. Nobody saw the car careen down the driveway, backwards, driverless, bottom out on the pavement, throw up sparks, hit the hedge, punch through, vault off the Beauregard-Vincent’s high stone wall and sail ten feet across their driveway. A flying Beetle. Nobody saw that. But everyone who was outside, anywhere in the area, heard the bang when the Beetle landed. And they all came running to see the car now balanced on the low stone wall out front of Sten’s house, teetering, teetering, the bumper – I swear it, I can picture it to this day – about two feet from the largest pane of plate glass I’ve ever seen in a house. To this day.

Everyone turned and looked when we came out, jam on our faces. Andy, the kids. Two cops, expressions like leather.

Sten and I said nothing. We could have squealed. We could have pointed fingers, said who was driving. Said who did what, left the parking break off. Whatever it was. We were eating jam rolls when it happened. I think we both tried to remember that detail. After it happened, down in the cop shop in Horseshoe Bay, the guy interviewed us. Sten and I kept our story to ourselves. We covered.

“What if some kid had been out on the street?” the one cop asked us.

Long pause. Then Sten said: “Well speaking hypothetically, in that case, sir, that kid would be most definitely dead.”

My dad didn’t get home until much later. But Mr. Beauregard-Vincent drove us home from the cops. We stopped for coffee on the way back. He bought us coffee, which is a thing he did. Little espressos which we loaded up with sugar. He didn’t say anything about the car. He talked to us about Vietnam instead. A bad war. Sins of the fathers visited on the sons.

It was the cop that made him think of it, Sten’s dad said.

It’s 1972. It’s West Vancouver. It’s Gleneagles Elementary school and nothing matters more than Wacky Packs. The coolest kids have them. Your tomboy pal Carrie has them. So you buy gum just to get them. And you put them on your binders, your desk, your lunch box. Your parents hate them.

That part is key. Your parents hate Wacky Packs.

Why do your parents hate them? Your parents hate Wacky Packs the same way they hate Mad Magazine, which you’re never allowed to buy but you also mostly can’t afford.

Wacky Packs, you can afford. So you buy gum just to get them. Five cents or whatever it is. The gum sucks. It tastes, exactly, like cardboard. You know this because you chew the cardboard once to check. Same thing. So you buy the gum, give it a couple chews, then throw it away. But not the Wacky Packs. Those you keep, you hoard, you sort, you trade. You get Mop n’ Glop. You get Rolaches. You trade for Burpsi-Cola.

But you can’t find the worst of the worst, the pinnacle Wacky Pack, the ne-plus-ultra. You can’t find Kentucky Fried Fingers.

Carrie lives on Marine Drive near Whytecliff. She has Kentucky Fried Fingers. One day after school you walk with her all the way down to the bend where the West Van High guys drove a TR6 off the road and died. You sit down there not far from the log where some kids say the blood is still soaked in. You sit with the legs of your jeans touching the leg of her jeans and you’re picking at her Kentucky Fried Fingers sticker on her Social Studies binder with one fingernail. She lets you do this for awhile, watching you. Then she tells you to stop.

You almost had it off. She gave you Hardly Wrap. You find yourself wondering what’s the difference, one sticker or another.

It’s spring and the birds are swooping. There’s bark peeling off the arbutus trees. The highschool boys who died down here were all on the basketball team. You heard. But there’s no blood, you know that. That whole story is all just kids scaring each other.

You walk home thinking: Kentucky Fried Fingers.

Smells and Bells

It was Dante who’d found the Professor’s body. Jeremy thought: of course. That strange friendship between his former boss and his father having forged hard after Jeremy fled his hometown. His two great would-be teachers seemed to have watched his flight leave together. Jeremy imagined them sitting in that little park at the end of the runway where the airplane nerds hung out. And after the howl of the engines had passed overhead, well, there seemed to be nothing left between them. They started playing chess weekly, as if the young man (young then) had been the very board they’d previously contested. He was gone. They needed a different board.

What was the feeling after learning that his father was gone? Jeremy gasped. He sagged. Martine rushed over, but he didn’t feel her hand on her arm or hear her questions. He felt what he would later describe as an envelopment. Something came over and around him, vaporous and entire. His atmosphere changed. He felt himself blur a little, smudge and disperse. He felt less solidly himself, but without any corresponding reaction to the feeling. Was this a good or bad thing happening to him? It wasn’t that kind of a moment or happening, such that it might be identified as either good or bad. It belonged – only this much seemed clear – in another category.

They had service, of course. Coming down hard as it always did. So Jeremy prepared himself to prepare for service. He said to Martine: “My father died. He had a heart attack.”

“Jeremy, oh Jer. Jay jay.” She held him, tight. Strong girl, Martine, whose interest in Jeremy burned with an odd brightness. He thought this often. How equal was her intensity in passion and temper.

But service meant putting the mind to its routines, and so that’s what he did. Foley’s Wilde Room. Named for the owners, who happened to be Martine’s father and uncle. But it was Jeremy who ran affairs here, and under whose guidance the room had really surged to join the big leagues. Alinea, El Bulli. Yes, he was mentioned in the same breath. Although always with the necessary caveat. “Innovative but earthy…” wrote Food and Wine. “Remains authentic, paradoxically…” said Saveur.

As for the Times, when they finally came through, they had the ethereal puff of lentil cloud and the laser-burnt-vanilla-infused rabbit saddle. The reviewer wrote: “I hated it but I loved it too.” And the reviewer knew Jeremy’s Vancouver background too. She knew about the long-ago Monkey’s Paw Bistro and its organic, seasonal, local ingredients. That idea. So long ago. She knew about Gerriamo’s, financed by Dante Beale’s billions, and about Jeremy’s fall from grace there. She knew even about the Food Caboose, the illegal restaurant that Jeremy had kept afloat for almost five years after Gerriamo’s, the most coveted reservation in the city if you knew how to navigate the secret phone numbers and necessary referrals, and if you were smart enough to get in before Jeremy was busted and left the city to travel. The reviewer knew these things because she knew Dante, very well. And so she ate the cube of chowder foam, solidified and tasting exquisitely of the mid-Atlantic. She registered that Jeremy had changed culinary camps, gone over from the Bloods to the Crips. And she hated it. But she also loved it. Her name was Kiwi Frederique. And of course Jeremy recognized her the moment she walked in the cut-glass doors at the front of the Wilde Room. But he did not change the tasting menu in any way. He gave her what he was giving everyone else. It was his room.

So, then, there was also nobody to cover for him. There was nobody above Jeremy who could step in and hold his place for any period of time longer than a bathroom break. And perhaps more importantly, there was nobody that the Foley brothers would trust to do so. Nobody they would trust with their money, scandal ridden as it may be. Nobody they would trust above this North American cook they’d brought in to run what appeared to be the only legitimate part of the business empire they controlled. Jeremy sensed these things about them, having been out to the family house on Shrewsbury Road in Dublin on two occasions now. The first on his hiring. The second with Martine. And on that second occasion there had been little doubt in which area the expectations and the questions were pooling. Martine’s father, Cillian Foley, sipped scotch and gazed at Jeremy with an amber flicker in his all-knowing, all-insinuating eyes, which were a lot like Martine’s eyes, in fact. Seamed with suspicion, interest, provocation.

Cillian Foley said to his then-new chef: “But it’s family that’s important now though, isn’t it? I mean, you would agree would you not?” Cillian Foley, who’d been senior under Bertie Ahern. Out of government now but still plugged in.

To which Jeremy nodded and made a noise of agreement. And to which memory, he made another noise of agreement now. A small grunt of carrying on as he smelled the smell of the house. As he heard Martine’s heels in the marble foyer. As he thought again of Dante finding his father, crumpledover his desk in his downstairs den, crumpled and dead, amid the mess. And here Jeremy surprised even himself by breaking down, weeping. Crumpling into a chair in the front window of the Wilde Room. And nobody came close. Everybody gave him space that he didn’t, really, particularly want just then. He wanted no space. He wanted proximity and warmth. He wanted his old best friend. The love who had never been a lover. He wanted Jules.

Love and grief. Different smells and bells. Different devotions. He caught himself in the split. And Jeremy allowed himself a few moments – holding his sides, rocking in place – to be nothing but miserable.

 The Wilde Room

When the Professor died, it was Dante who called. Jeremy picked up, standing in the alcove next to the reservation desk at The Wilde Room. And there he heard the voice of his long-ago mentor, tormentor, once-friend. He stood, watching his house manager Martine through the front window of the restaurant. Beautiful Martine, clipping the fresh sheet into the menu display on the black railing on the street, the green wall of St. Stephens Green rising opposite. High and scattered cloud. A nice April day in Dublin and booked to the rafters. And here came the long ago. The dreaded. The not-quite put behind.

Dante said: “You remember this voice?”

And with barely half a beat, Jeremy came right back. He said: “Tell me one thing. Tell me I don’t somehow still owe you money.”

Dante said: “If you still owed me money, it’d be my lawyer calling.” But then his voice moderated, or the pressure systems of the phone line shifted in response to his shallow breath. And somewhere in here, Jeremy felt it. Something beneath the surface of things. Beneath his feet. Something hidden in a cavern that had suddenly yawned up under the floorboards of the restaurant in the venerable old hotel.

Jeremy smelled lamb shanks in the afternoon air. Sometime that afternoon the shanks would be shredded into filments, suspended in tomato/red wine foam and chilled. He smelled sage heading into the lyophilizer for crisping and vanilla being burned. He saw a glimmer in the corner of his eye as Martine pushed back in through the front door, light splintering in the cut glass Wilde Room logo. He thought: I’m going to remember this next thing Dante tells me against this backdrop always. Martine, long simmered lamb shanks sixteen steps before completion. Somewhere, a brown butter.

Jeremy said: “What’s happened?”

***

It was Dante who’d found the Professor. Jeremy thought: of course. That strange friendship between his former boss and his father having forged hard after Jeremy fled his hometown. His two great would-be teachers seemed to have watched his flight leave together. Jeremy imagined them sitting in that little park at the end of the runway where the airplane nerds hung out. And after the howl of the engines had passed overhead, well, there seemed to be nothing left between them. They started playing chess weekly, as if the young man (young then) had been the very board they’d previously contested. He was gone. They needed a different board.

What was the feeling after learning? Jeremy gasped. He sagged. Martine rushed over, but he didn’t feel her hand on her arm or hear her questions. He felt what he would later describe as an envelopment. Something came over and around him, vaporous and entire. His atmosphere changed. He felt himself blur, smudge, disperse. He felt less solidly himself, but without any corresponding reaction to the feeling. Was this a bad thing happening to him? It wasn’t that kind of a moment or happening, such that it might either be identified as good or bad. It belonged – only this much seemed clear – in another category.

They had service, of course. Coming down hard as it always was. So Jeremy prepared himself to prepare for service. He said to Martine: “My father died. He had a heart attack.”

“Oh Jer, Oh JerJer, Oh J, J, Jaycee.” She held him, tight. Strong girl, Martine, whose interest in Jeremy burned with an odd brightness. He thought this often. How equal was her intensity in passion and temper. A walking, breathing, red haired, thin ankled Irish cliché. Jeremy didn’t love her. He was enslaved to her. Quite different, and he knew it too. But service was as service always would be. So he thought of his father in a way made numb by routines, pots, knives, a scraped knuckle, a blast of steam, the fragrance of herbs and searing meat. He scorched his hand, badly. Thumb to the flame, nerve endings announcing rather calming: your sleeve is on fire. Your flesh is blistering.

“Chef, chef.”

“I see it,” he said, and turned to douse the flames under cold water. His father had left a mess, a den full of papers, a mystery. No will. Jeremy saw it all in advance, the on-rush of personal chaos, grief. He was going to have to go home now. All the way back to the green west coast of North America, where he did not want to return. He was going to have to go, have to figure things out.

“Chef, chef.”

“Got it.”

Crash. Pots. Glances.

“Sorry. Got it.”

Dante, Dante, Jeremy thought. Tell me what really killed my father.