The Secret Ingredient

Fresh cranberries dot the white tablecloth like glossy drops of Hollywood-red nail varnish. Steaming biscuits tempt a nearby boat of thick, rich gravy, and a thin sheath of condensation sends an individual droplet trailing down the champagne bottle that leans jauntily from its custom created silver ice-bucket. The centerpiece, predictably, is a massively plump turkey. Its golden, crispy skin is stretched taut across the succulent flesh beneath.

The spread looks sufficiently spectacular. Most of it is inedible. Some of it is poisonous.

Janet, craned over the turkey, positions dried sprigs of thyme across the platter, trying hard to make them look haphazard and ‘rustic’. She asks me about holly sprigs, but I shake my head. No frills. We’re trying to create a simple, clean, modern look. A Christmas dinner that the average working woman will look at and think, “I can do that”. Except she couldn’t. Not like this. Not unless she has six hours to spare, a dedicated assistant, a tool-kit which could rival any seasoned car mechanic’s, and ten years’ worth of food styling experience. Never forgetting the necessary evil of a professional photographer.

“Are you chicks gonna be ready anytime soon?” Neil, our own necessary evil, asks. He’s made a show of draping himself across his camera, exhausted. It’s irksome.

“Almost,” I answer. This is Neil’s first “Kitchen Craft” calendar shoot. It shows. I want to tell him to go make tea so long and that I’ll call him when everything is perfect. But I know that the longer I speak to him, the more likely it is that I’ll smash a bottle of glycerine in his face, or scratch his eyes out with a cake comb.

William Turner usually takes the photographs. He’s been doing the calendar even longer than I have, and he doesn’t need to be told that, although all twelve set-ups need to be flawless, none is more important than December. Despite the magazine’s increasingly culturally diverse readership, there remains an expectation that the December image will feature a full-on festive feast, with a turkey stuffed to its metaphorical gills, and all the traditional trimmings.

January was a bowl of chartreuse pea soup, topped with rosy hunks of gammon. I added gelatine to the blended peas the night before and set it in the freezer to ensure that the ham (under-cooked and dipped in glycerine to make it look sweet and juicy) stayed in place on the surface of the soup for two hours. For April, we created the perfect three-layer chocolate cake, spongy but moist, and enrobed in a silky layer of chocolate ganache. We used Styrofoam, shaving cream and plastic “chocolate” curls that don’t melt under the lights to make it look mouthwateringly indulgent. And for July, I dropped a handful of hand-carved acrylic “ice cubes” into a jug of water, colored to look like lemonade, and individually arranged thirty-seven raw, oiled and blow-torched green beans across a carefully constructed Salad Nicoise for a “low maintenance’”summer lunch.

We have just under two weeks for all twelve set ups. Every time we change the angle of the shot, or adjust one of the lights, we need to rearrange the elements in the frame. It’s a time consuming process. One that requires patience and a hawk’s eye for detail. Even a short lapse in concentration could result in a peak of fake whipped cream losing its turgidity atop a polystyrene meringue, ruining the symmetry of the shot, the appetite-rousing efficacy of the image and, occasionally, one’s reputation. This was something William understood. Unfortunately, this year, William Turner decided that spending time with his family was more important than completing the coveted Christmas shoot. So much for his reputation, then.

Janet steps back from the table and comes to stand next to me, taking in the full arrangement. We survey our work. The glint of the gold stars and the gleam of the artificial berries sprinkled across the white of the table cloth seems heavier in some places than others. I tilt my head from side to side and try to visualize the perfect place for each pop of color.

“Ladies! Come on, it’s almost ten o’clock. Let’s shoot this bitch.” Neil enthuses, clapping his hands. Janet furrows her brow and looks at me.

“What do you think?” she asks in a whisper.

That’s what I like about Janet, she doesn’t leave anything to chance. There is definitely an imbalance of gold on the left side of the table. It’s subtle, and if all we were shooting were close ups, I might even let the arrangement slide. But this is the December set-up. No sliding.

“No.” I tell Janet. I turn to Neil, whose shoulders sag theatrically at my response.

“Seriously? What now?” He sounds like he’s getting ready for a confrontation. I ignore him and pick up a pair of tweezers. I start rearranging the stars, stepping away every two stars or so to make sure they’re balancing out.

“That’s it.” Neil says. He steps away from his camera, moves to the electrical outlet and starts unplugging his lights.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m leaving.”

“What? You can’t go anywhere until this is done.”

“Watch me.”

I look at Janet and see my own panic reflected in her eyes.

It’s taken me two days to dry and stretch the skin on the turkey for today. That big, dead bird is raw beneath the blowtorch-scorched and painted skin, making its life expectancy as a prop extremely limited. This is also our last shoot day, last day in the studio, last chance to make sure that the December shot is immaculate. He cannot do this to us. He will not do this to us.

“Neil,” I say his name gently, and surprise myself by not sounding angry at all.

“Neil, this is our last set-up and it’s the most important of the lot. Why don’t you take a quick coffee break and come back when we’re ready?”

“Piss off,” he responds without looking at me while rolling an extension cord around his arm.

He’s really just going to abandon us here with a mountain of fake food. I look back on my table. The dots of red and gold sparkling in the remaining light suddenly look like dying stars against the milky backdrop of the table cloth. The fake crystal ice, in which the champagne bottle nests, twinkles softly. This would have been my sixth calendar shoot. My best so far. Neil collapses a light stand and packs it away.

“Neil,” I say again.

“What?” he asks, stopping to look at me. He looks like a spoiled child, one eyebrow arched skywards, expectantly. I wonder about his parents. I wonder if they doted on him for years, meeting his every need, only to have that same ungrateful eyebrow disdainfully raised at them. Probably.

“I want you to understand, Neil, that as soon as you walk out of here, you’re finished.” I measure my voice, tempering it for evenness.

He laughs at my threat.

“Finished? In food photography? Oh, dear god, no!” he says sarcastically.

I hate sarcasm.

“Fuck this and fuck you. I’m going to go shoot models for real magazines, the kinds that have hot girls in them, not the sad, fat cows who read Kitchen Crap.”

He collapses another light stand and carelessly tosses it on top of the first in his tog bag. I cringe. Janet looks close to tears. Without December, the calendar is nothing, we are nothing. All of our work, all for nothing. The rage in my veins cools to dangerous purpose.

Photoshop and its equivalents have made a lot of old-fashioned food stylist tools obsolete. Like tungsten wire. Tungsten wire is incredibly fine and surprisingly strong. As long as you have something to hang it from, you could suspend flapjacks, apples, French fries, anything that needs ‘lift’, ‘depth’ or ‘architecture’. Height in other words. There’s not much need for it anymore, but I still keep it in my bag of tricks, just in case. My bag of tricks is also home to three long, thin steel picks. The biscuits on the table have been skewered on two of them, leaving one unemployed. It’s this free pick that my hand wraps around as I watch Neil sulkily move around the room, prematurely wrapping his equipment.

“Neil?” I approach him, he has his back to me.

“What. The. Fuck?” He asks, annoyed. He stands and turns to me.

As soon as we make eye contact, something jerks in my elbow and the pick is suddenly buried to the hilt in his thigh. He screams. I feel the instant rush of guilt and horror, looking at the miniature metal spear embedded in his flesh. I worry that his screams will be heard. I look for Janet and find her on the other side of the room. Her face is transformed from the shy girl I know into a mask of frightening coldness. She leaps forward and practically empties an entire can of Pam into his face. He coughs and splutters. We do too a little. But the screaming stops.

Without saying a word to one another, Janet and I each grab one of his wrists and secure them with the tungsten. We do the same to his flailing feet, one of which almost catches me in the face as he struggles. We string him up tight. Tighter than I’d ever tie a roast. The wire bites into his skin and I know that blood will stop flowing to his fingers and toes soon.

Janet grips Neil by the hair and holds his face close to hers.

“Now you see here,” she says, and I realize I don’t recognize this voice as hers anymore, “You’re going to shut up and finish taking these pictures or we’re going to see how much gas is left in that blowtorch. Do you understand?”

“How?” Neil whimpers in response, “I can’t move.”

He has a point. We untie one hand and secure the other to his ankles with a long thread of tungsten, chain-gang style. Janet grips the handle of the pick and pulls it out of Neil’s thigh. He cries out again and the hot blood streams from the tiny wound, staining the front of his blue jeans and the concrete floor of the studio.

“No funny business.” She says, holding the pick threateningly close to his eye.

The phrase is so cockeyed I want to laugh, imagining little Janet as a fedora-wearing mobster. She touches the tip of the pick to Neil’s face, pressing it into the soft skin between his cheekbone and his lower eyelid. I stop laughing.

“No funny business.” Neil repeats.

We help as much as we can, setting up the lights and helping Neil to shuffle his way to the camera. Bound and bleeding, he seems to finally understand that we all need to work together now. The arrogance and attitude from just minutes before melts from his features, and a combination of fear and blood loss makes him look simultaneously young and vulnerable. It makes me feel just a touch maternal. We communicate in the concise, short-hand sentences of close colleagues, making each shot go quickly. When Neil starts looking too pale, we ease him down to the floor and take a break. Janet even rubs the fingers of his trapped hand, helping what little blood is left in him to circulate more efficiently. We move his camera for him and adjust his lights for each shot. It’s an inspiring example of teamwork.

The time flies and after three hours, we all agree that we have enough options to proudly present to the Kitchen Craft team. Janet cuts Neil loose and he whimpers as the blood returns to his movement-starved hands and feet. I use one of my best cotton napkins to cover the dark hole in his leg. As I do, I notice the bleeding has reduced significantly and silently lament the waste of the 600 thread count item. We pack up Neil’s things first, so he can go home to rest, while we clean up the imitation Christmas dinner.

I look up and see Janet wearing a slightly sheepish grin and holding the champagne bottle in both hands. Neil massages the angry red welt around his wrist and his eyes follow my gaze. Janet raises the opened bottle.

“To a job well done.”

She pours each of us a glass. Neil holds his glass with what he will, I’m sure, from now on refer to as his “good hand”. We clink glasses, a high, light sound I’ve always loved. Neil drains his glass and holds it out for a refill. Janet and I laugh gaily. Janet refills his glass and Neil empties it again in a single swig. We don’t touch ours.

Not being sure whether or not we would be taking close ups of the champagne for the December shoot, Janet and I poured half the bottle of the sparkling wine down the kitchen sink this morning. The other half we topped up with a little salt, a healthy dose of antifreeze and a hard-to-come-by, but highly toxic brand of liquid resin that makes the bubbles last longer and move more slowly in the glass. It must taste terrible, but then Neil probably hasn’t noticed anything yet through the thickly cloying flavor of Adrenalin in his mouth. His arm wavers as he requests yet another refill. Janet obliges and smiles at me.

That’s what I like about Janet, she doesn’t leave anything to chance.