The Midlife Crisis Cookbook

By Nick Brownlee

“The thing you have to understand about me and Byron is that I was in charge of supper… In short, I didn’t cook. In twenty-five years as a responsible adult, I never had.”
Until his career spectacularly imploded, professional golfer, Greg Chandler, had it all – money, women, a jet-setting playboy lifestyle and not a care in the world. Now he’s middle-aged and on the scrapheap, and to make matters worse, his 12-year-old nephew has unexpectedly appeared, suitcase in hand, to disrupt his dissolute bachelor existence.
Bookish, shy and hopeless at sport, Byron is the antithesis of his wayward uncle. Greg hasn’t the first clue about Generation Z – especially when it seems that, in Byron’s case, Z stands for Zen. Yet, as the boy’s reluctant guardian, the faded star must now confront the alien concept of adult responsibility, as well as his own demons.
It’s the biggest challenge of their lives. It also sounds like a recipe for disaster. But blood is thicker than water, and together this unlikely pair just might have the ingredients to beat the world at its own game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528938471

Book preview

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About the Author

Nick Brownlee is the author of seven crime novels, including the acclaimed Kenya-based Jake & Jouma series. He has also written several non-fiction titles, among them Vive le Tour about the Tour de France. A former Fleet Street journalist, he has been a freelance writer for more than 20 years. Originally from Tyneside, Nick now lives in Cumbria with his wife, daughter and dog.

Dedication

For Janey and Georgia. Who else?

Copyright Information ©

Nick Brownlee (2021)

The right of Nick Brownlee.to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528935982 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528938471 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Acknowledgement

I started off as a thriller writer, and I suppose I still am. This book is very different, though – and a lot more personal. I would like to thank everyone who has kept the faith over the years, and I hope you enjoy this little diversion from the usual blood and guts. I certainly enjoyed writing it. My thanks also go to the team at Austin Macaulay, without whom it might never have seen the light of day.

Chapter 1

It was midnight on the hottest night of the year, and I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned until the sodden bedsheet was rucked and mangled. I screwed up my pyjamas into a sweaty ball and threw them against the wardrobe. I hung out of the open bedroom window, pivoting naked on the sill, sniffing for a cooling breeze like a dog scenting rabbits, but there was nothing, not even a sound from the streets.

Just thick, oppressive, unbearable heat in early September.

Later, I found myself with one foot poised over the bathtub and my left hand cocked on the shower knob, but then I thought about the thunder of water on plastic and about waking Byron, even though it annoyed the hell out of me that he could sleep on a night like this. Instead, I quietly trickled some cold water into the palm of my hand and smeared it into the sweaty patina on my skin, but to no avail.

Later still, I went into the living room and flicked through the sports channels with the mute button activated. A replay of a football match from Spanish League division two. Track cycling highlights from Poland. A boxing match between two bloodied, indeterminate flyweights. On the golf channel, an ancient documentary about Arnold bloody Palmer. I turned it off, wandered across to the drinks cabinet and thought about drinking myself into a stupor. But then I thought about Byron, if he should wake and find me naked and comatose on the sofa. So I went to the mirror above the fireplace and pulled my face about for a while, manipulating the pallid droops and furrows and watching them slump back into place.

Presently, I turned the TV on again. On the news channel, a weatherman on mute was blaming the heat on some sort of freak blast from the Sahara. I thought I lip-read the word ‘Uncomfortable’ coming out of his mouth. It was confirmed by the subtitle that flashed up on the screen a second or two later. But by then, he was already smiling that ironic, don’t-shoot-the-messenger TV weatherman smile that appears when it monsoons at Wimbledon or blizzards during a Test match.

Uncomfortable? Try oppressive, you smug bastard! Try unbearable! And in any case, I thought, what’s the point of telling me what the weather is? Where was the warning that it was going to happen? If I’d known that freak blast from the Sahara was heading north, I could have made plans. I could have bought an electric fan or an air-conditioning unit, or taken a cheap flight to Reykjavik for the night.

So I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling. Tried to think of legitimate reasons why a 44-year-old man should be awake at three in the morning. Problems at work? Money worries? Intimations of his own mortality?

But it was pointless, because I knew fine well what was keeping me up.

It was the eggs.

Byron’s hard-boiled bloody eggs.

***

Wednesday was my day off, so I’d met up with Taylor for lunch at Giacomo’s. Normally, we would sit in a booth near the bar, but it was the hottest day of the year, so we dined alfresco under a lime tree in the walled-off yard at the back of the restaurant. In keeping with the weather, we ordered a selection of antipasti and a bottle of rosé. No doubt we grumbled about the iniquities of where we lived, and how, if this was the Mediterranean, we would have lunch like this every day. Taylor probably said something about how civilised people could be judged by their eating habits, and how those habits were instructed by their climate. How in cold, rainy England, lunch was eaten on the hoof – a wolfed sandwich at the desk or a bolted sausage roll behind the wheel of a Transit van – whereas in Italy, pranzo was a sacrosanct interlude when even the lowest common denominator workman downed tools and headed to the nearest trattoria to engage in social intercourse over something home-cooked and a glass of wine. It was only to be expected, Taylor would have continued, that the English were such a brutish, uptight race compared to the laid-back Italians. I can’t be sure, but at this point I probably reminded him about Mario Carcetti, originally from Puglia, who had suffered a nervous breakdown during the Portuguese Open and tried to strangle his wife; but, knowing Taylor, he would have just shrugged knowingly as if my point was irrelevant in the scheme of his own worldview.

‘A civilised lunch opens the mind to all possibilities, even attempted murder,’ was the kind of thing he might have said.

Anyway, what I know for certain is that one bottle became three and then laid-back Giacomo, who is actually Sardinian, joined us and three became five. Then he bid us arrivederci with a complimentary grappa and we decamped to the golf club where, in keeping with the Italian theme of the day, we drank draught Moretti on the patio until the members began to assemble for the after-work fourballs, at which point, I drove home before they could find me.

Much later, I awoke with a start, slumped in an armchair and slicked with booze sweat. Low evening sun streamed in through the living room window, and when I checked my watch, I saw that it was 5.55pm. The room was airless and stale. I went to the window, opened it and looked down onto the street. My car was parked at a slight angle to the kerb but appeared to be undamaged. That was not my concern, however; I was a seasoned drink-driver and I knew every rat run between here and the club like the back of my hand. What I was checking for was something I had blearily noticed earlier but now irritated me beyond measure. One of the decals on the Opel’s exterior had peeled off, so my name on the door now read reg chandler in bold vinyl letters. I could only assume it had something to do with the heat or the shoddy workmanship of the company who had supplied the decals. Probably both. Either way, it was unacceptable. reg chandler made me sound like a used-car dealer. I made a mental note to kick some arse next time I spoke to Alan Sixby. And then I thought about that forlorn vinyl G lying on a road somewhere and I suddenly felt incredibly sad.

And then I remembered Byron.

Shit. It was now six o’clock.

I left the living room and hurried along the landing to his bedroom. The door was ajar, so I knocked and called his name. There was no reply and the room was empty.

‘Byron?’

There was a clanking noise from elsewhere in the flat. Then his voice. ‘Yeah?’

Thank God! I continued along the landing, down two steps to the next level and past the top of the stairs into the kitchen. Byron was setting the table: cutlery, plates, two water tumblers with a couple of red paper serviettes rolled neatly in each. He looked up when I came in, and blushed beneath his thick blond fringe.

‘You OK?’

He nodded.

‘What time did you get back from school?’

He shrugged. ‘Normal time.’

‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ I said.

‘You were asleep.’

‘You should have woken me up.’

‘You were asleep.’

I looked at the table. ‘What’s this?’

He blushed again and turned away, and there was a time, very recently when I would have blamed myself for that. Something accusatory he had detected in the tone of my voice, perhaps, or an inadvertent frown which he had mistaken for disapproval or even anger. But by now, I knew it was just Byron. Blush and turn away: it was his default setting, and to be honest, it was beginning to irritate the hell out of me.

He went to the fridge and brought back a large plate covered with silver foil. He laid the plate on the table, and under the foil were a dozen boiled eggs. They had been precisely halved, the halves precisely arranged in concentric circles. The yolks had been replaced by dollops of some sort of pale-yellow mush, which had been smoothed into convex mounds with the back of a spoon.

I stared at the plate. ‘What’s this?’

He blushed again. ‘Dinner,’ he said.

BYRON’S HARD-BOILED EGGS

Hard-boil the eggs for 12 minutes, then drain, cover with cold water and leave to cool. Peel and halve the eggs, then remove the yolks and mix with 2 tbsp of Heinz salad cream until consistent. Spoon the mixture into the halved eggs and chill.

Chapter 2

Taylor said, ‘I think you’re taking this far too seriously.’

I said, ‘You don’t understand. And you’re lifting your left heel again.’

He peered at the tiny screen jutting from the video camera. ‘Nit-picking,’ he concluded. Then, sniffly examining the head of his driver, ‘It was hardly Marco Pierre White.’

‘You pay me thirty pounds an hour to be nit-picking,’ I pointed out. ‘And that’s not the point. The kid cooked my supper. He went to the shop, bought a dozen eggs and a bottle of salad cream, and then he cooked my supper.’

It was 11.30 on Thursday morning and we were in trap eighteen of the driving range, away from the rump of the membership but still within painful earshot of their mistimed drives and the clang of their practice balls against the steel walls of the individual driving lanes. Occasionally, having duffed a shot, one of them would peer over like a flea-bitten meerkat, as if the sight of their ball bobbling hopelessly towards the safety nets would make me come running over with some free advice. But I have never been a charity: you get what you pay for, and Taylor’s thirty pounds got him my undivided attention for one hour.

‘So, what are you going to do about it?’ he said, placing his ball on the rubber tee.

‘Well, how difficult can it be?’

He paused and looked up at me sorrowfully. ‘Gregoire.’

‘Well?’

‘Don’t become a competitive dad.’

‘I’m not his dad.’

‘You know what I mean. Accept it for what it was: a nice gesture.’

‘Just hit the ball and keep your heel down.’

Taylor prepared to drive. He was a small, successful man, and his stance and appearance reflected both. Wide legs, thrusting hips, a vision in rose-petal pink and cream. His leather-gloved fingers were curled around the shaft of a £500 Callaway driver. His Footjoy shoes alone cost £200 – I knew, because I had sold them to him. But precisely because he was small and successful, equipped with top-of-the-range clubs, clothing and accessories, he assumed he could impose his will upon the ball, that by merely striking it with all his might he could propel it more than 300 yards in a straight line towards the distant flagstick. He assumed, furthermore, that the thirty pounds an hour he paid me was nothing more than another accoutrement, that my purpose was simply to finesse his natural talent.

He drove. His left heel lifted. His ball flew out of the trap and maintained a steady trajectory for a hundred yards or so before inevitably veering right as if swatted by some invisible hand.

‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘Heel again?’

‘The camera never lies,’ I said.

Taylor was a reasonable amateur golfer. And he would do OK in today’s Squirrels’ Medal, the weekly competition for the over-fifties. But he would never make single-figure handicap. In the grand scheme of the game, he was as hopeless as the rest of them.

He shook his head and turned for the ball basket. ‘So – what was it like?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The egg thing. Was it nice?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Actually, it was OK.’

***

The freak blast of heat from the Sahara had long gone. Instead, it was a typical September day in England: nine degrees, overcast and with a threat of rain from the west. I watched the last fourball of the afternoon hack its way from the first tee and then retreated to the warmth of the pro shop.

The club secretary was already there, inspecting the PowaKaddy golf bag trollies like he was in a car showroom. Prodding the wheels with his shoe. Fiddling with the dials. He said he needed to talk to me about inventory, but we both knew he was just touting for any freebies that might be coming in from the manufacturer. Fat chance. Alan Sixby might have run the club, but the pro shop was my domain. I did the ordering, I did the selling and I distributed largesse. I mentioned the decals on my car. Stalemate descended. Sixby shrugged and said he’d make a note to contact the garage, and then he sauntered out, humming a tune.

When he had gone, I spent a few minutes idly checking the bookings for the weekend, then went through to the clubhouse. The members bar was deserted as it always was at this time on a Thursday afternoon. The only members who ever came in at this time on a weekday were the Squirrels, but they were all out on the course. The restaurant tables were being arranged for their return, and a young girl, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the men’s team vice-captain, was inelegantly laying cutlery on the heavy linen tablecloths. For some reason, I thought her name was Alice. At least that’s what I called her when I asked her if Barry was in. She said she thought so but wasn’t sure and did I want her to check? I returned her helpful smile, and at that moment, I imagined myself as youthful-looking, sardonic, easy-going and approachable.

It’s not so very long since I was just like you, I imagined myself telling her. In fact, if I was 25 years younger, you’d really like me. We would hang out together, smoke a cigarette behind the greenkeeper’s barn, laugh about the filthy old perverts in their Pringle sweaters and action slacks who call you sweetheart and ogle your firm tits every time you reach over to serve them a gin and tonic. Then I would say, Let’s get out of this place, and we would head off into town in my fast car to a nightclub, to a party, and then…

When you get to my age, it’s mortifying to discover how old you look to young people, and by implication, what you represent. At forty-four, you think you’re still eighteen – but in reality, you are the ugly, faded imprint of another generation, a ghostly shadow scorched on a Hiroshima wall. Through Alice’s dark eyes, I saw her father or one of his sad bastard golf club friends.

‘It’s OK, I’ll find him,’ I said.

‘OK,’ she said and went back to her work.

Barry was round the back, changing the barrels. ‘Sevenby were looking for thee,’ he announced. He always called Alan Sixby Sevenby, out of pure cussedness.

‘I know. He found me.’

When Barry laughed, it was like shoes scraping on concrete. ‘Still got his eye on that PowaKaddy, has he?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘I hope tha telled him to fuck off.’

‘Not in so many words.’

I liked Barry. He was not a golf club person, more a refugee from the real world. In a previous life, he had run a moderately successful pub with his attractive wife. They had been the perfect couple for such a business – his wife behind the bar, Barry in the kitchen – until she’d caught him fooling around with a much younger barmaid, at which point it had all unravelled. After a suitable term of penance, and in an unlikely twist of fate, he had resurfaced at the golf club as its head chef and bar manager. It was a job which not only provided him with redemption, but more importantly, for a newly divorced man whose ex-wife had taken every penny, a grace-and-favour flat above the clubhouse.

‘So, what can I do tha for, Greg?’

‘Can I have a look at your menu?’ I said.

Barry was not pleasant to look at. Skinny, sallow, permanently unshaven. Until you got to know him, he was not a pleasant person either. He was from South Yorkshire originally, and even though he was only in his mid-thirties, he spoke and acted like an aggrieved Orgreave pitman. The kitchen was the best place for him, if only for aesthetic reasons, but when his wife left him, he’d had no choice but to go front-of-house, and that was the end of the pub. It was always a mystery to me how the hell he’d washed up here of all places. As far as I could tell, the only thing that qualified him was that he was white and heterosexual.

‘What’s th’after, then?’ he said. ‘Kitchen’s shut, but I can do thee a toastie or summat to tide thee ovver.’

‘No,’ I said, leafing through the heavy, plastic-coated pages of the bar menu. ‘I’m looking for inspiration.’

‘You what?’

‘I’m cooking this evening.’

Barry raised a thick, black, lascivious eyebrow. ‘Hot date, is it? Aiming to do some shaggin’ the night?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

He seemed disappointed. ‘Y’any good then?’

‘At cooking or shagging, Barry?’

‘Both.’

‘Reasonable at one, out of practice at the other.’

Barry cackled. ‘Cookin’, then. Scale of one to ten? One being shit, ten being Gordon Ramsay?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Seven. Six.’

‘I’m a six!’ he said with a grin. Then he said, ‘Here – try this.’ And he tapped the menu with a nicotine-stained forefinger.

‘Thai green curry?’

‘Piece o’ piss.’

‘You think so?’

‘Thai grub – it’s all smoke and mirrors, lad. You got any coconut milk?’

He pronounced it ‘cocko-nu’ ­– and it took me a moment to translate into English. ’No.’

‘Thai basil?’

‘No. Where do I get it?’ I had never even heard of it.

‘Asda, man! You can get everything at Asda. Or you could just get thee sen a jar of sauce. A lot easier.’

‘It’s got to be authentic, Barry.’

He shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Suit thee sen.’

‘What else do I need?’

At that moment, Alice went past the bar on her way to collect more cutlery. We both smiled at her, but it was noticeable that she looked only at Barry and that her cheeks flushed delicate pink when she did.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘Gie’s a pen and I’ll write it down.’

***

I went to Asda, and, like a trained rat, found myself heading instinctively for the ready meals’ aisle. I corrected myself, took a deep breath and moved into the unknown terrain of the fresh meat section.

What struck me first was how cold it was. I’d come from the golf club in golf club attire: Chinos, polo shirt, flimsy branded gilet. More than enough for an autumnal day in England, but hopelessly inadequate for the Siberian chill blasting out from either side of the aisle. But this was nothing compared to the horror of the aisle itself. It was a tunnel of carnage, coloured pink and purple and deathly white. The shelves were laden with raw flesh that had been carved and sliced and diced and yet arranged with such precision in their sweating plastic containers. Gripping the handle of my basket, I made my way past bloodied cubes of beef and lamb to the chicken. Here, at least, there was less gore, but it was no less disturbing. Breasts, legs, wings – save for the beak, it seemed there was no part of the bird that had not been dissected and packaged for human consumption. I consulted Barry’s scrawled shopping list and quickly threw a pack of skinless thighs into the basket before moving on.

I emerged into the central thoroughfare and felt instantly calmed. For a while, I drifted aimlessly on the slow-moving current of trolleys, soothed by the sound of Asda FM, before docking at the familiar haven of the booze aisle where I loaded up with a six-pack of Tsingtao beer. It would have been nice to stay a while, but all too soon I felt the pull of Barry’s list and I was off again, this time bound for the Fruit and Veg section.

I asked a member of staff where I would find Thai basil, but she looked at me blankly. ‘Try normal basil,’ she said and pointed to the herb rack.

I found the basil. Then, on my own, I managed to find shitake mushrooms, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, mangetout, bird’s eye chillies, garlic, shallots, fresh coriander, ginger and limes. I even tracked down powdered cumin, chicken stock cubes and a bottle of fish sauce. But there was one more item on Barry’s list and that was coconut milk. I admit I had been keeping it till last, purely for sentimental reasons. The last – the only time – I had come across it was in Malaysia, after the Singapore Open, and it had been served with dark rum in a tall, cool glass in a bar overlooking the Straits of Johor. The girl I was with had called the drink Syurga, which she said meant Heaven, and which sounded about right to me. Then again, I was 29 years old, I had a girl and I had a cheque for £150,000 in my back pocket. What could be more heavenly that that?

I asked the same member of staff where I could find coconut milk and, concluding that I was an idiot, she took it upon herself to direct me personally towards the aisle marked World Foods.

‘Cooking something fancy, are you?’ she said.