NSSA 2024 - Ghost Kitchen by Ross Raisin

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome back to the BBC Short Story Podcast, where this week we have been showcasing the five shortlisted stories for the 2024 BBC National Short Story. The final shortlisted story comes from York-based author Ross Raisin. His story, Ghost Kitchen, is narrated from the perspective of Sean. a courier who has sought refuge in the industrial wilderness after a tragic incident.

The story centres around the contrast of the invisibility Sean is able to choose, with the fragile existence and lack of opportunities open to fellow worker EBDO, a migrant he befriends.

The reader is Ashley Margolis. Ghost Kitchen by Ross Raisin. Read by Ashley Margolis. Already he had mastered these streets. He had also finally mastered the bike, which had been Frank's, and was in truth a piece of crap. And as he rode now onto Museum Street, he knew to downshift softly. letting the gears decide for themselves when to catch. At the crest of the hill, Sean pushed on. He was two minutes behind. He moved into the middle of the lane and peddled harder.

Nervous energy coursing through him, until at the end of the street, he was forced to stop. For a whole minute he waited, watching the slow procession of drivers, alone in their cars. before the release of the light when he could slice through the congestion, out onto the other side of the ring road. The roads were at once quieter. The dark was coming on, but he left his lights in his jacket pocket.

not wanting to stop and lose more time attaching them. The dike was close to here. He could turn to look down the passageway where part of it would be visible, but he resisted the impulse. He glanced at the wristwatch on his handlebar. He'd gained almost a minute. Still, he kept up his pace. moving deeper into this untouched part of the city where blue spiked metal fencing ran along the backs of industrial units. A meat wholesaler, a document shredding firm. The only sound anywhere

was the clicking of the front wheel as he slowed, stole around the side of the next warehouse building, and dismounted. The door was open. Sean could see all the way down the gangway. The hands and arms of men, silent as ghouls, were moving in the brightly lit mist of each pod. An order was on one of the collection shelves, the paper bag stapled and ready.

Sean checked the code on his phone against the one on the wall screen. Outside, a car was pulling up, its engine just perceptible underneath the churning of the ventilation fans. He took off his bag, and put the order inside, stooping to take in the smell of it. Fish and chips. A smell that reminded him of childhood. Of Frank.

reminded him too that he had not eaten before coming out to work. He registered the collection and studied quickly the route that came up on his phone. He was about to set off when a movement in one pod, Unit 3, Caught his eye. A tall, thick-set man, foreign, it seemed to shone through the mist, stood with his back against one of the line of deep-fat friars. A shorter man was standing in front of him.

Their faces closed together. The short man laughed, pointing to the floor, and the tall man bending down went out of Sean's view, then stood up again. He held out a pair of tongs, which the short man took from him. Laughing again and speaking to somebody out of Sean's sight, he raised the tongue towards the tall man's face and arranged the pincers around him, as if measuring his head. Sean could feel a familiar trickle of fear entering his blood.

There was a sound behind him, the man from the car coming into the building. Sean stepped back from the opening, put his bag onto his back, and went outside. He got on the bike and raced into the growing dark. Security lights firing on him one by one like search beams. In the shower, he let out a long moan of exhaustion. He toweled himself dry.

crossing the corridor into his room. For a moment, the incident at the warehouse played again in his mind. He was too tired, though, to think about that, and it was nothing to do with him. He was doing okay. This was what he needed now. He could do as many or as few deliveries as he wanted. He could go whole days without having to see or speak to anybody.

other than a fleeting transaction on a doorstep. He picked his jeans up from the floor and fished out the night's surprising and pathetic tip from his pocket. Then he collapsed, already almost asleep.

Onto the bed. The rain had been coming down heavily all afternoon. A new request was pinging on his phone. He shielded the rain from the screen with his hand and saw below the request. A message notification from earlier. All right, mate. How's things? None of us have... He swiped to clear it and pressed onto the order request. £5.42. The Harbour Fisheries.

Unit 3. He accepted and got back onto his bike. He crossed over the ring road. At the top of the passageway to the dyke, he paused. Then he forced himself once again to move. and pressed on. He arrived at the warehouse collection area, moved forward towards the order. Want to earn some more? A man with a big moist beard and white rubber boots had appeared.

like a real fisherman in the gangway entrance. Sean steadied himself, packing the order correctly into his bag. What do you mean? Two of my staff left, no warning. And tonight is busy busy, so if you want that to be your last delivery today, the job is yours. He was watching Sean put the bag over his shoulders. We pay better than them.

Sean thought about all the hours he had ridden since signing to the app to gain tonight's priority access shift. Part of him, however, had already decided. The rain had eased off by the time he returned. The short man from last night, who, from his clothing, Sean now took to be the site manager, was smoking outside the building. When Sean went inside and looked down the gangway into the Unit 3 pod, only the tall man...

and one other worker was stood at the friars. The man with the beard was approaching through the service corridor, into the space behind the collection shelves. Good! He lifted the metal counter flap to let Sean through. Mehmet, he introduced himself, clapping his chest. Follow me. Mehmet led him into a windowless room behind the pods. Towers of meal boxes were lined against the wall.

Here. Mehmet handed him a navy apron. I'll put you next to Zak. He can show you. But you can start with just chips. Inside the pod, Mehmet spoke briefly to a young man with short, stiff blonde hair. Zack. The tall man was at the far end of the line. He was working quickly, extracting fish from the fryer with one hand at the same time as spooning mushy peas into a frilled paper pot with his other.

For the next five or ten or twenty minutes, Sean fell into the timeless dulled rhythm of the work. He had forgotten to eat again, and his stomach reeled as he processed the baskets and baskets of chips. He saw with alarm that the short man was looking at him. Sean focused on another shovel of pale, frozen chips, his skin tightening as he heard the man laugh.

But when he peeked up, he realised with relief that the man was in fact looking past him, to where Mehmet was standing directly behind the tall man. One of the frilly paper pots was balanced upside down on his head, like a miniature hat. Sean tried to ignore the frightened quickening of his blood when the short man came past behind him.

He was laughing again. And when Sean turned to look, Mehmet was positioning another pot behind the first one. The man carried on at his tasks with the pots on his head like it was a party game. And then Mehmet put down a third to make a line. A Mohican of pots. Look, Dougie, Mehmet said to the short man who was bent over with laughter, his hands on his knees.

That's how big their heads are. Sean plunged another basket, not allowing himself to look up again until the basket was done. A pyramid of pots was now stacked on the man's head. Mehmet stood with his arms folded, admiring his work, Dougie at his side, losing it, as Mehmet stepped forward, puckering his lips to blow the pots off the man's head. They fell to the floor.

Except for one, which dropped into the boiling liquid of the man's fryer. For an instant, Sean was sure that he saw anger flicker in the man's face. Whatever instinct of reprisal had come into the man, however... He swiftly restrained. Sean watched him use his tongs to carefully pluck out the pot, brown and crumpled from the fryer, and put it into the bin by his knees.

while Mehmet and Dougie walked away together into the storeroom. Over the next two nights, he fell into a new routine. Delivering from late morning through the afternoon, then after a quick sandwich which he had foiled and tucked into his bag riding to the warehouse to stand at the friars into the night late on sunday night when he had drained the oil from his friar

he heard Mehmet calling him from inside the storeroom. When he went inside, Mehmet was sitting in the corner on an upturned crate. Two of the others were there, a boy who had worked on Saturday, and the tall man. From an inside pocket, Mehmet took out a handful of white envelopes. Both of the others moved forward slightly. Cue, Mehmet said plainly.

The tall man automatically moved behind Sean as the boy stepped in front of him. The boy, taking the envelope that Mehmet handed to him, mumbled thank you and left. You're okay with cash? Mehmet said, not looking up at Sean for a reply, instead opening one of the envelopes. He pulled out a £20 note from the small stash, raising his face now, grinning at the man behind Sean.

Oops. He slid the note into a different envelope. Must have counted wrong. He held out the envelope with the extra twenty towards Sean. A compulsion to not take the envelope, to not leave the man alone with Mehmet, rooted Sean where he was. Mehmet watching him, interested, until Sean felt it weaken. And leave him. Mehmet gave a short laugh. There will be more next week. Now go on. Same time tomorrow.

A couple of times, he got to the warehouse a few minutes early and joined Zack round the side for a cigarette. Here, during the strange brief intimacy of leaning back together against the wall, he learned from Zack that Unit 3's owners, men Sean had never seen, used to have two fish and chip shops in the city. Went bust, so they got a unit out here when all the dark kitchen stuff started.

All the expensive stuff gets paid for them, energy and rent and whatever, so all they've got to pay for is us, fish and a ton of frozen chips. While he was saying this, the tall man became visible through the fencing. walking down the lane. They've put me on the roll now, and fair enough, they've got to be careful, right? The only ones not on the roll, except for newbies like you, is the illegals. He nodded to where the man was going out of sight past the corner of the building.

But they'll hardly cost much. Far as anyone else is concerned, they don't exist. Just ghosts. Whether the orders were coming in hard or steady, the tall man always seemed to work at the same pace. His movements rapid and nimble, his station always immaculate. Most nights, he would be hassled at least once by Mehmet or Dougie. The hat game was a favourite. How easy it was to do nothing.

to let it become normal. But every night, when Sean peddled away, a rekindled feeling of guilt would cling to him as he replayed each incident and imagined all the ways that he could have stopped them.

Thoughts which, by the time he got back to the bedsit, had always taken him back to the dike. Sean stayed in bed awake, long into the morning. The pings were starting to come in. He let them sound, even though he knew he was not going to deliver today. He got up and walked to the corner of the room. He was still in his clothes, so he just picked up the hoodie that was on the floor, put it on, and went out.

When he got to the petrol station, he moved straight to the flowers, and gave no thought to which of the two varieties he would buy. With the flowers laid across his handlebars attached by the wristwatch at one end and an elastic band at the other, Sean cycled. until he came to the dike. The grass of the bank was bathed in sun, and Sean could already see them all there, laughing, drinking, their feet dangled over the water.

He got off the bike and leant it up against the crumbling, graffitied wall that ran along the top of the near side, then walked along the wall to the spot. There was not much there. The remnants of some previous flowers. Not his. He slung the old flowers over the wall and put down the new ones. For a moment, he stood there.

Then he stepped down the bank and jumped across the dike before climbing to the place where the bank creased into a grassy shelf. Then he sat down. He took off his shoes and socks. and let the brown water swallow his toes, closing his eyes now to the memory of the other group arriving, the four of them stepping through the broken wall. Their catcalls.

coming across the dyke goading playful at first but frank and his friends bristling a history with these other lads and the first bit of brick striking the bank close to Frank's hand his friends getting to their feet shouting leaping the dyke to get to the boys Sean could feel it strongly now The intensity of his need for Frank not to join in. The mangled sound that had left his throat. Pleading for Frank to come back. He opened his eyes.

A tiny bird was hopping about on the other side. It moved down to the water and took a drink. Sean watched the bird as it hopped back up the bank to the top. Where the phantoms... of young male bodies were closing upon each other, straining with intent. One of the other group, his face dark with blood. Being held back by his mate, but breaking free. And in an instant, both groups charging towards each other in a chaos of motion. Arms and...

fists and shouts and the hand reaching down to pick up the chunk of broken brick. Sean not able to see yet. In the speed of it all, whose body it was dropping to the ground as everybody else scarpered. He turned onto the lane, to the pods, and cycled towards the gap in a thick mess of bushes. He dismounted and walked his bike into the space and sat down on the tyre to wait. Every few minutes a rider rushed past on the lane.

With each bright flash of colour, Sean had the strange sensation that he was watching himself. Collecting, delivering, accelerating always towards the next order. Here, in this leafy bunker, Everything else became heightened. The far away hydraulic scoop and lift of a machine. The close, low laughter of a man behind the wall. As he listened to these things...

He took out his phone which, when he opened the list, brought up a uniform cue of attempts to speak to him. He put the phone to his ear and the voice of his mum was at once inside his head. Wondering how you're getting on and if you need anything. We just wanted to let you know as well that we're going to pay a visit, and we know you might not want to, but if you want to come with us, then... He stopped the message.

But before the phone was back in his pocket, his mind was already on the dike. They did not know that he went there. They thought he had severed that from his life. That it was only them who kept the memory of what happened there. Through the foliage, Sean could see the tall man approaching. It struck Sean for the first time that he travelled in on foot, and he found himself curious about how far the man came in from.

The same distance again walking back home in the dark later. Home. When he was a few metres away, Sean emerged from his hiding place. The man stopped still, staring at Sean. Got in a bit early, Sean said. Then when the man did not say anything. I work where you do. Unit 3. Shall we walk in? The man still said nothing.

but waited for Sean to wheel his bike away from the fence, and they set off together. At the end of the shift, when they had drained and scraped and paper-toweled the friars, swept and mopped, the man was first to complete his clean-down tasks. and left straight away, giving, as he walked out, a single nod goodbye to Sean. The next day, Sean went back to riding. He accepted his first ping at midday,

and he carried on through the afternoon until he could arrange himself, fifteen minutes before the start of his kitchen shift, in the gap in the bushes. The man did not seem surprised this time. He stopped and waited as before for Sean to get his bike. Then they walked off silently down the lane. When they arrived, Sean turned to the man before he went to lock up his bike. Sean, he said.

The man looked at him. Hebdo. Over the next couple of days, the short walk together became a routine. The same time each evening, the same nod hello and the quiet walk down the lane. On the Sunday evening, however, Hebdo was a few minutes late. An anxious thought quickly took hold of Sean, until there the man was, just as normal.

Sean realised that his arms and legs were streaming with relief, and he wanted in that moment to know more about Ebdo, to talk to him. It was raining, very lightly, but... Ebdo's hair was wet through, and Sean realised that he must walk in from some distance away. Where do you come in from? Sean asked. For a few seconds, Ebdo did not answer. Then, as Sean was thinking that he had not understood, he said, Kurdistan. Oh, Sean said. Long walk then. Sean turned his head.

At once worried that he had spoken out of turn, but Hebdo was smiling. Yes, he said. Believe me. It was about three hours into the shift. when the orders were progressively slowing down, that they started. Mehmet was standing against the wall opposite the friars. In one hand, he held a plastic box of lemon wedges. He picked one out,

holding it up level with his eye like a darts player, then threw it. The wedge landed with a spurt of oil in Ebdo's fryer. The next one dropped in just as Ebdo was tonguing out the first. A barrage of Mehmet's lemons were now flying through the air, and a chord of panic twisted in Sean's spine at the memory of the pieces of brick firing across the dike.

Ebdo carefully removed each foaming wedge from the liquid, like it was just another part of the job. A desperation for Ebdo to defend himself was climbing inside Sean's chest. Mehmet, though. had become distracted, moving away to show something on his phone to Dougie. There was a lemon wedge on the floor near Sean's feet. He tried to bend to pick it up, but suddenly his body would not move.

He could see the chunk of brick, still in Frank's hand. He remembered the brief moment of nothingness afterwards. Frank muttering, shit, shit, shit. Then... The boy's head cradled in his own fingers. And not knowing what to do. And looking up to see everybody else, Frank, running away.

By the time the order stopped coming in, Mehmet was already in the storeroom. When he came out, he held the envelopes up above his head. Come and get them. Fleetingly, Sean and Hebdo met each other's eyes. Sean went forward to where Mehmet was already holding out his wage packet. Once he had taken it, Sean did not move. Go home. Mehmet said. Dougie was by the entrance to the storeroom. At the edge of his vision, Sean could see him waving. Bye-bye, Dougie cooed.

Sean did not look at Hebdo as he walked out of the pod. In the collection area, he stopped. A dark rectangle of night was in front of him. Frank's bike, waiting in the shelter. The ride home. He could visualize himself moving towards it. But he could sense, even as he watched the ghost of himself leaving, his feet still planted on the floor.

And he knew, before he turned to see Mehmet crumpling the banknotes, Dougie laughing, that he would not come back to this place again after tonight. None of them noticed him at first. Ebdo was looking into his friar. Mehmet had the flat of his hand against Ebdo's back, coatsing him towards the friar. And Sean understood. Better get it out quick.

Dougie was saying, and then he turned to see Sean. You still here? His attention, though, went straight back to the spectacle at the friar. Mehmet was studying Ebdo, watching closely. as he reached for his tongs. No, Mehmet said quietly. With your hands. Hebdo stared into the friar. at his money seething in the oil. His expression gave nothing away, although Sean, treading closer, could see his hand, when he raised it to hover above the fryer, was shaking.

The pain, for the first second or two, did not register. Then it came, tearing like a barb of metal up Sean's wrists and forearm. Mehmet and Ducky stood powerless, while Ebdo reacted quickly, lifting Sean's hand out of the oil and guiding him away to a sink. The yellowed money still gripped in his hand until Ebdo could tease it out and place Sean's hand and arm under the running water. Holding him there.

A pure, exhilarating pain moving through Sean's arm until his whole body was alight. A rapture of fire. He did not know how much time had passed when he heard the dim wail of the ambulance. He was sitting outside, on a plastic chair that Ebdo had found. He could piece together only fragments. Mehmet and Dougie running away, the boiled banknotes lying on the floor like damp flower heads.

Ebdo, sitting on the ground beside him, had heard the siren too. He started to get to his feet, and Sean horridly reached his good hand into his jeans pocket for his own wage envelope. Ebdo... standing above Sean now, shook his head, smiling, and Sean let the stillness of the night begin to seep through him, the glow of the city, and further out, his parents at home.

Frank, waiting for their visit. As he watched the ambulance arrive and Ebdo walking away, his outline gradually disappearing into the soft blue pulse of air.

Ashley Margulis was reading Ghost Kitchen by Ross Raisin. The producer was Elizabeth Allard. Here's an interview with Ross on BBC Radio 4's Front Row. We've been interviewing all of the shortlisted writers for this year's BBC National Short Story Award, run in conjunction with Cambridge University. And it's the turn of Ross Raisin, shortlisted for his story, Ghost Kitchen.

A novelist as well as a short story writer, Ross won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2009 and who was named on Granter's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. His most recent novel, A Hunger, was set in a restaurant kitchen, but this story centres on a dark kitchen, a very different rung on the gastronomic ladder.

When I talked to Ross earlier, I asked him first to explain what a dark kitchen is and why it's the location for this story. It's an idea that I became quite interested in as a sort of...

So a version, actually, from the research that I was doing into my last novel, A Hunger, which is set within the high end, I suppose, of the restaurant industry, I did quite a lot of thinking and exploring of... the darker, more undisclosed side of the restaurant industry as a whole, which naturally enough took me to the idea of Dark Kitchens, which is a place where food is cooked for take-out meals.

but disconnected from the restaurant itself. So often in a warehouse or a porter cabin on the outskirts or in hidden industrial pockets of urban areas.

The term dark kitchen refers to the windowlessness, but it also refers to the ugliness, I think, sometimes that can happen in those places. We're asking all of the shortlisted writers about their opening sentences, about the openings of the stories. Could you just read the opening of your story for us? Already he had mastered these streets. He knew the cuts through the alleyways and service areas, where there would be vehicles parked over the cycle lanes, which lights could be run.

he had also finally mastered the bike which had been frank's and was in truth a piece of shit and as he rode now onto museum street past the theatre the memorial park the old boy playing his penny whistle outside the library He knew to downshift softly before the bike got wind of the climb ahead, letting the gears decide for themselves when to catch. I'm curious, was that word mastered in there from the earliest draft?

Yes, it was. It was there from the beginning. There's a degree of kind of tactical misdirection there, isn't it? Because you've got that word already mastered. Seems to... give us a sense of control, assurance, and then we find out that your central character is anything but. That's an astute point, yes. Seems quite assured, seems quite confident, but we realise. is lacking those things greatly, is lacking a kind of agency over his own life that, as the story then starts to unravel...

is in large part due to what has happened to him in the past and due to what has happened to the fellow that is mentioned in those opening lines, Frank, his brother. And that's the thing, you know, when you were writing something, it's a story or a novel, you don't... know the full thing until it is completed and the main, I suppose, kernel of it that came about is Frank. It's his brother. It's actually, in large part, it's a story.

about his brother who is not actually present in the story. No, in many ways sort of glimpsed in the peripheral bits of the story and literally almost down side alleys at certain points. And it is set in a very kind of precisely evoked space. Why is research important to you? You've done it before because you've written novels about specialised workplaces. Why is research? Because after all, you could make it up.

You know, very few people know what a dark kitchen is like. So why is it important to you to get all of those details right? Well, the researching process for me, the bedrock of it has always been... Talking to people. The enjoyment and the value of that is that when you start to actually speak to people, they'll tell you surprising things, things that you hadn't planned for your research.

And that will take you into new avenues, new creative avenues. And, you know, I like it. I like going into the workplace of people and letting them talk to me about it. And here... Just the specifics. Like I spent part of the research time in a car park of a popular DIY store in York on the Hull Road where there's a fantastic chip van.

that my daughter especially loves. And she bullied me into buying her some chips from the chip van. And in doing so, I said, I'm writing a story and it involves a deep fat friar. Can you tell me everything that I could find out about that deep fat friar about? The oil temperature, what do you do with the used oil? How do you clean off the blackened chips at the end of it? And as often happens, I find, when you're researching and talking to people...

If you're open about it and say, oh, I'm writing a novel or I'm writing a story, I'm interested, then more often than not, people are happy to talk to you. It's quite different to approaching people as a journalist, I think, or... with some different kind of angle that might have some difficulty around it. You obviously think of this short story as sort of important socially, you know, as a kind of political thing.

Could you tell me a little bit about First Story, where you're a writer in residence, what that does? Yes, I certainly can. It's been one of the real joys of my writing career, actually. When you're teaching, I use that word loosely, teaching, creative writing, because teaching is not quite the right word, let's say tutoring. What you're doing is you are encouraging and advising writers of any age how to shape.

an idea through language and often the younger or the less advantaged that writer is and these are the people that I work with with first story the more you are nurturing a self-belief in that writer that their language, their voice, their ideas have value and can give other people as well as themselves pleasure.

Ross Raisin there, author of Ghost Kitchen, one of the five stories shortlisted for this year's National Short Story Award. And if you're in Leeds, you might want to check out that chip van because he gave it an absolutely five-star review.

Thanks for listening to the BBC Short Story podcast. The winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2024 with Cambridge University will be announced on a special edition of BBC Radio 4's Front Row, live from the BBC Radio Theatre on Tuesday 1st October at 7.15pm.