Chapter 1
It was lunchtime at Buttmouth Bay. Frothing waves broke against the foot of black, guano-streaked cliffs, imbuing the air with a salty tang, while high above on the promenade waves of people broke against amusement stalls and food trucks.
The smells of fast foods filled the air: the sweet scent of frying doughnuts, the hot grease of battered fish, and, most prominently to Herb, as he was sitting right next to them, the delicious smell of sizzling sausages.
Herb sighed as he looked wistfully across the walkway at the huge queue in front of the stand belonging to his mortal enemy: Fabio’s Falafel. What kind of a world was this, where deep-fried, mushed-up legumes ruled the roost and the classic hot dog was consigned to history’s dustbin? Something had changed in recent years, and Herb had failed to keep up. Now he had no customers.
“Hey, is it ok if I have another lunch dog?” Gary, his grill cook, asked from beside him.
“You’ve already had two,” Herb said without looking at him, his eyes now resting despondently on the patch of empty concrete where his patrons used to be. “You know that’s the limit.”
“Yeah, but these sausages will just go to waste,” Gary contested. “No one else is eating them, so it might as well be someone who appreciates them!”
“They’ll go to waste because you’re cooking too many,” Herb said. “You always cook too many, because you know we won’t sell them and you’ll get to eat the leftovers!”
“That’s not true!” Gary said, affronted. It was definitely true. “Besides, I’m the one who suggested cooking to order, and you said that we need to have something on the grill to entice customers!”
“So just cook one sausage at a time, and fry a bit of onion,” Herb said. “Maybe smear some ketchup on a bun.”
“Why would I do that?” Gary said, looking at Herb as though he were insane.
“Because… maybe there’ll be a ketchup smell and… oh, I don’t know, Gary, I don’t know! I don’t understand why no one wants to buy hot dogs any more!” Herb cried, burying his face in his hands.
“Yo, do you sell dogs here?”
Herb’s head whipped up to see a man standing in front of his stall, mid-twenties, blonde hair that was cropped at the sides and longer on top, and next to him stood a young woman of about the same age with her hair styled like a starfish or something. Sure, like Maggie from The Simpsons, why not?
“Err, yeah, we sell dogs,” Herb said, adopting the same casual lingo as his customer. They were about the same age, after all, and it frustrated him sometimes that he couldn’t connect with his peers. It was probably the language barrier, since, as a man of business, Herb was always very precise with his lexicon and nobody else his age took the same care.
“Cool, do you have any chihuahuas? My girlfriend, Meggie Samson, always wanted a chihuahua, so I asked my parents, who we obviously live with because we’re under forty and can’t afford to pay rent or own a house, if it’s ok for us to get a chihuahua, and they were like, ‘oh sure, it’s ok’, so then I came down to the bay to get one.”
“You came to the bay to get a chihuahua?” Herb asked, staring at the man blankly after his torrent of unnecessary exposition.
“Yeah, that’s right,” the man said. “Do you have one?”
“We sell hot dogs,” Herb said.
“Oh right, well, could you cool it down a little? Like, I know you’re not supposed to leave dogs in hot cars, because it’s, like, cruel, so should you really be selling them in that condition?” the man asked, frowning at Herb.
“Yeah, that’s, like, animal cruelty,” Meggie chipped in.
“No, see, I mean hot dogs, like these,” Herb said, pointing at the blistering sausages that Gary was meticulously turning on the grill, exercising all of his expertise to keep them from burning whilst also keeping them warm.
“Those are sausages, not dogs,” Meggie said. “I know the difference. I have a Master’s degree in Animal Welfare.”
“Yes, but you put them into a bun with some fried onion, add some relish, and then you have a classic hot dog,” Herb said.
The young couple still looked confused. “Sorry, the sign says Dwayne’s Dogs?” the man said, pointing at the ancient, flaky sign above Herb’s head. “I thought this was a dog shop.”
“A dog shop? You mean a pet shop?” Herb asked.
“A pet shop would sell other pets too, but it sounds like you only sell dogs,” the man said. “Are you dumb or something? Do you even know what you sell?”
“Yes, I know what I sell!” Herb said. “I sell hot dogs, for Christ’s sake! Are you seriously telling me that you don’t know what a hot dog is?”
“I know what I think a hot dog is,” the man said, “and it looks a lot like a chihuahua in a hot car.”
“Wait, is that meat?” Meggie said incredulously, pointing at the sausage that Gary was just inserting into his slavering jaws.
“Yes, they’re eighty percent pork!” Gary tried to say around his mouthful.
“That’s horrible! You murderers! They’re selling meat!” Meggie screeched as people started to look around to see what the fuss was about.
Herb panicked. “I’m sorry! I know it’s currently meat, but we’re developing a new vegan hot dog! It’s just not quite ready yet.”
“I don’t know how you live with yourselves,” the man said, and then he spat all over the grill and the sausages on it. “Come on Meggie, let’s go. Oh, look, we can get falafel over there!”
“Yeah, great, now we have to trash those sausages and clean the grill, and those animals died for nothing,” Herb sighed.
“I don’t mind eating them,” Gary interjected.
“No, you can’t eat them, if you get sick and sue me then the insurance bill will go up!” Herb snapped.
“Hey, I was only kidding, I don’t want to bite on anything contaminated by that guy. I mean, he’s never heard of a hot dog? Lighten up, Herb. We used to have so much fun here,” Gary said, briefly wrapping a flabby arm around Herb and giving him a squeeze.
It was true. For Herb, it had seemed like such a thrill to help out his father at Dwayne’s Dogs, taking money from the customers, counting out the change, receiving innumerable compliments from old ladies about how pinchable his cheeks were. Now those same old ladies recoiled if their eyes ever met, as though Herb were some yob looking for people to mug. They no longer trusted this stall run by young people. His father had always been charismatic and witty, pre-loaded with the right joke for every customer, readily receiving their goodwill and their loose change while dishing out steaming dogs by the dozen. But Herb was not his father.
Just like that, the lunch rush was over. People still milled about on the promenade, but very few of them were stopping to eat. Across the walkway, Fabio was even beginning to pack up.
“So, err, one sausage then?” Gary asked, turning to the fridge, where stacks of juicy pink bangers glistened, awaiting their turn on the grill.
“Oh, just do what you want,” Herb said. “We’ll never sell all of those before they go bad anyway.”
“I know you’re going to say that this is my fault,” Gary said, “but I still maintain that the health inspector was intentionally being a knob.”
Gary had a thing about health inspectors. In truth, he had a thing about authority figures in general, and only worked for Herb because they had been friends since school and he knew that he could push Herb around (plus, he loved all the free hot dogs). Unfortunately, this particular health inspector had asked Gary to demonstrate his hand-washing technique and given him a score of four out of ten, before commenting that Gary was gripping his spatula too firmly, and that a looser wrist would surely turn the sausages more securely. Gary considered himself a maestro of the grill, and consequently responded to a question about meat storage by informing the health inspector that ‘I keep my sausage in yo mama overnight’. Sadly, the health inspector had chosen to take this literally and cited that the correct temperature to store raw meat was below two degrees Celsius, and that the normal internal temperature of the human body was thirty-seven degrees Celsius, and therefore he would have to issue a food hygiene rating of zero, to be displayed prominently at the front of the stand. Herb had requested a reinspection and was awaiting a reply.
“You know I don’t blame you,” Herb lied.
“Ok, maybe it was my fault a little,” Gary said.
In truth, business had been suffering for a long time, and this just seemed like another nail in the coffin. Sales had been plummeting exponentially for a couple of years, ever since Herb had taken over after his father’s death.
“Ah ah ah! If it isn’t ’Erb, my favourite little sausage man!” said a thickly accented Italian voice that Herb knew and feared. He had smelled Fabio before he saw him, the stale stink of onions and body odour heralding his approach. In fairness, he had never met anyone in the food stall business with an appealing scent.
“Fabio,” Herb nodded coldly. “I see you’re packing up. Giving in already?”
“Oh, we are all sold out! It is crazy!” Fabio said. “I don’t know why, but ever since last Tuesday when you get this big red zero on your counter, the people just cannot get enough falafel! Ah ah ah! I even think about opening a new houmous stand, maybe right here when your business fails!”
Herb gritted his teeth. “Falafel and houmous? Aren’t they basically the same thing?”
“You see, this is why your business is so terrible! You ’ave not moved with the times, ’Erb! The people, they do not want your fatty red meat any more. They do not want your cow brains and pig feet smashed up and ground into a paste and put into an intestine! They want good clean chickpea protein!”
“The joke’s on you,” Herb said. “I’ve been working on a vegan hot dog, and when it’s ready, it’s going to absolutely blow your boring stand out of the water! Falafels in pitta bread? It’s just fibre wrapped in cardboard compared to the delights I will serve in an artisanal hot dog bun, with fried onions and relish, and a big dollop of tomato ketchup!”
“You are so British it makes me sick!” Fabio smiled, his perfect teeth gleaming. “Hey Gary, ’ow would you fancy working at my houmous stand? I know you are the best grill cook around! There might be a place on my menu for some grilled halloumi, ah?”
“Oh, I do like grilled halloumi...” Gary said.
“Then we’ll put it in a hot dog, on our new menu five years from now when we’re still trading and Fabio has gone bust because a newspaper says that chickpeas have a carbon footprint the size of Jupiter, or that they wrote a racial slur on Facebook ten years ago, or that Jeffrey Epstein once ate them for dinner,” Herb said.
“Ah ah ah! You delight me, ’Erb! You know what? I will give you fifty percent discount at my food stands for life, because of all the customers you have sent me!”
“You could give me a one hundred percent discount and I wouldn’t eat your bland, deep-fried, salty sin balls!” Herb said. “How can you play the health card when you cook with a deep fat fryer?”
“Is all relative, ’Erb! Is all relative!” Fabio laughed, heading back to his stall to finish yelling instructions at his assistant in expressive Italian.
“You wouldn’t really go and work for that jerk, would you?” Herb said to Gary once Fabio was out of earshot.
“Err, well, I do love grill cooking,” Gary said, then caught sight of Herb’s expression. “I mean, of course not, haha! Totally fooled you there, mate!”
“Well, thanks, I think,” Herb said. He was about to return his gaze to the litter tumbling across the empty space in front of his stand when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a familiar figure weaving its way purposefully along the promenade towards them. “Hey, Reg is coming. It’s finally time to give those vegan sausages a whirl.”
“All righty,” Gary said, turning to the fridge and lifting a tupperware container onto the counter, inside of which were three long prototype vegan sausages.
Herb had spent the past week experimenting with different types of vegan sausage fillings, including soya bean sausages, lentil sausages and, though he was ashamed to admit it, chickpea sausages. In the end, he had no idea what tasted good, so he just mixed them all together, and, late at night, when he was exhausted and starving from a hard day’s work, they didn’t taste all that bad. A pinch of salt, a shake of black pepper, and a handful of herbes de provence, and the new recipe was ready for its test drive.
“Hello, Herb,” Reg said as he approached the counter, removing his flat cap and sweeping a hand over his wrinkled brow to pat down his last remaining wisps of hair. Reg was an employee of Buttmouth Council and had been a good friend of his father’s, as well as, most importantly, having the power to decide whether or not Herb got to keep his street vendor licence.
“Hey Reg,” Herb said, unable to suppress the butterflies that had just taken flight in his stomach. “Gary’s firing up the grill! Are you ready to sample the taste sensation that will put Buttmouth Bay back on the map?”
Reg looked at Herb for a moment, his caterpillar eyebrows creeping upwards into an expression of sadness and pity.
“Herb, look at all these people,” Reg said, turning and gesturing at the crowds enjoying the fine weather and amusements on the seafront. “Buttmouth Bay is already on the map. And that’s why I’m under pressure to clamp down on… misdemeanours like this,” he said, putting the food hygiene certificate down on the counter.
“Ok, I know that looks bad, but it was a mistake!” Herb said. “I’m trying to get a reinspection. Anyway, the violation was for meat storage, so once we unveil our vegan menu, we can take it down, right?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works, Herb,” Reg said, shaking his head. “And it’s not just the hygiene rating. I want to help you, I really do. Dwayne was a good friend of mine, and you know I’ll do everything in my power to honour his memory, but you have to hold up your end of the bargain. I’ve heard complaints about the food. People say it’s just not as good as it used to be.”
“We have to move with the times, and that’s why I have painstakingly crafted this… ah… soya lentil chickpea sausage to cause an explosion on the modern tastebuds of every customer in the 16-29 age demographic!” Herb said. He had practised that line several times in the mirror, and it sounded a lot more convincing at home.
“Let’s just get it over with,” Reg said, putting his cap down on the counter. He had a pained expression on his face, as though he were about to make himself lick a dead seal.
“It’ll taste great,” Herb said, trying to reassure him. “And it’s super healthy. Not like that deep-fried falafel rubbish. How’s it coming, Gary?”
“Err, nearly there, I think,” Gary said.
“They look a bit pale still,” Herb frowned. “Although I’ve never cooked them in the daylight.”
“I’m not going by colour, I’m going by temperature,” Gary said, waving a meat thermometer under Herb’s nose. “I don’t tell you how to scratch your butt and play Snake on your phone, so don’t tell me how to do my job either.”
“That’s not all that I do!” Herb objected.
“Oh, how many customers have you served today?” Gary said. “Because I’ve grilled a whole load of sausages!”
“Let’s not get into that argument again. Sorry, Reg,” Herb said, turning back to the man who held his future inside his jittery old palms.
Reg shook his head and focused intently on the counter, as though he could barely concentrate because of the terror that was about to pass his lips.
“There,” Gary said, finally declaring that the sausages had reached the appropriate temperature and placing each one into a bun. “Onions and relish?”
“Oh, yes please,” Reg said, relieved that there was at least something familiar about the new menu.
“Here you go,” Gary said, serving the hot dogs. “Three… err… do we have a name for these yet?”
“Err… um… maybe… soy… lent… pea...” Herb mused.
“Soylent pea green?” Gary suggested, a quizzical look on his face.
“Wait, is this made from humans?” Reg said, violently withdrawing his hand.
“No! As I said, it’s soya beans, lentils and chickpeas. That’s where the name came from. But we won’t call it that. I’ll think of something snappier, don’t worry,” Herb said.
“All right then,” Reg said, grasping his hot dog. Gary and Herb did the same. “Well, bottoms up.”
The three of them took their first bite in unison, and then there was silence, except for wet masticating noises, as they each ruminated on the flavour and texture.
“It’s a bit...” Herb began.
“Claggy,” Gary said.
“Tasteless,” Reg said.
“...of all right?” Herb tried.
“Look, I’m not the market for this stuff,” Reg said, spreading his hands before him apologetically. “It’s not for me, but I’ve tried Fabio’s Falafel and that tasted like flavourless crap too. I’m a meat-and-two-veg kinda guy. Make a roast dinner stand and I’d be there every day. I know it’s hard to make this stuff taste good, so you need the condiments to help it along, and they are not doing it for me, Herb.” He was shaking his head now, as if a great weight had descended onto his shoulders.
“Reg, where are you going with this?” Herb asked, a rising terror taking hold in the pit of his stomach.
“It’s not good food, Herb,” Reg sighed. “The coastal tourism business is a cut-throat world, and we can’t afford to have a sub-par catering offering. Do you know that you’re ranked last on TripAdvisor?”
“What’s TripAdvisor?” Herb asked.
“Herb, I’m sixty-three years old. I should not have to tell you what TripAdvisor is,” Reg said. “Herb, it is with deep regret, and out of respect to your late father, that I have to prevent you from besmirching the name of his business any longer. I hereby revoke—”
“Nooooooooo!” Herb said, putting his hands over his ears.
Reg was still talking, and looking at Herb angrily. He tried to pull Herb’s hands away from his ears, but he was too old and frail to succeed.
“Oooooaaaaaaooooaaaaaaa!” Herb said loudly. “Lalalalalalalalala! You can’t make me hear what you’re saying! I refuse to hear it!”
This went on for some time, until Gary intervened with his more substantial biceps and pulled Herb’s hands away from his ears.
“No, let go of me, you’re dooming us!” Herb cried.
“It’s ok, settle down,” Gary said. “I told him we’ll fix the relish. We’ve got one week.”
“Oh. Err, thanks, Reg,” Herb said.
“This is your last chance,” Reg said sternly, “or next week, Dwayne’s Dogs will be dead as a dodo.”
