The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (12 page)

But, ‘Ever the mug,' is all he will say.

‘Aren't you ever,' says Joe, his mouth and chin gleaming with grease, as he bites into his burger. He is a particularly good-looking one, this Joe, body like a whip, you can see his chest where his shirt hangs open, his chest like two gleaming brass gongs, topped with tight blackish little nipples and haloes of dark hair. Clarrie has a feeling towards him like lust. It worries him, feeling like this. He wants women, God how he wants them, so why does he feel like this when he sees
men like Joe? Envy, he guesses, because it is written on Joe that he never wants for women, he just has them.

‘He takes care of me, mister,' says Margie, of Clarrie.

‘Take no notice,' mutters Clarrie. ‘She's … you know.'

The truck driver says easily, ‘We know her, don't worry.'

‘Ah but I do, that's the trouble.'

The song has ended, and Margie stands wrapped in some private dream, enjoying the respite as well. They are all easier, a good quiet time before the day takes charge again.

‘Perhaps you should shoot through,' says Joe in a low voice.

‘I think about it mate. But where to, that's the question. It's a good job, you know how it is. Longest I been in one place for years, and that's not saying much. No, I've got nowhere much to go. I suppose we don't do each other much harm.' He looks at Margie.

The other man shrugs. ‘Your funeral. The longer you leave it … you know how it'll get.'

‘Ah … it'll work itself out I guess. Well, I'd better get on … day shift takes over soon, and then I'm off till tonight.'

‘What've you got on?' Joe asks, straightening from the counter, and wiping his chin with the back of his hand.

‘Go home and sleep. What else is there to do?'

‘You don't have much imagination do you?' says a voice behind them. It's a girl's voice, a quiet one, and even, without undertones, stating something inconsequential, seemingly obvious to the speaker, but it makes Joe leap with a dancing movement towards the door. She has come in so quietly that Clarrie knows instinctively that she has meant to frighten Joe, that she knows how to open the snappy steel door as if lifting it with feathers. But then she looks as if she knows everything. Everything, that is, that the road could have taught her. And maybe something else as well. Not that he wants to know. There are enough difficult things to know without the secret thoughts of a road urchin. Urchin? He must be mad. Been seeing too many old movies, it's all they ever show in this town. She's a scrubber if ever he's seen one, grubby jeans bagged round the knees, a shirt that might have been a man's once, and stringy hair falling lankly round her face.

‘Did you get me a burger, mister?' she says to Joe, her voice still even, unequivocal.

‘So you've woken up?' he says, surly, not looking at her.

‘Where did you pick her up from?' Clarrie asks, suddenly amused, glad to be on top, even though he likes the truckie.

‘Picked her up off the side of the road a coupla hours back.' He speaks directly to Clarrie as if the girl is livestock.

‘I'm a student of human nature,' says the girl in a more conversational tone. She climbs on to one of the high stools by the counter. ‘See, I got kind of interested. I was talking to this lady outside. Well she said there was a raving madman in here. I couldn't resist it. Nobody asked me for my ticket, so I just walked in.'

‘The one with blue hair?' asks Clarrie in spite of himself. She nods.

‘Surprised she didn't offer you a ride. You and she look like two of a kind.'

‘She did. I turned it down. I told you, I can't resist temptation. I wanted to study a madman at eight o'clock in the morning. They don't usually let them out till later. Frothing at the mouth she said you were.'

‘You better get back in the cab,' says Joe. ‘Hurry, I got places to go today.'

‘Yeah, fast,' says Clarrie, echoing the sentiments if not the word. ‘I don't like smart-arse broads.' His day is starting to look like some kind of
nightmare
. He could catalogue its shortcomings and at eight o'clock in the
morning
it would look like a petition to the Prime Minister.

‘I'm hungry,' she says. Clarrie notices that her teeth are better than he expected. It's probably just her brown nutmeggy little face. A suntan helps,
and it's been a long summer. Indeed it's hard to realise that it's crept into autumn, but he shivers again, and wonders fleetingly if it's an indication that beneath the bright glare of the day there's a change coming in the air.

Joe observes her narrowly. ‘Hard luck. I tried to wake you when I stopped.'

‘I was tired. I told you, I slept on the side of the road. If you could call it sleeping.'

‘Sure looks like it,' says Clarrie, curling his lip. He knows it doesn't suit him. He knows he looks like a snapper in a fish shop window.

‘D'you want to order?' Margie asks the newcomer.

‘Depends, doesn't it?' She measures Joe with her eye.

‘I'm ready to go. You've had your chance.'

‘I said I'm hungry. I need to eat.' She opens her hands wide in an odd little gesture, arty, thinks Clarrie, and he knows that her hands are beautiful, even if unkempt. The fingers are fine and long and pointed, flowing right from the wrist in one fluid movement. Nice. He finds it hard to take his eyes off her hands. She places them now on her hips, her thumbs inwards towards her pubis. It shows, even in the untidy garment, a neat little mound. The
three-point
triangle starting from the hips is clearly defined.

‘I'm pushing off,' says Joe.

‘Not yet,' she says, having come to some decision. Her eyes, Clarrie notes, have flicked back to the road, there are more trucks pulling up.

Joe has looked the situation over too. He flings money, a handful of silver coins, down on the counter. ‘Hitch another ride.'

‘Ta,' she says without touching the money.

‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.' Joe, for all his beauty, is blustering.

The money lies between them. ‘What did you have to do for it?' asks Clarrie.

‘Nothing,' she says, and the conversation leaves her indifferent. She is eyeing the money, calculating the amount, and reading the price list all at the same time.

‘Keep out of it mate,' advises Joe.

‘Your picnic.' Clarrie lifts a shoulder. He's in the business of giving advice now.

‘Nothing. I did nothing for it,' says this girl.

‘Then he's a mug to give it to you.' You get nothing in this world for nothing, of that he's sure, and often you don't get anything for something. He's a bad loser to experience. ‘A man must be crazy picking up jail bait like you.' The door slams. Joe is off, storming past his mates climbing down from the trucks that have just pulled in, hauling himself up in one fast easy
movement
into the cab of the truck, and, in seconds, the engines running and the
gears are crashing. Clarrie winces, it's expensive machinery to be beating around like that. As Joe's truck disappears down the road towards the Desert leaving a cloud of yellow dust from the roadside where it was parked, he thinks how amazing it is that one man, Joe's size, can belt up a great hulking piece of metal and engineering science.

‘A nasty bit of temper,' says the girl, following his trail too.

‘I wouldn't have thought he was such a mug.'

‘He's not a mug,' she says calmly. ‘He's very wise. After all, I could have said he'd done something, couldn't I?'

‘Would you? Say it?'

‘That'd be telling, wouldn't it?'

‘That's blackmail.'

‘It might be in your books, it's not in mine.'

‘You make me sick,' said Clarrie turning away in disgust.

‘That's what your kind always say. Answers everything, doesn't it.'

‘What's my kind?' he asks, and for a moment the question hovers between them, with frightening intensity, as if this stray might tell him the answer to that which has been troubling him all of his life.

But she's flippant. ‘Mad. Frothing at the mouth. Like the lady said.'

He mouths an obscenity at her.

‘You see,' she says, ‘if I said he'd done something, maybe he could prove it was a lie. But think of the trouble he saves himself. People like me are a lot of trouble when we say things about people like him.'

‘So you would have said it if it suited you?'

‘Oh no. But he doesn't know that, does he?'

‘That's worse. That's cheating.'

She rolls her eyes, looks again at the range of burgers available. In the background, Margie is agitated. She's seen enough for one morning too. It distresses her that Clarrie is entering into conflict again. ‘Clarrie,' she implores him.

And for a moment he listens, her unhappiness penetrating, so that he's ready to stop. Seeing him in retreat, the hitchhiker hasn't done with him yet, and she turns suddenly vicious.

‘You're a dumb slob,' she tells him. ‘I know his sort. He's paying for the other times, the other chicks. The ones that don't unload as fast as I do. He knows it and I know it, and he knows I know. So he pays. Now what about getting my food? There's your money. Don't expect me to pick it up.'

There's a trample of feet as the place starts to fill up again, and the steel door goes slap, slap, crash. Margie scoops money up, counting and arranging it in heaps so that her customer can see how much there is. For an instant
there seems to be an affinity between them. Madness, Clarrie thinks, Margie would make three of this bitch. Yet their eyes meet and Margie says gently, ‘What would you like? I'll get you something.'

‘Coffee please, and a cheeseburger. And some chips.' For the first time since the hitchhiker has come into the caf there's a touch of warmth in her voice, a desire if not to please, at least not to give offence.

‘Coming up,' says Margie.

‘We'd do better to throw her out.'

‘Please Clarrie,' says Margie, ‘no trouble … like Della says …'

‘Oh for God's sake shut up,' he snarls at her.

‘You're a nice customer aren't you,' says the girl. ‘Why do you take it from him?' she asks Margie.

‘She likes it,' says Clarrie.

‘Cat got her tongue? She must be perverted to like anything about you.'

‘Be careful what you say about her.' He means it. It's a stalemate. The rules of the game are changing so fast, nobody's got time to write them down. This time she's on her guard.

‘Sure. If you say so,' she says, matter-of-fact. ‘Give me a couple of ten cents out of that lot would you, please,' she says to Margie, and it pleases him absurdly that she is touching the money, it is a victory for him and for Joe and for men who are goaded by smart bitches with tight arses and humpy little cunts that stick out like dog's balls. She wants the money for the juke box, and the place fills with noise and there are men shouting orders, and he's splitting buns and slicing cheese, and all of a sudden the coleslaw bin looks low, and he doesn't have time to think properly, his and Margie's hands are working so fast. He takes cabbages and carrots and starts chopping at a furious pace, the blade of the knife making a cruel swift tattoo on the board, and things start to come under control again. He and Margie bump softly against each other as she reaches for the salt to sprinkle on a parcel of chips, and she looks at him, eyes full of love, and says softly, ‘It's all right Clarrie.'

He takes his time, as he sees things coming together and the burgers assembling as if off a conveyor belt and his own hands efficient, dolloping out first the coleslaw, then the rissole, then the cheese, or the egg, or the slice of tomato, or whatever the order requires, and packing the crisp toasty lid on with amazing precision, feels good, good enough to say to her, ‘Yeah, it's all right. Dunno what came over me — snarling like that. She rattles me.'

‘Makes no difference,' says Margie, and now they're standing side by side, trading coins and change, and the rush is all but over.

‘True?' says Clarrie.

‘Never, Clarrie. Not ever.'

Inside his head, that old warning voice says to him, ‘Oh God, how I wish it did,' but on the outside his voice says, ‘You're a good lady, I'm no good in the morning.'

‘It's all to do with your hormones,' says the hitchhiker.

‘You still here? Why don't you just wrap up?' says Clarrie, looking at his watch to see how much longer the ordeal of the morning has to continue. It has to be over soon, and indeed it is nearly time for the next shift to come on. Three minutes and Della Royal's never late. He sighs with relief. Nothing much more can happen in three minutes.

‘There's night people,' says the hitchhiker, yawning without covering her mouth, ‘and morning people. I guess you and I must be in the same boat.'

‘A real little mine of information aren't you,' he says. He watches her licking her fingers, and then turning the bag the burger's been served in inside out, picking for shreds of food. He picks up the parcel of vinegar-flavoured chips that the other woman left behind. They're still warm and for a moment he weighs up disposing of them, seeing as he and Margie have started tidying up for the next shift, but he follows an impulse and hands them over to the hitchhiker.

‘Here,' he says roughly. ‘You look as if you could do with them.' She accepts them without comment, but out of the corner of his eye he sees Margie looking at him. But then, Margie's always watching him.

Della arrives at last, bustling through the swing door, yesterday's banking books under her arm, and the canvas bags swinging from her wrist so that she can start stashing away the money from the night and early morning shifts as soon as she gets in. She's a handsome woman, Della Royal, and she knows it. She managed the Roadhouse Caf when it was just a plank shack, long before the Riddles bought it out and built a shiny steel and chrome job with flashing lights over it at night. But clean. They always said it was the cleanest eating house from one end of the North Island to the other. That's why the Riddles kept her on, and that in itself was unusual. Mostly they got rid of everyone who'd had anything to do with an eating place when they bought it out to add to their chain, as if to emphasise their brand-new look. But good staff are not too easy to come by here, not staff like Della, who has a name for such cleanliness in a town that still has a long way to go. Some say she was unhappy at the takeover, that she doesn't really care much for the way the Riddles do things, but it might be talk. She confides to her friends, not to her staff. She can be jumpy if Norman Riddle turns up though, and either exhorting staff to do better, or in rare moments rail against Riddle, but she is mostly given to a cool hand. The Riddles need her there. She isn't known just to travellers, the locals patronise the caf as well and if she isn't there they'd want to know
why. You don't take liberties with a family like the Royals. There is a sense of power round Della. There is more than a little point to her nickname ‘Princess Royal' and she has her way with a lot of things others wouldn't, especially with the Riddles.