The Waitress (13 page)

‘So you thought you’d ruin ours?’

‘That’s right,’ grinned the commuter. ‘Wanted to see if you were this rude all day long.’

‘Of course I am,’ said Katie. ‘Why should you get preferential treatment?’

The earlier regular who had sat down was now a bit over-excited in front of her friend. She called out. ‘She was horrid to me too!’

‘Were we talking to you?’ demanded Katie. The woman and her friend laughed uproariously. Jesus, thought Katie. They’re all mad.

‘Now look,’ she told them all firmly, ‘I’m busy trying to serve this poor man who’s lost.’

‘I’m not lost,’ said the young man.

The commuter turned to the man and grinned.

‘She’s like this to all of us,’ he explained.

‘Is she?’ said the man.

‘Oh yes,’ said Katie. ‘No extra charge.’

The commuter laughed even more and gave her a two-pound tip.

‘Why thank you sir,’ said Katie, taking it and biting it.
‘Now
I can put my children through school.’

More laughter.

After the commuter left, she turned to find the young actor studying her with a disturbing intensity.

‘Have you decided what you want now?’ she asked.

He nodded.

‘Would you like to tell me or shall we do
Twenty Questions
?’ she asked pointedly. ‘I warn you though, I’m good.’

‘What do you recommend?’ he asked.

Ooh, this was her favourite question. ‘I recommend you buy yourself a cafetière,’ she said. ‘The coffee’s rabbit droppings, you know. And I’d change that suit.’

The man’s face lengthened in surprise and she gave him a big wide beam of a grin.

‘I’m only teasing,’ she confided. ‘It’s a lovely suit. C&A have really found their niche haven’t they?’

His jaw dropped, while behind him the sound of laughter from regulars and non-regulars was now filling the café. She gave him another smile, not so wide this time.

‘Shall I do you a nice latte?’ she whispered sympathetically. Teasing time was over.

He nodded.

‘Anything else?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Can you tell me if . . .’ he looked at a piece of paper inside the portfolio, ‘Alec’s here please. We’re having a meeting about the purchase of the café. I’m a little early.’

Katie stared at him.

‘Well?’ asked the man. ‘Is he here?’

She shook her head.

‘Oh. Right. Well, when he comes back can you tell him I’m here?’

She nodded.

‘I’ll have that latte while I’m waiting. Thanks.’

She nodded again. When she took his latte over to him, she couldn’t help but notice that the regular was talking to him. The regular beamed up at her. ‘I was just telling him how you’re always like this.’

Excellent.

Twenty minutes later, when Alec came in, she watched them from behind the counter. They shook hands and Alec was all smiles. She went into the kitchen, where Sukie was on her ten-minute break. Technically, she wasn’t meant to have a break at the same time, but she didn’t see what she had to lose any more, seeing as tomorrow she’d be spending the first day of the rest of her life under her duvet. She explained to Sukie and Matt what had happened and they did their best to convince her that all wasn’t lost. He could be another estate agent – or a buyer who failed to go through with the sale. Or the meeting could be totally unrelated to the sale of the café and he just wanted to get his own back for her teasing. She was just beginning to believe that possibly, just possibly, she wasn’t the most unfortunate person in the world, when the kitchen door opened and they turned to see Alec standing proudly in its centre.

‘I thought I’d find you all in here,’ he said, his thin lips forming the widest smile they’d ever seen. He could barely suppress his glee. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve just shaken on the sale of the café.’

There was silence.

‘I asked him to save your jobs,’ he was almost laughing, ‘but I can’t promise anything.’ He turned to Katie. ‘Especially for you, Katie.’

‘Why?’ she croaked.

‘Because your new owner asked if the obnoxious waitress was always this rude to everyone.’

‘What did you say?’ asked Sukie.

He shrugged. ‘I told him the truth,’ said Alec. ‘Not when she wanted to go home early.’

He laughed at his joke for a while.

8

There were now eight whole shopping days to go before Christmas, which, considering Matt had only one present to get for his mother, was plenty of time. More than a week to build up to Christmas Eve shopping.

The only thing Matt liked about Christmas was that life was put off until the new year. It was a procrastinator’s paradise. College had gone mad on this last day of term and, quite frankly, he was glad to see the back of it. If he hadn’t been depressed before, he really was now. Two of his friends, Daz and Si, were dating two of the most fit girls in college. This should have helped his status as, by proxy, he had now leapfrogged most of the boys in college, but it hadn’t. It just made him feel self-conscious every time the girls came and sat with his crowd, humiliated that he was still single when the girls seemed so much more experienced than he, excruciated when his mates showed off in front of them, and downright angry at the looks of utter surprise at the girls’ choice from the rest of the college. It had just added extra piquancy to the normal bleakness of his world.

Not only that, but what on earth did these girls see in
Daz
and Si? They were tossers at the best of times. He only tolerated them because beggars couldn’t be choosers. But these girls? They could have their pick. He just didn’t understand it. Times had changed since the days of eternal loyalty towards one’s fellow boyhood companions and, a man of his time, Matt was the first to point out that his mates lacked a
je-ne-sais-quoi
in the eligible male department.

In fact, he had done so with great alacrity to his mother on many a cold winter’s night, and she had listened like the kindly soul she was. Until one night she’d stopped him mid-flow, to say, in a most annoying manner, ‘You know what your problem is, don’t you?’

Still to discover the correct answer to this, Matt fell into the trap and replied, ‘What?’

Sandra looked at her son. ‘You,’ she said with a firmness which left neither of them in any confusion over whom she meant, ‘are a misanthropist.’

Matt blanched. ‘I am not!’ he replied, livid. ‘Rescind that statement!’ he ordered, standing up.

‘Shan’t.’ She returned to her sewing.

‘I am
not
a misanthropist,’ he insisted. ‘I
hate
misanthropists.’

He saw no reason why his mother should find this as amusing as she did.

‘All right then,’ she said finally. ‘Prove it.’

‘How?’

She looked up from her mending. ‘Do something nice over Christmas.’

Matt was just about to launch into his patter about Christmas being nothing but paganism cynically
remoulded
, first to fill the churches and now to fill the coffers of commercialism, when he realised this would only prove her point.

‘Such as?’

‘Invite your hopeless friends over when college breaks up, and get them to help me put up the Christmas tree – I can’t do it alone –
and
,’ she pointed a thimbled finger at him, ‘have a laugh while you’re at it.’

Matt stared at her. What was the matter with her? Did she have a book upstairs called Ten Easy Steps To Embarrass Your Teenage Son that she pored over every night?

‘I’ll make hot mulled wine and mince pies for you all,’ she said, returning to her sewing. ‘From scratch.’

He kept on staring.

‘And you might even find what you want under the tree on Christmas Day.’

He mumbled something. His mother understood Matt’s mumbles and grunts like no one else. In exactly the same way that she had always understood his toddler mumbles and grunts – which conveyed complete concepts and were a complex language in themselves – so she understood his adolescent version. And she treated it exactly the same; she pretended she didn’t, giving him no choice but to talk in her language.

‘Pardon?’ she asked, clearly.

‘Hmuite.’

‘
Pardon
?’

‘All right,’ he said, defeated.

So, here he was, on the bus, on the last day of term, surrounded by his gang of idiotic mates who seemed to
find
it a great lark to be on the way to his house. He was the only one who was treating the entire expedition like a trek to Hades, but then, he was probably the only one who was going to be teased about his mother for the rest of his life. The only hope he was holding out was that she had been asked to work late and had forgotten her side of the deal, namely the wine and pies. He hadn’t mentioned this part to his friends, knowing that they’d only mock him severely for it. He was amazed, quite frankly, that they had chosen to do this instead of hang around the mall with their girlfriends, or go to the cinema in the gang or hit their own heads with a mallet, but they had all seemed dead keen to come and have ‘a larf’ at his place. He dreaded to think what was to ensue.

His heart sank at the sight of the twinkling lights in the front room of the little terraced house. His mother had been to Woolies. He put the key in the lock, and as the hall filled with his mates, he became acutely aware of her standing at the kitchen door, beaming at them all.

‘Hello boys!’

‘Hello Mrs Davies!’ Matt heard them chorus in a mockingly polite tone.

‘You must be freezing! Take off your shoes and coats and there’s hot mince pies just out of the oven for you.’ She turned briskly and went into the kitchen.

Coats and shoes were abandoned around Matt as his mates rushed down the hall.

‘NEATLY!’ came his mother’s voice from the kitchen.

The boys returned, piled their belongings in neat piles around him and scarpered back to the kitchen.

Matt stood with Daz, Tony and Si, somewhat
emasculated
in their socks, in his tiny kitchen, watching his even tinier mum take mince pies straight out of the oven, place them on a large plate, and add brandy cream to each one. He didn’t know where to look. He saw the kitchen through his mates’ eyes and felt ashamed at its smallness and shabbiness. Then he saw his mother through their eyes and felt humiliated by her girlish ponytail and low-slung, New Look trousers. Why couldn’t she dress like a proper mother? Tony’s Mum lived in velour tracksuits and Si’s mother hung her girdles on the garden washing line. He could see his mother’s flesh in the gap between her fitted top and trousers. He wanted to die.

Then he felt ashamed that he felt ashamed. He tried to work up from double shame, through indifference, to pride, but just got confused somewhere in the middle.

‘There’s more where they came from,’ she said, holding out the plate.

Gingerly, each mate stepped forward, took a mince pie, then took a plate and serviette and thanked his mother. Some of them even pronounced their ‘t’s properly. They were taking the piss. He’d never hear the end of it.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you the tree.’ And off she marched into the front room. As the boys dutifully followed her, she called behind her briskly, ‘No crumbs, thank you.’

Matt listened out for strangled laughs.

The small front room seemed even smaller than usual. Against the far wall, in the corner between armchair and window, leant one of the largest trees Matt had ever seen. On the floor lay familiar boxes of lights and icons that
immediately
transported him back to his childhood. While being assaulted by memories, it occurred to Matt that his mother was a genius. This job usually took the two of them the better part of a day and was tedious and harrowing in the extreme. At least now it would be quick, and maybe that would be worth the lifelong shame.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘We need to push the armchair over so that there’s room for the tree in the window, then put the tree in the base and then hang all the crap on it.’

Jesus, thought Matt. Now she’s trying to be cool.

‘Why don’t you play that nice band, Matthew?’ she was now saying. ‘What are they called, Poop?’

‘Pulp.’

‘Oh yes, Pulp. Silly me.’ She shrugged her shoulders and seemed to giggle internally. Did she actually hate him? The thought had never occurred to him before, but now that it did, many things made sense.

‘I saw them at Glastonbury,’ said Si. ‘They were ace.’

‘Really?’ his mother asked.

‘Mm.’ Matt watched as Simon blushed. Oh God, he thought. He was watching his own mate die a hundred deaths of embarrassment at having to have a conversation with his mum.

‘Did you all go to Glastonbury then?’

They all nodded mutely. Matt almost breathed out. His mother sat on the arm of the sofa, her ponytail swinging as she did so.

‘And did you all get good reports this term then?’

He stopped breathing. Daz actually hung his head down. ‘Shouldn’t think so. We’ve been a bit busy you see.’

‘Ah really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Too much sex, eh?’ she asked.

The boys snorted with uncontrollable laughter. I’ll just kill myself now, thought Matt. No one will notice.

‘And so . . . these girls,’ asked his mother slowly, ‘are they also getting bad reports?’

‘Oh no,’ piped up Si. ‘They work hard.’

‘It’s all right, explained Daz. ‘Nobody expects us to do as well as the girls.’

‘Don’t you want to do well?’ asked his mother. ‘Do you want all the girls to do better than you? Do you all want to have female bosses?’

‘Oh that won’t happen,’ said Si keenly.

‘Nah, we’ll be all right,’ added Daz.

‘How do you figure that then, eh?’ his mother asked.

‘Well, they all end up having babies, don’t they?’ smiled Daz.

They all beamed at her proudly. She stared at them, eyes wide. Matt forced himself into action. ‘Right then!’ he almost shouted, having found his voice. He hurried his mother out. ‘You just leave us to it.’

‘Yeah, with pleasure,’ said his mother, the change in her voice tone only audible to him and dogs.

The boys practically fell over themselves to assure her that her Christmas tree was safe with them. He shut the door behind his mother and turned to face them.