The Bluebird Café

by Rebecca Smith

  It was Saturday, so Gilbert was wearing his corduroy jacket. It stretched across his pudgy back and flapped like a skirt around his thighs. It was the colour of Caramac, and the smartest thing he had. He ate with care and hardly spilled anything on its generous lapels. He cleaned his teeth, J-clothed his shoes and left, sliding downhill on rotten leaves to the bus stop. Behind him another chunk of stucco fell off the Wayside Hotel.

  Gilbert didn’t often catch the bus into town. He could easily walk it, as it only took him half an hour or so. During the week he went to the library and the park. Sometimes he spent whole days in the precinct, watching the pigeons. He’d heard that the council wanted to move them on. On weekdays he wore his parka, and put the hood up for shelter. He’d noticed that it seemed to keep people away too. On Saturdays he wore his corduroy jacket and combed his hair back with water, into a blackish, brackish, oily DA. He was lucky to get a seat on the bus. Quite a few old people were standing. He got off at the Cenotaph and walked past East Park and Watts Park towards the shops. The Civic Centre clock chimed out the first few bars of ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’ as he passed the Titanic Memorial. Gilbert didn’t know that the hymn was by the city’s most famous son. He had never heard of Isaac Watts. He thought the chime was something like ‘When a Knight Won His Spurs’, of which he had vague memories from school. Hefty students were playing football while winos watched them, shouting instructions and jeering them on. What else should you expect if you wear shorts this early in the year?

  Gilbert loved the parks, the arrangements, the space to be doing nothing with nobody without anyone noticing. There was a little Chinese bit with bridges and rocks – like a multicoloured willow-pattern plate – where he spent ages wandering, some magnificent conker trees to sit under, and there was talk of restoring a bandstand. There had once been an aviary. The council had taken it down; it was too small, too expensive, too cruel. Azaleas grew where it had stood.

  Gilbert went to Asda. He only needed a few staples – bread, milk, Frosties, cheese and onion crisps – things that didn’t need cooking. At the precinct he rolled a cigarette. It fitted neatly into a brown stain, but stuck painfully because his lips were chapped. When it was finished he ate a Polo. He sat on a bench and watched the pigeons; children were chasing them with cruel glee. Nobody would talk to Gilbert with his baseball cap pulled right down over his sad, potato face.

  He’d chosen a bench opposite Monsoon and Oasis. Pretty young girls went in and out, in and out. He pretended to read his newspaper, and then just sat and stared. Sometimes he sat near New Look; wherever he chose there would be dozens, hundreds to see, marching along in pedal pushers, short skirts, combat trousers, all terrifying.

  It began to rain. Gilbert rolled and smoked another cigarette, and wondered what to do next. He tore open the Frosties and pressed a handful into his mouth. Golden dust fell on to his jacket and stuck to the webs of his fingers, and crumbs fell like stars on to his shoes.

  Chapter 4

  It was a second Monday and Gilbert’s day to sign on. He wore his parka because although it was very hot and sunny, and the sky was utterly cloudless, he expected it to rain. In his pocket he had an orange-and-black Tango baseball cap and his orange card, which was very old and battered and had somehow become stained with egg. He wrapped it inside his hat to try and stop it from getting dirtier. A dirty card could lead to loss of benefit for an unspecified period.

  Gilbert had seen lots of changes at the benefit office, but the spider plants were dying again, and a notice requesting that customers didn’t smoke at the desk still had ‘fuck off’ scrawled in a corner. Gilbert queued for fifteen minutes behind a woman with pale yellow hair that fell around her shoulders like a shroud. At last he got to the front of the queue, and someone looked at his card and asked him to go to Enquiries. He went. He queued for another five minutes and then realised that he was waiting at the wrong window. Eventually he was seen.

  ‘Mr Gilbert Runnic?’ asked a deceptively pretty girl in a not very clean white blouse. ‘Is this your card?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’ He had been holding it just seconds ago. She picked at the card with a long, sharp nail. Gilbert wondered if you’d keep hurting yourself with nails like that. He didn’t know that she was playing Titania in the Southampton Amateur Dramatic Society (SADS) production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that night. Her mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Well, it’s got egg on it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gilbert. ‘I don’t know how that happened.’

  ‘I could hazard a guess,’ said the girl. Then: ‘Well, Mr Gilbert, it seems that you’ve been unemployed for a very long time. What steps are you currently taking to procure employment?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘What are you doing to find a job?’

  ‘Oh, looking, mostly,’ said Gilbert. This was quite untrue. He had ceased to do more than look in some newsagents’ windows some years ago. He was vaguely hoping for a job looking after birds, perhaps at Marwell Zoo which he wanted to visit one day.

  ‘Do you go to the jobcentre?’

  ‘Umm, umm yes! I go every day except Saturdays, I mean Sundays. It’s closed then.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Got any jobs here then?’

  ‘What qualifications have you got?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘We haven’t then.’ She started to make a bracelet out of paper clips. Gilbert thought that the interview was over and turned to

  ‘Don’t just walk away, Mr Gilbert!’ she said in a stage whisper. ‘Walking away from your problems doesn’t work.’ She tried out a cheery smile, but failed. Gilbert returned to the counter.

  ‘I’m making an appointment for you to attend a New Deal Restart interview. The date, time and venue will be notified to you in due course.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Gilbert. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  In due course Gilbert was informed of the date, time and venue of his Restart interview. It was to be held in an office above the jobcentre. There were three other people there, callow youths. None of them spoke to Gilbert. He watched a video about job clubs, listened to a talk about starting your own business (but to do what?), and drank a cup of vending-machine tea. After that he thought he would be allowed to go, but instead he was taken into a unit of space with plyboard walls and promised a spotty man that he would start attending a job club. In return he would get free coffee, advice, paper, stamps and a seventy per cent chance of finding a job within two years.

  ‘Do they have tea as well?’ he asked.

  After this Gilbert left. He went back to the Wayside, sat on his bed and looked at his knees. He didn’t even have the heart to read Keeping Finches. He ate a packet of custard creams and then got into bed.

  The next day it drizzled and Gilbert left his room only to visit the lavatory at the end of the corridor. He read his books and listened to the baby crying behind the wall. He washed a shirt and some socks and pants, and hung them on the radiator where they didn’t dry, but gave off a warm and comforting vapour.

  He could have spent the evening in the TV lounge, watching programmes chosen by tougher, more popular residents. By the end of each evening empty cans lay around the room like very small sleeping dogs. Gilbert would put his own cans in the dustbin liner in the corner and shuffle off to bed. A few people would mutter, ‘G’night, Gilbert’, and he’d half raise a hand in resignation as much as farewell.

  The following day it poured and Gilbert decided to go out and even to look for a job. He always went out when it rained because there was rarely anyone about, just deranged women carrying drenched baskets. He walked around town, then, motivated by the free tea, he crossed the city to Shirley, walked up Shirley High Street to where the job club was held. One of the only people ever to do what he was told at a Restart interview.

  Chapter 5

  After eight and a half years of unemployment, Gilbert’s job-hunting was suddenly successful. The job club was held in a
disused church. The pews had been ripped out and sold, and Gilbert sat in a white plastic garden chair and looked at newspapers and drank cups of tea. After a few weeks he applied for two jobs, both with the City Council who claimed to pursue a policy of Equal Opportunities. It seemed that they did, because although Gilbert was short, dandruffy and had no formal qualifications, he was offered a job as a Refuse Sack Delivery Person. Perhaps the years he’d spent in a Sheltered Workshop painting miniature cottages had equipped him with the ‘transferable skills’ the interviewers were looking for, perhaps it was the endless days he’d spent shuffling around Southampton; Gilbert didn’t know what did it, but he was very pleased.

  He rose at six each weekday morning and missed the Wayside’s cooked breakfast. He walked to the depot where the dustcarts lurked beside huge sheds and a site manager gave him an allocation of bags. He rode in splendour to each of the day’s areas. His job was to walk through the streets and drag the full bin bags into gangs on street corners and leave the shiny new liners for people to find in ‘easily accessible places’. He shoved them through holes in gates and wedged them in fences and letter boxes. He had to work fast to keep ahead of the dustcart and the rest of the crew. He risked their wrath if they caught up with him. They aimed to be home and cleaned up as early as possible. His job was tiring and dirty. Despite gloves and his cap, his hands, hair, his whole self smelled permanently of garbage. The bin bags split or sometimes were left open so that nappies, cat litter, tea bags and cans with jagged edges cascaded on to his council-issue boots. The men who followed him, heaving the sacks into the truck, were brawny and matey. Sometimes they joked with him and called him Bert the Bags, but his inferior role as a bagger and dragger meant that he was never really one of the lads. His lack of height and strength made promotion unlikely.

  After a while Gilbert got into the swing of the bins. It was sunny and he began to love his job. He became familiar with his rounds and knew each garden, which hedges had birds in, the friendliest cats and who put out the neatest sacks. He tried to be speedy. There was hope of leaving the Wayside (but where for?) and the daily pleasure of lunch at the council canteen, which was very cheap.

  Gilbert could choose from dozens of dishes. Not everything was swamped by grease or water, there were great puddings, and exotic things like moussaka, chicken tikka in sandwiches, and pasta that wasn’t macaroni cheese. Sometimes they had theme days and the canteen ladies pretended to be Spanish or French or even Mexican. He filled his pockets with sachets of sugar and little tubs of UHT cream.

  Gilbert heard that people gave the binmen tips at Christmas and he hoped his job would last that long. At the Wayside he became one of the workers, and some people envied him. He wished that he, like the cake packers, could bring home spoils, but the only things he found and kept were books with mould-spotted covers. He picked over the remains of shoes, but they were always the wrong size (few men take a six and a half) or were too blatantly women’s. One day he found a Chinese paper parasol that smelled deliciously of toxic paint. It was decorated with peacocks, and although it was stiff to open and had a spoke missing, he took it back to the Wayside, intending to give it to the girl next door – she could use it to shield her baby from the sun – he just had to catch her eye first.

  On Saturdays Gilbert didn’t lurk in the precinct any more. He slept late and just went to the park instead. His crew had yet to ask him out for a drink, but they seemed pleased enough to see him each morning and no longer yelled at him for being slow. At night he had no trouble getting to sleep.

  Gilbert was fascinated by the homes where he left his sacks. He loved going into other people’s gardens; he’d rarely got beyond the gates before. On Wednesdays his round was on home turf, the inner city, the poorest part, the former red-light district, which was now populated by students, Asian families, and a few drug dealers and prostitutes. The houses were crumbling Victorian and Edwardian, homes built for dockers. In one window a Barbie in a cut-off wedding dress stared sadly into the road. Gilbert didn’t know that she was inviting people into a brothel. There were mango stones – huge, hairy, sucked lozenges in the gutters – and students’ bikes with detached wheels chained up in the yards. Gilbert was thankful that the Wayside had huge industrial-size bins – he didn’t have to drag that rubbish on to the pavement. He’d lived in the area for years, but he was only now up early enough to see its secret early-morning world. At a quarter to nine (early by local time) a trickle of children started on their way to school. It soon became a flutter, a flurry. The girls wore silky suits in vivid and pastel colours. Gilbert would stop to watch them, a flock of butterflies, of magic hummingbirds, nourished on coriander, pistachios, jalabis and 10p mix-up, while lollipop ladies directed them safely across the paths of juggernauts. The girls ran through the dust in their patent-leather shoes, their glossy black plaits beat against their sugared-almond backs. Who were these beautiful creatures of the morning, Gilbert wondered, and why were they always wearing party dresses?

  As Gilbert grew used to his job he became more and more familiar with individual houses. He could tell who had cats or children, who was neat. Each house was meant to get two bags, businesses got more, but Gilbert started to award extra bags to houses with nice gardens or children or cats. He penalised houses whose bags were split or filled with empty Skona lager cans and bottles. Points were lost if an expensive car or, even worse, a windsurfer was outside, or if the front garden looked newly concreted over. Children’s bicycles were worth an extra sack, hedges with birds’ nests scored the highest. After a while some houses were getting four or five bags a week, others none. Gilbert was annoyed by tardiness, so the Bluebird Café lost out.

  Gilbert liked the exterior of the Bluebird, the pretty painted sign and the bright colours. He wanted to go in, but it never, ever seemed to be open. It claimed to open at eleven o’clock, but Gilbert was beginning to have his doubts. It was closed on Sundays, and closed at 9 p.m. each night.

  ‘What about breakfast?’ he railed against its bolted door whenever he passed. What sort of café didn’t bother to open? If Gilbert had a café like that he’d open at seven sharp every morning, come rain or shine. There would be tea and toast and Full English Breakfast all day. He got angrier with it as the weeks passed, leaving them four, then three, then two and then no bags at all.

  Chapter 6

  Lucy, can I ask you, what’s this about?’ John Vir handed her a crumpled bit of computer printout. SOUTHAMPTON CENTRAL COLLEGE STUDENT’S INTERIM REPORT. The creases had turned grey.

  ‘Are you sure you want me to see this? Gurpal might mind.’

  ‘I’d like to know what you think,’ he told her. Gurpal was at the back of the shop, within yelling distance as usual.

  ‘It might be personal,’ Lucy said.

  ‘But what do you think?’

  Lucy read on, but silently. Then looked up, embarrassed. She was aware of John Vir peering intently at her.

  ‘Well, she is doing well with Keyboard Skills and Childcare, isn’t she? Cs are good.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘D for Domestic Science. That’s not too bad, is it? But maybe you should ask her about the Media Studies, Computing and Business Administration. Perhaps they aren’t her best subjects. There might be something she’d enjoy doing more.’

  ‘What was it she got again?’

  Lucy wondered if he found it hard to read the report, or perhaps the tatty computer printout was confusing, or perhaps he just wanted her opinion.

  ‘Oh, um, well, Fs,’ she said.

  ‘Her mother has written wanting news. What do I tell her? And what’s this?’ He handed her another crumpled slip, like an old-style credit-card voucher.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t give the college a very high grade for presentation,’ Lucy said, but he didn’t seem to think that was funny.

  Dear Mr and Mrs Vir,

  Appointment with GURPAL VIR’S personal tutor. Please attend on 27/3 at 18.40 p.m. to discuss your child’s pro
gress with his/her personal tutor. Meetings will last approximately 8½ minutes and will take place in the students homebase room. The student is encouraged to attend with you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Trisha Copperplate (Mrs)

  College Liaison Secretary

  ‘Well, that’s tonight, isn’t it? I think you and Gurpal should go. Then you could write and tell Mrs Vir what they say. Perhaps Gurpal’s missing her. You could tell her that.’

  ‘Hmm.’ John Vir looked as though it hadn’t occurred to him that his daughter might miss her mother whom she hadn’t seen for almost five years.

  ‘Perhaps I should send her to join her.’

  ‘Mightn’t Mrs Vir come back?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Perhaps if she knew how Gurpal was feeling.’

  ‘She bought a one-way ticket.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Lucy remembered to pay for her shopping (eggs, five tins of chickpeas, three bunches of coriander, a veggie samosa as a surprise for Paul) and left.

  ‘Gurpal, come here!’

  Gurpal shuffled towards him, her mouth full of Monster Munch.

  ‘Gurpal, we’re going to your college tonight to talk to personal tutor at 18.40 p.m.’

  ‘Aw, Dad, why? We never went before.’

  ‘You never told me about it before. This came in the post.’ He fluttered the printouts at her.

  ‘None of the other dads will go.’

  ‘Your mother has written for news on you.’

  ‘What does she care? She never sends us anything.’

  ‘Why do they have sawdust in buckets? That’s not going to put out a fire,’ John Vir asked. He was one of the only dads there.

  ‘For when people are sick in the corridor,’ Gurpal explained.

  ‘Does that happen often?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It wasn’t that surprising. The place stank of Impulse, school disinfectant, photocopying, mud and sick. There were displays of trophies and photos of what looked like the dreariest field trips ever to some flat beaches. In Gurpal’s Homebase room, which was also the Domestic Science room, were some more interesting displays on Home Technology.