Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  It is said that a frog won’t notice if the heat is gradually turned up on a pot of water. If you pop the unfortunate amphibian into hot water it will hop straight out. But if you start it in cold water and then put it on heat, it will remain blissfully oblivious that it’s about to become the famous French dish known as cuisses de grenouille. By this stage of my ‘career’ I was a boiling frog. Next stop on the slow descent to despair: the rather grandly named La Ritz Cafe, encased in the morbid retail environment of a huge, airless shopping centre and cursed by an amorous Indian chef with little understanding of local mores.

  Let’s call him John, because that wasn’t his name.

  ‘I’d like to say you’re looking very sexy today,’ John says as I walk past with a tray of red wine hidden in coffee cups for the department store girls who were forbidden to drink booze during work hours. ‘Your legs appear to be very fine in that skirt,’ John says as I scrape the brown bilge of his vitello tonnato into the bin.

  ‘That’s inappropriate,’ I say in an attempt to appease the Anglo-Indian relations that have become increasingly frosty since John began trying out his Flirting 101 coursework on the female floor staff. ‘You can’t really tell girls you work with they’re attractive. That’s harassment. You might get in trouble.’

  ‘And may I share with you the news that I am able to see your bosom as you bend over the rubbish bin,’ John says brightly.

  La Ritz is largely lost to the fog of memory. They weren’t good times, they weren’t bad times, they were just . . . times. The customers were mostly men forced to accompany girlfriends and spouses on shopping trips. Glum bag-carriers, one and all. My biggest mistake was forgetting to put in the order from a famous ex-cricketer. He waited more than an hour before inquiring after his omelette’s welfare in the manner of a person asking about the failing health of an elderly distant relative. And I tipped a glass of red wine all over a woman when I was startled by the shopping centre’s dancing promotional lion. But my usual litany of disaster was cut prematurely short when everyone fronting up to work one day found the doors closed and chained. The owner was going into legal battle with the shopping centre management over projected earnings. He said they lied. They said he just wasn’t running a good enough business. He hadn’t been able to warn the staff they were about to lose their jobs, he explained without a glimmer of apology to half a dozen waiters mentally calculating if they’d be able to pay next month’s rent, because he needed the element of surprise. At least he splashed out on a Spumante toast to his future legal victory. Half a glass for everyone!

  Word got out that John had taken over a greasy-spoon cafe on Swanston Street and was spending the next day interviewing. La Ritz waitresses who had waged a long and bitter war over his admiration for their legs sat grimly holding their CVs, waiting for their audience with the new pontiff. He sat enthroned on a twirly office chair raised to its highest point so each job supplicant was forced to look up at him. Power clearly didn’t agree with John. ‘I would like to inform you that the pay will be nine dollars an hour, not a penny more,’ he said with a satisfied smile, which is the politest way I’ve ever heard someone tell me I was about to be screwed. And then with an impressive grasp of the local vernacular he added: ‘Take it or leave it, sweetheart.’

  It was a breakthrough moment. It was the first time I thought, simply, ‘No. I will not subject myself to this. I will not kiss this man’s ring each day. I will not.’

  Such rigorous principles are why I came to be wearing regulation black polyester trousers with a white polo shirt and a baseball cap, both emblazoned with a lime green logo that looked like the upchuck of the Incredible Hulk.

  It is 31 August 1997. Princess Diana is meeting her maker in a Parisian road tunnel. I am descending into the more worldly hell of a subterranean juice bar housed in the sportswear basement of a large department store.

  My new manager Katie is a friend of a friend. Katie is blonde, athletic and heartbroken. Not only has she just been dumped by her boyfriend, a young man who sells sports gear in the very same basement, but the premature death of Princess Di represents a tragic waste of all those hours spent at the gym.

  That first day is spent consoling her over the double bereavement. Travis and Di. Di and Travis. In my head, an unstable English aristocrat and a third-year osteopathy student living with his parents in Sandringham will be linked forevermore. ‘I really like you,’ Katie says at the end of the day. ‘It’s weird, because you’re a Sagittarian. I normally hate Sagittarians.’

  I normally hate people who believe in star signs, but on this occasion I am prepared to turn a blind eye. The day’s conversation has revealed Katie’s relationship is the victim of a Montague-and-Capulet-style prejudice between the sportswear salespeople, a bunch of bronzed athletic types who look like they’re about to be drafted by the AFL, and the Juice Out employees, who are generally regarded as untouchables. It wasn’t difficult to grasp the basis of this social apartheid—they generally looked like they were glowing with lean muscle mass, whereas we were usually covered in a compostable spray of vegetable fibre. Katie was effectively dating up. Travis couldn’t handle the pressure. It, too, was a tragedy.

  * * *

  TIMOTHY

  He was a pretty famous chef and restaurant owner and he fell in love with a waitress. Nothing unusual there. However, once the two partnered up, the young waitress began throwing her weight around. Over the next few months the couple effectively formed a team of two that terrorised the rest of us and on top of it all, unbeknown to the chef-owner, his girlfriend began skimming the tips pool. On one particular Saturday night with a full restaurant we all decided to confront her about it. At first she denied it but then, with the boyfriend blissfully unaware of the pending firestorm, she explained that they were the partnership that drove the restaurant and that it wouldn’t have all its awards if it wasn’t for them. We all promptly downed tools in the middle of service and walked out, leading to the premature end of their relationship.

  * * *

  The fast-food industry is a slippery customer. I’m not talking only about all those sad broccoli sticks decaying in the fridge at McDonald’s, but the way the whole behemoth constantly shape-shifts, always probing for the soft, vulnerable underbelly of consumer guilt. This was the era when the exponential growth of juice bars was based on the Great Lie that a shot of pulverised wheatgrass is the equivalent of 1 kilogram of green leafy vegetables. This claim is the juice industry’s equivalent of the Immaculate Conception or the September 11 One World Government conspiracy. It’s been thoroughly debunked—a shot of wheatgrass is the equivalent of a shot of broccoli or spinach or other naturally occurring green substance. Quite possibly a shot of lawn clippings will do as much for you.

  But plenty of people still base the ‘healthy’ component of their diet on juices, which is kind of like basing your calcium intake on ice-cream. Juicing fruit and veg means you can kiss most of their fibre goodbye. On an unrelated note, drinking a whole heap of juice also means lots of trips to the toilet. This was a deliberate strategy of Juice Out employees, who were allowed to consume as much juice as humanly possible. To a bunch of impoverished uni students this was tantamount to saying, ‘Hey, try and consume all your B and C vitamins in your work hours so you can subsist on convenience-store crap for the rest of the week.’ The added bonus was that each trip to the toilet—‘Please, Katie, please, I’m busting!’—meant an impromptu five-minute break. For a while there we amused ourselves guzzling beetroot juice to turn our urine red. Kind of gross, but fun: ‘Oh my god, get in here, I’m dying!’ Let’s just say it was a job with a lot of back-end appeal.

  I didn’t mind working the juicer, an industrial monster that could have disposed of a whole dismembered body quite easily. The body I would really have enjoyed grinding into oblivion belonged to Georgia, a Geelong blonde disturbingly vocal in her support of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. ‘Well, she’s saying what a lot of people are thinking. The Abos have it eas
y,’ was her take on indigenous relations. I wasn’t sorry in the slightest when her expensive mountain bike was liberated from a street post out front.

  If Katie wasn’t around, Georgia always left early. She’d grab her bag, drawl a nonchalant ‘See ya’ and brazenly walk out with a smirk on her stupid, One Nation-loving face. This meant she usually left me to mop a cocktail of chemicals onto the black nonslip matting. Mopping is a bullshit exercise. You’re simply making dirt wet, then moving it around. And they were toxic, those chemicals. A thin, evil vapour rose off them. The cancerous gunge would eat through the rubber soles of our regulation black canvas sports shoes in a matter of weeks. Katie told me not to breathe it in but it was impossible not to. As I mopped and coughed, I sometimes imagined Georgia stuffed inside one of the chemical containers, a pink mist rising as her body slowly dissolved.

  Have you ever noticed how smash-it-out food corporations have a weird obsession with the mental state of their workforce? Apparently it’s not enough for an employee to front up to work each day, do their hours and go home. It’s a classic abusive relationship based on startlingly unequal power. They want your heart. They want your mind. Not only do they want to hear the words ‘I love you’, they want you to mean it.

  Maybe it’s to make the inhabitants of the mahogany-lined executive suites feel better that the minions are content to be earning minimum wage while working for an entity that reduces everyone to a number. Any workplace that refers to itself as a ‘family’ deserves contempt. A corporation can be a family only in the bastardised way of the Mansons or the Jonestown cult. Gather round for the Kool-Aid, children.

  The Juice Out, ruled remotely from a city far, far away, was part of one such corporate family. Life went on peacefully enough in our forgotten corner of the empire, but every so often head office would remember we existed and, like a matriarch ordering her grown children home for the holidays, announce a team meeting. ‘A fun way for you all to get to know each other,’ said the notice that also sweetly informed us attendance was compulsory under pain of sacking.

  Thing is, we already knew each other. We just didn’t really like each other. There was Caitlin, ambitious second-in-charge to Katie, so transparent her thought processes were telegraphed in neon above her head: One day this juice bar will be mine! All mine! Sandra harboured dreams of owning her own cafe but had fallen into a depression when her choice of business name, How the Foccaccia, was knocked back by Consumer Affairs for failing to meet community standards. Sara was a medical student who thought she was a rare intellect beyond the ken of her co-workers. (Sample conversation: ‘What are you reading, Sara?’ ‘It’s a novel by a Russian writer called Bulgakov. You won’t have heard of him.’)

  Contrary to what the literature says, team meetings are breeding grounds of resentment. I’ll grant you there’s no ‘I’ in team—as team leaders like to say—but there’s certainly a ‘me’. These corporate group jerk-offs are basically a bunch of individuals sitting around a table, each quietly furious that they have to indulge in inane psychobabble to stop their file being flagged ‘uncooperative’. And, just to rub salt into the wound then squeeze lemon juice all over it, it’s unpaid. That’s what happens when you let human resources teams loose onto an otherwise perfectly happy dysfunctional business. It’s ugly.

  It was quiet in the basement once the jock salesmen had gone home and the lights had been turned off. There’s something eerie about a department store after hours. Sepulchral. It could have been the scene for a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, the tragic tomb scene played out among moody rows of Nike three-quarter high-performance training pants.

  The last trip to the toilet—the day’s final juice had been kiwi and strawberry—was unsettling in the half-light. All those racks of sports clothes longing for a home, facing down their night terrors of being abandoned to the stocktake sale. They were the perfect hiding spot for a crazed customer armed with a knife and a burning sense of injustice at the lay-by policy. Turning a corner I gave an involuntary shriek on bumping straight into Waleed, the night security guard. Waleed let out a little cry as well, although that could have been from the tube of wasabi he kept in his pocket to shock him awake on his lonely night patrol. Smart man, Waleed—it was the healthier, cheaper alternative to amphetamines.

  The senior-manager-slash-team-leader was named Daniel. Daniel had flown in from Sydney just for us. ‘Just for you,’ he beamed benevolently. He had the forced jocular tone of the bachelor uncle assigned to look after the kids for two hours. He said ‘folks’ a lot. He handed out a photocopy, printed in Comic Sans, headed FRUIT SLAM. It was an acronymn: you know, F—Fun at work!; R—R you being the best employee you can be?; U—Understanding the juice process! Despite the near-fatal levels of eye rolling from the rest of us, Waleed loitered in the background, grateful to be soaking up the human company by osmosis.

  The last Comic Sans module (M—Magnificent new juices!) invited us to propose exciting new flavour combinations. ‘Celery, apple and kiwi—green power!’ chirped Katie, fully aware she was the only one among us who, in the eyes of senior management, possessed a name as well as a number.

  ‘Garlic. And ginger. Together,’ offered a resentful Georgia.

  ‘I’ve got one for you folks—banana juice!’ grinned Daniel, unaware it was a joke we’d heard a thousand times already from smart-arse eight-year-olds.

  ‘Hold on, folks, just one last thing,’ he announced over the flurry of a dozen irritable people grabbing their bags, assuming it was get-out-of-jail time. He wheeled out a television and inserted a video in the VHS player. ‘You know what, though, folks? At the end of the day it’s good to realise what the most important things in life really are.’

  The screen flickered into life. There was a bright blue sky. The sun shining on a typical Australian playground. Monkey bars and swings and a wooden fort being clambered over by small children. Children with Down syndrome. Children with Down syndrome being subjected to a synthesised Muzak version of ‘What a Wonderful World’. Pling-pling-pling-pling-pling-pling . . . pling-pling-pling-pling-pliiiiiing-pling.

  It went on for a full ten minutes and I guess it did achieve the desired effect, because the staff really were moved. Georgia sat shaking with suppressed laughter that made her look like a late-stage Parkinson’s sufferer. It figures—One Nation has never been known for its compassion towards the lesser-abled. Sara looked outraged, as if a bird had just shat in her mouth. Even Waleed, so desperate for human contact, quickly vanished into the shadows of male swimwear. Katie simply looked embarrassed to be associated, however tenuously, with such champions of new-age corporate leadership. She kept shooting sympathetic looks across the table. They were looks that said: ‘I’m with you guys. Not with them. Please, please don’t punish me for this moral outrage with increased toilet breaks and lacklustre mopping.’ Ironically, that was the only time the Juice Out staff displayed any solidarity at all.

  — 5 —

  BEST SERVED STEAMING COLD

  The woman and her three lovely daughters have arrived at the Juice Out like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or something similarly biblical. Like locusts. Or boils.

  The four very hungry, very irritable Horsemen of the Apocalypse have just ridden through the gates of hell, also known as the department store stocktake sale. They are emotionally, physically and spiritually spent after their morning battling other Boxing Day bargain-hunters for heavily discounted netball skirts, tennis socks and high-tech watches that will chart their calorific output in a handy algorithm altogether unnecessary for their ectomorphic body types. All four are accompanied by the grassy whiff of pony club—their bearing carries the distinct suggestion of saddlery—but the sportswear department on its busiest day of the year is not their natural habitat. The jagged, staccato nature of their conversation indicates morale is flagging.

  ‘No, Mother!’ hisses one lovely daughter through a clenched set of private-school teeth that cost more than my car. ‘I said caramel milksha
ke not chocolate!’

  Mother places her order while I stare transfixed at her bob, a cumulonimbus cloud of immovable blondeness. The temptation to touch it is overwhelming. ‘And we’ll be sitting over there,’ she finishes in the manner of a countess claiming her regular table at the Wolseley.

  ‘No table service,’ I say, flicking a thumb at the sign on the counter that says ‘No table service’.

  A fairly conclusive parry, I would have thought, but no. Just as the laws of physics do not apply to this woman’s hair, the laws of the Juice Out do not apply to her person.

  ‘We’ll be sitting over there,’ she repeats, slightly louder and slightly slower, in the manner of someone accustomed to donning a white cotton glove to show the housemaid where her dusting needs to improve.

  ‘Sorry, there’s no table service,’ I say again, in the manner of someone telling small children they are absolutely not getting another five minutes of television even if they hold their breath for a really, really long time.

  The woman attempts to stare me down as I glower at her from beneath my Juice Out baseball cap. She’s good, but she obviously didn’t get the memo about picking fights with disaffected juice bar employees forced to wear a lime-green logo that looks like nasal discharge. This is fast turning into the National Stare-a-thon Championships. The knock-down round. I wonder if we’re still going to be standing here tomorrow, retinas combusting from their own heat while a crowd barracks around us.

  ‘Her,’ the woman says, breaking off and turning to Caitlin. She means me. ‘She’s not very good.’