by Jenny Oliver
As the first of the buses hissed back into life, crammed with stranded tourists, their accommodation now sorted by harassed, understaffed reps, Sophie pulled up a stool for Ella and said, ‘Here look, take a break, sit down, there’s not much more we can do.’
The second bus load were filing out, all waves and smiles as they ran through the rain, and the kitchen held only the final dribs and drabs of tourists who had not yet been found a room.
‘No, no I’ll help you clear up.’ Ella said, her legs heavy with tiredness but her mind radiating with an adrenaline-fuelled excitement similar to how she felt after one of her client pitches. They’d pulled something off, together, made a fair whack of cash and it had possibly been better than had there been a full complement of staff and table service. She didn’t want it to end. Wanted to hold onto the moment where the morning had peaked, where they’d laughed together when hot oil had spat or a donut had come out a bizarre shape, or one of the tourists had had to shut their eyes in pleasure from a taste – or when her grandmother had dropped a pot of yoghurt as she was coming back from the outside fridge and the yellow-eyed cat had then run through it and they’d had to hide it from the tourists, giggling as they got soaked trying to mop it up.
‘Ella.’ Her mum put her hand on her shoulder. ‘Sit down. We can clear up later. Have a coffee.’ She bit down on a smile, ‘Oh no. Sorry, of course no coffee. An orange juice.’ she said, reaching over to pour some juice into one of the little coffee glasses. ‘You know sometimes it is really hard for me to equate the Ella now with when you were a little girl. Looking at you now I can’t believe I could ever forget that you hate tea and coffee. All those oranges I squeezed for you in the mornings.’ She laughed, leaning back against the counter and swirling sugar into her own coffee glass.
Ella found her smile back was more forced than she wanted it to be.
Her mum poured in another spoon of sugar, and said, while stirring, ‘It was lovely to cook with you again. I’d forgotten how good you are.’
‘I’m terrible.’ Ella said, quickly.
‘No you’re not. Just out of practice.’
‘I can only cook the things I know how to cook.’
Her mum laughed. ‘How do you think people learn?’
‘But you, you just know what goes together, what ingredients work with what. I could never do that. I don’t have the instinct.’
‘It’s practice, Ella. That’s all. It’s cooking for your kids, or your family every night. That’s what I did. You and Max must cook.’
Ella looked at her orange juice.
‘Sometimes, you must cook sometimes.’ her mum said with a laugh.
Ella shook her head. ‘I haven’t really cooked anything since I stopped living with you.’
Her mum paused. Ella watched her run her hand over her mouth. She looked exactly as Ella remembered her from being a kid – dressed in a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, blue Levi 501s, cream Converse hi-tops and a gold necklace with St Christopher on it. Ella had the same necklace, her mum had sent it to her on her eighteenth, she never wore it but she did carry it in her purse.
Ella’s comment seemed to hang in the air, the words dancing about like little pixies, then when there was no answer, drifted off through the open back window and Ella felt like a door that she had tentatively opened swung shut in the breeze.
Her mum took a sip of her coffee. Then, as she placed it down on the surface next to the ripped packets of sugar, said, ‘I like your hair like that. It suits you.’
Ella nodded in thanks for the compliment, thinking of the Brazilian keratin straightening treatment she had every month and the GHDs she had to replace every year because they lost the power she needed to tame her hair.
‘Girls,’ her grandfather called. ‘There’s a man over here gasping for a cup of tea. Literally at the end of life, gasping.’
Ella looked up to see him pointing to himself with his thumb and smiled at the look of desperation on his face. ‘I’ll do it.’ she said to her mum, sliding herself off the stool and walking over to the kettle.
Her mum started to load up the dishwasher. Her grandmother waved the last of the tourists away. Agatha arrived for the lunchtime shift looking perplexed at the state of the kitchen.
Ella watched the steam from the kettle rise and fog the window that was dribbling now with condensation as all the people had left. As she reached forward to wipe it away she saw her reflection in the glass and paused. The beautifully straight hair that she had swept into a ponytail that morning was gone. Instead, loose around her head, strands that had escaped from the band, were curled in waves, crazy and erratic and to Ella, absolutely hideous. The ponytail, she saw as she turned her head to the side, was equally wavy, the ends flicking in great loops. Obviously the heat, the condensation, the rain had all combined to create the kind of humidity that she’d avoided for the last ten or so years. Running her hands through the escaped curls, she scraped them back into a higher ponytail so that none of them could get free.
‘Oh don’t do that.’ her mum said as she walked past with a stack of dirty plates.
‘It’s awful.’ Ella said sharply. ‘I hate it.’
Her mum shrugged. ‘You shouldn’t. It suits you. I think nature knows what suits us best.’
Ella blew out a breath. ‘I completely disagree.’
Her mum chuckled as if Ella was deluding herself.
‘Hello. The tea. A man could die of thirst around here.’ her grandfather called.
Ella looked away from her mum and made the cup of Earl Grey, sploshing in the milk and walking it over to him in a sudden hurry because all she wanted to do was escape to the bathroom where there was a proper mirror.
‘Thank you very much.’ her granddad said as he practically swiped the cup from her hand and took a sip of the piping hot tea. Ella carried on out the door, walking in a sort of fast-paced trot as she tried to disguise her hurry.
Finally, when she’d safely locked herself in the loo, she stood in front of the mirror and yanked her hair out of the hairband. Scrunching it up in her hands to loosen all the curls and teasing the shorter strands of fringe so they hung forward, soft around her face, rather than sticking out at wild angles, she made herself look at her reflection. Made herself stare. Her eyes wanted to narrow at the sight. The curls were just a constant reminder of her fat little self. The self who didn’t want to be at boarding school, who didn’t want to win the maths prize every year, and the art prize. Who didn’t want to walk alongside Maddy when she came to visit in the holidays, her sister all lithe and brown and freckled with her huge gappy smile and long straight sun-kissed hair. Ella with frizz from the sun that her crappy pre-ceramic hair straighteners couldn’t tame, white skinned from an English summer, her brain packed with knowledge about her dad and her life with him that she couldn’t talk about because it made her mum shut her eyes for a moment too long and then get up and put the kettle on. When she went home her dad and Veronica would ask politely about Greece but never really listen to the answer. So her experiences sat, caught, trapped like bugs in a web.
She pulled one of the curls in front of her face and it sprang back up.
‘I hate you.’ she said to her hair.
Then she scraped it back up again, tight as possible and unlocked the door, stepping out into the rain to rush back into the kitchen and walking splat into Dimitri.
‘Hey, hey, watch it.’ he said, holding a newspaper over his head. ‘Oh it’s you.’
Ella recoiled back and then kept running towards the door. ‘Yes it’s me.’ she shouted, over the noise of the water.
Once inside, Dimitri shook out the paper and then tossed it into the bin. Ella wiped rain from her face.
‘We’re not talking are we?’ Dimitri said.
‘No.’ Ella shook her head.
‘Good. Just checking.’ he added, and then walked over to the table and poured himself a coffee and spooned some yoghurt and stewed cherries into a bowl, as if there was nothing
unusual about the set-up. ‘This all looks good.’ he said after a second, his mouth full. ‘Very relaxed. Very–’ he waved his hand holding the bowl. ‘Nonchalant.’
Ella’s mum laughed, ‘Thank you, Dimitri. Very helpful.’
‘I’m serious. It’s a good look. Self-service. I like it. I’m going to sit out there.’ he said, nodding towards the patio where the rain was beating on the roof and rivulets of water were trickling across the floor. Before heading out he walked back to the bin and, picking up his paper, shook it out. Realising he could salvage the middle pages, he tucked them under his arm and went to sit at a table overlooking the small grove of olives.
Ella watched him for a moment, watched as he put his legs up on the chair next to him, opened his paper and took a sip of coffee, seemingly without a care in the world, and then she walked towards the table and started to stack up glasses and scrunch up dirty napkins.
‘I’m sorry you didn’t cook again.’ her mum said. She’d cleared the island unit and was chopping up rabbit for what looked like a stifado, a bottle of red wine next to the saucepan alongside jam jars of cinnamon and allspice.
Ella paused, taken by surprise that her mum had brought the subject up again. ‘It was no big deal.’
‘It must have been sort of a deal, you used to love cooking. It was Maddy that hated it.’
Ella shrugged a shoulder, then picked up a stack of glasses that wobbled as she walked to the dishwasher. ‘I had other stuff to do. School. Uni. And when I was at home Veronica cooked.’
Her mum snorted. ‘I’m surprised she knew how.’
‘She’s ok. She’s an ok cook.’ Ella said, wanting to defend Veronica but also wondering why on earth she’d ever mentioned her name.
Her mum raised a brow in disbelief. ‘All that woman knows how to do is look good. She bedazzles. That’s her trick.’
Ella tried not to laugh at the word bedazzles and kept her head down, stacking the dishwasher, squeezing in the remaining glasses.
‘She got your father–’ her mum carried on, hacking at the rabbit carcass with a huge square knife. ‘And then she turned you into a little carbon copy.’
Ella’s hand stilled on the Start button of the dishwasher. ‘She didn’t turn me into anything.’ she said quietly.
‘Oh come on, Ella.’ Her mum blew out a breath to get her hair out of her eyes. ‘Look at you.’
Ella stood up straight. ‘She helped me.’
‘She ruined you.’
Ella felt her mouth drop open slightly. ‘No she didn’t.’
‘You were lovely. So lovely, so pretty, so clever and then bam, you follow after her like a duckling and you’re suddenly all Parisian chic and married to a man who–’ her mum paused, almost realised suddenly what she was saying and who she was saying it to.
‘Who what?’ Ella asked.
The chair in the corner creaked as her grandfather got up and walked as quickly as he could manage outside to sit with Dimitri.
Her mum threw the pieces of rabbit into the pan of hot oil and it spat and sizzled, steam rising in front of her face. ‘Who didn’t know how lucky he was to have you.’
‘That’s not what you were going to say.’ Ella said, walking round the counter to stand opposite her mum.
‘No, probably not.’ her mum said, turning the meat over so it browned, the smoke still rising and twisting, the rain still pelting down hard against the window. Outside it looked like a curtain of black had been drawn over the sky, birds were twisting in the wind, the sea was a rain-flattened grey.
‘You may as well say whatever it was you were thinking.’ Ella leant her hands against the counter top, tried to stay relaxed but could feel her mouth tensing.
Her mum threw in some onion halves that fizzed for a second then simmered down to a sleepy hiss. ‘I was going to say–’ she wiped her hands on her apron. ‘That it didn’t seem that he loved you for you. It always felt like you couldn’t be yourself around him.’
Ella licked her lips.
She heard rather than saw Dimitri appear in the doorway, and when she glanced to the right she saw his reflection in the big mirror over the fireplace – he had stopped on the threshold, mouth slightly open, empty coffee glass in his hand. He’d clearly heard what her mum had said, and backed away as quietly as he could, but not before he caught Ella’s eye in the mirror and she saw what she took for sympathy.
Infuriated by the direction of the conversation, humiliated that Dimitri had heard, annoyed that her mum had never said any of this before, Ella said in a low hiss, ‘Maybe I was happier that way.’
‘I very much doubt that, Ella.’ Her mum was sloshing vinegar into the pan along with big handfuls of rosemary, fat juicy tomatoes and cloves of garlic as big as marbles.
‘Do you know what I don’t understand?’ Ella said, her voice low and controlled, as she watched the contents of the pan bubble, ‘Is why you wait this long to tell me any of this?’
‘Because–’ her mum paused, stirred the stew, took a taste from the wooden spoon and then ground in more pepper before saying, ‘I suppose I never thought it was my right before now.’
There was a moment where only the sound of the rain filled the room, like white noise.
‘No.’ Ella shook her head. ‘No I don’t suppose it was.’ she said, before deciding that she’d had enough of the conversation and, pushing herself off the counter, started to walk away with the intention of going upstairs.
But just as she was leaving, the Christmas tree sparkling next to her, she heard her mum say, ‘You aren’t defined by Max. I just want you to know that. You are so much more than him.’
‘And how on earth would you know that?’ Ella asked, looking back at her over her shoulder. ‘You know nothing about me. You let me go. You chose to know nothing about me.’
‘I didn’t let you go, Ella.’
‘Yes you did.’ She turned round and took a couple of steps back towards the table. ‘You slag off Veronica but she was amazing to me. She helped me with school stuff, she helped me with uni, and yes, when I begged her because I was so damn miserable with who I was, she helped me with myself.’
The rain was incessant. The noise enough to drive a person mad. It battered the roof like ball bearings, splashed into great puddles on the concourse, cascaded down the windows while needles hammered into the sea.
‘You let me go.’ Ella went on, swallowing over a slight hiccup in her voice, watching her mum’s face, her big wide eyes, her lips parted about to speak, the lock of hair that fell forward from behind her ear as she shook her head as if to say no, steam from the pan rising in front of her like a wall.
‘You chose to go, Ella.’
Ella paused, hand on the back of one of the chairs. ‘How can you ever think that?’
Her mum sighed. ‘Because it’s true.’
CHAPTER 22
MADDY
‘Why are you back here?’ Walter asked as Maddy sloped back behind the bar. ‘Why aren’t you up there?’ he said, pointing to the stage where the girls were lined up on chairs, all lounging and lazy eyed, dressed in their Christmas corsets, lips slicked red, long satin gloves up their arms, black stilettos like skyscrapers, singing a sultry version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.
‘Because that’s not the kind of singer I want to be.’ Maddy muttered, cheeks red, embarrassed that she’d had to come back past Betty with her smug smile on her lips, humiliated that she’d had to shake her head at Mack and run away from the girls in the dressing room, angry that Walter was sitting there with a big grin on his face.
‘You said you wanted to make a living out of it. That was your dream.’
‘You set me up. You made me look like an idiot.’
Walter laughed. ‘You’ve never met me before. You know that I’m a grumpy old man and yet you trust me to help you. It’s bizarre behaviour. And now you’re angry with me. I gave you the chance to realise your dream. Handed it to you on a plate. I even cashed in a favour I was owed.’
‘But that wasn’t my dream.’ Maddy shook her head, felt the annoying, unwanted prick of tears.
‘It’s never going to be how you want it to be.’ Walter said, packing his pipe with tobacco and staring across at her with a look of pity in his eyes. ‘It’s like Christmas. A mirage. Get there and it’s just like any other day. Young Madeline–’ he said, sliding himself off his stool and opening his arms wide, ‘You’re already living the dream.’
At the end of her shift, the night bus deposited Maddy two roads away from Ella’s flat. It was dark and the snow was falling thick, wiping out her footprints so when she turned around it looked like she’d never even been there. The main road was busy but the side street she turned down was deserted and, spooked by the stillness and aware of her aloneness, she wrapped her coat round her, pulled her hat down low and almost ran to the front door.
The light in the hallway never turned off. While she’d thought it completely un-eco, as she turned the key and slid through the doors into the warmth of the municipal space, she was suddenly grateful for the twenty-four hour blaze, the scary, dark city outside shut out for now. It was only when she was in the flat with the door shut that she allowed herself a moment to wallow in her naivety. In her stupid, hopeful sounding innocence. In her absolute terror of the girls, all casually confident, in the dressing room. She was out of her depth, sheltered, trusting. At Dimitri’s bar they played backgammon, they watched X-Factor on YouTube, they flirted with tourists and added the shot after the mixer so the seasonal customers thought they were getting a super strong holiday drink, they spent their tips on locally brewed beer, they ate bread warm from the bakery when they walked home at four in the morning and prickly pears that she held in her jumper and skinned with a pen-knife, they watched the sunrise on the jetty and, when it was really hot, lay down on the boat to sleep. When she sang she had her guitar. She wore her holey jumper and her hair scrunched up on top of her head. Her grandfather would sometimes cut in midway through a Bob Dylan cover and people in the crowd would whoop and cheer.