It was one of these very expensive, exclusive restaurants. We served the best steaks in town. Everyone said that. You’d see the women coming in and eating steaks and then they’d have three veg and wine and coffee and cheese and go home convinced they’d had a slimming dinner. You got to hate people eating. They were so vulnerable-looking. So ugly. The women all looked at the men and the men looked at other women, going platitude, platitude, and the women thinking they were the greatest thing since fried bread.
At first I used to think the girls were awful, the way they’d smile at the customers and then come into the kitchen and say, ‘Jesus! What a poxey lookin’ divil,’ and splutter with laughing and then stiffen their faces up again like dough and go marching back out with the hors d’oeuvres. After a week you were the same yourself. You’d stand weighted on one leg listening respectfully while the man said what he wanted, and what his girlfriend, or wife or mistress wanted, and let him be pompous; then write it all down and not snigger when he pronounced the wine wrong. Off with you to the kitchen to say, ‘Janey Mac!’
For my first week there my feet ached the whole time. I’d peel off my tights as soon as I got home and pull the table over to the sink and sit up on it and drop my painful, blue, swollen feet in and run the cold tap over them. I thought, My feet are like Stilton cheese—soft, blue-white, rotting, smelly.
But the money was good. Two pounds a night, straight, and then whatever you made in tips. It worked out at about four pounds a night. We didn’t leave the place till one or two in the morning. So okay, the next day you didn’t feel like much and you wanted to get to bed early, but you’d got a good meal and a bit of booze if the customers left some over. I thought, It’s better than a lot of other jobs a girl without qualifications could get.
I was doing the typing course during the day and then the restaurant at night, three nights a week, or four, if I could get them. So that was usually twelve pounds a week. It was enough. Sometimes I’d see something in a shop and want it, and want it, and think, Oh God if only I could have that—it was like a pain, the wanting, but mostly it wasn’t too bad.
I didn’t go out very much the evenings I was off. I’d maybe have a drink down in the pub with Mr Maloney and then go up to my room and read, or go and see Mary. I kept thinking about what she said: ‘Nobody’s going to rescue you,’ and it went round and round my head. I’d feel sick.
You want to be loved. That’s the main thing. But you never know whether you’re getting it or not. Is it enough, too little, too much? You’re a kid and you’re being smothered one minute and told to run off and play the next. You say, ‘It’s not very much that I ask, is it? Just a little love.’ You hold your pillow and roll over and say why? It seems useless then. You think of all the people you know struggling around in the dark, groping —the sleepwalkers. You’re all kids at a party playing blind man’s buff but you’re always the one with the scarf round your face, your hands stretched out in front of you, looking for something to touch, to hold, to recognize.
I recognized Colin immediately when he came into the restaurant: his sloping shoulders, one slightly higher than the other. He pulled out a chair for the girl to sit on. I was just coming out of the kitchen, two steaks, veg and salad balanced for table number ten. I stopped. Colin had his back to me. He hadn’t seen me. I felt as if someone had pulled the chain of a huge lavatory in my head—a tremendous gushing and pouring, almost like a haemorrhage.
They were sitting at one of my tables. One of the girls, Susie, bumped into me from behind. ‘Get your finger out, then,’ she said and shunted me on. I put the food down in front of the two men and a woman at number ten. One of the men was saying something about a drink. Their voices kept missing my ears. I thought, If I keep on helping this table, I won’t have to turn round. I can just stay here till they go away.
‘Could I have the wine list please?’ the man was saying in this edgy voice. It clicked me back into action. Wine list, wine, order, yessir, of course sir, three barrels full sir and I hope it chokes you. Now, menus for table nine.
‘Hello, Colin, hello …’
‘My God, Liz! I didn’t know you were working here.’ Colin had both hands on the edge of the table. His eyes looked enormous, like a cat’s eyes at night, luminous.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they’ve made an honest woman of me at last.’ I laughed a stiff little constipated laugh. I walked back to the kitchen. The chef said, ‘Vassa matter?’ The chef was German. He said, ‘Here, take dis,’ and shoved a glass of port into my hand. I drank it down in one go. The chef did a Charles Atlas stance, biceps flexed, diaphragm pulled in, chest pushed out, his white hat cocked crazily on his head, his striped apron stretched across his belly.
I laughed at this mad German chef who was trying to make me happy. He said, ‘Ach, ach, that’s better.’ He waved his wooden spoon in the air; he said, ‘Never say dying till you’re dead—an English proverb, no?’ I went back through to take their orders.
I hadn’t seen Colin for five weeks. Having seen him day and night for a year, lived through him, five weeks seemed the rest of my life. There was with Colin, and then without Colin. That was all. I hadn’t got back or forward to anything else, not really, not yet.
My head felt like a fish bowl. I thought, Everyone will see in. They’ll see my frantic thoughts swimming around.
The girl was very pretty. She’d taken a lot of trouble to look that way. I should know. She had curly hair that framed her face, a small pert little nose and glass eyes—mean eyes, I thought. As I was coming back I could hear Colin saying ‘Oh from the past you know,’ and I wanted to crack their two heads together like eggs.
The girl was having a steak. Colin coq au vin. ‘Some wine perhaps?’ Oh yes, I thought, a little wine to mellow your edges, a little warm red fluid to blur your eyes, to soften your hurt, to ease your fright, a little wine to help you into bed. A little fool.
Colin ordered a bottle of Pommard. Nothing but the best for the new lady. The specialness of the first few outings. He looked embarrassed. Good, I thought, let him suffer.
Girls are so dispensable to men. One doesn’t fit, so you slip her off and slip on another. There are always plenty of girls waiting for some man to come and slip them on. Pretty girls too. The men move in and out of the pretty girls and gradually they get less pretty as they worry about their fading prettiness and their younger, prettier rivals coming up to sneer at them and flash their pretty young breasts at their own men. Then they cling to them, and the men have to slap them off, to free themselves for other girls; the more they slap the more the girls cling.
I spat in his coq au vin in the kitchen. The chef shouted with laughter. I thought he might have been annoyed; it was, after all, his speciality. He made gestures like peeing into the girl’s dish. We laughed a conspirators’ laugh and out I went with the dinners.
I thought, What would Mary do in this situation? Each time I came to their table, to take their plates, to pour their wine, to bring their coffee, I wondered what Mary would have done. Mary would be strong, I thought, Mary would think, Fuck you, inside her head, and carry on.
I tried to think, Fuck you, but then my insides were runny and I hated that girl. I thought: You left him, now he’s got another girl. Simple. What did you expect? That you’d go back to him, that he’d come running and begging, and you’d go back? Yes, in a way, in many ways, that’s what you expected.
He did come round to Mary’s flat three times since I’d left. He’d been drunk. He’d called her a hitching, bloody, lesbian whore. He said she’d poisoned my mind against him. He said what she needed was a good fuck. He said she was a know-all whore who wanted to have control over me, to use me for her own ends. Mary said, ‘Well what do you expect? The poor man is demented with insecurity.’
Oh I’d thought about going back, often enough. Even went down to the television station one day and then ran back at the last minute. If he�
�d been there I would have gone with him. Even now, if he jumped up and grabbed my hand and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s run away together for ever and ever,’ I would have gone. Back to the flat by the sea. Back to long days. Back to beautiful meals in restaurants. Back to parties with pretty girls. Back to bed. Back to bodies. Even back to hurt, yes, even that.
Colin said, ‘Are you allowed to sit down and have a glass of something with us?’ He smiled up, so confident, so sure. ‘Not while on duty, sir,’ I said. And thought, I hate him now, I hate him for that ‘us’; once it was ‘us’—me and him—now it’s another ‘us’.
He had a brandy and she had Chartreuse. I thought of the first drink I’d ever had with Colin when I’d asked for Benedictine because it was the only posh drink I knew. Time slid back like a climber falling down the wet-black rock side of a mountain.
I ran into the kitchen and into the chef who was sitting with a glass of wine at the big deal cooking table; I felt an iron fist clenching inside my chest, and my head turning solid, and I could hear my voice saying, ‘Oh God, God, God,’ and sort of squeaking the words out. The chef’s eyes looked like raisins in his puffy white chef’s face. He sat me down and pulled my head against his apron, which smelt of a million dinners, and wiped my face with it when I’d stopped crying. Susie came in and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and I asked her if she would do the bill for number nine. She came back with a note from Colin for me. I burnt it without reading it. Watching it curl and shrivel in the gas flame, I thought, That’s that. Now I’m really going to start again.
—7—
We all left the restaurant about 2.00 a.m. I was drunk. Not very, but enough to make me think the road was made of velvet and see despair in the chef’s eyes when probably he just had indigestion. Susie and he and I had drunk two bottles of wine between us. They walked down to the river with me and we said goodnight and they went on up the road to the taxi stand.
My little room over the pub. I opened the big heavy door that led up lino-covered stairs to the flats.
Mr Maloney was sitting in his kitchen on the first landing. He was talking to someone, a bottle of whiskey between them on the table. He heard me go by. He came out and said, ‘Come in and have a wee scoop with us.’ I thought of the room, the sheets, white and cold. I went in.
Mr Maloney poured me a thick yellow glass of whiskey. I don’t drink whiskey that often. It burned the back of my throat. I imagined a little soft animal at the back of my throat and the whiskey searing it. Mr Maloney said, ‘Yer lookin’ terrible sad tonight. Drink up now, there’s nothing so bad as a drop of the hard stuff won’t cure, or at least alleviate.’ He said alleviate with about ten vowels.
He said, ‘Miss O’Sullivan is renting the top room offa the missus.’ Explaining to his friend. ‘Very nice too,’ said the friend. (The room or me?)
The friend offered me a Woodbine, saying, ‘I don’t suppose you’d be after smoking one of these little cancer sticks, would you now?’ I said I would. ‘Thank you, I would.’ Mr Maloney lit it up. We all sat there smoking, me with a new cigarette and they with their small butty ones.
There was a small silence. ‘Angels passing,’ said Mr Maloney. (A nun had told us that at school: you were supposed to hear the sound of angels’ wings during those silences.) I felt sorry I’d interrupted their talk. I couldn’t drink the whiskey fast though; I sat sipping it, the whiskey burning and the Woodbine scraping the back of my throat, my head feeling thick.
‘A rough night all the same, isn’t it?’ Mr Maloney said.
I looked up, startled. The night had seemed so smooth—was the smoothness deceptive? But he wasn’t asking for an answer.
‘A terrible thing them students did to that poor Professor from Africa’, said his friend, Mr Hickey.
‘Terrible surely,’ said Mr Maloney. ‘It’s a wonder they’re not all sent home to England or the North of Ireland, or wherever them heathens come from. Pouring paint over visitin’ professors indeed.’ They stared down at their glasses of whiskey. The evening paper lay on the table. I hadn’t had time to read it before going to work. The headline said ‘Students pour paint over professor’. It seemed some of the Maoist students at Trinity had poured red paint over a Professor visiting the College. He was from Salisbury University in Rhodesia. The students said, ‘We don’t want any fascists here.’ I suddenly saw my father’s face as he walked out behind the Professor. A surprised face. Some of the paint had gone over his suit too. I felt a jolt. It was suddenly as if I’d never known him. I wanted to laugh too. I could see the students were shouting, shouting their arrogance and their fear and their hate—fascists go home—and I could see my father’s startled face, surprised at it all. Was he frightened? I couldn’t say.
‘That’s my father,’ I said to Mr Maloney and pointed to him. He and his friend were strained over looking at the picture. Mr Maloney took out horn-rimmed glasses.
‘Oh now a fine lookin’ man surely,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for his trouble.’ I thought, He’s wondering why I don’t live at home. He must have assumed up to now that my parents were living in the country or something.
‘I don’t get on with him actually’, I said, believing it as I said it. ‘He’s just a very different sort of person.’ Mr Maloney and his friend nodded. Slightly bewildered. They looked at the picture again. I said, ‘I must go now. Thank you very much for the drink.’ I tipped back the rest of the whiskey. I thought it wasn’t going to go down—like the Egg Flips that Mary used to make me take when I had flu. I always thought they’d come popping up again, yeeups.
I went upstairs to my attic. The bed was unmade, clothes hanging from the knobs. They say women living on their own are dirtier than men. They lose their civilized veneer, revert faster. I sat down on the bed and pulled off my shoes, tights, took off my coat. Took out a cigarette, lit it. Thought, I’ve been smoking too much lately. Puffed coming up the stairs. Puffed at twenty! I thought, Who cares?
I started taking the clothes off the bed. Folding things, jumble-folding. I hung up some dresses in the cupboard. I looked at a long dress Colin had bought for me. It was imitation black satin. Halter-necked and scooped very low at the back. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen one woman with two cleavages,’ Angus had said when he’d seen me in it. ‘One at the back and one at the front.’ I put the dress on. My face looked livid in the mirror, the room untidy and dirty behind the tired face atop a black halter-neck dress.
I washed my face, carefully. Then cleansed it, toned it, and carefully put on make-up. Getting and spending, scraping off and putting on. A recurring theme—the vicious circles of our lives …
I looked in the mirror again. Went over to the long one behind the cupboard door. It was flecked around the edges with black spots of age. Colin once told me what it was that makes mirrors go spotty with age but I couldn’t remember what it was.
I put my hand under my hair at the back of my neck, scooped it up and stuck a hairpin in. There was a rose somewhere, a rose made from starched linen that I used to wear. I started throwing things out of the cupboard. ‘The rose, where’s the damned rose?’ It was inside an evening bag, a sleeping rose. I put it in my hair. I put on more eye make-up: wide black lines, deep purple shadows, rouge on my cheeks, powder.
I stood back again from the mirror. Turned, walked away looking over my shoulder, walked back again. I did it again, making my walk sexier, pouting my lips, putting my hands on my hips, elbows strained back, bosom stuck out; I could hear Suzanna’s voice: ‘Walk as if your body is the most desirable, sexy thing on earth, but no damn fool guy is ever going to get near it … provoke.’
I thought of Mary, her saying once, ‘It’s easier for you good-looking ones to turn on the sex thing with men always, but therefore very hard for you ever to get through to them, to confront them as real people.’ Did I do that? Did I now? Hardly now. I didn’t see people. I hadn’t been out with a man since Colin. I’d had m
y bottom pinched in the restaurant, and patted. That was all.
How I’d changed. Five weeks. You look back on it and it just takes a second. Living it seems like years. Five weeks, upon five weeks, upon five weeks. That’s your life till you die.
Between now and then you’ve got to scrape off and put on. You’ve got to fill up and clean out. You’ve got to talk. You’ve got to listen. You won’t ever love again. Love? ‘What’s love,’ you say, ‘Love is a myth.’ It’s like religion. It’s a bad joke.
Colin said, ‘I love you,’ he went Mmm, he made me oblivious with his hands, he turned me on the tip of his finger … but I left; he said it to too many people.
He said ‘I love you’, but not to me. I left. I was not loved any more. Now he’d found another pair of eyes, another bosom; he was saying ‘I love you’ to them.
I was walking up and down the room. I just became aware of it. I was pacing, over and over.
I thought of Colin in bed with his curly-headed girlfriend. I didn’t know her name. I wished I knew her damn name. I thought of our bed. How we’d bought it together one Saturday morning and taken it home, wobbling on top of the car. We’d carried it up the stairs and Colin had said, ‘No, we must put it up immediately.’ He always wanted things done like that, quickly: wanted them finished, so’s he could stand back and look at them. He’d work and work on a programme, researching, filming editing, day and night, so he could look at it, the finished product.
I thought of the bedsheets. How I’d tie-dyed them one day in the launderette. Pushed them in knotted and tied, praying the attendant wouldn’t see me dropping in the packets of dye and then leaning over the machine, covering the Perspex top with a magazine till I was faint with the heat, hoping she wouldn’t come up and peer in like she sometimes did to make sure the washing was okay. She’d have seen bright purple soapsuds.
Fathers Come First Page 17