Show Them a Good Time

by Nicole Flattery

  That night, she took her usual trip to the 24-hour supermarket. She strolled around, swinging her wire shopping basket, the empty aisles opening out in front of her. She used to come here with her ex-husband in the sunny days of their courtship. They placed healthful items in baskets, their bodies slyly touching as they strolled. Now, the cashier girls wandered around, indifferent, as if this supermarket wasn’t once the site of a Great Romance. She said, ‘Oh, girls, I just want you all to be so happy,’ and tried not to cry. That particular Saturday, she watched the artificial rain falling on the vacant spaces where the greens used to be displayed. She admired the labels: their verve, their refusal to stop selling themselves even in the direst circumstances. She put in orders for exotic fruits, fruits that would never pass her lips, and the girls wrote them dutifully down, avoiding her gaze.

  *

  The restaurant was a basement, really, with a damp smell of impending disaster and a neglected feeling. Inside, the waiters kept their jackets on over their uniforms, expecting to be called away at a moment’s notice. There were only two waiters left from the previous staff of six. They hugged the menus to their chests, as if in possession of ancient secrets. The windows were fully covered. Angela and her date (forty-seven, artist, no visible scars) had just been to the theatre. Theatre wasn’t something she normally did – and the imminent end of the world wasn’t the time for trying new things – but, regardless, they attended the theatre. They had sat on a long, hard bench, their knees touching, then not-touching, then occasionally touching again at moments of dramatic seriousness. The touching was electrifying to Angela. It gave her a powerful rush to the head. The play didn’t do much for her at all, at all.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Angela said. ‘I didn’t get it.’

  ‘What didn’t you get?’

  ‘All of it, it has to be said.’

  There was one other couple in the restaurant, young and disturbingly beautiful, their smiles wide and postures primed as if in constant pose for a photo. They glanced over as Angela and her date began to raise their voices.

  ‘That’s a very ignorant point of view,’ her date said.

  ‘It is, I agree. My own ignorance is my business though, and I don’t feel the need to explain or justify it to anyone.’

  ‘Didn’t you like the way their naked bodies symbolised their vulnerability in the face of the end of the world?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the dancing as the earth opened up below them? Their bravery? Their joy? Didn’t you like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Angela, I don’t want to put pressure on you but if you didn’t enjoy and appreciate that play, you’re not going to understand me, fundamentally, as a human being.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said.

  The surlier of the two waiters approached them and set down their near-empty plates. Angela’s date suddenly began grabbing at the dinner items as if to speed up the process.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she instructed, ‘that’s his paid employment.’

  The artist whipped out his napkin and produced a pen. ‘Angela, what is your ex-husband’s address?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I would like to send him a card in the post, just a small token, to show him his hard work didn’t go unnoticed. I believe people should be thanked for the duties they have performed in this life and you must have been a handful.’

  ‘I was,’ she agreed. ‘I was like a long day’s labour in the sun. You would emerge disorientated and physically exhausted, but stronger for it.’

  His hand hovered excitedly over the napkin, as if planning exactly what to write inside his card.

  ‘I’m sorry I don’t know his address. I know he lives alone in an apartment but I couldn’t tell you which one. It’s a block of apartments with other men who live alone.’

  Her date leaned backwards and performed a waving motion with his hand, as if trying to communicate with Angela’s ex-husband from a distance. ‘What age are those kids you teach?’ he said, through a mouthful of lettuce.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They are short and move quickly in all sorts of directions.’

  Her date (wide-legged jeans, shirt from a disco decade) looked desperately at the young couple across the restaurant as if wishing to signal his immense distress.

  ‘You know what I didn’t like about that play?’ Angela didn’t know how to let things go.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way it was about the end of the world. Doomsday stuff. That felt obvious to me.’

  ‘But that’s what is happening right now. That’s life,’ he said, and the way he emphasised life made Angela want to throw her knife and fork at him. She would have done it too, had she not been nervous of the ire of the waiters.

  ‘Yes, exactly. It’s happening. I don’t need to see it on stage.’

  ‘I don’t think you like art, Angela.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I think I’m too anxious to spend long periods of time looking at things trying to figure out what they are.’

  ‘You know what else I think you don’t like?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nudity. Oh God, you’re just like my ex-wife. A prude – exactly like her. I bet if I got naked right now you would have a problem with that.’

  The young angel-boy leapt out of his seat and dashed to his girlfriend’s side. He placed his hands over her unbelieving eyes as Angela’s date began unbuttoning his shirt. The waiters let him get to the third button before they intervened. There was a brief bout of wrestling before Angela’s date, out of breath, fully-dressed and furious, sat back down.

  Angela exhaled a long, delightful plume of smoke.

  ‘I’m having such a nice time,’ she said. ‘After dessert, would you like to sit in my car with me for a while?’

  In Angela’s car, they listened to the radio. Two men with the wild intensity of actors were shouting about disease and rising sea levels. One of the radio presenters said he had been having bad dreams, the other said he hadn’t been sleeping at all. Finally, the more innovative of the two screamed, a thin piercing sound that rattled Angela’s car and further reduced its life span.

  ‘These people shouldn’t be allowed on the radio,’ she said.

  As the presenters listed out the odds for the human race – which were not favourable from what Angela could tell – her date made to kiss her. She turned away at the final moment.

  ‘Would you like to see a picture of my cat?’ Angela inquired, as a token of peace.

  ‘No,’ he replied, sulkily.

  Without a further word, he stormed out of the car, slamming the door behind him. She watched through the windscreen as he ruffled his hair and popped the top button of his shirt, creating a bedroom look. When the young couple emerged from the restaurant, he stopped the boy and offered a high-five, as if to celebrate his incredible sexual success in the car.

  Angela thought: I’m never coming to this restaurant again. Never again.

  *

  The restaurant was a basement, really, with a damp smell of impending disaster and a neglected feeling. The waiters hung around in stained vests, helping themselves to drinks from the bar. Music Angela had never heard before was being piped through the speakers: loud, explicit and full of pushy directions. ‘Get low,’ this music advised and the waiters obliged by limboing underneath the entrance to the wooden bar. Each limbo was followed by a supportive whoop from a fellow waiter.

  When Angela and her date (fifty, fruit and vegetable man, one faded scar running across his cheek) entered the restaurant, one of the waiters embraced Angela like she was a cousin who reminded him of carefree memories from his childhood. Plaster and dust from the ceiling littered the abandoned tables. A sign, in sloppy teenage handwriting, read: ‘Only Dessert Available.’ At a table nearby, sat a shabby-seeming couple and their young daughter, sharing a single slice of chocolate cake.

  ‘This place is usually wall-to-wall sophisticated people,’ A
ngela told the man.

  The waiters, out of unquestioned routine, threw them two dinner menus. Angela shouted across to them, ‘This fellow isn’t my date.’

  Her date raised his head in alarm.

  ‘He’s more of a guest,’ she explained. ‘He’s employed in the local supermarket.’

  The waiters ignored her.

  ‘It’s not always easy to recognise people out of their work uniforms,’ she said. ‘You look nice.’

  ‘How is the school coping?’ The fruit and vegetable man shredded his napkin nervously. He glanced at the waiters as if to find an answer to the apocalypse in their unruly behaviour.

  ‘The staff room,’ Angela shook out a cigarette, ‘is pure farce at this point.’

  ‘What do you get up to in there? I’ve always wanted to know.’

  ‘Talking. Rage.’

  A few days previously, the end date named, one of the older teachers had taken to wearing a veil – a wispy, fluttery piece of fabric that obscured her hunted face – as a gesture of mourning. Soon, she had amassed followers, a group of impressionable teachers who moved in a slow pack wearing makeshift veils fashioned from household materials. ‘We just listen to the radio, eat sandwiches,’ Angela said. ‘Think regretfully about our lives.’

  ‘Great!’ he said. ‘I just want to inform you this is a date.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It is. I have seen you around the supermarket and I always thought I would like to show that woman somewhere nicer than a supermarket – like a museum. We don’t have much time left but would you like to go to a museum?’

  ‘I like the supermarket,’ Angela said. She pictured the hideous fluorescent lighting, the disappointing stock, the scowling staff in their polyester fleeces. ‘I think some of the happiest moments of my life have taken place in that supermarket.’

  ‘You would look good walking around a museum, I think.’

  She ignored the compliment. ‘So,’ she said, eyeing up the rotating desserts, ‘have you been doing anything?’

  ‘I prayed.’ He perked up at the memory of his brief interaction with God. ‘I also lit a candle in a church.’

  ‘Wow,’ Angela said, in genuine awe. ‘I stole a cat. I didn’t necessarily steal it. I just looked at it and it came with me. I don’t consider myself a sexually aggressive person but it’s possible I seduced that cat.’

  The little girl at the next table over vomited chunks of chocolate cake across the tablecloth. She carefully wiped her mouth, as if in preparation for a second round.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the mother announced to the waiters. ‘She’s just nervous, I’m sorry.’

  The waiters nodded in unison but made no move to clean up.

  ‘That’s one of mine,’ Angela said. ‘She’s been doing that a lot lately.’

  ‘She’s in your class?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Say hello.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ she said. ‘They don’t like me so much, the children.’

  ‘I imagine you are a good teacher, Angela.’

  ‘Oh, I do my best,’ Angela said. This was true, maybe once. She had kept a close eye. There were still accidents on her watch, of course. A scratched elbow, a stone that had to be wrenched free. The children would rest their bodies on her lap. They would rise up then, recovered and forgetful. At the end of the day, no matter what she did, they left with whoever came to collect them. Children could be as breezy and carefree as adults.

  ‘Today, I had to write “China: Wiped Out” on the board. Doubly underlined.’ She managed a weak half-smile.

  ‘How did that go?’

  ‘Lots of questions: “Why are we still here, teacher?” “How do you spell that, teacher?” That sort of thing. The afternoon dragged right on.’

  ‘It’s hard to know how to fill the time,’ he agreed.

  At the other table, the little girl was crying, clutching her stomach with one hand and attempting to eat the remains of the cake with the other. Her parents observed her, their hands flat on the table in front of them, skilfully avoiding the vomit.

  The fruit and vegetable man watched the family for a moment before turning back towards Angela. ‘Have you been in contact with anyone?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. My ex-wife, she would just disappear. Even when she was there, she wasn’t there.’

  ‘My ex-husband lives alone. He lives in a block of apartments with other men who live alone.’

  ‘Kids?’

  She made a zero figure with her thumb and wedding-ring finger. ‘Well one actually,’ she admitted, ‘but he died. Do you mind me saying that? Not really died,’ she corrected herself, ‘got away from us early.’

  ‘Did you try again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He wanted to. I was scared.’

  ‘Scared of death? That’s natural.’

  ‘No,’ Angela said, ‘scared of everything else.’

  ‘My ex-wife used to say I wasn’t ambitious,’ the man explained. ‘Afraid to progress from the fruit and veg section, but I explained it was just because I really liked fruit and vegetables and I wasn’t going to fight it any longer.’

  She laughed. ‘Do you know what I find amazing about this world? What I will miss? How you can wander around looking like other people, but not really be like other people at all.’

  ‘In what way are you not like other people?’ The fruit and vegetable man gestured determinedly at the dessert tray.

  ‘The child didn’t like his surroundings, that’s what the doctor told me,’ she said. ‘Like even a foetus couldn’t bear to spend time with me.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I screamed, “Look around, moron, who does like their surroundings? I wouldn’t rush myself to get here either.”’

  One of the waiters, sweating heavily, chose this moment to slop the unappetising carrot cake in front of them. They took a fork each.

  ‘Do you think that’s small? Being a woman who screams in a doctor’s office?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It’s not something I had planned for myself.’

  They both took huge mouthfuls of cake, crumbs spilling indelicately on the table.

  ‘So, what music do you like?’ Angela asked.

  ‘I like the classics. The oldies.’

  Angela threw her arms open and sang loudly.

  ‘That’s one of my all-time favourites. I love that one,’ he said. ‘So tell me how you met your ex-husband?’

  The family stood up and, without discussion, the girl bundled up in her father’s arms, left the restaurant. Their exit brought in a blast of cold air and a quick glimpse of the outside space. The car park, the street lamps, the fluorescent restaurant sign – soon they would be gone. And then the restaurant itself, and whatever followed after that and after that. It would all go.

  A wail silenced the restaurant. A teenage body lay unconscious on the floor. The waiters gathered cautiously around their brother, as if shocked by consequences at a time when there weren’t supposed to be any consequences.

  Angela stared directly at her guest. ‘I had wanted him to stay, you know,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t know how to say that. That one word seemed like a big word. I couldn’t find a way into it. And I was afraid of what might happen if I even tried.’

  He sat up straight, smiled wanly in her direction.

  ‘Don’t look too delighted,’ she said. ‘I took him to the cleaners in the divorce. Got the car and everything.’

  Her guest put down his fork, struggling for the words like a man who has spent a long time without company, living alone in an apartment complex with other men who live alone.

  *

  The car dealership was on the outskirts of town. She expected to find it abandoned, but no – through the windscreen she watched the man behind the counter swinging gloomily on his swing chair. He had the look of someone who might have debated wearing a cowboy hat to hawk his goods, b
ut was persuaded out of it by a sensible person aware of cowboy hats and what they could do to a man’s reputation. The tinkling bell announced the arrival of Angela – a tall woman, a handsome woman, a woman with a cat peeking out from underneath her coat – and the counter-man’s disappointment was plain. He would not be able to tell Angela what he told men: that cars brought a certain type of life, a certain type of woman, a certain type of insane luck. Angela just wanted to sit in a car for one last time, enjoy the new car smell, and not feel fear or disappointment. In the window of the car dealership there was a convertible rotating sleekly in defiance of all the outside decay.

  ‘How much is that?’ she asked.

  The man, his belly swinging bountifully, spread his arms out wide, a move Angela suspected he had been practising in new and used cars during his downtime. It was a clear and direct arm-spread: it said, ‘Angela, you are going to love it. You probably dismissed the sports car experience at some stage, we all have. You probably have thought – that’s not for me. But you’re going to adore it. Every last bitter second.’

  Angela fitted snugly in the leathered front seat and Screechy mewed appreciatively. It was a car that could make a singular impression. Yes, Angela thought, as she exited the car dealership, that’s smooth. On the radio, the announcer said we should be frightened, very frightened, and Angela looked at the sky: a fantastic scene of pinks and reds.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the editors of the publications in which early versions of these stories first appeared – The Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, Winter Papers and the White Review.

  A debt of gratitude is owed to the Arts Council for their continued support. A special thanks to Annaghmakerrig and the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, where two of these stories were written.

  A huge thanks to Alexis Kirschbaum, Liese Mayer and the team at Bloomsbury.

  To Colin Barrett and Tom Morris for their invaluable feedback and encouragement.

  To the Wylie Agency, particularly Tracy Bohan, a kind and smart presence throughout the entire publication process.