The Waitress (46 page)

This, however, was the stuff of nightmares. This was probably the first time he had ever been truly scared.

‘Do I look OK?’ asked Eva.

‘God yes,’ whispered Matt. She looked amazing. She was wearing a sophisticated two-piece summer suit with strappy kitten mules, her hair pulled back, her lips
enhanced
by deep red lipstick. He was standing next to a schoolboy fantasy. He squeezed Eva’s hand as they heard his mum come to the front door. He didn’t know who he was squeezing it for, her, him or his mother. He decided it was all of them and squeezed again.

The door opened and he stared in disbelief at his mother. He blinked. She grinned at them both. He blinked again. What the hell was her problem? Would Eva make a run for it or chuck him during lunch?

‘Hi!’ she greeted them. She put her hand out to Eva and gave her a big smile. ‘You must be Eva. Welcome.’

Eva handed her the flowers. ‘These are for you.’

‘Freesias! My favourite.’ She took a big sniff and allowed them in. Matt gave her a look. What was it with her? Did she want to ruin his life? As they followed her down the corridor into the kitchen, he mouthed the word ‘Sorry’ to Eva. She frowned and then gave him a big grin. She was pretending not to even notice. What a star. He watched his mother flick on the kettle and get the mugs out.

Her hair was in its usual ponytail, her jeans were the latest look and her bright pink T-shirt had glitter on it and little stars. It said ‘Motherfucker’.

‘Right,’ grinned Motherfucker. ‘Who’d like a cup of tea?’

Eva started giggling. She’d spotted the joke. ‘I
love
your T-shirt!’

‘Oh do you?’ grinned Matt’s mum, joining in. ‘I’m so relieved. I thought it might break the ice a bit. Got it at the market. £2.50. Rude not to really.’

Eva laughed loudly. ‘It’s brilliant!’

‘Excellent!’ Matt’s mum held up the flowers. ‘Do you know how to “do” flowers?’ she asked. ‘You could do them while I make the tea.’

‘Oh yes,’ Eva rushed forwards.

Sandra watched her trim the flowers and display them in the vase. Eva looked at her and stopped.

‘Is this right?’ she asked.

Matt’s mum nodded. ‘Are you sure you’re not over-qualified to be going out with my son?’ she asked seriously.

Matt grinned as Eva burst into laughter. He decided now was the perfect time to leave and went to sit in the front room. Once on his own, he allowed himself a hearty chuckle. His mum was meeting his girlfriend. That’s right. His mum was meeting his
girlfriend
. His girlfriend was
twenty-one years old
. His
girlfriend
was twenty-one years old. He was not a virgin. He looked out through the faded net-curtains of the little bay window and listened to the hooting of laughter coming from the kitchen. He was a man. He could hardly wait to go to school tomorrow and tell his mates.

Meanwhile, a few roads away, Hugh sat in the front room of his knocked through lounge-diner staring through the newly updated sash window with its Heal’s gauze curtains. He was surrounded by silence. He’d called in sick today and he really didn’t think he was lying. He knew he just wouldn’t have been able to go in another day and pretend everything was all right; joking with the lads, smiling at the bosses and concentrating in meetings. He just couldn’t do it any more. He felt like he was having a slow-motion panic attack. His body was in fright or flight mode all the
time
. It had started yesterday, after he’d got into work, and it had been there all day. There was some secret silent madness going on in his head too that no one else could hear. He thought it would be all right when he got home, but it got even worse when he was on his own. It stayed there all night. He couldn’t relax, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t even watch TV. He couldn’t do anything.

He hadn’t slept a wink. He’d put on the World Service till Radio Four had kicked back in, but he hadn’t heard a single word. Perhaps he should pop into the café today and see Katie; it would be good to see someone he knew, someone he could really talk to. Someone he’d once loved. Do him good. He covered his mouth, alarmed by the sound escaping from it.

28

By the time she got to work on Thursday morning, Katie was beginning to feel a tad tetchy. Partly with Dan for not returning any of her calls, but mostly with herself for making such an enormous wazzock of herself. How many times had she called him in the end? For goodness sake, she was supposed to be his manager! How could he possibly respect her when she couldn’t even leave a basic answerphone message? Truth was she knew she could hardly blame him for not calling her back – he’d probably pulled a ligament laughing so hard at her messages – but blame him she did. She’d stayed in all evening, tense with anticipation at the thought of sharing a phone call with him. She hadn’t been able to go to bed until midnight, assuring herself that he might have been at some important late-night meeting and might yet phone. Then she hadn’t been able to sleep till three. Needless to say she was exhausted this morning. And with tomorrow being the big party she really didn’t need this. Then when she got in, she discovered that he wasn’t in work again, but this time no phone call to explain. What was going on? Was he going to leave them all?

Meanwhile, things were not going quite as smoothly with her own plans of leaving. The purchase of Ye Olde Tea Shoppe wasn’t quite going according to plan. It turned out that although Mr Blatchett was very keen to sell the café to someone his mother knew, who knew the area and who had management experience, and although he was a lovely man who was not interested in making a fast buck out of a business his mother had nurtured like a child, he was also very, very keen to get that £10,000. Katie had managed to go up £1,500, thanks to a promised loan from her parents, but he was not budging. He hadn’t even come down £500 to pretend to meet somewhere near the middle. It looked like he was not playing. This was the price, take it or leave it.

Katie realised that she had to consider the real possibility of losing the tea shop, and she felt utterly despondent at the thought. How could she not get what she wanted, if she wanted it this much? She realised in an instant why she had put off this moment for so long. Pure self-preservation. Now that she’d finally realised what she wanted to do, she didn’t want to wait any more, not even a day. Life was too short. Today was the first day of the rest of her life and she wanted to buy Mrs Blatchett’s café.

And typically, for the first time in her life, everything else was on hold too. Dan wasn’t in again so she couldn’t tell him her monumental news. She couldn’t even talk about it to Sukie and make it real that way. She so wanted to tell her about the change in her, and how it had all started with Sukie’s bluntness; confess that Sukie had probably changed her life. If not that, just connect with
her
again; share a joke, a moan, a sarky comment. She’d settle for just some eye contact, but Sukie was refusing to look at her and she was feeling more and more alone as the morning progressed. She’d tried talking to Patsy, but that had made her feel even more alone.

Patsy was nowhere to be found when the commuter queue started, so Katie and Sukie had to work it together.

‘One cappuccino with two sugars to go, one almond croissant and a Mars Bar, please,’ said the first extremely early commuter.

‘Diet going well then?’ Katie asked, putting the croissant in a bag as Sukie made the coffee. Surely Sukie would respond to that, she thought.

‘Oh
no
,’ laughed the commuter. ‘I gave up on that years ago.’

‘Really?’ gasped Katie.

‘
Yes
!’ The commuter held up her Mars Bar. ‘Look!’

Sukie handed the commuter her coffee, unsmiling. ‘That’s £3.50 and she’s taking the piss.’

The commuter handed the money over, smiled uncertainly and thanked them both.

Katie stared in disbelief at Sukie. That was beyond the pale. Some things were sacred, and the Them and Us attitude was one of them. She’d had enough. She did not deserve this. As far as she was concerned the woolly mittens were off.

‘Oh I’m
so
sorry,’ she said. ‘Was I stealing your role of arsy bitch?’

‘No,’ Sukie replied evenly, giving her a deadened look. ‘I just think that not everyone is blessed with your metabolism.’ She started wiping the counter.

‘Not everyone’s blessed with your hair,’ Katie replied just as evenly, ‘so does that mean you’ll stop calling that eleven o’clock Americano Worzel?’

‘That’s different.’

‘Yeah right,’ muttered Katie. ‘Because that’s you and not me.’

‘No,’ said Sukie, ‘because I don’t do it to his face. Your woman can’t help the fact that a Mars Bar helps her through her boring day at the office. At least she got off her arse and got a job. You’ve got to respect that.’

‘What the hell am
I
doing? Finger painting?’

‘Morning ladies!’ cried out the first of the 7.14. ‘And isn’t it a beautiful one?’

‘No!’ they shouted.

She looked at them. ‘OK,’ she said slowly. ‘My mistake. I’ll have a double espresso and two slices of toast please.’ As Sukie went to the toaster, she called after her, ‘Please could my espresso be blacker than my toast this morning, there’s a dear.’

Sukie ignored this and Katie smiled at the commuter. ‘Sorry,’ she told her loudly, starting to make the coffee, ‘but you see, Sukie’s the unluckiest person in the world. Count
your
self lucky you only got burnt toast.’

‘Oh,’ murmured the commuter.

‘Do you know,’ continued Katie, ‘some people believe they’re unlucky because they’ve got a terminal illness or have been debilitated in an accident.’ She laughed. ‘Did you know some people in this world are blind! Or deaf! But,’ she leaned forward, ‘not one of them is as unlucky as our Sukie.’

‘Why?’ Three commuters were now agog.

‘Because,’ she concluded, ‘Sukie Woodrow is not famous yet.’ She heard Sukie suck in air behind her. ‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘she did go and pick the hardest career in the world because she wanted lots of people to watch her and think she was wonderful. And then for ages she refused to listen to her agent’s advice, because she thought she knew better than her agent who had years of experience
and
would actually benefit from her doing well, so had her best interest at heart. But that’s what happens when you’re unlucky and everyone else is lucky.’ The commuters all stared over at Sukie, whose face had gone a funny colour.

‘You bitch,’ whispered Sukie.

‘Shame really,’ continued Katie, turning back to the commuters. ‘She had such good friends that they came to see every play she was ever in – not just once in the run, but every night of every single run – and they spent hours of their lives listening to the unluckiest person in the world moan on and on and on about how crap it was when someone else got the part instead of her, just because they were better looking than her or taller than her or shorter than her or more blonde than her or less blonde than her or a better actress than her. But I suppose some people are just cursed with bad luck.’

‘Have you two had a row?’ asked a commuter.

‘That’s £2.75 please.’

As the commuters left, Sukie ran into the kitchen, probably to get a knife. Katie let out a deep breath and leaned against the counter. She had to face facts. There would be no best-friend making-up scene. Sukie really did hate her. And where on earth had she had found all that
vitriol
from? She’d always thought she loved Sukie. In wondering, she remembered sitting through the worst open-air
Midsummer Night’s Dream
in the world, during which 200 teenage boys had sniggered and hooted every time someone said ‘Titania’ and after the interval it had hailed. She’d been wearing a summer dress and had caught a cold which then turned into flu. Now she came to think about it, that evening alone had earned her absolute loyalty from Sukie and Sukie had more than reneged on the deal.

She jumped as the kitchen door slammed shut again and Sukie was standing behind her, panda-eyed.

‘Oh my God!’

‘I know! I’m sorry,’ rushed Katie. ‘I don’t know what –’

‘Nik and Patsy are at it on the cooker!’ screamed Sukie.

Katie felt her eyes and mouth open wider than they’d ever opened before. It hurt. Then, to Katie’s amazement, Sukie started laughing. She tried to say four times that Nik’s Homer Simpson underpants were round his ankles, but in the end she just had to push the kitchen door open and pull Katie by the hand. If Katie thought her eyes and mouth couldn’t open any wider, she was proved wrong. She did an Edvard Munch silent scream and then, before risking making any noise, ran back into the café and almost burst. Sukie clamped her hands over Katie’s mouth and pulled her to the café door and then on to the street where they finally allowed themselves to laugh out loud. Pedestrians stared as Sukie laughed so much she almost started to retch. Katie feared she might need stitches afterwards.

Ten full minutes later, sitting on the café floor behind
the
counter, exhausted, they both looked at each other at the same time.

‘Ooh that felt good,’ said Sukie.

‘Not as good as for Patsy and Nik obviously,’ said Katie.

‘Obviously.’

They smiled at the image again.

‘By the way,’ said Sukie quietly. ‘Thanks for coming to all those plays.’

Katie smiled. ‘’Salright,’ she said.

When Sukie put the café phone down, she called out to the others. ‘Dan’s not coming in again today.’

Patsy and Katie gathered round. Even Nik came out of the kitchen for this.

‘Why?’ asked Nik.

‘Who?’ asked Patsy.

‘How did he sound?’ asked Katie.

‘Not good,’ said Sukie. ‘Like he had a really bad cold. Or he’d been crying.’

They all looked at each other.

‘What the hell has happened?’ asked Katie.

‘Maybe he’s having woman problems,’ said Nik. ‘Poor bastard.’

Sukie shook her head. ‘Surely you wouldn’t miss work just because of that.’

‘Well,’ said Patsy. ‘Maybe she’s broken off the engagement. Maybe he’s broken hearted.’