Autumn: The Human Condition (10 page)

No-one's coming. Christ, no-one's coming.

Twenty minutes later and still no-one else had arrived at the school. Juliet had been counting on someone else finding Sam's body on the steps. She'd planned to act dumb and pretend she hadn't known he was there.

Someone else should have been here by now. Where were the other children?

Marie and Dorian, two of the other nursery helpers (who travelled to work together), should have arrived at least five minutes ago. So where were they? Were they outside? Had they found the body and had she just not heard them? Unlikely. She crept towards the window and peered outside again. She could still see Sam's foot. He was still there.

As the minutes ticked by her conscience finally got the better of her fear. She had to do something. She couldn't just sit there knowing that the poor boy was out there on the steps.

The main school office was directly across the playground from the nursery hut. Juliet decided she'd have to make a run for it. She'd open the door, run down the steps and then find the headteacher or the deputy head and tell them what had happened, despite the fact that she didn't know what the hell was going on herself.

She had to do it now.

Juliet put on her coat and, taking a deep breath, opened the classroom door and burst out into the open. Forcing herself to look anywhere but down at the body on the steps she half-jumped, half-tripped over the boy's corpse, landing awkwardly, twisting her foot and almost falling over. Managing to keep her balance she ran across the playground with the sounds of her footsteps, her heavy, frightened breathing and the thumping of her heart ringing in her ears.

The headmaster of the school was dead. She found him in the corner of his office, buried under a pile of papers that he seemed to have knocked off his desk when he'd fallen to the ground. She found the school secretary dead in the short corridor which ran between the office and the staff room, and in the staff room she found three dead teachers.

In a vacant, disorientated daze Juliet roamed round the silent school and then the surrounding streets looking for someone to explain to her what had happened.

Quarter past five.

After what had happened at the school Juliet returned home before midday and had found both of her elderly parents dead. Mum was in the bathroom, sprawled across the floor with her knickers round her ankles, and Dad was (as always) in his armchair, staring up at the ceiling. Dribbles of blood had run down his chin and trickled down the front of his shirt. She'd wept for them both of course (especially Mum), and had felt a real sense of devastation and loss. But after a while the hurting feeling had, unexpectedly, started to fade. In the strangest, perverse kind of way, she began to enjoy the freedom that the dark day had unexpectedly given her. She'd never had the house to herself like this. She hadn't had to eat at any particular time (not that she felt like eating anything anyway) and she hadn't had to sit through Dad's choice of television programmes (not that the television had been working). She hadn't had to explain her movements every time she got up out of her chair. For the first time in a very long time she felt free.

Juliet's small, quiet and fairly insignificant world had been turned upside down. She'd seen hundreds upon hundreds of bodies littering the streets and hadn't known the reason why any one of them had died. She'd tried to make contact with her few friends, her neighbours, the local police and pretty much everyone else she knew in the local vicinity but she hadn't been able to reach anyone. Her telephone didn't work. There were no answers when she knocked on the front doors of the houses of friends and family. Frightened and bewildered, but also feeling strangely empowered and stronger than she had done for a long, long time, she sat alone in her bedroom and waited for something to happen or someone to come and help, not that anyone knew she was there. At the end of the first day she moved Mum and Dad into the back room. When she woke up on the second day she dug two deep holes in the garden and buried them both. Dad had always wanted them to be buried together. She knew that Mum would have preferred them to be close but slightly apart. She'd still loved Dad but, like Juliet, she'd had enough of him too. KAREN CHASE

`What the hell do you call that?'

I looked at him for a second. Trick question? What did he expect me to say?

`I call it your order,' I answered. `Full English breakfast. Bacon, sausage, scrambled egg, mushrooms, hash browns and baked beans.'

`Doesn't look like the picture in the menu.'

He opened the menu up, laid it out on the table in front of him and jabbed his finger angrily at the photograph at the bottom of the breakfast section.

`I know, but that's only a representation...' I tried to explain.

`But nothing,' he interrupted. `I appreciate that there will inevitably be differences between a photograph and the actual meal, but what you've brought to me here bears very little resemblance to the food I ordered. The bacon's undercooked. The mushrooms are overcooked. The scrambled egg is lumpy. Do I need to go on?'

`So do you want me to...' I began.

`That was what I ordered,' he sighed, tapping the photograph with his finger again, `and that is what I expect to be served. Now you be a good girl and run along back to your kitchen and try again.'

A genuine complaint I can deal with, but I have a real problem when people try and patronise me. I was so angry that I couldn't move. It was one of those second-long moments which seemed to drag on forever. Did I try and argue with this pathetic little man, did I tell him what he could do with his bloody breakfast, or did I just swallow my pride, pick up the plate again and take it back to the kitchen? Much as I wanted to go for either one of the first two options, commonsense and nerves got the better of me. I picked up the plate and stormed back to the kitchen.

`Bloody man,' I snapped as I pushed through the swinging door. In the kitchen Jamie and Keith, the two chefs on duty, stopped playing football with the remains of a lettuce and stood and looked at me.

`Who's rattled your cage?' Jamie asked.

`Fucking idiot outside. Wants his breakfast to look exactly the same as the picture in the menu.'

`Tell him to fuck off and get a life,' Keith sighed as he kicked the lettuce out through the back door.

I stood and stared at the pair of them, waiting for either one of them to move. `What do you expect me to do about it?' mumbled Jamie.

`Make another bloody breakfast,' I answered, `you're the cook, aren't you?'

Christ, these two were stupid. Jamie was still looking at me with his mouth hanging open as if I'd just asked him to prepare forty meals in ten minutes. All I was asking him to do was his job. It was what he was being paid for, for God's sake. If he'd done it right first time he wouldn't have to do it again now.

`Fucking hell,' he complained as he snatched the plate from me. He studied the faded photograph on a copy of the menu stuck to the wall and took a clean plate from the cupboard. Then he took the food from the original plate, rearranged it on the clean one, warmed it up in the microwave and then slid it across the work surface towards me.

`You expect me to take this out to him?' I said, not quite believing what I was seeing.

`Yes,' he grunted. `Looks more like it does on the menu now, doesn't it?'

Keith started to snigger from behind the newspaper he had picked up.

Knowing that there was no point in arguing with either of the chimps I was working with I picked up the plate and turned back round. I stood behind the doors for a couple of seconds to compose myself and looked out through the small porthole windows into the restaurant. I could see my nightmare customer sitting at his table, looking at his watch and tapping his fingers on the table impatiently, and I knew that whatever I did he was going to give me a hard time when I went back out to him. If I went back too quickly he'd accuse me of not having had time to prepare his food properly. If I kept him waiting too long he'd be just as incensed... I decided to wait for a few seconds longer.

Customers were the worst part of my job, and today I had been landed with the very worst type of customer. We got all sorts of passing trade at the restaurant, and there tended to be a couple of customers like this one coming in each week. They were usually travelling sales reps who were stopping in the motel just up the bypass. As a rule they were all badly dressed, loud, rude and ignorant. Maybe that was why they did the job they did and spent their time travelling around the country? Perhaps their wives (if anyone had been foolish enough to marry them) had kicked them out? Perhaps that was why they all came in here with an attitude like they had something to prove. Bastards the lot of them. It wasn't my fault they were so bitter and insecure, was it?

I pushed myself back out through the door and stood cringing next to the customer's table.

`That's better,' he said to my surprise as I put the plate of food down in front of him. Thank God for that, I thought as I quickly began to walk away.

`You're welcome, you wanker,' I muttered under my breath.

`Just a minute, girl,' the customer shouted as I reached the kitchen door. The three other customers in the restaurant looked up and watched me walk back to the table.

`Yes, Sir?' I answered through gritted teeth, doing my damnedest to remain calm and polite and not empty his pot of tea into his lap.

`This is cold,' he complained. He skewered a sausage on his fork, sniffed it and then dropped it back onto his plate in disgust, sending little balls of dried-up scrambled egg shooting across the table.

`Is it really?' I asked with obvious sarcasm and mock concern in my voice. `Yes, it is,' he snapped. `Now you listen to me, missy, you scuttle back over to your little kitchen right now and fetch me a fresh breakfast. And while you're there, send the manager out to see me. This really isn't good enough.'

There may well have been some justification to his complaint, but the tone of his voice and the way he spoke to me was completely out of order. I wasn't paid enough to be patronised and belittled. It wasn't my fault I had bills to pay and no other way of getting the money to pay them. It wasn't my fault that...

`Are you going to stand there looking stupid all day,' he sneered, `or are you going to go somewhere else and look stupid instead?'

That was it. The customer is always right, they say, but there are limits. Here at the Monkton View Eater, it seemed, the customer was always an asshole.

`Look, I'm sorry if the food isn't up to the standard you were expecting,' I began, somehow managing to still sound calm, even if I didn't feel it, `I'll get that sorted out. But there is no need to be rude to me. I'll go and get you...'

`Listen,' he said, the slow and tired tone of his voice indicating that it was a real effort for him to have to lower himself to speak to me, `I'm really not interested in anything more you have to say. Be a good girl and fetch me my food. You are a waitress. You are here to serve me. And if I want to be rude to you then I'll be as rude as I fucking well please. You're paid to take it.'

`No you listen,' I began to pointlessly protest, `I'm not...'

`Get the manager,' he interrupted with a tone of infuriating superiority. `I don't need to speak to you any longer.'

Another one of those moments which seemed to last forever. I was suddenly so full of anger and contempt that, once again, I was too wound up to move. Compounding my awkwardness was the fact that the other customers had all now stopped eating and were watching and waiting to see what I'd do next. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that the Neanderthals in the kitchen were peering out through the portholes at me too, grinning like the idiots I knew they were.

`Well?' the customer sighed.

I turned and walked, pushing my way through the swinging doors to the kitchen, sending Jamie flying.

`Where's Trevor?'

`Fag break,' Keith replied.

I stormed out through the back door to where Trevor, our so-called manager, was standing smoking a cigarette. He was leaning up the rubbish bins, reading Keith's newspaper.

`Trevor,' I began.

`What?' he grunted, annoyed that I'd interrupted him.

`I've got a problem with a customer. He says he wants to speak to the manager.'

`Tell him you're the manager.'

`Why should I?' He shrugged his shoulders.

`Tell him I've gone out to a meeting.'

`No.'

`Tell him I've got Health and Safety coming.'

`No.'

`For Christ's sake,' he groaned, finally lifting his head from the paper, `just deal with it will you. What the hell do I pay you for? Dealing with customers is your responsibility.'

`Looking after your staff is yours.'

`Oh give it a rest...'

`He swore at me! I'm not prepared to speak to a customer who's going to swear at me. Do you know how bloody insulting he was when...?'

`Now you're swearing at me. You can't have it both ways, love!'

That was it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I ripped off the bloody stupid pinafore that they made me wear and threw it at Trevor, along with my order pad.