The Same Woman (11 page)

“How do you know my cousin?”

“Nal is friends with my B.F.”

“B.F., that's cute, that's so high school.” Ulli leaned back on his heels so that he could see her past the open fridge doors. “Is that the boy you stole from Frankie?”

Ruby's heart finally dropped into her stomach. She leaned forward to rest her head against a shelf, and then recoiled as the icy steel stung her face, knocking the back of her head on the inside of the fridge.

“Whoops, sorry!” Ulli laughed. “I didn't think that would shock you so much.” Ruby rubbed the back of her head as her eyes watered from the pain.

“Who told you about that?” She tried not to sound angry but she didn't think she was successful.

“Aurelio. He's dating Frankie now you know.”

“How do you know Aurelio?”

“He works here.”

“Oh,” she said. She sucked in her breath and the cold air from the
fridge almost made her choke. “Well, I wouldn't say that I stole ‘her' boyfriend. That's not what happened.”

“Oh really?” Ulli's eyes seemed to literally glow. “That's what Malena in south bar said,” Ulli gestured vaguely towards the other end of the room.

“I thought you said Aurelio told you that.”

“Well, no. Malena said that Aurelio said that Frankie said it.”

“What? Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds? I did not steal her boyfriend, she...” Ruby stopped. She was not ready to dishonour this story as gossip. “This is silly. The whole thing is a lot more complex, and not so one-sided.”

“This is soooo Melrose Place! Thank God you got a job here. It makes things so much more exciting. Everyone is talking about it.”

“What?” Ruby, crouched behind the counter, surveyed her surroundings. The music had not been turned on yet. The club was in that strange and unnatural state where you could actually hear the voices of those around you clearly — even conversations on the other side of the room. Two men were hanging off a ladder that reached up to the DJ booth suspended in the middle of the ceiling.

“You will not believe what she did next.”

“That girl's a waste, yo.” They wouldn't be talking about me so loudly, Ruby told herself, when they know I can hear them. But an earthquake of panic was unleashing itself upon her stomach. Someone at far end of the room was talking about bees, but Ruby kept on hearing her name. Her eardrums were on fire.

“Don't freak out about it,” Ulli said, “it's not personal. People just love a good cat fight.” He leaned closer to her. “Just in case you were wondering, I'm on your side.” He leaned in towards her and cried, “meow!” She jumped at the tickly feel of his voice in her ear.

“Whoa,” he said, putting a steadying arm on her. She pushed it off.

“I don't want you to take sides,” Ruby said, though she already had. Ulli finished the count and stood up and closed the fridge. He seemed immune to her rudeness.

“Okay okay, don't worry, I won't bring it up again. We'll be best work buds. We have to be, at least for the duration of this shift. But I can't make any promises if next week I work with Frankie.”

Ruby's eyes widened.

“I'm just kidding, kidding!” Ulli started polishing the high priced bottles on the wall behind them, whistling as he went. She began to take the wine glasses down from the rack where they hung by their feet. She watched him in the mirrored surfaces of the bar as she wiped away the leftovers of fingerprints and lipstick marks with a coffee filter: a trade secret. She felt very alone.

“Oh boy!” hissed Ulli. “It's game time!” Frankie and Aurelio were crossing the floor together, this time in matching tiny ties. To get to their door, they had to come all the way around Ruby and Ulli.

In action movies, when the duelling protagonists are in the same room together, things are often slowed down. There are echoes of echoes as shots are fired, bullets leave barrels achingly slowly, and travel at turtle speed towards soft, permeable organs. But in this room time didn't slow down. The DJs continued to punctuate their conversations with expletives as they dragged heavy equipment up the ladder to the impractically placed booth, Malena continued to rattle the change in her till, Ulli continued to lustfully watch the scandal that unfolded not slowly, but too fast. The blood was rushing into Ruby's face. She wanted a pause button, a way to stop and sit and try and make sense of what she was doing. Her mouth was filling with the juices that come as a precursor to vomit. She had heard people say that they were so panicked they threw up, but she always thought it a figure of speech, not a real physiological possibility.

But Ruby did not throw up in the sink. She crossed her arms and planted her feet, like she could make her body a symbol for her remorselessness. She smiled. They passed her, walking at a leisurely pace. They would not quicken their steps for her. Frankie stared straight ahead. She did not reveal any shock or confusion at seeing Ruby in her safe space. Aurelio held the curtain as Frankie balanced the till on her hip and used her thumb to enter the code. Frankie's long hair gushed out of a high ponytail. Ruby stared openly at the purple bra strap on Frankie's shoulder, she could not stop herself wondering if Tariq had ever seen the whole of that bra. Ruby was no longer hiding behind windows and fences. She was ready for any look that might kill.

“Hey guys,” Ulli said.

“Hi Ulli,” Aurelio said, and to her surprise, he nodded at Ruby. Frankie did not look up. She twisted the doorknob and went inside and Ruby listened to their footsteps moving behind the wall.

“Phew,” Ulli said. “Well, that was tense.” He grinned and elbowed her right in the lung.

Taxis were starting to pull up outside. It was raining, a miserable summer rain, the kind that peevishly sloshes street dirt into your sandals and in between your toes. Across the road a man and a little girl were dragged through the muck by an excited dog on a leash. Everything was bizarrely normal.

“Let's hustle,” Ulli said. “The better set up we have, the better we can beat Main Bar's ass.” Aurelio poked his head around the corner and Ruby's stomach gave another sickening wrench.

“I heard that Ulli!” He called.

“Can they hear everything we say?” Ruby hissed at Ulli.

“Not when the music starts. Don't worry honey, this shift will be the best. I promise.”

The sound system burst in just as the first patrons started to dribble through the glass doors, down the long tunnel of curtains, and into the club. “
Love is not enough, never enough, lalalala...
” a woman with a European accent began to sing over pulsing dance beats.

“Now you can scream as loud as you want about that W-H-O-R-E and no one will know,” Ulli yelled into her ear.

“Don't call her a W-H-O-R-E!” Ruby said back.

“What?”

“Nevermind,” Ruby said, not able to bring herself to say it twice. She couldn't do it. It was too confusing to spend the night trying to convince Ulli that Frankie wasn't a whore, while trying to convince herself of the opposite at the same time.

People splashed out of cars and onto the street, making faces as muddy water dirtied expensive shoes, laughing and running together under suit jackets held up as umbrellas. Ulli brought in buckets of ice and Ruby crushed it into glasses, watching as the alcohol carved crannies in each cube, calmed by the routine of work she knew well.

“
If
you love a little more, the world would be less of
a chore,
” the sound system carried on with its strange messages. A small crowd had gathered around the dance floor, watching each other casually and
waiting for the first body to break free and get down.

Ulli was friends with everyone. He stretched his long body across the counter to receive shiny-mouthed kisses and muscular handshakes. Ruby tried to smile as effectively as Ulli but her attempts were not as warmly welcomed. She was new and patrons were still rating her. She pushed herself to smile brighter, to wink, to giggle. This emotional forgery absorbed her attention — she started to feel better in the fakest of ways. “
Maybe those bitches hate me the most, but it's only ‘cause I got the best flavour on the coast!
”

The main bar and the eastern bar faced away from each other, but as Ruby propped her chest on the counter and waited for the crush to really start, she saw reflections of movement in the glass behind their heads. She had a perfect side view of the main bar lit up with fairy lights and candles against the backdrop of the dark, rain-spattered street. They could watch each other all night, without much effort.

The dancing had started. It was dead and then it was crammed in the blink of an eye. Ulli and Ruby stumbled around oversized jars of carcinogenic red cherries. Ulli had taken them out of the fridge so he could clean its sticky floor while they waited for patrons to arrive, but now there was no time to replace them. They tripped gracelessly over these bottles, pudgy evidence of the speed of the patrons' descent. The cold of the ice box made Ruby's finger bones feel as if they were rising to the surface of her hands, threatening to bust out of her skin.

“So tell me Ulli,” she said as she made a martini, “when two men have a problem because they both like the same lady, what do they do? Do they cat fight, or is it only women who are naturally bitchy?” Ruby talked in a vocabulary that wasn't her own, infected by the sassy and unreal mannerisms of bar staff.

Ulli was using the zester to make long yellow ribbons of lemon peel to garnish the drinks. He cranked them out at high speed. “I don't know, when men have a problem they just punch it out.”

“That's not true,” Ruby said. “If that was true you'd be having constant brawls.”

“Maybe. But girls are backhanded about it, always cooking up schemes, taking sides and turning people against each other.”

“I don't think all women are like that.” Ruby persisted in saying “women”, Ulli insisted upon “girls”.

“You're one to talk,” Ulli joked. In clubs people have no real feelings, and it is easier to say cutting things. But Ruby was stunned. Once she had been young, open-hearted and good-natured. Now she was one of those cocky, congealed girls that she had never believed she could become. Her forgery stopped short.

“I don't know,” Ulli said, “I guess girls would duke it out if they could, but it's just not ladylike. It's so much more genteel to claw someone's eyes out — figuratively speaking.”

Ulli's words made sudden, crystal, sense. Ruby clung to this nugget of logic.

“That's amazing! You're so enlightened!”

“How's that?”

“You just said that the reason why women fight in covert ways is because it's not okay for them to just talk it out.”

“I don't know if I said that...”

“But you did! Women are encouraged to be catty, they have no other option but to be catty. But then when they are catty, people call them bitches and hos as if it's their fault, AND then still encourage this bitchy-ho-ness by egging them on when they mess each other up!”

“Well, your argument adds up but I still don't know if it makes sense...” Ulli trailed off and began gaping at something over Ruby's shoulder.

“What?” Ruby laughed at his funny face and spun around. She was eye-to-eye with Frankie. She stopped breathing.

But Frankie's lips did not blaze with foul insults. There was no, “Bitch, I'll Kill You”. She didn't lunge for Ruby's hair. Instead, there was something in her face that the million pep talks Ruby had given herself could never have prepared her for: Frankie's eyes were unbearably sad.

“Can I borrow your zester?” she said. It was the first time Ruby had heard her voice. Ulli fumbled and dropped the zester in the sink. He recovered quickly and passed it to Frankie. She looked like she might say something.

An angry woman came marching up to the east bar.

“You put a lemon in my gin and tonic!” She was livid. “I specifically asked for a lime!” Ruby was speechless at the stupidity of
this complaint. She stuttered. The woman looked like she was going to throw the drink in Ulli's face. Quickly Ruby began making a limed gin and tonic. Frankie was gone.

People kept coming with an endless stream of inane demands. Ruby treasonously abandoned her post. She somehow found the hidden door and groped her way across the creepy passageway and into the staff toilet. It was one dingy room lit with a naked bulb. The mirror was dotted with rust like age spots and the air stank of various kinds of excretions. She was still clutching a bottle of gin. Over the mirror in red writing there was a sign that said, “This is what the customer sees. You better LOOK YOUR BEST.” Ruby lifted the bottle and took a swig.

The night passed, somehow. Ruby watched Frankie in the mirroring windows, but the way she passed a glass across her counter, the way she shut the fridge door with her hip, the way she sorted the beer bottles told Ruby nothing about who she really was. The rain got worse and Dan paced around the room putting a damper on the party spirit.

“This fucking weather is bringing the numbers down. Fuck!” He hit Ruby and Ulli's counter with his fist. “This was supposed to be a good night!” He stalked off.

“That's the cocaine talking, if you were wondering,” Ulli said dryly.

After last call, drunken dancers, their buzz fading fast, stood in limp bunches, trying to figure out how to find a cab in the storm. “
My heart beats like the last rain drop of
the storm
” the speakers droned on as staff closed up the bar, counting out the tedious bottles again to make sure their totals were on. The music died just as Malena began to yell at her bar back. Her shrill curses replaced the beat and the bouncers started to push patrons out.

“Sorry, it's the law, you have to be out by 3 a.m.,” a bouncer announced to a man begging for mercy.