The Waitress (3 page)

She woke up edgily, her first conscious thought being that she wanted to be asleep again. Then she remembered that she had a date with Dan and knew all was right with the world. Then she realised she had a dull ache all over her body and the date would probably be a disaster.

It was going to be a long day.

She ripped herself untimely out of bed and was so traumatised that her entire body went into hibernation mode, huddling against itself for warmth. Her teeth were chattering so loudly she could almost make out what they were saying.

Wrapping herself tightly in her ancient towelling robe, she tiptoed down the hall, past Jon’s closed door and into
the
shower. Twenty minutes later, she came out clean, refreshed, as awake as she was going to get, and now late for work. After diving into her work clothes – the nearest things that were clean and comfortable – brushing her hands through her urchin hair and setting off for work, most of her optimism had faded.

The walk into work was usually a pleasant-enough interlude. Katie craved routine and she made a point of taking the same route every day. It grounded her and gave her a sense of context. Unless she was so dramatically late or exhausted that she needed to take the bus, she liked to pop into the grocer’s to pick up something healthy to eat on her way to the newsagent’s where she bought her usual chocolate bar.

Today, however, was a bus day. She kept her eyes down and her head supported. She didn’t read, she didn’t make eye contact, she didn’t smile. She fitted right in.

Porter’s Green was what up-and-coming people called ‘up-and-coming’, and what its oldest inhabitants called ‘shot to pieces’. Its borders touched the borders of an already up-and-come part of north London, which boasted borders abutting an area so up-and-come it had blue plaques splattered on its houses like bird-droppings.

The process of an area ‘coming up’ included a rapid change in local shops, people and events, which spoke to its newest inhabitants of buzz and excitement. And word spread. Eager potential home-owners would first feel disappointment at not being able to afford even a bijou garage near a blue-plaqued property in central London, and then dismay at not being able to afford a good-sized flat on the borders. Finally, they’d find a spacious, family
home
in Porter’s Green and discover that not only were the amenities superior, the shops more practical, the people less pretentious and the atmosphere more cosy, but, even better, within the next few years it was all going to change.

And so an entire set of New-Labour voters moved in next-door to Old-Labour voters and set about transforming their old Victorian houses into up-dated Victorian pads with more mod cons and fewer internal walls. At weekends, they’d drive into the neighbouring up-and-come village to take brunch in the cafés that had yet to arrive in their high street. Meanwhile the oldies, who had woken up one day to find themselves living in an unrecognisable, overpriced village where you couldn’t get a decent cup of tea any more but could get 150 different types of coffee, made the bus journey in the opposite direction to find the bargains they could now no longer find in their own high street.

Katie’s bus dropped her off about twenty yards from the café where she worked. She could see it from here, but usually tried not to. Her workplace, the thirty square yards where she spent up to sixty hours a week, was called, unsurprisingly enough, ‘The Café’. One had to be inside to fully realise the leap of imagination that had created such a name.

She opened the door, her entrance heralded as usual by the tired jangle of what passed for a bell but sounded like a cat being slowly strangled. The same instant, a stifling warmth and sticky smell invaded her nostrils and pores.

Head down, she focused on her shoes as they stuck to the discoloured lino, unsure whether it was the fluorescent
lighting
making her feel sick or just the fact that it was Monday morning.

‘Oh look! It’s Herself!’ came a reedy voice from the darkest corner.

She glanced up at the grimy clock-face above the coffee machine. Damn. Three minutes after seven.

‘Morning Alec.’

‘Only just.’

She looked over to where her boss was sitting and gave him a full beam, taking in his greasy hair and ever-present half-moustache. ‘How was your weekend?’ she asked.

Alec’s right eyebrow twitched. ‘Get your pinny on and help Sukie with the coffees.’

Katie walked past the coffee machine through the staff door into the kitchen. She stuffed her coat under the worktop, took out the pinny she’d washed on her Sunday off and wound the fraying belt several times round her waist. She barely noticed that Matt, the dishwasher, wasn’t here yet and there was already a pile of dirty coffee cups waiting. She walked back into the main part of the café.

The sense that no one in The Café wanted to be here, but through no fault of their own had ended up here, seeped into one’s consciousness via the plastic seats and Formica tables. Usually Monday mornings made Katie want to go straight to the meat knives and commit hara-kiri. Luckily they were blunt.

It was hard to believe that three years ago, she’d popped into The Café on a whim one sunny afternoon. She’d just moved into Jon’s flat nearby, straight after her year of travelling had ended. When she got the job she’d thought she was on the first rung of a ladder she wanted to
stay
on forever, and they’d even celebrated that night with a bottle of wine. One day she’d get a manager’s job in a respectable London restaurant and from there start her journey towards owning her own restaurant franchise. With the waitressing job to pay her rent, she’d have time to go for interviews, money to buy an interview suit and relevant experience to discuss.

At first it had felt heaven-sent. There she’d met Sukie, an out-of-work actress, and they had clicked immediately. Katie’s flair for cooking blossomed and she often came up with inspired and delicious menu ideas that her boss was happy to let her make as well as serve. She liked her employer, a circular Greek woman who called her Sweetie and gave her delicious home-made leftovers that she and Jon would devour. But then her boss’s husband became ill and she sold the café quickly to become his full-time carer. The farewell party was sad yet not without hope. That was because they hadn’t met their new boss yet.

The first thing Alec did as owner was open up The Café two hours earlier each morning to catch the city commuters who set out every morning from the station directly below. Then he cut his staff by half, doubled the price of coffee, shrank the menu and only cooked fresh food twice a week. After that, the next step was easy – make customers spend their money and then leave.

Katie couldn’t remember when she stopped looking in the papers for a new job. Was it after she got scared of going for interviews because she knew she’d be too tired to do herself justice? Or after she realised her interview suit was out of fashion, and she couldn’t afford another one and refused to ask her parents for a handout? Or after she
realised
she’d have to give a convincing answer to why she’d worked at a crappy local café for so long?

Whichever it was, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she had to get out of here.

Back in the café, she joined Sukie who was already attacking the coffee machine with gusto. The first commuter queue had started. The 7.14 into Euston was notoriously unreliable. It either came in late or smack bang on time but at the wrong platform, so that fifty knackered commuters had to race over the bridge to catch it. There was usually no tannoy announcement, so they had to be alert to spot whether it was their train or the 7.24 straight through to Brighton. Their morning coffees were not a luxury, they were a necessary tool in making it into the office instead of to the south coast.

If The Café staff resented making coffee for tired, ungrateful and often surly commuters, the commuters resented buying it, with knobs on. For a start, they would rather be in bed. Then there was the flickering fluorescent light that always pissed them off. And what did they have to look forward to? A crowded, over-or under-heated train where they probably wouldn’t get a seat, followed by a job that didn’t even pay them enough to be able to live near the borders of a place splattered with blue plaques – and that was if they were lucky and didn’t catch the Brighton train.

‘Double espresso, two sugars.’

Sukie took the change from one customer, nodded to let the next one know she’d heard him and whizzed back to the coffee machine. Katie joined her and spoke to commuter number three in the queue.

‘Good morning! How can I help you this fine day.’

‘Black coffee.’

‘Black coffee coming up. It’ll be my absolute pleas—’

‘Excuse me,’ cut in commuter number five, a man whose face seemed to have been pummelled in the night. Number four in the queue had overtaken him on the stairs up to the café and he wanted to knife him. ‘Some of us have got trains to catch.’

‘Right,’ said Katie and she turned to the coffee machine.

‘Will you spit in his coffee or shall I?’ muttered Sukie without breaking from her task.

‘Someone’s already trodden on his face,’ muttered Katie back. ‘Give the guy a break.’

They both whizzed back round, coffees in hands, smiles on lips and continued with the queue until it had finished and the last train from Porter’s Green to the city had left (the 8.54: only two minutes late, right platform, but minus two carriages), its commuters stuffed into each others’ armpits, dreaming of Friday.

The sudden dip in custom on a Monday morning was usually Katie’s lowest point of the week. This was when she had time to face the reality of her working day. Alec would approach them and, summoning up a spirit of excitement and eagerness for the week ahead, would command the same thing every single Monday morning.

‘Right. First day of the week girls, first day of the week. Here we go. Salads out front, chip oil frying in back, make your boss a nice cup of coffee.’

And Sukie and Katie would reply the same thing every single Monday morning.

‘Make it yourself, you lazy bastard,’ from Sukie.

‘You’ve got hands, haven’t you?’ from Katie.

And Alec would make himself a cup of coffee, while expressing his doubts over their parentage with imagination and spirit.

Today, though, Katie did not feel swamped by the usual onslaught of misery and failure. Today, the rudeness of the commuters, the miserable fug of the café and the dismal attempts at leadership from Alec had the opposite effect – all because of what had happened to her late on Friday afternoon.

For she had had an epiphany. She was going to become an educational psychologist.

It all happened during a double-shift that had gone so painfully slowly that she thought she must have actually died and gone to hell. She’d started chatting to a customer. It wasn’t the done thing – it was hard to chat freely with Alec around – but he’d been oppressing someone in the kitchen at the time and the customer had been at table 18, right by the door, so it had felt a fairly safe risk.

The woman had had a quiet Friday at work and had popped in for a quick coffee before getting home to a house full of overtired children and an underpaid nanny. She’d started chatting to Katie about the weather and somehow Katie had found herself telling her that she was considering becoming a teacher. This thought had occurred to her only the week before, after she’d seen a reality TV show about an inner city school where a teacher had got locked in the girls’ toilets and had escaped through a window. It seemed like an adventurous job. It
just
so happened that the woman had been a teacher once, a while ago, before she’d started training to be an educational psychologist. Once you’d been a teacher for two years, all you needed was a masters degree and voilà! An educational psychologist. Much better for pulling at parties, the woman told Katie, and better still, you didn’t have to wait for a bell to go to the toilet.

Katie was reborn. Not only did she already have the requisite psychology degree (from Oxford no less) but she’d always liked children. They liked her too – she had an affinity with them. By the time she had deposited the warmed croissant on a plate and taken it to the woman, Katie’s new future was set; restaurant franchises were a dim and distant memory. This woman was
meant
to come into the café that day, and she, Katie Simmonds, had been
meant
to see that TV programme the week before. It was destiny.

So here she was, starting the first week of the rest of her life. Which was why today, The Café’s usual Monday morning depression didn’t seep into her bones and numb her; instead it reminded her – as if she’d already mentally escaped this place – of what she’d left behind.

‘Table 8 wants serving.’

Katie turned to Alec, who was still sitting by the till, the steam from his coffee cup mingling with the smoke from his hand-rolled cigarette. He nodded briefly over at table 8. He always sat in the near corner by the till because he said it gave him a good view of everything in The Café as well as the window-front. By happy coincidence, it also gave a good view of any passing policemen who might want to check his kitchen for illegal substances and any
passing
traffic wardens who might disagree with him that laziness was a disability.

Katie walked over to where two men were having a morning meeting, both pretending that their self-made careers were going excellently and that they were content to be in a café rather than a pub.

‘Two English breakfasts and two coffees,’ said one man, returning the menu to Katie without looking at her.

‘One decaffeinated,’ added the other, briefly examining her chest.

Katie walked away, muttering, ‘I’m going to be an educational psychologist, I’m going to be an educational psychologist.’

Keith the ‘chef’ had just arrived, a man not driven by demons as much as devoured by them. He had so many phobias it was a wonder he made it from his flat down the street into the café. He was telling Sukie about his weekend. Katie could tell this, because she kept hearing Sukie’s regular murmurs of ‘Oh dear.’