Virtue (7 page)

Fifty yards away, the rest of the Pigg family, wrapped firmly in overcoats against the gunmetal sky, sets out the day’s festive luncheon. Irene Pigg, hair protected by a clear plastic pac-a-mac headscarf printed with gaily waving umbrellas, finds hard-boiled eggs, salt, pepper, bread and, from the bottom of the picnic basket, a nice tin of Fray Bentos.

‘Ooh.’ Her sister-in-law, Ivy, desists, for a moment, from the demanding task of adding condensed milk to four cups of tea poured from a large Thermos flask that Stanley Pigg has carted like the Crown jewels across the shingle. ‘Corned beef! We
are
in for a treat!’

Irene starts to hack at the tin with the rust-stained can opener she has kept in her handbag ever since the time when she found herself spending twelve hours in a bomb shelter with only a keyless tin of sardines for sustenance. ‘Well,’ she replies, ‘I always say, there’s no point in being married to a butcher if you can’t occasionally benefit from the stock.’

Geraldine, high upon her perch, realises that her audience is not with her. ‘LOOOOK!’ she howls into the wind, lifts one foot from the top of the old railway sleepers and holds it out to the side at hip level.

Stanley Pigg leans forward in his deckchair. He has tucked an old scarf round his neck to keep out errant breezes, so that his face is only visible between moustache and the tweed cap that matches his scarf. ‘I’ll have that cup of tea now, if it’s not too much trouble,’ he says with the untroubled authority of one who can lay his hands on corned beef whenever the need should arise.

Ivy passes Stanley his own special Bakelite mug, the red one he has had since his own childhood, stained a rich brown on the inside with the residue of a thousand consoling cuppas. Behind him, his daughter waves and wobbles, her eyes never straying from her potential audience.

‘Do you think,’ asks Ivy, ‘that we ought just to look at your Geraldine and get it over with?’

‘Leave her,’ replies Irene, never looking up from the loaf as she slices and butters, using the basket lid as a board. ‘It’ll only encourage her.’

Ivy thinks for a while, cracks open the shell on an egg and begins to unpeel it. ‘So why,’ she eventually says, ‘if you don’t want her attracting attention, did you let her come to the seaside in her ballet costume?’

Irene sighs. ‘You have no idea’ – the corned beef is sliced up thin and laid across the bread. She produces a pair of tomatoes from a paper bag, pares them as TV chefs will do fifty years later with garlic and razor blades, and lays them over the beef – ‘how hard it is to get Geraldine out of her ballet costume. It’s as though she had been welded into it. It was either let her wear it, or die fighting. We’d never have got here otherwise.’

In the background, Geraldine, finding that the parallel-leg thing just isn’t doing it, leans forward and points her toe out behind her. She is, it has to be said, remarkably sure on her feet for one so young in such a high wind. Even the gust that blows violently up the crotch of her tutu is insufficient to produce a diversion. ‘Look!’ she shrieks, but the grownups sit obdurately with their backs to her.

Geraldine puts the foot back onto solid sleeper, thumps her fists into her sides. Geraldine doesn’t like her parents much. They’re not the people, with their sensible clothes, their sensible picnics, their careful budgeting, that she would have chosen had she been given the choice. But since the weather has driven all the less hardy holidaymakers off the beach and in behind the steam-covered windows of the Cozee Nook teahouse, they’re the only audience she has. She reaches up, tucks her hair behind her ears and pouts.

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ says Ivy, ‘if she’s really your daughter at all.’

‘Steady on,’ says Stanley, who’s the wag of the family, ‘what are you implying about my good lady wife?’

Ivy laughs and elbows him in the knee, which is the only part she can reach from her perch on the tartan rug. ‘Now, don’t go on, Stanley. You know what I mean. Some sort of mix-up in the hospital or something. I mean, she hardly takes after any of us, does she? When was the last time there was a blonde in the family? And as for the showing off, well – I don’t know where it comes from, I really don’t.’

‘Well, it must come from your side,’ says Irene. ‘The last time anyone got up in public in my family was when our George was made jury foreman in that burglary trial in 1937. And then all he had to do was say ‘Guilty’. I don’t know. Rich Tea with that, Ivy?’

‘Mmm! Can’t beat a Rich Tea with a cuppa, I always say. Stanley? Rich Tea?’

Stanley Pigg shifts in his seat, shakes his head. ‘Can’t stand ’em,’ he says. ‘Dry and dull as ditchwater.’

‘Dull! A Rich Tea biscuit? Are you mad?’

‘Mad,’ mutters Ivy.

‘Completely barmy.’ Irene takes back the biscuit tin, presses down firmly on the lid.

‘I might have another one of those in a minute.’ Ivy sounds ever-so-slightly plaintive.

‘Ooh, sorry, love.’ Irene re-produces them and each helps herself. The three sink back on their seats and fall into mutual contemplation of the glories of nature: the crashing waves, the suck on the shingle, the flock of seagulls attracted by the teeming life in the warm outflow of the gasworks.

‘This is the life,’ says Stanley. ‘You can’t beat a good day out at the seaside.’ He tucks his scarf further in around his chin and basks in the silence of agreement. A shriek from behind and the shush of body hitting pebbles. Then a wail, quiet with shock at first, then building with outrage as the wailer realises that no one is looking.

‘Oh, dear,’ says Irene, ‘I have to look now, I suppose.’

‘Leave her. She’s only trying to attract attention.’

The wails rise higher and wilder on the breeze. Evidently, the injured party is not in immediate peril. ‘Aaaah! Aaaah! AAARRRGH!’

‘Oh, well,’ Irene puts her hand down on the ground, ‘I suppose …’

What she sees brings her immediately to her feet and bustling over to where her daughter hunches at the foot of the breakwater. Geraldine caught her thigh as she fell and has torn a hole four inches long in the skin, from which blood runs freely, soaking tutu, sandshoes, white socks. Her face and hair are covered in a sticky brown residue where she landed head-first in a patch of sea-tar-covered seaweed.

‘Ooh, ooh WAAAH!’ she howls. ‘Aah! Waah!’

Irene kneels beside her stricken daughter. ‘What have you been doing? Look at the state of you! What on earth …?’

‘Aargh!’ yells Geraldine, then says, through a gout of snot, ‘I was trying to get my foot up by my ear to show you, and I fell off.’

‘Well, really, Geraldine.’ Her mother produces an off-white handkerchief from her coat pocket, spits copiously on it and starts to rub at her daughter’s wounds. ‘I don’t know what possessed you. Now look at you. Haven’t I told you that you’d get into trouble with your showing off?’

Geraldine flinches at the touch of the handkerchief. It does hurt, for her mother’s impatient ministrations aren’t the gentlest, but there is element of the Maria Martens in the way she flings herself backward, hand over face, as she suffers her fate.

‘That’ll scar now, you silly thing.’ Irene puts her face up close to the cut, sees that, though ugly, it probably isn’t life-threatening. ‘And your tutu’s ruined. I hope you’ve learned your lesson, my girl.’

Geraldine sniffs, and a fat tear runs down her cheek. She has already mastered the art of storing up tears so that they roll individually, like glycerine drops, from her eyes, rather than massing in salty puddles round her nose. ‘Well, it’s all your fault,’ she announces.

‘And how do you come to that conclusion, young lady?’

Geraldine sits up straight, says imperiously, ‘Well, if you’d only looked at me when I wanted you to, it would never have happened.’

Roy is standing with his hand on his hip when we come in, and, from the twisted, Mr Punch grimace on his face, I get the feeling that the hand I can’t see is probably scratching his arse. ‘Girls,’ he says, and goes back to staring at the greenery in the window, which has turned once again to brownery.

We go, ‘Roy,’ and drop our bags and coats in the understairs cupboard behind the bar. Even though we haven’t seen a journalist since Nigel persuaded them all to scatter this morning, we couldn’t really risk leaving the tower in full uniform tonight. Harriet goes to the loo to put her hair in bunches and do her make-up: bright, childlike colours smeared over the eyelids (peacock blue), cheeks (round splodges of embarrassment pink) and lips (slut-red; we may be pretending to be schoolgirls but the punters like their schoolgirls tarty) and to change into stockings with her miniskirt. I don’t need to make so much effort. Where God blessed Harriet with one of those knowing, adult faces that convinced the nuns that she was up to no good when she was about six, he blessed me with the sort of face that gets carded by bouncers well into its thirties. School uniform looks perfectly normal on me, under a cover-all coat; I just look like I’m dressing my age.

I pick up a pile of clean napkins from the counter, make a start on laying them out on tables.

‘I don’t understand’ – Roy fondles the curled leaves of a weeping
ficus
, which crackle between his fingers – ‘what’s happened. Is it the light in the window, do you think?’

I shrug, place a napkin in the middle of a place setting made up of adult-sized red-plastic-handled training cutlery and those heavy Arcoroc beakers that bounce when you throw them. You need beakers that bounce in here; and you need sharp reflexes to dodge them. ‘No good asking me, Roy. I’m crap with plants.’

‘Oh, well,’ says Roy glumly, ‘maybe that’s it. I used to have a green finger until you two came along. This whole window used to be like a jungle. I had everything here. Banana plants, weeping figs, aloes, rubber plants, agaves, avocado, spider plants, yucca, swiss cheese, ferns, cacti: everything all in one window. You couldn’t see in, you couldn’t see out. It looked lovely. And now look at it. Either you’ve cursed them all, or you’ve got some virus.’

‘Bollocks,’ says Harriet, emerging from the loo with her woolly stockings rolled down over rubber bands to hold them at just-over-knee-height. ‘People don’t carry plant viruses. You’re imagining things again. Just keep feeding them that fertiliser I gave you and you’ll see what happens.’ She takes a wad of napkins from me and starts folding them, yawning widely, gets halfway down the table, then looks up, says, ‘So what treats have you got in store for us tonight, then, Roy?’

Roy has a look at the reservations book. ‘Two stag parties, a birthday party and three corporates. Biggest table fourteen, smallest seven. Birthday starts at seven, corporates seven thirty, eight, eight thirty, stags are staggered at nine thirty and ten. Specials are Welsh rarebit, bacon roly-poly, tapioca and jam but second two corporates are on the set menu as they’ve got Japanese with them.’

‘Oh shit.’ Harriet slaps her napkins down on the table, throws herself into a chair. ‘You didn’t tell me there were going to be Japanese tonight.’

‘Of course I didn’t. I knew you’d find some excuse not to come in if I did.’

‘Too bloody right,’ says Harriet, lights a cigarette. Jiggling her foot in her five-inch tranny-shop stiletto, black kohl pencil smeared beneath her eyes, she looks exactly like a petulant twelve-year-old who’s tarted up her uniform in preparation for the trip on the school bus. Which, of course, is exactly what the job requires. Roy couldn’t believe his luck when the two us walked in here in search of a job. At the time, we couldn’t believe what Shahin had told us about the tips. We do now, though. But I don’t think either of us realised how hard we’d have to work for them.

‘Presumably they’ll be wanting the Sapporo, then,’ I interrupt. I can’t face a fight today. I think we need to keep on Roy’s good side at the moment. I know we’re his best waitresses, but he’s not the most kindly of employers, and I have a feeling that there might be some unscheduled absences coming up in our part of the rota. Fortunately, even Roy recognises that this job is a tough call, so he has six waitresses, and none of us works more than three nights a week. You won’t believe it, but the tips really are good enough to survive on that.

‘There you go, there’s the spirit.’ Roy points at me as I dig out the keys to the cellar. ‘That’s the sort of attitude we need, milady: not your shan’t do this, shan’t do that. Why can’t you be more like your friend here? She doesn’t mind what …’

His voice fades as I go past the fusebox down the basement stairs, into a jumble of exchangeable table tops, broken chairs, blackboards, tablecloths, the washing machine and tumble dryer, metal drums of rice, baked beans, semolina, tapioca, flour, raisins, the desk and computer, the toolbox, cardboard boxes full of receipts mouldering in wait of the bookkeeper and enough bottled beer to refloat the
Titanic
. From the corner, a couple of hundred spiders watch silently as I edge my way past the maypoles left over from Roy’s 4th of June (a free flower-edged boater with every jug of Pimms!) and the giant mortar boards from the graduation promotion (degree certificate with every bottle of champagne!). I reach gingerly down behind the walk-in freezer and nab the vodka bottle. Take a large gulp from the top, sneeze, gag, take another one. Harriet has her mother’s theatrical background to fall back on when we’re out there performing; I need a bit of help from time to time. I’d burst out laughing, otherwise. Or crying. If I’ve got two lots of corporates and a stag party, I need to be half cut. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Most of the time I enjoy my job; it’s just that even I can see that it’s a weird way to make a living, and it can get to you sometimes.

Behind the Tsing Tao, I locate the case of Sapporo. Bring an armful up the stairs; if Roy wants the whole case carrying, he can bloody well do it himself.

Just as I reach the top of the stairs, there’s a shriek from the kitchen and the swing door bursts open in a pall of smoke. Shahin must have put the bangers on to cook, then. I can hear him cussing out of the back door. The whole neighbourhood can hear him cussing out of the back door. ‘Crazy motherfuckin’ hangdog sonofabitch forget you!’ he cries. Shahin’s colloquial English has the old-fashioned elegance of a language gleaned from American shows watched on a secreted satellite dish in downtown Tehran. He’s one of the weirdest shags I’ve ever had: all ‘Ooh, baby baby give eet to me,’ and ‘You like that, baby?’ Not scary, you understand, just a bizarre combination of Starsky and Hutch and Dick Dastardly. Very clean, though: fingernails scrubbed to porcelain, and he’s never held it against me that I didn’t go back for more. Didn’t just not hold it against me: turned out to be a total sweetie, actually. Set me and Harriet up with Roy when things went pear-shaped at the Bean-Bag Bar. Shahin loves it here. Thinks it’s hilarious. ‘Best job I ever freakin’ had,’ he says. ‘But I don’t understand this spotted deek. Are all this airheads crazy, or what?’