It was one of those mid-winter days where the sun begins to coagulate
in the sky mid-afternoon, turning the sky to sickly pallor before finishing in
a bruise of black by 4pm. Beth began to notice this as she was finishing her
lunch-time shift in the restaurant – the absurdity of the time of year where
people consumed food endlessly into the day, clutching comfort where they could
get it!
She threaded between the tables under the incessant stare of
artificial orange light and the twisted paraphernalia one may manage to
associate with Italy when under the influence of alcohol. Plates were stone
cold in her hands as she lifted away the finished meal from the table of an
elderly couple – a meal that looked barely different from when she had served
it. The strange empty eyes of the old man, the shrunken skin hanging against
the jaw, made her want to cry. A young couple argued at an adjacent table, the
clockwork gesticulations of their hands seemingly attempting to compensate for empty words –
such horrible desperate gestures! Gestures drawn by thick sluggish pulses of
blood and wine mulching in the veins like a sickness.
She had had enough. Enough of the forced façade people had
fastened to their faces – the whole room seemingly an exhibition of synthetic
sympathy. It made her sick! Sick as she heard the regular Click, click, click – from the wall-clock perhaps, or the sharp
shocks of knife in the kitchen, splitting the heads from spring onions in a
bitter execution. Only ten minutes left. Damp hands shook in the fold of her
apron.
Ten minutes of waiting. She wanted to open her mouth and ask
them – what am I actually waiting for? Am
I waiting for you to fill my life with some menial activity so I can feel money
cold in my palm and go home to return again? Am I waiting for you? Am I waiting
to say the anticipated words at anticipated times and mirror your
gesticulations so you feel safe? Do you want me to wait, dripping with
cordiality?
Seething, she cleared away the detritus from the corner
table – the table where a young woman had sat by herself all evening, eating
with painstaking slowness like a kind of sacrilege, poised like she had been
preserved amidst the strange sour smell of vinegar. Beth remembered how the red
wine had stained the woman’s lips – appearing, from a distance, to be a slick incision
scoring between pale cheeks. The cutlery was eerily clean. Beth picked up a napkin
smeared damp with mascara, crumpling it into the bin. She wondered why people visited
restaurants in that grand old exhibition of public life, as if affirming that
they had a kind of self-consciousness, operated like others. For everyone
seemed so unhappy.
A birthday cake coated in candles emerged from the back – it
seemed to drip flames, circulating the restaurant interior. The illuminated
boast – look who’s survived another year!
Manic applause and laughter,
horribly cavernous smiles to cover the unrepentant sadness which slid through
the blood as coarse as salt.
Those who looked especially unhappy were those who would
usually ask for their meat ‘rare’ – as if they envied some mistaken form of
exclusivity, desired some strange sense of identification. What of the identity
of flesh and blood and grease and sweat?
Very little. Beth supported soiled plates against her chest
like a porcelain doll, taking them mechanically to the back of the restaurant where a boy, not much older than
herself, would clean them. It was strange how so few seemed to think about his
task – his hands against the saliva of speech, coursing away those empty words
and teeth-marks. His fingers flexed in the water is as if stirring a vat. Beth
turned and choked her apron against the whitewash in its own noose. She had 4pm
leave to return by 6pm. There was no comment from anyone – just table after
table of greying skin like some dreadful metaphorical tapestry, the clash of
glass being scoured, the choking gasp of hot oil left too long in the pan,
lobsters screaming.
Outside, the sky was still slightly flecked with cobalt and
instead of walking, she ran.
The restaurant was some kind of highly-idolised, rural
composition for those who had convinced themselves they were passionate about
location, having lost self-location long ago. For those couples with cavernous
cars they could use to construct some idea of identity – parked row after row
like new-shined coffins. Beth crossed behind the restaurant over a stile and
into a field. The grass cast against her legs, almost serpentine, an endless dark
mass in the dying light opened up languorously like liquid. Silence was treasured,
and here it glistened as it seemed to sink her to the ground, her hands crystalline
with dewdrops as she lowered her head onto the earth.
Staring upwards, the magnificent expanse of sky domed like
an arched spine. How everything pulsed and throbbed – these terrible organs of
the world! All flashing lights and loss and screams! The blood pounding through
her ears, the occasional click of the pheasant, the throbbing lungs crackling
as if sifting ice from the chill air. She hated herself – for having eighteen
years of experience and still not knowing why she felt such inerasable sadness,
a sadness which would smite as if sewn through tissue.
Her body lay heavily whilst the ground seemed to force
upwards, like in her suspension she was amidst some terrible conflict which
strived to crack her ribs apart. Her tongue trilled against her teeth as if nervous
in the hiatus, anticipating hysteria. For
the World cannot cope with those who stop, that was what she told herself
as her work clothes became saturated against her back, beyond any form of
identification, the body clotted inside a single skin. Cocoon-like, a chrysalis.
Tears trembled like globes to decorate the cheeks. It was as if a weight
brooded in each half-open palm, fixed to the vague texture of the earth usually
scored only by footfalls and floodlights.
The stars peered through the black bandage of the sky like
poorly shrouded puncture wounds. For the
whole thing was rotten, she knew. Her mouth opened in a half-cry as if to
taste the sudden seep of silence, the hot salt of the advancing evening in
which people may hold each other, some image, anything to flee like desperate
animals the immeasurable pulse of loneliness which continuously creeps over
unassuming flesh.
She thought of the cries in the restaurant, the exclamative
assertions announcing ‘I’m so happy!’. How bitterly she laughed, how she
laughed as she felt something so cold and beautiful against her palm, the arms
of the night flexing towards her mouth. It could have been hours, she let the
earth cradle her like a corpse. There was an annihilating cold.
A group of cows huddled softly, gently in one corner of the
field, their long eyelashes brushing the bottom lids with an eerie regularity,
keeping their gaze cautiously, almost tenderly.
Beth rose, for she knew she had to return the restaurant –
to return to the instrumental, the sprockets and springs with the desired femininity
of consumer efficiency. Nothing more than a pylon, throbbing a few fields away,
dully, numbly. Why had she been given the capacity to feel? Granted the capacity
to hurt like some great greased weight? The wood of the stile was a bare bone beneath
damp hands, a human skeletal arrangement for some kind of convenience.
She staggered into the restaurant – the thickened air of forfeited
joviality swam through her nostrils, the familiar persuasive sedative. The Click, click, click like the strange sideward
motions of securing ammunition, lock, trigger. Beth put a hand to her head. To
her left, another waitress sat entwined on the bar stool - some
ornate ornament, adding to the complimentary
furniture.
The fork had stopped halfway to her mouth. The meat seeped,
still pink.
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