Page 130 of For Real

And he’s been awake since the call. Greasy Joe has volume, even over the air waves, so I don’t know how much of that Laurie caught before I got out of bed and out of the room. None I hope. I’d fucking hate it if he heard.

“What’s the matter?” he asks as I start scrabbling around for my clothes and yanking them on.

“Forgot work.”

“Was that your manager? Does he usually talk to you like that?”

I shrug. Try not to look at him.

He stirs in his cloud of Egyptian cotton. “Are you sure you’re well enough?” He hesitates a tiny second before he says well. Like there were other words he had to discard first. Strong enough, maybe. Or capable. “You’ve had so little time.”

“Well, it’s what I got. And you’re the last person to talk to me about what I want versus what I get.”

I yank-zip my hoodie so hard I nearly hit myself in the face and run downstairs to find my shoes. Truthfully I’m almost glad to get away from him. I don’t want to talk about this, and the more he’s nice to me, the more I want to cry.

So, no.

When I finally get to Greasy Joe’s, sweaty and late, it’s total carnage. I don’t know who’s been in the kitchen while I’ve been away, but it’s…it’s not trashed, but it’s not right. It’s not been cared for and everything’s kind of higgledy-piggledy, stuffed wherever, and I know this makes me sound like a freak, but systems are important in a kitchen. It feels like somebody’s been wearing my pants and had them on backwards all the time they were wearing them. What the fuck’s with the ordering? There’s way too much bacon and way not enough eggs and no tomatoes at all and the mushrooms look kind of oogly and argh, argh, argh.

And that’s just the back. Up front…I have no idea what’s going on up front, because there’s only Ruby serving, and she’s really nice, but she smokes a lot of weed and you can tell. There’s customers, and some of them have food, but nobody looks happy, and there’s a bunch of American tourists standing in the doorway kind of laughing in a mean way about how lousy service must be part of the authentic British experience.

I know it’s just a caff and just a job and it’s not my fault and I shouldn’t care so much, but it feels really overwhelming right now, and I do care, because if I don’t, I’m just wasting my life. Everything is really bright and loud, and everywhere I look there’s something I don’t know how to deal with, and out of nowhere, all I can think is my granddad is dead and I wish he wasn’t. But there’s nothing I can do about that either.

There’s nothing I can do about anything.

My hands are shaking so hard I can’t even tie my apron properly, and I’m just standing there in the kitchen like a stunned moose when Joe barges in and tells me I’m a worthless fuckup who’s fucking up his caff. He goes on and on, getting louder and louder, as if it’s not enough that all the diners can hear him, he wants to make sure the street can hear him. Laurie back in bed in Kensington can probably hear him. The whole fucking world.

He finishes with, “Sort it out, or get out, or I’ll throw you out,” before he’s off, in this immense ripple of fat and muscle, like a Spanish galleon under full sail.

Ruby’s got her elbows propped on the service hatch, watching the show. “Wow, his dander, it’s like so up today.”

“Yeah.” I try to act like…like I’m okay. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fucking matter. All I have to do is cook some shit for some people. That’s it. There’s scraps of paper blowing about on one of the surfaces. “Uh, what’s this?”

“Which?”

I point. “This!”

“Oh, that’s orders, babe.”

I paw through them crazily, this shipwrecked sailor looking for a message in a bottle. “Which comes first? What tables?”

“Oh yeah, forgot. Soz.” She’s chewing absently on a piece of her own hair. I seriously want to rip it out of her mouth.

“It’s fine,” I say, and I don’t recognise my own voice. “It’s fine. Just…sit those Americans.”

“Which Americans?”

“Jesus, Rubes, the ones in the fucking doorway.”

She turns really slowly. “Oh yeah, lol.”

“Like, put them on six.”

“Which one’s six?”

“Put them anywhere. Just put them anywhere.”

She drifts off, and I’m left in my wreck of a kitchen. I try to stack up the orders based on how and where they’ve flown, but it’s hopeless. In the end I go for one I can read and whizz it along the grabber as if this is the same as being even a little bit in control of what’s going on.

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