Page 131 of For Real

I tell myself: one thing at a time.

Except there’s a lot of things, and they’re stacking up faster than I can do them, which means…I’m never going to get on top of this. I’ve failed before I’ve even tried.

And I feel weird, like hot and cold at the same time, and I still can’t seem to stop shaking, which is really bad when you’re supposed to be preparing food. But it’s not like I have a choice.

One thing at a time.

Full English. Okay. I can do that. I can do that.

I wash my hands, fire up the griddle…and realise about half the stuff I need is piled up in about six inches of stagnant water in one of the stainless steel sinks.

Fuckfuckfuckfuck.

I try to wash up while I’m cooking, but that just means I do a shitty job of both. And more orders come blowing in through the service hatch, and Ruby can’t remember how to use the coffee machine, and I drop a stack of plates and I don’t have time to clean the shards up properly so I just have to kick them under one of the counters, and while I’m stressing about that, I burn my eggs, which takes real fucking skill because, Jesus, they’re eggs. And while I’m scraping them off the griddle in a torrent of grease and charcoal, I burst into tears, and then I’m weeping my heart out into someone else’s breakfast as Stevie—one of our regulars—sticks his head in, and is all like, “I can see you’re up against it, son,” and tells me he’s going to come back tomorrow.

I know he’s trying to be nice. I know he’s trying to help.

But I’ve lost a customer. I’ve fucking lost a customer.

And I can’t stop crying.

In the end I go to the back of the kitchen, and I crawl into a space under one of the work surfaces where we keep the industrial-sized tubs of mayo and ketchup and mustard, and I make myself about as small as I can get—disappearing small, like I did for the bad year I had at school when everybody knew I was gay.4

I don’t even know if what I’m doing is crying anymore. There’s some tears, but mainly it’s noisy and weird and sounds more like hiccoughs, and the more I do it, the more I keep doing it, even though it’s starting to hurt a bit because my mouth and my throat are all dry and I can’t seem to get enough air.

I’m so lost and stuck in this loop of breathless-cry-hiccoughing that I don’t even hear footsteps, I don’t even know there’s somebody with me until Laurie’s drawing me into his arms, whispering my name, calling me darling, and gently brushing the hair out of my sticky eyes.

At first I think I’ve gone bona fide nutters. Like I’m so miserable I’ve hallucinated him.

But, no, he’s really here. Laurie is here, in Greasy Joe’s, with me. And that’s so incredibly, well, incredible that I forget what a mess I am. So I’m just pathetically happy to see him, which I mainly demonstrate by covering his shirt with snot and slobber.

Eventually he manages to coax me upright, and I manage to ask him what he’s doing here.

“I was worried about you,” he says.

That doesn’t exactly make me feel brilliant, but since he found me cowering behind a tub of Hellman’s, it’s not like I can claim I’m fine. I scrub at my face since I’ve basically abandoned all hope of pride and dignity. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Everything’s a mess.”

I squint up at him, looking for wariness or disgust or shock, but there’s only Laurie, my Laurie, frowning a bit, but in his thoughtful way, not his angry way. “Come home, Toby. Let me take care of you.”

Home. That sounds so nice. So does the bit about taking care of me.

But I’m supposed to be able to take care of myself.

I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and drink it scary fast. “I can’t. I know it’s rubbish, but this is my job and we’re understaffed and if I go away there’s nobody to cook. I just…” Looking round at the chaos makes me want to run away and hide again. “I don’t know…how to…” I give up. I can’t even finish a sentence right now.

Laurie doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he goes, “All right.” And I have no idea what that even means in this context. He leans in and kisses me lightly.

Then he’s unhooking one of the spare aprons off the back of the door and putting it on. And while I’m gaping, he strides out of the kitchen, sweeping the crumpled heap of orders with him. I hear the clatter and click of the filter coffee machine and then his voice cutting easily over the disgruntled hubbub of the caff.

“All right, everyone, we’ve had a technical hitch with our ordering system—”

“What sort of hitch?” asks one of the Americans.

There’s a teeny tiny pause. And then Laurie, at his driest, “They fell off the slider.”

And people are laughing. But not, like, in a bad way. “So, we’re going to give you all a free cup of coffee while we double-check your orders, and then we’ll get your food to you as quickly as we can.”

I’ve been working at Greasy Joe’s for nearly a year, so I know the place, and I feel the atmosphere shift. I’m kind of stunned. A free cup of 99p coffee shouldn’t make people go from not-okay to okay just like that, but there’s something about Laurie, something I’ve only ever seen sort of banked before or maybe only in the way he focuses it on me. Somehow he makes you believe in him. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a big thing or a small thing, you just do.

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