Page 1 of The Winter of Second Chances
Annie was almost home when she realised she’d left her phone at the restaurant. It was September and the night air was nipping at her jacket collar, letting her know that summer was on the wane. The gentle rhythm of her rubber-soled boots on the pavement was as soothing as the tick of the old carriage clock that used to sit on her parents’ mantelpiece.
The high street was quiet. The pubs had long since expelled their patrons and the lights in the flats above the shops were all but extinguished. Even a town as busy as Leaming on the Lye had to sleep sometime. Annie wandered slowly back the way she had come. She was completely alone aside from the flash of a bushy red tail as a fox disappeared down an alleyway, no doubt hoping to find a loose bin bag or discarded kebab.
Annie liked this time. After the heat and rush of the kitchen during service and then the laborious cleardown, when the last customers had departed, full-bellied and ruddy-cheeked from the house wine, came the quiet. The front of house staff left first, carpets hoovered and tables laid ready for lunch service the next day, leaving just the kitchen staff, tired yet strangely elated at having got through another crazy night. When the last pan was dried and the floor mopped, Annie would let them go, listening as their animated conversations drifted out of the courtyard and into the sleeping streets beyond. Since the twins had left home, her chefs had become like her surrogate children. And then she was alone. The calm after another hard-won day washed over her. She was too tired to dwell on things and that was just the way she liked it.
Up ahead, towards the mall, a man in a leather jacket staggered under the weight of his companion, who leaned listlessly against him, drunkenly singing ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’. Annie walked on and soon she was standing back outside The Pomegranate Seed, the restaurant she and her husband Max had run for the last fifteen years.
Annie unhooked the latch on a tall gate to the side of the building. A steep path led down towards a small courtyard and kitchen garden, with raised beds and cold frames to the right, and to the left, a crooked flight of stone steps down to the kitchen door.
The security light was on the blink again and the gravelled passage was in almost complete darkness, save for the dim phosphorescence of the harvest moon. But it didn’t trouble Annie: she knew every dip in the path, every leaning nuance of the ancient stone steps – this was her domain.
She fumbled for her keys, then let herself in. The kitchen hummed with electrical appliances; the green lights atop the industrial fridges and freezers punctuated the blackness of the still-warm kitchen. Annie located her phone quickly on the vast stainless-steel worktop by way of the red message light that pulsated from it. The cold light from the screen spilled out into the sleeping kitchen. It was a message from Max:
Sorry, love, going to be late. Jude’s fallen out with Petra again, so I’m going to sink a few pints with him. M xx
Annie rolled her eyes. Petra seemed to throw Jude out of their flat above the pub on an almost weekly basis. She shoved the phone into her pocket and was about to leave when she heard a noise coming from the restaurant. She froze.Shit!She cocked her head in the direction of the restaurant beyond and strained to listen.
She couldn’t make out voices but there was definitely somebody moving about in there. She opened her phone to see what time Max had sent his message; with luck she could catch him somewhere between sober and useless. As Annie’s finger hovered over Max’s name, the last bar of her phone battery blipped out and snapped her back into darkness.
Bugger, bugger, bollocks!Annie cursed silently. The dull thud of a glass being dropped onto the rush matting of the restaurant floor thrilled her to attention. Her heart thrummed, eyes wide against the dark, as her breath came hard and fast. And then she did the thing that always made her shout at the actresses in horror movies: she crept slowly towards the noise.
Her intention was to sneak behind the bar and use the restaurant phone to call the police. The sticking noise her rubber soles made against the vinyl flooring seemed to fill the black corridor with a sound like Velcro strips being ripped apart. Annie pulled herself up onto her tiptoes and teetered on.
As the dim outline of the doorway to the lounge area came into view, Annie got down on all fours and crawled the last few feet.
The lounge area consisted of two long velvet banquettes and low tables – also known as tables eight and nine for the purposes of the staff – where diners could enjoy drinks and canapés before being escorted to their tables in the restaurant beyond. Annie was squeezed between the open dishwasher and two metal barrels with plastic pipes that led up to the drink pumps. There was a pervading smell of stale beer and drain at this level.
Over the drone of the drinks fridge and the wine chiller, Annie could make out heavy breathing. It was closer than she would like. Now what was she going to do? She couldn’t very well call the police with the robbers on the other side of the bar.
She had to do something, she was not about to let some thieving arseholes make off with her hard-earned cash. If they wanted what she had, they’d have to work twelve-hour shifts like she did.
Annie had heard somewhere that if a predator in the wild approaches you, you can scare it off by running at it, full pelt, and yelling at the top of your voice. Spurred on by outrage and an increasing need for the toilet, Annie decided to test the theory. She slipped the electric fly swatter off a nearby shelf and set it to ‘zap’. After several abortive counts of three, she took a good lug of air and leaped out from behind the bar, shouting and screaming. She slapped her palm against the bank of light switches on the wall and light flooded the lounge. Still fully embodying the banshee spirit, Annie swiped wildly in the direction of the intruders with the swatter.
What followed was unexpected. There was a lot of frightened screaming. The sudden change from dark to light had left Annie temporarily dazzled and it took her a moment to register what she was seeing. Sprawled across the banquette at table nine, desperately and inadequately trying to cover her nakedness with cushions – one of which had the wordsKeep Calm and Carry Onembroidered across its front – was Ellie, the newly appointed waitress. And stood before her, with a fast-drooping erection and a blue bar towel held up against his nipples, was Annie’s husband, Max.
Later, as Annie lay back against the crisp white pillows in the hotel room, she would think of all the clever, cutting things she could have said to her husband in that moment.
‘It’s not what it looks like!’ Max had said.
Behind him, Ellie sat very still, eyes wide like Bambi, as if she thought by not moving, Annie might not be able to see her. In an ideal world Annie would have whipped back smartly with something along the lines of:
‘Ah, I see you’re training young Ellie in the finer arts of customer service.’
Or:
‘Don’t tell me: there was a blackout and all your clothes fell off and Ellie was so frightened you had to put your penis into her vagina to calm her down?’
But what Annie actually said, when faced with her naked husband screwing the naked waitress half his age, while she, his long-suffering wife of twenty-six years, stood before him deflated, with crow’s feet around her eyes and an electric fly swatter hanging loosely by her side, was, ‘Gup...Gup...Ubber...Affphoof.’ Then she’d stumbled backwards, zapped her own thigh with the swatter and let out some wee.
Annie slept surprisingly well, considering she had just entirely changed the course of her life, and woke before dawn on a strange sort of high. She called Marianne, her head chef at The Pomegranate Seed, filled her in on the situation and handed her the responsibility of the kitchen.
‘What a shitbag!’ said Marianne. ‘Don’t worry about a thing, I’ve got this. How long do you think you’ll be gone?’
‘I haven’t really thought that far ahead yet,’ said Annie. Her heart began to pound as she realised she had no plan beyond the next two days, for which she’d booked a hotel room. ‘Can you remind Max to feed Mrs Tiggy-Winkle?’ Annie asked. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was her cat.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ asked Marianne.
‘Don’t I sound okay?’ said Annie.
