Читать книгу Stretch, 29 - Damian Lanigan - Страница 13

£2.91

I remembered my job offer to Sadie. The thought brought me down a little. I genuinely couldn’t remember trying to get off with her, but I had no doubt that I had done. If she combined that example of my behaviour with my humiliation at the hands of Colin, she probably wasn’t currently holding her new boss in particularly high esteem. I think I’d told her to turn up at six-thirty-ish, which turned out to be lucky, because Paolo the chef told me that the witless girl I’d hired a week before had phoned in to say that she was quitting. She had been typical of the general standard. She was Irish, from Kerry, but she was so off the pace she could have been either from the Frozen North or the fourteenth century. She had spent all her time smoking crazily out by the bins and weeping softly into her apron. O’Hare’s had had them all in my time there: thieves, mutes, illiterates, screamers and truants. The rates Bart paid attracted people with such ineptitude with the English language and such scrofulous skin that McDonald’s would reject them out of hand. There was little chance of Sadie not being up to the job.

She turned up about ten minutes late in a dirty mac and tiny once-black mini skirt. I was standing by the bar putting white plastic flowers into vases.

‘Shite. Sorry I’m late, got lost in Clapham.’

She seemed breezily unconcerned that nineteen hours previously I had attempted to tongue her face.

‘That’s OK, get your coat off and I’ll tell you the deal.’

Her hair really was very red indeed. It wasn’t sandy or hint-of-mouse-y, it was bright orangey red. She had it pinned back to her scalp and gathered into a complicated curled bun, but you couldn’t tone down hair that colour so easily.

When she was ready, I took her over to an empty table and told her the deal: ‘Lunchtime shift eleven-thirty till five, evening shift five till eleven-thirty, read the specials off the blackboard, £2.91 an hour.’

Finis.

‘That’s outrageous.’

‘Plus tips, you could be clearing well over twenty quid a day.’

‘What does it say in my contract about my rights when the boss tries sexually assaulting me?’

‘Oh, come on, give me a break. I didn’t have to give you this job, you know.’ I was aware that this had hit the wrong note.

‘I don’t have to accept.’

‘OK, OK, OK. But try not to mention the … incident … again. I’m really sorry about it.’

‘Don’t be sorry, I was flattered.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, particularly the bit when you said you don’t normally go for gingers or people in the vocations, but I was worth making an exception for.’

‘I didn’t say that, did I?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘That’s bad.’

‘Yeah, but I’ll get over it. How’s your concussion?’

‘Better. It was more of a blackout, I think.’

‘And how’s the poetry coming along?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. You were saying last night how you’re a great poet of the human soul, I was just wondering if you’d cranked out any stanzas today.’

By this stage my head was collapsed on to my forearm in grief. Sadie laughed. It was a filthy, masculine, merciless kind of laugh. ‘Right. There’s a customer. I’m off.’

Part of me had thought that Henry had been making it all up. I contemplated sticking my head in the pizza oven, but instead went out to the bins for a bifter. I didn’t speak much to Sadie for the next hour or so, but every time she went past me she said: ‘Ah, the Great Poet fixes a drink,’ or, ‘See how the bard polishes the side plate.’ I was beginning to warm to her, to be honest.

At eight, Bart dropped in with Brian. This was unusual. He would occasionally drop in early evening to put the wind up everyone but he wouldn’t dream of eating in one of his own restaurants. He sat at a table near the window looking agitated and summoned me over.

‘Stretch, how are we doing this week?’

‘Good. Ten grand easy already.’

‘How many shifts you done?’

‘Four so far. The normal.’

‘Fucking hell, Frank, why can’t you do me a few more? We take bigger when you’re on, guaranteed.’

‘Oh, you old softie. I can’t do any more. I’d go fucking mad. And you won’t pay me any extra. I’d have to be a nonce.’