Читать книгу The Park Bench Test - Sarah Lefebve - Страница 21

I stare at the pieces of plate on the floor and smile nervously at my new boss.

“Oops,” I say.

Which is quite fortunate really. I very nearly said “bollocks” instead, remembering just in the nick of time that I am in the company of ten eight-year-old girls in pink sparkly cowgirl hats.

I have a new part-time job. At a coffee shop.

In hindsight, when Katie said that the sister of one of her colleagues was looking for some help at her coffee shop, it might have been an idea to clarify exactly which kind of coffee shop we were talking about.

This is not a quiet little coffee shop where little old ladies come to enjoy a pot of tea with a fruit scone, or where nine-to-fivers take refuge for a few minutes before returning to their offices with tuna baguettes to eat al desko. No, this is a coffee shop where children – and occasionally adults – sit and drink orange squash with malted milk biscuits whilst they ruin perfectly good white plates with pictures of trees and farmyard animals and call it art.

The name Potty Wotty Doodah should have been a bit of a clue.

But, in all honesty, I couldn’t afford to be fussy. I wanted something part time and with as little responsibility as possible to maximise the time I have available for composing begging letters to editors of glossy magazines. Which kind of ruled out half the ‘situations vacant’ pages in the local newspaper. My newly acquired aversion to paperclips and staples ruled out a further twenty per cent – office clerks, administrators, personal assistants, general dogsbodies… And a traumatic experience as a waitress at the tender age of seventeen, when I mistook a vegetable spring roll for a raspberry pancake and served it up with two dollops of vanilla ice cream and a generous helping of raspberry sauce, ruled out the remaining thirty per cent.

I don’t think even I could go wrong with a cappuccino machine. But a cappuccino machine and a slice of art on the side…?

Let me make this clear…

I cannot draw.

I cannot draw to save my life.

No, really, if my life actually depended upon my ability to draw, I would, in fact, be dead.

To illustrate (no pun intended), until the age of ten (okay, fourteen) I drew people with square heads, because I couldn’t draw circles, and with arms that protruded horizontally out of their bodies, because shoulders and elbows were beyond even comprehension to me.

But I haven’t even got to the stage yet where I’m being asked by a five-year-old to draw a giraffe on the side of an eggcup and I’m already a disaster.

Caroline – my new boss – opened Potty Wotty Doodah three years ago, after six years as an art teacher and two years studying business at night school. In other words – she can draw.

It’s adorable. The walls are covered with rows and rows of shelves filled with every kind of plain white pottery you can imagine – bowls, plates, cups and saucers, salt and pepper pots, cookie jars, money boxes. There are even light switch surrounds, doorknobs and toothbrush holders.

The far wall is half-decorated with a mosaic of tiles painted by customers since the café opened, while the other half is waiting for the next three years’ worth.

To the left as you walk in there is a counter where Caroline greets everyone and serves coffee and juice. And in the centre is an island unit – it’s the kind you find in big kitchens, but instead of pots and pans and recipe books it’s filled with picture books, stencils, rubber stamps and tracing paper, and hundreds of bottles of paint. Inspiration Island – that’s what Caroline calls it.

The rest of the room is filled with pine tables and chairs, a different coloured plastic cloth draped over each table, a miniature pinny hanging from the back of every chair.

It’s just like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory – except you don’t eat the decorations, you paint them.

Caroline has a little girl – Molly, who’s five, and she’s six months pregnant with her second child. She’s starting to take things a bit easier now. Her friend Fiona works here too – but she’s in the process of setting up her own shop – a children’s clothing shop – just a few doors down in the same street, so she isn’t able to work any extra hours.

That’s where I come in.

So – Caroline is a former art teacher and Fiona stitches pictures of angels on t-shirts and socks, whilst I, it seems, am the token pleb who can’t even draw stick-men.

Today, though, stick-men are the least of my problems.

I am learning how to glaze a pot – that’s the bit that makes them shiny when they come out of the kiln, apparently. I haven’t gone near the kiln yet. I’m not sure I ever will after today’s disaster.

I pick up the larger fragments of plate from the floor and apologise to Caroline. Again.

“Don’t worry,” she says kindly. “That’s why we’re doing this – so you can get it right before you start handling the proper stuff.”

By proper stuff she means the pottery with the pretty pictures – straight from the hands of proud little girls and boys – instead of the plain items straight from the shelves. The very thought of touching the ‘proper stuff’ makes me nervous. The last time I had anything to do with any kind of pottery was in art class at secondary school when I accidentally dropped Emma’s cat dish. It was a masterpiece – a bowl in the shape of a cat’s face with delicate clay whiskers sticking out of the sides. She cried for the rest of the day. So did I. It was very traumatic. And we were eleven. Imagine what it could do to a toddler…

“Try again,” Caroline says, handing me the tongs you use to dip the pottery. They look like a pair of industrial-size barbecue tongs. I hold them awkwardly. I feel like Julia Roberts in the scene from Pretty Woman when she’s trying to pick-up snails at that posh restaurant.

I grip a mug like Caroline has shown me, with one half of the tongs at the bottom and the other on the rim, and slowly ease it into the bucket of glaze. It’s a thick blue gloopy substance.

“So why doesn’t everything come out of the kiln blue?” I ask Caroline.

“The blue disappears in the heat, but there are chemicals in the paints which make them resist the heat,” she explains. “Normal paints – poster paints for example – they would burn off.”

“Hmm,” I say, taking it all in, twisting the tongs gently in the bucket, to make sure the mug is coated all over.

“That should do it,” she tells me.

I ease the mug out of the bucket and then watch as it slips out of the tongs and drops back in. It bobs up and down like a bobbing apple at a Halloween party before filling up with glaze and sinking to the bottom of the bucket.

I smile at Caroline. It’s a smile of resignation.

I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. Selling pencils was much easier.