Participation

I requested and paid for a piping hot sandwich and the man said I'll bring it to you and I sat down. I read the paper given away on raining morning corners by the evangelical ponchos who've lately begun unzipping my coat and tucking it under my armpit while saying paper, paper, paper, you will not live without this news. And you get it indoors and it's three-quarter page adverts for slightly larger phones and pictures of professional disgraces with incomprehensible teeth.
The sandwich didn't appear. I put the paper back on the shelf and tilted my head at the man. He asked if I was the man with the sandwich and I wanted to say no, I'm the man without the sandwich, my popping up here with an angled head ought to make that fairly clear, wouldn't you say, but I just said yes. He said he looked everywhere for me. I told him I was starving to death, and he threw four pound coins one by one at my face, screaming well here's your bastard money back you filthy haddock. I couldn't help thinking his response was disproportionate, and was reassured by the next day's free paper, which contained news of his protracted and gloopy end-of-shift kidnapping, opposite a full-page advert for a better kind of water.

Fat Together

This didn’t quite happen: I was the café’s only customer, sat at the counter seducing a bacon sandwich looking out the window and reading a book while the waitress sat beside me tutting at the Times quick crossword. My book was an old Russian novel and I was hoping the waitress would notice the fuss I wasn’t making about my impeccable taste, so I could then tell her it only cost fifty pence and establish that along with my heroic lack of look-at-me I also know about how far money can go. She exhaled through her nostrils and looked up from the crossword and said I’m not good at these things. I smiled and said sometimes they’re a bastard. I didn’t ask her whereabouts in Australia she was from. 

We stared out the window and I conquered the sandwich and watched legs and shoulderblades go past outside and time stand still in the cold and cockroachy prison in the book. She said moustaches in the summer must be bothersome. I thought about telling her how I used to have a moustache but it was joined to a beard because everyone had a hairy face because we were in the mountains near enough and if you shave in the mountains your priorities are reckless, you’re not going to be able to wrestle any goats or worry any snakes with a soft bald mouth, are you, mate, but I just said yeah. 

Something two foot tall fell from above the window and shattered on the pavement. It was a potted house plant. Soil rolled into the gutter. The waitress tsked and said it’s the flat upstairs, they’re really spacey. It probably frightened one of them and they kicked it out. We watched legs avoid tripping over it. Or maybe, she said, it just got sick of its owners.

The Things You Should Have Handy

A spider descended at my bed and face, just after I'd won another snooze, at about eight fifteen, to congratulate me, I imagine, on the ease with which I wake from nightmares about the real-life situations nightmares frequently precede, and mid-turnover we were eye to eye to eye to eye and so on and I realised it was bigger than my hand, and I immediately tried to re-feel my fear as something like familiar delight at its resemblance to the last spider of similar size that had been so close to my mouth, which was the one I used to share a caravan with, back when I ate cheese four times a day, but I didn't manage to fool it, and it wouldn't stop approaching, so I got out of bed and waited for it to land, and then I gave it a fiver and told it to get a fucking taxi.

Call It What You Like

Sometimes you're an alarm clock as well as a postman.
Good night was it?
No one got hurt.
Sign there.
Your machine isn't sensitive enough. You can't even tell it's a signature. I might as well just be pressing a button.
But then there'd be no proof that I hadn't pressed the button myself.
There's no proof you're not a forger.
Impossible. It doesn't respond to my actions.
It can't be that sophisticated.
It wasn't at first.
Blimey.
I had to teach it who I was.
Was it very disappointed?
Your hair's looking less unacceptable than usual.
Thanks. I just had some of it removed.
I hope no money changed hands.
I did it myself.
By accident?
I wanted to look like a better version of me.
Not one that knows what it's doing?
You don't seem to be in much of a rush.
Time and a half today.
Divorce to pay for?
Your flies are undone.
I'm glad you've noticed.
I couldn't help it.

Rejoice Yourself Raw

At last I'm employed in a brewery. I knew it: I kept having dreams about boozy mischief and I'd wake up smelling of alcohol, gently sweating. How'd you explain that?
I'm in the canteen, being what some people would call a food service assistant, but anyone with any sense would call a dinnerlady. It's simple work and I don't have to talk, so I can leave my brain in the fridge and think about nothing at all. The disappointing thing is that there's no 24-hour batch-testing hall where everyone gets shitfaced and vomits their pain away like they must've done in the olden days (the sixties). The other disappointing thing is that we are paid entirely in Pounds Sterling instead of Pints Heineken. It must've been a laugh-a-minute at one time, because half the men are so very miserable now. Some of them seem to perk up after breakfast, which makes things worse for the ones who've worked there longer than I've been alive.
One of my fellow dinnerladies thought that I couldn't tell the difference between hash browns and beans and very helpfully pointed at the beans and said there's the beans. Sometimes I forget, though, and carefully place one or two beans on someone's plate next to the bacon and hand it back to them and they laugh and say I think you need to go to breakfast boot-camp.