Chapter Twenty
Twenty
Mick’s patience snaps on my very next shift.
I can’t muster any enthusiasm. This café is draining me of creativity.
Any original thought. All I do, day in, day out, is smile benignly at dirty children whom I can barely bring myself to look at, make the same coffee orders for the same tedious people, scrub stains from tables while suppressing the urge to retch.
And what do I get in return? A pitiful wage and ungrateful customers.
It’s simply too much, particularly when I’m under so much strain from other aspects of my life.
Jack. Mum’s frequent absences. Freddie. That fucking house.
It’s all begun to crowd me in a way that is most unpleasant.
I slam a coffee onto the counter so hard it spills right over.
The exhausted mother for whom it was intended glares at me, but I ignore her and shove a wad of napkins in her direction so she can mop at the spill. I’m not doing it for her.
It is, apparently, the final straw. Mick grabs my arm and drags me into the back room in a blatant display of workplace harassment, but I can’t be bothered to point it out.
I thought I’d become immune to the smell of bacon fat, but it’s worse in here, right next to the tiny kitchen.
Out front at least attempts to give the impression of cleanliness, but there’s no need to keep up the pretense in this poky back room, where only the lowly employees are allowed to come.
Thick, sticky grime has settled into every available orifice, between the pages of the fat ledger book, which—judging by the figures—tells a sad story of the café’s steady decline.
I stand in the middle of the room, back straight, and try not to touch anything.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Mick’s eyes flash dangerously.
I’d thought he was a well of patience, but clearly I have gone too far.
Pushed him over the edge. “It’s like you’ve been a different person recently.
I’m this close.” His thumb and forefinger are nearly touching.
“I don’t understand,” he continues. “You asked me for more shifts.”
He has a point, but that was before Jack started ignoring me. Before I realized that I was able to find exactly nothing about Alice online, despite the numerous hours I have spent trawling the internet. Because Alice, I have decided, is the key to all of this.
There is no time to dwell on her now, though. Mick is looking at me as though he barely recognizes me. And, as much as I might like to, I can’t afford to give up this job. Not if I want to leave Mum’s. Which I very much do.
So I summon tears. I grit my teeth, slump against the desk, and force myself not to reach for my sanitizer. I duck my head, round my shoulders, and allow them to shake with silent sobs. It’s not long before the pretense becomes a reality, and the tears start to flow of their own accord.
Anger, frustration, confusion. It’s all been simmering just beneath my surface for the past week.
Jack’s curtains are still closed. I’ve checked every night this week, but there’s been no sign of movement.
No flicker of interest. I’ve sent a couple more messages, but it’s feeling increasingly like screaming into the void, and my patience—what little there was of it in the first place—is wearing thin.
Mick is by my side in seconds, just as I knew he would be.
“You poor thing. You’ve been through so much.
” He rubs my upper arm, and it feels a little like a violation, so I shift slightly farther away from him and allow the tears to fall freely onto the desk.
Hopefully, the salt will clear some of the bacteria.
I give a believable hiccup. “I’m sorry. I know I haven’t been on the best form recently. It’s just…all been so difficult. All the memories of Freddie. I think being here just brings it all back. We met in a café, you know?”
Mick’s eyebrows pull together. “I didn’t. I can understand how that might be difficult for you.”
I nod, a singularly sad gesture that conveys the depth of my grief.
As though my head is too heavy for my body.
“And now,” I say, “there’s this new guy.
You met him actually. He came in the other day.
And I’m just so confused by all the feelings.
He’s not talking to me, I’m worried about him, and it’s all just a mess. ”
Mick smiles gently. “I knew he liked you. He wouldn’t stop looking at you. I thought I saw him outside the café the other day, but he didn’t come in.”
I snap my head up. “Did you? When?”
Mick removes his hand from my arm. Oh dear, I’ve confused him again with my capricious personality swings. It did come out more sharply than I intended, but I hope he chalks it up to emotion.
“A couple of weeks ago,” he says slowly. “But I wasn’t sure it was him, and, when I looked again, he was gone.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Why is it that everyone in my life is so utterly incapable? “Well, anyway,” I plunge on, gritting my teeth, “it’s all been a bit much.”
“Listen.” His voice is gentle. “If you like each other, it’ll all be OK in the end.”
And therein lies the problem. Because I’m not sure if Jack does like me anymore. I showed a side of myself that I rarely—with the exception of Mum—allow anyone to see. I ruined it, just by showing him a glimpse of myself.
Which is where Alice comes in. I tried every trick that I knew with Jack, but when the chips were down, it wasn’t enough.
I was audacious and loud, bold and brash, flirtatious.
I was Marcie. But it has become ever clearer that Marcie is not what he wants.
What he wants is harder for me to emulate. What he wants is Alice.
“These things have a way of working themselves out. If he’s not talking to you, is there someone you could reach out to, to check he’s all right?
” Mick says, patting me on the shoulder again, and—though his nails are rimmed with dirt—his words spark against something I hadn’t previously thought of.
Something that ignites a tiny nugget of hope in my chest. “Why don’t you go home?
” Mick continues. “Honestly, you’re no use to me today. Offending all my best customers.”
I nod gratefully, give him a watery smile that I hope does not belie my mounting excitement. Going home is exactly what I need right now.
I sanitize as soon as I reach the street, then march home. My tears dry instantly. I don’t detour past Jack’s. There’s only so much staring at the wrong side of a curtain one can do.
I let myself into Mum’s ten minutes later and head straight upstairs.
She’s not home again. That’ll be the third time this week, but I don’t have the time to dwell on her whereabouts.
Because, to align myself with Alice, I will need to do more than simply comb the internet for mention of her.
I need to speak to someone who actually knew her.
I need to speak to Jack’s mother.
There are a few messages waiting for Sally when I log in to Facebook, but I ignore them and go straight to Jack’s profile.
I click on his friend list, type the name Reynolds into the search bar.
There are a few, likely cousins, but only one woman of the right age with the right sort of stature. Catherine.
Sally won’t work for these purposes, so I log out and use Holly instead.
I don’t like using Holly if I can help it.
She doesn’t have quite the same level of benign inoffensiveness as Sally, whose achingly boring life can dupe even the most suspicious of stalkees.
But she’s too old for this, for what I need her for. So Holly it is.
Holly is a little zanier. She’s young and has several piercings, and a tattoo that travels up one side of her neck.
She only came into the café once, and looked as though she’d stumbled in by accident.
No doubt she’d expected something a little cooler, but—once inside—she ordered a coffee out of politeness and took a seat by the window.
In her profile picture, she’s staring out of it, a wistful expression on her face.
Like she wishes she hadn’t come into this particular shithole.
She’s looking wonderfully arty; all credit to the photographer, of course.
She was easy to create a backstory for: all poetry and tortured expression.
A bit like Billy, actually. She’s perfect for the task at hand.
I type Catherine’s name into Facebook, add her as a friend, then compose my message.
Hi Catherine, I hope you’re well. I think we met a few years ago at Jack and Alice’s wedding (I was a good friend of Alice’s—at school with her).
I don’t want to trouble Jack with this, but me and a few old friends were hoping to pull something together of Alice to remember her by.
Like a sort of digital photobook. I don’t suppose you have anything you could share?
Any memories? Voice notes? Photos/videos?
Anything like that? We’ll send you a copy, too, of course, when it’s ready. Thanks so much!
Perfect. Casual. Believable. Now I wait. It’s going to be a tough one.
That done, I log back in to Sally’s profile.
There’s a message from Tilly, rambling on about something or other.
Some issue she’s got with her husband, who is fifteen years older than her.
Tilly is Sally’s closest friend. A best friend adds to the veracity of Sally’s profile, and she can always rely on Tilly to step up to the mark, commenting on each new post with an abundance of exclamation marks, Liking every status update, sometimes posting something funny to Sally’s timeline.
Having someone real as a friend relieves the pressure on me to constantly generate believable content.
I keep Tilly sweet by listening to her insensitive complaints about her husband, though frankly it sounds as though she has it good.
He’s older than her, sure, and she does like to go into detail about his old-fashioned habits in the bedroom, but he sounds committed.
Like he’s a good father to their two children.
Which, from experience, is not always a given.
She’s a good distraction, though, so—to keep my mind off waiting for Catherine’s response—I tap out a sympathetic reply and watch as those three dots bounce along the bottom of the screen.