Chapter 2 Bess
Chapter two
Bess
Ihover in the opening between the café and the gallery, bored by the sluggish gallery foot-traffic and watch one of my café staff, Jeanette, clearing tables.
"Is it Classics Day over at the library or something?"
Jeanette glances at me in her mad rush towards a recently vacated table, puts the dirty crockery into a pile and pushes it to one side so she can clean the table's surface. She blows a strand of greying hair out of her eyes. "What? No. Why?"
She's wearing a dark green Victorian dress complete with lace collar, bustle and a multitude of tiny buttons up the front.
"No reason. Apart from the whole Little Dorrit thing you've got going on."
She peers down at her front and laughs. "Oh this." Jeanette’s laugh has the hint of a giggle to it, which is very sweet and endearing in a middle-aged woman. Given she laughs at nearly everything, Jeanette is sweet and endearing most of the time.
She balances the crockery in both hands and staggers towards the kitchen as if the whole thing weighs twenty pounds instead of her needing to compensate for the pile's lack of stability. "Just thought I'd air out my Sunday best."
Jeanette is a raging atheist and therefore has no need for a Sunday best, let alone a Victorian one, so it's anybody's guess as to what her proclivities might be on a Sunday. Playing parlour games, or steampunk karaoke maybe.
I've told her at least five dozen times not to hurry, and at least two dozen times more than that to bring a tray with her so that she doesn't make a liability of either herself or my not inexpensive serving ware, but Jeanette is admirably committed to chaos.
"I think you look very nice, Jeanette," says Lutek as only Lutek can. Lutek is exceptionally lovely to everybody, all the time, regardless of whether they deserve it or not. Even me.
He sensibly wears a black T-shirt, black jeans and a black barista's apron. Spooning some jam on top of a clotted-cream scone in the Devonshire way, he pushes it to the front of the counter.
"She looks very nice for someone happy to celebrate the repression of pre-suffrage women," I say to her disappearing back.
Lutek laughs. "Bess. Your brain is sharp as always. It's charming."
It's not charming. At best, it's on the abrasive side of moderately witty.
Either Lutek is dredging perilously close to a new 'insufferable' depth in his brand of niceness, or he's brown nosing on account of me being his boss and someone who scares him a little bit. I give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to be gracious. "Thank you, Lutek."
Jeanette takes longer than usual delivering her stack of used crockery. She is no doubt caught up in some minutia that has little consequence to the everyday running of the café, like arranging the goods in the refrigeration unit in colour order.
At some point she'll remember she has more important tasks, like serving customers, that are probably the priority and then the panic over the stuff that she now needs to urgently haul arse over will set in.
I sigh. I actually have nothing to do and could probably help out a bit.
The most exciting thing to have happened that morning since I emptied my water pistol into a couple of randy pubescents was the post-Story Time rush, which the café experienced and the gallery didn't.
A stroller filled with little, sticky, grabby hands has no place in a large room filled with pottery figurines and glass pendant earrings.
And thankfully everyone understands that without the need for me to glower passive-aggressively.
If I didn't own the gallery, I'm not sure I could justify my existence for the last two customer-free hours.
Picking up the scone Lutek's finished dressing, I take it to Carlos.
Carlos is our weekday regular, resident poet, and an original of the Port Derrum creative set.
The town, quaintly clustered between two headlands on the south Devon coast, has a reputation for nurturing the artistic temperaments of people like Carlos.
The rep is courtesy of the hippies that gravitated to the area in the 60s due to the notoriety of the 'shrooms that grew symbiotically with a particular species of tree in the Port Derrum woodland.
And also because of an earl who fancied himself a white Jimi Hendrix and the next great musical messiah.
He had land. He wanted followers. A commune was inevitable.
It also helped that his property bordered the mushroom-laced woodland, so it was win-win for everyone.
The commune no longer exists, but the mushrooms are a cottage industry now that everyone wants their drugs free-range and organic.
It isn't the only thing to have survived.
Just like all good cockroaches in any kind of political apocalypse – Thatcherism, Brexit – the artistic movement in Port Derrum refuses to roll over and die quietly despite everyone's best efforts.
If rural Devon is a great, white, Tory whale, Port Derrum is the rainbow barnacle stubbornly clinging to its left arse cheek.
"Darling girl," Carlos says as I place the scone on his table. "You bring light to a fractured and stultified world."
Ordinarily ‘Darling girl’ might trigger my allergy to being patronised, but because Carlos is very old, frequents my business more than anyone in Port Derrum, and like all nobs is an unconscious slave to the verbal tics of the very posh, I let it slide.
Also, I'm distracted by mentally noting to look up ‘stultified’ on my phone.
This is the problem with poets. They speak a language that's impenetrable to normal people.
"I'll have to take your word for it, Carlos."
He leans towards me and whispers, "You must know anything I say might convey the meaning inherent in the words. Or it might not."
I do know. Carlos likes to swing between the literal and cryptic to keep MI5 on its toes.
If MI5 were watching him, they would have given up years ago having never found the cipher to his baffling verbiage.
"See that woman there?"
Carlos nods towards the gallery.
There's no one in there.
"Which woman?"
"The one in the string bikini."
The only woman in a string bikini is one of Jeanette's whimsical pottery figurines that are surprisingly popular with London weekenders.
"She's been watching me ever since I got here. She's not even hiding it. Likes to wink at me whenever I look over."
Carlos is also on the neon end of the eccentric rainbow.
"Let me have a word with her," I say, intending to swivel the sculpture around so that she couldn't possibly be mistaken for a scantily-clad government operative.
As Jeanette scuttles past me with a plate that should hold an innocuous arrangement of standard-fare brunch food, one of the eggs twinkles, which is somewhat disconcerting.
I take the plate off Jeanette just as she's about to place it in front of the waiting customer and return it to the chef in the kitchen.
"Elly, in most parts of the universe, even the bits where unicorns frolic, eggs Benedict doesn't come with a garnish of orange and turquoise glitter. Call me fussy, but my expectation of a mouthful of egg white is that it doesn't crunch or turn the toilet bowl into a disco the next day."
I grab a spoon and do my best to remove the little shiny pieces without damaging the egg.
"I am a glitter artist, Bess," Elly says with solemnity and I almost do my best in trying not to roll my eyes, "who chefs as a day job. I find glitter under my toenails. There's going to be some collateral damage."
Elly’s toddler son, Jackson, adores all things glitter and so his mum decided to embrace his obsession as her artistic direction. Which is utterly delightful. Except for when it’s a major inconvenience.
She leans over an English breakfast to arrange the bacon, and several pieces of glitter wink at me from within the tight black curls of her hair.
"Not if you're wearing the hair cap I told you to wear there won't."
"I get a red line around my forehead. I look like I've just recovered from a frontal lobotomy."
I grab the box from a shelf, remove a cap and hold it out. "Put the cap on, Elly, or you'll be a glitter artist with no day job."
Elly continues to plate up. "I'm an ethical glitter artist. It's biodegradable, so it's probably edible."
I gather my strength. "Elly? Look at me."
She puts the pans in the sink and has the bad grace to place a hand on her hip.
"This is what I think of you prioritising your vanity over my business.
" I don't say anything else. I stare at her, gathering my features into the most meaningful I'm Not Impressed By Your Attitude look I've ever mustered.
I make it last a full thirty seconds, which is pretty impressive and should make Elly melt into a puddle of acquiescence.
Except she's an artist. And Gen Z. Which means she's both very precious about her medium and has no respect for authority.
Which then means all this amounts to is a staring contest.
Fortunately, thanks to having more eye degeneration than her due to my being older and thereby having to wear contacts, I win.
"Fine." She holds out her hand.
I slap a cap into her palm and turn to leave the kitchen. I throw, "Grow a fringe," as a parting comment.
Elly returns serve with a "Hello! Fro!" that I should have seen coming.
I return the eggs Benedict to the customer, apologise for the delay, and try to do some good service stuff like asking if there's anything else they need, because I begrudgingly value the profitability of the café part of my business highly. It's the bit that makes most of the money, after all.
The gallery does fine, but most of the general populace have a taste for tea and scones. Not all of them have a taste for the way in which Port Derrum’s often eccentric artistic community chooses to express itself.
“Ah, Bess?” says Lutek on my way back to the gallery. “Can I have a minute?”
I raise my eyebrows at him and walk in behind the café counter.