‘I told you, you daft cow – not where the customers can hear.’ The owner was overweight, short and balding, his arms covered with tattoos.
‘Don’t worry. They’re all too thick to understand plain English.’ Laura scooped up the burger and flicked it into the warming cabinet. ‘They shuffle up here every day, following the same routine that’s been programmed into them, and stare at me with their fat, stupid faces. And they knowingly risk growing extra breasts thanks to all the hormones stuffed into the shit you serve. You think they have the sense to listen to me?’
‘You’re well on the way to the sack.’
‘No, I’m not, because you couldn’t get anyone else to do this crappy job on the wage you pay, and you know it.’
The owner looked ready to punch Laura, but she pushed past him and stripped off her plastic apron. ‘Ten o’clock and all’s hell. That’s my shift over.’
‘This is your first warning!’ the owner bellowed after her as she marched out of the café and into the dingy side street not far from Northampton’s main shopping area.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she mumbled bitterly, battling down the self-loathing that threatened to break through every minute of every day.
The sodium glare of the street lamps made her feel worse. She wanted to be in a cool, dark wood looking up through the branches to glimpse a clear night sky. She wanted the scents of cooling vegetation, but all she could smell was the rancid odour of fat coming off her clothes.
She wondered where it had all gone wrong. She was sure she must have had dreams some time. Surely she hadn’t always planned on a career flipping burgers and a wage that was just enough to cover her rented bedsit in the shittiest part of town, but not enough to buy her time to look for better employment. Not that she had the qualifications to support it. She tried to recall the moment when everything had soured, but her past life was a blur of days in front of the hot griddle and it made her queasy just to consider it.
She didn’t have enough cash to get drunk or buy some drugs to expunge her thoughts. She was almost desperate enough to consider giving her dealer a blow job for some E.
In the window of the house where the old hippie woman lived, five candles burned. It wasn’t a particularly intriguing image, but it triggered odd stirrings inside her that she recognised with surprise as incipient excitement. As she watched, Hippie Helen appeared to extinguish one of the candles. Laura literally jumped with a surge of electricity that made her feel like sex. She got a strange itch in the tattoo on the back of her right hand – interlocking leaves in a circle – the one she didn’t remember getting.
‘Hi. How are you doing?’
She turned to see a smiling, handsome face.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to frighten you,’ the man said. ‘The name’s Rourke.’
11
Shavi should have gone home a long time ago, but these days it felt as if the offices of Gibson and Layton never closed. In the window he saw the reflection of a handsome Asian face framed by long black hair, a sad expression, a cheap suit; it was him, but not him, somehow. There were too many invoices to go through, too many columns to balance, the whole of the world broken down into numbers, profit and loss. Whenever he got to the end of one client file, another would appear as if by magic. It felt a little bit like purgatory.
Yet he had now managed to reach a state where he could immerse himself in the figures so fully that his tap-tap-tap on the calculator became a mechanical act, almost meditative. It allowed his mind to free itself and fly, considering what it might be like to live another life, one with meaning, where worthy deeds were done despite the danger.
And in that state he knew he was not a man who considered cash important. He had an extensive knowledge of diverse spiritual paths, though he had no idea how he had amassed it; his parents were strict in their observance and would not have condoned any study of other religions. It was one of many mysteries clustering around his life.
Everybody in the company recognised he was different. They never involved him in the office gossip or invited him for after-work drinks. The bullies amongst the staff saw his benign, thoughtful nature and mistook it for weakness, attacking him with a thousand barbs of pettiness every day. His resilience drove him through it easily, but it didn’t prevent the creeping depression. This was not the way life was supposed to be.
Just after ten and he was the last one in the office. He’d had enough. He pushed back his chair, stripped off his shoes and socks and put on his iPod, winding down before the journey home. The music drifted into his head, some Celtic house, some Balinese temple music, followed by Indian and African beats.