Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  ‘I’m taking orders,’ I said.

  ‘I did not hear you taking orders,’ Suzanne said, almost quivering with rage, ‘I heard you giving orders. I heard you telling them what they should choose. As if they couldn’t decide for themselves. How dare you?’ And then she said, ‘I can’t possibly let you speak to customers. You’d better go and wash up.’

  So that was my last day at Mumbo Jumbo. I was running out of road.

  Yet two days later I got a job at a restaurant called Starlight. The walls were lavender grey with thin silver stripes, and hung with black-and-white photographs of film stars like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. On each white tablecloth was a glass vase with a single white tulip. This restaurant was run by a husband-and-wife team: Chris, who was the head chef and ran the kitchen; and Rebecca, who ran the dining floor and was maître d’. I didn’t have much experience, I told Rebecca, but I was eager to learn. She showed me where everything lived, the glasses, the cutlery, the corkscrews, and how she liked the tables to be laid. She took me into the kitchen and introduced me to Chris and the other two chefs and the guy who was washing up. There were three other waitresses and a wine waiter, and she told me that we shared the tips equally. This was a completely new experience. Chris went through the menu with me and described each dish. Everything was spotless; the fridge was spotless, the floor was spotless, the cookers were spotless. I would spend the first night just learning and helping the other waiters, Rebecca said.

  I concentrated hard. I watched the other waiters carry three or four plates at a time. I helped in the kitchen, and then Rebecca asked me to go to a table of two to get the orders for desserts. That night there were no awful stories for the chefs at Le Gourmet. Things were looking up. It seemed I’d finally got a decent job after all.

  Jonathan was also enjoying his job, and so I began working five shifts a week at Starlight, with only the odd slip-up to report. There was a bit of coffee-cup rattling – well, a lot of rattling when I learnt I had a food critic on my table – but although I was slower than the other waitresses, and a bit nervous, and my hands were still a bit inky, and my shoes a bit too practical, and I didn’t have the waitress-cool, and often had to ask twice what people had ordered, I was getting tips like the other waitresses, and nobody was getting cross with me, and after work we all sat together round a table with a cold beer.

  I had reached my record three weeks when one Friday night Starlight was fully booked, with two shifts on every table. The banker boys were in, and on one of my tables an exceptionally loudmouthed specimen was holding court and being the jock. Raewyn, one of the waitresses, knew him. ‘Hi Charlie,’ she smiled; he put his right arm round her waist and rested his head on her bosom. Then his arm slid down her back, and as he sent her off he patted her bum. I stiffened. Raewyn laughed and carried on with her tables. Charlie blew a kiss to his girlfriend sitting next to him. (At least I assumed she was his girlfriend, from the fact he had his left thumb slipped down the back of her trousers all this time.) A couple of minutes later Charlie grabbed another waitress and she smiled too.

  ‘Who’s the new girl?’ he asked, pointing at me. I gave a tight smile and backed into the kitchen to fetch nothing at all.

  ‘So, English girl,’ Charlie said, ‘you want our order, huh?’

  ‘If you’re ready.’

  ‘If you’re ready,’ Charlie mimicked. I smiled feebly.

  ‘If you’re ready. If you’re ready,’ he said, looking round at his table. They laughed. I stood there with my pad and pen.

  ‘I can come back later,’ I said.

  ‘I can come back later,’ Charlie mimicked. Everyone laughed again. I stepped back to move away.

  ‘Hey, where you going? We’re waiting to order!’ Charlie shouted. His table laughed, all eyes on me. I was the amusement.

  ‘What would you like?’ I turned to the woman on the opposite side of the table.

  Mistake.

  ‘What I would like,’ Charlie interrupted, ‘is a decent waitress.’

  I smiled, waiting, cheeks burning, with my pad and pen hovering.

  Charlie folded his arms, leant back in his chair, and then began to stare me out. ‘Well, well. What have we here, a little uptight English girl?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘Come here, English girl. Come here.’

  I walked round to stand at one side of him, just out of arm’s reach. He twisted his chair and gave me a once-over, up and down, like a market cow. My face was burning red. The table laughed. Then Raewyn called me aside and offered to take over the table.

  Every time I passed Charlie’s table, he made a snooty noise and talked loudly in an English accent. I kept my eyes averted. After service, Rebecca called me into her office.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. I sat down.

  ‘One of our customers has left a very large tip,’ she began.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is.’ And then she made a kind of grimacing face. ‘It has a condition attached,’ she said. ‘That on no account can it be shared with you. Can you explain this? What happened? What did you do?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, heart beating faster.

  I told her I didn’t think Charlie liked my accent much, and that I hadn’t played along with his bum-pinching. I asked her how much the tip was. She said it was $300. Between us that was fifty bucks each, a humungous amount. A fifty-dollar tip was a big deal. I felt shit; I felt that this was the first job I’d liked and that it would have been fun to share the big-tip bonanza. I shrugged. But it hurt, and was all the more galling because I thought it was a sly, cowardly way to get back at me. Rebecca said that sometimes customers were difficult, but that she and Chris were trying to launch their business and get a good reputation, and sometimes you just had to take things on the chin and be good-natured. Fine, I said, but he was being really obnoxious. She said she had no doubt he was, a lot of customers were obnoxious, but there were ways of dealing with them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jonathan said later. ‘You were right.’

  ‘It felt shit to be singled out like that. Why did he pick on me?’

  I slept badly, and all the next day the injustice kept circling, I couldn’t stop chewing it over. It really bugged me. But I still had a job, and the next night I was determined to be a really good waitress and that everything would go really well. Then who should walk in the door but toss-head Charlie with a different girl. The red mist came down. It just came down. Like cutting the cords of a venetian blind.

  ‘So it costs three hundred dollars to pinch bums, does it?’ I squared up to him. ‘Oh, I see we have a different girlfriend tonight. Different one every night, is it? How much does that cost? What happened to the other one? How does it feel to be such a big shot? With your show-off tips. As long as you can bully some defenceless waitress who can’t answer back. Well, I don’t give a shit about your tip,’ a statement which my outburst was certainly contradicting, ‘just buy everything! Bums. Revenge. Girlfriends. Friends. Laughs even. Buy them too.’

  A little audience was gathering. Charlie’s face was puce and stone at the same time. The new girlfriend’s face was puce too. ‘Get me the manager!’ Charlie exploded.

  Rebecca was on the scene in seconds, looking white and serious as she ushered them into her office. I began to gather my things. I felt strangely unburdened. Then Charlie and his date came out of Rebecca’s office, his lip curled sullenly as he walked past, and they left the restaurant.

  I sat meekly on the other side of Rebecca’s desk. I had been called into her office, and waited silently for the fait accompli. Rebecca was busying herself with her papers.

  ‘He wants you sacked,’ she said.

  I nodded sheepishly.

  ‘I’m not going to sack you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m not going to be told who to hire in my own restaurant.’

  ‘Really?’ I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Really,’ she
said.

  They were nice, Chris and Rebecca, and I did stay working at Starlight for at least three or four more weeks, but it was clear waitressing and I were not well matched. I was very bad at it. I just didn’t have the je ne sais quoi. I think you need to be a bit sassy to be a good waitress, to care enough but not too much, to have hands that don’t shake when you give a restaurant critic his coffee. Not to mention hands that are not covered in ink and fingernails that don’t contain half the garden. You need to be able to shrug it off, not seethe at night at bad manners or bad taste. You need to remember where you are and what you are doing, like where your tables are and who’s waiting for what, not daydream or get distracted by conversations happening elsewhere, or an idea that might suddenly switch on in your head. And you really shouldn’t be too nervous or too aggressive with your customers. And so it was that the night of socking-it-back to Charlie marked the beginning of the end of the end-of-service entertainment I was able to serve up to Warwick Brown and his chefs at Le Gourmet.

  THE TIDY HOUSE

  I had few possessions when I lived in West Cork in the 1980s, but those I had were precious to me. I existed frugally with my Egyptian boyfriend as we worked at odd jobs, painting, gardening, pulling carrots for a pound an hour, and moving from one rented cottage to another. After we parted ways, and I’d met Jonathan in London and got married – and before we left for his New Zealand homeland to meet his family and see his life – I had to pack up my things in Ireland and find somewhere to store them.

  It felt sad sorting through my paltry possessions. There seemed something so final about it, so end-of-an-era. Pleased as I was (and thankful) to have bagged such a happy soul, it was a wrench to be leaving Ireland, and every funny day I’d lived there came flooding back.

  I had loved it all. The wild winds that charged straight off the Atlantic; the glittering stippled sea beyond High Island and Adam and Eve, to Hare Island and the jutting Stags. I’d lived in houses beside castle ruins, on the edge of cliffs, with seagulls and gannets wheeling and peregrines hunting in the sky. I’d fallen asleep in sheltered gullies pin-cushioned with sea pinks. I had followed the band Toss the Feathers from bar to bar, watched Paddy Keenan fall off his stool playing his uillean pipes in late-night lock-ins at O’Briens, or Casey’s or Connolly’s, or the Skibbereen Eagle. I had been happy there. Swum the seas. Walked the fields. Foraged the hedgerows. Pulled carrots. Dug potatoes. Sung (my one song) at Connie Burns’ Station of the Cross when the priest came to say Mass and bless the house and the poteen came out and everyone got pie-eyed drunk. There was no better life. No better place. In my eyes, it was where I felt I could belong. The moment I landed on Irish shores my shoulders dropped three inches just with the relief of being there. And that was not just because of the twenty-four-hour journey from London’s Victoria Bus Station to Skibbereen in a smoke-filled Slattery bus.

  And now here I was, in my tiny rented cottage in West Cork, sitting amongst my few books, my cups and plates and saucepans, my clothes and towels and sheets, and a pile of newspaper and three empty tea chests, becoming quite maudlin over it. I had made Jonathan agree that we would come back in a year – maybe he could get a job on one of the commercial fishing boats out of Union Hall.

  I gave my writing desk away. I gave away my old sofa with the dropped arm. I gave away the counterpane off my bed. But there were some things I couldn’t give away. The miniature china tea set I’d had since I was four. A small Victorian toy seal, made, worryingly, now I contemplated it, from real seal fur. The box of treasures I had amassed from the archaeological excavations of my childhood in the garden of 75 High St, Fareham, where I grew up – flints, feathers, stones, birds’ eggs, a tiny glass perfume bottle, a glass poison bottle with POISON written on it, a meteorite, some gold bugs, four diseased leaves I had picked from a bush for their beauty and which still bore their kaleidoscope of fractal scars, and best of all, a clay pipe with a jester’s face moulded onto the front of the bowl, completely intact. I put the pipe to my nose, inhaled its chalky earth smell. And the Beatles cake decoration of the Fab Four with Ringo’s drum set and everything, which my mother had put on my eighth birthday cake, which she’d made in the shape of a guitar. There were the shells I found on Berria Beach in Spain, where we used to free-camp for a whole month every year on the dunes like gypsies, and where I had gone missing with my cousin, Tony, and my brother, Patrick, on the mountain by the beach (which probably isn’t quite a mountain if I were to see it now), and where we had stayed crouched in the undergrowth all night in case we walked off the cliff and into the sea. And then there was the embroidered Guatemalan huipile with the tropical flowers twining around the neckline, which I’d bought in a market near Lake Atitlán from an Indian women with betel-juice-stained teeth. And the woollen jacket with the emerald-green quetzal birds on the back that I wore riding on top of the train in the Andes from Riobamba past the snowcapped volcano of Cotopaxi. I know because there is a photograph of me wearing it, sitting on the corrugated roof at the end of the carriage by the brake, in one of my South American photo albums, which of course I also couldn’t throw away. And the Spanish fan a boy gave me in Barcelona, where I worked as an au pair in 1975. These weren’t just things. They were my life. The red Indian bead necklace from my first love, my grandfather’s tinted postcards of horses, from Kerry, before Dad was born, hundreds of them, which he gave me because I was horse-mad. These were things that fingerprinted moments in time, and transported me back to those moments. So I wrapped them up carefully. Three tea chests, heavy with history. And we nailed on the lids.

  It was a strange thing, that in all the space we had in West Cork – in our small community of fishermen and carpenters and painters and writers and poets and drop-outs and gardeners and expat English and Germans and Dutch living in old houses rebuilt from wet ruins purchased for very little – no one seemed to have any room. It was hard to believe. Maybe it was because we were an industrious lot: we stored vegetables and made wine, and smoked fish, and collected things, and rarely threw anything away in case it came in handy. So it was a hard task finding someone willing to store my three tea chests for a whole year. Eventually an English guy called Tim, who was caretaking Sean the electrician’s house while he was working in Dublin, agreed to let me put my tea chests in Sean’s attic, out of harm’s way. Jonathan heaved them up. My life. My fractal leaves. My clay pipe. My Guatemalan huipile.

  We said our goodbyes, sitting outside the Glandore Inn with pints lined up along the harbour wall. Then we tore ourselves away.

  It wasn’t a year, but a year and a half before we returned to Ireland. New Zealand and Jonathan’s family had been kind to us, we’d worked in different jobs (the good and less good); made friends; run a lunch bar together; we’d surfed and swum in the warm seas; barbequed fish on the beach; camped in the wilds; but I missed Ireland terribly. I missed the landscape, and my friends, and the craic, and oddly even the weather. So when our ferry slowly pulled into Cobh harbour I could have almost leapt off it. Ireland had become the promised land. Where I had put all my future dreams and all our hopes. I was eager to get back to my old haunts, have a drink in the pub, shop at Fuller’s in Union Hall, walk old paths, visit friends, find us somewhere to live, and retrieve my precious things.

  But for some reason Tim seemed oddly content to leave the tea chests exactly where they were. For the moment. He was not living in Sean’s house anymore. He was living in Declan’s house just down the road. And he now had a girlfriend, he told me; she was English too, and she had two kids.

  ‘An instant family,’ I said. ‘That’s great, Tim. Where is she?’

  ‘Well, we have sort of split up,’ Tim said. ‘Temporarily.’

  He was sitting in the glass porch of Declan’s house smoking roll-ups and chain-drinking cups of tea.

  ‘Getting back to the tea chests . . .’ I persevered.

  But Tim was too busy to sort it out right this minute. They were now at the back of Declan’s shed, which w
as full to the brim.

  And this went on. And on. Days slid into weeks. And every time I asked Tim if I could get my tea chests now, there was a hitch. It was never convenient. The shed was too full. The padlock was broken. The key was mislaid. He would fish them out. Soon. But not that day.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ he drawled, roll-up stuck to his bottom lip, making me feel all hasty and New World.

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to believe the padlock was broken, and I didn’t want to mar the picture I’d painted of my beloved place. But I was suspicious. Something was not quite right.

  ‘Something is not quite right,’ I finally admitted to Jonathan.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He won’t get my tea chests out.’

  ‘I’ll go round.’ This was the New Zealand way.

  ‘No, don’t.’

  ‘Then you go round, and tell him you’re not leaving until he hands them over.’

  I went round and told Tim I was not leaving until I got my tea chests, that I needed them, that waiting two months was long enough. Tim hung his head. He said he suspected things might have got a little damp. That mice might have got in. He fetched the chests.

  Carried them from the shed. Very easily. For they were very light chests now. Indeed, their lids had been levered off and splinters of plywood jagged away from the nails, forming rough wooden stars around the square rim. I peered inside. The silver-foil lining glinted and crackled emptily, torn shreds flopped sadly down. A couple of broken mugs floated amongst some old jumpers, photographs and torn books at the bottom, like bobbing potatoes in a stew. There was also a child’s sock. And a baby’s bottle.

  ‘Tim!’

  He hung his head some more.

  ‘Tim?’ My mouth was open. My mind was whirling. This was inconceivable to me. ‘What happened?’

  He went on the attack. ‘You went away.’

  ‘I told you I was going away.’

  ‘But you said a year.’