Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  There was at least one cafe on Brunswick Street, ground zero of the then-revolutionary ‘breakfast all day’ menu, where they’d poach dozens of eggs the night before the craziness of weekend brunch service. They’d leave them in a vat of iced water, bobbing around like so many silicon breast implants. Chef’s job was to ‘refresh’ them to order. Nice. Add a slice of toast and some limp spinach and that’ll be $15, sir.

  Anyway, Mo’s poached eggs were little more than a rock-hard yolk with the memory of the whites fluffed grimly around it. It was an act of awe-inspiring chutzpah simply to put the plate in front of someone. They’d usually look up in dismay. Unsurprisingly they’d often ask to send it back. They weren’t to realise, although I was painfully aware, that Mo was in the kitchen sweating out the toxins after a big night at the casino and/or the strip club, and swearing his head off every time another order came in. Mo knew he couldn’t poach eggs. That was why they weren’t on the menu, and didn’t I fucking know not to let anyone order them even if they were a regular fucking customer? Okay, so I was a bit of a softie in that department. My bad.

  So here’s my advice to any waiter in this situation: nod in a polite but non-committal fashion, turn, walk off, and act really, really busy. Sure, the customer will summon you back if they’re of a determined frame of mind, but work on the assumption that most people don’t like to make a fuss. Steel your resolve with the knowledge that a psychology study proved Australian diners are practically allergic to anything approaching confrontation. A couple of actors pretending to be waiters staged an escalating series of rows to judge the response from customers. By the end the actor-waiters were yelling and throwing things at each other, and still the diners kept their eyes politely averted from the action.

  Why? Because most people have been raised to think it’s uncool to raise a fuss. This plays right into the hands of the typical waiter, for whom ‘whatever’ is the default position.

  It backs up my experience that nine out of ten diners will accept defeat, complain bitterly among themselves, pay the bill and never return. You won’t get a tip, of course, but foregoing a few bucks is good value, in my book, if it means escaping a major bollocking from Vlad the Kitchen Impaler.

  I have described the inner workings of restaurants in the harshest of terms. I have described them as places of siege, where the soul goes to shrivel and die. Yet love blooms in the unlikeliest of places. When I think of the good that can come of the industry, I think of Kelli and Will. A couple that should never have been. A couple that defied the odds and won.

  She: the 41-year-old waitress who had been at the Duke the longest. Not to be messed with. Trapped in a loveless marriage with a husband whose idea of a good time was to lie in a darkened room listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

  He: the hospo brat. The 22-year-old son of one of the Duke’s owners. Overly fond of motorbikes, but on the whole a sweet young man working his way through university.

  They should have been oblivious to each other. A negative charge repelled by a positive. At most they should have politely nodded across the nineteen-year age gap.

  But it was the closeness of the working arrangements that started it. You squeeze past someone in the line of duty enough, you’re going to start wondering what they look like with their clothes off. Plus it was reported to Will by his workplace spies that the sexy older waitress had declared, ‘I’ll have a crack at that boy.’ It was a drunken fit of pique about having to listen to all that Pink Floyd, but it helped light the spark. He’d only just lost his virginity, to a different waitress at the Duke. He liked to keep things in-house.

  Things were moving in an arse-grabbing-behind-the-bar direction when Will called her one day to say his mum had gone out. Strange words for a 41-year-old married woman to hear, but it wasn’t exactly an everyday sort of situation. So Kelli headed over to Will’s mum’s house, taking with her two of those small bottles of Champagne with straws in them because someone told her you get drunker if you drink it through a straw, and she needed to be drunk. They had sex for the first time in his single bed.

  After that—game on. ‘We had sex at work everywhere. On the staff meal table, upstairs in the function room, out the back. The only thing out of bounds was the boss’s chair. That would just have been weird.’

  The world isn’t kind to a couple who defy expectations. Grappling with anxiety, Kelli saw a therapist, who yelled at her for being unfaithful to her husband. Perhaps not the world’s greatest therapist. She and the hospo brat kept their relationship under wraps for more than a year until enough people started guessing and eventually another of the owners warned darkly that if the rumours turned out to be true, Kelli would be looking for a job. No older waitress messed with a Duke scion without getting her come-uppance.

  The truth has a funny way of wriggling out and in this case it was Ben who accidentally dropped the news to Will’s dad. I know people often say they ‘accidentally’ dropped some incendiary piece of top-secret information when they’re actually inveterate gossips, but in this case it was true. Lucio had only recently suffered a severe stroke that left him talking slower than a one-fingered typist. He’d had a minor stroke a decade earlier, at the tender age of thirty-two, but didn’t pay it any heed. Kept smoking and drinking and generally carrying on as if he was an indestructible teenager who’d snuck into the Playboy mansion while Hugh Hefner was off getting a prostate examination.

  It was instinctive to try to prod the conversation along a little to help him out, but one day Ben prodded it along a little too much. Bear in mind that Lucio was a proud Italian man who prior to his stroke had enjoyed an energetic love life. Every week he’d be in the bistro with a different woman. They were always glamorous. Always young. Sometimes two of them. ‘Parmigiana for dessert tonight, boys,’ he’d crow. That’s top-secret Italian man-code for ‘Look who’s about to get a threesome: jealous much?’ But by this stage, although he could think straight enough, he couldn’t get the words out. All he could do was look helplessly at Ben—shocked, outraged—visibly struggling to form the words clawing for release from his skull.

  ‘. . . Kelli . . .?’

  ‘. . . Duke . . .?’

  ‘. . . Old . . .?’

  Nine years later he’s still not reconciled to his only son being with a woman almost two decades his senior. But Ben’s been vindicated for his loose lips. All that Dark Side of the Moon is only a bad memory. Kelli and Will are now living together and happily waiting on the arrival of their new broadband connection: ‘High-speed porn, babe, high-speed porn!’

  And for Ben and me? Our ending was less sunset-over-water, although my rival in the love stakes turned out to be not another woman but a pub. In fairness to him, he had tried his best but we had reached an impasse. There are only so many times you can fight with your beloved at work then make up in the coolroom before it gets really depressing.

  So Ben did what men (and women) have done for time immemorial when they want to deliver bad news. He took me to an expensive restaurant.

  I’ve seen plenty of people break up in restaurants. Couples break up in restaurants all the time. From the dumper’s point of view, they’re a relatively safe place where the throwing of plates and yelling of insults is far less likely to occur than if the news was delivered in the privacy of one’s own home. For the dumpee, the only consolation is this rule of thumb: the more expensive the restaurant, the more significant the relationship. If you can count your wedding anniversaries on two hands and get the flick at Sizzler, consult your lawyer.

  It was a nice restaurant. Nicer than any restaurant I’d been in up until that point. And Ben was sweating bullets. I actually thought with a little ‘squee!’ of excitement that he might be about to propose. But instead he dropped a bombshell. ‘It’s not working out.’

  Perhaps he could have phrased it better. It was a relief to find out after intensive questioning that he meant the job. Not us. We were still on. It was the Duke that was getting rid of me
. He was merely its emissary, delivering painful news while still hoping I would accompany him home that evening. What a hoot. It will be something we laugh about in the future. Maybe sometime around 2045. Anyway, years later, when he did actually propose, in a carpark next to a dumpster on the eve of Bin Day, it was an endearing flipside to the romantic scene in which he dumped me professionally.

  So Ben gave me a reference and sent me out to make my own way in the world. Did I resent him for choosing his career over his girlfriend? Well, maybe, just a little, although it was tempered by the self-awareness that I was patently rubbish. And I suspect, although he denies it to this day, considering what later transpired there, that he got me my next job at another shiny gastropub known as the Rising Star. He also quite possibly intervened on several occasions to stop them firing me. But that’s just a hunch. He ain’t talking.

  These days hospitality and I have reached a truce in our battle over Ben and settled for a slightly resentful ménage à trois. We share him, although which of us has the better part of the deal I really can’t say.

  — 11 —

  THE DARK ARTS OF PERSONAL ADVANCEMENT

  The casual observer would have noted the two police cars parked haphazardly out front as a dead giveaway that something was wrong. Maybe the shatter of glass from the pub’s door, a glittering arc splayed on the footpath in a tableau of arrested energy. But to the initiate there was one herald of disaster even more glaring—it was early morning, and George was there. This was an event unusual bordering on unthinkable, because George was never early. George was never even on time. George was always late, although in the unfailingly positive self-appraisal of the Rising Star’s owner, he could never be late because whatever time he showed up was the perfect time. George was like that.

  I said ‘owner’ but really he was forced to share the title with two other guys. Co-owner: that pesky little prefix was the handbrake on an ego that would happily have gone careening down a hill like a runaway truck and come to a fender-crunching halt in a glorious pile of money. Oh yes, the Rising Star—more commonly known among its ratbag staff as the Rising Damp—was a flourishing business. It must have pained George to share custody, but the consolation was that he held the royal flush because he was the only one with industry experience. The other two were old buddies from the ’hood. Wog boys done good. In construction and real estate. Money to burn.

  George was the hands-on owner. The evil overlord, although his business card actually said general manager. The other two left him to it, more or less. They were your Type-B pub owners. Guys who got into it for the boasting rights, to make a bit of extra cash and to pick up chicks. Not necessarily in that order.

  Dan was an electrician by trade who’d stitched up a sweet deal with one of those construction giants that bash up thirtystorey apartment towers in a few months that start falling apart a few weeks after the owners move in. Dan, Dan, ladies’ man. He thought he looked like Liam Neeson although he wasn’t so bold to come right out and say it. ‘Some people think I look like Liam Neeson,’ was his far subtler tactic for introducing the idea that he was movie-star handsome. Tables of women would sit looking at him slightly befuddled—he looked like Liam Neeson only if you squinted really hard and tilted your head to the right while drinking a second espresso martini—but when they found out he was an owner of the joint, they’d often switch on that invisible sign above their heads that said ‘open for business’.

  The other owner was Tommaso, the head of the construction company that contracted Dan, destined to be his wingman forevermore. Not much to say except that he was a decent guy with an interesting taste in friends.

  George liked being called Boss. The arse-licker head chef Damien complied, but everyone else called him Bubbles. Behind his back, of course, but it was uncannily fitting. Bubbles was the name for a small, inconsequential lapdog. Truth be told, if George was a dog he would have been more of a basset hound—all jowly, with dark baggy pouches under his eyes to match his rumpled, baggy body. His toenails were downright frightening. Gnarled claws the colour of a dying person’s urine, stepped with thick, horned ridges. It was deeply disturbing when he wore sandals in summer. They were a moving violation. A walking occupational health and safety issue. Any customer catching sight of those gruesome digits would immediately cancel their order for the fried calamari, but it didn’t matter in the long run because the Rising Star was bulletproof. They’d hit the jackpot. George had been in the industry for three decades and at various times he’d owned some big-name nightclubs and pubs, but he’d never had anything like this.

  George was one of those figures well known within the industry and not without. Neither a bottom feeder nor a whale, he was a practical fish that sticks to the temperate mid-depths where the middle class likes to swim. That was the Star. Immediately beloved by the people who had priced the suburb out of the reach of its old guard of immigrants, factory workers, bohemians and uni students, it overlooked a park the council had decreed, via Local Ordinance 2.9, be referred to as ‘leafy Barton Square’ in all subsequent mentions in the local newspaper. Up the road there was a chemist riding a two-speed economy, slinging blood pressure medication to stressed professionals and methadone to the junkie underclass stacked into the nearby council towers. The more entrepreneurial ones would duck into the cobblestone alleyway to spit their daily ration of green gunk into a cup to on-sell for profit. It was what passed for spectator sport while setting up at the Rising Damp, lugging tables and umbrellas outside for another day’s bruschetta madness. Inside it was the usual story. A glossy curved bar hugged by the bustling bistro. Timber, gloss, glossy timber, mwah, mwah, mwah. The far end of the bar was the invisible start of the restaurant proper, where linen was laid on the tables, garnishes were more extravagant and prices were 20 per cent higher.

  * * *

  IZZY

  I was working in a fancy restaurant that had a really strict staff drinks policy. Zero tolerance, which was seen by most of the staff as a personal challenge. We drank a ridiculous amount of great wine so it wouldn’t look like too much of any one thing was missing. It was back in the day when there wasn’t a computer stock system, just a book and a pencil. So we’d constantly adjust the stock levels and usually drink there until dawn at the end of each working week.

  * * *

  And they got it for a song. An absolute song. It pains me to think of it. May everyone in the restaurant trade pause to whisper a prayer for similar good fortune.

  And now, as the Tuesday after a long weekend dawns over leafy Barton Square, we find Bubbles’ black Holden Statesman parked in the disabled spot across the road while its owner paces the street and sucks another Dunhill down to the butt.

  Upstairs his office is in its usual state. Translation: it looks as though a gang of union heavies has done a run-through with a baseball bat. The ashtray hasn’t been changed in a week. For a committed chain-smoker it means the paperwork strewn across every available surface is covered in a fallout of soft grey ash. The cleaner was never allowed into the office. Trust wasn’t Bubbles’ strong point.

  His cleanliness-is-next-to-slovenliness mantra is not what has attracted the local constabulary, however. On this particular morning there is a large safe-sized hole where the safe used to be. Overnight it has been jackhammered out of the fireplace into which it had been cemented, dragged to the stairs, and surrendered to the laws of gravity. It must have weighed 250 kilos, easy. It bounced off the walls, punching a couple of safe-sized holes into the plasterwork as a memento as it passed through en route to the ground floor. Next to the smashed-in front door, the alarm system has been disabled. Don’t go imagining some crack team of career criminals going all heist-movie on it, abseiling through the roof while sinuously avoiding the laser movement sensors. All they had to do was switch it off at the power point, which was conveniently located next to the unit on the wall. Security at the Rising Damp left a little to be desired.

  George was inexplicably nervous, like an o
ld woman at a bus stop. Pacing, sweating, clutching his ciggies for comfort. One can only speculate. He was going through a messy divorce. That safe, to which he alone possessed the combination, would have been the ideal place to hide tens of thousands of dollars in cash from the prying eyes of his soon-to-be ex-wife’s lawyers. Money that he wouldn’t be able to declare to the insurer because it was money that didn’t officially exist. Maybe there was other phantom money residing in that safe. Maybe there was money skimmed off the Star’s profits that his business partners remained blissfully unaware of. Yes, that could have explained his nervous cigarette smoking. Nothing stings quite so sharp as being robbed of the proceeds of crime.

  So how did this brazen band of criminals manage to spirit away a massively heavy hunk of metal? It’s a mystery. There was no CCTV footage. They must have jacked it into a truck and taken it off for a loving date with a blowtorch. The cops never discovered if it was an inside job. Someone obviously knew the safe was full after a festive three days’ holiday trade. Not that hard to figure out, really, but did I mention they’d had another business partner, at the very beginning? A guy who only lasted a few months before a mysterious falling out. He owned another restaurant up the road. Occupying a less prominent place on his CV was the fact he’d also done time for armed robbery. Anyway, someone knew what was sitting there after a hectic long weekend. A whole lot of lovely money. I wonder if the culprit took a leaf out of Scrooge McDuck’s book and rolled around in it joyfully, like a dog in cow shit. I would have, if it was me, but unfortunately the Great Safe Heist of ’96 remains unsolved.