by Danny King
‘I see. And is your granny still alive today?’ Charley fished, sensing a clue in my shpiel.
‘No, unfortunately,’ I said sadly. ‘No, she was shot down on a routine reconnaissance mission over Biggin Hill.’
Charley blinked a couple of times but resisted the temptation to ask me if I was serious.
‘Anyway, what about you?’ I countered. ‘When was the last time you… er…’
‘Got banged?’ Charley finished for me.
‘I wouldn’t have put it quite like that.’
‘Oh yeah, so how would you have put it?’ she asked.
I thought for a moment.
‘Got done,’ was the term I finally plumped for.
‘Nice,’ she said.
‘Yeah, anyway, how long is it since you last got done?’
Charley gave that one some thought, then said that perhaps it was best if we didn’t play this game after all, presumably because she somehow knew that this was the answer that would rob me of the most nights’ sleep in the weeks to come.
That put a nice little awkward crimp in the conversation and neither of us knew what to say next for a few moments, so instead we just lay there, gently stroking each other’s skin with our fingers and sinking into the lilac pillows.
After a while, Charley turned one of my hands over in hers and examined it.
‘You have very big hands,’ she said, squeezing my fat fingers and prodding my calluses.
This had been pointed out to me by girls before, usually in a ‘urgh, aren’t your hands rough and horrible’ kind of way, so it was something I was a tad self-conscious about.
‘Sorry,’ I automatically apologised, worried that she was angry with me for sandpapering her tits for the last twenty minutes.
‘No, don’t apologise, I like them. They’re men’s hands.’ She then went on to tell me about some solicitor bloke she once went out with who used to have hands spindlier than hers and who used to moisturise three times a day with hand cream.
‘It actually got a bit creepy him touching me. My friends all said he had a handshake like a wet fish.’
I didn’t even know wet fish shook hands, but I liked that Charley liked my hands, though in all honesty they were just the product of fifteen years of handling bricks. I wasn’t genetically any more manly than her solicitor mate, if that’s what Charley was getting at, and I’m sure if he ever got a job with us he’d soon sling his hand cream in the bin when he saw the benefits of having hands your could put your fags out on.
I told Charley about when I’d first started on the sites as a teenager. Back then I’d had kid’s hands, as kids tend to have, and for the first couple of weeks I went through agonies I can’t even begin to describe as my fingers found themselves a long way from the classroom. Those first couple of weeks, everything I touched hurt, especially in the evenings after work. I couldn’t even pick up a cup of tea without shrieking in pain and my old man used to love the nightly spectacle of watching me trying to eat my dinner without using a knife and fork. Then the next morning it would start all over again. Bricks, blocks, scaffolding poles and planks, each one feeling like someone had wrapped it in barbed wire overnight.
‘You should’ve just worn gloves,’ Charley said, like this had never occurred to me.
‘You can’t, even a good pair of gloves falls to bits after a week or so, and even when they’re new, grit always finds a way inside the fingers, especially in the winter when everything’s wet, you can’t avoid it. You might as well go through the agonies and let them toughen up.’
I wondered why I was telling her this. Was I trying to impress her with more tales of dare-doing, like the scaffolding collapse adventure from earlier on, or was I simply colouring in a little more of my background for her? Probably a bit of both, if the truth were to be told, though it’s always nice when people show an interest in your life and the things you’ve done, even if these things are pretty ordinary.
‘Well, I like your hands,’ Charley said, giving my fat sausage fingers a little kiss. ‘I like them a lot.’
‘That’s good, because my hands like you,’ I replied, returning her kiss.
Before setting my hands to work again.
8 The greaseless spoon
I’ve never really liked Sundays. I think it has something to do with all the Sundays we had to endure as kids. When there was nothing to do because nothing was open and no one was ever around, primarily because Sunday dinner time is bang smack in the middle of the afternoon, where no meal has any right to be, let alone an enormous great one like Sunday’s, with peas, carrots, cauliflower and cabbage piled sky high, all boiled and about as appetising as my bedroom a couple of hours later.
And there was never anything but a load of old depressing dregs on the telly: Songs of Praise, The Antiques Roadshow, Last of the Summer Wine and All Creatures Great and Small, all topped off with That’s Life! It certainly was and a miserable one at that for most of us until the nineties came along and someone had the stunning idea of actually opening a few places on our national day off so that we didn’t have to sit around staring at the wall and sobbing quietly about the prospect of work or school the next day. We could go to the pub, go to a restaurant, go to the pictures, watch the football or even do a bit of shopping if we were so inclined. Suddenly we had a choice. Naturally there were a few miserable old gits who thought it was their divine right to tell the rest of us what to do and lobbied to ‘keep Sundays special’, but they were massively outnumbered by the dancing majority who were just thankful to finally have something to do to take our minds off our fucking Mondays.
Still, I think all this came just a little too late for me to ever be able to fully appreciate them. The rotten, miserable, dreary Sundays of my youth were just too deeply ingrained on my psyche so that it didn’t matter how many bowling alleys opened up near my house, I could never fully shake off that overwhelming sense of wall-climbing lethargy that hung around my neck all day long and went off the dial if I turned on the box and found Ski Sunday on.
That said, this particular Sunday certainly went a long way to redress a lot of that wrong when I opened my eyes and found Charley purring gently beside me. She looked even lovelier than she had done that first morning I’d woken up next to her, though maybe that had something to do with the fact that I knew she wasn’t a prostitute and stinging me five hundred quid for the privilege.
A slow stirring soon turned into a stretch then Charley sent her limbs to the four corners of the bed and let out a yawn that sounded like Bambi desperately screaming for help as she was strangled in an icy stream. Don’t ask me how I know that, by the way.
‘Morning,’ she said, when she opened her eyes and noticed me staring down at her.
‘Morning,’ I replied, as I watched her rein in her arms and drag my neck with them. I was just starting to wonder what a bloke had to do to get a cup of tea around here when Charley let me in on the secret.
‘Put the kettle on, will you?’
Of course, it was suddenly so obvious.
I got out of bed, pitter-pattered barefoot to the kitchen and looked through a few cupboards. I had no problem finding Charley’s English breakfast tea, but then that was only because there was hardly anything for it to hide behind. She had a jar of coffee in there next to the tea, a few tins of tuna, a bag of pasta and six – yes, count them – six half-finished boxes of Weetabix.
In the fridge, a splash of milk, a dollop of butter, a few jars of pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and an assortment of condiments, but there was nothing you’d really call food in there. There was certainly nothing I’d call food in there.
She didn’t live on this stuff, did she?
I wasn’t sure. I also wasn’t sure I fancied my chances of getting any breakfast this morning.
‘Tea up,’ I said, returning to the bedroom and handing Charley a steaming hot cup of English breakfast.
‘Oh, it’s a bit strong, isn’t it? Can I have a drop more milk in mine, please?’
‘Oh yeah, I think I need to do a shop,’ she remembered.
‘No, I think you needed to do a shop six weeks ago,’ I corrected her. ‘This goes beyond needing a shop. What the hell do you eat in the evenings?’
‘I don’t know; pasta, Weetabix, that sort of thing,’ she told me.
‘I usually eat with friends quite a lot too,’ she then said, filling my head with visions of skinny posh girls sitting around on crates eating handfuls of dried cereal straight from the box.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll treat you to a slap-up café breakfast a little later if you like,’ I told her. ‘Before that, though, why don’t you put your tea down?’ I suggested, then slid back into bed beside her.
Charley took me up on both offers and forty minutes later… sorry, I mean an hour and a half later, we were walking down Upper Street keeping our eyes peeled for eggs and bacon.
We passed a perfectly decent-looking café along the way but Charley dragged me straight on past it and reassured me that she knew a much better place a little farther down the road.
That was fine with me. I had my own particular favourite café in Catford that wasn’t the closest one to where I lived but it was worth the extra two minutes in the car for the grub they slopped out.
That said, the Funky Zebra looked a different kettle of sausages altogether.
‘Is this a café?’ I asked in confusion when Charley pushed the door to go inside. ‘It looks more like a cake shop.’
‘Come on,’ she simply told me.
Inside, the place looked even less like a café than it had done outside. The walls were lined with books, there were enormous great overgrown plants in every corner and a coffee machine the size of the Tardis off up near a big bright deli counter. What was most weird, though, was the fact that there was hardly anywhere to sit. Don’t get me wrong, it was a roomy enough place in itself, but all it had were six little silver tables, each surrounded on all sides by big leather armchairs that seemed to fill the room, occupied by roll-neck-wearers who looked in no particular hurry to say goodbye to their empty plates. There was also a queue.
Five other couples waited patiently to be seated while the tossers at the tables folded and unfolded dirty great broadsheets and drank little thimbles of jet-black coffee.
How I didn’t start tipping people out of their seats and slapping glasses off faces after five minutes of clock-pointing is beyond me.
‘This place is really popular,’ Charley told me.
‘Yeah, I can see why. It’s great, isn’t it?’ I replied after another five minutes of holding my empty guts.
We finally got seated a full fifteen minutes after arriving. Some gormless Janet- and John-a-likes finally folded their papers away and started putting their coats on. I charged straight over before any of the smart bastards behind us decided they’d quite like to start their Sunday with a smack in the gob, but unbelievably the moment I appeared, Janet and John suddenly went into first gear, John tying and untying his scarf half a dozen times in an effort to get it just right, while Janet sat back down and made a phone call on her mobile.
‘Are you two going or what?’ I finally had to ask.
I couldn’t understand how they hadn’t noticed the half-dozen people patiently waiting to be seated when neither of the inconsiderate fuckers had been distracted by cutlery for the last twenty minutes.
‘In our own time,’ John haughtily replied. He should’ve got one straight in the chops just for that, but he was lucky, Charley was standing just behind me, and I didn’t want her thinking I couldn’t go anywhere without threatening to punch somebody’s lights out, so I simply hovered over the pair of them, folded my arms and started whistling.
And I ain’t very good at whistling.
I didn’t get more than a verse into ‘Hit The Road, Jack’, before Janet and John decided to do just that before any more spit landed down the backs of their necks and finally we had a table. Charley cast me a disapproving look as we sat down, but really she should’ve been casting it Janet and John’s way. Surely they were the ones in the wrong, not me.
For a moment I wondered if chronic inconsideration was some sort of class thing. I mean, first that dickhead in the Workers’ Social and now this. Perhaps these spoilt little posho brats were so used to getting their own way all the time that they’d never had to learn basic consideration for others and the higher they climbed up the social ladder, the more they used their elbows on everyone else.
It was a possibility, but I wasn’t really buying it. Charley wasn’t like that, just as I’m sure a lot of middle-class poshos weren’t.
If anything, I reckon it was more to do with the fact that most people in these places were probably just a bit too polite for their own good to say anything, so all the me-first merchants knew they could get away with it. Neither this place nor the Workers’ Social looked like the sort of place you’d worry about getting your eyes blacked in so what was there to stop a selfish git from doing a bit of queue-jumping or table-hogging if they were so inclined? Not a lot that I could see, but sooner or later they’d do it to the wrong person. It always happens. I’ve seen it dozens of times before and no doubt I’ll see it dozens of times again. You simply can’t get away with being a wanker for ever. It’s a basic rule of life. So why not show everyone else a bit of common consideration and save the already overburdened NHS the trouble of having to put your face back together when some mental Jock on his football travels blunders into the Funky Zebra looking for a deep-fried Mars bar?
‘Sorry, but I thought he was off and he only sat back down when he saw me coming over as a sort of fingers-up at me,’ I explained.
‘Well, people feel intimidated when they’re being rushed,’ Charley replied, and I wanted to ask her if they also felt intimidated when they were being launched head first through plate-glass windows, but I already knew the answer to that one.
‘Anyway, what shall we have?’
I looked at the menu and found a full English at the top of the page.
‘Do you like eggs Benedict?’ Charley asked.
‘Yeah, which one was he again? Face in The A-Team, wasn’t he?’ I replied, made up by the fact that someone had finally asked me this question a mere twenty years after I’d first thought up the accompanying gag.
Charley had never seen The A-Team and didn’t know what I was talking about so she pointed it out on the menu and asked me again if I liked them.
‘No,’ I told her, then added, ‘Don’t know. Never had it.’
‘Well, how do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never had it?’ she asked.
‘I’ve never been run over by a dumper truck either but I know I probably wouldn’t like that,’ I reasoned.
‘What sort of answer’s that?’ Charley asked.
‘My final one,’ I informed her.
‘Well, it’s your loss, because it’s delicious,’ she pointed out, presumably to try and break my spirits. ‘Go on, why don’t you have it?’ she then went on, tapping my menu with hers.
As much as I liked Charley, I didn’t want to get browbeaten into having something horrible to eat that I didn’t want to eat when I’d already lined up my taste buds for a full English. At the same time, though, I didn’t want Charley to go off thinking I was just some big dummy who hadn’t made it past Farley’s rusks yet either, so I quickly weighed up my options, tutted a few times, wobbled my big fat lip, then told her, ‘OK, I’ll have the eggs Benedict with you, then.’
‘I’m not having the eggs Benedict,’ she told me.
‘You’re not? I thought you were.’
‘No, I’m having the haddock and eggs Florentine,’ she said, almost knocking me off my chair in disgust.
‘Urgh, what the hell’s that?’ I heaved, my eyes scampering back down the menu in horror. Charley reached over and pointed it out to prove that she hadn’t just made up some disgustin
g concoction to laugh at my reaction.
‘There.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ I double-checked.
‘Of course I’m not,’ she assured me, and I almost honked up all over the table when I saw that it had cream and spinach in it as well as haddock. No, surely that wasn’t right? People really ate that?
‘What’s it like?’ I asked warily.
‘I don’t know,’ Charley replied.
‘What? You mean you haven’t even had it before?’ I gasped in astonishment, my revulsion skyrocketing by the second.
‘No, but it sounds lovely.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ I had to point out. ‘Don’t have it. It’ll be horrible.’
‘Don’t you like smoked haddock?’ Charley asked.
‘God, no,’ I replied.
Charley thought for a moment then asked me if I’d ever actually had it. What a question! Of course I hadn’t.
‘Then once again, how do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never had it?’ she asked, and for a moment I shat myself thinking she was going to make me have a plate-load of that filth just to teach me a lesson.
‘Look, I know what I like and I know what I don’t like. And I just like bacon and eggs,’ I explained in my defence.
‘Well, it’s got eggs in it.’
‘Yeah, and fish and spinach. You drop either of them on my dinner and see how fast you get it back. And these are in my breakfast!’
Charley almost laughed. Almost, but I’m not sure she entirely knew what she was laughing at.
‘You don’t like spinach?’
‘Urgh, no, I don’t,’ I told her.
‘And have you ever actually had it?’ she asked, sensing a pattern.
‘Yes, actually, I have,’ I replied, shooting the pants out of that particular theory.
