She was a good waitress, and I liked to watch her working. It pleased my eyes to follow her round the room, stopping only when she happened to look over in my direction. She could stack and carry heavy china plates like they were made of paper, and she could keep many different things in her mind at once: the menu for table twelve, the bread for table ten, the bill for table three, and the wine list for the man with the face like an aggrieved muskrat who was signalling at the table by the window.
She was friendly to customers almost all the time, but I saw her behave otherwise once with a man, a City type who had had too much to drink. He was with three friends at a table close to the bar, and all night they had been ordering successive bottles of a very expensive white wine. They had loosened their ties, and their voices became slightly slurred as they grew a little too loud. A jagged haze of noise surrounded them, the kind of noise that always set my teeth on edge.
As the wine flowed, they thought they would have a bit of fun with the waitress. Every time Eve brought them something they would quickly demand something else, ‘Oh, and more bread!’ or ‘Another bottle of mineral water!’ – stagily, like loud, capricious children with a powerless nanny.
With each demand, Eve’s manner grew one degree colder: slowly she was retreating into herself, the way Murdie used to when there was trouble at the Whistle.
She brought them another bottle of white wine, in an ice bucket. ‘Here comes the ice maiden!’ one of them shouted, a tall, sandy-haired type, his face lightly mottled with drink and excitement.
Eve smiled, but her smile was a sliver of frozen water. She had endured enough of them over the course of the evening. Sandy Hair could see the put-down in her smile: he was quick to spot the offence, in the way that drunks are quick.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked, in a bantering tone edged with aggression.
‘Eve,’ she said. She turned to go.
‘Eve!’ he said, loudly, and gave the abashed man next to him a little shove. ‘This bloke’s name is Adam. Really.’
‘Would you Adam-’n’-Eve it?’ chimed in a third man in a mock-cockney accent, his face shining at his own wit.
‘No,’ Eve said, still smiling thinly, ‘I wouldn’t.’ She turned again to go.
‘Will you bring Adam an apple?’ said Sandy Hair.
‘We don’t have apples.’
‘Not even an Adam’s apple? It looks like you have one.’ He peered showily at her throat, screwing up his eyes.
Two of the men laughed. One looked a little embarrassed. Eve stood there just staring at them, as though something had disconnected inside her. Sandy Hair perused the pudding menu, ostentatiously. Something in her reaction was disturbing and annoying him. He was struggling to keep his game in the air, to re-establish his authority.
‘Well, could I have an Apple Strudel with Glazed Caramel then, Eve,’ he said, sharply. She went to the kitchen to get it.
I watched her coming back with it: her body was stiff and her mouth was pinned into a tighter line. She set the strudel down in front of him.
‘This looks wonderful,’ said Sandy Hair. He took a spoonful quickly before she had time to leave.
‘It tastes so magnificent, I think my friend Adam would like one of these as well now, Eve, so hurry up,’ he said.
The exchange had lost all pretence of lightness. They stared at each other with hatred, like two battling cats. Somewhere along the line, with the ‘hurry up’, this had flared into war.
‘I don’t think he’s going to have one after all,’ Eve said, her face utterly impassive.
‘Why not? I’m paying the bill here.’
‘Yes, and you’re going to pay the bill now,’ she said with a terrible flatness, ‘because you’re ugly, and stupid, and rude, and there’s only so much shit that I’m prepared to take.’
The surrounding tables fell discreetly silent, the diners’ forks suspended halfway to their half-delighted, half-open mouths. But at Sandy Hair’s table the men had stopped laughing. Their round eyes were jerking over to her, and then back to him.
‘Get. Me. The. Manager,’ spat Sandy Hair. His face was rigid with anger. Eve turned and walked away.
Mrs Delaney, to her credit, took Eve’s part. She brought them the bill, and when Sandy Hair kicked up too much of a fuss she just knocked off the cost of a bottle of wine, but without conceding the point. Maybe some vestige of sympathy with the workers still clung to her from her hippie years. Or maybe she just knew how hard it can be to find really good waitresses these days.
It took me a while to work out what it was I liked about Eve, and when I did, I wasn’t sure what that said about me. It was her air of dislocation, the feeling that the current of life had suddenly picked her up and swirled her off to somewhere out of her control. Most people had harbours, and anchors, and moorings, but Eve was floating on the sea with her eyes wide open, holding tight to her son’s hand.
She brought her son into the restaurant once, because the childminder was sick and there was nowhere else for him to go. His name was Raymond. He sat in the corner of the kitchen and played solemnly with some dough that Francis gave him. I watched him making dough-pebbles and then some funny-looking dough-men, with big unwieldy heads and stringy arms and legs. Francis put them on a baking tray and stuck them in the oven to cook for Raymond to take home, but a party of twelve people came in and we all forgot about them. We opened the oven when Francis smelled something burning, and there they were: a huddle of little burnt bodies, hapless midgets who had overnighted in Pompeii.
Francis was annoyed at himself and swept them into the bin with a snort of irritation as if to erase all evidence of his mistake. I saw Raymond’s face fall. It wasn’t the burning he minded, I think, so much as the discourteous disposal.
‘I’ll make you some more and send them back with your mother,’ I told him, and he stared back at me with his oddly lucid, grey-green eyes.
‘I made those ones myself,’ he said, with the air of someone quietly stating an obvious fact.
When Eve was taking him home later, holding his hand, I saw something like a broken stick of charcoal hanging loosely from his side trouser pocket as he ambled out the door. He had fished one of the blackened bodies out of the bin.
There were times when I thought there wasn’t much point to the life I had. I sat up in my room and looked at the squares of grey city sky through the dilapidated window frame. I missed Phyllis, for all her ways. I missed Titch and his mother. I missed my father most of all, and I thought sometimes that, now he was dead, there was no one in the world who my own death would really matter to, beyond casually saying, ‘Oh isn’t it terrible what’s happened to poor Jacky,’ no one who might lie awake night after night and ache for how big the darkness was without me.
That’s how we measure out our own reality, through the pain that the absence of us will cause in others. That’s what roots us and gives us substance. Without it we’re just ghosts passing through a series of doors, river water running into the ocean and leaving no trace.
When she wasn’t at the restaurant for a couple of days, I even found myself missing Eve. It felt good to miss someone I could see again.