As I walk through the doors of Has Beans, even though I am about to work a gruelling shift, I couldn’t be happier. There’s a spring in my step. I feel like cute little animals should be running around my feet as I perform an awesome musical number that everyone in the café will join in with, all in perfect pitch. Nope, nothing can ruin my awesome mood today. Nothing except…
‘Ruby, you are late,’ Rita snaps.
I look at the time on my phone, that is already in my hand, because it’s almost always in my hand, or at least within grabbing distance.
‘Oh, come on, I’m three minutes late,’ I laugh. ‘That’s not late. You want late, you should’ve been here earlier this year when I slept through pretty much my whole shift. I got here at five to six – I was over nine hours late that day. That’s late.’
Millsy sniggers quietly.
I grab my apron from the hook and give Millsy a fist-bump, hoping that will be the end of it.
‘And you’re proud of that, I imagine?’ Rita asks me.
‘Not proud, per se,’ I reply, well aware that I’m annoying her, but she’s annoying me too. ‘Just trying to make you smile.’
‘You’ll make me smile by turning up to work on time and doing your job well,’ she snaps. ‘Two things you find impossible, it seems.’
I look over at Millsy, expecting a little back up, but he’s constantly telling me how Rita is the best boss he’s ever had. He’s just watching us talk, his eyes darting backwards and forwards between us, like a kid watching his parents argue at the dinner table.
Before I get the chance to defend myself, Rita storms back into her office.
‘Aw, it’s sweet that she pops out to see me when I arrive, she must love me,’ I say sarcastically, as I eat a croissant.
‘Well, you’re not exactly a model employee,’ Millsy replies. Such hypocrisy, I drop my croissant for dramatic effect.
‘This coming from a man who tried to argue that regular masturbation breaks were important for his mental wellbeing.’
‘It makes me a productive worker,’ he replies.
‘It makes you a productive wanker,’ I correct him. ‘You’ll go blind!’
‘I’ll stop when I need glasses,’ he laughs.
I laugh, shaking my head. Only Millsy can amuse and disgust me at the same time.
‘You’re just as bad an employee as I am,’ I remind him.
‘Not this week,’ he tells me. ‘This week I need to kiss-ass, to make sure I can get all the time off that I need for rehearsals.’
I’ve only just retrieved my croissant from the floor, and I drop it again.
‘Nope. No way. Nuh-uh. You can’t leave me here with this mo…rning,’ I say, turning to the customers who have just approached the counter, saving myself from saying a word that even I know I shouldn’t be saying in front of customers in the nick of time.
Standing in front of me are a couple of twenty-something girls, who order two skinny caramel lattes to go. I can see that little glimmer of something in Millsy’s eye, like he’s going to hit on them, he’s just waiting for a pause in their conversation. As I make their drinks, I can’t help but listen to their conversation, in fact, the best part of my job (other than the free coffee and food) is probably listening to other people’s conversations.
‘…and I thought we’d been broken up a long time, but then I realised that I’m still using the same tube of toothpaste he bought me. And I know it was a new tube, but I brush my teeth twice a day, and I still have half a tube left, so I guess it hasn’t been that long.’
I look over at Millsy, wondering what he’ll do. On the one hand he hates drama, but on the other, I know how he likes to pray on “wounded gazelles” as he so endearingly refers to them.
‘And I don’t think I’ve had a period since he left,’ she says quietly, but not only do Millsy and I both hear, it takes us by surprise, causing Millsy to choke on whatever he’s eating and me to mis-pour the hot milk, spilling it all over the counter. It drips off all over the girl’s shoes, much to her annoyance.
‘I am so sorry,’ I babble, grabbing a cloth to try to halt the waterfall of milk that is continuing to cascade over her heels. It’s not enough though, the girl looks absolutely furious. From the sound of her conversation that I couldn’t help but overhear, it sounds like she’s having a pretty rough time at the moment. I can’t imagine she has much patience for things like this but, seriously, she looks like her head is going to explode.
‘Cheer up, love,’ Millsy says, leaning over the counter to rub her shoulder tenderly. ‘Your calendar might be wrong.’
With this, the girl flips. She screams a furious scream that, by all rights, should shatter the latte glasses. Everyone in the café falls silent, stopping their eating, drinking, chatting and typing to spectate.
‘I want to see your manager – now,’ she says angrily.
‘Look, there’s no need for that,’ I start, but I’m wasting my breath. Rita has heard the noise and she’s storming over.
‘What’s the problem?’ Rita asks, cutting to the chase.
As the angry girl tells her everything, Rita’s expression doesn’t change. She gives the girl a sympathetic nod as she listens to her account of events before sending them to sit at a table.
‘Make these girls new drinks and then see me in my office,’ Rita instructs us firmly.
‘What, and leave the counter unattended?’ I ask.
‘No, Joe can watch the counter, you are to see me in my office. He needs to leave for his audition soon anyway, don’t you, my love?’
Millsy nods.
‘What, that’s not fair!’ I can’t help but squeak. ‘What I did was an accident, he was the one who made the period joke.’
‘It wasn’t a joke, it was a reassuring suggestion,’ he insists, but I know my friend, and he says that line to girls all the time. It’s his Millsy-fied version of: “cheer up, it might never happen”.
‘Ruby,’ Rita says my name slowly and quietly through gritted teeth. ‘Come to my office, now.’
I exhale deeply, following her like a naughty child on her way to the head teacher’s office. Once inside, I close the door behind me.
‘Look, I’m just going to come out with it, your issues with authority are not going to wash with me,’ she says, taking a seat at her desk, placing both of her hands flat on the table. What does that mean? It looks unnatural. Perhaps it’s something they taught her at a business management course, telling her it’s some body language move that will ultimately up productivity in the work place.
‘I don’t have issues with authority,’ I insist, calmly. Well, I don’t, I just have issues with her. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, it was an accident.’
‘You’re proving my point, Ruby.’
‘I mean, I’m no narc,’ I start, fully prepared to grass on my mate. It’s not that there’s no loyalty there, we just display it differently to most people. I think it comes from being best friends since we were babies, we’ve developed this sort of sibling relationship where it just comes naturally to throw each other under the bus so we don’t get in trouble with “mum”, we can throw the harshest insults at one another and laugh them off, and we’re not above the occasional play fight where necessary, because that’s what siblings do, right? Granted we haven’t done the last one since we were teenagers, but that’s because there was an incident in the park where my nails drew blood from his face and an old lady called the police because she thought he was a rapist. The best bit of that ordeal was just how offended Millsy was because the old lady hadn’t figured “he was too handsome for girls to not want to sleep with” – sometimes, it’s hard to tell if comments like this are a product of his sense of humour, or his spectacular vanity. ‘It was Millsy who upset her, and yet, somehow, I’m in here getting told off, and he’s getting to finish early. You see my point, right?’
Rita massages her temples for a moment and lets out a long, deep sigh. It’s clear that I’m wasting my breath; Millsy is her golden boy. I’ll just have to take a deep breath and go back out there and do my job.
‘I’m giving you an official warning,’ Rita tells me, taking a pen from the coffee jar that sits on her desk.
‘What?’ I squeak. ‘For spilling milk?’
I’m pretty sure there’s a pretty widely documented phrase about the spillage of milk and how it’s not a big deal.
‘For upsetting customers, using bad language, being late, having a problem with authority and for your attitude generally, Ruby. Is that enough reasoning for you, or would you like me to go on?’
I can officially say that Rita is a bitch. So I was a little late, so I spilled a little bit of milk. OK, I hold my hands up to those, but I don’t think I’ve done anything that deserves a formal warning. Still, two strikes and you’re out, so keeping my job is reliant on me keeping my mouth shut. I bite my tongue.
‘Shall I get back to work so that Millsy can get off to his rehearsal?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ she replies, her pen practically smoking as she makes notes about my behaviour. ‘And he’s Joe when we’re at work, not Millsy. We’re not teenage boys on a football pitch.’
We might not be on a football pitch, but she’s certainly talking balls. Still, I keep my mouth shut.
‘Sure,’ I reply, skulking out of the office like a ticked-off kid.
I return to my post just in time to see Millsy swapping numbers with the girl he upset ten minutes prior. She looks super-over it.
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ he assures me.
‘Really?’ I ask. ‘Because it looks like you just swapped numbers with the bird who landed me an official warning.’
‘Oh shit!’ Millsy, sorry, I mean Joe exclaims. ‘Well, first of all, OK, it’s exactly what it looks like, but we got talking and she’s a big Scottish play fan. Also, that’s rough, Rubes, you didn’t deserve a warning. You did nothing wrong.’
I shrug my shoulders.
‘Meh, what can you do.’ I think for a second. ‘Sorry, did you say that girl was a big Macbeth fan?’
I hate to judge a book by its cover, but I never would’ve had this bird pegged as someone who even knew who Shakespeare was, let alone consider herself a fan. And I’m not saying this because she’s a young, blonde female – because I am too – I’m saying this because she’s wearing a velour tracksuit and everyone knows they went out with the noughties.
‘Yeah,’ he replies confidently, before sounding less sure of his statement. ‘Well, she’s a big Michael Fassbender fan, and she really wants to see the movie.’
As furious as I am, I can’t help but laugh.
‘Go to your audition,’ I tell him.
‘You’re a star,’ he replies, going to kiss me on the cheek before hesitating. ‘I don’t wanna cock-block myself by kissing you, just pretend I did.’
I give his arm a soft(ish) punch.
‘Just go,’ I instruct.
Millsy doesn’t need telling twice. He whips off his apron, throwing it at the hook (and missing), and jumps over the counter before dashing out of the door. I’d assume this was a showy act for his new female friends, but I’ve seen him jump the counter many times. This is what I’m talking about, if anyone needs a warning, it should be the person who uses this counter like a dating app/piece of gym apparatus. Not that I want him to get sacked, I just want the injustice noting.
I’m not going to let this get me down, because pretty soon Sally will have had her baby, she’ll be back, and Rita will go back to stoking fires in hell, or whatever duties Satan usually hands out to his favourite child. At least things are improving with Nick. That’s my priority right now. That and making it out of here today without throwing the panini press out of the window in temper.