I don’t want to go that way, I want to go this way. I want to go the way we always go: left at the laundrette, up past the house with the curly willow, up to where the school is and if it’s recess the children are sitting on the wall, playing hopscotch on their phones.
I know by how Rose yanks me that she has no intention, either, of deviating from our usual route. And Vince is of similar mind. He hooks me by the neck with his umbrella handle, and here we are, the three of us — the same old, same old, flexing our creaturely inclination to immutable habit.
I have a new job and while every single part of me knows it’s the right one, I’m screaming inside. All the old stuff has boiled to the surface. And boils beneath. Newness looms like a giant peach, and I’m in a chain-linked pen for hapless incompetents.
I was fired from the first job I ever had. For two or three hours when I was 16, I was a bar wench at a pub in Wimbledon Village. It was called The Brewery Fart. Actually, that wasn’t its real name but was coined by me in reference to the publican’s hopsy, meat-pie flatulence. (It was actually ‘Tap.’ The Brewery Tap).
We were in close quarters, he and I, squeezing past each other with rusty pints of warm, breakfast ale. I was wearing skirts and a frilled, peek-a-boo corset. My bottom was ripe for the pinching, my cheeks were rosy, and a tendril of hair escaped from my crocheted bonnet. I was perfect for the job.
But I couldn’t, and didn’t, add up.
Not my fault; the till – a giant, ornate type-writer-ish thing – worked for sh*t. A bit of theater, really, when the actual sums were being done – or not – in the heads of the help.
So I guessed, and then — in sympathy for the old boys draped over the bar like last night’s trousers — I rounded down; it didn’t go well.
If I was 16, I may just have sat – for the fifth time – my maths O’Level (the national British exam which, if you pass, guarantees absolute success for the rest of your life). I actually did pass, and did receive a button for grit – for staying the course. Because, after an early life of being told I sucked at numbers – and everything else – by the joyless blue stockings at my all-girls school, I had finally come in to contact (thank you, Dad, for scouring London and Europe beyond) with a Greek man called Mr. Nikiforos.
I’ll never forget him. I’ll never forget standing on his doorstep, pencil and jotter in hand, while my father trumpeted my brainlessness.
“Help us, Nikiforos. You’re our only hope.”
But Nikiforos had already tweezed me in. He was easing shut the door on my father’s mealy beseechments when he said, clear as day: “Mr. Beattie. There’s no F-word in my vocabulary.”
To be clear, his eschewal of failure did not a Steven Hawking make. But it got me past long division. It got me to A’ Levels, and it got me to college. It got me to a newsroom, and college again. And it got me to stocking shelves and passing groceries across a blinking red laser-scanner, thanking the heavens for that beautiful beep … beep … beep.
AB - 01.14.24
All my college years lead to 10 years as a Kelly Girl, and now housekeeping.
You’re gonna be great! Onward, with a new frock.