The Bluebird Café (2 page)

‘Sit down. Please have some food,' she said.

Frank Pillory wondered what such a pretty girl was doing mixed up in a risky, low-profit venture like this hippie café. If only he could offer her something at the bank, but those days were gone. There was no certainty any more.

‘How's trade?' he asked.

‘Oh, booming, booming!' boomed Paul.

‘What would you like to eat?' asked Lucy. ‘There's carrot cake, coconut cake, cherry flapjacks, coffee, twenty-something types of tea …'

He looked at the blackboard.

‘I'll try the soup first.'

‘Coming right up!' said Lucy, attempting jauntiness.

‘And then perhaps …'

‘Coffee?' Paul suggested.

‘The watercress quiche, five-bean pasta salad and a white roll.'

‘We offer butter or a non-dairy alternative,' Lucy told him.

‘Oh.'

Paul remembered being very small and climbing the steps of the travelling library each week for months to renew
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
. He must tell Lucy to put Tiger Food on her list in case a tiger should come to tea and eat everything they
had. Frank Pillory tucked into his carrot soup. It tasted faintly of mud. The quiche was on the table and getting cold before the soup was finished. He left his bowl half full.

‘Very nice, tomato was it?'

‘Carrot, but with tomato,' said Lucy, politely.

‘I must tell my brother about you. He could bring his kids.'

‘We do hope to attract families,' said Lucy, who didn't. She could hear some students talking about whether or not they agreed with the conspiracy theorists about the lunar non-landings. The café had a long way to go before it became the haven for artists and intellectuals that she had planned. At least her copy of Françoise Sagan's
Bonjour Tristesse
was there, steadying a wobbling table.

‘And at least,' she told Paul, in bed that night, ‘Frank the Bank will spend tomorrow in agonies of flatulence.'

‘Hmm?'

‘He had thirds of five-bean pasta salad.'

Five-bean pasta salad certainly wasn't on the menu at Armando's, Lucy's favourite restaurant, the night the Bluebird, a joint venture of friends, headed by Lucy, had been conceived. Armando's was Southampton's finest Italian restaurant. It was decorated in the traditional style, green, red and white, with plastic and real lobsters and bunches of grapes, and crazy pictures of fountains.

Lucy and Paul, Abigail and Teague, all in their mid-twenties, were admitting to surprise and misgivings at still being in Southampton three years after they'd graduated from the university. While the other three were worthily occupied with PhDs, Lucy was floundering. She had been the restaurant critic
of the local free listings magazine (unpaid), but it had just folded, bankrupt. She wanted to leave her job as admin worker at Southampton Kids' Clubs Association. The Kids got on her nerves.

There were people dancing. A fiftieth birthday party with women in strappy, some backless, dresses and lots of jewellery.

‘Promise to tell me if I ever get a fat back,' said Abigail, audibly, Lucy feared.

Abigail's five-foot nine-inch frame was as slim and smooth as one of the many clay pipe stems she dug up each week. Her dark blonde hair was precision cut; she was very vain about it. She had small, often muddy paws. Lucy thought that she always looked fantastic, especially in her digging clothes. Abigail and Teague had been the golden couple of the Archaeology Department, but then the opposition hadn't been that hot.

Lucy and Abigail had met on their first day at the university. They shared a kitchen, as well as the cultural heritage of Surrey girls, and were soon united against the Christian wets and engineers who dominated their corridor.

When the waiter took Lucy's coat he said: ‘Oh, Sophia Loren!'

This was stretching it a bit. Lucy had dark hair and looked sallow in winter. She was wearing a light green shift dress. She wondered if he meant she looked buxom. She'd always wanted to look like Katharine Hepburn.

But the food was delicious.

‘You could do this, Lucy, just as well,' Paul said. Spaghetti Arrabiata was one of his favourites. ‘Mmm.' Hot food made him flush red.

‘The thermal effect of eating,' said Teague, ‘excessive in Paul's case. Studies have been done on it.'

‘If I'm not going to be a film star,' mused Lucy, ‘I have always wanted to open a café.'

‘You should. I'll help,' said Abigail.

‘OK. I might just try.'

The waiters had come in banging saucepan lids together and singing ‘Happy Birthday' to one of the fat-backed women. It seemed a fitting start. As a future restaurateur, Lucy should have noticed the sneers and the sighs of the staff as they retreated to the kitchen to cut up the cake.

The Wayside Hotel was the cheapest in Southampton and Gilbert lived there. It had special rates for the unemployed, but the stony face of the proprietor belied the poster, faded marker pen on green fluorescent card, DSS WELCOME. Once Gilbert had proved his eligibility for housing benefit he had been allowed to drag his tartan trolley up the three flights of stairs to his new home. He was almost forty and he had nothing else.

In his room was a sink with a mirror tile and a shaving point, a double bed with the inevitable orange candlewick cover, a wardrobe with chained-in coat hangers, a lukewarm radiator, and a bedside cabinet sort of thing where he kept his books –
What to Look for in Autumn, Keeping Finches, Parrots as Pets
and the
Observers Book of British Birds
. No pets were allowed at the Wayside, but in the room next door a young woman kept tame rats and a baby slept in a drawer.

Downstairs was a TV lounge where residents gathered in the evenings.
Strike It Rich
was very popular, and petty criminals united to see
Crimewatch
and
The Bill
. When
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
was on they all shouted out the answers and groaned.

You could easily tell the workers from the unemployed. Almost all of them did shifts at the Kipling's factory. They rose at odd hours and wore white overalls dusted with icing sugar. They gave cakes to their friends, and Gilbert's diet was
sometimes supplemented by rejected Fondant Fancies and Mini Bakewells.

It was Saturday, so Gilbert was wearing his corduroy jacket. It stretched across his pudgy back and flapped like a skirt around his thighs. It was the colour of Caramac, and the smartest thing he had. He ate with care and hardly spilled anything on its generous lapels. He cleaned his teeth, J-clothed his shoes and left, sliding downhill on rotten leaves to the bus stop. Behind him another chunk of stucco fell off the Wayside Hotel.

Gilbert didn't often catch the bus into town. He could easily walk it, as it only took him half an hour or so. During the week he went to the library and the park. Sometimes he spent whole days in the precinct, watching the pigeons. He'd heard that the council wanted to move them on. On weekdays he wore his parka, and put the hood up for shelter. He'd noticed that it seemed to keep people away too. On Saturdays he wore his corduroy jacket and combed his hair back with water, into a blackish, brackish, oily DA. He was lucky to get a seat on the bus. Quite a few old people were standing. He got off at the Cenotaph and walked past East Park and Watts Park towards the shops. The Civic Centre clock chimed out the first few bars of ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past' as he passed the
Titanic
Memorial. Gilbert didn't know that the hymn was by the city's most famous son. He had never heard of Isaac Watts. He thought the chime was something like ‘When a Knight Won His Spurs', of which he had vague memories from school. Hefty students were playing football while winos watched them, shouting instructions and jeering them on. What else should you expect if you wear shorts this early in the year?

Gilbert loved the parks, the arrangements, the space to be doing nothing with nobody without anyone noticing. There was a little Chinese bit with bridges and rocks – like a multicoloured willow-pattern plate – where he spent ages wandering, some magnificent conker trees to sit under, and there was talk of restoring a bandstand. There had once been an aviary. The council had taken it down; it was too small, too expensive, too cruel. Azaleas grew where it had stood.

Gilbert went to Asda. He only needed a few staples – bread, milk, Frosties, cheese and onion crisps – things that didn't need cooking. At the precinct he rolled a cigarette. It fitted neatly into a brown stain, but stuck painfully because his lips were chapped. When it was finished he ate a Polo. He sat on a bench and watched the pigeons; children were chasing them with cruel glee. Nobody would talk to Gilbert with his baseball cap pulled right down over his sad, potato face.

He'd chosen a bench opposite Monsoon and Oasis. Pretty young girls went in and out, in and out. He pretended to read his newspaper, and then just sat and stared. Sometimes he sat near New Look; wherever he chose there would be dozens, hundreds to see, marching along in pedal pushers, short skirts, combat trousers, all terrifying.

It began to rain. Gilbert rolled and smoked another cigarette, and wondered what to do next. He tore open the Frosties and pressed a handful into his mouth. Golden dust fell on to his jacket and stuck to the webs of his fingers, and crumbs fell like stars on to his shoes.

It was a second Monday and Gilbert's day to sign on. He wore his parka because although it was very hot and sunny, and the sky was utterly cloudless, he expected it to rain. In his pocket he had an orange-and-black Tango baseball cap and his orange card, which was very old and battered and had somehow become stained with egg. He wrapped it inside his hat to try and stop it from getting dirtier. A dirty card could lead to loss of benefit for an unspecified period.

Gilbert had seen lots of changes at the benefit office, but the spider plants were dying again, and a notice requesting that customers didn't smoke at the desk still had ‘fuck off' scrawled in a corner. Gilbert queued for fifteen minutes behind a woman with pale yellow hair that fell around her shoulders like a shroud. At last he got to the front of the queue, and someone looked at his card and asked him to go to Enquiries. He went. He queued for another five minutes and then realised that he was waiting at the wrong window. Eventually he was seen.

‘Mr Gilbert Runnic?' asked a deceptively pretty girl in a not very clean white blouse. ‘Is this your card?'

‘Yes. I think so.' He had been holding it just seconds ago. She picked at the card with a long, sharp nail. Gilbert wondered if you'd keep hurting yourself with nails like that. He didn't know that she was playing Titania in the Southampton Amateur
Dramatic Society (SADS) production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
that night. Her mind was elsewhere.

‘Well, it's got egg on it.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Gilbert. ‘I don't know how that happened.'

‘I could hazard a guess,' said the girl. Then: ‘Well, Mr Gilbert, it seems that you've been unemployed for a very long time. What steps are you currently taking to procure employment?'

‘Oh,' said Gilbert.

‘What are you doing to find a job?'

‘Oh, looking, mostly,' said Gilbert. This was quite untrue. He had ceased to do more than look in some newsagents' windows some years ago. He was vaguely hoping for a job looking after birds, perhaps at Marwell Zoo which he wanted to visit one day.

‘Do you go to the jobcentre?'

‘Umm, umm yes! I go every day except Saturdays, I mean Sundays. It's closed then.'

‘I know.'

‘Got any jobs here then?'

‘What qualifications have you got?'

‘None.'

‘We haven't then.' She started to make a bracelet out of paper clips. Gilbert thought that the interview was over and turned to

‘Don't just walk away, Mr Gilbert!' she said in a stage whisper. ‘Walking away from your problems doesn't work.' She tried out a cheery smile, but failed. Gilbert returned to the counter.

‘I'm making an appointment for you to attend a New Deal
Restart interview. The date, time and venue will be notified to you in due course.'

‘Thank you,' said Gilbert. ‘That's very kind of you.'

In due course Gilbert was informed of the date, time and venue of his Restart interview. It was to be held in an office above the jobcentre. There were three other people there, callow youths. None of them spoke to Gilbert. He watched a video about job clubs, listened to a talk about starting your own business (but to do what?), and drank a cup of vending-machine tea. After that he thought he would be allowed to go, but instead he was taken into a unit of space with plyboard walls and promised a spotty man that he would start attending a job club. In return he would get free coffee, advice, paper, stamps and a seventy per cent chance of finding a job within two years.

‘Do they have tea as well?' he asked.

After this Gilbert left. He went back to the Wayside, sat on his bed and looked at his knees. He didn't even have the heart to read
Keeping Finches
. He ate a packet of custard creams and then got into bed.

The next day it drizzled and Gilbert left his room only to visit the lavatory at the end of the corridor. He read his books and listened to the baby crying behind the wall. He washed a shirt and some socks and pants, and hung them on the radiator where they didn't dry, but gave off a warm and comforting vapour.

He could have spent the evening in the TV lounge, watching programmes chosen by tougher, more popular residents. By the end of each evening empty cans lay around the room like very small sleeping dogs. Gilbert would put his own cans in the
dustbin liner in the corner and shuffle off to bed. A few people would mutter, ‘G'night, Gilbert', and he'd half raise a hand in resignation as much as farewell.