OH SUE

‘What am I looking at here, Sue?’

Sue stared at the screens mounted on the desk.

‘Mossad’s special ops control centre.’

Her boss drummed his fingers on the table and made a guttural noise.

‘Okay, okay. Three couples in Christmas attire, about to order some of our finest cuisine.’

‘Shut up.’

Dale sighed. Sue was sitting on the balloon of his life and slowly squeezing the air out of it. ‘I mean, here.’ He tapped the paused, greasy screen of monitor five.

Sue didn’t need to see; she had lived it an hour ago. Instead, she looked away and around the office that was his domain: The perfectly folded napkins, the stacked menus, the trays of cinnamon candles still wrapped in plastic holly twine. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, if you weren’t Sue, watching your boss swivel in his leather chair, preparing to deliver a villain monologue about how everyone, well, Sue, had it coming. Was there any point to the managerial performance? They knew that this was the end of the line for Sue as a Front of House Karen.

Let’s face it, she just didn’t have what it took to be a bold, sarcastic, low patience-high heels Karen. She was a Sue, a slightly weird looking creature with an addiction to cheese and fragranced candles.

‘Let’s turn up the volume, shall we?’

‘I’d rather we didn’t.’

‘Shut up.’

Dale smacked the return button on the keyboard and leaned back in the leather swivel chair. Sue undid her dirty apron and sat down next to him with a sigh. Her chair didn’t swivel and it was low, almost as low as a primary school seat.

‘I didn’t know it was legal to record conversations between guests?’

Dale looked menacing, drew his forefinger to his lips to signal silence and then dragged it across his throat to indicate death if she followed it up with more questions. Sue nodded her complicity to ensure survival before going to table ten to offer them dessert menus. It was the time of year when everyone wanted sweet things; the fattening time that helped you cope with the cold, both outside and inside, where families’ frosty grievances thawed by the fire. December truly was a cruel month for some. The homeless, say, they needed dessert much more than –

‘Sue!?’

‘Sorry man, I was in my own world.’

‘That’s the problem. Also, you don’t know how to talk to customers. Listen to this.’ He turned up the volume regardless of her protests. Amidst the clattering of cutlery and low rumble of chatter the interaction was audible.

‘What did you just say to me?’ asked the woman in white fur with the peroxide blonde perm and the louder than everyone else voice.

‘I was wondering if you would like to order?’

‘Wondering? Are you new here?’

‘I am. This is my first week and I –

‘Oh right.’ But really the woman meant, ‘Oh boring,’ because the dumpy waitress’s arrival – the one with the brown bob and the ridiculous electric blue eyeliner – meant she had to stop holding court for five minutes. Others in her party studied their menus a little too closely: sniggering wolves on crack trying to stop themselves doing a crack dance. It was obviously their first time here. But not for the blonde woman in white; this predatory space was her domain.

‘Everyone else go first,’ she told her friends.

The experience wasn’t terribly challenging, one man asked for butter that didn’t taste like butter and thought himself very clever indeed. His girlfriend squealed like a poked pig. Another woman with sad eyes asked Sue if she could make the specials actually, “sound special”, but her tone was more of a plea than an insult. Sue was tempted to tell her that everything in life was special if she only looked closely, but she simply smiled and hoped the woman got the message. The woman held her gaze a second too long and then coughed uncontrollably. Sitting next to her, a man in mint polo-neck cashmere looked disappointed. If this was Rome and they were in the Colosseum, she would be the one calling for mercy and embarrassing him with her empathy. He patted her back and rolled his eyes at the woman in white, who smiled indulgently – not everyone had it in them to demean others, it was O.K.

‘My turn.’ said a man with a handlebar moustache so thick it made you want to rescue it from his top lip and pop it back in the garden. With a smirk he announced that he was vegetarian but ate chicken and could she check with the chef that the gravy was vegan. Sue rolled her eyes but said nothing; the six clapped feebly. Expensive watches cymballed against gold bracelets, perfect teeth crawled out from salon-bought lips. This was what they came for, the fight, the entertainment, the insult.

Sue smiled back, a rookie error.

Dale paused the camera footage to light a joint. It seemed incongruous in his manicured hand. A joint meant something serious, it meant he was losing his grip on the performance – the one that didn’t let on that he lived off the leftovers from the kitchen from Sunday to Wednesday, that he had debts he could never pay off and a sister who was incapable of holding down a job. He took three deep drags, blew the smoke into the dirty tablecloth bag under the desk and handed her the spliff. She reached for it as naturally as if they were curled up on the tattered couch in their flat in Bethnal Green. No need for eye contact, no gratitude, just routine; a ritual that marked the end of another night’s struggle to understand the Human Race.

‘Right there! The chicken thing, he gave you a perfect opportunity to call him a wanker.’

Outside, a group of carol singers began singing about goodwill to all men.

‘I know, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. He might have been someone who thought chicken was like fish or something.’

‘Oh, Sue.’

‘People do. Some people think only red meat is real meat.’

‘Idiots.’

‘If it’s pink then it’s more like cod or shark or –

‘Shut up.’

Dale kicked off his shoes and pressed play with the heel off his holey sock.

‘My turn,’ grinned the woman in white; the group held their breath and waited. ‘I want the octopus linguini but no chilli or wine in the sauce. Can you make sure I have extra octopus and make the linguini wheat free because I’m gluten intolerant.’ It was good; the perfect balance of too much info, greedy demands and finally disrespect for the most intelligent animal on the planet. She’d struck gold. Her fellow diners looked awed.

‘So, let me get this straight. You want gluten free pasta and to eat something that’s smarter than you?’ asked Sue with genuine impatience. Not impatient enough apparently.

‘What’s your problem?’ asked the woman, still grinning until it looked as though her cheeks would split.

‘Oh, no problem, I am just saying that the octopus may be the alien life force behind all existence. If you eat it and there is a god, well maybe, just maybe you are going to hell.’

Dale paused the recording; frozen in time were the expressions of five suddenly self-conscious adults, and one, the lady in white, looked bored as she yawned so widely you could see down her gullet. Sue pictured a pelican choking on a large fish, too greedy to move slowly, beak open, consuming everything, choking on her misguided judgement.

‘Seriously?!’ Dale took three massive tokes on the spliff. ‘Spiritual advice based on the menu? You are meant to be insulting them, not starting a philosophical debate.’

‘But I –

‘She made a complaint, sis. You weren’t insulting enough. She said they gave you countless opportunities to say something rude, but they got nothing. She said she found your philosophical banter,’ Dale opened up his notebook, ‘“distasteful.”’

Sue took the end of the spliff off her brother and made it her own. When it was down to the roach, she threw it in the dregs of an abandoned coffee cup and reached for her coat.

‘Cool, well, I’m taking a few candles for the flat.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘And you will be home, when?’

‘When I have made sure our lovely diners have enjoyed every last insult we can throw at them. I mean, there was so much you could have said to that woman. Octopus intelligence? Jesus.’

Sue had stopped listening to his griping, it wasn’t worth worrying about. Another job gone, so what? Money wasn’t everything. In fact, money made people weird. Had she ever met a truly appreciative rich person? Not really. Money made people fragile, brittle, battered by the mercurial winds of economics. At any moment the illusion that they were different from the rest of humanity could shatter, so to not feel exposed they had to separate, had to move above: to penthouses, to higher ground, to judgement and superiority. They hated nothing more than to look into the eyes of a poor person and to see they were exactly the same, exactly.

‘You’re going to have to start robbing banks at this rate,’ said Dale as she shrugged on her tatty parker.

‘I’ll find something.’

‘A little pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Fucking hippie.’

That didn’t deserve a response, just a door slam and a trudge down the steel stairs to the kitchen exit. She walked through the bustling room of three chefs, pot washers, wet floors and steel, steel everywhere: for slicing meat, balancing hot plates, enduring all manner of bashing and heat.

No one stopped to greet her as she passed. They were too busy preparing food that would probably come back half eaten, to be scraped into the bin and chucked into landfill – a banquet for urban foxes, whose fur got glossy on the wastefulness of man. But they would leave the octopus, no doubt, out of respect for their creators. No one noticed her big thoughts getting in the way of the pass, or the waitress balancing three plates, who jostled and pushed with an impatient, “behind you”, to let her know that no one actually had her back.

Fired for not being insulting enough; now that was a first. The dog’s home she understood, kidnapping a greyhound due to be euthanised was a dick move; and the hairdressers, sure, the customer’s perm was on her.

What was it that made her just not fit in? Authority? Unfairness? What did it matter: Ho, ho, ho. T’was the season to be jolly – at least it was until she pushed too hard on the fire exit door and collided with the bottle bin. She slid into the middle of the back alley and came to a halt like a forgotten hockey puck. The icy pavement seemed as good a place as any to get herself together, while rain made music on humanity’s drumkit: bottles, boxes, potholes.

A well-fed rat, sitting proud on top of the compost bin eyed her suspiciously. She doffed an imaginary cap and wished him a delicious evening; he stared back as if she were something to be avoided. He sniffed the air; yes, a bad smell.

At the opening of the alley, forty paces away or so, she would be confronted by the sea of Friday revellers. Sue preferred the alley. Perhaps she would stay here and freeze for a while. Wasn’t that the new trend anyway? To get high on getting cold. Only people who knew they could get warm at any moment would come up with that idea. The rat looked disapproving at the thought of sharing its domain with such an odorous creature.

Up ahead there was a ruckus – a lot of shouting above the general cacophony and there at the entrance to the alley was a woman struggling with a man who seemed to be trying to take what was hers. They looked like two terriers fighting over a bone, only in this case it was a Louis Vitton handbag and one of the terriers was dressed in white and had a snarl that would make most thieves scarper.

‘Give it,’ he growled, dragging her down into the alley.

‘Oh crap,’ said Sue. A moral dilemma presented itself: of course she should help, but which one, the mugger or the woman who had cut off her salary? Everyone in this scenario needed money badly, that much was clear. A conundrum from the icy floor, for sure.

What would Dale do? He would kick the guy’s arse. But then Sue had just had her own arse kicked and would probably get it again if she intervened.

‘Oi!’

Assailant and assailed turned to look at the dirty grey parker that had just called out from the puddles and for a moment they were united in mutual confusion. ‘Give the polar bear her bag back.’

This confused everyone further – an insult followed by chivalry. The mugger remembered himself first and got back to the task in hand.

‘I said, leave her alone.’

One moment Sue was chilled to the bone on concrete, next she was burning heat. Before thoughts had formed, she vaulted several bins, including the one with the king rat, who looked aghast that the inedible detritus had it in her.

The man found himself pinned to the ground by Sue’s hips, his head caught between her thighs. All he could say was, ‘Oh.’ There was no “Sue” after it.

Sue roared a lifetime of frustration in his face, the ferocity of which made the man start to cry. Sue started to cry too because what else was there to do? Attempt a citizen’s arrest? Let him go? Faint? That could work – shut down, reboot, it really was very, very cold and she was very, very tired.

‘Please don’t kill him,’ said the woman wearing the polar bear. ‘Then we’d have to involve the police and we’d never hear the end of it.’

‘Man, I’m so sorry.’ Sue told the world as she released his head from between her thighs. The way he gulped air told her she may have lost control, just a little. ‘I had no idea. I’m a bit stoned and this is all a bit much, am I right or am I right?’

The mugger didn’t hang around to debate the subject; he scarpered, skidding his way across the icy pavement to the safety of his hunting ground.

Sue handed the woman her bag and slowly stood up.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ said the woman in white.

‘I know, I had to listen to you for most of the night.’

Up ahead the crowd surged past. No point putting off the inevitable, she would have to join them eventually and let them take her on the tide of tidings into the belly of the underground, to her paint-peeled front door and her dirty bedding. Home. She got up.

‘Wait.’ The woman barked. ‘Please,’ she said, her voice vibrating with the cold and adrenaline. ‘Would you mind staying here with me for a few minutes, just so I can get over the shock, to talk.’

Sue liked to talk, she liked the company of strangers, and this woman was stranger than most, but she had just got her fired. It was best to walk away, and so she did until she caught the eye of the king rat with his impervious stare, sitting on his hind legs. He sniffed the air in a way that suggested one odorous imbecile was no better that the rest; they all smelled the same. Sue allowed herself a backwards glance and saw that the woman in white was slumped in the same spot that she had occupied moments earlier.

‘Damn it, man.’

She wandered back and flopped down on the ice.

‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘The octopus,’ said the woman in white.

‘Nice, nice, so what do you want to know?’

Sue sat back down. Perhaps there was hope for the woman in white after all. Perhaps, there was hope for them all.

(Image thanks to Henry Stander)