Love and Other U-Turns Read online

  ‘Lou! Meet Hayden!’ she squealed as soon as she saw me, and I shook the clammy hand of her new friend. Hayden wore a slick top, flashed his teeth in a canine-like grin which implied either cocaine or ecstasy, and spent way too long staring at me without blinking. Still, Sally seemed to really like him, and was smiling more than I’d seen her smile in a long time. So I left them to it. As I walked away I could hear him angrily talking about his work and his boss, while she nodded, entranced.

  I found a plastic glass and poured myself a drink, glancing at the throbbing party which, by all measures, was ‘going off’. Glossy girls in knee-high boots poured through the door kissing the air and disappearing to the toilets, re-emerging rubbing their noses, giggling and laughing their way through a dance floor of flashing lights with suddenly wide eyes.

  The men reminded me of prowling wolves. Glowing teeth from the neon lights flashed whenever they caught a glimpse of exposed female flesh. I stood and watched, made eyes and small-talk with some, who clutched their designer beers and looked over my shoulder. I got bored, and checked myself for the temptation to race to the bathroom and rack up myself, just so I’d have something in common with everyone.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. ‘I saw you walk in. Wanna dance?’

  He was tall, dark and, I guess you’d say, good-looking. His t-shirt had some logo on it but I tried not to hold that against him.

  ‘Okay.’

  We started shuffling in time on the packed dance floor, a giant disco ball glittering wickedly above. More people kept arriving, and before I knew it, I could feel my dance partner’s body through his t-shirt, our personal space small, hot, growing in intensity. All of a sudden I felt an elbow in my rib, and when I looked up, my dance partner had his eyes rolled back in his head on some trip with his arms around me. He hadn’t noticed, but I was having trouble breathing.

  ‘Um – sorry, I have to go.’

  ‘What? What?’

  He followed me off the dance floor, and I found a space against a wall to catch my breath. I was still clutching my stomach, which by now was aching like a stitch.

  ‘What happened?’ He’s twitchy now. Aggro. I should have kept quiet.

  ‘Oh, I’m just going to go to the toilet …’

  I walked past Sally, still happily ensconced with Hayden, left her to it and grabbed my jacket, pulling my shoes off on the way out to walk faster.

  It was autumn and the palm trees in Canning Street stood strong and gracious. I suddenly felt a wave of gratitude, that I’d made such a swift exit from all these people I had no interest in being with. Same age, same city, same upbringing. What happened? To think of myself with a man like any of those wolves on offer filled me with a peculiar mixture of sadness and apathy. I kept walking, relieved to be alone.

  When I rounded the corner to St Georges Road, I saw the Italian brothers from Danny’s Hamburgers. Once, when I’d been followed home, two of them walked me to my flat and stood guard in the cold for an hour until the police came. Gus, my favourite, was having a cigarette on the corner as I walked past.

  ‘Hey Louie! How are ya!’ Covered in bacon grease and chip fat, he leant in to give me a hug. Out of relief, or maybe shock, a couple of tears fell out of my eyes.

  ‘Uh, sorry.’

  ‘Nah! No worries Louie! Oi’ve got seven sisters and a woif, sometimes goils just need to croi. I know it doesn’t mean nuthin’.’ He slapped me on the back in a ‘chin up’ kind of way.

  I said thanks, wished him goodnight and kept walking. I slept soundly, knowing Gus was there frying patties through the night, keeping an eye out.

  I wanted to write more than anything, but somehow, despite five years at university, pounding the floors of restaurants on the top end of Bourke Street had become my accidental career. Cliché? You betcha. And being a walking, talking cliché becomes boring. I grew to hate it when customers asked what else I did with my life. (‘What else do you do dah-ling? You do have a brain don’t you?’ one woman asked me. I reeled in horror, only to have someone else ask exactly the same thing the following night.) Not that I judged anyone who was a professional hospitality worker, I just had this painful, niggling voice which always interrupted any semblance of contentment to ask, ‘When are you going to try to make a living doing what you want? When are you going to take a risk?’

  It’s easy to drown these doubts out with alcohol, and I did that often enough, but when there is something that genuinely gives you joy, like writing did for me, it’s really quite hard not to do it. Anyway, hospitality wasn’t all bad. In a way, I felt privileged that I had a ‘trade’ I could ply, a ‘back-up option’, to keep me stocked with clothes and magazines, friends who always knew about the hippest new places, days and nights so busy and filled with people and life you can very easily lose years like that.

  I enjoyed the physicality, the fast-forward friendships, the clatter and movement, and the earthy simplicity of meeting the basic human needs for hunger, thirst and conversing with others, which brought well-dressed people into restaurants night after night, spending ten times the cost of certain foods just for the fanfare of being served.

  I loved how the pace of a busy restaurant at peak hour knocked every other thought out of my mind in an all-consuming orchestra of orders, meals and table numbers. Besides, it was immensely satisfying, on an instinctual, human level. This restaurant was their treat, and I was like an actor, ready and waiting to sweep them off their feet with a flawless performance.

  I did try to find alternatives to waitressing. I once found a job in a traditional office environment, but the confinement, inertia and constriction of being monitored for eight hours every day in a room full of white-noise felt like torture. At least waitressing kept me on my toes. I had days full of unexpected events, parties, pop-star bookings and celebrations, ridiculous amounts of cash being dropped, and a certain intensity of human interaction you just don’t get in a silent, computerised cubicle. Besides, I saved a fortune on gym fees.

  In a way it was like I was putting off ‘growing up and getting a real job’ for as long as I could. I could sleep all day and stay up all night, starring night after night in a dazzling opera of serving Melbourne’s high-flyers, and all it asked of me was that I turn up to work with a starched shirt and a willing smile.

  Graduating from regular waitressing to fine dining, I was also afforded an entrée into a world that perhaps I never would have had the opportunity to glimpse without the ability to decant wine or memorise sixteen specials per night. The Bold and the Beautiful-style couples thought nothing of charging their two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Tuesday dinner to Amex. Melbourne Mafiosos tipped me fifty dollars for remembering their favourite cigar brand, and I met famous tennis players, pop singers and actors. I was also able to put off the only alternative I could see most of my friends in ‘real’ jobs settling for: heading to Bunnings on a Saturday. Catching peak-hour trains home to CSI Miami and monotony. A life spent in front of the TV.

  But the dizzying arrays of compliments and complaints from the personal to the ludicrous never failed to surprise me. Like the English investment banker who would come in every night for a risotto he could have easily cooked himself for next to nothing. All it took was a ‘How are you, Steven?’ and his entire face would light up. He prided himself on knowing every single staff member’s name and noticed whenever we changed our hair. The easiest customer to serve, his nightly twenty-dollar tip broke my heart. But just as he used the restaurant to fill his own gaps, there were others, too, who performed strange complaining rituals which said so much more about their inner battles than it did about the temperature of the food. Like the unsmiling woman who would come in every Thursday with her endlessly placating husband, order something she would invariably never eat, complaining loudly that it was too hot, cold, salty or sweet, and he would always pay, thanking us in hushed tones.

  I was well-versed in this world of opposites and paradoxes of the human condition. Criminals who’d tasted the inside
of a jail cell ordering $478 bottles of wine on a Wednesday, tables away from a couple whose family had saved all year to shout them a meal here for their twentieth wedding anniversary. And me, dancing around the restaurant, wearing my poker face for each nightly routine.

  I knew the food was only part of the reason the customers were willing to fork out ludicrous amounts of money for a simple pasta dish. People revert to a certain childlike, raw state when it comes to being fed, revealing their innermost wounds over forgotten details such as sauces and wines. They didn’t come for the food, as much as the idea of being served. At least, this was how I saw it. It was about having someone smile at you and make you feel that you were worthy of being looked after, pandered to like a prince, every little detail of the matter of your meal effortlessly covered. All you have to do is sit, eat, let it take you over.

  And I had Marco. Marco was just one of the many reasons I was able to stay in a job which only used a droplet of the rivers of dreams I tried hard to ignore. I loved Marco in a way people talk of falling in love with a foreign country. Its differences are its delights – but at the same time you know, one day, you will have to return home.

  Marco was my saviour. He turned a boring job into a beautiful movie and we were the stars. Each night at work I searched for his bobbing head passing the doorway as I set tables upstairs, exchanged secret gifts of cheese slices and handmade chocolates from the dessert tray, and felt a rush of pride when I noticed he now always hung around for a Stella Artois at the bar. He never drank ‘knock-offs’ until I started working there.

  We didn’t really have anything to talk about except our everyday experiences at the restaurant, but this was enough. His poor command of English meant I sometimes got a headache trying to explain anything more detailed than a simple statement, so in nine months together we never spoke of anything more complicated than the basics: food, sex, work, sleep. The past was best left alone. We were attracted to each other physically, we would care if the other one tripped over, and we enjoyed spending our one night off per week together. That’s love, right?

  Time passes quickly when you’re moving in such a frenzy, and after twelve months of sixty-hour weeks at the restaurant, my dreams most nights were about coffee cups I’d forgotten to restock, or a risotto I’d forgotten to put on the bill.

  ‘It’s like you work on an oil rig,’ said my sister Ayala, when I popped over for a visit one day. I was exhausted, and spoke of nothing but sore muscles, the nuances of the people I worked with, the money I was relieved to be making yet too busy to enjoy.

  Her living room, scattered with notebooks, novels and periodicals, from Sue Grafton to Tolstoy, reminded me of a girl I once knew. In another lifetime – was it only three years ago? – I’d shared this very house with her and her husband as I plugged away at a writing degree. Some nights, when I got home, I’d find little notes on my pillow. ‘Here’s a pen I saw in the city on my lunch break, it made me think of you.’ Her encouragements made me want to succeed, just to say thanks.

  Another time, they took me out for pizza to celebrate my first paid published poem. I pinned the cheque, for one hundred dollars, to the board above my desk, and kept it there for weeks, a visual reminder that the line between dream and reality was only ever an idea away, only ever just trying away. Eventually, though, I pulled it down. You can only live on one hundred dollars and dreams for so long.

  Meanwhile, I had mastered the art of hiding my dissatisfaction. I avoided socialising with anyone not from the restaurant, I was too busy to go to any other functions anyway, as they were usually at night, and I didn’t know anyone who did what they really loved for a living. I melded my life dreams to suit my current situation. If what comes easily is what you go by, then I was doing what I was meant to do, I rationalised.

  The only time my dreams ever came back was when I had more than two days off in a row, and I would start to fantasise about how I would make a living as a writer instead of carrying plates. And perhaps I’d still be dreaming if it weren’t for an old croissant, a bout of conjunctivitis and a cracked rib.

  2

  More than a croissant

  ‘Louisa, anything is possible. You’ve just got to be willing to step off the cliff …’

  ‘Going 2 Borders in half an hour. Want 2 come?’

  Eyes thick with weepy conjunctivitis, I woke early on Sunday morning to my sister’s text after my first Saturday night off work in six months.

  ‘My eyes are-sick!’

  I told Marco the night before, to make him understand why he couldn’t catch a cab over when his shift finished.

  ‘I no understand,’ he replied. ‘You need glasses?’

  I pulled out my Italian-English dictionary, the only way I could get through these sorts of conversations. ‘Altamente contagioso.’ Highly contagious.

  ‘Oh, okayyy. Goodnayt.’

  After four hours spent drinking coffee, browsing Borders, and reading all the latest issues of US Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire with my sister, it’s still only the middle of the afternoon. Wow. When you get up early, you really get stuff done.

  ‘You should go home and pitch some of those stories, Lou,’ says my sister, and as I sail my bicycle down Canning Street, which is drizzling with rain, I’m so hyped up on caffeine and ideas that I don’t notice the pole until I slam into it and fall, with a thud, onto the pavement.

  ‘I’ve had a fall off my bike, the doctor says I have a cracked rib – ah – I can bring in a certificate … ?’

  I can hear Chef barking orders in the background as I pathetically plead for two days off work in a row. I feel like a whinger and a complainer. But part of me is annoyed. Employed as a casual, it’s not like they have to foot the bill for my forty-eight hours on Nurofen-Plus.

  ‘Well can you come in tomorrow? We have forty booked in the private room for the Australian Medical Association Christmas dinner.’

  The irony of what Angela, the manager, is asking me to do isn’t lost on me. And the thought of another Christmas party season spent watching other people celebrate, while I have accomplished nothing but a cracked rib this year, makes me suddenly angry.

  Still, I answer robotically, ‘Yeah, that’ll be okay.’

  One good thing to come of my two days off work, sans the distraction of Marco, is that I do, in fact, send some story pitches to magazines. Fuelled with sisterly motivation on the Sunday, despite the bicycle-crash interruption, I sent seven pitches to different women’s magazines. ‘How to live to 100’, ‘Famous firees’, and ‘Recent research into circadian rhythms’ were just some of my genius-seeming ideas, met with a resoundingly silent email inbox.

  Why hadn’t anyone replied? If I was bad at pitching, I wanted to know why. So on Tuesday morning, met with a blank day of nothing, I picked up the telephone and called the number inside one magazine.

  ‘Ah – Louisa, yes I did get that pitch from you. Look we’re not really commissioning at the moment. Where are you based?’

  ‘Melbourne.’

  ‘Oh okay, look, I’ll keep your details on file in case anything comes up.’

  Yeah, right. What could possibly ‘come up’? I try to forget about it and knock back another two Nurofens. The pain in my rib is like a knife being sliced into my back, every time I breathe.

  When I get to work that night, nothing can prepare me for the chaos that is there to greet me.

  ‘Jimmy’s quit, Marco’s not answering his mobile to come in, and I need you to set table sixteen, twenty and twenty-one up for the AMA function. They’ll be here in twenty minutes!’

  No ‘How are you feeling Louisa?’ No ‘Is your rib okay? Glad you’re alive!’ Nope, just lift every single tabletop on your own, carry twenty chairs up three flights of stairs, oh and set for three courses in twenty minutes. With a cracked rib.

  I manage as best I can, grunting and gritting my teeth in pain, because Jeremy, the only other waiter in the restaurant, is madly setting up the entire main, one-hundred-seat dining room, o
n his own.

  ‘You okay, Lulu?’ he yells from across the floor, when Angela sidles up behind him.

  ‘No time to talk Jeremy, let’s just get this room set up.’

  I’m wondering why exactly Jimmy quit, why Angela is being so rude, and how much longer I can stay in a job which doesn’t even pay for a sick day when I’ve cracked my rib, when I notice something in the corner behind one of the tables. By now laying down forks and knives with Olympic speed, I weigh up the time and pain involved with investigating what it is, and decide against it, just as one of the first AMA partygoers walks through the door.

  ‘Lulu, take a first drink order, I’ll finish the tables,’ says Angela, appearing beside me. And I wonder, not for the first time, why she always acts like she’s doing me a favour when she’s bossing me around. It’s remarkably unsatisfying having to leave an unset table when you’re three wine glasses off from finishing it. I just want some sense of completion, dammit!

  ‘Hello, sir, can I get you a drink?’ Out of the corner of my eye I send vicious bolts of rib-located pain to Angela, as she smoothes the linen and surveys the settings smugly, like she’s done the whole thing herself.

  In the small bar, off to the side of the restaurant, Chef comes out, as he always does, just before we are meant to have our briefing, to discuss the night’s specials, check the bookings, and tell us how we are going to space out the orders. Night after night he conducts the symphony of five hundred exquisitely prepared meals with impeccable detail, barking orders, monitoring the time on each docket, overseeing every single meal which comes out. I have nothing but admiration for him, doing it in a boiling hot kitchen and only occasionally getting the pleasure of people’s faces when they receive his perfectly arranged meals.

  Just as he appears, recognising in one swift glance that thirty customers are already here, there are only three waiting staff in the entire restaurant, and there’ll be no time for briefings, Angela stomps into the bar, clutching a stale, cobweb-covered croissant from centuries-past.