4. Splendours and Miseries of Waitressing

Dave was not the only other person on the premises on Tuesday morning. In the kitchen a stranger was making a bacon sandwich. She was a stranger to Nick, who had met her at the party the night before but had since cleansed his mind of the memory by immersing it in formaldehyde. She was a stranger to the kitchen, which was why she had to open three drawers and two cupboards to find a knife, but not to Dave, on account of the fact that she had just spent the night in a sleeping bag with him, circumstances under which the most aloof become acquainted.

She was wearing a Sony Walkman, the earphones hidden under a nest of tangled blonde hair. A hairdo that had attracted adverse comment from Nick the night before. “Is this the new trend?” he had asked. “What do you call it? The Dragged-through-the-Rosebush look?”

Enduring a night with Dave had been very much like being dragged roughly through a rosebush. She had come out the other side with her hair ruffled and her mascara like blackfly on her rosy cheeks. She was scratched and soiled and covered in horticultural pests.

She had met Dave at the party and clung to him as a way of getting rid of Nick. Nick had encountered her first, standing in the queue for the lavatory, and began chatting her up with probably the single most boring thing he could have said in the circumstances.
“What do you do?”
“I’m an actress.”
“Might I have seen you in anything?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“Have you been on the telly?”
“No.”
“That’s funny, because you look familiar.”
“Well, I haven’t been on the telly.”
“Where have I seen you then?”
“Do you ever go to the Globe?”
“The Globe Theatre? Didn’t that burn down years ago?”
“No, the pub. Well, it’s a bistro now, in Camden Town.”
“Oh yes, I’ve been there a couple of times.”
“Well, you might have seen me there. I’m waitressing there at the moment.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, when you said you were a waitress, I thought you said actress!”
“I did.”
“But you just said you were a waitress.”
“Just until my next acting job.”
“So you used to be an actress, but now you’re a waitress.”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean sort of?”
“I’ve never actually been in anything. I’ve auditioned a lot.”
“So you never have been an actress.”
“No.”
“And how long have you been a waitress?”
“Seven years.”
“Really, how interesting! Do you like your job?”
Nick wondered what he had said to offend her, after she rather hurriedly gave up queueing for the loo with the words “I’d rather go in the garden.”

At drama school they were taught every aspect of a theatrical career; juggling, blank verse and of course carrying a tray with lots of plates on it. They also held a series of Rejection Classes to help the future unemployed actors and actresses cope with the humiliation and loss of self esteem when meeting someone like Nick. At a typical seminar they are asked the apparently innocent question; “What do you do.”
“I want to be an actress.”
Everyone laughed when she gave this answer.
“Look, dear, if I may interjerk here,” the instructor said, “it’s no good swaning around saying ‘I want to be an actress’ you have to say ‘I am an actress.’ If you hear yourself saying it often enough, darling, even you will believe it.”
She said it to herself but wasn’t convinced.
“Firm resolve is essential if you want to make it in showbiz,” her teacher said. “You must embrace the humiliation,” – the teacher embraced himself with an ecstatic shudder by way of demonstration – “you must use it to make you stronger.”
These were the meaningless formulae her mountebank tutors peddled, and the poor sap fell for it. His teachings had provided no protection from Nick’s well meaning blunders. They chanced to meet slightly later in the evening when she short-sightedly mingled towards Nick.
“So, it’s the waitress!” he said cheerily. The resentment she bore him grew weightier. How could she get away from him this time? Then she saw Dave. He was standing nearby leering at her. Nick was clearly taking great pains not to notice him. Finally Dave found a neat opening in the conversation:
“Well, introduce me then, you cretin,” he said.
She watched Nick writhing as he failed to recall her name.
“This girl is an actress,” he said instead.
“One day. I want to be,” she had corrected despite herself. “Waitress, actress, what does it matter?”
“So you want to be a mattress?” said Dave, making what sense he could of her flustered attempt at badinage. “You could come back with me, I haven’t got one, I have to sleep on the floor.”
Nick wandered off and took his frustration out by sitting in the meter cupboard and drinking the ouzo to which he was guided by a supernatural voice. Meanwhile Dave was dancing in the front room with a girl he had met first. Eventually Nick satisfied himself that there was no more ouzo or ethanol to be found and came up to the dancing couple and announced that he had had enough and was going to leave.
“Are you coming?” he demanded.
“No, bit longer!” shouted Dave. Then the music dropped.
“Right, well, I’m going to take on the elements.”
“Are you sure you’re up to it, Nick? That’s four against one.”
Dave proved to be an uninhibited dancer, and he kept finding her drinks after the booze had apparently run out. He would dash off between songs and return seconds later with a bottle of chilled white wine in his hand. This made him universally popular, in contrast to Nick.
“Where do you keep getting more wine from?” she asked him.
“Well, as this is the last one, I can tell you,” Dave whispered. “I hid a couple of bottles in the lavatory cistern earlier.” His face beamed with pride. “Keeps them cool too.”
She had forgotten about Nick’s rudeness and was enjoying herself very much. They walked home togther, passing Nick, unnoticed in his slumber, she pushed her unicycle in front of her. It was the project for the week. Last week had been learning to mime being trapped in a glass cage, this week was unicycling. Dave begged her to give him a demonstration of her skills but she said it was too dangerous in the snow. When they got home she left the unicycle outside the house.

One of the more sadistic classes at drama school had been an improvisation workshop in which each student was encouraged to divulge to the others his or her greatest phobias and the whole class would then act out the phobia in mime. She had said her greatest fear was to have creepy crawlies creeping and crawling all over her. The resulting “impro” caused her to go into hysterics and only after they had brought her a glass of water from the ladies did she calm down. The techniques of the Ministry of Fear were either going to make the young people into great actors or nervous wrecks.
When Dave brought her home she had forgotten her nightmare and the last thing on her mind was creep crawlies. The front room was dark, there was no lightbulb. The creatures were around her in the darkness. She could not see them, but they made themselves known with myriad mating messages that would have shocked Dr Doolittle.
“Had we but world enough and time,” one bull-toad was croaking to his coy mistress, meanwhile a cicada was serenading his paramour with the request; “come live with me and be my love.” Dave must have been inspired by their romantic whispers, he took her in his arms and groaned, “oh you’ve got a lovely bum.”
The cicadas and the horny toads were deafening. Their erotic cries emerged amplified drom the cylinders and gaskets of the dismantled motorcycle. Then a howling monkey rent the air with insane laughter like Monserat Cabalhe choking on a peanut. Some parrots and cockatoos took up the laughter mockingly and the recital ended in uproar.
“You’ve got a menagerie in here!”
“It’s all right,” said Dave. “It’s a tape recording of jungle noises. It’s to create an ambulance. I’ll turn it down if you like.”
When he lowered the volume the monkeys parrots and cockatoos got quieter but the toads and crickets didn’t, but she didn’t notice. In fact she was quite impressed with Dave’s imaginative choice of atmospherics. She hadn’t realised that the tropical ambience was not being created for her, but in order to make the toads and crickets feel more at home. She curled up in Dave’s arms and a gecko named Buddy curled up to sleep in her left stiletto.
Dave was all over her. How did he manage to tickle the soles of her feet whilst at the same time stroking her hair and doing all those other naughty things?
Afterwards she put a blank tape into her walkman and placed the earphones over her ears. By means of this ingenious contraption she dimmed the chattering of Dave’s invisible creatures and got some sleep. What she did not know was that their moments of passion would have a lasting effect, and that, despite their precautions they had created new life. It happened like this:

After he had satis-fired himself Dave attempted to tie a knot in the used condom so that he could leave it hanging over her shoe and it wouldn’t leak out and wake up Buddy, but his big fat pink fingers were not dextrous with slimy latex, and it shot out of his hand, catapaulted by its own elasticity. It flew in a wide arc across the darkened room like a feeble comet and splash-landed in a carboretor manufactured by Suzuki of Japan. Inside this carboretor was a recently developed oil made from genetically designed strings of molecules, described in the adverts as quite simply the last word in organic lubrication. An enzyme-rich soup in other words, held in a magnetic field and occasional sparked with static electricity when swiped with the nylon sleeping bag: an excellent place in which to create new life.

The molecules started forming new combinations and Dave’s sperm began to grow. Soon it began to take shape, dividing and mutating at a fantastic speed. First gills and then primitive nostrils appeared. By the mid afternoon it would be learning to move about on its belly. Dave (although he didn’t know it yet) had achieved the summit of the naturalist’s ambition – he had created a new species.

In the gloom of the morning a squint of light penetrated the drapery and made strange shapes perceptible, but Dave’s house-guest didn’t recognise them as moving objects. That is the advantage of moving slowly, ant snail will tell you that predators and – as a bonus – phobic blondes, only notice moving objects. In the sober dawn she asked herself why she had gone back with him and had been his mattress. If humiliation was going to make her strong, she must be transformed into Wonderwoman by now.

When Dave asked her to go into the kitchen and make her a bacon sandwich she agreed because it would be a way of escaping his groping hands. She put on the donkey jacket that she found on the back of the front door, and barefoot ventured into the kitchen, a breeding ground of germs and a good place to learn microbiology. This is where she remained for the time being, oblivious to the dramas going on around her as related in the next chapter, thanks to her Sony Walkman which was now seranading her with bedsit hits of the seventies.