One Day

head vigorously. ‘See, all gone, right as rain. Let’s forget it.’

‘So what do you think? About being manager?’

‘Can I think about it? Tell you tomorrow?’

Scott smiled benignly and nodded. ‘Go on then! Take a break—’ He stretched an arm towards the door, adding with infinite compassion: ‘Go get yourself some nachos.’

In the empty staff room, Emma glared at the plate of steaming cheese and corn chips as if it was an enemy that must be defeated.

Standing suddenly, she crossed to Ian’s locker and plunged her hand into the densely packed denim until she found some cigarettes. She took one, lit it, then lifted her spectacles and inspected her eyes in the cracked mirror, licking her finger to remove the tell-tale smears. Her hair was long these days, styleless in a colour that she thought of as ‘Lank Mouse’. She pulled a strand from the scrunchie that held it in place and ran finger and thumb along its length, knowing that when she washed it she would turn the shampoo grey. City hair. She was pale from too many late shifts, and plump too; for some months now she had been putting skirts on over her head. She blamed all those refried beans; fried then fried again. ‘Fat girl,’ she thought, ‘stupid fat girl’ this being one of the slogans currently playing in her head, along with ‘A Third of Your Life Gone’ and ‘What’s the Point of Anything?’

Emma’s mid-twenties had brought a second adolescence even more self-absorbed and doom-laden than the first one. ‘Why don’t you come home, sweetheart?’ her mum had said on the phone last night, using her quavering, concerned voice, as if her daughter had been abducted. ‘Your room’s still here. There’s jobs at Debenhams’ and for the first time she had been tempted.

Once, she had thought she could conquer London. She had imagined a whirl of literary salons, political engagement, larky parties, bittersweet romances conducted on Thames embankments. She had intended to form a band, make short films, write novels, but two years on the slim volume of verse was no fatter, and nothing really good had happened to her since she’d been baton-charged at the Poll Tax Riots.

The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no-one had noticed her arrival, and no-one would notice if she left.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. The idea of a career in publishing had floated itself. Her friend Stephanie Shaw had got a job on graduation, and it had transformed her. No more pints of lager and black for Stephanie Shaw. These days she drank white wine, wore neat little suits from Jigsaw and handed out Kettle Chips at dinner parties. On Stephanie’s advice Emma had written letters to publishers, to agents, then to bookshops, but nothing. There was a recession on and people were clinging to their jobs with grim determination. She thought about taking refuge in education, but the government had ended student grants, and there was no way she could afford the fees. There was voluntary work, for Amnesty International perhaps, but rent and travel ate up all her money, Loco Caliente ate up all her time and energy. She had a fanciful notion that she might read novels aloud to blind people, but was this an actual job, or just something that she’d seen in a film? When she had the energy, she would find out. For now she would sit at the table and glare at her lunch.

The industrial cheese had set solid like plastic, and in sudden disgust Emma pushed it away and reached into her bag, pulling out an expensive new black leather notebook with a stubby fountain pen clipped to the cover. Turning to a fresh new page of creamy white paper, she quickly began to write.

Nachos It was the nachos that did it.

The steaming variegated mess like the mess of her life Summing up all that was wrong With Her Life.

‘Time for change’ comes the voice from the street.

Outside on the Kentish Town Road There is laughter But here, in the smoky attic room There are only The Nachos.

Cheese, like life, has become Hard and Cold Like Plastic And there is no laughter in the high room.

Emma stopped writing, then looked away and stared at the ceiling, as if giving someone a chance to hide. She looked back at the page in the hope of being surprised by the brilliance of what was there.

She shuddered and gave a long groan, then laughed, shaking her head as she methodically scratched out each line, crosshatching on top of this until each word was obliterated. Soon there was so much ink that it had soaked through the paper. She turned back a page to where the blots had seeped through and glanced at what was written there.

Edinburgh morning, 4 a.m.

We lie in the single bed and talk about the Future, make our guesses and as he speaks I look at him, think ‘Handsome’, stupid word, and think ‘might this be it? The elusive thing?’

Blackbirds sing outside and the Sunlight warms the curtains. .

Once more she shuddered, as if peeking beneath a bandage, and snapped the notebook shut. Good God, ‘the elusive thing’. She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.

Putting the notebook away, she reached for yesterday’s Sunday Mirror instead and began to eat the nachos, the elusive nachos, surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.

Ian was in the doorway. ‘That guy’s here again.’

‘What guy?’

‘Your friend, the handsome one. He’s got some girl with him.’ And immediately Emma knew which guy Ian was talking about.

She watched them from the kitchen, nose pressed against the greasy glass of the circular window as they slumped insolently in a central booth, sipping gaudy drinks and laughing at the menu. The girl was long and slim with pale skin, black eye make-up and black, black hair, cut short and expensively asymmetrical, her long legs in sheer black leggings and high-ankled boots. Both a little drunk, they were behaving in that self-consciously wild and reckless way that people slip into when they know they’re being watched: pop-video behaviour, and Emma thought how satisfying it would be to stride out onto the restaurant floor and cosh them both with tightly packed burritos- of-the-day.

Two big hands draped on her shoulders. ‘Schhhhhwing,’ said Ian, resting his chin on her head. ‘Who is she?’

‘No idea.’ Emma rubbed at the mark her nose had made on the window. ‘I lose track.’

‘She’s a new one then.’

‘Dexter has a very short attention span. Like a baby. Or a monkey. You need to dangle something shiny in front of him.’ That’s what this girl is, she thought: something shiny.

‘So do you think it’s true what they say? About girls liking bastards.’

‘He’s not a bastard. He’s an idiot.’

‘Do girls like idiots then?’

Dexter had stuck his cocktail umbrella behind his ear now, the girl collapsing into enchanted laughter at the genius of it.

‘Certainly seems that way,’ said Emma. What was it, she wondered, this need to brandish his shiny new metropolitan life at her? As soon as she’d met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her. Even so this would be the third girlfriend, lover, whatever, that she had met in the last nine months, Dexter presenting them up to her like a dog with a fat pigeon in his mouth. Was it some kind of sick revenge for something? Because she got a better degree than him? Didn’t he know what this was doing to her, sat at table nine with their groins jammed in each other’s faces?

‘Can’t you go, Ian? It’s your section.’

‘He asked for you.’

She sighed, wiped her hands on her apron, removed the baseball cap from her head to minimise the shame and pushed the swing door open.