from his chair and enter the inner sanctum of the scullery, with its sizzling terrors of rayburn and microwave. Old Mr Garcia stuck his head through the hatch and started calling out the first orders of the day. Mary ferried the slippery plates from Russ's counter to Mr Garcia's tray, and took the rubbled returns back to her own waiting sink. Mr Garcia trundled back and forth unsmilingly into the growing rumours of the cafe. Sometimes he would say, 'Mary, the bacon toast—you bring it', or 'You bring the steak salad, Mary', or 'You bring it, Mary—the treacle custard', and Mary would bring it, straightening her apron and patting her hair before moving out into the cafe's noisy limelight. Nearly all her hours were spent over the sink, erasing from white plates the many kinds of blood lost by food. After the breakfast clamour subsided into mid-morning, Russ would come from his cauldron to help her with the drying-up. And after the two-hour panic of lunch even Alan would leave his pads and clips and spikes to stand beside her rolling up his sleeves. That was the pinnacle of Mary's day, when the three of them were round her sink. Sociable flies weaved their fishing-nets in the air. 'Jesus, these fucking flies,' Russ would complain, dancing backwards from the sink and uselessly batting the air. 'What's the bloody point of them, that's what I want to know.' Mary, who moreover knew several of them by sight, wasn't worried by flies. She knew what the point of flies was.
How readily the world had spanned out to accommodate her. Really the main thing about life was its superabundance: there was so much of it, and always room for more inside. The girls of the exhausted Hostel, even the ones with jobs or men, suffered bitterly at the hands of boredom. They said that life itself was boring, life was dead. But surely the terror lay the other way, the loosening of the mind at the thought of all that life contained.
And when the present became too populous you could always look to the skies and their more idealized fortunes. There variety itself was abstract. On the way to work in the morning, the sky looked like heaven. On the way back to the Hostel in the evening, the sky looked like hell. At morning the white beings rode the blue vault in yachts and galleons, showing all their sail, or they smugly sunbathed with their arms tucked behind their heads, in heavenly peace and freedom. Later, and obedient to the iconography of evening, they lost their outlines in the hellish cliff face of the west, forming a steep red fault into the chaotic night.
This was on good days, of course. On bad days Mary felt saddened and battered by the thought of the things she might have done in her life—and anyway the clouds came then, and you couldn't see the creatures at all.
10
• • •
Good Elf
One morning Mary carried a trayful of heaped plates to the quartet of incredibly old cabbies who always liked to sit by the window near the door. They were nice to her, these old men, they were nice; not bad going, Mary thought, to be nice after forty years of boxed rage. Also to their credit, she supposed, was the fact that they all still looked like men. Women of this age didn't look like women. Women of this age looked like men: they had given up the ghosts of their femininity. Perhaps life was just extra hard on women, or perhaps being a man was the more natural state, to which women were obliged to revert in the end, despite all their struggles.
It was a good morning. It was payday. Tonight she would go out drinking with the boys. Something else pleased her even more. The previous afternoon she had finally managed to ask the boys if they had any books she could borrow and read. 'Books ?' they said in startled unison, and Mary thought she had made a mistake. They went on muttering about it all afternoon—'books... books! ... books ... ' But this morning they had come with books, three each, and they said Mary could have them for as long as she
How readily the world had spanned out to accommodate her. Really the main thing about life was its superabundance: there was so much of it, and always room for more inside. The girls of the exhausted Hostel, even the ones with jobs or men, suffered bitterly at the hands of boredom. They said that life itself was boring, life was dead. But surely the terror lay the other way, the loosening of the mind at the thought of all that life contained.
And when the present became too populous you could always look to the skies and their more idealized fortunes. There variety itself was abstract. On the way to work in the morning, the sky looked like heaven. On the way back to the Hostel in the evening, the sky looked like hell. At morning the white beings rode the blue vault in yachts and galleons, showing all their sail, or they smugly sunbathed with their arms tucked behind their heads, in heavenly peace and freedom. Later, and obedient to the iconography of evening, they lost their outlines in the hellish cliff face of the west, forming a steep red fault into the chaotic night.
This was on good days, of course. On bad days Mary felt saddened and battered by the thought of the things she might have done in her life—and anyway the clouds came then, and you couldn't see the creatures at all.
10
• • •
Good Elf
One morning Mary carried a trayful of heaped plates to the quartet of incredibly old cabbies who always liked to sit by the window near the door. They were nice to her, these old men, they were nice; not bad going, Mary thought, to be nice after forty years of boxed rage. Also to their credit, she supposed, was the fact that they all still looked like men. Women of this age didn't look like women. Women of this age looked like men: they had given up the ghosts of their femininity. Perhaps life was just extra hard on women, or perhaps being a man was the more natural state, to which women were obliged to revert in the end, despite all their struggles.
It was a good morning. It was payday. Tonight she would go out drinking with the boys. Something else pleased her even more. The previous afternoon she had finally managed to ask the boys if they had any books she could borrow and read. 'Books ?' they said in startled unison, and Mary thought she had made a mistake. They went on muttering about it all afternoon—'books... books! ... books ... ' But this morning they had come with books, three each, and they said Mary could have them for as long as she
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