Unspoken by Sam Hayes

stuck around long enough, then some of their lives might rub off on me. I would be a scholar by proxy.
    ‘Make yourself at home, then,’ Abe told me, and paid me overtime as well as a generous share of the tips.
    Within three months, I had qualified as his longest-surviving employee. Mostly he’d hired no-hopers or students who couldn’t hack the demands of a busy café, so when I came to Café Delicio, stayed for more than a few weeks, rearranged the interior and – having coaxed Chef to be more adventurous and pasted up new menus – I was suddenly in Abe’s good books.
    Before long, he gave me the title of café manageress. It meant I got to wear a badge with my name on. It meant that the customers, after glancing at my chest, would call me Mary.
    It meant that when he came in and eyed me up, when we flirted over scrambled egg and rashers of bacon, when he demanded a recount of his change and a cloth to wipe his spilled tea, there was a vague hope that he would remember who I was.
    Mary Marshall, the girl with the long blond hair at Café Delicio.
    I certainly remembered him from one visit to the next. With his fresh face and white teeth that were always on show, one of them crooked so that sometimes his lip snagged on it. It gave him a quirky appeal; almost roguish in a beautiful way. He had skin that gleamed and light brown hair that fell about his face in a long, slightly tousled style.
    Occasionally he came alone, but mostly he herded a posse of fellow students to take up half of Café Delicio with their book bags, their huge egos and their mountains of knowledge. I served and adored every one of them.
    Especially him.
    After his first visit, he squeezed a fifty-pence tip into the knot of tea towel that I wrung between my palms.
    ‘Your tea was good,’ he said in a voice that rivalled any movie star. There was something about the way his eyes narrowed, drank all of me in in a second. I was dumbstruck.
    ‘Thanks,’ I finally managed. ‘Would you like some more?’ The pot shook in my hand.
    He nodded and I poured. When his group of friends left, he stayed. Sipping from his white china cup, glancing casually around the café, he watched me work. I felt the heat of his eyes on my back, saw him tracking me in the big gilt-framed mirror. He sat there for nearly two hours, all the while drinking tea and pushing more coins into my hand with every refill. I busied about with other customers but never ignored him. I brought him food when I thought he was hungry and wiped his table so he could lay out his books when he wanted to study.
    ‘ Gray’s Anatomy ?’
    ‘First-year medical student,’ he replied, looking up from his work. His half-smile lit up my life. His outstretched hand made me belong; pulled me into another world. His world. ‘I’m David,’ he said. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you and your teapot.’
    It was 1976, and even before it began, I knew it was going to be a long, hot summer.
     
    ‘Mrs Marshall, we’re all done now. We’re going to take you out of the machine. Just relax. You’ve done very well.’ The invisible person still speaks to me as if I am a child.
    I’m very dizzy after the scan, and the nurse who was looking after me has gone on a break. No one notices as I stumble unaided into the toilets.
    When I come out, there is no one around to help me. They have taken what they wanted from me and now I am forgotten; an empty husk with the life sucked out of her by a giant magnet. If only it were that easy.
    I am standing in a corridor and there, up ahead, is Julia. A splash of colour in the white tunnel but with a deep, dark shadow by her side. I turn one way and then the other, searching for a way out. There isn’t one, but then, after all this time, I’m used to feeling like that.
    ‘Dr Carlyle came to see how you got on. That was kind of him, wasn’t it?’ Julia takes me by the arm and pulls me where I don’t want to go.
    Suddenly I am a young woman again, and before I have