This is another fiction piece I wrote for my mid-semester assessment. For the record, I thought it was a piss-poor effort.
Holly was the sort of girl who always had a poppy seed between her front teeth, the girl with unintentionally odd socks, the girl whose hair would often fall from being tied back – not in a “windswept-jean-model-looking-totally-natural-yet-hyper-stylised-romantic-comedy” way, but in an awkward-limp-directly-in-her-face-that-no-amount-of-pursing-lips-and-blowing-upwards-in-a-hopefully-adorable-but-actully-just-looked-a-bit-spazzy kind of way.
She worked in the Greek restaurant on a busy street in an inner Eastern suburb of Melbourne. The place was run by a Greek family, but not the stereotypical loud, loving, everyone-is-here-for-fun type, it was the quiet, we-need-to-make-money-or-we-all-starve type. Holly also wasn’t Greek. She hadn’t been to Greece, she hadn’t even left Melbourne. The only Greek words she knew were items on the menu and even then she still referred to them as ‘the pink dip’, ‘that greenish dip that isn’t guacamole” and something she couldn’t identify but what she thought was hummus or tzatziki - she was pretty far from mastery of Greek things. She had been working there for just over a year but when the family would greet her in Greek she’d still ask them to translate. Or worse, reply with “Oh yes, saganaki to you to!” with over-done enthusiasm.
* * *
The night had been as dull as dishwater. Restaurant staff are often privy to some impressive displays of human culture – bill disputes, the making or breaking of relationships, the explosive drama when wine is knocked onto a new dress. But that night was calm, quiet, and dreary. Holly had just begun clearing the tables in preparation for closing when a young man walked in. He was more skinny than slender and had a way about him that could be called forced grace, like an emu in ballet shoes.
Holly stood there staring at him. Dirty plate in one hand, chux cloth in the other, mouth open slightly too wide, staring at his well dressed shoulders, with her own slightly slumped in impulsive, yet unconscious defeat. Eons seemed to pass as she looked, resembling a drugged Rhesus monkey.
He coughed to get the attention of the head waiter.
“Erm… are you guys still open?”
His voice was warm and despite the initial hesitation quite steady. He ordered a bunch of dishes to take away, before heading outside to have a cigarette while waiting. He played with his mobile in what he hoped would appear less like a nervous habit and more like he was very important and with tonnes of people needing to communicate with him. By the time Holly had finished clearing the tables he had taken his meal and gone.
* * *
He came back a few nights later, and again a few nights after that, always ordering the same dish. Soon enough he was making semi-regular appearances in the restaurant. Most nights he would wait for his order outside, smoking and absently playing with his phone. But sometimes he would strike up a warm but stilted conversation with Holly.
“Worked here long?”
“About a year,” she replied. “How long have you lived upstairs?”
“Not quite a year”, he smiled.
“Do you like it?”
He shrugged. “Trams get a bit annoying. But the plethora of cafes and eateries make up for it.”
These conversations were pithy without being verbose. Holly learnt that Serge hated iPhones, liked cats, and loved pancakes. Serge learned that Holly had never been in a plane, hated wearing high heels for fear of falling over, possibly in mud, and she enjoyed her pancakes with bacon and ample slatherings of maple flavoured syrup because real maple syrup just wasn’t right.
Late one July night, Holly was waiting for a tram in the blistering cold. The wind was lazy, it didn’t bother going around her it just went straight through her. She hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms around her middle and bounced lightly to help stave off the chill. A similarly hunched figure was walking briskly towards her. She recognised Serge and shot him a smile.
“Bit cold.” He said through clenched teeth.
“Just a bit,” she replied, grinning at him.
“Waiting for a tram?”
“Yeah, I’ll probably turn 40 before it gets here so you’d better wish me a happy birthday now.”
He laughed. “I just live upstairs actually. Want to come in and warm up while you wait?”
She hesitated.
“Come on,” he said “pretend you need to charge your iPod. It’ll be like the 21st century equivalent of borrowing a cup of sugar, or milk.”
Holly couldn’t help but find the idea appealing, so she agreed.
Serge’s flat was quickly and quietly observed by Holly. She noted that the tram depot was next door, which of course meant many wakeful mornings with the constant clanging, scraping and grinding of trams moving out in the pre dawn chill, or returning late at night when only cab drivers and 7-11 workers were awake. It was spacious enough for three couches, but had no room for a breakfast table let alone a dining suite. The bathroom was large enough to accommodate a decent sized bath, but there weren’t taps or space for a washing machine. The main bedroom was too big, the second too small. But there were windows. Large, double hung, and without flyscreens. They were the type of windows where you could sit on the sill and hang your legs out while smoking a cigarette on a stuffy summer’s night but in the cooler months, the chill would hiss straight from the glass onto any exposed extremity – a nose above the doona, or a sneaky foot sticking out the bottom. A set of shaky, wooden stairs lead from the gravel driveway off the bluestone back alley to the kitchen. Another set lead from the living room to the busy main street below where trams would rattle past in a sort of clanky parade.
He hadn’t lived there for an entire year yet, so the place still didn’t quite feel like home. Home is where you know how the shower works, and he still had to waste precious minutes, jumping from foot to foot on the frozen tiles getting the water temperature just so. He also didn’t have a set place for his keys and would turn the flat upside looking for his lone pen in order to do the Sunday crossword. He hadn’t quite settled in yet which was evidenced by his hesitation in choosing where and how to sit when there was a guest present.
“Nice place.” Holly commented. “Wish I could afford something like this.”
“The restaurant doesn’t pay too well then?”
“Enough to keep me in cheap rum and donuts but living alone in a place this size? Not worth contemplating because it’s never going to happen.”
Serge’s mobile phone rang, interrupting them, and he excused himself to answer it behind a closed door. Holly could hear him, he sounded exceptionally serious, like a political correspondent on SBS but she couldn’t work out what was being said. She pretended she couldn’t hear and absent mindedly tried to pin back some of those rogue hairs in her fringe. After a few minutes, Serge returned and Holly made her excuses to go, heading back out into the chill July air.
The next night Serge came into the restaurant. Holly had managed to get some of the pink dip on her hands, and had rubbed some onto her forehead without realising.
“Busy night?” asked Serge, handing her a paper napkin and gesturing to her forehead.
“Ahh… the pink dip. The bane of my existence.” She laughed while dabbing at her forehead.
“I enjoyed chatting with you the other night. If you’re keen, come up for a coffee when you finish work.”
Holly did, and did most nights for many months. She got to know Serge. He was The Man. The kind of guy who knew everyone’s name, was the first to crack a joke, the last to willingly appear weak. He was trusted and admired, and placed on a small but significant pedestal by his peers. Impeccably dressed, always stylish, younger men aspired to be like him, older men openly respected him while mutely bemoaning their greying hair. Women paid special care to the way they dressed when he was around. For all intents and purposes, he was The Guy. But as Holly got to know him better, and dug a little deeper, she saw a very different Serge.
His phone would often ring at odd hours, and the ensuing conversations were held in secret, outside, out of range of her hearing. Sometimes he would return from one of these calls in an agitated state. Other times he would just smile and shrug. And sometimes he wouldn’t answer his phone at all. Holly was perplexed but she was enjoying the very real friendship that was building between them. They stay up late arguing over who would win in a fight – The Incredibles versus The Fantastic Four? They ate left over Greek food from downstairs, and fell about the floor laughing over Holly’s inability to get food from her plate to her mouth without coating her clothes or nearby furnishings.
Very late one December evening, they were lounging in Serge’s apartment, all windows and doors open to get a semblance of breeze through the otherwise stagnant air.
“Uh, Hols? You’ve got, like, half a steak in your hair.”
Holly jumped up and bolted to the mirror to find, for once, a perfectly clean and meat free hairstyle. She ran back into the living room and threw pillow after pillow at Serge. He threw them back, and just like in some cheesy romantic comedy, they locked eyes. Realisation dawned on Serge immediately, and he lowered his pillow chucking arm. Holly wasn’t as quick and took his actions as a sign of defeat. She danced about, proclaiming victory while he stood there, dumbstruck.
It wasn’t until the next morning when Holly awoke that she realised what had happened. She spent the day stressing over what outfit to wear so as to impress him, what words she might say, how badly she was going to mess this up, but how much she wanted him to be a permanent part of her life. So worked up and agitated was she that she could barely sit still on the tram to work that night. She spent her shift with eyes glued to the door, waiting for him to walk in. She’d only pay half attention to what the customer was ordering and messed up every meal.
But Serge never came.
Feeling more worried than dejected, she made the lonely tram trip home listening to a bad mixture of love ballads from the eighties. She tried calling, but there was no answer. She sent a concerned text, but received no reply. Days and days went by, and there was still no word from him. She plucked up the courage to knock on his front door, but there was no answer and she could see mail building up on the floor.
Her world became two dimensional and limp, like living in a town made from cardboard and blu-tac. She would work, sleep, eat, work, rinse, repeat. She lost interest in all her previous hobbies. She shied away from friends and outings. She thought she saw him on a tram once. She often dreamt of him and when she had more than a day or two away from work, she would take a sleeping tablet every twelve hours in the hope she would dream of him again, but in reality it was so she didn’t have to bear all those hours of being conscious, awake, and wondering.
Holly just simply fell apart.
* * *
The two elderly ladies were sitting on a park bench, feeding the ducks. It was a spring day, cool, but the sun warmed old bones when the wind managed to quiet down.
“So did he ever come back?” she asked.
“No,” replied Holly as she scattered the bread crumbs around her feet.
The ducks quacked and quibbled. The sunlight played off the water. High up in ancient green trees, leaves swayed with the breeze.
“No.” she said again dusting the crumbs from her hands and managing to get some stuck in her hair. She leaned heavily on her walking stick and quietly thumped her way home, lost in the past.
