Lonie23

Lonie and Audrey drove back to the office in the Hillman Imp before lunchtime. He was still seething, but a bit worried. ‘Whit are we goin’ to tell the fatman?’ Audrey was parking her car. She checked the rear view mirror and the side mirrors and was continually revving the engine and bumping the back tyres sideways against the pavement.

‘That’ll do.’ Audrey looked quite pleased the Hillman was quite straight, and she’d reversed into quite a tight spot. The car engine juddered to a stop. That was why she liked coming in early, so she wouldn’t have to reverse.

A green Astra, backfiring, farted along the passenger’s side of the road. Lonie waited until it passed them before he stepped out onto the road, his hand’s automatically digging into to his pockets to check he had his fags. Audrey was preoccupied. She’d got out of the car, shut the door, opened it again, put her bag down on the front seat and was rifling through its contents with her bum sticking out of the door. Lonie had a fag, whilst slouching into his coat and leaning against the car door as he waited. Audrey unfolded herself from the car. Her face was unlined and fresh. She flashed clean white teeth in a warm smile. Lonie flicked his butt into the middle of the road. He couldn’t help but return a green watery smile. She stood close enough for them to link fingers and hold hands as they waited for the traffic slow so they could dash across the road.

‘Aren’t you meant to park the car near the pavement?’ Lonie asked.

Audrey’s smile disappeared quicker than a half pint of beer on a Sunday. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Ah just mean…’ Lonie had another look at the distance between the pavement, the tread of the Hillman Imp and the road, but he wasn’t taking any chances answering. He darted across the road, waving the traffic aside, until he was standing safely on the pavement on the other side of the road.

Audrey waited until there was a space in the traffic. She walked more sedately across the road, as if she had two poles strapped to her shoulder and she was carrying a bier.

Lonie had another fag in his gob, but was too distracted and put it back in his packet. ‘Whit are we goin to tell the fatman?

‘Just tell him it was my fault.’ Audrey didn’t wait for him. Her rubber- soled heels clipped the pavement in an even beat as she walked ahead of him.

Lonie quickly caught her up and matched her stride. ‘Ah don’t mean you to take this the wrong way, but the fatman doesn’t want to hear about it being a woman’s fault. You might think he’s like a big cuddly teddy bear. But he’s a bit like God. He’s not going to blame Eve when he can boot Adam’s arse. He wants results and he doesn’t care how we get them.’

Audrey stopped to let a lorry clank its way past her, coming up and out of the metallic ramp into the Glasownian building. ‘What are you saying? It’s my fault?’ She looked round at Lonie, her eyes shining. ‘You don’t want to work with me?’

‘Nah. Nah. ’ Lonie grabbed for her arm, but she pulled away. ‘Look, nobody’s expectin’ us back the now. Let’s go for a cuppa tea in the café and we’ll try and figure something out, an angle we can go for?’ Her expression softened.

‘Or a quick half?’ Lonie said.

Audrey shook her head in consternation. He was always chancing it. Taking things too far. ‘No. I think a cup of tea will be just fine.’

The Captain’s Rest was busy, but not hectic busy the way it usually was. There were tables empty. Some of the coveted seats near the window weren’t taken. Most of the lunch-time customers had gone. A thick greased-in smell stapled the air, but there was a lull between then and the dinner-time crowd. One of the waitresses with her hat askew and a fag in her hand was leaning over the serving hatch chatting to the cooks in the back. She glanced over at Lonie and Audrey standing uncertain near the door and continued with her observations. The waitress reached in the hip pocket of her apron for her pad to take their orders. When she turned to look at thme again, they were sitting facing each other, the false wilt of a plastic rose in a blue necked vase between them, in one of the tables near the counter. Her thick legs trundled over as if she was being pushed on castors.

Lonie looked up at the waitress and smiled warmly as if they were old friends. She’d served him a few times. He’d already marked her out as somebody he’d never tip again. ‘Ah’ll just have a roll- in- cheese and a cuppa tea.’ His feet were touching Audrey’s under the table. That wasn’t much consolation, but it was a start.

‘What kind of cheese is it?’ Audrey asked the waitress, her toes retreating to her side of the table.

The waitress’s pen was poised. Her cheeks were red from the heat and puffed up in consternation. She looked at Lonie for help. Then at Audrey. ‘It’s just cheese.’ Her hand dropped and she turned as if to ask those in the back, but thinking better of it turned back towards Audrey. ‘Cheese,’ she said louder and with finality, as if Audrey was a tourist and didn’t understand the Scottish accent and that made it clearer.

Lonie leaned across the table to help her with her translation. ‘It’s no’ that plastic cheese. No’ the stuff you get wrapped in wee bits. It’s no’ that stuff you spread like shite-sorry, no shite- on your pieces.’ He looked across at Audrey to see if she understood.

‘It’s not Dairylee,’ said the waitress. ‘It’s real orange cheese!’

‘I don’t doubt it’s real cheese.’ Audrey looked up at the dropped open mouth of the waitress. She looked at Lonie’s sheepish expression. ‘Can you just give me a roll with sliced tomato on it? No butter on it. And a cup of coffee.’

The waitress jotted down Audrey’s order. Her body drifted in a curve sideways to their table, but her head turned suddenly. She’d thought of something. ‘No butter? It’s not margarine you know. It’s real butter.’

Audrey’s jaw tightened. ‘I don’t like butter. I don’t like margarine. If that’s quite all right?’

‘Fine,’ said the waitress. ‘If you’re allergic to butter I’ll just tell him that in the back. I’ll make sure you don’t get any butter on your roll.’

Audrey pushed back into her chair, her lips tightened and her forehead frowned across the table at him.

‘Do you mind if Ah smoke?’ Lonie held a fag up, like a ticket. His other hand was shifting the square red ashtray back and forth an inch or more on the table.

‘No!’ Audrey blinked rapidly and then reconsidered. ‘Go ahead. If we’re working together I suppose I’ll have to get used to it.’

The waitress brought their order on a tray, placing Audrey’s plate with dry roll, a knife and a tomato as a side dish carefully in front of her. ‘I told him about your allergy. And we thought it best if you just cut up the tomato yourself. That way you’ll not need to worry about contamination.’ She leaned across and confided in Audrey. ‘My daughter’s pal’s pal had that. Peanuts. She ate a Marathon and it nearly killed her. She had to go to the hospital and they had to take the peanuts out with something or other.’ She blinked and began to sneeze. ‘Sorry, bit of a cold.’ She wiped her nose with her apron.

Lonie had pushed his chair at a forty-five degree angle to Audrey and was sitting on the edge of his chair, smoking sideways.

Audrey finger tipped her plate with the roll, and the smaller plate with a tomato, away from her. She stirred her coffee, added sugar and started sipping it.

‘You no’ goin’ to finish that roll?’ Lonie one- handedly chewed his way through his lunch and mopped up his mug of tea.

‘No.’ Audrey warmed her hands on the coffee cup. ‘She sneezed all over it.’

Lonie picked up the tomato and took a bite out of it like an apple. ‘No harm done. Clean germs.’ He took another bite of his roll and then a bite out of hers. Lifting his mug he wiped at his mouth and tried to say something at the same time, but seeing the expression on Audrey’s face he concentrated on chewing.

Audrey watched the bolus of food go down his throat like a python swallowing a live rat. She was fascinated but repelled. ‘Finished?’ She raised an eyebrow.

‘Yeh,’ he admitted, falling back into his chair, a little squeak of a fart escaping, which he ignored and hoped she would have the good manners to ignore too.

Audrey leaned forward across the table. 'Remind me to never go anywhere with you for something to eat again.’

‘Sure.’ Lonie scratched at his head. ‘But Ah never go anywhere to eat. It’s a waste of money.’ He began to cough and phlegm began to gather in the back of his throat. His eyes watered. He looked desperately around for something to spit into. He picked up the blue paper napkin from the side plate. One look from Audrey and he’d changed his mind about spitting into it and was scuttling towards the café’s toilet.

Audrey was hungry, but she sipped at her coffee, content to quietly have the time to people watch. She liked doing that. Lonie’s coat was sitting on the back of his seat, like some kind of black carapace, a living thing that a beetle had shed before it had scampered under some pried up floorboard. That was what he was like. She lifted her bag onto the table and placed her shorthand notepad on the table with a pen at the ready. Her perfume bottle glinted. She was sure she smelt a bit whiffy and that when she would use the women’s toilet at work she would give herself a quick burst of spay, rub it on her wrists and the back of her neck, to refresh herself. She was sorting through her purse for change, tilting it one way and then the other so that she could find the round- about- the- right- change for her half- of- the- bill when the cloying smell of cheap spray caught on her throat and someone bumped into the back of her chair. She felt the silken brush of a woman’s hair against her face and an arm thrown around her shoulder as someone kissed her on the cheek.

Audrey flinched and flung her purse into the air, scattering coins: silver fifty pences, ten pences, shillings, sixpences, five pences, and brown tuppencies and half-pennies; all the money she had, like a scramble at some poor- man’s wedding, all over the table and rolling onto the floor and under tables and chairs.

‘Did I startle you?’ Mary’s warm hand stayed on Audrey’s shoulder before slipping away.

Marj bent herself to collecting the money, hoovering it up, like some dead-eyed shark. She looked up from underneath a table. Lonie stood, his shirt sleeves rolled up, waiting to get past her.

Mary was crawling under another table, her tight skirt fishtailing out into the passageway. Two workmen, wearing Donkey jackets, with PVC panels at the shoulders, beamed at Lonnie and each other as if they couldn’t believe there luck.

Audrey had pulled her chair back from the table. She was leaning over, a ball of hair, her arm a mechanical grab at the sideshow as she scooped up coins. Her face was flushed, when she looked up at Lonie. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I dropped my purse.’

Lonie stood on tuppence and bent down to pick it up, flinging it on the table with the variety of other change. Then he spotted sixpence, under an older woman with a face like the map of Italy. He bent down to pick it up. Then there was a three pence hiding behind a chair leg.

They piled the change on to the desk higgledy-piggledy and laughing found themselves squeezed into the same table. Lonie and Mary on one side of the table. Marj and Audrey facing them.

‘You got any fags?’ Mary’s face still carried the animation of the chase.

‘Sure.’ Lonie passed her one from his packet on the table. He automatically passed one to Marj too.

The waitress whom Mary and Marj seemed to know, by the familiar way they addressed and behaved with her, took their orders for tea and Tunnoch wafers. Audrey noticed the waitress jotting down the bill on a slip of paper, putting it on a plate and sliding it slyly towards Mary and watching her moving it sideways towards Lonie, as if that was what she expected. Before she left their table, Mary and the waitress shared conspiratorial smiles at this. Marj, of course, smiled as much as a stuffed dummy, so it was difficult to assess where she fitted in. But the way Mary was hanging onto every word and gripping Lonie’s arm made her feel she was the one that hadn’t been invited to sit down.

‘What exactly do you for a living?’ Audrey asked Mary.

‘Exactly?’ It was Marj that answered for both of them. ‘We’re prostitutes.’

‘Well not exactly prostitutes.’ Mary laughed, a high reckless laugh, teetering on the hysterical.’ Her bangles jangled as her arm shot across the table and grabbed Marj’s hand, her eyes narrowing and pleading with her.

‘Oh, I see.’ That was all Audrey could manage. She looked for the waitress to pay the bill, but she seemed to have wandered away.

‘Tell her Lonie.’ Mary grabbed at his arm. Forcing him to look at the tears forming in her eyes. ‘Tell her.’

‘Tell her what?’ Lonie looked straight ahead, judging the distance to the café’ door and the freedom of being away from her grasping hands and needy eyes.

‘Tell her you’re my boyfriend.’