Spinning Plates

Apparently, Zoe Ball used to work in this bar. Before she got famous of course, and long before she got married, had a baby, and got not-so-famous any more. If she had the same taste for balding men dressed fifteen years below their age bracket then as she did when she married that Norman bloke, then she’d probably have been getting much better tips than me.
“You’re new, aren’t you?”
Even four months into the job, they leer over the bar and ask me that. They might come in here once every four months but hell, nothing else changes here except the staff. Given the amount of overpriced Riocha they slug back I suppose I should be flattered that they’ve even managed to hitch their eyes up from chest level and noticed my face. Other than the constantly high staff turnover the rest of the bar is almost eerily unchanging. The same chairs, around the same tables. The same bouquet of lilies in the corner, replaced every two weeks by a florist who charges the owners a day’s wages for me. Although to be fair, I suppose the fresh flowers contribute more to the general ambience than I do.
Once in a while the paintings are switched around, mainly in a half-hearted effort to persuade the owner’s wife’s best friend that someone might actually have bought one. Overpriced, sticky acrylic daubs of Provencal country towns. A three-quarter-length portrait of an old man in what look like blue pajamas, nodding off in a chair next to a small dog. A watercolour of a poppy field, and hanging next to it a truly monstrous “cubist” interpretation of the same scene. You can tell it’s cubist because instead of the poppies in the foreground being violent, ovoid splotches of red bleeding into the wet grass, in this version they are neat squares, with a smaller square of black right in the middle. The sky is a straight blue line at the top of the painting and the middle ground is a grid of red and green that looks like it’s been carefully mapped out with a ruler. I have never met the owner’s wife’s best friend but I spend between six and ten hours walking past her paintings most days and by now I’ve formed a fairly strong impression of what she looks like, dresses like, and thinks about property prices.
I wish I could carry on staring at the old man and his dog as I finish wrapping tonight’s knives and forks in their twists of green paper napkin, but Sarah’s already kept me back twice after our monthly staff meetings and told me to try and be more friendly to the customers and wipe the frown off my face once in a while, so I drag my eyes bar-wards and plaster on a standard-issue smile.
“New here? I haven’t seen you before,” he says again. “I’m Paul, ha, you’ve probably heard about me from the other girls already.” He grins expectantly, the jowls just beginning to sag under his forty-something neck and his eyes doing something that he probably thinks is a roguish twinkle but comes across more as a lecherous half-wink.
He’s wrong, actually. There was no Paul on the list of regulars that the others warned me about when I started here. He probably doesn’t come here often enough. Sad, really. He probably talks about this place, calls it his local, recommends us to his friends, and yet none of the waitresses even remembers his name, his favourite drink, or which part of their bodies to keep out of range when walking past his table.
“Paul. Hi. What can I get you this evening?”
I try to keep the balance in my voice pitched on the right side of friendly but firmly on the wrong side of gropable. Rich, who isn’t supervising tonight, calls this my ice queen voice, but really it’s pretty cosy given how frosty I’m feeling on the inside.
Instead of telling me what he wants to drink and then buggering off to a table, Paul hauls over a bar stool and hops up onto it. He really is a very short man. Everyone looks fairly short from behind the bar – the floor on this side is up a four inch step – but really, he can’t be much over five feet. He squints at the small blackboard propped against the end of the bar with our by-the-glasses chalked on it.
“What would you recommend?”
Oh God. One of those. The only customer worse than the middle-aged eejit who’s watched Sideways fifty times on DVD and wants to tell you all about Cabernet Sauvignon before segueing seamlessly into asking for your phone number is the middle-aged eejit who’s watched Sideways fifty times on DVD but still doesn’t know what to order in a bloody wine bar. He’s either racked with genuine indecision, or he wants to entrap you into a long, long conversation, possibly a tasting, definitely some lengthy prevarication while the tables fill and your window of time for getting the pre-dinner prep done shrinks.
“Red or white?” I ask him. Come on, Paul, lets narrow it down a little, I think.
“Mmmn. Well. Perhaps a glass of red. Something I haven’t tried before.”
Since I have never clapped eyes on Paul before, and since our by-the-glasses change round every couple of weeks depending on which wine rep has got Sarah, the bar manager, the most pissed at the tasting (or offered her the best kickback) odds are he has never tried any of the five reds on the board before.
“Merlot?” I ask, just to test my own theory.
“Ah, no. Something a bit more interesting, Hmm?” Yep, he’s definitely a Sideways Man. No idea what he wants or likes, but wouldn’t be seen dead with a glass of Merlot in his hand. I know your type, baby. I put on my brightest, perkiest Sideways Smile.
“We-ell, if you like something a bit more interesting, we do have this Chianti in at the moment. Now, I know what you’re thinking – but this is seriously good. Really full-bodied, meaty wine. It’s not some straw-wrapped seventies thing any more. It’s a real gem. Single estate. Good year. Fancy a taste?”
God, I sound plausible. Although the context helps. I mean, you go to a library, you expect the person behind the bar – well, the counter – to know something about books. You go to a wine bar – especially one with a vase of fresh lilies in the corner and jazz on the stereo – and you expect the person begind the bar to know about wine. Maybe not all about wine, after all, they’re waitresses – how much information can they fit in their pretty little heads, ha ha! – but at least something. Enough to be able to give you some advice. To recommend the right wine to go with your food. To suggest the bottle to order when you’ve got someone to impress.
Nope.
All those times you’ve bellied up to the bar, leant across it, made eye contact, given the waitress a roguish twinkle before asking her what she recommends? Nine times out of ten you were both bullshitting. Yep, just like you were twitching the wedding ring out of sight and flexing your biceps as you hauled the barstool over with one hand, pretending to be the kind of guy who listens, really listens to a woman’s opinion on wine – thus implying that you might also be available to listen to pretty much anything else she wanted to say to you if only she’d give you a chance…yes, she was faking it just as badly.
It’s a safe bet that the waitress standing behind the bar – yes, her with the smart black apron and a sexy way with a corkscrew – it’s a safe bet she’s only pretending that she knows anything, anything at all, about the wine she is about to flog you.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some people who work in wine bars – the upmarket ones, the city-centre ones – do get sent on courses and that sort of thing. Some people want to work in wine bars because they like wine. Some people decided aged six that they wanted to run their own vineyard, and spending their gap year in a wine bar is all part of the masterplan.
But the vast majority are just like me. Hired because they can smile to order, and because they need the money bad enough to put up with the job for five, six months before they move onto something better.
People like me know nothing about wine. We may be so familiar with the 3 for 2 selection in the local Safeway that we can tell the difference between the one with the red writing on the label and the one with the kangaroo on it, but that’s about it. And we don’t get trained. We mostly never even taste the wine we sell you, unless we happen to buddy up with the wine rep, which is rare – why would they talk to us? That would be a waste of valuable manager-bribing time.
But does that stop us selling it? Does that stop us having opinions, or recommending which wine to have with your dinner, or nudging you towards the back pages of the wine list where the prices per bottle approach our weekly take-home pay? Hell, no. And when it comes to bullshitting, I am the best. The main reason (ok, the only reason) I still have my job, despite the two little chats with Sarah about being more friendly, despite my ice-queen rep, despite the time I accidentally on purpose spilt a half-pint glass of boiling hot irish coffee onto a yummy mummy in white jeans after she clicked her fingers at me twice, despite possessing a personality which is fundamentally incompatible with an industry that has the word ‘service’ in its title, is that for the last three months I have singlehandedly sold more of this appalling Chianti, ordered by Sarah after a particularly drunken and flirtatious tasting with particularly flirtatious and tasty wine rep, than any other member of staff at Le Petit Bouchon. Forty boxes in the cellar. When they’re gone, I’ll be on borrowed time – the next time I fold a napkin the wrong way she’ll fire me – but I kind of like that. Every time I go down to the cellar and grab an arm-stretching load of bottles I see them in the corner, and the lower the stack gets the closer I am to getting a new job.
I mean, I hate it here. I hate my job. But I know I won’t get round to looking for anything better until I get fired. So the Chianti crates are like one of those thermometer signs outside churches in reverse. Once the red liquid shrinks down to floor level I plan on shoving the last bottle into my handbag and walking out, never to darken these doors again. In the meantime, I take a weird pride in the number of glasses and bottles of the rough stuff that I can persuade men like Paul to choke down, wincing, and winking over the rim of their glasses when they catch me watching them. Most of the other barstaff just aren’t quite as sadistic as me, I guess, so every month when Sarah gets to the incentive part of the meeting it’s always my name she reads out, and it’s always me who walks home with a bottle of house red, twenty four quid cheaper and a hell of a lot more drinkable than the big glass of the big C I am about to pour. If I can just get Paul to swallow the bait.
He’s looking doubtful. I guess he’s probably having flashbacks to his youth, before his hair started thinning and he ordered the chianti, either because it was the only name on the winelist he recognised or because of the fact that the name on the straw-wrapped candleholder had burned itself into his cortex.
“Seriously. Have a taste. I have to say, it’s definitely my favourite on the list.”
I reach up for a large glass and glug a few miserly drips into it. Whether it’s the fact that reaching upwards has placed my breasts directly in his eyeline or the fact that I, the knowlegable member of staff, have just given the wine my personal seal of approval, he’s smiling again as he lifts the glass towards his face. Pauses to swirl it and inwardly I’m screaming that it’s not bloody brandy, get on with it, as he sniffs greedily and then tips the dregs onto his tongue.
I’m kind of surprised that the acidity doesn’t send a hiss of vapour out of his ears but he’s taking his medicine like a good boy, and even shuts his eyes for a moment as he replaces the glass on the bar.
“See?” I ask him, injecting just the right note of peppy enthusiasm into my voice. “what do you think? A large glass?”
“Definitely.”
I fill the glass up to the invisible line – the only real piece of training they did give us, how to fill a glass precisely, no brimming cups of plenty in this bar. The line of dinky tasting glasses are gathering dust on the top shelf. This was one of Sarah’s brainwaves. Don’t give them a fresh glass if you can help it. Saves on the washing up, saves on the infinitisemal wastage left in the bottom of the glass. Don’t even give them enough to properly taste it, because five or six glasses with a centimetre or so of wine adds up to a full glass and that’s a glass’s worth of wastage.
“There you go. Four pounds twenty please, Paul.”
“I guess I’ll start a tab. I’m having something to eat later.”
He hands me a gold card and I write “Paul” on a piece of paper from my pad, wrap it round the card, and pop it into the first of twelve tumblers lined up behind the bar. Bugger. There goes any chance of my tip. Even if he does shove a couple of quid on the credit slip four or five hours from now, it’ll never reach my pay packet. And despite the gold card, I very much doubt he’ll remember these precious moments we’ve shared, Paul and I and the Chianti, when the evening winds down and I start banging the furniture around and asking them all to leave. I’m Paul’s best friend right now, but come closing I’ll be just like his ex-wife, just another bitch who wants to stop him having fun.

To be continued...