Work In Progress
SHORT FICTION
The Couple Who Stood Up
by: Joshua Hennessy
The Trout Lane Tandoori was largely brown with seventies furniture and stains. Tony - a local non-indian waiter who worked there because of the free food - saw a couple enter. He liked it when there were customers. It gave him somebody to talk to. The chefs were off limits conversation wise as the only common vocabulary was the menu. In fact, the menu comprised a complete glossary of the unusual Anglo Indian language of this particular restaurant. If it couldn’t be said in shashlik, murgh and capiscum, it couldn’t be said at all. Also, it embodied the Law and Democratic Constitution. If a dispute occurred, detailed examination of the menu, with much gesticulating, would invariably resolve the difficulty. On the rare occasions when it was necessary to involve the Indian manager, he would never do anything so crass as to override what was written in sacred brown upon yellow. He would simply examine the page with his one good eye and clarify the interpretation. He used his bad eye to eye up the customers.
Tony, the English waiter glided over to the couple in his black plastic slip-ons.
‘Good evening. Isn’t it marvellous? Table for two?’
‘Yaaas,’ said Enoch, the generally male element of the pairing.
‘Absolutely correct,’ said Mabel, the mostly female one.
Tony slid along as if on runners, rotated like vinyl on a turntable, inclined his body to 20 degrees from the vertical, allowed his napkined left forearm to flop outward, palm inclined towards a small table with two chairs made out of bent steel tube and stretched garam masala fabric. He posed like a puppet bereft of its operator, awaiting the arrival of His Guests.
Enoch and Mabel three-legged it over to the table in perfect synchronisation. They parted like curtains either side, swung their bottoms in over the chairs and lowered themselves in a perfectly controlled double peach landing.
As bums hit nylon, the lights took on a sour putrescence, and the ceiling speakers began to play some Elton John Greatest Hits for sitar and panpipes.
‘We-e-e-e-ll,’ drawled Enoch, as if he were falling down one. ‘Here we aaaare.’
‘I really don’t know where else we might be.’ Mabel spoke like a machine gun.
‘Hmmmmm... We might have gone to the ahhhhhhh....’
Mabel picked up her menu and perused it aggressively.
‘The ahhhhhh...’
Mabel considered furiously. Jalfrezi? A chef’s special? Definitely skip the starter.
‘The ahhhhhh...’
‘The what for heaven’s sake?’
‘Pub.’
‘But we didn’t, did we? So what’s the point of mentioning it? What are you going to have?’
‘For starters, I think I’ll have the ahhhhh...’
‘I wasn’t going to have a starter.’
‘..ahhhh...oh. What were you going to do instead?’
‘Not have one.’
‘Ye-e-e-s. That is the alternative.’
They glanced at Tony, who moon-walked over and deftly slid a pencil and pad from his breast pocket.
‘Are you ready to order?’
‘Yes,’ said Mabel.
‘No,’ said Enoch.
Tony raised an eyebrow and tapped his foot.
‘Madam? You are ready?’
‘I don’t want a starter,’ said Madam.
‘If you don’t start madam, it is difficult to see how you can curry on, or indeed finish.’ Tony sniggered to himself.
Enoch looked up lugubriously. ‘Don’t talk like that to my wife you supercilious toad. Anyway, I do want a starter.’
Tony smirked. ‘Is there any particular one you had in mind, sir?’
‘N-o-o-o-o.’
‘No?’
‘N-o-o-o-o.’
Tony licked his lips, shifted his hips and let out a hot sneaky one.
‘I want a generic starta-a-a-ar, with no particula-a-a-ar characteristics whateva-a-a-ar. Is that understood?’
‘Such an item does not appear on the menu, sir.’ said Tony, inhaling deeply.
Enoch took out a pen and wrote on the yellow paper under the starter column:
Generic Starter (spices, meat and
carbohydrate)...................................£2.45
‘Now, take that to the chef.’
‘I’d rather not, sir.’ Tony’s knees buckled, and he farted again, only this time noisily and involuntarily.
‘Damn your backside. Why will you not take it to the chef?’
‘My backside, sir?’
‘No, you imbecile. The menu.’
‘The chef and I don’t get on very well.’
‘You surprise me, absolutely not,’ broke in Mabel. ‘Come, Enoch. We’ll ask the chef ourselves. Which way is the kitchen?’
Tony gestured towards a red door before collapsing into a chair.
As a zeppelin from which the cords are cut takes flight, or as the balloons escape from a greedy balloon seller who forgets herself and lets them go in order to pick up a dropped five pound note, Mabel and Enoch arose from their seats. By now the music had changed to more regular tabla-sitar Indian restaurant style, and the lighting seemed less gangrenous.
With a swing and a hop Mabel and Enoch were poised to move, three-legged again, arms linked. They crossed the floor with the grace of a caribou and, as one, swung open the door to the kitchen.
The chef was not Indian, as they had expected, but he could hardly be identified as belonging to any other category. The nearest would be Austeropithecus. He was naked except for a lead codpiece, presumably to protect against the old Soviet microwave ovens the restaurant had bought at a discount price from Ex Communist State Industrial Equipment Direct, (Grays Lane Industrial Estate, Croyden). His arms reached his knees when upright, which was seldom, and his short legs bowed like an earwig’s pincers. On his empustuled inflated bladder of a head there were two particularly enormous bulges which struggled to contain independently gyrating eyeballs. His belly hair was so long that he weaved it into a mat to cover his groin like a curtain covers a boudoir.
‘This is absolutely ridiculous,’ exclaimed Mabel, unnecessarily.
‘I agreeeeee,’ agreed Enoch.
‘Let’s just go and do something different, shall we?’
They backed up, wheeled clockwise and headed towards the exit.
Tony got up from his chair where he had been creating a miasma rivalling any even a vegetarian dog could produce, and headed them off.
‘Please, I apologise, it’s been so long since we had a customer... I beg you.... please stay...I’m so lonely... I’ll even speak to the chef...’
But Enoch and Mabel, with a smart manoeuvre spun past him and exited into the orange roofed night.
They spent the next week on a cruise of the Inner Hebrides watching the sea, mountains and sky as they stood at the railings, and loved every minute of it. The following week they spent together sitting at home watching daytime television and playing honeymoon bridge and they had an awful time. They blamed it on the uncomfortable nature of the sofa.
‘We absolutely need a new sofa. I can feel every spring,’ said Mabel, bouncing up and down.
‘No we don’t,’ replied Enoch, remaining bum down inert.
‘Yes we do.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘No,’ said Mabel, slyly.
‘Yaaaaas.’ said Enoch.
‘Hah! You said yes.’
‘Damn you, Mabel. Alright, lets go.’
Trout Lane Discount Furnishings was two doors up from the tandoori, which was now boarded up and had graffiti which said: ALYSIUM SEEKERS GO HOME.
They stopped and stood next to a bench outside the furniture retailer, arm in arm. They looked around them at the litter and cracked tile shop fronts of Trout Lane, noticing the little puddles of dog urine which were regularly replenished at the bottom of each baobab lamp post like ammonia oases in a cemented desert. A cold North-Westerly insulated their noses from any smells because it dropped straight out of the clean odourless sky. Mabel felt the hairs on her top lip ruffle and wiggled her toes in her boots to delay the numbness which crept from the concrete paving. Enoch waggled his fingers in his coat pocket and rocked backwards and forwards for a few moments, feeling the solar system tilt like a gyroscope under his feet.
‘Do you know what the last thing in the world is that I want to do?’asked Mabel.
‘W-e-e-e-e-ll, ahhhhhhhhh,’
‘Shall I tell you?’
‘Yaaaas.’
‘Attempt to buy a sofa at Trout Lane Discount Furnishings.’
‘Hmmmm. Indeeeeeed. Anything could happen.’
‘Absolutely right. That insane waiter might have got himself a new job there. Imagine that! But I can’t imagine anyone employing the chef except a circus, but you never know with these Trout Lane establishments.’
‘Maybe the chef’s gone home to seek, ahhh, alysium.’
Mabel wondered where the chef’s alysium might be, and said so.
‘Some disease-riddled country in the southern hemisphere, I should imagine,’ mused Enoch.
‘I doubt it. He looked Caucasian to me. I wonder if he was happy?’
‘Hard to te-e-e-ell from his body language. Aaarms all over the place, spit everywhere.’
‘But, in a way, he was quite sensible, you know, with the lead codpiece and all those microwaves. Boil in the bag, you see? Best avoided. Like sofas.’
‘Thou speakest truly, my love.’
They took the 76 bus home that evening. There were plenty of free seats, but they stood near the front, enjoying the swing and the sway of the bouncing bus as the driver span the power steering like he was opening the stop –cock of Krakatoa.
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