An October Morning 2012
‘They’re fine provided you keep feeding them.’
He smiled. It was meant as a joke, a typical comment between two people who understood all there was to know about young children. But the woman, who had jumped the queue for coffee at Starbucks, affected that disapproving air she normally reserved for her Nanny. ‘Hers’ note! Not her children’s.
She turned her plump little face back to the counter and ordered a double decaf skinny cup of Glug. The Polish Coffee Barista trainee operative passed her order down the line to his spotty Latvian trainee girlfriend. The woman plunged her hand into a jar of lollipops, extracting two which looked exactly the same (she had two children and a fear of them fighting in public). The coffee machine made plughole gurgles and across the room her young offspring were testing the old rusty springs of the worn out yellow leather sofa by climbing on the arms and smearing their runny noses on its broken, arthritic back. No one batted an eyelid.
Stephen Pyke, tall, slim, aloof, sixty – but looking fifty - rose above the rabble and glanced at his own charge who was sitting placidly in her pushchair reading a book about something called a Garuffalo.
As far as Stephen was concerned half the place was full of mothers talking in twos and threes about their afterbirth. The other half was full of nannies from eastern Europe talking about their English boyfriends.
Stephen hated Starbucks. He hated the Northcote Road and he hated SW11. Still. It was probably better than Chingford. Not that he’d ever been anywhere near Chingford. In fact it was almost the same as Chingford except for the dress sense. Ok he didn’t hate SW11 exactly, but he did hate the people here. But that was ok. He liked to hate them.
He ordered his tea and smiled at the very idea of an American chain producing anything resembling tea. To be fair to the Americans they were pretty much ok if they produced something with the word ‘Iced’ in front of it; but Starbucks tea left him cold even when it wasn’t iced. He needed to sit down and Daisy was hungry.
‘And a sunrise muffin please.’
It was like this every weekday. And would be like this every weekday until Daisy started nursery, which would be soon. Then he could slip to the pub in the morning and sit outside until it opened sucking his pipe or doing the crossword. Stephen had never done a crossword in his life, except once when he was commuting into the city. He didn’t look at the clues, just filled the silly little squares up with the first words he could make fit. He finished the Telegraph crossword in record time and started on the Times (ok he had almost done two crosswords). No one else in the serious little compartment seemed very impressed. Stephen never felt the need to impress other people and he hated crosswords.
As Stephen picked his way across the heaving mess of coffee shop, gently negotiating triplets, sprawled on the floor and covered in green coffee beans, he thought to himself:
I probably won’t come here when she starts school.
He squeezed himself into the solitary chair in the unfashionable corner of the mighty conglomerate’s outer southwestern arm. Daisy reached up for the muffin and said:
‘Thank you, Grandpa’
He stroked her blonde head. On reflection he would probably still come to Starbuck even when he had nothing to do in the mornings.
Daisy delicately levered the little sugary roof of the muffin from its soft spongy body. That was the best bit. Grandpa could eat the yucky bit. Again.
The fat, queue jumping, mother was being bossy and talking in a loud, silly, affected, posh voice to her hapless, fat four-year-old son.
‘You’ll have to behave better than that at Sputnik’s, Igor.’
She pronounced it Eye-gore (Like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein) In fact, she looked a bit like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. Sputnik’s was the latest private pre-pre prep school to get in on the ritual extraction of money from the locals. These were locals who spent their weekends in the country where they also looked upon themselves as locals.
Stephen sneered inwardly at the woman. It dawned on him that she had asked him something about Daisy without listening to the answer just to push in front of him. He calmed his anger by deciding that she had no other interest in her life but her children and her husband had no other interest but her nanny. So, Whose nanny? He imagined her slipping down to the kitchen at night and reheating a cold curry on the Aga and washing it down with a hot chocolate, No! He was being spiteful. So what.
Stephen held his dislike of this woman and her kind behind his expression. He would not wish her any harm; just lower cholesterol, less of a lifestyle and a more meaningful life.
What he could not have guessed at that very moment as he sipped on his tea was the part the Mrs Bossy queue jumper was about to play in his life. He would be seeing a lot of her over the coming week - something that neither of them would particularly enjoy. But when Stephen got his teeth into something he couldn’t let go until the fat lady sang.
No comments:
Post a Comment