Page 16 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
Visitors appeared to have stumbled on the café by accident and then wished they hadn’t. The food was poor-quality burgers and sandwiches, as the menu I’d found had suggested, the premises shabby, the facilities basic and the ambience non-existent.Andthey had the rudest staff ever.
I could sympathize with the latter, for my sharp tongue had got me into trouble once or twice when I’d been pressed into serving customers rather than working in the kitchen.
Then I struck gold with two video clips of the café interior that had been uploaded to YouTube. The quality wasn’t brilliant, but I was riveted.
In the first, the camera panned round the café and then settled on a tall, gaunt and elderly waitress as she pushed a large mobcap out of her eyes and then slapped a plate of food in front of a beady-eyed and noisy small boy.
He looked down at his plate and asked suspiciously, ‘Are these Brontëburgers made out ofrealbrontosauruses?’
‘Aye, they breed them up on t’ moors,’ she said.
‘I never knew that before,’ said his mother indistinctly, having already taken a large bite of what was probably, having seen the menu, a Charlotte Chicken wrap.
She seemed to be serious. They were both now looking at the waitress with wide eyes and bulging hamster cheeks.
‘LikeJurassic Park?’ the child asked. Then he added through a second larger mouthful, ‘This tastes kinda weird.’
‘Shut tha moaning and get it et,’ the waitress advised him, then stumped off.
The other clip was of a customer complaining to a different member of staff – perhaps the manageress Mrs Muswell had left in charge, whenever she’d gone back to Spain. She was younger, possibly late forties, but as tall and gaunt as the first one and clearly related. Mother and daughter?
‘Can you take this toastie away and remove the onion? I can’t eat onion,’ said the man.
‘You ordered a cheese and onion toastie, you great daft lump – what were you expecting to find in it?’ she said, looking scathingly at him from under a pair of heavy, straight, Frida Kahlo eyebrows.
‘I didn’t come here to be insulted!’ the man said indignantly.
‘Well, if tha don’t like it, take thisen off,’ she advised him. Then her eye fell on those customers near enough to hear the exchange, who were sitting, stunned, with their mouths hanging open.
It was like a halibut convention.
‘What are thee all staring at?’ she demanded. ‘Tha dinner’ll be as cold as a stone if tha don’t get a shift on and et it!’
Well, Edie’d always said I was so brusque with customers that I should never be allowed out of the kitchen, but clearly I hadnothingon the staff at the Branwell Café.
They were women after my own heart, sisters in sarcasm … and as I finally fell asleep in my lumpy bed with the hard, flat pillows, I was visited by the firefly glimmer of a Good Idea …
‘There’s nothingtoknow, you just had a bad dream,’ I told her, putting the tray down on her lap. ‘Now, eat this and forget all about it.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t eat a mouthful – and how can you look and sound so normal after what happened last night?’ she demanded.
‘The natural resilience of youth,’ I said, which was a bit of a low blow, considering the way she struggled against the signs of ageing, a female Canute battling to hold at bay a sea of wrinkles. ‘And we’re never having this conversation again, right?’
‘So cold and hard …’ she murmured, wincing and shutting her eyes.
But when I went back to collect the tray and tell her I had to go out for a short while, it was cleared to the last crumb and she was watching some mindless soap series on the bedroom TV.
9
Up the Creek
I finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, but was awake again at the crack of dawn with a complete scene in my head fromWhen Beauty Goes Bad(as I’d called my new novel), which I got down on the laptop before I forgot it.
‘It is your birthday,’ said the stepmother, who wasn’t so much wicked as at the end of her tether. ‘I know how you love a game of hide-and-seek, so I have concealed a beautiful necklace of sparkling diamonds in the bower deep in the woods and if you find it, you may keep it as my gift.’
Of course, when the stepmother adds that if Beauty doesn’t find the necklace she’ll give it to one of her own daughters, Beauty is off in a flash.
And after this,Iwas off like a flash too – down to a large, chilly dining room to eat a fortifyingly huge breakfast with the only other occupant, who might as well have had ‘sales rep’ stamped all over him.
