Trashcan Animal
Siân Williams
I offered to wash pots one night when the kitchen porter was away, taking on a job that sounded boring so that the other waitresses, a couple of fine arts grads who wore thin asymmetrical tops, thought I was nice. The utensils piled up even as I jammed them in the dishwasher as fast as I could. “Sorry,” I repeated cringingly.
The smell of soiled cutlery beginning to cling to my shirt made me feel sort of subhuman, separate from the rest of the chattering restaurant and embarrassed that they could see me here, probably thinking I was always banished to this corner with the dishwasher, unfit to greet guests. Talking to customers usually made me feel like I was Part Of Something as they conferred with me about the anchovies or aged stilton I was serving them—“Having lots of small plates like this is kind of like girl dinner, isn’t it?” They pronounced wine labels with an affected, French-sounding swallow. I liked to act too, laying down the organic, slow cooked produce between the families and friends with an assured smile as if I was promising they were about to be stuffed with hearty food at a cool venue. I thought they must feel good standing out the way to let us pass holding trays and maybe slightly guilty, in the same way I had smiled at a stringy teenager who took my order at Pizza Express the other week, indulging in my own friendliness.
Around 9, the manager told me to take a cocktail to Table 16. A stale waft of old food hovering about me, I approached the two seated, septum-pierced guests. As I asked if this was their negroni, one of them who was wearing some sort of crochet jumper stared at me slack-jawed like I was an foul animal, as though one of those foxes with ratty tails and 3 legs you see foraging for food scraps in the city trashcans had wandered inside the restaurant. “Mine, thanks,” said their companion politely. I thought with a bitter, pleasurable rush that the jumper looked more like it was made by someone’s blind grandma than Paloma Wool. I retreated to my corner, tail between my legs.
After-Work Drink
Siân Williams
My manager, Andrew, seemed to dislike me, so I stayed for staff drinks after my second shift in a last-ditch effort to make a better impression while we were all drunk after my nervous fumbling around with plates and mischarging of customers. I’d felt Andrew’s eyes boring into my back from his omniscient position behind the bar as I took orders. Sometimes he’d ask me suspicious questions about someone’s tequila shot order that I’d taken 10 minutes ago, or exasperatedly pointed out a table I hadn’t cleaned.
The other waitress left early and Andrew changed the music on the speakers to a man who seemed to sing about pining for depressed, self-destructive women. ‘What a poignant songwriter, don’t you think?’ he reflected while we listened to one song about a woman smoking naked in bed because she was too depressed to do it outside and clothed. ‘Now all you young people know about them through TikTok.’ He had seen the band this summer at one festival which I thought was somewhere 17-year-olds went to do lots of ket. I had actually been to see them too, the year before, along with a crowd of teens wearing smeared eyeliner and legwarmers.
Mayonnaise by The Smashing Pumpkins came on next, Andrew saying how when he was 15 he used to sneak into an old windmill or something to blast this loudly. That sounded weird— did I mishear? He kept topping up both our wines.
“Are you into the Pumpkins?” Andrew asked, leaning in closer. He was beginning to gaze at me with a sloppy, dazed look, as if having just woken from a nice, fuzzy dream after being hit on the head with a beer keg and knocked out. I’d seen them on Spotify playlists and thought they were something I should like so I said “Yeah.”
Hunger in the Artisan Restaurant
Siân Williams
I started working in a restaurant where you ordered like 6 tiny plates that cost £12 each. Painted a shade of beige so unobtrusive that meant I sometimes accidentally walked past it, the venue was sandwiched between other small plates bars but also lots of fried chicken joints, and I liked walking home amidst the spicy wafts from Crazy Crispy, Lit! Shisha and Florida Krunch. Especially on Saturdays, when University of the Arts London students shouted raucously on their way home from the pub. The glare cast by the harsh lights of the LED cartoon chickens made me feel closer to life, more alive.
There was a sense of doom that winter. A lady with 3 plastic supermarket bags on the bus seat across from me unzipped her puffer and rubbed her neck raw with a new toilet brush. Inside the restaurant though, it was woody and gently lit by candles, and a little Christmas tree perched merrily on the bar as if we were in a log cabin in the woods of Maine.
The chef kept developing the winter menu, which featured ever heartier and more obscure ingredients. I stuffed cranberry chestnuts and black pudding— arranged medically on a dish like interior body parts that had been surgically cleaved from someone’s stomach, intestines or stool maybe— onto the oak plank tables at a corporate Christmas party. The rising steam obscured the modernist, thick-framed glasses of the brand strategists and execs, so that they might actually have been noblemen seated in rows at a banquet, their faces flickering medievally in the candlelight. Eaters often asked for the music to be turned down, but these ones just shouted to one another over the carols. They spat festive, mid-conversation flecks of red wine on the food while haunting church organs resounded on the speakers. “You’re like my favourite person in unit 2,” one woman confided to another whose hands she clasped in the lap of her pantsuit. “Stop, because you’re one of mine!” said her friend.
