Side Work

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You have been accepted for a place at university to study creative writing, but your maintenance loan does not cover the rent. You apply to a pub in the financial district for a part-time job. Skyscrapers are orbited by white circles of sun, like celebrities on a red carpet polka-dotted by paparazzi flashes. Hear a man say: the numbers! A woman says: let’s get lunch! 


During the interview, the manager tells you about all the perks you get working for the UK’s largest pub chain. Discounts at Alton Towers, free dough balls at Pizza Express. You can opt-in to a pension scheme. You do not know what a pension is, exactly, though you feel you could describe it vaguely enough to identify it, like an actor you’ve seen in more than one movie. You are excited about the dough balls. Imagine taking your mother and little sister out for dinner, flashing your payslip to the waiter like a gold-embossed Amex, your little sister stuffing her cheeks with the marshmallowy bread. You are eighteen and have no sense of irony. You could practically float off the ground with the amount of helium still contained in your freshly blown dreams. 


Start as a glass collector. Learn how to carry two towers of glasses so high that you have to bend your knees to make it through the swinging alleyway doors. Stamp your feet to avoid the rats who come out sniffing when the chefs send down the food lift full of burgers, the all-day English breakfasts, the bowls and bowls of cheesy chips. Your wrist muscles harden, your fingers grow calluses. Learn that everyone who works at the pub has slept with everyone else at least once.


Start getting given the Friday night shifts on the bar, where three of you take over ten thousand pounds in five hours. Bankers press against the back windows, indistinguishable as zombies, their arms flung forward, waving cash for your attention. The queue is twenty-deep all night long. Watch two of the male bartenders take change out of their short, burgundy aprons for dozens of orders, pretending to put drinks through the till whenever a manager struggles nearby. 


During a shift where a manager says she will dock your pay for breaking two champagne flutes, and a man pings your bra strap when you bend over to grab a crisps packet stuffed between the rivets of a picnic table, you steal a ten pound note from a woman who tells you to keep the change, love. You are astonished at how easy it is to earn more than an hour’s wage by simply taking it. Quickly learn how to tally a whole series of orders in your head. Steal twenty quid in one night, then forty, then, a hundred, your heart hurtling out of its confines. Go to Oxford Street and buy a ridiculous amount of clothes, smother your tiny room with carrier bags. Think of your mother, who has recently started saying thank you all the time, one of her new methods from the hippie church mothers she watches on YouTube late into the night, women who promise foolproof tricks to happiness the same way they promise the secret to a moist cake (add sour cream!). Your mother says thank you in a rush when you hang up the phone, and you noticed when you last visited that she whispered it when she left the house, in the supermarket aisle, before you ate dinner, when she passed a rust-coloured tree. It humiliates you to hear her. She never seems to care about the lack of response or acknowledgement for her gratitude (to who? for what?). You guess this is why she is so good at believing in God. You say thank you now, alone in your room and surrounded by your stolen, beautiful things, sounding a little stroppy, defensive, but feeling, for the first time in your life, victorious and deeply satisfied. 


One night, you and the two other thieving bartenders buy a bottle of ancient, dusty champagne as the last bar closes. You shake it open in the empty street, the cork popping, releasing a curtain of gold onto the damp, gum-dotted pavement. It looks beautiful cascading through the air, until it lands and stills, becoming like any other pissy stain on the ground. Drink it straight from the bottle at the bus stop with a breakfast of chips and mayonnaise. The smaller of the two boys throws a couple of sad leftover fivers in the air above your head. You catch them, drunk enough to feel cinematic, like your life is unspooling in a projection of decided light. 


Sleep with both boys depending who is on shift with you. One teaches you how to bleed your radiator. The other figures out how to open your paint-stuck window. Watch his back as the glass raises, the cool dawn breeze in your stuffy room so exquisite you feel like you have been lifted, too, dislodged. Write stories about both boys, using everything they tell you when drunk, about their parents divorces, losing their virginities, their fears of death, false imprisonment, balding, bad reputations, not being able to pay rent. 


One of the bartenders reads everything on your computer when you are in the shower. He won’t speak to you for a week. Cry when he brings it up on the night bus home. Explain that fiction is about theft, that good writers borrow but great writers steal. Ask if he thinks the writing was any good. He says no, that was the worst part. Hug yourself and say he wouldn’t understand because he has no ambition except to get drunk. He sleeps with your manager. Another girl at work. He tells you about both occasions, naked in your bed. ‘Material for you,’ he says, smiling. Clench your fists and smile back.  He presses a thumb hard beneath your left eyelid and says, ‘I think you pretend to be happy, but you are a really unhappy person.’


The other bartender tells you that you look beautiful when you wake up, that he likes the wrinkles in your cheeks. He puts his hands together. ‘Like you’ve been squished a little,’ he says. ‘Is it weird that I like the idea of you all squished up? Like when they compact rubbish into those cubes?’


The management finally puts two and two together due to miscounts on the tills. Watch as the two bartenders deny everything, and blame the newest hire, a woman in her thirties who has a one-year-old daughter. The general manager insists on gripping her by the arm as he walks her out of the pub. She refuses to be dragged and keeps her pace in front of him, until the effect is comical, like two children walking as fast as they can in a school hallway where they are not allowed to run. Air feels trapped inside your mouth. 


No one questions you about stealing. You are eighteen and blonde and everyone knows you are sleeping with two boys at once. The general manager advises you to apply for a supervisor position, never looking above your neckline or below the hem of your skirt. Cry on the train every time you travel to or from work. Nine out of ten times a woman rummages in a bag to pull forth a crumpled Kleenex, their gestures as identical as the blessing your mother taught you to make above the font. Want to confess your tainted soul but instead say thank you and blow your nose. Dump both the bartenders. Leave the job and move home for the summer. Seek to transform yourself into a better person through hair dye, fake tan, and a strict diet of powdered tomato soups. Whiten your teeth with bicarbonate of soda and bare your sore gums at your mother. She asks you about university. You tell her you are writing a novel about a girl sleeping with two boys at once. ‘Sounds saucy!’ she says. Give all your stolen goods to your little sister, who has always wanted to look just like you. 

//

Graduate from university and get a job as a hostess in a large, trendy restaurant in Mayfair. Read on the bus for two hours there and back everyday. Before you start, you are given a booklet full of thumbnail images and descriptions of food critics and journalists, advertising execs, celebrities. You are told to memorise their photos, their names, their preferences, whether they like the avocado on toast or table 43. Forget them all instantly, besides any good names you can use for your characters. The head hostess is a gorgeous woman in her late twenties who speaks five languages, double-kisses flawlessly while never touching the skin, and sips black coffee like a bird. She is engaged to a petite, older man with a thick grey moustache and bright blue glasses, who barely brushes her shoulder and collects her every night from work. She ladders her hands and tells you that to fall in love the man must be first kind, then (she equals her hands) funny and rich. ‘But he doesn’t have to be funny if he laughs a lot at your jokes.’ She tilts the rich hand up an inch, then slaps it hard on the hostess desk, making the dessert menus you are wiping down jump. ‘Beauty is at the bottom,’ she tells you. ‘Because beauty and the word beauty are not the same thing.’


The waiters and waitresses wear white shirts, waistcoats, and black trousers, but you are told to dress to match the restaurant’s vibe.  Learn that this means short dresses, long skirts, lipstick in strange shades. Pick one body part to bare, and bare it fully. Feel what it’s like to lead a group to a table and know that they are looking at your bum the whole time. It is your job to be a bum with good navigation. You run around the restaurant with an Ipad reporting who is on mains, dessert. Seat the Backstreet Boys. Seat Bill Nighy and watch as he shreds five napkins, then tidies them into a neat pile. Seat the BBC London news anchor. Report these as aspects of your shift with some pride on the phone to your mother. You’re in the big city, baby! Watch how every month a man books the same table to break up with his girlfriend. Watch a dozen stunning women cry beneath the bright, eggy light. Learn how to judge which way a kiss on the cheek is going to go. Learn the different kisses, the brief and the lingering, the slithering arms around the waist, on the upper back. Learn that it is almost always men with their families who touch you the most. Learn that when women are with men they do not talk to you, but when women are with women, they become motherly and ask what you are studying, the way you ask your little sister what she wants to be when she grows up. 


Learn that many people take cocaine while working and dining, and you start to recognise the signs, certain flutters of the hands, licked lips, wide eyes. Slouch at the hostess stand. You grow bored of wealthy, creative people. You do not know how to communicate with them. Watch another assistant hostess excel. Watch admiringly when she manages to make returning a coat end with an offer of an internship for a biannual magazine. She studied journalism and you studied creative writing. This seems to be an essential difference between you. You still have no sense of irony, and pretending to have one is exhausting. You have cut out the boys, and now write exclusively about grandmothers with dementia. Rejection emails cram your inbox, overflowing it. Ignore it, hyperactive from Nescafe Azera. Your grandmothers grow cranky and mean with thwarted desire, but you keep smiling. 


Go to the summer staff party for the restaurant. The management have talked about it for months, how it’s your chance to live a little luxuriously, to be the ones waited upon. The theme is Living the Dream. It takes place at a warehouse on the Eastern edge of the city. There are trestle tables covered in buckets of dry ice, a disco ball slowly spinning flickers of light. Shirtless men stand around, glazed-eyed, holding silver trays of hors d’oeuvres and fizzing prosecco, covered in body paint and dressed as fawns and unicorns. Watch the rest of the wait staff and the managers pose for pictures, kissing the adorned waiters cheeks and pretending to ride and hump them. A roasted suckling pig rolls on a spit, its mouth wedged wide with a red apple, its eyes black as beads. Smoking a cigarette, you talk to two of the bussers who complain about the tronc system, that the company takes all your tips to pay for shit like this. Realise you are being ripped off. Watch the managers stumble out of a single port-a-potty, wiping their noses with the backs of their hands. The head hostess doesn’t come, she is on a mini-break with her husband in Tuscany. She sends you a selfie, looking impossibly beautiful and happy. Have fun, honey bun, she writes. Leave early. Quit. 

///

Move into a windowless box room and get a job in a cafe. Clean up after dozens of children. Claw squashed bananas from smudged water glasses. Scrub dried spitty milk from high-chairs. Miss your little sister. Have nicknames with your co-workers for all the regulars. Meet a couple of struggling writers. A man in his thirties comes in every Tuesday night to write a sci-fi script that he’s been working on for seven years. Try to focus as he explains the concept of wormholes to you while you restock the sugar cubes. On a Saturday morning, a woman waits with her laptop while you open the shutters, away from her children for an hour. She tells you her book is fantasy YA, because that’s where the money is. The plot, astonishingly, also revolves around wormholes, though you do not know how to inform either of them of this coincidence. She drinks two double espressos like they are tequila shots and leaves with her hands shaking. 


Try to write a novel behind the counter in the slow afternoons. Try to write something that feels close to being alive, but you are always out drinking with the other baristas and can’t remember any conversations that seem illuminating when you have them. You play a lot of kill, fuck, marry, which always starts with famous people and then comes back to regulars, then yourselves. Questions, eyebrows, would you? Could you? Develop a huge crush on a beautiful Australian boy who broke his leg skateboarding, who swings jauntily around the tables on his crutches. All women adore him. You hand him three napkins scrawled with phone numbers in the same number of days. He wears tank tops with the sides cut down to his hip bones. You go home with him after work one day. When you get to his room, he tells you to come here, and you perch on the edge of the bed, whispering thank you fervently in your drunk mind. ‘That’s not here,’ he says, laughing at you. ‘That’s still there.’ He moves back to Australia. Marries his high school sweetheart. Feel devastated and equally embarrassed by your devastation. Write about your night together. Spend a long time describing how the light looked, a little on how he looked and the sex no time at all. 


One day, you discover another regular is a real published writer. You are starstruck, staring at her as though she is no longer human, but a marble sculpture to admire. She says she’ll read a story if you’d like to share one. Have coffee together in the cafe, try not to jump up when you hear the bell toll for food, flinch when you hear the new girl frothing the milk for way too long. Focus. The writer tells you that you have a strong sense of imagery but you use too many similes and need to make more things happen. Less light. More sex. Submit a story to a new magazine she tells you about with half the similes excised. Your first acceptance email makes you feel like you are levitating for a week. The magazine is small and you will not be paid. Go to the opening in a white gallery with sketches on the walls, tiny scratches that look like someone imprisoned counting down the days. Get red wine lips. A perfect-looking woman with thick-framed glasses says she liked when you described your character’s heart like a fire extinguisher, and to send her an email if you ever finish a novel. You want to clutch her arm and ask: but what do I do now? You are broke. ‘Move back in with your mother,’ no one says. 

////

Move back in with your mother and sister, on the orbital edge of the city, the motorway on one side and the airport on the other. You are surrounded again by the lights and sounds of leaving with nowhere to go but where you’ve already been. You are nervous all the time, you spill everything you touch. Your mother says thank you, hesitantly, when you pass her tea, always too strong or too weak for her taste, flopping the liquid over her fingers. 


Get a job in a new French café opposite the train station. On your first shift, a dead, rain-soaked Monday night, the owner leaves you alone with both her baby and her dog. The dinner menu is long and complex and includes fondue and flambé as well as fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, pizza, and inexplicably, sushi. Ask the chef what flambé means and she shrugs. A couple comes in, shaking umbrellas, and immediately orders the apple tart flambé. The chef is stoned out of her mind in the kitchen, which is the size of a shower cubicle. The oven is off and the frozen tart takes forty minutes to bake. Increase the volume on the Serge Gainsbourg. Call the owner, crouching down behind the counter. Her baby looks at you from her bouncy chair. She lifts a fist to wave and you wave back.  The owner tells you to pour brandy over the tart and light it on fire. ‘C’est simple,’ she says. Borrow the chef’s lighter, hand her the owner’s baby, tell her to keep hold of the head. Sweat at the table. The bewilderingly happy couple stare at you. Pour a trickle of brandy over their raw tart, then a flood. Hurt your thumb flicking the lighter. Eventually, a light blue flame swims through the pastry like an iridescent minnow. The couple clap and cheer and eat the whole thing. Look through the numbers on your phone that night. Sleep with one of the bartenders from the pub and both cry in the morning. Try out the apps. Sleep with a man with a wolf tattoo on his chest. Sleep with a man who can’t get his jeans off because they are so tight around his ankles. Wait for the morning light, spooning, his jeans descending over the end of the bed like an unruly garden hose. 


The restaurant gets a new head chef, who you suspect is younger than his beard, deep voice and few words imply. He has a snaggletooth, and when you wait for him to present the dishes to you, you find yourself running your tongue along your gum in that spot, like wiping your own face to reflect a stain on someone else’s. He cuts down the menu, gets rid of the fondue, the sushi, everything except the flambé, which you can now perform in your sleep. The owner becomes inspired, stops complaining about England, its rain and its misery. She buys paper tablecloths from Amazon that look more expensive than they are. Stumpy candles that you put into old wine bottles. Dried flowers you arrange together in glass jars. Amber-coloured light bulbs that soften the walls, make the linoleum floor look almost clean. Customers start returning. Serve dishes like asparagus and butter. Bouillabaisse. Coq au vin. Eat a lot of heavily buttered bread slices in the kitchen from the baguettes the chef comes in early to bake. You are working long hours to save up to move out. ‘You’re the one that’s always hungry,’ the chef tells you, and he gives you a freshly cooked chip from the fryer, topped by a round of sweet pickled cucumber that seems to instantly double the saliva in your mouth.


Summer arrives slowly then suddenly, like an alarm shaking you awake just after you finally fall asleep. Wonder how every summer still feels like the first. Drink a bottle of cold red wine with the chef after work, then go back to the flat he shares with his girlfriend above the train station opposite. The trains blaze by every ten minutes, turning the room iridescent, sheathed in light. Feel like you are ensconced in the slowest-moving of strobes. He explains that his girlfriend travels often and that they have, what he calls, in his growly accent, ‘an arrangement.’ Imagine a life where all the g’s could fall out of your voice, your life, in one single swoop. Even the word ugly would sound pretty. Oolie. You are drunk. Kiss the chef sloppily and happily, like a child being handed an ice cream cone for the first time. 

The chef’s girlfriend comes in after work from her job in the city, and the chef brings her the dishes he is experimenting with, then slivers of dessert, brown glasses of sherry. They leave together after the last dessert has been plated. She always makes a point of saying goodbye to you when you are finishing the closing tasks; wiping menus, polishing cutlery, cleaning the last glasses. Once you call, ‘Thank you!’ as they walk out of the door on instinct, then wince when they turn around, smile and wave, their arms tentacled around each other. In your bed, alone, your feet aching, eat pints of cheap ice cream, discounted supermarket doughnuts. Drink wine and watch YouTube. Watch celebrities applying skincare romantically to their own faces, old black-and-white interviews with writers bitching on talk shows. Wake up early everyday to write Your Novel. You reach 30,000 words and hate it. Try again. Another 30,000 words and suddenly you cannot bear to look at it. Bite all your nails so far down that they bleed. Look up the Australian boy from the cafe on Facebook. Astonished to discover he died from a drug overdose, bad MDMA taken beneath a Thai full moon. Feel like your sadness is seeping from you, like a tea bag dyeing your only, tiny world slowly darker, until it is too bitter to take. Stop speaking to your mother, tell your sister she has to sleep in her own bed, that she is too old now to come into yours. Almost step on her beautiful face one morning, curled up on the carpet with her head pushed against your door. 


Spend two nights each month with the chef when his girlfriend leaves the city. The months pass in stages: panic, denial, relief, regret. It feels like tracking your period. 


Tell him you love him once just to see what he’ll say, thinking it will be fine, because you can’t really love someone you only get to love once a month. He tells you he loves you, too. You are shocked. Realise that love isn’t that hard to fall into, actually. Avoiding it is harder. Love forces itself to be confessed, like guilt.  Eventually you blurt it out, and then there is nothing to say but the same thing again. Think how the happiest song still becomes a little depressing when you hear it too many times. Imagine yourself in a cover band in ten years time donning an out-of-fashion hat, regretting your tattoos, singing the same songs too close to the microphone. Don’t mention love again. Apply to do a master’s degree. 


At work, your co-workers come up with believable rumours to start about each other as a joke. One of you is secretly a scientologist. One of you is actually forty. The owner’s daughter is the chef’s lovechild. Yours is that you can’t read or write and spend all day writing gibberish. Find this painfully funny because it also feels true. 


The chef tells his girlfriend about you, and she threatens to break up with him because he broke their first rule: no waitresses, and their second rule: not more-than-once. The chef proposes to his girlfriend. The owner decides to move back to France. You all cry on the last night of service, have a lock-in with the regulars. You sing karaoke until 6 am, drink the dessert wine no one ever ordered. Wake up on the chest freezer beside the chef, both of you under a pile of dirty aprons, fully clothed and with a ruler-width gap of air between every possible part of you that could touch. Think of that shape pulsating between you, like a wormhole to another life you could have (should have?) led. The owner is still there when you leave, dancing by herself between the cardboard boxes on the newly emptied floor, her daughter asleep in her pushchair. Her dog died. 

////

Two months later, the restaurant is a Costa and you take your little sister there for a vanilla bean frappe with extra cream. You are moving back into the city, applying for supervisor jobs at restaurants that specialise in natural wine, small plates. An agent has said she likes your novel, but wants more plot. You are writing furiously, awake at dawn, drinking coffee until you are frantic, feeling like the air around you is fringed with static, your fingers stiff with trying to make something, anything, happen. 


‘I can’t believe I used to work here and it’s all gone,’ you say, pointing behind the Costa counter, where a teenage girl flicks a milky rag toward the boy at the till, giggling. ‘Remember how you used to come in and top up all the table water for me?’


‘No,’ says your sister. She pauses. ‘I’m going to be so rich when I’m old.’


She is thirteen. She wears tracksuit bottoms and sports bras too baggy for her birdy chest. She is obsessed with skincare and orders samples off the Internet, or uses cheap tricks she sees online, like covering her hair in smashed-up banana, her face in Vaseline. She is secretive in her habits, hides the banana peels in her room, runs to the bathroom in the morning with her face bowed to the carpet, hissing, ‘Don’t look at me, please!’ When you peek into her room at night, she appears glowing and somewhat radioactive, her phone breathing light across her sticky face. 


‘When I was your age, it was embarrassing to be rich,’ you say. ‘People used to pretend not to be.’


Wonder when you became a person who says: when I was your age. 


‘Everyone lies about everything,’ she says. 


She folds her arms, sips, looks out of the window. 


‘No one’s embarrassed to be rich,’ she says. ‘Mum says you’ll believe anything. That’s why you won’t get a real job.’


Think of your little life so far, accidentally falling from your hands, like a glass you have knocked over. Think of your mother still whispering thank you when she finds a parking space, when she falls asleep, when she strokes your eyebrows into shape, when she leaves big Tesco. The other day a woman, bleary-eyed, a scowling baby trapped into her trolley, turned to your mother and said, loudly, as though remembering something she needed to buy: ‘You’re welcome!’ Your mother laughed all the way home. 


‘I’m actually a pretty happy person,’ you say to your sister. 


She sucks up the mush at the end of her drink until there is only air remaining. She is finished, but you can tell she is enjoying herself, staring at you, making this unnecessary noise. 
 

Dizz Tate’s first novel, Brutes, was published by Faber in 2023. She has worked in hospitality for thirteen years. 

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