A/N: Please enjoy and let me know what you think
Chapter 54
The Perfect Pint
"The trick to pulling the perfect pint," he said, pausing dramatically and wiggling a fairly annoying fair eyebrow in my direction as he added a slow pressure on the smooth black lever. "Is…"
I couldn't believe he was talking that slowly. How could any person be expected to just sit back and listen to someone milk a sentence that much? I didn't say anything though, I had managed to get this job by charming this guy with my weirdly symmetrical features and if I told him to shove it now it would be added to a pile of three others. The job where I couldn't stay on because everyone noticed how terrible I am at simple tasks had been the first I ended up storming out of. Just nod. I told myself, just nod. It was four in the evening, he had all the time in the world to slowly talk his arse off in the empty bar. He was the youngest of the family who owned the place and apparently acting manager.
"Are you ok, Siri? You seem a bit glum." I pressed my lips together as the man-boy bar-hand boss-guy or whatever addressed me at a normal pace, proving he was capable of such a feat and further depleting my stock of patience as physical inability was ruled out as a plausible excuse for being him so trying. I realised that in my nodding I had forgotten to smile. I put on a nice bright one.
"So sorry-" what's his name? what's his name? what's his name? Ah fuck- "love," I surrendered and stared forcefully into his eyes. "I was caught up in the sound of your voice, a slow even pressure. Can you show me again?" I asked, raising an eyebrow coyly. His ears flushed, it wasn't even remotely endearing. He cleared his throat, I felt bad.
"Right, just put your hand here," he guided my hand up toward the disturbingly phallic piston before swooping in far too close beside me. He grabbed a glass and guided my hand down.
"Maybe this time you could do it... slower?" I asked lightly, keeping the bite out of my words but enjoying the joke on my own. A private mockery, something I was doing more and more as of late, or perhaps as much as I always had. Who knows? Nine months since I had woken from a three month long nap. Nine months in which I learned that I already knew how to do long division and that my vocabulary was grotesquely expansive. Nine months to develop an accent to match my fellow Londoners as upon waking I had no mark of a past. No hint of being anyone, no age or name or family. Just a right to claim on disability and a form to write whatever name I wanted on.
Serena had a sound about it that I liked. I misspelt it though, Sirina just looked more homely on paper. Something about the way the letters curved, Sirina Blake, it seemed to me to be a name that belonged to me. If I said it enough times to the mirror I could almost see myself nodding back to myself approvingly.
"Siri," they sigh breathily. "Siri." I almost feel a need to sigh back, I wonder if I'm a narcissist when I smoke and drink strawberry milkshake in the diner under my apartment. The owner of the diner wouldn't hire me because he thinks I'm after his daughter. I told him I liked girls just to get a start out of him and to change the subject off of rent. The truth was I didn't think I liked anyone, people who were in love just made me want to go back upstairs and talk with the mirror some more. I felt like the mirror was listening, I wonder again if I am a narcissist but then decide I mustn't be a very good one if I feel like I am my favourite company but also hate myself for letting me abandon whatever my life had been. The girl who had made my life this way, surely I had no one to blame but myself? I was virtually unmarked when they brought me in, they said. They searched for clues, anything. Files, photos, missing persons archives. I was wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt and boys underwear. I had strange diamond shape open wounds along my ribs and along my left hand. They took skin grafts off my thighs.
Nothing was stranger though, then on my hand below the knuckle of my thumb where it appeared someone had scraped in a symbol with there fingernails. These were things I often repeated to the mirror, the girl I was before wore a Scooby-Doo T-shirt and boys underwear. I was brought in with open wounds along my rib cage and on my left arm. They took skin grafts from the girl I am now, they took ribbons of clean skin from my thigh with a stripper that worked like a cheese grater. I still can't bare to look at cheese graters.
Someone carved a symbol into the girl I used to be with their fingernails, I wrote it down everywhere. In fogged up windows, in drying cement, I especially liked to write it under my name when I signed something. The strange symbol rested purposefully underneath Siri Blake. The girl in the mirror and I would stare at it for hours and we were glad we didn't know anybody too well, because we didn't have time to wonder if we were crazy when there was so much wondering to be done.
I had started kissing the fair-haired boy now, I was tired of talking and I thought maybe it would distract me. Maybe for some reason I would turn out to be the love of his life, maybe it was meant to be, maybe I wasn't meant to be alone. He groaned.
"I want you," he whispered against my cheek and I hummed vaguely before feeling slightly miffed.
"Why do you want me?" I asked. Knit picking at the admittedly innocent perverse motivations boys like him said such things to me. He huffed a gentle laugh against my cheek, not yet realising that I was that coldest girl to ever kiss someone.
"Because your beautiful and smart and sweet," he remarked, it was phrased a little like a question and I bristled further as he kissed my cheek.
"Anyone can be born beautiful, beauty, intelligence and disposition are not to be praised." He kissed the corner of my jaw and I frowned. "They are hollow victories. Even if I was the most beautiful girl on the planet, it's just an accident of birth, are you going to congratulate me for being born as well? Because I assure you it was just as much my doing as the shape of the bones underneath my face." He pulled back a small amount and looked at my eyes. He was wearing a name tag but it wasn't his, it said Karen.
"You talk a lot," Karen whispered before moving toward me again, I pushed him away and began to untie my apron. It had been a year and I was no closer to figuring out who I was before, and knowing that I was good looking or that I didn't have anyone looking for me wasn't enough.
"Do you want to know where I grew up? Where I went to school? Whether I have any waitressing experience?"
"Sure, but I think you're about to nail this interview either way." I threw the apron on the counter, and he began to untie his, clearly misconstruing the situation, not that I blamed him.
"I don't need a past to have a present, do I Karen?" He put his hand back on my waist and I took a step back.
"Right," he said, smiling. I stepped out from behind the bar.
"When do I start then?" I asked. Trying to somehow turn this interaction back into something normal. I had this tendency to run hot and cold. If I had any friends, I'm sure it would drive them mad. My neutral shade of interview lipstick was all over the poor boy's face.
"Tuesday week?" he asked.
"Right," I said, and I was gone. I let the door swing shut behind me and felt the stinging December air slip around my nose. I looked at the mark on my hand, I had traced in pen earlier and scrawled my name over the top of it. It made me feel lucky. I began to walk quickly around the corner toward my bus stop. I kicked a can petulantly along the road ahead of me. I turned into a shop on the way and bought a snickers.
I chewed noisily on the bus on purpose, causing a child sitting across the aisle from me to laugh.
I walked back toward the diner and the sky darkened. I sniffed against the cold and shoved my hand into my armpits to make them warmer. I wondered if I had been happier before, as I clinked into the diner and sat in the booth farthest from the door as usual. At the very least I had landed on my feet in terms of my living arrangement. Vern was behind the counter, already making up my milkshake as I pulled a packet of cigarettes from the folds of my coat. I couldn't afford them and I didn't even inhale. I just like having something to do with my hands and it was a conversation starter, not that I generally enjoyed conversation, conversation was something I dominated and took out my frustrations on. I longed to talk to someone who talked back.
"There you are Serena." Vern's daughter: Orna, smiled as she put the milkshake down on the table in front of me along with a paper wrapped straw. Her smile was bright and familiar, she played piano and had what Vern's wife Margaret described as an artistic temperament, I just called it hormonal imbalance. Not that I could talk. My face screwed up oddly as the thought soured my would-be happy smile. Instead I just bit my lip and winked up at her.
"My hero," I whispered teasingly. When her cheeks heated I wondered if she was going to propose we take our fantastical lesbian romance (fueled by Vern's paranoia) to the next level, but she just let out a nervous laugh and span on her heel, marching away. There was cream on the shake, I must have looked fairly miserable coming in to earn cream. Maybe I should sweep Orna off of her feet. She was beautiful after all and I tended to prefer women. I made a note to look more cheerful. I had been under slept the last while due to a series of dark and foreboding nightmares.
Like a horrid premonition they plagued my thoughts, I spent I a great deal of my 'new' life, although well looked after by Vern, startlingly frightened. I was confused and verging on homeless. I often dreamed of a family or a home somewhere who would have me, I felt an odd familiarity that came with the longing for a family. I drank some of my shake and put my mouth on the cigarette for a moment before moving it away and tipping some of the ash into an ashtray. My face felt funny again when I thought of my knotted innards. I suppose I would just have to buy babies like Woodie Allen. That night I listened to the blues on my second hand Marconi radio and burnt out an entire packet of cigarettes.
I dreamt of shifting darkness and every so often I thought I saw something terrible smiling out at me from the hell I looked in on, but only every so often and only for a moment.
a/n: Thanks for reading and PLEASE REVIEW!
