In His Dark Service
Warm and humid air, thick with the scent of rich foods, seemed to hang like a woollen blanket nothing at all. The cloud of aromas seemed to tolerate absolutely no motion or flow within its gaseous boundaries, aside from the gradual infusion of new scents from freshly prepared dishes. Such a large quantity of air remaining entirely undisturbed in a moderately cramped restaurant setting raised the implication in Ellie’s mind that no-one in the vicinity was breathing, which would be a difficult hurdle to overcome in any dining experience. From what she’d seen of the patrons over the years of serving there however, it probably wasn’t too far from the truth. Breathing would necessarily require the mouth to be free from the tasks of eating, speaking, or tutting, and by the cacophony of unnecessarily raised voices and gnashing teeth that the restaurant always became at prime time, it was hard to find any such availability.
With two ‘Farmer’s Tartlets’ on one arm and a bowl of ‘Soup of the Quarter’ on the other, Ellie weaved her way through the narrow inter-table passages that served variously as walkways, conversation nooks, and fire escapes. With honed senses she expertly avoided a chair that slid aggressively outwards without so much as a moment’s notice. Without missing a beat she took another two strides, before screeching to a soup-sloshing halt as another patron gestured enigmatically from their chair at exactly waist-punching level. A less experienced member of waiting staff would expect an apology, or at least acknowledgement, from the perpetrators in such a scenario, but that would be to make the cardinal mistake of expecting to be treated as a human. Ellie was far wiser than that. She’d learned the hard way. Even so, every time it happened she struggled in the battle to maintain a pleasant, neutral expression.
With the patron’s energetic emotiveness concluded for the moment, Ellie resumed her journey towards table eleven and its three hungry incumbents. Right where it had been several minutes earlier, she passed through a dense pocket of red-wine-jus-scented air that filled her airways like an aromatic gag. It travelled through the internal passageways of her head and seemed to invade the space behind her eyes, seeping down her throat before she could catch it. Every part of her airway was blocked by a thick and velvety sauce, which apparently complimented what the menu called ‘a delectable contrivance of root-like vegetables and deconstructed grains’. Even having seen the dish being cooked several times a day for the last handful of months, Ellie had no idea what it was or what that description meant.
Employing a squint to ward against further ocular gassing, coupled with laboured exhalation through the viscous air, Ellie managed to limp through the cloying bubble. The comparatively fresh but still objectively overwrought air of the restaurant at large didn’t so much flood as drip into her airways, purging the jus from her system without making it a whole lot easier to draw breath. Vitally however, all of the dishes lining Ellie’s arms were still stable and their contents were un-spilled. From what little Ellie knew about human mutations, adaptations and evolution, she was sure that her own body must have developed a preternatural ability to keep overcomplicated foodstuffs balanced no matter what terrain she encountered. After years of exposure to the task, she was fairly sure that her joints could rotate indefinitely in the same direction, such that a brimmed soup could be kept gyroscopically stabilised even if she tumbled head-over-heels down a staircase. Her shift supervisor had ruled out clinical trials of such a hypothesis on the basis of not having a staircase in the restaurant.
With only a couple of trips on the loose, ruffled carpet that had desperately needed replacing for a decade, Ellie finally arrived at table eleven.
“I’ve got two Farmer’s Tartlets and a, er… potato and egg soup.”
From the table three faces, with an apparent combined age of one thousand thanks to the unflattering lighting afforded by dim overhead bulbs and yellowed candles from below, turned towards Ellie. All were blank and flustered, as if the arrival of the food they’d recently ordered, was a deeply unexpected course for events to have taken.
“Um, yeah. Tartlet here please.” One of the faces finally admitted. Despite the utter bewilderment of words on a page becoming a real and physical item of food, he had thankfully found his voice again.
“Thank you.” Ellie said reflexively, more for something to fill the gap than out of any real gratitude, as she placed one tartlet in front of the gentleman. He was held at bay from the table by a generous belly that vied for independence from the rest of his torso. Although the buttons of his shirt were holding, there was no guarantee that they’d keep such a tremendous force restrained for long.
“And the other tartlet?” Ellie asked with her usual professional brightness. All emotion had vacated the words long before, but none of the patrons really seemed to notice. They were always too intently focused and stressed about the ordeal of saying ‘yes please’ when their dish was offered.
“Here, thanks.” Said a woman. She was of similar age to the man-and-belly team which had claimed the first tartlet, but approaching the table was much easier for her. She seemed to have already experienced a minor gravitational disaster at the hands of her red wine however; staining, located in a mockingly precise outline of where a napkin should have sat across the legs of her dress, told candid tales of a sip taken poorly.
“Thank you.” Ellie said, repeating the ritual. “Then that leaves you with the soup.” She continued towards the final guest.
“Is this the Soup of the Quarter?” The third face enquired with uncertainty. She was again of similar age to her companions, although Ellie had begun to lose confidence in her age intuition since even the wine glass looked to be on the brink of a mid-life crisis.
“Yes, it is. Potato and egg soup, this quarter.”
“What does it have in it?”
“Potatoes, I think.” Ellie said, not wanting to make too many assumptions about the correlation between soup title and soup contents. Not since the minestrone & birds-nest soup debacles. “And egg.” She elaborated.
“Bird or mammal egg?”
“Uh… bird.” Ellie guessed. Or, more accurately, hoped.
“Can you be any more specific than bird?”
“Chicken. It’ll be a chicken’s egg.” She said, with decreasing confidence.
“Chicken? Right. Thanks.” The woman accepted at last, indicating the space in front of her on the table, just in case Ellie had forgotten how the general logistics of table service went.
“Thank you. Can I get you anything else?” Ellie’s hollow customer-facing voice offered, despite her deeply-held desire not to invite more questions. A trio of submissively-raised palms and shaken heads released her from the danger of continued interaction, but simultaneously condemned her to another journey through the jus-cloud.
“Enjoy.” She said, meaning goodbye, before turning around and holding her breath for the walk back to the kitchens.
“Another Mechanic’s Pie with mash, three orders of humiliated vegetables and a corner salad.” Shouted one of the other waitresses as Ellie entered the kitchen again. The lightly hinged double doors flapped backwards and forwards with their typical ‘thum thum thum’ sound, spilling flashes of bright white strip-lighting into the dull yellow of the restaurant. Ellie was convinced that the stark contrast between blindingly bright kitchen and almost twilit seating area must have given her and the other serving staff at The Vulcanised Penny the most muscular irises in the world. Going through so many reps of dilated-to-contracted and back again each night was international-level training.
"I smell burning! Who's burning their carrots?" Shouted the sous chef urgently.
"Right, where am I next?" Ellie muttered to herself, checking over the assembled dishes with their torn-out notepad pages pinned above. Table 2 needed their mains, but none of them were ready yet; there were too many special requirements on their order for a rapid turnaround.
"Crap, yes! Those carrots are mine, on it." Replied the junior cook, scuttling past the hanging pans to reach their blackening vegetables.
Ellie took the chance to saunter past rows of boiling pots, sizzling pans and soiled hobs and grab a glass of water from the sink. She'd been hot when serving in the restaurant, but entering the kitchen was like leaping bodily into a furnace made of volcanoes, which was in direct sunlight and had been situated, somewhat redundantly, in a fire. At least, that's how it always occurred to Ellie.
"Still busy out there?" Asked Jamie, almost shoulder-deep in suds from the washing up.
Yeah, rammed." Ellie answered, snatching up an offputtingly warm glass from the draining rack and shouldering him aside gently to access the tap.
"Ugh. I'm going to be stuck doing this for hours, then. We give them all way too much crockery with every dish."
"Mhm." Ellie grunted whilst gulping down fluids.
”Come on, Ben. You know better than this, I need you paying attention!” The sous chef chastised the junior cook, stirring at the carrots to stop them sticking further.
“Yes chef, sorry chef.” Ben answered, also stirring.
"And it's a living hell trying to get all this complicated stuff clean. I mean, look at this!" Jamie continued, holding up a bubble-coated porcelain shape. Ellie peered at it politely, still drinking, while Jamie cleared away the suds to reveal a tiny ceramic octopus. She instantly recognised it as the tartare dispenser served with the "Committee of Pulses" main meal. Sauce drizzled out through the ends of each tentacle to ensure that it got over everything, not just where it was intended to go, and she’d had several arguments over the fact that there were no alternative dispensers available. Options to be served with the pulses, she thought to herself, were a jacket potato on toast or mashed pasta. She hated herself for immediately knowing it.
“Pretty annoying.” Ellie agreed, gasping in a lungful of air to follow the water and watching the chef at the carrots with casual curiosity.
“Chef in the kitchen!” The sous chef announced suddenly, putting the wooden spoon down once damage control had been executed with the carrots.
“Burning carrots again? Step it up, we’re busy tonight. Who’s looking after the steamed veg?” Asked the head chef. As if by magic he was already standing in the centre of the kitchen, where the junior cook was delicately placing a pastry lid on top of a bowl of tomato soup.
“That’s me, chef.” The sous chef replied. “Took my eye off everyone. Won’t happen again.”
“Fine. “
“Thanks, Terry.” Ben muttered. The sous chef nodded and Ellie tipped her head to one side. It didn’t matter how many times she saw it happen, the chef’s unique system fascinated her.
“I can let the water run through it but that doesn’t properly wash away the bits that stick inside. Sometimes the nozzles get plugged too, or someone will push a chunk of vegetable in there or something, and then I need to get the pipe cleaners out. Pipe cleaners, Ellie. No-one uses those to clean things anymore; they’re meant to be exclusively for children’s arts and crafts exercises.” Jamie persisted, pulling Ellie away from the chef drama and back into conversation about washing up difficulties.
“It’s irritating to have to carry all the crockery as well. Balancing five plates on my arms is bad enough but when you’ve got one of those octopus dishes wobbling about and clattering on top it throws everything right off.” Ellie finally offered.
“Customer out there on Table 6." Tim, the concierge, announced through the doors.
"OK, that’s my next one. Fingers crossed he doesn’t want tartare." Ellie said with a sympathetic smile as she made her way back towards the restaurant.
“I’ve got him seated and he’s asked for sparkling water. Oh, and just be aware that he’s got horns.” Tim said conversationally, turning on his heel to return to the front desk.
“Horns?”
“Yes.” He confirmed, still walking away.
Ellie screwed her face up, trying to work out what Tim was blathering on about. If there was a customer sporting a stag’s antlers then that would make the evening more interesting for sure, but she had a sinking feeling that the concierge was just warning her that he would be a pain. She’d find out soon enough, she reasoned, so she grabbed a bottle of sparking water from the bar and made her way through the custard-dense air of the restaurant.
Waitressing had been Ellie’s income source for years. In that time she liked to think that she’d seen a fairly complete cross-section of society that covered various personalities, body types, fashion choices and, distressingly, attitudes towards sitting on used plates to signal that they were no longer required. With that exposure to a variety of clientele she believed that a certain professional robustness to gut-reactions had grown in her, like a broad-leafed plant sheltering the insects below from a rainstorm of poor life-choices and genetic abnormalities. When she saw the occupant of table 6, however, with his honest-to-goodness short, red, pointed horns protruding from the forehead, just below the jet-black hairline, she was helpless against a small gasp.
The customer was otherwise unremarkable enough, but that might just have been the perspective-warping effect of the horns. His hair was short and neat, his ears were the expected shape, head was supported by a neck that emerged from a smart red jumper, and the grey slacks on his legs didn’t offer any challenges to cultural norms. Ellie steeled herself.
“Good evening, sir.” She said with her empty professional brightness, flipping over the glass in front of the gentleman.
“Hello there.” He replied. His voice was smooth, like a rock-face eroded by millennia of sandstorms. “How are you?”
“I’m very well, thank you sir.” She responded reflexively as she poured sparkling water.
“Thank you.” The gentleman said when the glass was full.
“Would you like me to come back in a few moments? I’m aware you’ve not had long to peruse the menu yet.” Ellie offered, making a concerted effort to look the man in his eyes and not stare into the polished red horns.
“That would be most appreciated, thank you.”
“No problem. I won’t go far.” She smiled, another stock response to sound friendly.
“Ha. As long as you stay between me and the deep blue sea I’m sure I’ll be able to get you again.” The man replied. Something in his eyes, even above the friendly smile, seemed to look through Ellie’s own eyes and into her head. No, not even her head. Stupid as it made her feel, she felt like he was looking into her soul.
“Ha.” She said, not understanding him entirely but respecting that the statement had the cadence of a joke.
“There’s something weird about that customer at table 6.” Ellie said as she returned to her hiding place in the kitchen.
"What do you mean?” Asked Jamie, one arm plunged deep into a yard-long gravy boot.
“For one thing, he really has horns. I thought Tim just meant… you know… that he was demanding or something. Come and have a look.”
“Oh, him. I know who you mean. He comes in from time to time." Said the sous chef.
"I've never seen him before." Ellie protested.
"Yeah but you don't normally work Sundays do you? He says they're the only days he can get away with it, whatever that means."
Metallic clanging and wet splattering sounds filled the kitchen as the sous chef dropped a pan of gravy onto the floor. Or it might have been the junior cook. It was hard to tell when none of them were speaking.
“Damn it.” The head chef said. It took Ellie by surprise, but she supposed that kitchen experience didn’t necessarily correlate with grip strength.
“The way he talks is weird too, though. It’s not just the horns.”
“Never noticed anything.” One of the chefs garbled through a mouth that was busy testing the polenta on toast.
Ellie looked at him quizzically.
“Who’s saying that? Because if you’ve ‘only been here for three days’ then your testimony doesn’t hold much water.”
The chewing chef gave a withering look and swallowed.
“Can’t you tell? I’m the sous chef. Been here for seven years. We’ve worked together all that time.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. Silly me.” Ellie answered, restraining her sarcasm as much as possible but still rolling her eyes. The table 6 customer would never be the weirdest occupant of the restaurant as long as this chef never quit.
Most kitchens required a whole team of people, with a clear hierarchy, in order to keep the orders flowing. Not The Vulcanised Penny, though. Not anymore, at least. When it had first opened the restaurant had a perfectly commonplace kitchen team who worked in the same way as restaurant kitchen teams across the world. But following the auspicious recruitment of Terry the sous chef, and the subsequent resignation of all other kitchen staff, The Vulcanised Penny became an anomaly.
After the departure of their last junior cook, there was no immediate replacement available. In order to maintain the dynamic, in a move that no-one else would have dared to predict, Terry the sous chef also became Ben, the new junior cook. Ben prepared everything and then Terry cooked it, with Terry diligently teaching and disciplining Ben on correct techniques where necessary. When the head chef couldn’t cope with that nonsense going on and subsequently quit, Terry and Ben also became Javier, the new head chef, who maintained full creative control and cooked the more complex dishes while his staff took care of the simpler work. In a delicate ballet of multiple personalities Terry-Ben-Javier kept everything cooking, everything chopping, and everything except their own grip on reality under perfect control.
The restaurant’s manager had found it troubling to adjust to the new dynamic. There were several tense moments that nearly led to a collapse, but she had been forbidden from quitting lest she make the problem worse; there was no knowing where Terry-Ben-Javier’s remit would stop. Instead she’d been left to try to make sense of his unique work practices as best she could.
On one occasion, early on in Javier’s tenure, she’d insisted that Terry stopped being so ridiculous and just do everything in one persona so that no-one had to get confused. It only took twenty minutes for the kitchen to fall apart, and not just because of Terry’s vocal protests at the sudden firing of Ben and Javier. As Terry alone he was just one man, and entirely incapable of doing everything at once. When the manager finally relented, face-in-hands, to letting Ben and Javier ‘return’, he got everything under control and served in record time. No-one had dared to tamper with the system since.
“Anyway” Terry said “he’s never caused any trouble. I think you just need to get used to him.”
“Right.” Ellie replied, unconvinced. Terry wasn’t listening anymore, however. Javier was too busy shouting abuse at a bowl of broccoli to prepare the humiliated vegetables.
After a brief interval of retrieving dirty plates from table 12, noting with distress on Jamie’s behalf that the remnants of a pie had been stuffed thoroughly into every orifice of the octopus tartare dispenser, it was time to go back to table 6. Between the stuffy air and the general ambience of oddness that the gentleman maintained, Ellie could feel herself sweating.
“Hello sir, are you ready to order?”
“Yes, I believe that the world is primed for my order.” He grinned, showing starkly white and slightly sharp teeth. “But I do have a question over the Soup of the Quarter.”
“How can I help?” Ellie made herself ask.
“I can see from the board that it’s a traditional potato and egg soup, but I was wondering what type of egg is used? Bird or mammal?” The gentleman crooned.
“You’re not the first person to ask me that this evening.” Ellie said conversationally but with mounting concern. “It’s a bird egg. Chicken.”
“And the type of potato?”
“Jersey?”
The gentleman smiled.
“Thank you, I feel much better. The devil is in the details after all.” He smirked. Ellie resisted the urge to scrunch her face up. “I’ll start with the Soup of the Quarter, and then I think for my main…” he scanned his hand down the menu "I would absolutely love the seitan."
Ellie didn’t like the way he rolled the word ‘seitan’ around in his mouth, nor the look he gave when he said it. There was no way she was imagining this, surely. She realised she was starting.
“One potato and egg soup, and one seitan. No problem. Anything else I can get for you? A wine maybe? Or some bread?”
The gentlemen reeled slightly, but kept his demure expression.
“No, thank you. I find the combination of bread and red wine to be… disagreeable.”
Ellie shivered despite the heat.
“OK sir. Thank you.” She accepted, grateful to be able to leave.
“Oh, one more thing, please.” He said, just after she’d turned her back. It was as if he’d been able to sense her relief and knew that it needed to be stamped out.
“Yes?”
"Are the lavatories unlocked or do I need a code? Some kind of loo-cipher?"
“Um, they’re open. Just along there and on your left.” Ellie told him, pointing through the restaurant. His turn of phrase definitely didn’t sit well with her, and that question seemed particularly contrived.
“Thank you.” He said, not making any move to leave his seat.
“You’re welcome.” Ellie replied, hurrying away. Deep down she felt that he was anything but. Hurrying back through the labyrinth of other tables and the hazards of other guests, Ellie idly collected empty glasses and used plates while also gathering her thoughts. She was certain that the restaurant was getting even hotter, and the smells of rich food were clinging to her face like clay.
“A soup of the quarter and a seitan for table 6.” She announced when she returned to the kitchen, pinning her order slip up. Terry-Ben-Javier checked it, and then got to work.
Ellie stood and fiddled with her apron distractedly for half a minute. She knew that table eleven would be done with their starters, but wanted some time away from the cloying restaurant air and, more to the point, table 6.
“Everything OK Ellie?” Javier asked. Despite his high position in the kitchen he was, at heart, a people person who took the time to care.
“Yeah. Yeah fine.”
“Looks like something’s on your mind.” Javier said, while Ben chopped potatoes with the wrong kind of knife. So wrong, in fact, that it was a serviette.
Ellie couldn’t express exactly why the man at table 6 unsettled her so much, but knew that Javier wouldn’t take ‘nothing’ for an answer. The only thing she knew for sure was that he kept making strange allusions to being something that he couldn’t possibly be. There was, however, another matter that could be settled.
“I’ve had a couple of people ask whether it’s a bird or mammal egg in the potato and egg soup.” She told the head chef.
“Bird or mammal?!” He exclaimed, disbelieving.
“I know!” Ellie agreed, grateful to be able to voice the confusion that had welled up from the question.
“Eesh, these people. It’s mammal, obviously. The best pig eggs we can harvest.”
“Wh-“ Ellie started, but Tim burst into the kitchen and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Ellie, table eleven are done.”
“Right… I’m on it…” she said, no longer trusting anything in the kitchen. Her questions and concerns would have to wait for later.
Eyeing the potato and egg soup with a grimace, Ellie weaved a path back to table 6 and placed it down in front of the horned gentleman cautiously. In this moment of her life, just as in every other, there was absolutely no way that any pig eggs could be permitted to touch her skin.
“Delightful, thank you.” The gentleman said, flourishing his spoon.
“You’re welcome.”
“I was wondering, miss, if there is any chance that the heating could be turned up?” He asked, smiling knowingly. Ellie suspected that he was either joking or incredibly ill.
“Up?”
“Yes. I do like things to be warm.”
“Erm, I’m afraid not sir, sorry. The heating is either on or off, we can’t make it go any higher.” She said, sticking to the facts and leaving aside her speculations that he was playing games.
"Ah, a shame. In that case I would be interested in one of your customer-use jumpers, if the heating really can't be turned up."
“Customer -use… yes, certainly sir. I’ll be right back.” Ellie said, preferring an insane task over a conversation with the gentleman, and almost running away. Anything was worth agreeing to if it meant she didn’t have to speak to him any longer.
“Tim. Tim.” She said when she reached the front of the restaurant. The concierge looked up from his reservation book.
“Yes, Ellie?”
“The guy at table 6. With the horns. He wants a ‘customer-use jumper’.” She told him, desperate for someone else to acknowledge the insanity.
“Oh, right. Yeah he does that sometimes. I usually just give him one of from lost and found.”
Ellie stared open-mouthed at the concierge.
“So he’s not ill? Or joking?”
Tim shrugged.
“If he’s either then it’s not ever changed. Guy just likes to be warm.” The bell above the door jingled. “I’ll need to see to these people. Just get him a jumper.”
“I mean… fine.” Ellie accepted reluctantly.
“Here you go sir.” Ellie said, holding out a thick jumper that she’d discovered in the lost and found box. It was the warmest-looking garment she could see.
“Marvellous, thank you.” The gentleman said, covering his mouth with one hand to hide the partially chewed soup.
“Is everything alright with your meal?” Her professional auto-pilot asked upon seeing that the gentleman’s mouth was still full.
“Lovely, thank you. I’ve never had chicken eggs that taste quite like this before.” He said, pointedly. Ellie swallowed.
“Our chef is very talented.”
“Please pass on my compliments.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
"Table 11 mains are ready, Ellie'. Ben told her, before she'd even got her whole body through the door.
She groaned.
"OK, fine."
A few practiced sweeps of her arms skilfully lifted the three plates into transport position, the heat of newly cooked food providing an unwelcome source of warmth against her body. Veering her gaze away from the reflective pans after catching a glimpse of how sweaty her face looked, she carried her plates back to the restaurant's cloying airspace.
From the plates Ellie carried a new layer of dense flavour-space started to diffuse through the treacle air of the restaurant. It hung in a smog of parsnip reductions and toasted rice, launching whole-heartedly into olfactory combat with every nose in the area. It was quite the assault in and of itself, but once merged with the lingering remnants of other aromatic meals the scents took on an ever-more assertive aspect.
Ellie’s head didn’t stand a chance. Her nasal passages were fully occupied by the smell-scape, and its vanguard had started to make gains on her eyes and ears. In her weakened state she wasn’t sufficiently quick to react when a chair was slid outwards suddenly, crashing itself into her hip.
“Agh!” Ellie yelped, the sudden expulsion of air pushing the smells away from their nose-garrison.
“Oop! Be careful!” The seat-sliding menace chastised. Ellie ignored him, focusing instead on the rocking, wobbling and oscillating stack of plates on her arms. The delicately balanced crockery assembly had become an unpredictably dynamic system, one which could be cast into disarray by even the slightest disturbance. Sauces sloshed this way and that, shifting the centre of mass all the while, and large, round potatoes rolled into newly vacated cavities on the plate. Her porcelain tower had become a nightmare of wobbles and rotations that threatened to pour intricately combined ingredients onto the long-suffering carpet.
Eyes that could not under any circumstances become wider watched the ballet of unstable cuisine. Soon enough the nearby patrons and a couple of other serving staff joined the tense vigil. All of them were transfixed in helpless wonder at the display. Would there be an irreversible carpet-staining incident, some of them wondered. Would this waitress be able to demonstrate a super-human capacity to restore order, others posed to themselves. Will this careless buffoon ever apologise for crashing a chair into me, Ellie thought.
In the end, only one of the eventualities came to pass. Like the intricate and inscrutable mechanisms of a clockwork albatross, each of the dishes on Ellie’s arm played out a harmonic, oscillatory dance. Gradually their movements slowed until, mercifully, they came to a rest. A calm silence descended and sat among the guests as they enjoyed a moment of reverence at the events which had unfolded. Once the gravitas of the display had been properly respected, the burble of chatter slowly swelled back to its normal volume.
Heart pounding and sweat situation worse than ever, Ellie tentatively started to pace towards table eleven again.
“Apologies for the delay.” She said, with a quiet shell-shock. “I have rice-on-toast with toasted rice, a confusion of legumes, and a serving of coagulated rye?”
The three guests looked up at her with bewilderment at once again receiving the very items they had ordered less than twenty minutes previously. This time Ellie said nothing. She simply held their gazes with a neutral, expectant expression. It wasn’t her problem if they couldn’t remember a single piece of information that they themselves had provided, and it wasn’t her who would be going hungry.
The guests looked at one another for a moment and then back at Ellie. None of them seemed to be emotionally or intellectually equipped to deal with the situation. Like a sentinel at the gates of Babylon, or a patient handmaid awaiting the orders of her queen, Ellie held herself perfectly still. She waited in silence for one of them to act like a functioning adult and answer her, refusing to give in to their pathetic display of helplessness.
Cars passed the windows outside, tyres hissing against the roadway. Other diners continued their racket of ‘conversation’, grunting, chewing and clinking cutlery. None of the three from table eleven appeared to have come any closer to remembering what they were intending to buy for too much money and ingest for too many calories. Ellie was a patient person, though. She could wait.
The stasis was finally broken after another minute when the gentleman took an uncertain sip from his water, but upon completion there was no progress in allocating meals. Hot air oozed around Ellie’s glistening face as she stood and waited for any of them to say or do something, reminding her of how uncomfortable every moment in the restaurant would be until the end of her shift.
“Um. Um I think I had the rice.” One of the women finally said. Ellie slowly turned her head to face in her direction.
“Thank you, madam.” She said, placing the rice meal down. Her arm pulsed with relief at some of the load being lightened.
“Legumes for me, please.” The gentleman then announced. It appeared in front of him.
“Then I suppose that leaves me with-” The other woman managed, before the rye was dropped between her knife and fork.
“Is there anything else I can get for you?” Ellie asked, but only because she had to.
Another terrified silence engulfed the table.
“Er, no? Thank you?” The man said after only a few seconds. Ellie was impressed at their progress.
“Wonderful. Enjoy your meals.”
As she wound her way back through the restaurant, this time maintaining a deliberate vigil for chair attacks, Ellie risked a glance in the direction of table 6. The horned gentleman had genuinely put the jumper on, the mere sight of which made Ellie feel even hotter somehow. Sitting up with a disconcertingly straight spine, he was twiddling his long, thin black moustache in one hand and twirling his cutlery in the other. Quite how he was managing to wind soup around his fork like spaghetti was well beyond Ellie’s comprehension, but the facts were right there for her to see.
Without warning the gentleman’s head snapped around and the two of them made direct eye-contact. He smiled the beckoning smile that all patrons manage to generate when seated for a meal. Ellie cursed herself for being nosy enough to watch him, and foolish enough to leave herself exposed to such a risk, and resignedly made her way over.
“Is everything alright with your meal, sir?” She asked. Whatever could possibly have been wrong with the chef’s cooking would never be patch on what was wrong with the horned gentleman himself. Ellie still wouldn’t let herself think about her concerns explicitly. They were ridiculous and impossible, but at the same time inexplicably real.
“It’s lovely, thank you. I am also finished with it. I was just wondering if I might also have a cup of coffee to warm my belly?” His voice dripped like a melting candle over the table.
“Coffee? Er, yes. Of course.” She said, picking up the soup bowl. It felt red hot to the touch and she flinched when her fingers made contact. “I’ll be right back.”
“He wants coffee to warm himself up. To warm up!” Ellie blurted when she was through the kitchen doors again. “I might as well have been swimming I’m so sweaty, and he wants coffee. And he keeps saying really weird stuff at me.”
“He’s a bit of a character.” Terry confirmed, distractedly. He appeared to be wrestling with Javier for control of a large chopping knife. Ellie didn’t know how she could tell that it was Javier trying to take the knife away.
“There’s something deeply wrong with him.”
“So he feels the cold, that’s not a crime.”
Javier finally wrested control of the knife from Terry and started to furiously chop an unpeeled banana. Terry turned his attention to some pasta instead.
“He also has horns. That’s a pretty big deal.”
“Seems a bit narrow-minded of you, Ellie.” Jamie observed, barely visible among the suds and dishes.
“I’m not saying that the horns are necessarily bad, but they are weird and the way he talks gives me the creeps. He’s like…” she thought about it, desperate to find a way of articulating her discomfort. “… biblically strange.”
Jamie and Terry both paused what they were doing to look at her. A teapot sank beneath the waters and a pot of pasta started to boil over.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Jamie finally said.
“He’s saying a load of stuff that makes me think of the devil. Like he said I would be between him and the deep blue sea. No-one in the history of time has ever said that about themselves instead of the devil.”
“Maybe he’s just a bit literary.” Terry said, while Ben tried to snatch the knife away from Javier. Javier, in a move that Ellie saw for herself but would never be able to comprehend, shot Ben a look that shut his intentions down.
“And he wanted the seitan, before asking about a loo-cipher. I really think he might be Satan.” Ellie continued to plead.
“Sometimes you want to see a pattern so much that your mind just invents one.” Jamie observed, a sage voice from beyond the wall of soap. “It’s like when people say that the floor’s always wet after I’ve been washing up. Pure coincidence, with relevance attributed to it by a bored mind.”
“You… you almost had a point there Jamie. The floor is wet right now around your feet because you’re obviously pouring the washing up water all around yourself.” Ellie said, unable to resist biting at that bait.
“See, that’s exactly what I was saying! You’re looking for connections. That makes two strikes in the same place, just like lightning doesn’t do.” Jamie announced with an undeserved air of triumph. “The floor is just wet because that’s how it is around here, and someone using a few strange turns of phrase and ordering seitan doesn’t make them the devil.”
“He’ll be waiting for his coffee and his main, Ellie. Strange, devil or anything else, he’s a customer.” Tim announced from behind her. Ellie leapt into the air at the sound of his voice.
“How long have you been in here?” She asked, seeing him emerge from among bins.
“Since before you walked in. I was searching for treasure in the bins during my break.” He said, without a hint of humour or irony. “I really don’t think that our guest is the embodiment of all that is evil, but even if he is you need to serve him properly. Unless he starts trying to cart your undying soul off across the Styx, I don’t want to hear anything more about him.”
Ellie sighed heavily. The conversation was written off as a bad job by Tim’s interjection, so she left to make a coffee.
“One coffee, sir, and your seitan.” Ellie told the horned gentleman, unloading her tray of mug, milk and sugar whilst shaking slightly.
“Thank you very much.” The man said, eagerly wrapping his hands around the hot mug. He appeared to be wearing bright red nail varnish. Between the shock of his manicure and another act of temperature elevation, Ellie’s stifling discomfort escalated yet further.
“Do you need any other sauces or more drinks?” She said. She just couldn’t stop herself despite the primal desperation to get away; muscle memory of years spent serving was taking over.
“No, thank you. I’ll stick with what I have. After all, better the devil you know, right?” He winked.
Ellie hurried away.
“Does anyone else want table 6 from me? He’s on main already.” Ellie asked the kitchen at large when she got back. A couple of the other serving staff looked up at her.
“Why?” Asked Eugene. His thick glasses glinted bright strip-lights back at her.
“Because I just get the creeps from him.”
“She thinks he’s Satan.” Jamie shouted over. Most of his body was obscured by a wall of suds.
“Oh, him. Nah you can keep him.”
“Please, you can have the tip and everything.”
“He’s fine, Ellie. The guy has his tastes and that’s alright. He’s never given anybody any trouble. Just serve him like a normal customer.”
“But he has horns and he keeps saying things about being the devil. Why does no-one else think that’s unsettling?” Ellie pleaded.
Eugene shrugged. “I can advocate for him, alright? I promise it’ll be fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to walk past table 8 again without looking at them. If I can ignore them for ten more minutes then that’ll be a record for keeping someone waiting with dirty plates in front of them.” He said proudly.
Tim entered as Eugene left.
“Just on the way to pick up table 6’s plate.” Ellie pre-empted before he could speak.
“Would you like to see a dessert menu, sir?” A sweat-sodden Ellie asked. The air around table 6 felt several degrees higher than the rest of the scorching restaurant. Once again the plate in front of the horned gentleman was hotter than it had been upon delivery.
“Oh go on then. Tempt me.” He replied. Ellie wasn’t looking at him, but she could hear the wink in his voice.
“One second, then.”
Without stopping off to deposit his dirty plate, Ellie swiped up a dessert menu and dropped it in front of the gentleman.
“You’re a bad influence on me.” He sniggered.
“So, are you ready to order dessert?” Ellie asked a few minutes later. She’d made a trip back to the kitchen to drop the dirt plate off and tried to hide in the walk-in freezer, but Tim flushed her out again.
“Ah, yes. It’s sinfully gluttonous of me, but I think I’ll have the profaneteroles.”
Ellie tensed.
“The what, sorry?”
“Profiteroles.” The horned man smirked.
“I could have sworn you said profaneteroles.” Ellie accused. Immediately she cursed herself for continuing to speak to him. All she had to do was walk away and get the order, but her mouth had got her into trouble again.
“Did I? Silly me.” He answered, staring directly into her eyes.
“I’ll have them with you right away, sir.”
Ellie hid just inside the kitchen door, watching the horned man. He’d been drinking sparkling water all evening and then gulped down a whole cup of coffee. Logic dictated that he would be in need of the cipher-free toilet at any moment.
“Those profiteroles are going to warm up if you don’t hurry, Ellie.” Javier observed. His hand was covered in scratches where he, Terry, and Ben had been fighting over the same ladle a few moments earlier.
“He’ll be gone soon, and I’ll be able to sneak them over.”
“It can’t possibly be that bad.”
“Have you tried talking to him?” Ellie asked.
“Well, no.”
“Then believe me, it can possibly be that bad. He’s just unsettling. Maybe I can make Tim deal with him for the rest of the evening.”
“Probably not. Tim went home a few minutes ago.”
Ellie ceased her vigil over table 6 and looked up at Javier.
“What?”
“He found a load of treasure in the bins and said he didn’t need the job anymore. We’ll be getting a new colleague soon.”
Ellie held Javier’s gaze and looked for any hint that he was joking. The terrifying alternative was a catastrophe of logistics with Terry taking on another full-time job role. Worse still, there’d be yet another name to append to Terry-Ben-Javier, and it was already a mouthful.
“This is the last thing he’ll eat, and then he’ll be out of here. Just finish the job.” Terry encouraged.
“I guess I have to. None of the others are going to take the table away from me.” Ellie said with a heavysigh.
“Look! He’s gone to the loos! You have a chance!” Ben said suddenly. Ellie looked to confirm and saw that the table was indeed vacated.
Faster than she had ever moved through the restaurant, and chair-risk be damned, Ellie carried the profiterole-burden over to table 6, placed it silently down, and retreated. Under normal circumstances she would have been overwhelmed by embarrassment, but not this time. This was perfectly necessary.
After leaving it for as long as she reasonably could, Ellie admitted to herself that she needed to take the horned man his bill and pick up the used dessert plate. He’d been making obvious attempts to attract her attention for a few minutes already, and even without Tim’s watchful eye there was only so long she could spend hiding with the kitchen staff.
“All done, sir?” She enquired, already picking up the crockery.
“Yes, thank you.” He said in his level, polite tone. Either he didn’t realise that she’d been avoiding him, or he was completely unfazed by it.
“Would you like the bill?” Ellie asked. It was another move that would normally bring her shame. These, however, were not normal circumstances.
“Ooh, yes please. Let’s make a deal. You name your price.” He said, unveiling his toothy grin again.
From her pocket Ellie produced the pre-prepared bill. She anticipated a negative reaction at the extreme presumptuousness of her actions, but the horned man already had an obsidian-black debit card in his hand.
“One moment, sir. I’ll get the machine.” Ellie said sheepishly, somehow on the back-foot again.
When she returned, the horned man gave her the card and she pushed it into the bottom of the machine.
“Check the amount, please, and enter your PIN when you’re ready. Thank you.” Ellie said, shaking with anticipation at her interactions with the man nearly being over.
“Right you are.” He accepted. Without looking he rapidly tapped in a series of numbers and passed the machine back. The ‘6’ button looked faintly scorched, but Ellie put it out of her mind. Instead she stared down at the screen under the pretence of waiting for instructions, so that she didn’t have to look into his face any more than necessary. After a complex series of beeps and false-starts at printing out a receipt, Ellie pulled the card back out. Her heart nearly stopped when she saw that the name read "Bill Z. Bub".
“H… here you go, sir. Have a lovely evening.” She said, thrusting the card and receipt into Bill’s hand and spinning on her heels to dash away.
“Wait, wait, please.” Bill said. Ellie was too terrified to disobey. “This is for your troubles.”
With one eye closed, Ellie looked at Bill’s hand. It contained a small, folded bundle of money.
“Oh.. er… thank you very much sir. That’s very kind.”
The toothy grin reappeared.
“I can be, when I want to. May I keep this jumper?”
“Yes. That’s fine.” Ellie said. Between her desperation to see him leave and the generosity of his tip, Ellie was prepared to give him any number of other people’s clothes.
“You’re a real angel. And I should know a thing or two about that.” He said with a snigger. Ellie smiled awkwardly and then ran stumbling back to the kitchen. Once through the doorway she leaned against the worktop and drew several deep breaths. It was over.
Terry-Ben-Javier were discussing among themselves how they could best help the new concierge, Jamie was no longer visible behind his tidal wave of foam, and the other serving staff were nowhere to be seen. Ellie closed her eyes tight. Part of her was desperate to tell the others everything and force them to acknowledge that the man wasn’t right. But from the back of her head came a warning that perhaps the topic was best left unmentioned. After all, the voice maintained; speak of him and he shall appear.
With two ‘Farmer’s Tartlets’ on one arm and a bowl of ‘Soup of the Quarter’ on the other, Ellie weaved her way through the narrow inter-table passages that served variously as walkways, conversation nooks, and fire escapes. With honed senses she expertly avoided a chair that slid aggressively outwards without so much as a moment’s notice. Without missing a beat she took another two strides, before screeching to a soup-sloshing halt as another patron gestured enigmatically from their chair at exactly waist-punching level. A less experienced member of waiting staff would expect an apology, or at least acknowledgement, from the perpetrators in such a scenario, but that would be to make the cardinal mistake of expecting to be treated as a human. Ellie was far wiser than that. She’d learned the hard way. Even so, every time it happened she struggled in the battle to maintain a pleasant, neutral expression.
With the patron’s energetic emotiveness concluded for the moment, Ellie resumed her journey towards table eleven and its three hungry incumbents. Right where it had been several minutes earlier, she passed through a dense pocket of red-wine-jus-scented air that filled her airways like an aromatic gag. It travelled through the internal passageways of her head and seemed to invade the space behind her eyes, seeping down her throat before she could catch it. Every part of her airway was blocked by a thick and velvety sauce, which apparently complimented what the menu called ‘a delectable contrivance of root-like vegetables and deconstructed grains’. Even having seen the dish being cooked several times a day for the last handful of months, Ellie had no idea what it was or what that description meant.
Employing a squint to ward against further ocular gassing, coupled with laboured exhalation through the viscous air, Ellie managed to limp through the cloying bubble. The comparatively fresh but still objectively overwrought air of the restaurant at large didn’t so much flood as drip into her airways, purging the jus from her system without making it a whole lot easier to draw breath. Vitally however, all of the dishes lining Ellie’s arms were still stable and their contents were un-spilled. From what little Ellie knew about human mutations, adaptations and evolution, she was sure that her own body must have developed a preternatural ability to keep overcomplicated foodstuffs balanced no matter what terrain she encountered. After years of exposure to the task, she was fairly sure that her joints could rotate indefinitely in the same direction, such that a brimmed soup could be kept gyroscopically stabilised even if she tumbled head-over-heels down a staircase. Her shift supervisor had ruled out clinical trials of such a hypothesis on the basis of not having a staircase in the restaurant.
With only a couple of trips on the loose, ruffled carpet that had desperately needed replacing for a decade, Ellie finally arrived at table eleven.
“I’ve got two Farmer’s Tartlets and a, er… potato and egg soup.”
From the table three faces, with an apparent combined age of one thousand thanks to the unflattering lighting afforded by dim overhead bulbs and yellowed candles from below, turned towards Ellie. All were blank and flustered, as if the arrival of the food they’d recently ordered, was a deeply unexpected course for events to have taken.
“Um, yeah. Tartlet here please.” One of the faces finally admitted. Despite the utter bewilderment of words on a page becoming a real and physical item of food, he had thankfully found his voice again.
“Thank you.” Ellie said reflexively, more for something to fill the gap than out of any real gratitude, as she placed one tartlet in front of the gentleman. He was held at bay from the table by a generous belly that vied for independence from the rest of his torso. Although the buttons of his shirt were holding, there was no guarantee that they’d keep such a tremendous force restrained for long.
“And the other tartlet?” Ellie asked with her usual professional brightness. All emotion had vacated the words long before, but none of the patrons really seemed to notice. They were always too intently focused and stressed about the ordeal of saying ‘yes please’ when their dish was offered.
“Here, thanks.” Said a woman. She was of similar age to the man-and-belly team which had claimed the first tartlet, but approaching the table was much easier for her. She seemed to have already experienced a minor gravitational disaster at the hands of her red wine however; staining, located in a mockingly precise outline of where a napkin should have sat across the legs of her dress, told candid tales of a sip taken poorly.
“Thank you.” Ellie said, repeating the ritual. “Then that leaves you with the soup.” She continued towards the final guest.
“Is this the Soup of the Quarter?” The third face enquired with uncertainty. She was again of similar age to her companions, although Ellie had begun to lose confidence in her age intuition since even the wine glass looked to be on the brink of a mid-life crisis.
“Yes, it is. Potato and egg soup, this quarter.”
“What does it have in it?”
“Potatoes, I think.” Ellie said, not wanting to make too many assumptions about the correlation between soup title and soup contents. Not since the minestrone & birds-nest soup debacles. “And egg.” She elaborated.
“Bird or mammal egg?”
“Uh… bird.” Ellie guessed. Or, more accurately, hoped.
“Can you be any more specific than bird?”
“Chicken. It’ll be a chicken’s egg.” She said, with decreasing confidence.
“Chicken? Right. Thanks.” The woman accepted at last, indicating the space in front of her on the table, just in case Ellie had forgotten how the general logistics of table service went.
“Thank you. Can I get you anything else?” Ellie’s hollow customer-facing voice offered, despite her deeply-held desire not to invite more questions. A trio of submissively-raised palms and shaken heads released her from the danger of continued interaction, but simultaneously condemned her to another journey through the jus-cloud.
“Enjoy.” She said, meaning goodbye, before turning around and holding her breath for the walk back to the kitchens.
“Another Mechanic’s Pie with mash, three orders of humiliated vegetables and a corner salad.” Shouted one of the other waitresses as Ellie entered the kitchen again. The lightly hinged double doors flapped backwards and forwards with their typical ‘thum thum thum’ sound, spilling flashes of bright white strip-lighting into the dull yellow of the restaurant. Ellie was convinced that the stark contrast between blindingly bright kitchen and almost twilit seating area must have given her and the other serving staff at The Vulcanised Penny the most muscular irises in the world. Going through so many reps of dilated-to-contracted and back again each night was international-level training.
"I smell burning! Who's burning their carrots?" Shouted the sous chef urgently.
"Right, where am I next?" Ellie muttered to herself, checking over the assembled dishes with their torn-out notepad pages pinned above. Table 2 needed their mains, but none of them were ready yet; there were too many special requirements on their order for a rapid turnaround.
"Crap, yes! Those carrots are mine, on it." Replied the junior cook, scuttling past the hanging pans to reach their blackening vegetables.
Ellie took the chance to saunter past rows of boiling pots, sizzling pans and soiled hobs and grab a glass of water from the sink. She'd been hot when serving in the restaurant, but entering the kitchen was like leaping bodily into a furnace made of volcanoes, which was in direct sunlight and had been situated, somewhat redundantly, in a fire. At least, that's how it always occurred to Ellie.
"Still busy out there?" Asked Jamie, almost shoulder-deep in suds from the washing up.
Yeah, rammed." Ellie answered, snatching up an offputtingly warm glass from the draining rack and shouldering him aside gently to access the tap.
"Ugh. I'm going to be stuck doing this for hours, then. We give them all way too much crockery with every dish."
"Mhm." Ellie grunted whilst gulping down fluids.
”Come on, Ben. You know better than this, I need you paying attention!” The sous chef chastised the junior cook, stirring at the carrots to stop them sticking further.
“Yes chef, sorry chef.” Ben answered, also stirring.
"And it's a living hell trying to get all this complicated stuff clean. I mean, look at this!" Jamie continued, holding up a bubble-coated porcelain shape. Ellie peered at it politely, still drinking, while Jamie cleared away the suds to reveal a tiny ceramic octopus. She instantly recognised it as the tartare dispenser served with the "Committee of Pulses" main meal. Sauce drizzled out through the ends of each tentacle to ensure that it got over everything, not just where it was intended to go, and she’d had several arguments over the fact that there were no alternative dispensers available. Options to be served with the pulses, she thought to herself, were a jacket potato on toast or mashed pasta. She hated herself for immediately knowing it.
“Pretty annoying.” Ellie agreed, gasping in a lungful of air to follow the water and watching the chef at the carrots with casual curiosity.
“Chef in the kitchen!” The sous chef announced suddenly, putting the wooden spoon down once damage control had been executed with the carrots.
“Burning carrots again? Step it up, we’re busy tonight. Who’s looking after the steamed veg?” Asked the head chef. As if by magic he was already standing in the centre of the kitchen, where the junior cook was delicately placing a pastry lid on top of a bowl of tomato soup.
“That’s me, chef.” The sous chef replied. “Took my eye off everyone. Won’t happen again.”
“Fine. “
“Thanks, Terry.” Ben muttered. The sous chef nodded and Ellie tipped her head to one side. It didn’t matter how many times she saw it happen, the chef’s unique system fascinated her.
“I can let the water run through it but that doesn’t properly wash away the bits that stick inside. Sometimes the nozzles get plugged too, or someone will push a chunk of vegetable in there or something, and then I need to get the pipe cleaners out. Pipe cleaners, Ellie. No-one uses those to clean things anymore; they’re meant to be exclusively for children’s arts and crafts exercises.” Jamie persisted, pulling Ellie away from the chef drama and back into conversation about washing up difficulties.
“It’s irritating to have to carry all the crockery as well. Balancing five plates on my arms is bad enough but when you’ve got one of those octopus dishes wobbling about and clattering on top it throws everything right off.” Ellie finally offered.
“Customer out there on Table 6." Tim, the concierge, announced through the doors.
"OK, that’s my next one. Fingers crossed he doesn’t want tartare." Ellie said with a sympathetic smile as she made her way back towards the restaurant.
“I’ve got him seated and he’s asked for sparkling water. Oh, and just be aware that he’s got horns.” Tim said conversationally, turning on his heel to return to the front desk.
“Horns?”
“Yes.” He confirmed, still walking away.
Ellie screwed her face up, trying to work out what Tim was blathering on about. If there was a customer sporting a stag’s antlers then that would make the evening more interesting for sure, but she had a sinking feeling that the concierge was just warning her that he would be a pain. She’d find out soon enough, she reasoned, so she grabbed a bottle of sparking water from the bar and made her way through the custard-dense air of the restaurant.
Waitressing had been Ellie’s income source for years. In that time she liked to think that she’d seen a fairly complete cross-section of society that covered various personalities, body types, fashion choices and, distressingly, attitudes towards sitting on used plates to signal that they were no longer required. With that exposure to a variety of clientele she believed that a certain professional robustness to gut-reactions had grown in her, like a broad-leafed plant sheltering the insects below from a rainstorm of poor life-choices and genetic abnormalities. When she saw the occupant of table 6, however, with his honest-to-goodness short, red, pointed horns protruding from the forehead, just below the jet-black hairline, she was helpless against a small gasp.
The customer was otherwise unremarkable enough, but that might just have been the perspective-warping effect of the horns. His hair was short and neat, his ears were the expected shape, head was supported by a neck that emerged from a smart red jumper, and the grey slacks on his legs didn’t offer any challenges to cultural norms. Ellie steeled herself.
“Good evening, sir.” She said with her empty professional brightness, flipping over the glass in front of the gentleman.
“Hello there.” He replied. His voice was smooth, like a rock-face eroded by millennia of sandstorms. “How are you?”
“I’m very well, thank you sir.” She responded reflexively as she poured sparkling water.
“Thank you.” The gentleman said when the glass was full.
“Would you like me to come back in a few moments? I’m aware you’ve not had long to peruse the menu yet.” Ellie offered, making a concerted effort to look the man in his eyes and not stare into the polished red horns.
“That would be most appreciated, thank you.”
“No problem. I won’t go far.” She smiled, another stock response to sound friendly.
“Ha. As long as you stay between me and the deep blue sea I’m sure I’ll be able to get you again.” The man replied. Something in his eyes, even above the friendly smile, seemed to look through Ellie’s own eyes and into her head. No, not even her head. Stupid as it made her feel, she felt like he was looking into her soul.
“Ha.” She said, not understanding him entirely but respecting that the statement had the cadence of a joke.
“There’s something weird about that customer at table 6.” Ellie said as she returned to her hiding place in the kitchen.
"What do you mean?” Asked Jamie, one arm plunged deep into a yard-long gravy boot.
“For one thing, he really has horns. I thought Tim just meant… you know… that he was demanding or something. Come and have a look.”
“Oh, him. I know who you mean. He comes in from time to time." Said the sous chef.
"I've never seen him before." Ellie protested.
"Yeah but you don't normally work Sundays do you? He says they're the only days he can get away with it, whatever that means."
Metallic clanging and wet splattering sounds filled the kitchen as the sous chef dropped a pan of gravy onto the floor. Or it might have been the junior cook. It was hard to tell when none of them were speaking.
“Damn it.” The head chef said. It took Ellie by surprise, but she supposed that kitchen experience didn’t necessarily correlate with grip strength.
“The way he talks is weird too, though. It’s not just the horns.”
“Never noticed anything.” One of the chefs garbled through a mouth that was busy testing the polenta on toast.
Ellie looked at him quizzically.
“Who’s saying that? Because if you’ve ‘only been here for three days’ then your testimony doesn’t hold much water.”
The chewing chef gave a withering look and swallowed.
“Can’t you tell? I’m the sous chef. Been here for seven years. We’ve worked together all that time.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. Silly me.” Ellie answered, restraining her sarcasm as much as possible but still rolling her eyes. The table 6 customer would never be the weirdest occupant of the restaurant as long as this chef never quit.
Most kitchens required a whole team of people, with a clear hierarchy, in order to keep the orders flowing. Not The Vulcanised Penny, though. Not anymore, at least. When it had first opened the restaurant had a perfectly commonplace kitchen team who worked in the same way as restaurant kitchen teams across the world. But following the auspicious recruitment of Terry the sous chef, and the subsequent resignation of all other kitchen staff, The Vulcanised Penny became an anomaly.
After the departure of their last junior cook, there was no immediate replacement available. In order to maintain the dynamic, in a move that no-one else would have dared to predict, Terry the sous chef also became Ben, the new junior cook. Ben prepared everything and then Terry cooked it, with Terry diligently teaching and disciplining Ben on correct techniques where necessary. When the head chef couldn’t cope with that nonsense going on and subsequently quit, Terry and Ben also became Javier, the new head chef, who maintained full creative control and cooked the more complex dishes while his staff took care of the simpler work. In a delicate ballet of multiple personalities Terry-Ben-Javier kept everything cooking, everything chopping, and everything except their own grip on reality under perfect control.
The restaurant’s manager had found it troubling to adjust to the new dynamic. There were several tense moments that nearly led to a collapse, but she had been forbidden from quitting lest she make the problem worse; there was no knowing where Terry-Ben-Javier’s remit would stop. Instead she’d been left to try to make sense of his unique work practices as best she could.
On one occasion, early on in Javier’s tenure, she’d insisted that Terry stopped being so ridiculous and just do everything in one persona so that no-one had to get confused. It only took twenty minutes for the kitchen to fall apart, and not just because of Terry’s vocal protests at the sudden firing of Ben and Javier. As Terry alone he was just one man, and entirely incapable of doing everything at once. When the manager finally relented, face-in-hands, to letting Ben and Javier ‘return’, he got everything under control and served in record time. No-one had dared to tamper with the system since.
“Anyway” Terry said “he’s never caused any trouble. I think you just need to get used to him.”
“Right.” Ellie replied, unconvinced. Terry wasn’t listening anymore, however. Javier was too busy shouting abuse at a bowl of broccoli to prepare the humiliated vegetables.
After a brief interval of retrieving dirty plates from table 12, noting with distress on Jamie’s behalf that the remnants of a pie had been stuffed thoroughly into every orifice of the octopus tartare dispenser, it was time to go back to table 6. Between the stuffy air and the general ambience of oddness that the gentleman maintained, Ellie could feel herself sweating.
“Hello sir, are you ready to order?”
“Yes, I believe that the world is primed for my order.” He grinned, showing starkly white and slightly sharp teeth. “But I do have a question over the Soup of the Quarter.”
“How can I help?” Ellie made herself ask.
“I can see from the board that it’s a traditional potato and egg soup, but I was wondering what type of egg is used? Bird or mammal?” The gentleman crooned.
“You’re not the first person to ask me that this evening.” Ellie said conversationally but with mounting concern. “It’s a bird egg. Chicken.”
“And the type of potato?”
“Jersey?”
The gentleman smiled.
“Thank you, I feel much better. The devil is in the details after all.” He smirked. Ellie resisted the urge to scrunch her face up. “I’ll start with the Soup of the Quarter, and then I think for my main…” he scanned his hand down the menu "I would absolutely love the seitan."
Ellie didn’t like the way he rolled the word ‘seitan’ around in his mouth, nor the look he gave when he said it. There was no way she was imagining this, surely. She realised she was starting.
“One potato and egg soup, and one seitan. No problem. Anything else I can get for you? A wine maybe? Or some bread?”
The gentlemen reeled slightly, but kept his demure expression.
“No, thank you. I find the combination of bread and red wine to be… disagreeable.”
Ellie shivered despite the heat.
“OK sir. Thank you.” She accepted, grateful to be able to leave.
“Oh, one more thing, please.” He said, just after she’d turned her back. It was as if he’d been able to sense her relief and knew that it needed to be stamped out.
“Yes?”
"Are the lavatories unlocked or do I need a code? Some kind of loo-cipher?"
“Um, they’re open. Just along there and on your left.” Ellie told him, pointing through the restaurant. His turn of phrase definitely didn’t sit well with her, and that question seemed particularly contrived.
“Thank you.” He said, not making any move to leave his seat.
“You’re welcome.” Ellie replied, hurrying away. Deep down she felt that he was anything but. Hurrying back through the labyrinth of other tables and the hazards of other guests, Ellie idly collected empty glasses and used plates while also gathering her thoughts. She was certain that the restaurant was getting even hotter, and the smells of rich food were clinging to her face like clay.
“A soup of the quarter and a seitan for table 6.” She announced when she returned to the kitchen, pinning her order slip up. Terry-Ben-Javier checked it, and then got to work.
Ellie stood and fiddled with her apron distractedly for half a minute. She knew that table eleven would be done with their starters, but wanted some time away from the cloying restaurant air and, more to the point, table 6.
“Everything OK Ellie?” Javier asked. Despite his high position in the kitchen he was, at heart, a people person who took the time to care.
“Yeah. Yeah fine.”
“Looks like something’s on your mind.” Javier said, while Ben chopped potatoes with the wrong kind of knife. So wrong, in fact, that it was a serviette.
Ellie couldn’t express exactly why the man at table 6 unsettled her so much, but knew that Javier wouldn’t take ‘nothing’ for an answer. The only thing she knew for sure was that he kept making strange allusions to being something that he couldn’t possibly be. There was, however, another matter that could be settled.
“I’ve had a couple of people ask whether it’s a bird or mammal egg in the potato and egg soup.” She told the head chef.
“Bird or mammal?!” He exclaimed, disbelieving.
“I know!” Ellie agreed, grateful to be able to voice the confusion that had welled up from the question.
“Eesh, these people. It’s mammal, obviously. The best pig eggs we can harvest.”
“Wh-“ Ellie started, but Tim burst into the kitchen and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Ellie, table eleven are done.”
“Right… I’m on it…” she said, no longer trusting anything in the kitchen. Her questions and concerns would have to wait for later.
Eyeing the potato and egg soup with a grimace, Ellie weaved a path back to table 6 and placed it down in front of the horned gentleman cautiously. In this moment of her life, just as in every other, there was absolutely no way that any pig eggs could be permitted to touch her skin.
“Delightful, thank you.” The gentleman said, flourishing his spoon.
“You’re welcome.”
“I was wondering, miss, if there is any chance that the heating could be turned up?” He asked, smiling knowingly. Ellie suspected that he was either joking or incredibly ill.
“Up?”
“Yes. I do like things to be warm.”
“Erm, I’m afraid not sir, sorry. The heating is either on or off, we can’t make it go any higher.” She said, sticking to the facts and leaving aside her speculations that he was playing games.
"Ah, a shame. In that case I would be interested in one of your customer-use jumpers, if the heating really can't be turned up."
“Customer -use… yes, certainly sir. I’ll be right back.” Ellie said, preferring an insane task over a conversation with the gentleman, and almost running away. Anything was worth agreeing to if it meant she didn’t have to speak to him any longer.
“Tim. Tim.” She said when she reached the front of the restaurant. The concierge looked up from his reservation book.
“Yes, Ellie?”
“The guy at table 6. With the horns. He wants a ‘customer-use jumper’.” She told him, desperate for someone else to acknowledge the insanity.
“Oh, right. Yeah he does that sometimes. I usually just give him one of from lost and found.”
Ellie stared open-mouthed at the concierge.
“So he’s not ill? Or joking?”
Tim shrugged.
“If he’s either then it’s not ever changed. Guy just likes to be warm.” The bell above the door jingled. “I’ll need to see to these people. Just get him a jumper.”
“I mean… fine.” Ellie accepted reluctantly.
“Here you go sir.” Ellie said, holding out a thick jumper that she’d discovered in the lost and found box. It was the warmest-looking garment she could see.
“Marvellous, thank you.” The gentleman said, covering his mouth with one hand to hide the partially chewed soup.
“Is everything alright with your meal?” Her professional auto-pilot asked upon seeing that the gentleman’s mouth was still full.
“Lovely, thank you. I’ve never had chicken eggs that taste quite like this before.” He said, pointedly. Ellie swallowed.
“Our chef is very talented.”
“Please pass on my compliments.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
"Table 11 mains are ready, Ellie'. Ben told her, before she'd even got her whole body through the door.
She groaned.
"OK, fine."
A few practiced sweeps of her arms skilfully lifted the three plates into transport position, the heat of newly cooked food providing an unwelcome source of warmth against her body. Veering her gaze away from the reflective pans after catching a glimpse of how sweaty her face looked, she carried her plates back to the restaurant's cloying airspace.
From the plates Ellie carried a new layer of dense flavour-space started to diffuse through the treacle air of the restaurant. It hung in a smog of parsnip reductions and toasted rice, launching whole-heartedly into olfactory combat with every nose in the area. It was quite the assault in and of itself, but once merged with the lingering remnants of other aromatic meals the scents took on an ever-more assertive aspect.
Ellie’s head didn’t stand a chance. Her nasal passages were fully occupied by the smell-scape, and its vanguard had started to make gains on her eyes and ears. In her weakened state she wasn’t sufficiently quick to react when a chair was slid outwards suddenly, crashing itself into her hip.
“Agh!” Ellie yelped, the sudden expulsion of air pushing the smells away from their nose-garrison.
“Oop! Be careful!” The seat-sliding menace chastised. Ellie ignored him, focusing instead on the rocking, wobbling and oscillating stack of plates on her arms. The delicately balanced crockery assembly had become an unpredictably dynamic system, one which could be cast into disarray by even the slightest disturbance. Sauces sloshed this way and that, shifting the centre of mass all the while, and large, round potatoes rolled into newly vacated cavities on the plate. Her porcelain tower had become a nightmare of wobbles and rotations that threatened to pour intricately combined ingredients onto the long-suffering carpet.
Eyes that could not under any circumstances become wider watched the ballet of unstable cuisine. Soon enough the nearby patrons and a couple of other serving staff joined the tense vigil. All of them were transfixed in helpless wonder at the display. Would there be an irreversible carpet-staining incident, some of them wondered. Would this waitress be able to demonstrate a super-human capacity to restore order, others posed to themselves. Will this careless buffoon ever apologise for crashing a chair into me, Ellie thought.
In the end, only one of the eventualities came to pass. Like the intricate and inscrutable mechanisms of a clockwork albatross, each of the dishes on Ellie’s arm played out a harmonic, oscillatory dance. Gradually their movements slowed until, mercifully, they came to a rest. A calm silence descended and sat among the guests as they enjoyed a moment of reverence at the events which had unfolded. Once the gravitas of the display had been properly respected, the burble of chatter slowly swelled back to its normal volume.
Heart pounding and sweat situation worse than ever, Ellie tentatively started to pace towards table eleven again.
“Apologies for the delay.” She said, with a quiet shell-shock. “I have rice-on-toast with toasted rice, a confusion of legumes, and a serving of coagulated rye?”
The three guests looked up at her with bewilderment at once again receiving the very items they had ordered less than twenty minutes previously. This time Ellie said nothing. She simply held their gazes with a neutral, expectant expression. It wasn’t her problem if they couldn’t remember a single piece of information that they themselves had provided, and it wasn’t her who would be going hungry.
The guests looked at one another for a moment and then back at Ellie. None of them seemed to be emotionally or intellectually equipped to deal with the situation. Like a sentinel at the gates of Babylon, or a patient handmaid awaiting the orders of her queen, Ellie held herself perfectly still. She waited in silence for one of them to act like a functioning adult and answer her, refusing to give in to their pathetic display of helplessness.
Cars passed the windows outside, tyres hissing against the roadway. Other diners continued their racket of ‘conversation’, grunting, chewing and clinking cutlery. None of the three from table eleven appeared to have come any closer to remembering what they were intending to buy for too much money and ingest for too many calories. Ellie was a patient person, though. She could wait.
The stasis was finally broken after another minute when the gentleman took an uncertain sip from his water, but upon completion there was no progress in allocating meals. Hot air oozed around Ellie’s glistening face as she stood and waited for any of them to say or do something, reminding her of how uncomfortable every moment in the restaurant would be until the end of her shift.
“Um. Um I think I had the rice.” One of the women finally said. Ellie slowly turned her head to face in her direction.
“Thank you, madam.” She said, placing the rice meal down. Her arm pulsed with relief at some of the load being lightened.
“Legumes for me, please.” The gentleman then announced. It appeared in front of him.
“Then I suppose that leaves me with-” The other woman managed, before the rye was dropped between her knife and fork.
“Is there anything else I can get for you?” Ellie asked, but only because she had to.
Another terrified silence engulfed the table.
“Er, no? Thank you?” The man said after only a few seconds. Ellie was impressed at their progress.
“Wonderful. Enjoy your meals.”
As she wound her way back through the restaurant, this time maintaining a deliberate vigil for chair attacks, Ellie risked a glance in the direction of table 6. The horned gentleman had genuinely put the jumper on, the mere sight of which made Ellie feel even hotter somehow. Sitting up with a disconcertingly straight spine, he was twiddling his long, thin black moustache in one hand and twirling his cutlery in the other. Quite how he was managing to wind soup around his fork like spaghetti was well beyond Ellie’s comprehension, but the facts were right there for her to see.
Without warning the gentleman’s head snapped around and the two of them made direct eye-contact. He smiled the beckoning smile that all patrons manage to generate when seated for a meal. Ellie cursed herself for being nosy enough to watch him, and foolish enough to leave herself exposed to such a risk, and resignedly made her way over.
“Is everything alright with your meal, sir?” She asked. Whatever could possibly have been wrong with the chef’s cooking would never be patch on what was wrong with the horned gentleman himself. Ellie still wouldn’t let herself think about her concerns explicitly. They were ridiculous and impossible, but at the same time inexplicably real.
“It’s lovely, thank you. I am also finished with it. I was just wondering if I might also have a cup of coffee to warm my belly?” His voice dripped like a melting candle over the table.
“Coffee? Er, yes. Of course.” She said, picking up the soup bowl. It felt red hot to the touch and she flinched when her fingers made contact. “I’ll be right back.”
“He wants coffee to warm himself up. To warm up!” Ellie blurted when she was through the kitchen doors again. “I might as well have been swimming I’m so sweaty, and he wants coffee. And he keeps saying really weird stuff at me.”
“He’s a bit of a character.” Terry confirmed, distractedly. He appeared to be wrestling with Javier for control of a large chopping knife. Ellie didn’t know how she could tell that it was Javier trying to take the knife away.
“There’s something deeply wrong with him.”
“So he feels the cold, that’s not a crime.”
Javier finally wrested control of the knife from Terry and started to furiously chop an unpeeled banana. Terry turned his attention to some pasta instead.
“He also has horns. That’s a pretty big deal.”
“Seems a bit narrow-minded of you, Ellie.” Jamie observed, barely visible among the suds and dishes.
“I’m not saying that the horns are necessarily bad, but they are weird and the way he talks gives me the creeps. He’s like…” she thought about it, desperate to find a way of articulating her discomfort. “… biblically strange.”
Jamie and Terry both paused what they were doing to look at her. A teapot sank beneath the waters and a pot of pasta started to boil over.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Jamie finally said.
“He’s saying a load of stuff that makes me think of the devil. Like he said I would be between him and the deep blue sea. No-one in the history of time has ever said that about themselves instead of the devil.”
“Maybe he’s just a bit literary.” Terry said, while Ben tried to snatch the knife away from Javier. Javier, in a move that Ellie saw for herself but would never be able to comprehend, shot Ben a look that shut his intentions down.
“And he wanted the seitan, before asking about a loo-cipher. I really think he might be Satan.” Ellie continued to plead.
“Sometimes you want to see a pattern so much that your mind just invents one.” Jamie observed, a sage voice from beyond the wall of soap. “It’s like when people say that the floor’s always wet after I’ve been washing up. Pure coincidence, with relevance attributed to it by a bored mind.”
“You… you almost had a point there Jamie. The floor is wet right now around your feet because you’re obviously pouring the washing up water all around yourself.” Ellie said, unable to resist biting at that bait.
“See, that’s exactly what I was saying! You’re looking for connections. That makes two strikes in the same place, just like lightning doesn’t do.” Jamie announced with an undeserved air of triumph. “The floor is just wet because that’s how it is around here, and someone using a few strange turns of phrase and ordering seitan doesn’t make them the devil.”
“He’ll be waiting for his coffee and his main, Ellie. Strange, devil or anything else, he’s a customer.” Tim announced from behind her. Ellie leapt into the air at the sound of his voice.
“How long have you been in here?” She asked, seeing him emerge from among bins.
“Since before you walked in. I was searching for treasure in the bins during my break.” He said, without a hint of humour or irony. “I really don’t think that our guest is the embodiment of all that is evil, but even if he is you need to serve him properly. Unless he starts trying to cart your undying soul off across the Styx, I don’t want to hear anything more about him.”
Ellie sighed heavily. The conversation was written off as a bad job by Tim’s interjection, so she left to make a coffee.
“One coffee, sir, and your seitan.” Ellie told the horned gentleman, unloading her tray of mug, milk and sugar whilst shaking slightly.
“Thank you very much.” The man said, eagerly wrapping his hands around the hot mug. He appeared to be wearing bright red nail varnish. Between the shock of his manicure and another act of temperature elevation, Ellie’s stifling discomfort escalated yet further.
“Do you need any other sauces or more drinks?” She said. She just couldn’t stop herself despite the primal desperation to get away; muscle memory of years spent serving was taking over.
“No, thank you. I’ll stick with what I have. After all, better the devil you know, right?” He winked.
Ellie hurried away.
“Does anyone else want table 6 from me? He’s on main already.” Ellie asked the kitchen at large when she got back. A couple of the other serving staff looked up at her.
“Why?” Asked Eugene. His thick glasses glinted bright strip-lights back at her.
“Because I just get the creeps from him.”
“She thinks he’s Satan.” Jamie shouted over. Most of his body was obscured by a wall of suds.
“Oh, him. Nah you can keep him.”
“Please, you can have the tip and everything.”
“He’s fine, Ellie. The guy has his tastes and that’s alright. He’s never given anybody any trouble. Just serve him like a normal customer.”
“But he has horns and he keeps saying things about being the devil. Why does no-one else think that’s unsettling?” Ellie pleaded.
Eugene shrugged. “I can advocate for him, alright? I promise it’ll be fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to walk past table 8 again without looking at them. If I can ignore them for ten more minutes then that’ll be a record for keeping someone waiting with dirty plates in front of them.” He said proudly.
Tim entered as Eugene left.
“Just on the way to pick up table 6’s plate.” Ellie pre-empted before he could speak.
“Would you like to see a dessert menu, sir?” A sweat-sodden Ellie asked. The air around table 6 felt several degrees higher than the rest of the scorching restaurant. Once again the plate in front of the horned gentleman was hotter than it had been upon delivery.
“Oh go on then. Tempt me.” He replied. Ellie wasn’t looking at him, but she could hear the wink in his voice.
“One second, then.”
Without stopping off to deposit his dirty plate, Ellie swiped up a dessert menu and dropped it in front of the gentleman.
“You’re a bad influence on me.” He sniggered.
“So, are you ready to order dessert?” Ellie asked a few minutes later. She’d made a trip back to the kitchen to drop the dirt plate off and tried to hide in the walk-in freezer, but Tim flushed her out again.
“Ah, yes. It’s sinfully gluttonous of me, but I think I’ll have the profaneteroles.”
Ellie tensed.
“The what, sorry?”
“Profiteroles.” The horned man smirked.
“I could have sworn you said profaneteroles.” Ellie accused. Immediately she cursed herself for continuing to speak to him. All she had to do was walk away and get the order, but her mouth had got her into trouble again.
“Did I? Silly me.” He answered, staring directly into her eyes.
“I’ll have them with you right away, sir.”
Ellie hid just inside the kitchen door, watching the horned man. He’d been drinking sparkling water all evening and then gulped down a whole cup of coffee. Logic dictated that he would be in need of the cipher-free toilet at any moment.
“Those profiteroles are going to warm up if you don’t hurry, Ellie.” Javier observed. His hand was covered in scratches where he, Terry, and Ben had been fighting over the same ladle a few moments earlier.
“He’ll be gone soon, and I’ll be able to sneak them over.”
“It can’t possibly be that bad.”
“Have you tried talking to him?” Ellie asked.
“Well, no.”
“Then believe me, it can possibly be that bad. He’s just unsettling. Maybe I can make Tim deal with him for the rest of the evening.”
“Probably not. Tim went home a few minutes ago.”
Ellie ceased her vigil over table 6 and looked up at Javier.
“What?”
“He found a load of treasure in the bins and said he didn’t need the job anymore. We’ll be getting a new colleague soon.”
Ellie held Javier’s gaze and looked for any hint that he was joking. The terrifying alternative was a catastrophe of logistics with Terry taking on another full-time job role. Worse still, there’d be yet another name to append to Terry-Ben-Javier, and it was already a mouthful.
“This is the last thing he’ll eat, and then he’ll be out of here. Just finish the job.” Terry encouraged.
“I guess I have to. None of the others are going to take the table away from me.” Ellie said with a heavysigh.
“Look! He’s gone to the loos! You have a chance!” Ben said suddenly. Ellie looked to confirm and saw that the table was indeed vacated.
Faster than she had ever moved through the restaurant, and chair-risk be damned, Ellie carried the profiterole-burden over to table 6, placed it silently down, and retreated. Under normal circumstances she would have been overwhelmed by embarrassment, but not this time. This was perfectly necessary.
After leaving it for as long as she reasonably could, Ellie admitted to herself that she needed to take the horned man his bill and pick up the used dessert plate. He’d been making obvious attempts to attract her attention for a few minutes already, and even without Tim’s watchful eye there was only so long she could spend hiding with the kitchen staff.
“All done, sir?” She enquired, already picking up the crockery.
“Yes, thank you.” He said in his level, polite tone. Either he didn’t realise that she’d been avoiding him, or he was completely unfazed by it.
“Would you like the bill?” Ellie asked. It was another move that would normally bring her shame. These, however, were not normal circumstances.
“Ooh, yes please. Let’s make a deal. You name your price.” He said, unveiling his toothy grin again.
From her pocket Ellie produced the pre-prepared bill. She anticipated a negative reaction at the extreme presumptuousness of her actions, but the horned man already had an obsidian-black debit card in his hand.
“One moment, sir. I’ll get the machine.” Ellie said sheepishly, somehow on the back-foot again.
When she returned, the horned man gave her the card and she pushed it into the bottom of the machine.
“Check the amount, please, and enter your PIN when you’re ready. Thank you.” Ellie said, shaking with anticipation at her interactions with the man nearly being over.
“Right you are.” He accepted. Without looking he rapidly tapped in a series of numbers and passed the machine back. The ‘6’ button looked faintly scorched, but Ellie put it out of her mind. Instead she stared down at the screen under the pretence of waiting for instructions, so that she didn’t have to look into his face any more than necessary. After a complex series of beeps and false-starts at printing out a receipt, Ellie pulled the card back out. Her heart nearly stopped when she saw that the name read "Bill Z. Bub".
“H… here you go, sir. Have a lovely evening.” She said, thrusting the card and receipt into Bill’s hand and spinning on her heels to dash away.
“Wait, wait, please.” Bill said. Ellie was too terrified to disobey. “This is for your troubles.”
With one eye closed, Ellie looked at Bill’s hand. It contained a small, folded bundle of money.
“Oh.. er… thank you very much sir. That’s very kind.”
The toothy grin reappeared.
“I can be, when I want to. May I keep this jumper?”
“Yes. That’s fine.” Ellie said. Between her desperation to see him leave and the generosity of his tip, Ellie was prepared to give him any number of other people’s clothes.
“You’re a real angel. And I should know a thing or two about that.” He said with a snigger. Ellie smiled awkwardly and then ran stumbling back to the kitchen. Once through the doorway she leaned against the worktop and drew several deep breaths. It was over.
Terry-Ben-Javier were discussing among themselves how they could best help the new concierge, Jamie was no longer visible behind his tidal wave of foam, and the other serving staff were nowhere to be seen. Ellie closed her eyes tight. Part of her was desperate to tell the others everything and force them to acknowledge that the man wasn’t right. But from the back of her head came a warning that perhaps the topic was best left unmentioned. After all, the voice maintained; speak of him and he shall appear.