The waitress brings the scalding teapot to our table. She is tall and quiet, with a face like an open peony. I had watched her make my drink through furtive glances at the clock above her head. She’d dialed up a jet of almost-steam and sprayed it hard into steel and eager tea leaves, wielding boiling water with the casual indifference of many years’ practice. The out-in flick of a delicate stud from the flesh beneath her pillow lip is the sole betrayal of her hidden concentration as she makes her way over to us. Few seem to notice that fleeting dart of metal, that hint of doubt. To most, she makes it seem like balancing a breakfastful of plates, cups, spoons, knives and napkins is really no trickier than breathing.
I watch her as she walks her efficient waitress walk back behind the screeching coffee machine. After three years of passing in run-down corridors at university and the odd half-smile of mutual acknowledgement every now and then, we still don’t know each other’s names. Another thing she doesn’t know is that I’ve watched her shining nut-brown hair from the back row of countless lectures, my mind between her legs while my right hand made all the proper notes on dilated cardiomyopathy. So many times I wondered whom she went home to — a man, a woman, herself? — after the clock ticked past the hour and the class surged out of that grimy theatre like funnelled roaches.
I remember the year when her belly grew and grew, and then she stopped coming to lectures and then the next time I saw her it was small again. I once passed her as she huffed uphill behind a pram with a wayward shopping-trolley front wheel. In it, she pushed a baby girl with nut-brown hair and a face like an open peony. This morning, her uniformed black cotton clings to her stomach like the wrinkled skin on gone-cold custard. It reveals the only piece of her that is no longer smooth and crisp as a new apple, and somehow she is now more beautiful than ever. Her essence swims inside the jasmine tea that coils itself around me with its sweet corpse waft. I sip. I gulp. I drink her in, and burn myself ripe grapefruit pink on the inside.
There is toast, brittle and squeaking to the bite, and beside it a few neat squares of pale, dewy butter. I ate brittle, squeaking toast the morning after my last night beside another girl with nut-brown hair, although, in truth, the strongest memory I have of that final stay with her is one of loneliness and aching unfulfilment. Her family home smelled of baker’s yeast and the metallic tang of tank water. She was six months younger to the day, and she was ripe and lovely as a polished copper penny. She was stolen sherry, and breasts that filled my hands with unexpected weight, and yes, yes in the dim of bedrooms. She was the spike of grown-back hair that left me with my first beard rash of sorts, which everyone mistook for reassuring evidence that I’d been kissing boys. Years later, I would walk into a bakery only to feel that I was waiting at her kitchen bench again.
Her boyfriend was a redhead, just like me, and one day after school he left a lemon under one of my car’s windscreen wipers. It was squashed ragged, pulped to all but yellow rind beneath the fat tyres of his shining Commodore. There was a note: stay the fuck away from her you lezbo, and underneath, a picture of a bleeding, punctured cat with a carving knife through its heart. And so I stayed away. But today, she is spread before me on the table, the pale and dewy butter on my brittle toast. She drips into the bread and seeps onto the pristine white below for me to tidy-tidy with a licked finger.
There is jam; it is house-made, all red and syrupy and lumpy with whole berries. It is a cold and visceral déjà vu to one winter and a third girl with nut-brown hair, the last one I loved in secret. Her boyfriend of four months is at the pub, my boyfriend of five months is far away, and we are in her dorm room. I am dabbing Betadine onto the shallow slashes that cross-hatch the canvas of her upper thighs. The rust of iodine trickles and blotches stains all over sheets and clothes and skin; it mingles with the tacky blood that shrivels and darkens at the open edges of her cuts.
Two days before, she’d seen one pink line, and then another, appear on a white plastic stick as she slumped against the wall in the communal bathroom. She calculated three and a half months. But that bleak evening, she had sobbed and bitten her fist as the toilet filled with red and syrupy and lumpy, and then something grey, and then more red. And when it stopped, she broke her plastic safety razor open with a skill honed through long habit. Later, she bled raw grief onto my fingers as I tried to make it better with iodine and tears and fumbled kisses everywhere and did not succeed. But this morning, she is the sticky sweet on my toast, layered over butter and beside my jasmine tea.
They are already becoming my body as I finish the last few precious crumbs. I pick up my basket, cross the dark floor, and leave the café with the man I am to marry as the glass door to Utopia swings shut behind me.
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