Deeply Dissatisfied
Deeply Dissatisfied
Erik smiles apologetically as he places the meal before Table 69, who spears a delicately sliced strip of perfectly cooked duck breast and then examines it like a biological hazard.
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Erik smiles at the bustling tables dotting the dining room. Clicking fingers rise like crab pincers reaching for a sinking carcass. The diners' fingers and thumbs snap Erik up and down the restaurant so efficiently that he virtually materialises from nowhere. Each table bombards him with requests and questions ranging from reasonable to crimes against humanity. Erik does not discriminate. Erik just smiles. Sometimes with feeling. Sometimes with sympathy. Sometimes with a family-friendly quip. But Erik never smiles with sincerity. No, Erik's knee-jerk smile stretches between his cheeks as subconsciously as the shallow breaths he catches between orders. Erik barely sees the diners as people anymore. They are merely extensions of The Customer, a hydra-headed being of insatiable hunger and unquenchable thirst, discernible only by the little plastic numbers that mark each table. Erik smiles for The Customer, nice and wide as they…
Clickclickclick!
-Waiter?
Clickclickclick!
-Where's he got to?
Clickclickclick!
-Service is a bit slow.
Clickclickclick!
-Excuse me.
Clickclickclick!
-Waiter!
Clickclickclick!
-That's right, steak well done… but bloody.
Clickclickclick!
-Excuse me!
Clickclickclick!
-Are the burger buns gluten-free?
Clickclickclick!
-That seems expensive.
Clickclickclick!
-I'm in a hurry, actually.
Clickclickclick!
-Well, is there at least a vegetarian option?
Clickclickclick!
-Was this definitely made on soy?
Clickclickclick!
-See? See! This sauce is simply inedible!
Erik inspects the supposedly inedible sauce on Table 69's plate and then smiles gravely despite seeing nothing wrong. Erik takes Table 69's half-eaten meal, which he could never afford, from this table, which he will never have the prestige to reserve, and rushes it back to the kitchen. Erik doesn't know the chefs. Not by name. Like The Customer, they are little more than a mishmash of emotions and tones set by the Head Chef, who oversees the kitchen with professional impatience. Erik smiles and then mumbles Table 69's complaint in a voice he thinks will go unnoticed beneath the clattering and clangs swirling around the kitchen.
But the chefs immediately stop slicing and dicing to stare at Erik in unison. Erik repeats Table 69's concerns verbatim, then smiles sadly and averts his eyes. The chefs scream at Erik and call him names. The chefs want to know what Erik's problem is. The chefs want to know what Table 69's problem is. The chefs want to know if they're both fucked in the head or something. Erik doesn't have the answers to these questions. Erik just smiles down at Table 69's perfectly edible duck à l'orange as it sinks into the garbage.
'Fuck sake!' barks the Head Chef. 'One duck, go.'
'Yes, chef!' his white-jacketed troops reply as one.
The Head Chef wishes violent death on everyone, including himself. He then returns to sprinkling delicate garnishes atop a line of neatly arranged meals steaming at the pass. This tiny window joins the kitchen to the dining room like a prolapsed anus leaking into otherwise pristine underpants. Erik smiles as he returns to the dining room and informs Table 69 that the chefs are very sorry indeed and that a replacement meal is on the way. Yes, of course The Customer could have done a better job at home. No, of course that won't be necessary. Yes, of course The Bartender would be happy to mix The Customer a complimentary drink, given the circumstances.
Erik then zigzags through another barrage of clicking fingers to relay Table 69's demands to The Bartender. Erik is already dreading the interaction, so he smiles.
Clickclickclick!
-Waiter?
Clickclickclick!
-What's the WiFi?
Clickclickclick!
-I dropped my knife.
Clickclickclick!
-Savings? More like... spendings! Ha-ha!
Clickclickclick!
-Speaking of gravy, let me tell you about my ex-husband's…
Clickclickclick!
-Excuse me!
Clickclickclick!
-This is too spicy, but this isn't spicy enough.
Clickclickclick!
-My gazpacho is ice cold.
Erik arrives at the bar with numerous new requests and complaints infesting his thoughts. But before he can process these, Erik asks The Bartender if she would mind mixing a complimentary drink for Table 69. The Bartender says nothing. She never says anything. Not to the staff, anyway. She speaks only to The Customer and only when its table-numbered appendages approach. She speaks to them easily and soothingly as she places down their drinks. But Erik knows how much she hates them. Erik has seen her socials, where she condemns them to all sorts of exquisite torture. She shoots Erik a look that shows exactly how deeply she would, in fact, mind mixing Table 69 a complimentary drink. But she shakes one up anyway while narrowing her eyes at Erik in a way that makes him want to die. Erik smiles. Erik would happily die for her right now. Only he's a little busy with all the...
Clickclickclick!
-Can I swap the chips for another burger patty?
Clickclickclick!
-I know it's not on the menu, but surely the chefs can…
Clickclickclick!
-Don't you know the customer is always right?
Clickclickclick!
-Excuse me!
Clickclickclick!
-Can we split the bill sixteen ways, with a third paying cash and the rest on card?
Erik doesn't even slightly care about any of this, and while The Customer's shouts, screams and whispers tighten his chest around his racing heart, this is simply who he is now. When Erik first started waiting tables here, he cried after every single shift and sometimes even at lunch, resolving each time to never return. But that was two years ago. Aeons in hospitality time. And Erik's really come into his own since turning sixteen last week. The chest-clutching anxiety that rose within him in the leadup to each shift now follows him everywhere and always. Now, he always wants to cry, so he smiles instead, and people like him this way. We adapt. Life goes on. Well, not for everyone, of course. But…
From across the dining room, Erik hears the Head Chef swatting the order-up bell as if an indestructible fly were buzzing on its surface. Erik smiles and rushes to the pass. Speaking as one, the chefs tell Erik to tell Table 69 to tell their mother to go fuck herself and that he should go fuck himself, too, while he's at it. The chefs laugh. Erik smiles. The Head Chef glares at Erik, then leans into the dish room and blasts his vape up the induction vent. Erik takes the remade duck à l'orange (now with no orange sauce) and marches back into the dining room.
Erik smiles apologetically as he places the meal before Table 69, who spears a delicately sliced strip of perfectly cooked duck breast and then examines it like a biological hazard.
-I guess that will have to do.
Erik smiles and assures Table 69 that he'll be right back with their complimentary drink. Yes, of course he should hurry along.
As he approaches the bar, Erik overhears an extension of The Customer demanding that their drink be made extra strong. The Bartender winks and then pretends to top up their bourbon while subtly tipping half the shot down the drain and filling the glass to the brim with cola. Erik stabilises a tray on his fingertips and then balances Table 69's drink on top. But before he can return to the dining room, The Bartender catches his attention by clearing her throat. Erik smiles. She nods at the ready-made cocktails lining the bar, in everything from martini glasses to tiki heads, garnished across a spectrum of fancy fruits to active fireworks. The Bartender then nods from each drink to its corresponding table. Erik arranges the drinks onto his tray and then smiles as he staggers away with this upside-down chandelier of cocktail glasses clinking at each step.
Table 69 slurps a few words between mouthfuls of orangeless duck à l'orange as Erik approaches. Erik smiles. What's that? Yes, of course The Customer can get some tomato sauce for that. Yes, of course it's a bit dry. No, of course you're not being unreasonable. Yes, of course I'll suggest that the chefs serve the duck à l'orange with tomato sauce in future. Yes, of course I'd better get going with these drinks.
Erik turns back to the dining room just as several tables rise in unison. Erik weaves between them as they hug and kiss goodbye while raising their wallets to tokenistically argue over who pays. Erik smiles and tries not to notice his arm shaking beneath the weight of these precariously balanced drinks. No one pays him any attention. Several people nearly walk right into him. Erik glances at the glasses teetering on his tray and tries to remember if Table 17 ordered the cocktail sloshing around inside the scooped-out watermelon or if they wanted the one that's currently on fire. When he gets there, Erik guesses correctly, but Table 17 has no idea what they ordered anyway. Erik smiles as Table 17 opens wide to receive random drinks like baby birds straining for a mouthful of puke.
Erik manages to serve all the drinks on his tray without incident, only to be told that one of his fellow waiters has quit on the spot while another is crying in the dish room. Erik knows he better step up his game because he's the restaurant’s last line of defence. Erik smiles and begins clearing tables with the efficiency of an octopus combing through corals. Erik smiles as his bare hands scoop up snotty napkins, slobbery bones and what is potentially a baby's diaper. Erik piles The Customer's refuse into a mountain of crusty plates, slimy cutlery and scummy glasses atop two over-stacked trays before dashing for the dish room.
But then, as occasionally happens, one of The Customer's writhing heads sticks its neck out above the others and lets loose an almighty shriek. The cry is decisive enough for this section of The Customer to separate from the writhing mass and take human form.
'Excuse me!'
Erik freezes, reeling slightly from the inertia of the stacked plates. Erik scans his mental map of the dining room and pinpoints exactly where the shrill came from without even looking. Erik condenses every pleasant memory his meagre life has produced and forces them into a smile. He rushes towards Table 23 like a battlefield medic, his recycled grin straining his cheeks, the city skyline of plates threatening to collapse at every half-breath.
But before he can speak, the old woman at Table 23, who appears to be shrinking from within, launches into a bitter tirade over how her meal was so below standard that she fears she may never be able to eat again. Erik's eyes wander to Table 23's plate. He sees that it's been licked clean by the same withered tongue now smearing lipstick across a row of yellow dentures.
Erik does not smile this time. Erik frowns.
Erik's otherwise smouldering anxiety flickers and flames the more he frowns down at Table 23's spotless plate. How could she seriously behave like this? She's eaten everything. Even her cutlery is spotless. How could anyone behave like this? What does she expect him to say? Is this just how things really are? Erik realises his frown is collapsing into outright revulsion. Erik tries to revive his expression by thinking of his terminally ill sister, who finally passed away just before Christmas, and how the whole family masked their secret, shameful relief behind mournful smiles.
'She's in a better place,' his mother had smiled.
'She looks so peaceful now,' his father had smiled.
Erik wasn't so sure, so he said nothing and smiled alongside them.
But Erik barely knew how to smile genuinely, not anymore, and with his muscle memory now straining beneath the weight of this petulant old cow's complaints, he was at risk of contracting a severe case of honesty.
To Erik, Table 23 had completely torn free from The Customer's tendrils and taken shape as an actual, for-real, honest-to-god person. She was the reason he was working five nights a week after school and one on weekends. She was the reason his father's slashed disability pension could barely touch the cost of his sister's ultimately futile treatments. And that was despite the politicians cutting these payments while promising they were still on a living wage - just not a dying one, apparently. She was the reason political promises made decades ago were now being broken by politicians with brand new promises for future generations. She was the reason his father hounded him for staring into space on his day off. Worse, Erik knew she would be the reason he would do the exact same thing to his overworked kids when they, like he, had to bury their grief beneath the reality that prolonged death is expensive enough to devour an inheritance. She was the reason he had nothing to go home to and nothing to look forward to and that this insanely irrational complaint would be the highlight of his day. She was the reason that all these things he didn't really understand made him too depressed to even consider suicide.
'Well?' she barks.
'Well, what?' replies Erik.
The old woman, who, as it turns out, is a full-on human being, merely sitting at a table with a plastic 23 on it rather than a node within an unknowable and, therefore, inconsequential hive-mind, huffs and shoves her plate to the very edge of the table.
'How dare you! I demand to speak to the manager this instant! What kind of place is this where…'
The old woman continues rambling as Erik shuffles her plate into his porcelain deck and strides towards the dish room. Erik frowns at The Bartender as he passes, causing her to raise her eyebrows, then smile and nod knowingly in return. Erik frowns at the Head Chef, currently shouting his name, causing the man's hand to freeze limp-wristed over the order-up bell as its final ping echoes away. Erik frowns at the manager and then nods forcefully at the old woman sitting cross-armed at Table 23 before storming into the dish room.
No one notices Erik dumping both trays directly into the sink, shattering everything before he continues through the back and out the fire escape.
Erik stares at a swollen bin bag perched atop the garbage. What looks like a single duck bone has speared through the side and is now spewing orange-stained trash everywhere. Erik smiles as he whips his apron off, then flourishes it over the pile like a sheet draped over a dead girl's face.
Erik's manager, Ameerah, locks eyes with the disgruntled old sow at Table 23. The frumpy old woman looks like a drag comedian impersonating a frumpy old woman. Ameerah has never seen Erik quite so shaken. She wonders if she should go after him. She thinks she heard a door slam back there. She doesn't really like him (or anyone she works with), but the oxycodone she downs before her shifts, on her breaks and whenever things get tough sometimes makes her think otherwise.
Ameerah fondles the orange plastic bottle in her pocket. She runs a finger over the label with someone else's name and the ridges in its white lid. She feels better already. She forgets all about Erik.
Ameerah's mother's drug-dealing boyfriend introduced her to the wonders of oxy three years ago when she was just seventeen. She didn't really have a taste for it during school; there was not much stress in those days, but selling it to the cool kids boosted her social standing. Ameerah only started using after dealing said drugs led to her expulsion, which spun her mother into a shame-induced overdose. Ameerah's mother recovered but soon cut ties with her old life and moved to a wellness retreat in another country. She left behind a jaded ex with drug connections, an impressionable young daughter with no connections and zero concerns as to what that proximity might produce. Ameerah and the ex started dating not long after she read the goodbye note her mother stuck to the fridge. Life has been pretty up and down since then. The relationship especially is a bit of a struggle. They were technically still together, but Ameerah only ever sees her supposed boyfriend when she needs a fix or when he needs a babysitter while out hustling.
When Ameerah was born, her mother opened a savings account for the future. And while she gave this to Ameerah when she skipped town, the transaction history showed more withdrawals than deposits over the years. Ameerah picked up a part-time gig waiting tables to tread water above for her dwindling savings. Over time, as the restaurant's managers quit with increasing frequency, Ameerah found herself promoted to the role, and despite her personal life, she was damn good at the job. She believed in nothing and cared about no one, which was the perfect mentality for a gig that required her to pretend otherwise.
Ameerah goes over to the old woman without focusing on anything beyond how dreamy she feels and how little dreams seem to matter once you are awake. She knows how this will go. She knows she will have to apologise profusely for something that is not her fault or completely unimportant to the world at large. Ameerah smiles; she always smiles; people think that's just how she is.
The old woman at Table 23, known to her friends (and therefore nobody) as Irma, shrinks from the expression of genuine concern on the approaching young lady's face. Irma keeps her arms crossed, not from the senile outrage that deserted her almost immediately but from a deep-seated need to remain guarded at all times. She has a voice inside her, rattling the cage, someone who needs constant reminding of the things the world has done and the way life truly is. But this clearly kind-hearted girl - for she is barely even a girl by Irma's standards - appears to have nothing but kindness and understanding inside her.
Irma knows that the other diners are looking at her by looking away. Married couples, first dates, big families and groups of friends; all conversation within a three-table radius has either ceased entirely or dropped to a hiss. She notices some teenagers holding their phones at strange angles beneath their table and knows from past experience that she is on camera.
What can Irma do? Look directly into each of the three lens rectangles and regurgitate her life story? She needs them to understand her. She needs to understand herself. But the caged voice now howling within tears her attention in two. Besides, no one has time for stories these days. No one has time for anything. Certainly, no one has time for her. And why should they? Did she have time for such silly old women when she was young? Irma tries not to make eye contact with the snickering teens or their Medusa-like lenses. Instead, Irma sits in stony silence while the caged voice within takes the form of her twenty-year-old self. It cringes from the entitled old woman complaining about a plate of spaghetti meatballs for no good reason. On the outside, Irma cringes from the voice.
Irma deeply regrets having treated that poor waiter so unkindly. He'd had such a nice smile before her attitude wiped it from his face. She doesn't like who she is or how she behaves, but she no longer knows any other way. She goes through life from two perspectives at once.
Externally, she sees her outbursts and bigotries as justified revenge over her increasingly confusing surroundings and life's general hostility. Internally, the caged voice takes on her idealistic youth's punk-rock morals by sneering at every obnoxious move she makes. Over time, muddled by the critical commentary from within and polarised by the contrary energy she excretes at others, these two extremes fused into an inexpressible unease that left Irma in a perpetual state of fight or flight uncertainty.
No one in this restaurant knows that Irma spent her twenties as an avid progressive, tireless anti-war protester and (to her parent's horror) an obnoxiously free spirit with socialist leanings. And while Irma never fully abandoned her idealism, the world outgrew its tolerance for rebellion and punished her accordingly - over and over again. Then, before she knew what was happening, Irma retreated entirely within the thorny cocoon of the same sensationalist news-ogling, tabloid-frothing geriatrics she'd once faced from the frontlines of social change.
Nowadays, Irma thinks different coloured people in poor countries whose names have too many vowels should, indeed, be proactively bombed in the interest of national security. Hadn't the bleeding hearts learned their lesson? Her husband even said… Nowadays, Irma believes that kids today simply don't want to work anymore (especially within this restaurant) and that home ownership is merely a matter of sacrifice rather than a result of this austerity nonsense. Hadn't the interest rates been sky-high in her day? Hadn't they caused her husband to… Nowadays, Irma finds the idea of homosexuals getting married more than a little outrageous. Even though her husband had secretly been a…
But, deep down, Irma doesn't believe any of these things and never will, at least not entirely. Caged inside her slowly congealing skull is the same relentless idealist with multiple arrests for disturbing the peace and destruction of property. This caged alter-ego never ceased rioting within the prison she made and is now forced to watch helplessly as the jaded old woman she's become assaults the world in increasingly entitled ways. She already knows that her caged twenties will punish her for complaining about these spaghetti meatballs and force her to smother her self-loathing with self-justifications along with an antacid for the ensuing indigestion.
Back in the day, however, years after university, yet still no time into a career, Irma sang to the same anarchist tune she had in her campus days. Meanwhile, her old comrades - as she had once called them - steadily traded their placards for parking spaces. She dropped to a static whistle when the relentless in-fighting and factionalism split her old cliques and causes into opposing sides. Later, she dropped down to hum when corporate interests appropriated their activism and repackaged their angst as individualism. Then, towards the end of her twenties, when she realised Western rebellions now failed in whispers rather than rifle fire, she merely tapped her fingers to a tuneless song no one else was playing.
By the time Irma turned thirty, she had nothing and no one. Everyone she knew now treated her like a historical anomaly, a chicken descended from a once ferocious dinosaur lucky to escape armageddon. Then she met Walt, and everything suddenly fell so perfectly into place that she would later have no trouble tracing the fault lines clearly leading to ruin. Walt's full name was Walter, but the only people who ever called him that were the authorities. Walt caught Irma's eye at a protest for peace that was steadily devolving into a riot. Irma, whose taste for civil disobedience had soured with age, edged to the mob's peripheries and merely nodded with the protestors' chants so passively that the police were uncertain whether she was a participant or a spectator. Irma saw two police officers pluck Walt from the churning crowd and drag him back towards their lines. She locked eyes with the washed-up rioter the police were corralling into an idling paddywagon. Walt met her gaze with a wink and smile through the paddy's bars that sent a spark down her spine. All around her, the crowd chanted: Change! Change! Change!
Irma followed the paddywagon to the police station, where she used her wealthy parents' influence to spring Walt on provisional release. She took him home to her studio apartment, and within six months, they were deeply in love and living together despite her family's concerns. Everyone told her that Walter was a dangerous radical with an inflated ego - like she didn't know, like that wasn't why she loved him. But she refused to believe that Walt thought of himself as a true radical, a pure anarchist, someone who believed in tearing down all power structures despite feeling entitled to personally run everything.
Walt dragged Irma up and down the country, sniffing out potentially violent protests and outright riots across the political spectrum. But she loved him. She loved him so much. She loved him enough not to notice that their weekends sometimes started with chanting skinheads only to end amidst bra-burning feminists. Irma tried to match what she called Walt's passion (but what a judge would later term Walter's zeal). Yet, he always slipped her grip as the brooding crowds were, coincidentally, incited into brick-throwing, mounted-police-charging violence.
Irma spent thousands of her parent's stock-market dollars on Walt's legal fees. She was arrested herself but only ever for misdemeanours and then later as an accomplice. Sometimes, when Walt refused to leave the lock-up until he'd finished reciting his latest manifesto to a crowd of disinterested drunks and prostitutes, the police dropped Irma back to her parents' swanky house, their car parked outside like a pimple on a supermodel's nose.
Soon after Irma's parents refused to fund any more legal battles, Walt dropped to one knee and gave Irma a promise rather than a ring. One week later, Walt delivered on that promise at the local registry, witnessed by Irma's reluctant second cousin and a homeless woman Walt had lured from a service station. Walt immediately bundled Irma into a rust-encrusted station wagon she had never seen and burned rubber into their future. On the way, Walt suggested a quick stop at the nation's capital, where she could take in some history while he made the final preparations for their actual honeymoon in Peru.
No one knew any of this until Irma called her parents from a roadside phone booth to give them the good news. Either Irma's parents were less than impressed, or the connection was faulty because the line went dead almost immediately. Meanwhile, Walt bickered with a bootlicking mechanic who was supposedly one of them.
Once they were back on the road, speeding slightly to get away from the mechanic before he regained consciousness, Walt shot Irma the same wink-laced smile from the day they first met and put a reassuring hand on her knee. He was trembling. She didn't know if it was because of his cut knuckles or newlywed jitters. Either way, she loved him so much. A little too much, really. And he surely loved her too, in his way.
Walt took Irma to the gardens surrounding Parliament House. He made her promise to keep her eyes shut, led her into the centre of a hedge maze, spun her around until she thought she might puke and then told her to count to twenty for a spontaneous game of hide and seek. She tried to do as she was told. She didn't know that she would never see him again. She'd barely reached seventeen when a sudden explosion filled the air with smoke and sirens. Dizzy, stumbling, she followed a small crowd of terrified tourists through the embers scorching the hedge maze. They made it to Parliament steps, where emergency crews were pouring into a smoking hole and tending to the blood-soaked victims.
'That's her!' someone shouted through the confusion.
Before Irma knew what was happening, she was handcuffed in the back of a black sedan with the same federal agents who had wrestled her to the ground amidst a strobe of camera flashes, which were now swarming the vehicle as it sped from the scene. She cried for Walt the entire time.
But Walt was nowhere to be seen, though she would later learn that atomised pieces of him were floating around them with the rest of the debris. Yes, according to the investigators, Walter had either deliberately or inadvertently blown himself to pieces with an improvised pipe bomb, a plan they now believed Irma was in on.
Less than a week after the explosion, while Irma and Walt should have been sipping Peruvian coffee on their honeymoon, the investigation snagged due to Irma's status as an uncooperative witness. She had remained borderline catatonic since the explosion. But then, in the days that followed, every major broadcaster in the country started to receive identical handwritten notes that Walter had posted before the wedding. While these explained his actions and motives, they did nothing to exonerate Irma.
Apparently, Walter hadn't meant to hurt anyone. Least of all himself. Parliament was no longer in session. Walter's act of terrorism (as it would come to be known) was supposed to be a purely symbolic gesture. A way to expose the entire country to his anti-everything stance, an explosive middle finger where the sun don't shine. His loving new wife, Irma, to whom this act of terrorism was dedicated, was supposedly also his main source of inspiration.
What went wrong? Well, as the same investigators who held Irma without explanation would later reveal, the mechanic whom Walter had knocked unconscious was actually a jaded veteran with a similarly anti-everything disposition. But Walter's anti-everything beliefs included a few things that the mechanic was not so anti about, and vice versa, so the collaborators came to blows. During the scuffle, the mechanic managed to pin Walter, who then reached for the bomb and cracked it over the man's face before bludgeoning him with it several more times. By the time the mechanic came too, Walter, the bomb and that pretty little thing he'd arrived with were long gone.
No one could say whether the bomb broke when Walter struck the mechanic or if it had simply been cobbled together by an inexperienced roadside hack. Either way, the bomb's twenty-minute timer rushed to zero the second Walter flipped the switch. In any case, the prosecution preyed upon the mechanic's fragile ego until he proudly admitted to making the pipe bomb 'to exact specifications' in collusion with the deceased terrorist known to the media as The Parliament Plumber. So the why became much less important than the how.
But Irma's ego was in more pieces than her late husband, meaning the authorities could scarcely get the vacant-faced woman to give a statement, let alone evidence. None of her old friends came to her defence, and there were no protests in the streets for her freedom. Because while the authorities eventually established that Irma had no knowledge of Walter's plot, and while her parents' lawyers managed to coax her through the ensuing court proceedings, the media rallied their viewers against The Parliament Plumber's clearly culpable widow. Irma's parents navigated the storm by quietly bundling their daughter off on a lengthy overseas vacation for some much-needed soul-searching. They did not see their misguided little girl again for five years. Irma spent those years in domestic service to her parents' international friends. These benefactors never let her forget just how lucky she was, even while she slaved away as their overworked maid, their under-appreciated nanny, their broken-backed gardener and, occasionally, their discrete sexual plaything.
Only when Irma found herself married to a passionless real estate tycoon did her parents agree that she had, indeed, learned her lesson. And while the marriage wasn't exactly arranged, both business-minded families orchestrated and exploited every detail.
So, Irma and her new husband caught the next plane home. And while she expected to find the media circus still going round and round the merry-go-round, she instead learned that no one had talked about The Parliament Plumber for nearly four and a half years. And that it had been at least four years and eight months since anyone had talked about that wife of his. What was her name again? Irene? Mona? Hm…
Irma spent the following years cooped up inside the black and grey geometry showcase her husband called a house. She remained virtually anonymous and was only occasionally trotted out for face-saving social events. She barely spoke to her husband, and he barely spoke to her. And when they did pass a few words over the marble breakfast table, it was to leverage her family name against his business dealings.
Over the decades that followed, Irma came to suspect that her husband, a practising catholic, had secretly mastered the art of homosexuality long ago. Before she could confirm her suspicions, however, her husband came down with a sickness that, while consistent with HIV, was officially diagnosed as 'a mysterious illness' by an ambitious doctor who retired soon after. Rather than face the pain or suspicion, Irma's husband quietly committed suicide, leaving Irma with a voided life insurance policy and a company with more debt than the remaining assets could touch. Irma declared bankruptcy, took one final handout from her parents, and vanished into the anonymity of a normal life.
Here she remained until the present day. No one knew who she was, least of all the woman who stared vacantly at her from the mirror every morning. She worked as a cleaner, a cook, a receptionist and anything else to get her over the line. At the age of seventy-one, Irma finally retired from the medical records department, where she had gas-lit herself into a passion for data entry. Scores of colleagues came to her farewell morning tea and said how sad they were to see her go, though Irma knew that most of them were seeing her for the first time.
Irma hated parties anyway. She hated people. She hated the world. Irma never really outgrew the young idealist inside her, who had been swept away with love and violence. She still knew that wars were wrong, and that all people were created equal and that the youngsters of today were up against obstacles her generation could barely understand. But a lifetime of disappointments, confusion, trauma and anxiety had locked these ideals in a cage of guarded uncertainty, a cage the relentless world rattled but never unlocked, a cage that was scattered with the skulls of her potential selves, left to decay and shatter as the voice inside plotted its escape. She had a damn good reason for being this way. She loved Walt so deeply and believed in societal progress so profusely that the simultaneous loss of both gouged a deep wound in her psyche. But the caged voice inside didn't care. It craved conflict, same as Walt, and it desired nothing more than to punish, just like her parents, and it was addicted to dishing up scathing self-criticisms, which is now just how she is.
And nowhere did Irma's caged voice collide more violently with reality than within crowded restaurants, places where young people took pleasure in each other's company and parted with disposable income for indulgences that would quite literally be converted into excrement by morning. They talked about bewildering things like crypto and streamers and some app that ticked and or toked. Worse, no one talked to Irma about anything, ever. Even though she had experienced pretty much everything. They understood nothing. She hated everyone even though the caged voice defended them by forcing her to imagine how they saw the old bitch huffing and puffing over her spaghetti meatballs.
Irma's eyes flick between the countless phones now subtly pointed in her direction and the compassionate young woman standing by the empty place at the other end of her table. How did it come to this?
'Hi there, I understand you weren't so satisfied with your meal today?' Ameerah says through a gentle narcotic haze. In the car park outside, she notices Erik vaping and laughing with the Head Chef, which seems unprofessional, but whatever.
'Well, to tell you the truth,' Irma says to the empty place across from her, unable to face Ameerah's gaze. 'I am deeply dissatisfied, indeed.'