Seedling 34: Secrets
It was cold for the end of April. At least that’s what they were saying on LBC RADIO when I got up the next morning. And I could feel the sting as I huffed and puffed my way along the Thames Path, swerved onto Narrow Street and raced up and over Limehouse Basin. It felt good, really. I needed a bit of a wake up after last night. There had been too much to process after that many beers and the blurry cycle home seemed all of five minutes vs the thirty-five minutes it took me from Sandown, home. I hadn’t had time to think.
The pub turfed us out around one a.m. You had the regular milling about, the flirtations, the chain-smoking, pratfalls and the ‘too loud for one a.m.’ shouting that wasn’t really okay for a Wednesday night.
Charlie was gone before I even knew what was going on. She’d hailed a cab and told me she was on her way to ‘my best friend’s place, Doll. Cycle safe! Watch out for the foxes and I’m not talking Oliver!’. Boom, she was gone. The Italians tended to linger. I don’t think the party stopped for them with last call. Nor for Patrick, for that matter. The young chef seemed to be quite doe-eyed around Marty and I’d wager neither had a lonely night.
Then, next thing I know, I’m walking back across Waterloo Bridge with Reneé, both of us needing to collect our bicycles from the building’s secure outdoor cages that faced out over Embankment. We’d always gotten along, and perhaps it was more the liquid giving us license, but our back and forth was chummy to the extreme. To be honest, this wall between me and a lot of the staff was partially my fault. Even after five months I was pretty circumspect in how I dealt with everyone at Seedling. I was on a mission, after all. Like one of those shit competition reality shows, ‘I’m not here to make friends!’.
How cliché.
I’d been keeping things pretty close to the vest while I got the lay of the land.
None of that seemed important, now, after seven pints of Doom Bar, and with the lights of Aldwych glowing on the north bank, once more.
‘I fucking told Eoin, I told him - do not have sex with Elena. Motherfucker. I mean, how many staff is he gonna shag? Unreal’.
‘That boy is yeeaasty,’ I returned, quoting the dearly-departed.
‘Ha ha, Erich. That boy was a twat’.
‘Major twat’.
‘You’re pronouncing it wrong, Yank. It’s not “twaahht’. It’s “twatt”. Short, Vulgar. Like that. “Twat like That”. HAHAHAHA. I just made that up!’.
I tried it out a few times, much to Reneé’s audible glee.
‘Reneé, I have something to tell you, but it’s kinda a secret.’
‘OK,’ she stopped and feigned a deep breath. ‘Okay, I am prepared. What is this “secret”?’
I took a deep breath, myself, and then tried to spit it out without sounding too childish.
‘I’ve been promoted to Assistant Head Sommelier’.
Reneé put her hand up for a high-five.
‘Mate, that’s amaze. I have a secret, too’.
‘You do?’
‘I’ve been promoted to assistant manager!’
‘Wow’.
And I did mean ‘wow’. I was in shock. Not that I disapproved of Reneé in management - but what did this even mean? Was my promotion not a stand-alone product of hard work and merit? If Reneé was being promoted at the same time…not to sound paranoid, but it made me question why I was being promoted at this specific place and time.
‘Oh. My. God. I’ll never have to be on lemon duty, again!’ She was excited, now, and positively exuberant to be able to have told someone.
My mind was a fog.
What more we chatted about as we made our way down the steps to Embankment, I couldn’t tell you. It couldn’t have been important; my mind had already erased it. I have a vague memory of fobbing into the bike cages and then what? A hug? Another high-five before we went our separate management ways, Reneé to Dalston and me back to Canary Wharf?
At least, that must be what happened since I woke to said bicycle lumped up against the side of my narrow eighteenth floor bedroom. And as I stumbled towards the kitchen for some instant coffee and paracetamol, I briefly paused and glanced back to the Little Italian’s room. The door was wide open and it looked as if it hadn’t been touched in a week. The bedroom was as spotless as a home furnishings advert and the bed dressed as tautly as military code.
This was like this last night? Or wasn’t it?
Not important. I waved it off. Couldn’t remember anyway.
And now here I was, thirty minutes later, navigating my way through Shadwell as cyclists collided with the school-run rush. Some spandex-clad twat(like ‘that’) tried bollocking me when I braked for a woman dragging her two toddlers across the Cycle Superhighway 6 against the light.
I gave him a quick ‘fuck off, asshole’ before working through the gears of my bike and brain, once again.
By the time I fobbed my way back into the bike cages, the sun was starting to glint off the Thames just across the road. I was noticeably dizzy as I bent over to get my serpentine lock out of my messenger bag, tightly rolled and stuck inside the shiny black shoes I was wearing with my new management look. When I stood up I stopped for a moment - looked at the back of the cages and then at the entry gate, and a memory came racing back to me: Reneé and I standing at the gate when a fox suddenly dashed past our feet, a dead(or semi-dead) rat in it’s toothy grin. Reneé and I had both screamed and devolved into buckled over laughing.
I fobbed back out and made my way through the house courtyard; trolleys, dollies and maintenance workers swirling past me, delivery vans spilling out their goods and Melody dragging a cigarette from the corner of a far loading dock.
So, foxes eat rats, I thought.
Wow.
NEXT more Seedling Stories, soon