Free Starter For Ten by Nicholls David

'Hiya!'
    'Hello, how are you today?' she says.
    'Oh, fine. Except I'd rather not be here. Double shift!'
    'Oh, God. Poor you!' she says, rubbing his arm in sympathy.
    'How are you, anyway?' he says.
    'Very good, thank you.'
    'You're looking lovely today, if I may say so.'
    'Aw, gee,' says Alice, and puts her hands over her face.
    Zut alors.
    'So what can I get you?' he says, finally remembering what he's here for.
    'Could we just get a bowl of pommes frites, d'you think?'
    'Absolument!' says the garcon, and more or less sprints off to the kitchen to commence the preparation of the precious, gold-plated chips.
    'How do you know him?' I ask when he's gone.
    'Who? The waiter? I don't know him.'
    'Oh.'
    And there's a silence. I sip my coffee, and rub the cinnamon dust out of my nostrils with the back of my hand.
    'So! I wasn't sure if you'd recognise me without my dog collar!'
    'You said that already.'
    'Did I? I do that sometimes, get muddled up about what I've said or haven't said, or I find myself saying things aloud that I'd only meant to say in my head, if you know what I mean . . .'
    'I know exactly what you mean,' she says, grabbing my forearm. 'I'm always getting muddled up, or just blurting things out . . .' It's sweet, what she's doing here; trying to establish common ground between us, though I don't believe her for a second. 'I swear, half the time, I don't know what I'm doing . . .'
    The too. Like the dancing last night . . .'
    'Ah, yes . . .' she says, pursing her lips '...the dancing . . .'
    '...yes, sorry about that. I was a little bit pissed, truth be told.'
    'Oh, you were fine. You're a good dancer!'
    'Hardly!' I say. 'You know, Fm just surprised no one tried to put a pencil between my teeth!'
    She looks at me puzzled. 'Why?'
    'Well ... to stop me biting my tongue off?' Still nothing. 'You know, like an ... epileptic!'
    But she doesn't say anything, just sips her coffee again. Oh, my God - maybe I've offended her. Maybe she knows an epileptic. Maybe there's epilepsy in her family! Maybe she's an epileptic ...
    'Aren't you hot in that donkey jacket?' she asks, and the garcon returns with the exquisite chips, about six of them, arranged artfully in a large egg-cup, then loiters around, grinning, pleased with himself, trying to strike up another conversation, so I keep talking.
    'You know, if life's taught me two things so far, the first is don't dance when you're drunk.'
    'And the second?'
    'Don't try and put milk through a Soda Stream.'
    She laughs, and recognising defeat, the garcon retreats. Keep going, keep it up ...
    '...I don't know what I was expecting, I just thought I'd get this amazing fizzy, milky drink, but there's a name for fizzy milk . . .' (pause, sip) '...it's called yoghurt!'
    Sometimes I could make myself throw up, really I could.
    So we talk some more and she eats her chips, dipping them into a Pyrex contact-lens of ketchup, and it's a bit like an afternoon spent in that cafe in T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but with pricier food. 'Do I dare to eat a peach? Not at these prices, no . . .' I find out more about her. She's an only child, like me - something to do with her mum's tubes she thinks, but isn't sure. She doesn't mind being an only child, it just means she has always been a bit bookish, and she went to boarding-school, which is politically not very right-on, she knows, but she loved it anyway, and was Head Girl. She's very close to her dad, who makes arts documentaries for the BBC and lets her do work-experience there in the holidays, and she's met Melvyn Bragg on many, many occasions, and apparently he's really, really funny in real life, and actually quite sexy. She loves her mum too, of course, but they argue a lot, probably because they're so similar, and her mum works part-time for TreeTops, a charity that builds tree-houses for deprived kids.
    'Wouldn't they be better-off living with their parents?' I say.
    'What?'
    'Well, you know, kids living on their own up in