Free The Bluebird Café by Rebecca Smith Page B

hear. It had been a heavy night. The Bluebird had been full. A party of women with eating disorders had booked for five but turned up with twelve. The debut of Lucy’s pecan pie had been a great success. As the last compulsive eater had cycled whistling into the night, Paul and Lucy had melted like toffee into each other’s arms. They had made a profit, and consequently the Bluebird wasn’t going to open until at least noon the next day.
    John Vir wondered where his brother had got to. He hadn’t seen him for weeks. Two paper boys were approaching. He was thankful that so few of the locals wanted their papers delivered. He paid a generous weekly wage, but it was getting increasingly difficult to find willing children. He sometimes had to deliver the papers himself. His kids would never have agreed to get up so early, or to be seen dead doing something like that. Now he knew how the grey cotton straps dug into the paper boys’ shoulders, and how those huge fluorescent bags thudded on to their thighs with every step.
    The large orange notice asking for paper boys or girls or even (this desperate) active pensioners brought few enquiries. He wondered if any of the other posters and flyers that he agreed to display in the window, advertising things like Green Partymeetings, jumble sales, Crèche Workers Wanted For Punjabi Women’s Group, Islamic Students’ Day of Prayer, had any more luck.
    John Vir’s spirits plummeted whenever he found a left-behind shopping list on the counter or the floor, or in a basket. He’d hated lists ever since his wife had left him and he’d found the one she’d made. On one side was:
    underwear
    slipper
    housecoat
    brush
    passport
    cloths
    maked up
    money
    nail files
    On the other side were two columns, For and Against. He had seen that Against was against staying with him. There was also a name, Raj, and a phone number. Who was Raj? They knew lots of Rajes. He saw that the number wasn’t local. He dialled it.
    â€˜Good morning! You’re through to
This Morning
and Dr Raj Persaud. Please hold. Your call is being held in a queuing system and one of our operators will talk to you soon.’ But an operator didn’t. It was the afternoon and the show was over. The line went dead. As he listened to the monotone of nothing he studied her lists. For and Against.

For
Against
Quite tall
Dirty feet
Opens pickle jars
Doesn’t take notice
Doesn’t help with kids
No ambition
Lazy
Won’t wash van
Not romantic
Not firm
Gives tic
    His heart had broken, not just because she had left him, but because she had decided to do so on a daytime TV phone-in, probably in front of five million viewers, while he was downstairs in the shop bundling up the
News
from yesterday.

Chapter 22
    When Lucy put plates in front of customers she stared at their hands. She had realised that you could tell how old people were by their hands, the elasticity of the skin, the wrinkliness, the faded or yellowed nails. She was keeping an eye on her own and thought that she could detect the first signs of decay, a certain greyness about the knuckles, a shininess of the skin over the third phalange. She was so busy spying on her hands that she failed to notice a rearguard action. And then one day, trying on some trousers and checking that her bum didn’t look big, she saw that there were somebody else’s elbows attached to her arms. She was turning into her old RE teacher, Miss Dowling, starting with the elbows. She wondered if there was a diet to save elbows, or the backs of knees, which also worried her. She thought that she might have some invisible varicose veins. She wouldn’t talk to Paul about it. She didn’t want to tarnish the image he had of her. She remembered reading somewhere that you should sit with your elbows in lemon halves for half an hour every week. She could attach the lemons with Sellotape and carry on cooking. She decided to write a book,
How