#waitre

So I’m about to plunge my hand into the toilet. There’s a 50 pence piece lying at the bottom and it’s mine, damn it. After pocketing the handful of coins that made up my tips, I’d run to the toilet for the tenth time that night (a stubborn case of cystitis). When I pulled my jeans back up, the coins spilled forth onto the floor, save for one single 50 pence piece that is now lying beneath piss and loo roll at the bottom of the bowl.

It’s 50p. Let it go. You are not so desperate for money that you’re going to fish through your own urine for a single coin. But then I flush the toilet and the 50p is still there. No longer surrounded by my own wee, it lies at the bottom of a clear pool of water, so crystal, I can pretend to myself that it’s clean.

And I was that desperate for money.

Sat on my bed were letters with red banners boasting ‘PAYMENT DUE’ and ‘LATE’. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs were expecting £1509.69 from me in a matter of weeks for the pleasure of being self-employed during the previous year. With an average of £800 a month coming in, half of which went on rent, it made things pretty bloody difficult. There’s also, you know, eating. That’s something I like to do.

That 50p was coin-shaped evidence of a day’s worth of sycophancy. There’s a lot of sycophancy involved in waitressing. When you rely on tips to pay your rent, you become awfully agreeable: you laugh at unfunny jokes, you agree with reprehensible opinions, you strike up temporary relationships with people you normally find deplorable, you flirt with men who don’t stand a chance.

It’s a tough act to maintain.

Our pub is a nice one and it attracts an upper middle class clientele, including bankers who live locally. That night we were playing host to a group of them who were ordering shots in rounds of 20. I’d been serving the same blonde bouffant with long red nails for most of the night and we had built up a rapport. She asked for my name and was sure to say please and thank you. She saw the bar was very busy, so was nice and patient. I thanked her for this and was always happy to serve her. I complimented her on the effort she had put into her appearance, withholding the fact that the bouffant was bordering on the excessive, although she had saved it all by filing her nails to a classy point rather than porn star square tips. She must have knocked the card while handing the machine back to me because the little grey screen declared that it had DECLINED. I was trying to tell her that I’d try it again when she panicked.

 “What?! No, that’s not possible! I just got a five grand bonus today. It can’t decline!”

Money’s a powerful divider, isn’t it? I was getting on perfectly well with this woman, and while I was under no illusions that we were anything but barmaid and customer, I became angry. I was angry that I didn’t have £5000. I was angry that this woman couldn’t just say that she had been paid today, but that she, “just got a five grand bonus.”

I ignored her for the rest of the night. I wish I was a better person and could have allowed myself to be happy for her, but I’m not and I wasn’t. All I could think about was the money that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs were taking from me faster than I could earn it, about the degree I hadn’t used, about how I will never be in any kind of a job that gave £5000 bonuses. In my last job, my bonus came in the form of £50 and a spliff.

Come closing time, and I was doing the usual dance with customers who refused to budge. I wandered over to some male bankers who weren’t paying attention to my passively aggressively putting chairs on tables around them.

One of them was holding up his wallet to the others. It was a sleek, black leather sheath with room only for his black Amex, though if he could have made room for his penis, I’m sure he would have.

“I don’t carry cash anymore. There’s only room in this wallet for cards. I swear, if I found a pound in here, I would just throw it away.” They guffawed. I took a deep breath and told them that it was time to drink up and leave.

“Am I your favourite customer, dahlin?”

Suppressing a flicker of an urge to vomit into his lap, which often feels like the only appropriate response to such clientele, I beamed, chuckled and said “… Yes.”

“I bet you say that to all the customers.”

“You’ve got me! I’m an absolute sycophant.” I laughed.

“A shickofant?” he slurred, “In’t that jusht a whore?”

I sighed and added this little delight to the stash of karma I’ve been building up, which will one day allow me to punch someone in the face: I put on my best pageant smile, placed a hand on his arm and ushered him out of the pub.

Ostensibly, I owed my cystitis to what NHS Direct listed as the most common causes: bacteria, frequent sex and wearing tight clothing. But while I wondered if my mother was proud of me, I posited whether something more cerebral might not actually be at play. The overwhelming urge to pee seemed to occur most on two occasions: when my bowels were full (as apposed to my bladder, curiously) and when I was being particularly sycophantic; in other words, when I was full of crap.

So there I was, staring at a 50 pence piece at the bottom of the toilet bowl, deciding if I could leave it until the next shift to make another 50p, or if all the fawning, the sweet talk and pushing aside the instinct to reprimand other people’s rudeness meant that I couldn’t possibly leave it there. After all, I had bills to pay.