Canterbury is a picturesque place. The Tudor and Victorian buildings line the cobblestone High Street where students and tourists meander soaking in the sunlight. Elegant silver-haired ladies wheel trolleys between shops passing by chatty couples who inhabit the terraces of the coffee shops. But there is another side to this almost Tolkienian universe. There’re the dirty rooms above takeaway shops, the cash-in-hand jobs, the sketchy neon-lit restaurants and the immigrant communities. This is your Canterbury. You are an outsider holding on to the hope that one day this will feel like home so you close your eyes, hold your breath and push through each day with an exaggerated sense of purpose, lying to yourself that there is meaning in struggle, that it will all be worth it in the end and if it isn’t at least you know you’ve tried.
Despite the lump in your throat and the pain in your stomach you walk into the restaurant taking a few steps across the empty dining area and there, standing behind the bar, you see him: tall, bald, overweight, breathing heavily over a notebook. He fixates you with a hateful gaze but you tell yourself it doesn’t intimidate you because you’ve seen it before. You approach to fetch your apron, he grabs your arm, twists it slightly and tells you to listen to him. He says that you are late and even though you know you are ten minutes early you nod and apologise, know better than to confront him. Then the morning takes its usual course. You make coffee for the staff, clean the bathrooms, vacuum, wipe the floors. You are on your knees scrubbing dirt with your nails to remove it from the crevices of the white ceramic tiles and the manager stands in front of you twisting a knife between his fingers telling you everything you’ve done wrong the night before, calls you names and the usual threats ensue. He says he’ll fire you, make sure no one else in the city will ever employ you, nothing you haven’t heard before so you continue unbothered. This annoys him so he kicks the bucket of water splashing the hot chlorine mixture over your hands and the only set of work clothes you have. He calms down and says you need a new shirt, maybe something with a little more cleavage, laughs, tells you to lighten up.
The restaurant fills with diners and the collective murmur of the crowd overtakes the music—tambours and corded instruments that earlier dominated the restaurant roaring from the speakers have been reduced to a faint hum in the background. You operate almost on autopilot, responding to customers who wave you down to ask for more sauce or drinks or an extra plate, monitoring newcomers to take their order as soon as they set the menus down, making sure glasses are always full, that tables are cleaned as soon as they become empty, that you send dirty plates to the kitchen promptly and that you always have polished cutlery and glasses available. Working a double shift you hope for some half-eaten plates to nibble from, but lunch customers are often more frugal, ordering small plates that they wipe clean. When you eventually find an untouched piece of meat on a plate or an uneaten flatbread you stuff it in your mouth quickly before any other waiter can get to it.
Lunch melds into dinner, your feet burn, and your back aches but you push through. You are called to take an order from the kitchen. A sick cook tells you something in a language you don’t understand, signals you to wait and keeps coughing in a blood-stained handkerchief. While upstairs the dominant sounds are chatter and music, in the kitchen, it’s the incessant clanging of metal pots, the almost continuous running of water and the rapid exchange of instructions among the crew. She hands you a hot platter decorated with orange bulgur, yellow rice, green falafel and an assortment of grilled meats. The other dish you pick up comes on a copper plate with a lid covering the slow-cooked lamb shank which sits on a bed of mashed potatoes with peas and mint. You go back upstairs, acknowledge a customer who is asking for more water, set the plates down at a table of six, go down to pick up the rest of the food and serve it to the severely intoxicated girls in the window booth. One of them is wearing a sash and a balloon is floating over her head and she is leaning against the window with her eyes closed. Her friends are calling her name, ‘Bethany!’ They are yelling while shaking her but she is motionless until her head drops, jolting her awake, whispers some guy’s name, falls back asleep.
Your boss asks you to take a bottle of wine to table nineteen, tells you the women sitting there are prostitutes he slept with and that the man is their pimp. You don’t believe him at first but you know that he orders escorts to his house from a website and paradoxically you feel both pity and envy for the girls because they are sitting down, eating, wear pretty clothes, and you are hungry, tired and wear a cheap outfit that reeks of stew and bleach. You haven’t quite mastered the skill of uncorking bottles yet and can already tell you’ve started out wrong. The screw goes in sideways, the cork only comes out one-third of the way and you try to pull it out with your hands while the manager yells profanities over the radio into the headphones, saying how incompetent you are, how he is going to stick the tip of pointy shoes inside your anal cavity with such force that you will fly through the wall and half amused, half scared you turn and squeeze the bottle between your legs and push the cork inside. The customers seem unfazed, talking among themselves and you wonder if they even noticed or care that you botched their forty-pound bottle of Shiraz. It would appear not, so you thank God for pimps and self-absorbed individuals and start pouring the wine, praying they don’t see the cork floating inside the bottle.
Every minute customers leave and new ones come in, you clean tables, take orders, mix drinks, send empty plates down, you hear mains away over the radio non-stop and run down to get platters of meat, bowls of hummus, baba ghanoush, salads, fried cheese rolls, baklavas, bowls of rice. The drunk girls leave and they are quickly replaced by a family of six. Downstairs at the grill the fire is blazing, large skewers of meat come out, you take them to their respective tables, come back for more. You see Mustafa the restaurant owner coming in with his wife, adult children and eight other people. The manager courteously attends to their every need, serving their drinks, appetisers, and main courses personally. The owner’s son pulls you aside, says that his niece spilt rice and asks you to clean it up. Despite hearing the call for mains-away in the headset you temporarily ignore it, following the instructions and crawling under the table to pick up the rice while the manager makes angry faces, asking why you haven’t picked up the orders yet. When you eventually bring the food up, the owner tells you that the table next to theirs has been vacant and uncleaned for ten whole minutes, deeming it unacceptable and insisting that you attend to it immediately. You start by collecting the dirty glasses, placing them on a tray, but as you pick it up your foot slips, you fall, the glasses shatter. The loud crash silences the restaurant and everyone stares at you. The owner whispers, ‘You idiot,’ and the manager drags you away from the crowd by the neck, whispering obscenities and threats into your ear, then slaps your butt, making everyone laugh, then you start cleaning the shattered glass through teary eyes.
Eventually, the tables you clean no longer get filled up with newcomers, a sign that the night is winding down. The manager announces you’ve made record profits, that the owner will be happy. At the end of the shift you sit down with the manager and the kitchen staff picking at leftovers from the owner’s table. Everyone relaxes and is in better spirits now that the night is over, jokes and laughs. It’s the end of the week so you get paid twenty-five pounds for each of the seven shifts you’ve worked the past week, each of them being seven hours or more. The total of one hundred seventy-five pounds paid in notes of fives and tens feels heavy in your hand and you are proud of every penny.
Irina is a Romanian immigrant who moved to England at the age of 19 in pursuit of higher education and the promise of a better life. Her writing draws inspiration from her experiences working in restaurants where she encountered an abusive boss and other exploited migrants. Ten years later, she calls London her home and through her writing she wants to showcase the realities of working in the hospitality industry, especially as a woman and immigrant.
