Mud in Your Pretty Eye

Nine years later, you’re leaving a bar with a friend and you see him across the wet road, getting on to a bus. From then, from the restaurant.

Francis

You always thought, Francis, rhymes with answers. Which it doesn’t, really. But you’d change the s of answers to be soft like his name. Francis, Francis, there’s no answers. It was a walking rhyme. A home from the bus-stop rhyme. The rhyme of a Fifteen-year-old girl who could feel sad every time she thought of that soft s.

Hands in gloves in the hot water in the sink, you’d turn around and be surprised again, every time, when you saw his face. His eyes crinkled up and were almost lost when he laughed. His laugh was nearly silent and you tried to match it. You and your friend Thea had developed the habit of snorting whenever you laughed. You tried desperately to curb this around him. At the restaurant. You never thought of it as going to work, you thought of it as going to see Francis. You barely remembered that you were a dishwasher.

Brideshead Revisited was on television at the time.

You were not your usual self around Francis. None of the cackle, the shrieking, the tough-girl acts that you and Thea lurched around school and town with. You shrank, you backed off, you revealed nothing. If you smiled it was anxiously, if you spoke it was so softly that people said What? Eh? Speak louder. You were in love with this feeling of self-consciousness. You wanted so much that the constant holding of breath could bring tears to your eyes. The only freedom you allowed yourself was imaginary. Elaborate fantasies you dared yourself to get lost in while Francis banged in and out of the kitchen, carrying plates, scraping them, arguing with the chef. You thought maybe your daydreams would be strong enough that he could read your mind, would look at you, know, love you. Or maybe your body would reach out, involuntarily, necessarily, and save itself on his thin arms. This never happened, of course. You were Fifteen. Nothing ever did.

Very thin, with wispy kind of no-colour hair, not tall, pale, dark circled eyes, cheekbones. Cheekbones. Every angle you yourself did not possess was page 4 there in his cheekbones. You can’t even remember the colour of his eyes. Probably blue, some cold colour. He dressed like he knew nothing about fashion and cared even less. You loved this gap in his knowledge, this laziness, this flaw. You thought nobody else could see how beautiful he was.

What happened was entirely predictable, though you never predicted it. After you’d been at the restaurant for four months, Francis left. He had exams at university and he quit his waitering job. You didn’t even know it was going to happen until he said Last fucking time I have to serve up this shit. What? you asked but nobody heard you. Why? and you felt your eyes get hot and you felt dizzy and you felt like running out, now, or saying You’re wrong, making a mistake, it’s me I’m here, you can’t, no. But the same thing happened, nothing. Nothing at all. And he left, he smiled your way and left, and you stayed on through the summer until March when your family moved to Auckland.

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