And it’s cold. Behind the counter Jason rolls down the sleeves of his black and white checked shirt and rubs his arms, briefly. He shouts the order through the hatch door just over his shoulder, rings up the three euro, which the customer has in change, and waits.
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He inserts no money but continues to press on with games he will not play. Jason’s used to this. With the exception of the guy who’s barred from the betting shop next door, nobody has ever put money in. They had to call the cops one night after he started to punch and kick the machine, and he hadn’t been back since either. They’re thinking of getting rid of it but Jason’s still hoping it might catch on. He knows the kind of money these machines can make – offering to relieve takeaway boredom, and the chance of a chance is enough for most.
This one looks peaceful enough and Jason ducks his head round the kitchen door to check the soccer score on the TV set bracketed to the kitchen wall when the second customer, a woman, walks in.
A phone is ringing in the bowels of her bag as she comes through the door. She searches blind within the cavern before drawing it out, too late, to address nobody with ‘Hi, this is Amanda’. She drops it back and the man at the machine, wonders about the wisdom of doing that, about not being able to reach it a second time, should it ring again.
Amanda scans the menu taped to the top of the high counter, going slightly on her tiptoes to gain the necessary height. Jason’s back in place behind the counter, as though he’d never moved, scanning the top of her head.
She looks up, decision made.
‘Can I get one beef satay, one Peking duck, one order of spring rolls and a prawn toast?’ Her order is placed.
‘Boiled or fried rice?’ Jason asks.
‘Fried.’
And then, by way of after thought: ‘Oh, and wontons and prawn crackers, please.’
The man by the machine registers quite a lot of food, for two it has to be, and late.
‘If you spent €15 you get prawn crackers free’, Jason tells Amanda.
‘You’ve already spent €13.50 – so…’, and waits. Amanda’s probably thinking I don’t need any more food.
‘Even a bottle of coke would do it,’ he suggests.
‘Is that a one-and-a-half litre bottle?’ Amanda wonders, clearly used to reaping the rewards of supermarket competition, and suddenly interested in the idea of something for nothing, a kind of payback for the larger order.
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‘No’, he gestures towards the glass-door on the fridge off to his right, behind the counter (it’s that kind of neighbourhood) behind which bottles of soft drink stand shoulder-to–shoulder. ‘It’s a small one, like that.’
‘Oh, 500ml’, she understands and then ‘Okay’.
Precise, thinks the gambler. Jason picks the bottle from about three rows in, so it’s cold. It just feels right to make sure a drink from a fridge is cold, even if it’s cold outside.
‘Are you from around here?’ Jason has taken the gambler by surprise but he stares resolutely at the flashing buttons, and waits. If it threw Amanda she doesn’t show it, just hesitates.
The gambler thinks it could go either way – If I was a betting man, it would be an even money situation – and finding a stray coin in the corner of his pocket resists the urge to use it, just to see what would happen in the play. He passes the coin between his fingers, still inside his pocket, and listens.
‘Yes, just up the road.’ How do these guys do it? The gambler is impressed but wonders if she’ll stand for too much more of the getting-to-know-you routine. In his experience, women don’t like being chatted up in takeaways after closing time.
‘But your accent? It is not from here?’ The gambler is impressed. This guy is having no truck with the sullen silence of take-out etiquette. Does he do this with every good-looking woman who comes in? With every woman? What’s his success rate? Does he do it if other women are in? The gambler doesn’t think they’d like it much. Hanging around waiting for spring rolls or something, and having to listen to your man chat up the other woman? Why? Cos she’s better looking? A woman doesn’t need that in the takeout, he’s thinking.
What does he mean by “here” – what does a Chinese guy mean by that? The gambler thinks he’s Chinese, well, it’s a Chinese take away and he looks Chinese. Does he mean the street, suburb, city, country, the EU. What? Where is “here” when you come from somewhere else. Pints made him a bit philosophical and occasionally argumentative.
But he’d registered the accent too. Thought it that of somebody who’d learned English late and overlaid with something “posh’”– by way of disguise or picked up from the teacher, he wouldn’t know.
And so was surprised to hear: ‘I’m originally from England – the west of England.’ He’d never heard that before – the north, yes; the south, the home counties (but not back here), London, Manchester, Liverpool – yes.
Never the west of England. What was that, something along the border with Wales? Where? All the English people he ever knew, and he knew some from his time there in the eighties, said they came from this or that city, even if they really lived out in the middle of nowhere.
Except that one girl who came to London to go to college and wanted to bring him home to the manor one weekend when her parents were in Italy. He didn’t go.
He turns closer attention on this good-looking Amanda, from the west of England, ordering lots of food for two at midnight, from a takeout in a Dublin inner city suburb. He always clocked a good-looking woman. But now he registered her scarf and hat, brown wool, her black polo-neck and heavy linen skirt, the brown ribbed woollen tights and the chunky black leather boots that were, just then, all the rage, though he wouldn’t have known it.
It was a good look, he decided. She wasn’t tall but had a good figure, her hair was nice, a kind of dirty blonde. He wondered if that was her own colour, a lot of women dyed their hair now and you’d never know. Well, he never knew unless they told him and he hadn’t been that far along with anyone for a while.
‘So you work around here?’
Jason was going somewhere but the gambler is thinking to himself for a man with so much interest in a woman, he really isn’t paying proper attention.
‘No, live. I live just up the road.’ Remember? Jason betrays the slightest blush, though it’s interest rather than embarrassment, the gambler thinks. Amanda, he’d say, is by now wondering the best route to negotiate between this flattery and caution.
And then unprovoked offers: ‘I work on Merrion Square.’
‘In the casino?’ Jason presses his advantage. The gambler knows the casino on Merrion Square too but Amanda says: ‘No, I have a real job,’ but she’s smiling.
‘Do you know it, the Merrion Casino,’ Jason’s smiling now too. ‘I used to work there.’ It’s not true that he worked there but he needs to stay on the one piece of common ground he’s found but doesn’t think the image of a no-good gambler is a good look just now.
But neither does he feel, here and now, like explaining one of the great traditional rituals of the Chinese restaurant and takeaway world when once a year, after the shop has been shut up for the night, the boss empties the till and takes the staff off in a stretch limo for a night in the casino with the day’s takings to flitter away, or multiply, until dawn breaks over the city and the casino workers go home for a few hours. Jason did it for the first time with the staff here just last year because his parents had to leave for China to take care of family business over there.
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‘No, I walk along the same side every day. It must be on the other side, or maybe, in a basement?” Is she apologising, judging or just explaining.
‘There are a lot of colleges there.’ Jason’s used to being judged here but refuses to give up on Merrion Square.
‘Do you know the American University?’
The gambler resists the urge to say: ‘Yes, I know it.’
‘Yes, I know it,’ there’s his answer, delivered by way of a ventriloquy that suited everyone because he’s pretty sure neither Amanda nor the Chinese guy would appreciate his input at this point in proceedings.
‘Do you like to go to the movies?’
This boy has cruised long enough. The gambler thinks to himself, that if there had been music playing it would have stopped to register this bold step across a line most Irish men have to be blind drunk to even see.
‘Yes.’ Amanda is equally impressed.
‘What do you think of Miss America?’
‘I haven’t seen it but I think it might be a bit cheesy,’ Amanda ventures.
‘Yes, it might be cheesy,’ he agrees. ‘I’m off tomorrow, we could go to see it?
A move so long in the making, finally made, still manages the element of surprise – for everyone but Jason.
The gambler thinks the guy behind the counter may be missing something, may have run on too fast. And sure enough.
‘The food, it’s also for my boyfriend,’ (who the gambler now pictures at home, just up the road, becoming distracted from his footie by his hunger and just beginning to wonder where his woman is).
‘That’s okay.’
What does that mean, the gambler wonders. Is he still hoping for the date, is he saying he is not deterred by the fact that she has a boyfriend, at home, hungry or not. Or that he’s stepping back in the face of this new reality.
‘Oh, have you paid?’ The gambler looks, he wants to see the expression of the face of a guy who shifts ground so seamlessly. Amanda brings out her wallet, can only find a €50, says, ‘Sorry, that’s all I’ve got’ and hands it up and over.
Jason takes the note and while they are united in the exchange, says: ‘I talked a lot so I could tell you something’.
What a line, what a finish, thinks the gambler. She’s impressed. Shit, I’m impressed. She’s going home to hungry boyfriend but I bet she’s not going to tell him about this.
A bell buzzed behind, the hatch door opened, two spring rolls dressed in grease-proofed paper are handed through. The gambler takes them, blankets them in paper napkins and steps out into the night leaving Amanda to wait for her order to be filled.
Barbara Clinton©
