8. Jan, 2021

'Fat Lot of Good '

The tiny patisserie cakes were each as daintily exquisite as a Fabergé egg.  The display window of ‘Bijou’ glowed with them like a jeweller’s – ruby red glazes shining and the pinks, yellows, oranges and greens of candied fruits studding them like precious gems.

“How many sins d’you reckon there’d be in one of them?” asked Helen, as she and her friend Pam, feeling they were fairly hefting themselves out of Slimming Club after an embarrassing weigh in, paused to look.  Both had ‘gained’. 

“Not enough,” commented Pam.  “Too small to count for ‘a moment on the lips’…”

“…’forever on the hips’!” chimed in Helen as they quoted Angie (their club leader) in a favourite phrase.

“Oh, I’d kill for a fresh cream meringue, me!”

“Mmm, and a very large caramel latte.”

“Don’t!”

“Shall we?”

“Yes!  Let’s go and see how Mags is getting on.”

The two women bypassed these dainties and headed into ‘Valentine’s’, ‘the Shopper’s Oasis’, as it billed itself on its sandwich board.  Behind the counter, another old schoolfriend of theirs was working.  She had recently moved to this part time job from a previous stint serving in one of the bakery chains, a place, as Helen and Pam recalled, she had been keen to work for as the ideal spot to get into at one time, a wistful nirvana she hankered after while suffering drudgery elsewhere but,

“I have to move on,” she had said after a few short months there.  “I can’t stand the smell of them pasties we have to cook trays of for another day!  And you never get any tips.”

Mags had never been renowned for her job satisfaction and they were looking forward to hearing what she would have to say about this one.

“I bet she hates it already!” said Helen as they went in.

“She’s only been here a couple of weeks.  Give her time,” Pam smiled.

“What are you two doing in here?” Mags demanded bluntly, when they walked up to her counter.

She was busy splashing boiling water with reckless abandon from a large urn into one cup teapots and banging lids on them like somebody on an assembly line (Mags had never been known for her finesse, either).

“We want two massive fatberg coffees and one each of those fresh cream meringues with jam down the middle and sprinkles,” said Pam with relish.

“I can’t serve you,” said Mags primly.

“Why not?  Do we look underage?” asked Helen.

“No, you look overweight!” and Mags, who made two of each of them, laughed hugely.  “You’ve just come out of Slimming Club!” she accused.

“How did you know?” asked Helen.   “It’s a secret society, like Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“No it isn’t.  There’s a sign outside.  Look,” said Mags, who was literal minded,  pointing.  “Do you go to ‘AA’ as well?” she asked with interest.

“No we do not!” declared Pam roundly.  “How about some customer service?  There’s a queue here!”

“There’s only you and Helen,” said Mags prosaically, dolloping squirty cream into the top of the bucket sized mugs with all the panache of Mr Whippy on an ice-cream spree.

She plonked two of the puffy meringues on to plates and dumped the lot on a tray.

“There you go.  You’ll never be beach ready at this rate,” she observed critically.

“Of course we will!  Malaga’s months off!” said Helen.  “Anyway, how are you liking it here at Valentine’s?”

“It’s all right,” conceded Mags.  “A bit boring.”

“How about the tips?” asked Pam.

“Depends on the customer,” responded Mags pointedly.

The two friends made a great deal about sighing and picking over small change.

“Oops, no, sorry, that’s a pound,” said Helen, putting on a show of taking it back out and replacing it with another coin.

“It’s twenty percent, not twenty pence,” said Mags, with a deadpan stare.

“That depends on the customer service as well as the customer!” cackled Pam.

“Charming,” said Mags offendedly.

“Here, is the owner really called Valentine?” asked Helen.  “I’ve always wondered.”

“I doubt it,” said Mags flatly.  “Everyone just calls her ‘Val’.”

“Right,” said Helen and she and Pam exchanged a look of amusement.

They could always rely on Mags to provide them, however unintentionally, with a giggle.  Mags shoved the tray towards them, the creamy swirls slopping over the top of the mugs.

“Enjoy yer meal,” she added tonelessly, in obedience to Valentine’s requisite customer care statement.  Not, when spoken by Mags, exactly the equivalent of being told to ‘have a nice day.’

The two women, noticing the owner, Val, coming into earshot with a loftily patrician smile, left Mags to it.  They went to sit down at a window table from which they could look out at passers by and make the odd comment, which was always enjoyable.  They gazed mischievously into each other’s eyes as they bit into the explosively soft sugar bombs, from which the cream oozed unctuously into their mouths.

“Delicious!” mumbled Pam through hers.

“Mmm!  How many sins, Pam?” spluttered Helen stickily.

“A lifetime in Purgatory, at least,” laughed Pam.

They looked across the road to where the Slimming Club signboard was outside the building it was held in.   A large painted hand pointed, somehow rudely but also as if towards heaven, up the staircase to the room which they had just left.  They could see Angie coming out now,  toting her ‘bag for life’ of approved treat bars away with her.  She conscientiously provided them for the group to buy, but Helen and Pam had long since given up salving their consciences with these expensive gimcracks of snack bars as being a bit of a pointless exercise.

“Never mind,” said Helen compassionately, as they watched their calorie pastor’s stoically trim but rather lonely looking figure disappear out of sight. Fortunately, she had not spotted them.  “There’s always next week,” and the two friends settled down happily to the guilty pleasure which, more often than not, followed on from their dutiful session.

The point was, as Helen and Pam regularly said to one another, if they’d done well, they deserved a treat and if they’d done badly, they needed cheering up.  Mags came over on the excuse of wiping tables down nearby them.  She gave a long suffering sigh.

“You'd soon get that weight off if you had to do this all day,” she told them.  “I’m always on my feet in here.  I wish I'd stayed at the bakery now.  You got extra breaks there with more staff in.”

“You’re never happy wherever you are, Mags,”  Pam smiled.

“Would you be?” retorted Mags unanswerably.

She went back to the counter leaving her rhetorical question dangling in the air, a Mags-like summing up of the dissatisfaction inherent in the human condition.  Helen and Pam looked at one another.

“Always cheers you up, doesn’t it, a conversation with Mags?” said Helen.

“Oh, yes,” agreed Pam dryly.  “There’s always someone worse off.”