Oh, Sue
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Friendships are curious things, are they not? The collision of atoms in a space, which, up until the moment you make them, was free of emotion, connection. Then, bam! You turn a corner, walk into a room, sit on a bus and everything changes. And life-long friendships… well, they’re more curious still. There in front of you is a stranger, whom one day you may defend with your life. You couldn’t have seen them coming. Life has a plan… maybe.
That was what Sue was thinking on New Year’s Day, as she sunrise-stumbled into her basement. She was very stoned at the time. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s rewind.
***
“What am I looking at here, Sue?” her boss asked the screens mounted on the desk.
Sue peered into monitor four: a warehouse-sized space of circular tables filled with gangs of revellers – some trying to make themselves heard over the crap party music, others studying menus, a few silently staring into space, perhaps in shock at the battery farm fun they had willingly walked into.
“Well?”
“The demise of Western Civilisation one over-priced cocktail at a time?”
“Oh, Sue,” he sighed and wearily tapped the paused screen.
“Alright, alright, so, six people dressed like Russian circus performers, about to order some of our finest fried food before heading back to the Big Top.”
Sue didn’t need to see more; she’d met them an hour ago. Instead, she took in the cramped office space: the trays of clean linen, piles of dirty menus, cinnamon candles wrapped in plastic holly twine and blue laundry bags overflowing with a day’s worth of wiped mouths and false cheer. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. If you weren’t Sue, watching Dale swivel in his leather chair, preparing to deliver another managerial monologue.
What was the point? They knew that this was the end of the line for Sue as a waitress in Karen’s of Kilburn – an insult themed restaurant where the diners came for a side of fries with their rudeness. She’d been called into his office three times this week alone. “A record,” her colleagues had told her, not without glee.
He should just get on with it, fire her now so she could catch the last Tube home before the New Year’s Eve maniacs turned London into a scene from a horror film. Let’s face it, she didn’t have what it took to be a Karen. She couldn’t roll her eyes to the back of her head, she couldn’t tut like the others, she didn’t have an actor’s agent, wasn’t auditioning to be in West End musicals in her free time and didn’t own a push-up bra. She did have a need to please her boss however, because he also happened to be her flatmate and her twin. Look at him, sitting there with his head in his hands as if losing the will to live.
“I should probably be getting back to –”
“Sit down. Let’s turn up the volume.”
“I’d rather we didn’t.”
“Well, we’re going to. Sit!”
“Yes, General!”
She slumped onto the small plastic chair next to his big one and kicked off her uniform high-heels.
Dale smacked the return button on the keyboard and leaned back, the chair squeaking under his slight body. If he were an animal, he’d be a whippet – an injustice, that he got the adrenal skinny genes while she got the neanderthal ones.
“I didn’t know it was legal to record conversations?”
“Not much is legal here, including the chicken.”
Her mind wandered to the family on table twenty, who would be getting antsy now that they were forced to talk to each other instead of filling their faces. It was the feasting, fattening time of year, when frosty grievances thawed by the fire of enforced joy and overindulgence. Such a strange ritual when you thought about it. December was a cruel month for some – the homeless, say – they needed dessert much more than…
“Sue!”
“Sorry, I was thinking about…”
“You don’t think, that’s the problem.”
He turned up the volume. Amid the clatter of cutlery and rumble of chatter the conversation was surprisingly clear.
“Are the mics in the poinsettias?”
“Shut up!”
“What did you just say to me?” asked a woman in a white fur-trimmed dress, her peroxide blonde curls bouncing in rhythm with her breath and breasts that were dangerously close to falling out of her corset. Hot, if you like the TikTok version of a snow queen mixed with Marilyn Monroe.
“I was wondering if you were ready to order?”
“Wondering? Are you new here?” If her accent was a wine, Sue would up-sell it as a sophisticated red, with notes of artisan acidity. Posh mixed with working class – something that was unpalatable to both gangs of the English system.
“I am. This is my first week and I…” Sue watched herself gesticulate wildly as she told her story, almost knocking a tray of glasses out of a waiter’s glide-by.
“Right.” The snow queen meant boring because Sue’s attitude was not as advertised. Others at the table studied their menus a little too closely and sniggered – wolves circling an injured animal.
“Everyone else go first,” she told her pack. Maybe they were friends? Hard to deduce from their shrugs and throat clearing. The huge dude with the bulging biceps sneered at the snow queen like he was raising a dumbbell with his lip. Sue shivered.
The ordering experience wasn’t terribly challenging; she’d had more original. One man in a cream turtleneck asked for butter that didn’t taste like butter and thought himself very clever indeed. A woman with sad eyes and red lips asked Sue if she could make the specials, “actually sound special.” Sue almost told her that everything in life was special if you looked closely enough, but instead just shrugged. Maybe she was getting better at this disinterested thing.
“My turn,” said a man with a handlebar moustache so thick it made you want to rescue it and pop it back in the garden. With a smirk – and an accent that belonged in the Cold War – he announced that he was vegetarian but ate chicken and could she check with the chef that the gravy was vegan. Sue shrugged again. The wolves clapped feebly. Expensive watches cymballed against gold bracelets, perfect teeth crawled out from salon-created smiles. This was what they came for, the fight, the entertainment. Sue straightened her imaginary gladiator breastplate and smiled back, a rookie error.
“Something funny?” asked the snow queen.
“Your face? Sorry. Too much, too soon? You have a lovely face. Very Instagram influencer. Heavy makeup for the real world but you’re pulling it off.”
The snow queen grimaced.
Dale paused the playback to light a joint. A joint meant something serious, it meant he was losing his tenuous grip on the performance that didn’t let on he lived off kitchen leftovers. He took three deep drags, blew the smoke into a dirty tablecloth bag under the desk and handed her the spliff. She reached for it as naturally as if they were curled up on the tattered basement couch. No need for eye contact, no gratitude, a ritual that marked the end of another night’s struggle to understand the human race – a marathon designed to be won by those with enough luck to be able to buy the appropriate footwear.
“‘Too much makeup, but you’re pulling it off?’” Dale asked.
“You try being down there.”
“What about the guy and the chicken? You could at least have called him a dick.”
“It’s not in my vocab.”
Outside, a group of singers began a descant of Auld Lang Syne.
“Can’t you at least try?”
“I am. I couldn’t embarrass him. He might have been someone who thought chicken was fish or something.”
“What?”
“Some people think only red meat is real meat. Which, of course, is stupid but…”
“Seriously?”
“If it’s pink then it’s more like tuna or –”
“Shut up!”
Dale pressed play again.
“My turn,” grinned the snow queen. The group held their breath and waited. “I want the octopus linguine but no chilli or wine in the sauce. I want extra octopus and make the linguine wheat-free because I’m coeliac.” It was good. The perfect balance of impossible demands, an allergy and finally disrespect for the most intelligent animal on the planet. Her fellow diners looked awed.
“Let me get this straight. You want to eat something that’s smarter than you are?”
“What’s your problem?” grinned the woman until it looked as though her unnaturally smooth cheeks would split.
“No problem, I am just saying that octopi may be the alien life force behind all existence. If you eat it and there is a God – unlikely, but let’s say for argument’s sake it’s true – well maybe, just maybe, you’re going to Hell.”
Dale paused the recording. Frozen in time were five self-conscious guests and one oblivious snow queen, who was mid-yawn so wide you could see down her throat. A pelican choking on its catch.
“Spiritual advice based on the menu? You are meant to be insulting them, not starting a theological debate.”
“But –”
“She made a complaint, said you weren’t sassy enough. They gave you countless opportunities, she said, but found your banter,” Dale opened his notebook, ‘distasteful’.”
Sue took the end of the spliff from her brother, finished it, threw the roach in the dregs of an abandoned coffee cup and reached for her coat.
“Grand. Well, I’ll be pilfering a few candles for the flat?”
“Go ahead. Consider it a redundancy package.”
“Do you ever wonder how we got here?”
“Necessity.” He rubbed his leg where the scar was.
“You’ll be home when?”
“When I’ve made sure the people have enjoyed every insult we can throw at them. There was so much you could’ve said to that twat. Octopus intelligence? Jesus.”
Sue had stopped listening to his griping, it wasn’t worth worrying about. Another job gone, so what? Money wasn’t everything. Had she ever met a truly happy rich person? Cash made them brittle. They feared nothing more than to look into the eyes of a poor person and see that they were the same – all headed back towards the earth they couldn’t care less about.
“We’re going to have to start robbing banks at this rate.” Dale said as she shrugged on his old parka, her fingers grazing badges that told a story of life long before this room.
“I’ll find something.”
“Sure you will… A little pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? Rent is real, you hippie.”
That didn’t deserve a response, just a door slam and a trudge down the stairs to the kitchen exit.
She walked through the bustling backstage of three chefs, pot washers, wet floors and steel. Steel everywhere, not dissimilar to an operating theatre – with knives for slicing flesh, trembling fingers and barking men in white. Must be all that chilli on their fingers, all that onion cutting that made them so moody. Bad smells and bad tempers taken home, never washed off.
No one noticed her thoughts getting in the way of the pass. Certainly not the waitress balancing four plates, who pushed by with, ‘Backs!’ Reminding her that no one had hers.
Wherever she worked, people didn’t notice her leave. It was a skill really. Maybe she could have had a career as an SAS officer like her brother? Something to add to the list for 2026.
What was missing from modern life was a sense of humour. Sue’s had got her into trouble more times than she could count and even though she’d tried to temper it, it was never quite enough for employers who didn’t get that life was a joke. Get serious in ‘26’. That could be their motto. Maybe she’d get it printed on a T-shirt for her and Dale. Team serious. Serious… curious word. Oh dear, she was pretty stoned.
Sue pushed too hard on the fire exit door, collided with the bottle bin and slipped on the icy step down to the pavement. A human hockey puck, she slid into the alley and came to a halt next to a frozen downpipe. She leant against a moss-covered wall and listened to the rain making music on humanity’s drumkit: bottles, boxes, potholes, bat-da-dat-dat-dah. Next to her, a corpulent rat sat atop a bin like a regent. She doffed an imaginary cap in his direction; he stared back and sniffed the air haughtily. Oh, to be alone at this time of year.
London took on a manic quality on this night. End of Days vibes, with people off their faces, ignoring the world and its imminent demise via cocaine and sparklers. Sue should join in the denial at the top of the alley, but she preferred the cold hard truth of the ground – the rat’s domain. Perhaps she would stay here and freeze for a while. Wasn’t that the new trend anyway? To get high on getting cold. Only people who could get warm at any moment would come up with that idea.
The rat gave her a disapproving look.
“You can join the queue, my friend.”
A ruckus up ahead – shouting above the general cacophony. A woman screaming, “You can’t have it!” They looked like terriers fighting over a bone, only this bone was a Louis Vuitton handbag and one of the terriers was dressed in a white fur-lined dress… Great. The thief growled, dragging the snow queen down towards the bins, towards Sue.
“Oh feck.”
A moral dilemma presented itself: of course she should help, but which one? The thief who clearly needed money? Or the woman who had ended her short career carrying plates? A conundrum from the icy ground, for sure.
What would Dale do? Even though he was just a strip of a man, he wouldn’t think twice about his safety and kick the guy’s arse.
“Hey arsehole!” she called out.
It was a start at least, leading pause in the tussle. Assailant and assailed turned to look at the abandoned army jacket that had yelled in the dark and for a moment they were united in mutual confusion.
“Will you give the snow queen back her bag?”
Realising the voice belonged to a woman, and one with hair the colour of pink candyfloss, the thief remembered himself and got back to the task in hand.
“I said, leave her the feck alone!”
One moment Sue was chilled to the bone on concrete, the next she was burning heat. It was one thing to be ignored by the spoilt and selfish, quite another to be ignored by a criminal who was in her gang in terms of financial concerns. Before thoughts had formed, she was crashing past bins, including the throne of the king rat, and soon she had the thief pinned to the ground, his head between her thighs. Only then, under the copper light of the streetlamps, did Sue see that his skin was sallow and dehydrated. The man was nothing more than a felled sapling.
“I picked the wrong one,” he whispered.
“Too feckin right you did!”
Despite his fragility, Sue roared a lifetime of frustration in his face, which made the man burst into tears. It was the desperation that did it, the fear she had created in another – Sue started to cry as well, because her raised hand surprised her as much as him. Was this her breaking moment? Everyone had one.
“Stop crying!” she shook his shoulders. When he didn’t, she slapped him gently across the face. “Come on now, this isn’t what you’re meant to be doing.” It was not right for a man to cry like a baby over his bad decisions.
“Don’t kill him,” the snow queen’s voice was casual, as if that outcome would be mildly inconvenient. “Then we’d have to involve the police, and I can’t have that.”
“I’m sorry.” Sue released him and rolled onto the ground, panting. “Got a bit carried away. I’m stoned you see, and this is all a bit much, am I right, or am I right?”
The thief didn’t stick around to chit-chat. Once released from her thighs, he abandoned his quarry and skidded up the road to the safety of Kilburn’s hunting ground.
Sue handed the snow queen her bag.
“Thank you.” She gripped it to her chest like it contained nuclear codes. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I know, I had to listen to you for most of my shift. My last shift thanks to you.”
“I didn’t want to complain… but he made me.”
“Who? Mr Biceps?”
The snow queen barked a laugh; a fascinating guttural thing that jarred with how she presented herself. It wasn’t at all designer, more threadbare couch in a basement flat in Camden. Don’t do it, Sue. Do not go looking for clues that you and this woman share any common ground, because you absolutely do not.
“Well, make sure you thank him from me when you get back to your ice palace.”
Up ahead the crowd surged past. No point putting off the inevitable. She’d have to join them eventually, let them take her on their tide of tidings into the belly of the Underground to her paint-peeled front door and Boris, who would have destroyed furniture in protest at being left alone for five hours.
“Wait! Stay here with me for a few minutes, until I get over the shock.”
“You don’t look particularly shocked to me.” Except perhaps the shaking hands, but what business was it of Sue’s?
“Stay.”
“I’m not one of your minions to be ordered around.”
“Please. I mean, talk…?”
“With you?”
‘With me.’
Sue liked to talk, she liked the company of strangers, and this woman was stranger than most, but she had also just properly ruined her day.
“I don’t think so.”
It was best to walk away, and so she did until she caught the impervious eye of the rat, sitting on his hind legs in judgement. He sniffed the air in a way that suggested one odorous imbecile was no different from than the rest – they all walked away from responsibility, which was why the kingdom would once again soon be ruled by him and his kind. So stoned. Sue allowed herself a backwards glance and saw that the woman was slumped in the same spot, no sign of movement, defeated, her white coat stained with London dirt.
“Oh, damn it.”
Sue wandered back and flopped down on the ice.
“Alright. What do you want to talk about?”
“The octopus. Do you really think I’m going to hell because I ate it?”
“Nice, nice.” Sue’s kind of chat. She reached out her hand. Perfectly manicured nails wrapped around her bitten ones.
“I’m Sue.”
“Grace.”
“Well, yes Grace, you are definitely going to hell.”
The woman looked terrified. Not the smartest cookie in the jar.
“Not for eating octopus but because you, I suspect, are not a huge sympathiser with the plight of modern man – what with your acrylic nails, false eyelashes and enhancements. Just a theory.” Grace blinked hard as if trying to decode a maths equation. “Ah, there is no god, you’re all good. Now let’s go grab a drink, I’m not sitting on the pavement all night.”
“He could still be out there.”
“The mugger?” When Grace didn’t nod. “Mr Biceps?”
Grace stared into the middle distance. It was the expression you saw on the faces of old ladies who had lost their marbles and were desperately searching for the right way to explain the jumble in their heads.
“Good name. I call him ‘my shadow’.”
Goddammit! The woman looked so scared, the first genuine expression Sue had seen on her cartoon face. She’d have to rescue her now or Dale would court-martial her.
“Well, since you’ve told me that, there’s no way I can let you go without an explanation. Come on.” Sue stood up and grasped Grace’s hand. “I know a place that serves the finest malt. He won’t be able to find you there. It’s kind of a dive.” She looked at Marylin for the TikTok age, her fur, her cleavage, every detail attended to. A doll. “But you’re going to have to try to blend in,” she said with as much confidence as a soldier going over the top. “Whatever the problem is, we’re going to get to the bottom of it. We’re going to work it out.”
Grace looked up, her eyes wide and smiling. And Sue knew, then and there, stoned or not, that this New Year’s Eve was going to change her life, because this woman was her next big love.