Being Shelley Page 3

  I especially can’t admit to Di or Jerry (he knows he is the bailout if it all fails) how much I worry about the money because they already worry themselves into the ground. We have a three-month rolling lease that started in November with an option to renew, and even Jerry was impressed with me negotiating that. The proper money worries came with the shop fittings (that counter!) and buying stock and the everyday running costs that just add up and eat whatever sales we make. Beauty and Cynthia worked shifts as shop assistants, but we knew that if we wanted Coffee & Cream to be a success, either I or Di, an owner, needed to be right there talking to the customers at all times. That’s when the second-biggest nightmare started. We both wanted to be free at the same times for our families and there was no down time or holidays since the mall is open seven days a week, nine to seven and nine to six on weekends. Four months in and our lives outside the shop had shut down.

  Something needed to change.

  Until then, I was like every other bored shop assistant everywhere. I spent a lot of time standing in the doorway or sitting behind the counter, staring at my phone, watching for messages, talking to Beauty. Waiting for the time to pass. This afternoon, Theresa sent me photos of Harley and Stacey having a picnic in the garden, with voice notes from Harley lisping for me to come home, ‘Please, Mommy.’ Cutie. I put some Lindt balls in my bag for him – he’d love that; chocolate is his favourite thing. I’d have to get something for Stacey or she’d flip; maybe I’d make a five-minute dash for a picture book from Exclusives next door. Jerry sent me a photo of our empty fridge. Looney, why doesn’t he go to the shops if it bothers him that much.

  Then came Wayde. Smiling at me in his profile pic, topless on the beach.

  Him: Hey schweet Shelley. The wind is going to be up tomorrow afternoon, won’t be that much fun for the kids. Howzit for Saturday morning?

  Me: Okay, that’s cool.

  Theresa is off, but it’s Di’s turn at the shop on Saturday morning, so I could take the kids to the beach. Jerry played golf on Saturday mornings at the Atlantic Beach Estate down the road in Melkbos. Theresa would be there in the afternoon to help when I was at the shop.

  Him: Awesome! How’s your day? Busy?

  Me: Sucks. I can’t work the coffee machine so have to turn people away.

  Him: I can work a coffee machine? I can help for a bit, I’m in any case on my way to hang out with James.

  I looked around. The shop was empty. Beauty was standing near the door trying not to sleep with her eyes open. Maybe the smell of fresh coffee would lure some customers, wake both of us up.

  Me: Serious? Yeah, that would be great. Smiley face.

  Him: Be there in fifteen. Coffee-cup emoji.

  Forty-five minutes later he strolled into the shop.

  ‘Sorry, took me longer to get here than I thought,’ said Wayde, lazy smile on his face as he walked in. It was worth the wait, I thought, looking at him. Same hair, different board shorts and a clean T-shirt; he not only smelled but also looked like a breath of holiday. Coffee & Cream suddenly felt too polished, too formal, too stuck up with him in it. I saw a woman browsing at the entrance shelves do a little glance up at him as he walked in; then she did another glance, a longer one, as he came behind the counter and caught me in the fastest of hugs. The hug nearly gave me a heart attack, my face full on into the hard chest of Pina Colada Coconut Vanilla, only a thin T-shirt between us. I don’t get this hugging thing that all young people seem to do every time they see each other, but hell, I got a kick seeing that woman’s face turn from interest to undisguised surprise. Almost like when a woman flicks a look at your new Louis Vuitton – you know she’s pretending not to see it. But she wants it.

  ‘No worries,’ I said, regaining my balance, copying what seemed to be his favourite WhatsApp reply to anything I said. I moved closer to the coffee machine, secretly watching the woman move slowly to the next gift display stand, the one nearest the counter. I’m sure she’d looked through that display before. ‘How come you know how to work a beast like this?’ I asked, standing in front of the chrome expanse of the Astoria. ‘I’ve never been able to make anything other than weak brown water and under-frothed milk come out of it.’

  ‘Told you I was in hotel school at Granger Bay last year? I wanted to make some money while I was studying, so I did a quick professional barista and bar-tending training at Shakers. Did better at that than I did at hotel school,’ he said as he switched on the machine. ‘I worked at some places in town for a bit. Didn’t waste my mother’s money completely.’

  ‘Ah, okay,’ I said, watching as he made water gush out the little steel spouts that the coffee usually comes out of. You’d think I’d have learned all the right words from having Di try a million times to teach me.

  ‘You gotta get the tamping part into the portafilter perfect. The grounds can’t be too loose or too tightly packed,’ he said over the noise of the coffee grinder as it filled the round silver coffee thing that he’d untwisted from the Astoria. He leaned over, pressing the coffee into the silver round with what looked like a metal stamp. His right arm muscles, the side I was on, flexed under the short exertion, making his tattoo flowers ripple. As he went about clicking the silver thing back into the machine, making coffee come out of the spouts, filling the air with the smell of arabica beans, I noticed the browser woman on the other side of the counter.

  ‘Hi!’ I said, my best big hope-you-spend-a-lot smile on my face. ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ I’d seen her shake her head when Beauty offered her help earlier.

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled, red lipstick seeping into the fine cracks above her top lip where she had coloured over the line. ‘When it’s ready, could I have that coffee please?’ Her blue eye-shadowed gaze was on Wayde, as if he were the one offering to help her.

  Wayde smiled at her.

  ‘This is just the first sample cup that Wayde’s tried,’ I said. ‘If it’s good, you can definitely have the next one – order it exactly as you like.’

  ‘I’m sure whatever Wayde makes will be absolutely perfect for me.’ She almost licked her lips. Gawd. I cringed. Women of a certain age – my age – we can embarrass ourselves. I hoped I hadn’t behaved like that in the surf shop.

  ‘If the young lady wants my first cup,’ Wayde first looked at me, then smiled at her again with the tiniest little wink of his right eye, ‘she can have my first cup.’

  The woman laughed as if he had made the funniest joke. I laughed inside, recognising myself at his age, remembering how many times I’d flirted with a customer. We watched Wayde stick the steam wand into the steel jug, froth the milk up, then stamp the base of the jug lightly onto the counter. He poured the milk over the espresso so that a loose heart formed in the foam. Small fine milk bubbles. I knew at least that meant he had done a good job with the milk.

  After some one-finger poking of her phone, two more ladies with Poetry shopping bags arrived to join browser woman. They stayed for another two lattes and a piece of chocolate cake each. And like coffee shops everywhere, there is nothing that draws people in like seeing other people inside. Coffee & Cream was busy for the first time since the January sales.

  Wayde, the genius, made the coffee and chatted to them all, Beauty and me hopping to answer the questions about the gifts they pointed to on the shelves. One woman asked me for a tip jar. They all bought rose-gold soy candles. But even with the candles sold out, my Coffee & Cream cage was getting lit. It had needed a Wayde to do it.

  6

  Friday, 16 February

  Time to tell Di what I had done.

  ‘I found us a barista. One who will also help out in the shop and,’ I pre-empted the question from her as I bounced into the shop at nine-fifteen, ‘his coffee is good and … he’s great with customers,’ I finished to the shocked Di. Well, I bounced as much as someone can bounce who hates mornings, but I needed to distract Di any way I could. I knew she was going to moan about my barista hiring.

  ‘What?’ She crumpled her face. She really should go and see Lily. ‘What barista? And why are you so happy? Why are you even here? It’s early and not your morning.’ She stared into me with the laser stare of a mother with teenage daughters. ‘I thought Theresa was only coming in the afternoons now?’

  ‘Still no Theresa in the mornings, but the world is full of unicorns and rainbows when Stacey doesn’t fight me about her clothes before school. I have no choice but to be happy, even though I should be murderous since they both think it’s perfectly normal to wake up at five every day.’

  ‘Uh-hmph,’ was the only sound from Di as I let her process the barista news while she checked the coffee machine. I know that other mothers, even my friends, judge me for having had full-time au pairs from the start, even before I had the shop as a reason they could accept. I used to feel the weight of guilt about it. But hell, the judgment was worth it. Having help doesn’t make me less of a mother in my books. Plus, having twins is like having two shops next to each other in the Table Bay Mall, except they are open twenty-four seven. I couldn’t cope with the reality of having babies. Hell, let alone cope, I barely functioned. I put on a show when I left home because it felt wrong to say I was struggling when I’d done so much to have them. ABS never knew there were days I could hardly get myself out of bed, never mind care for two little helpless lumps of human. I thought a twin pregnancy was hard, all that worry to keep them in until they were big enough, but it was harder once they were out. When I am alone with them, even now that they are good at keeping each other company, it feels like I’m always turning from the one to the other, never giving either exactly what he or she wants. It’s not just about the time; it’s life with children. I love them, but I lost control of my body and my mind the minute Jerry and I decided to have kids. From not wanting children, to having the epiphany of wanting them and then finding out how hard it was to get them. All that fertility bullshit to make them happen, and all the drama to keep them in my body for long enough. I was a human incubator. Seriously. All that, and they still came a little early. I was petrified.

  I couldn’t talk to Jerry about it – we’d struggled together to have these children and I thought he would be the first one to say I was ungrateful for the luck. I was Shelley, wasn’t I? He liked me tough, laughing, jolly; saying inappropriate things that made him laugh. I wasn’t the kind of person others would guess to feel overwhelmed by two tiny babies who came home after a week in NICU. But I was. And I dealt with it by getting a night nurse from seven in the evening to seven in the morning for the first two years. Theresa arrived at nine in the morning and, no lies, those two in-between hours were hell. Last September, I eased the twins into a playgroup in Blouberg. I drop them around eight-thirty, eight forty-five (or nine-thirty if Stacey has a tantrum about her clothes). Theresa fetches them at one and she works until seven-thirty so she can help with the chaos that is bedtime. I’m dreading the day she leaves me, even if her stomach is so flat and she is so young and beautiful that at first it used to form a lump of jealousy in my own stomach.

  Di doesn’t get it. She thinks I don’t want to look after my own kids. It started to get easier when they turned three. I felt like I was coming back to myself; the wreckage of my post-pregnancy body was fixed, and I started thinking maybe there was more that I could do than simply survive the days. I got the idea for the shop. But still, what I want is for everything to be as perfect as possible for Stacey and Harley, and having Theresa help me is the only way I can halfway try to do that. I don’t get it right. Valentine’s MomFail, my most recent note-to-self of my inadequacy, a case in point.

  ‘What’s that about a barista?’ Di said finally. She talked while packing the cups on top of the coffee machine, turning the handles all to face to her right, the frown still on her forehead. ‘I’m sure I packed all the coffee things yesterday before I left? It looks different now – the machine is not properly clean and there’s no milk. Did you try to make coffee?’

  ‘Tadaaaa, I said that I hired a barista. His name is Wayde. He was here yesterday and he is coming in at twelve today. You’ll have to show him exactly how you want him to leave all the coffee things,’ I said. I felt smug. Not only had I solved our barista problem but I remembered Wayde’s face when I’d asked him if he wanted a job at Coffee & Cream. It was the last round of coffees and he’d just finished pouring milk into a cappuccino for James from the surf shop when I made the offer. He’d looked at me as if I had the powers of Wonder Woman. God knows, I want someone to think I have the powers of Wonder Woman. He’d given me a giant smile, cocked his head to the side, and said, ‘If you gave me a job here, that would be solid.’ I didn’t know exactly what he meant by ‘solid’ (my only reference was to the quality of poo in the baby years), but I took it to mean it was cool, so I told him it was a deal and that I would sort out a contract. I shouldn’t have done it without talking to Di.

  She knew I wasn’t Wonder Woman.

  Di cocked her head this time, standing in nearly the same spot as Wayde yesterday, but without the giant grin.

  ‘What were you thinking? How can you just hire someone? You didn’t talk to me … We haven’t even properly agreed to hire another barista.’ Di’s face was bright red, her hands furiously repacking the coffee cups she’d just packed while she talked. ‘What about references? I haven’t even met the guy. What if he is an asshole to Beauty? We need someone who gets on with her, since she is the only person I can rely on to work in this shop.’ I ignored the barb; I knew she included me in the unreliable ones. ‘I don’t want her to get pissed off by an idiot,’ Di finished. The ever-present, ever-competent Beauty heard her name but pretended not to and carried on dusting the shelves near the shop entrance. In this moment, Di and I were exactly like Jerry and I – that couple having a fight in full view of everyone, but everyone pretends that nothing is happening.

  ‘I’m sorry, okay.’ It seems that every day I need to apologise to Di for something. ‘I got excited. I met him in the surf shop the other day and we got to talking, and turns out he has a barista qualification and most of a hotel school diploma.’ I stretched the truth; he lasted three months at school. ‘And he’s worked plenty places as a barista.’ I didn’t know exactly, but I’m sure he’d said somewhere in town. I pushed on: ‘When I was here with no coffee yesterday, he came by and jumped right into making coffees as a favour. The customers loved him and the coffees. He made a lot. Like, a lot.’ I pointed out the tip jar on the counter. It was empty now, but Wayde must’ve taken home three-hundred bucks yesterday. ‘A bunch of women stayed until closing time and some of his surf friends dropped in for coffee.’ Fine, it was just surf-shop James and his cappuccino was free, but I’m sure more surfer friends will come. ‘We sold all our candles, two trays and three sets of champagne glasses,’ I pointed at the gaps where Beauty was dusting, ‘and he got on fine with Beauty.’ He’d called her ‘Beautylicious’. She’d laughed him off, flapped her hands at him – ‘Hey, wena, don’t talk to me like that,’ in a way that made it clear she wasn’t joking despite her laughter.

  Di was quiet; she seemed to be thinking about what I’d said, noticing the gaps on the shelves. We haven’t exactly been doing a roaring trade.

  ‘You can see what he is like this afternoon. I haven’t signed anything, so I can back out if you hate him. But just think what it would be like if we had an extra person who was also reliable like Beauty,’ I knew Beauty was listening, ‘and could do the coffee? Maybe we could even have an afternoon off at the same time? He and Beauty would be that good together.’ I waited. I knew I had to get the perfect mix of pushy and quiet with Di. ‘We could try to get ABS together – it’s been forever.’ Another bout of Di silence, another wipe down of the marble counter top. I lit the lemongrass-scented ‘candle of the day’ while I waited.

  ‘Fine. I’ll see what he’s like. I’m not promising anything. Don’t hire anyone else without me.’

  7

  He came; he saw; he conquered.

  Wayde arrived at twelve sharp. Hair tied in a squirt of pony at the back of his head (I’d messaged him about the hair after I found two long ones on the side of the counter next to the coffee machine. Di would fire him for that before he even started), clean grey RVCA T-shirt, dark shorts, black Vans. Still with the Pina Colada Coconut Vanilla smell but with a layer of something masculine from a bottle I didn’t know. A black rubber watch and beaded leathery wrap things on his wrist completed his look. I guessed this was him dressed to impress. I was impressed. Di too. He shook her hand, smiled those smiles, hung on her every word about how she liked the coffee area to be. He produced every coffee she asked for and she didn’t ask him to redo a single one (unlike me – she gave up on me with my twelfth bad cappuccino). He didn’t flinch when she told him that he needed to help with everything when he wasn’t doing coffee – from helping me unpack boxes, to washing cups, dusting shelves, basically anything that Di or Beauty or I needed help with. I didn’t know he had a car, but that was clearly a bonus. No reason ever to be late, and he could collect the Trecastelli cakes if we needed him to since he lived in Blouberg Ridge. I was rather proud. Given our age gap, you could’ve said I was proud as if he were my son, but I wasn’t proud like that. It was more like when you introduce someone you like to your friends, and your friends like him too. I was that kind of proud.