half-caf semi-dry cappuccino – let me weigh it.’
Imogen rolled her eyes. ‘That turd of a human being made me remake that drink four times on Tuesday. I even weighed the damn drink on the scales and he didn’t believe it was heavy enough. A semi-dry cappuccino isn’t even a thing!’
‘How long have you been here, three weeks? My darling, you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ Declan grinned at her, holding her gaze a little too long. ‘But I’m pretty sure you can handle it.’
‘I’m glad someone thinks so.’
‘Well, that scowl on your face when you turned around almost made me shit myself, so I think you can handle a couple of pompous wanker bankers.’
Imogen twitched her mouth into a smile. ‘Well, I don’t take kindly to strangers talking about my cups.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
Emanuel returned with a stack of large takeaway cups. ‘When you’ve quite finished being your usual self, maybe you should get back to work before your boss starts calling here in a panic?’
Declan took the cups and smiled at Emanuel, who wore a look of saintly patience. He nodded and buttoned up his coat, heading for the door. He turned back. ‘Was lovely to meet you, Miss Imogen. You should stop by my store sometime. I’m sure I could teach you a thing or two.’
Imogen was so torn between saying ‘I’m sure you could’ or ‘I sincerely doubt it’ that she simply rolled her eyes and said nothing.
Not a bad day at all.
*****
Imogen couldn’t bear to stay in the tiny studio all the time, and instead sought out solace in a little pub on a backstreet behind her flat. The Hope and Anchor, it was called, and she spent that afternoon with a pint of pale ale and her laptop. Soul music whispered from tinny speakers, and occasionally she’d nod her head along with Etta or Aretha as she tried to scratch the coffee grounds from under her fingernails.
‘Y’all right there. darlin’?’ the barman, a slim, grey-haired man called out across the empty bar. She stared up at him from the blank page.
‘Yeah, just … blank.’
The older man grinned, his bright eyes enhanced by his red cheeks. ‘Finish your pint, love. That’s liquid inspiration right there.’
‘I’m trying to savour it, or I’ll only want another,’ she shrugged, fingers stroking the keys.
‘So what? Worked for Hemingway,’ the man laughed. ‘I’m Keith. Just bottling up out back; give us a shout if you need anything.’
‘Cheers, Keith!’ Imogen grinned back, relieved that the rumours of Londoners not being talkers was clearly a myth. The pub was empty at four-thirty in the afternoon, but then again, it was a Shepherd’s Bush side road on a Tuesday. She loved how these pubs just seemed to appear out of nowhere on the corner of residential roads, as if they had been put there for the locals, and no one else would find them if they didn’t know where to look.
Imogen took in the worn blue wallpaper and sticky dark-wood tables … no one had been looking for the Anchor for quite a while, it seemed. Which was a shame, because those stained-glass windows gave the whole place a warm glow.
Imogen managed to squeeze out a few small articles – about London pubs, about moving to the big city from the north, about what London property agents had the audacity to call a one-bedroom flat. None of it was very good.
Maybe what she needed was to write herself a fairy tale. She’d spent years researching them, after all. Her English MA dissertation was on representations of femininity in fairy tales … which everyone was really fucking sick of hearing about. The blokes who worked at the pub had been nice enough, but when they’d made the mistake of asking her about it, and she’d made the mistake of answering, their honest response had been, ‘Huh, didn’t know you were one of them lezzers. Cool.’
What fairy tale would she write herself into now? The princess out in the wilderness, looking for a key to the castle? Except princesses were boring. She wanted to be an Amazon, or even better a goddess. She’d loved all those Greek myths that her dad had told her as a child, fudging the storylines and melding them together in the wrong places, but told with such joy and pride. ‘This is your birth right, my darling – you keep these stories for you.’
Demi had it, an identity ready-made with her name, after Demeter, goddess of the harvest, of the seasons. And it fit. Her little cousin was the barefoot hippie child, always chilled, always with a smart answer and a perfectly arched eyebrow. She’d walk into this pub and find someone to talk to. Hell, she’d stand out on the street until she found someone to drag into the pub with her. But Imogen wasn’t like that.
Friends. That’s what she was missing. Sure, she loved working with Emanuel, and they had a laugh, but he wasn’t someone to go for a drink with. At least not yet. A couple of her London-based uni friends had said they’d meet up, but it’d been radio silence since she’d moved down. Saskia had been quite frosty with her when Imogen had asked what happened with the internship. She’d frankly said, ‘You just don’t get how it works here.’ She was right.
The only other person she’d quite enjoy having a pint and a chat with was Declan, the chatty Irish barista. In the five minutes that she’d spent talking to him, she’d started to feel pretty. To feel interesting and witty, like she had something more to offer than an empty shell covered in coffee grounds and operating on caffeinated auto-pilot. But princesses (or goddesses) never needed a man to make them feel interesting or pretty. Which was why Imogen packed up her laptop, downed her pint, shouted her goodbyes to Keith and jumped on a bus to Oxford Street. A free makeover at the beauty counter of Selfridges was just London-y enough to make her feel excited, and wasn’t an extravagance. She was off to have adventures. And her mother had always said a woman with the right shade of red lipstick could do damn near anything.
*****
Declan came by again over the weekend. A brief appearance on Saturday morning with a hurried plea for long straws. ‘Fucking caffeinated milkshake bastards. Drink some freaking orange juice,’ he said lightly, grinning as he took the bag from her.
‘Nice lips,’ he winked, and was gone without a backward glance, leaving Imogen smiling to herself, sure that the eye-watering twenty quid on a lipstick called ‘Artemis Red’ had been a good choice. She felt powerful, invincible even.
‘This is NOT a flat white,’ a voice whined from the left of her, and she went to explain for the fourth time to the same woman who came in every week, ordered the same drink, and always complained about it, that what she really wanted was a bloody cappuccino.
‘But I like the name of a flat white,’ the woman said staunchly.
‘Okay, so from now on you order a flat white, but we’ll both know that what you really want is a cappuccino with extra foam, right?’ Imogen compromised, wondering for the tenth time that day whether she was going mad.
‘But I want it in the same cup that a flat white comes in, so it looks like a flat white.’
So it looks like a cappuccino with extra foam in a flat white cup … lady, just kill me now. Imogen smiled and made the woman the drink she wanted, in the cup she wanted, and made herself a green tea. She’d learnt if she limited the coffee she was less
