The Love Bite

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The girl who threw my plate on to the table had a love bite the size of a wagon wheel on her neck. She smiled at me and then turned around and went back towards the kitchen to get Mikey and Carwyn’s food.

Mikey, Carwyn, Paul and I were in the Great British Burger Restaurant at the entrance the St David’s Centre in Cardiff. In front of me was my quarter pounder with cheese and chips, half on the plate, half on the greasy Formica table.  As I was scooping my chips back on the plate, the girl came back with the rest of the meals. Again she threw them from a distance, gave me a coy little smile, and then walked away.

“She’s cute,” I said. And she was in a surly, uninterested, fifteen-year-old way.

“She’s a dog,” Mikey said.

“A valley’s dog,” Paul agreed.

“You’re just jealous cos she smiled at me?” I said. “I reckon she fancies me.”

The other three boys laughed, Paul snorting milkshake all over the table.

‘Why the fuck would she fancy you?” Mikey said.  

“Blind is she?” Carwyn chimed in.

“But she smiled at me,” I protested.

“She’s a waitress,” Carwyn said. “She has to smile at people.”

“But she’s not smiling at anyone else,” I pointed out. The three boys all turned their heads to see her grumpy face snarling at a new customer.

“Okay, so she was probably just laughing at your hair.” Paul said.

I ran my fingers through my newly coiffured flat top.

“This is cool, this is.” I said and again Paul snorted milkshake all over the table.

And so there we were. Four boys killing time until we became men. Talking crap, eating crap and generally just being crap. We’d discovered women but they hadn’t really discovered us yet. Our pimply faces and spindly frames were competing for their attention with George Michael or Owen Paul or the sixth formers with cars and cigarettes Let’s face it, it wasn’t a fair contest. By the next summer all would change. Paul would be with Claire who he’d stay with until their messy divorce fifteen years later. Carwyn would be with Emily, then Josie, then Jackie and then Emily again. I would be with Caroline and Mikey would quietly tell us he thought he was gay before coming out as one of the straightest men I ever knew. But for now, we were young, hopeless and largely invisible.

“Hey the love-bite waitress smiled at me again.” I said, I still hadn’t learnt to keep my mouth shut.

“You’re imagining it,” Mikey said.   

“And anyway,” Carwyn said, “She’s got a love bite.”

“So?” I said.

“Well you don’t just get love bites do you, she must have a boyfriend.”

It was a good point and it rather took the wind out of my sails. I’d kinda liked thinking a real live woman had taken an interest in me.

“She could have done it to herself, you know with a vacuum cleaner.”

The boys laughed.

“Looks real enough to me,” one of them said, but none of us really knew how to spot a fake love bite.

It was time to pay. We went to the till with our bills and all handed over our money to the waitress with the love bite. The waitress smiled at me as she gave me my change and me and my friends bundled out of the restaurant and into the July sunshine. It was then I checked the money in my hand.

“Boys, I told you she fancied me, she’s given me change from a tenner, I only gave her a fiver.”