12 August
Dear Rudy,
Honestly, what were you thinking with that boat? It is probably the worst thing you’ve ever done. You might have thought it was just a silly prank but look what it led to. I’m so furious with you I can barely sit still. Someone paid a lot of money for that boat, someone probably worked really hard to be able to buy it and then one morning they walk out onto their jetty and what do they find? A complete disaster. I think you’re selfish and vulgar and immature. You can’t think about anyone other than yourself for even a second, can you.
Maybe you’re wondering what prompted this, or why I’m even writing to you. Let me start by saying it wasn’t my idea. I told them there’s no point. But I also want you to know I lost my job because of someone just like you today. Someone who cared more about having a laugh than about how they might hurt the people around them. I had an outburst. You call them meltdowns, but I call them outbursts, and seeing as I’m the one who has them I think I deserve to be the one who decides what we call them. I had one at work, and now I don’t have a job. Do you even know what it feels like to have an outburst? Of course you don’t. You’re the ‘normal’ one. Ha. You’ve never watched people’s eyes get wide as they slowly back away from you like you’re a rabid dog or the ghost of their long dead relative. You’ve never felt your senses screaming as the world becomes too loud, too bright, too strong, too close. You’ve never felt like you’ve lost control of your own words, as truths come bubbling out before you even have a chance to think about how they are going to land. I’m feeling a lot lately, all the time, and when I’m feeling a lot the outbursts come so eagerly. I’m not blaming you for that, I guess. But you can’t go around doing things like joyriding in boats and shitting in change rooms and expecting there to be no consequences, Rudy, you just can’t.
Maybe I should elaborate, even though I’d rather keep telling you off. It’s much easier to get everything out when you’re not in front of me. But, the job thing. So this is what happened. My shift started like normal; I was working at the register. I wish this one customer had come in an hour later, or if ten other things were slightly different, then maybe I’d still have a job. We have to thank every customer with ‘Thank you for shopping at Surf Zone, have a radical day’. I said that in as pleasant a tone as I could muster given that I couldn’t tell if the middle-aged bald guy hated me or wanted to date me. He held eye contact for an uncomfortably long time—eye contact, that game of chicken I always lose. When he finally turned to leave, I saw my manager ‘Great White Molly’ approaching at speed, coming in for the kill from the accessories wall.
You know why I have all these ‘wacky’ nicknames for people. I’m not trying to be cool or get attention. I know you think I do a lot of things for attention, but I can’t think of anything I hate more than people noticing me. I make up the nicknames because I have a hard time remembering faces and names unless I pinpoint one particular feature and remember that.
I would definitely have chosen a different nickname for myself if it had been my choice. Maybe ‘No Eye Contact Erin’ or ‘Book Hermione’ because of the teeth and hair situation that was erased when Emma Watson got the part.
Everyone says ‘I’m terrible with names!’ but I’m actually terrible with faces. Anyway my manager is Great White Molly. It’s easy to remember because we work at a surf shop and she looks like a shark, because of her big white fake teeth, pointy nose and black eyes.
Don’t worry, Rudy—you don’t have a nickname. I can remember your face just fine. And the family. And Dee. But there is so much to remember about a person, like their laugh and their voice and their hands and the way they say goodbye. A face is the last thing that sticks in my mind.
You know the way people sometimes ask questions they already know the answer to just to get you to give them the answer so they can tell you off about it? I think that’s what Great White Molly was doing when she said, ‘Did you ask that customer if he wanted to buy a two-dollar enviro-bag?’
You would have screwed up your face and had a calm, clever response for her. But I told her the facts. The customer was a forty-year-old dude, and the only bags we had left were the pink ones with frangipanis on them. He wasn’t going to buy one so I saved time not asking.
Her face went as pink as one of the bags she was trying to get me to offload. ‘I’ve told you before: every customer, every purchase. The bags are two dollars. If they can’t afford it they shouldn’t be shopping here. I am powerless in my own life so I get off on putting young people down.’
Okay, maybe she didn’t say that last part. But her lips curled up at the sides in this way that made her look like an evil clown. It will be hard to forget that look. She wasn’t finished either.
‘This is strike two, Erin. You’ve already received a warning for slacking off during stocktake last month.’
It’s probably a good thing I didn’t explain how my actions were based on the statistics I’d collected from eighteen months at Surf Zone. If that customer had bought a pink bag, he would be the first middle-aged man to buy a pink frangipani bag in the entire time I had worked there, and he didn’t strike me as the mouldbreaking type.
And about the whole ‘strike two’ thing, I hadn’t slacked off. I’d just needed to take breaks because the shop got so hot and the music was loud and no one was following the labelling system properly. I didn’t say that, though. Great White Molly’s voice and words sounded angry, even though the look on her face made me think she was happy, like she was somehow enjoying telling me off in front of customers and other staff members.
The most stressful interactions for me are the ones like this, where the person’s face says one thing and their words say another. Which one am I supposed to believe? Faces seem to be more truthful, but people always act as though their words are the only things that matter. Like when Mum says to Dad, ‘I’m fine’, and fine is the last thing she is. Dad has to act like she’s fine, while still trying to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. It would be a lot easier if she just said, ‘I’m mad at you for spending too much time and money at the pub this week,’ and then maybe he could stop doing that.
One of the best things about Dee is she tells me when she’s mad and so I never have to worry about where I stand. She’ll say if I’m pissing her off for not asking how her day was, and so I’ll remember to ask how her day was for the next whole week. I guess that’s why she’s my best friend. Oliver doesn’t so much tell me how he feels, but he cries when he’s sad, laughs when he’s happy and yawns when he’s tired. Kids are awesome like that. Adults complicate things.
Great White Molly was standing in front of me with her hands on her hips and I remembered we were talking about my strikes. And then I accidentally asked if it was even legal to lock underage staff members in the shop until 3 am with no food or air-conditioning. I definitely should have kept my lips shut on the whole stocktake debacle, but I could feel my ears burning and my mind swirling like an outburst was on its way and I always say what I feel instead of keeping my mouth closed when I’m having an outburst.