‘Marmite’ by Claire Kieffer

It’s a dark and stuffy little shop with rails that encourage bumping into one another. Empty, two-dimensional men hang from the walls: navy blue, black, black and black, here a bold beige or a silver-fox grey. Many of the 3D men who come in are under strict orders to get something black, can’t go wrong with black. They are rarely accompanied, unless newly in love, and if that’s the case, there’s nothing to be done anyways.

From Ella’s vantage point at the till there’s the cluttered window – backs of dismembered necks wearing ties which claim, somewhat suspiciously, to be discounted from thirty to twenty pound, socks, boxes shaped like jewelry cases containing nothing but cufflinks, sure to disappoint a snooping little girl some day – and in reverse, the name of the shop: GORMLESS MENSWEAR. Named after Edward Gormless, father of Martin Gormless, current owner of the shop, and introducer of advances such as allowing the shop assistant a comfortable seat behind the till, provided she wear high heels.

Much of Ella’s day is spent waiting, looking at the blitzes of life she can see through the partial window, faces come and gone in a blink with sometimes an unexpected gaze returned. Further away, bald trees with sunlit limbs seem collaged onto clouds that mean business, white-bellied birds are scattered like spilled oats on the green. The clouds can switch Turnerian bright in an instant, making Ella angry with their pretence that everything is good and beautiful in the world. Otherwise, she scrolls through her Instagram feed, blitzes of life but less true. Her thumb hovers over the picture of not-even- acquaintances at a local organic coffee shop. She thinks about the Image, how we strove for realism at first (the renaissance, photography) but have now departed into a generalized aestheticism which she despises, mocks. She decides to squeeze it in somewhere in an essay for her History of Art class – lecturers always starved for nuggets of self-thought, no matter how trite.

The door jiggles. Here’s one, she thinks, putting her phone down. The door always jams at the first try. Martin Gormless showed her how to unclench the bit at the top in the mornings, but she doesn’t do it, likes a warning. She arranges herself Vermeer-like, takes out her book, the half-light from the top of the window suiting her just fine. From her navel up to the deep thumbprint of the clavicle, juices rise. She can remember a time when the job was boring, drawn out, she a faded rag doll barely saying hello to customers. Then Martin had shown her the sales figures from last year. Had said she’d get a Christmas bonus if he saw them rise by twenty-five percent. That was all she had needed – a challenge, a competition. It’s not even about the money, she says. Last year, it had been a German girl, Jana, holding the shop. She had shown Ella how to manoeuvre the ancient till, how to navigate the stock room and how to tell if a suit was too long at the arms or needed taking in. Now, Ella often thinks of Jana’s thin, orange hair, her diaphanous presence, her quiet competence, her reassuring kindness, the way she told clients the suit they had picked matched them perfectly and the gentle manner with which she had corrected Ella’s mistakes, always taking pains to tell her that she, Jana, had made mistakes too at first.

She’s going to destroy that bitch’s sales figures. She’s going to pulverize her.

The door opens, and she looks up with a perfect face of surprise – the mouth almost comically o-shaped, you’d swear you’d walked in on her naked, but they never seem to mind a bit of overplaying at that stage. Her lips are full and soft like downy apricot skin, and she never wears lipstick or gloss to maintain the illusion that she is unaware of their sensuality. The entrant almost always mirrors her surprise, and then she smiles, and the ice is broken.

This one is a man in his mid-forties, and she quickly gathers a whole basket of information, she has to get in fast, like a surgeon, before the man closes up which they do as soon as they notice there is a game to be played here. Maybe they expected the acneic face of a high school boy or Martin Gormless himself. The man’s hair has started turning the colour of a 50p coin but is not thinning, its vitality will be a source of confidence for him. A moderate paunch is just visible under the nondescript winter coat, indicating a wife, confirmed by a wedding ring – bachelors are either toned or have completely let themselves go. He has the face of a man who prefers baths to showers. His rimless glasses do not make his eyes appear either bigger or smaller. Enough wrinkles to indicate at least two kids, laughter mostly, the scolding being done by someone else.

A good father, or fathoming himself a good father, perhaps continuing to tickle the little girl even after she says ‘no’. His features are washy and classic enough in these parts to make her approach her prey with confidence. She’s had dozens like him, in the past few months.

She makes the most of the five steps out from behind the till – has practiced them many times, misusing the full-size mirror intended for male and practical use. The small, hard nipples stand up like Athena’s lance through her white, tight, a little transparent shirt. She has taken to wearing unpadded bras to hammock her breasts which are the shape and size of navel oranges. The freshness of her twenty-year-old face is as unalterable as the fact that coffee-flavoured beers are the new IPA. By the time she reaches the man, extends her hand, there is usually confusion.

‘Let me take your coat,’ she offers, having let the confusion tousle the man’s greying hair. She gets her accent to shine through and it continues to resonate, reverberate in the man’s head so he can’t fully focus on what he’s doing. She watches patiently, benevolently, as the man uncloaks himself. She has disregarded Martin’s instructions with regards to saving on heating expenses and the shop is always warm as a jungle. Doesn’t Martin know that heat mellows the mind and body? The man struggles to divest himself, in his confusion has forgotten about the banal scarf – no doubt a present from the wife, Ella can see her clearly in front of her inner eye, as though she knew her, a woman who works some office job of no consequence, with hair bleached blonde, who jokes loudly with colleagues in the singing-saw accent they have here, using the right words for the place, innit – which holds the coat together at the neck. Ella always enjoys this moment immensely, enjoys men taking off their clothes for her, in her shop, while she watches patiently but not without some judgement. She’s been on the other side.

The exercise of making a sale, Ella has discovered, is about designing a rollercoaster: an up must follow a down, a humiliation be redeemed by a gesture that will bring swelling in all the wrong places.

When she turns, there’s a surprising bum, a shelf that could hold a conversation, unlike the self-effacing ones worn by thin women in films, an arse as round and big as the moon that, you can tell, would be jiggled if shaken – and is, as the heavy coat is heaved onto the hanger – a departure from the small breasts and hard, slim waist, the stones of hip points. At that moment, the client usually notices his surroundings, the sultry French singer susurrating through shop speakers a tad too loud – in this too, Ella has disobeyed Martin who thinks low-volume Classic FM will give his clients a nice, familiar environment – and too late, if they weren’t really planning on buying anything, that their coat has been taken hostage.

She takes her time with it. When she turns again, the man has a carnivorous look that jars with his fatherly, comfort-loving face. But them’s the breaks, in sales, she knows, has been told, or that’s what she understood, at least. She fake-mirrors the look with a gracious smile, making him feel like that’s what he looks like too, lip corners curved up as if receiving a Klimtian neck kiss.

Before he can think of his wife and recite instructions, she says she knows exactly what he needs, what he needs is this grey suit that’s almost shiny, almost silver. She sees uncertainty flash before his eyes, the wife – she enjoys making them buy the wrong suits, the ones that are sent by wives, and see them return a week or two later, with their tails soft now between legs, murmuring they would like to buy another suit, black this time. Sometimes they don’t return, but that doesn’t concern her, her gambit ends at Christmas. Of course, they had to tell the wives they simply loved the grey shiny suit or the electric blue one that makes them look like a trombone player. Why, otherwise, would they have bought it?

While he changes into the grey suit – just to try it, just for me, for the pleasure of the eyes as they say in Morocco – she rustles the curtain once or twice when she assesses the man is at his most vulnerable, hunched over a pant leg, paunch at its least appealing dragging down like a full udder, white, boyish undies stretched on hairy cracks, high socks on skinny legs – in men, legs turn old first. In women, necks.

When he comes out, flustered, perhaps a little angry, feeling violated by the rustle and the cold shower of the brightly lit mirror in the cabin – down – it’s time to admire him, there’s hope after all – up again. She coos softly and with genuine tenderness, important not to appear false now so she makes herself love the skinny arms in the absurd material, brushes down a crease at the back of the jacket like a mother would, takes a step back, gently pulls him in front of the mirror and doesn’t let go of his arm there, there they both are, the man in a grey suit and the young woman with the navel-orange breasts gently stroking his arm, and she watches, pleased, as his mirror reflection births a small bird at the crotch that beats like a heart.

They’re wide-eyed, the grey-haired ones who sometimes haven’t been touched by a woman other than their wife or mother for ten, twenty years, and not for a long time with intention, with discovery, with curiosity and hunger. After that, when she removes her hand briskly – an eye cast down, the spell is broken, a last plummet – what can they do other than say they’ll take it? They hurry back into the cabin, and if sometimes the braver ones take an unduly long time in there, come out clenching and unclenching a fist, she won’t notice, will have been absorbed with something else and be charming at the till. Important to always send the customer off on a good note, Martin had said, and for once, she had agreed. A good open-ended send-off meant there was space to return for the new tie or correct black suit they would soon need.

It’s the hour between dog and wolf when she leaves the shop. Season-wise, it’s not quite the dead of winter, there’s a bit of life in the old focker yet. The air is pleasantly laden with decomposing leaves and stars are already getting bogged down in the mud by the canal, which must be carted in from the country in designer bags, she thinks, a feature opted into by the City of London, barely enough to get your shoes dirty. She likes the unfamiliar smell coming out of Boots and Marks & Spencer, the neatly lighted and nestled artefacts, the turd-naked pavements that always surprise her with their indoors appearance. Ella devours the smell of decay, seeking the paper-cut sharpness of underlying freeze under the perfume and chicken wraps. She looks into all the faces, as one would into brightly lit windows at that time in the evening after lights are turned on, before curtains are pulled. She looks with curiosity, obscenely, hungrily, can’t help herself, looking for what? Sometimes a gaze is returned like when she’s in the shop, and now her gaze is held, the man walks towards her as if to block the sidewalk, a dark figure backlit by the streetlamp. Scared, she comes to a stop.

Tell me Ella, what has become of that sweet young man, the kind boyfriend who was never seen again?

Towards the end, they had fucked with the energy of despair, trying to create a spark through mere friction. He had become as safe and annoying as a brother, they had become shy of their bodies as siblings would. The way he walked, emphasis on the ball of the foot, was the gait of a younger brother; a semi-colon walk.

‘Don’t you love me?’ he had asked. Ella, alone.

‘Don’t you recognize me?’ the man whose face remains in the shadow says with a wide grin, and then she does, he is one of those she had preferred to forget – must forget, the show must go on – for he had come in looking like any other, and married his hand said, and had left victoriously with a black suit, had even come out of the cabin grinning with that same impudent smile. The discrepancies would have left her unsure had she let them.

She shoos the blood back out of her heart and face which have become unpleasantly congested. She had wound down for the night, turned it off, and needs to wind up again, but she is tired-hungry. Now she makes herself feel like the man and her are two wildfires that could merge into a headline-worthy inferno.

‘How about a drink?’ he demands. She hesitates, not sure how to win. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he says, what a stupid thing to say, he is a stupid man, and now she has to accept – just long enough to assert her dominance. If she says no now, she’ll come across as a timorous little girl, whose ‘no’ can be easily overheard anyways, he’ll never know that she is strong and it is important that he does, or he might laugh at her the way boys at school laughed (kicking her padlock under the locker so she would have to go down on all fours), and she has left that Ella behind bars in the playground.

At Jam & Jelly, it is as though she has fallen into a rabbit hole in her Instagram feed. He apparates falsely light lemony drinks – them hipsters got some things right, she thinks (albeit not the art of picking undeceiving names for cocktail bars), eyes lost in the Fata Morgana of golden drink lights, a castle made out of expensive, exquisite bottles – until she hangs in a hammock of spider webs high up, right under the ceiling, attracting looks, huge. There’s small comfort in knowing her friends could make fun of this place, its vintage teacups and maya wall hangings, and of the people with short fringes, cloaked in maya wall hangings.

He is talking about art (her subject!), making her feel small:

‘You mean you don’t know Pierre-Auguste Cot?’ Looking genuinely hurt, his gaze gets lost over the lights. He’s thinking of more sophisticated, experienced women. The next second he leans in, brushes something (what?) off her face:

‘You have the most delicious-looking lips,’ he says close, making a trail of nettle stings from her ear down to her shoulder. Breath, sweat, cologne. Want. Don’t want. That being said, when was the last time someone had desired her with such class and passion? Dean certainly hadn’t, she makes herself think.

The man jokes about the suit he is wearing – ‘and you wanted to sell me that dreadful brown one’ – she cuts him off, petulant like a child:

‘I hate your suit.’ She blushes with shame, she has let her guard down, shown all her cards, and he laughs, white teeth clinking like cocktail glasses.

‘I’ll take it off then, will I?’

He peels out of the black, elegant jacket – the most expensive suit in the shop, the one she had sometimes brushed her cheek against, something even her father would wear – and she tries to bring up the judgemental look she uses for undressing customers but it doesn’t come. Underneath, his white shirt is taut, starched. She can’t help but look at the wide shoulders like a reassuring living-room coffee table, the sloping belly an appealing Sunday morning pillow and – is that his nipples piercing through like snowdrops? It should be ridiculous, but instead all she feels is the unbearable need to take them into her lips, to let him be father and mother at once and more. Her disgusting, chapped lips; she was stupid to think she was pretty before. Who does she think she is?

She feels dizzy – is it from the rollercoaster, or from the drinks? She suddenly remembers she hasn’t eaten anything since morning.

‘Excuse me,’ she mumbles and gets up with all the grace of a whale on dry land. She knows her exit is a forfeit, he won’t want her now, but she has to get to the bathroom, she feels incredibly nauseous. His playful laugh follows her until she turns the corner. She stumbles closer to the door, just a few more steps, when the fringes of her vision darken. She panics, where is her phone, where is her wallet, she’s still wearing her jacket, was the phone in the right or the left pocket?

‘I think I’m going to faint,’ she says to no-one in particular; and next, she’s in a dream world, where things are strange but comfortingly blurry, unimportant.

When she comes back to consciousness, it’s to a sea of swirling and concerned-looking bearded faces and she instantly knows that the dream world was an infinitely better place. There’s something sticky under her hand and her chest is burning cold. The bearded people ask if she’s diabetic and if she wants an ambulance, over and over again. She’s being fed peanuts and coke, all on the house, some part of her thinks.

‘No,’ she says, ‘no, no, no, no, no, no.’

She even forces a smile. She becomes aware of a warm, reassuring presence. Someone is stroking her back, brushing back hair from a sweat-covered face. She has never felt such shame. She wishes they would all just go away. She starts to see the kind person, whom for a second she took to be me: it’s a woman with a short fringe and mom jeans. They tell her she’s lucky she was there, she caught her before Ella hit the ground. She feels flooded with love. Ashamed and grateful, she takes the woman’s hand and squeezes it. Shame, shame, ashamed she is, shamed.

‘You’re all right,’ the woman says and smiles, revealing a gum piercing. After a while, people disperse.

‘Are you here with someone?’ the kind woman asks. Ella says she has to go to the loo. On the other side of the glass castle, the man hasn’t noticed the commotion.

She drops into the softly lit mirror, surprised at how normal and pretty she still looks. There’s the apricot lips and canyon cheekbones under olive eyes, now crossed (some find it endearing). He had taken that from her, momentarily, and she is feebly angry.

It’s one of those places where there’s only one bathroom, it’s on the ground floor and it doesn’t look like a bathroom in a bar, rather like your Spanish friend’s grandmother’s bathroom where you once spewed chorizo stew all over as a result of too much calimocho. It’s got a home-bathroom sized window, that is, one that you could easily climb out of, one that could shrink you back to your normal size – so she does, jiggling the latch (thanks, Martin), remembering to unlock the bathroom door before birthing herself out, she rolls onto the ground in a dramatic stunt-double act and laughs, freed, a child again – a happy flutter comes up in her belly like when she was playing cowboys and Indians, or that time when she had spied on my lover and I in the kitchen. Stealthily, she sneaks up onto the wall, a trellis of ivy grows up it and she climbs, roughing up her clothing but that doesn’t matter when you’re a child – she drops down on the other side and scrapes her knees, the pain a party-pooper as she now stands up with tears in her eyes. She has become the mannequin behind brightly lit windows people stare at dully, torn tights and fucked knees.

Car brake lights and traffic signals turn the wet street into a river of fresh blood. She walks upstream until the open mouth of a tube station floods her with white light and relief, she runs down, her Oyster card finds itself after the briefest of panics, she jumps onto a departing train at the platform. She sits with shaking and bleeding legs, a filly after the race, and although she realizes that she has taken the train in the wrong direction – the sudden transplantation of place chills her like an icy drink – she has to stay on for another two stops before she can make use of herself again.

At home, she puts on Dean’s hoodie and smells it like a junkie. It wouldn’t do to have this scene in a story, to record that she notices how a little bit of his smell drains out each day. She wouldn’t be a good character.

But this isn’t some story: it’s my daughter’s life.

My darling Ella. Did your heart bleed, did your soul weep, what did you reap that near-winter eve, far away from home?

Oh, Ella.

From issue #11: spring/summer 2021

About the Author
Claire Kieffer was born in the Alsace region in France. In her decade of adulthood, she had tried both working and travelling. Now she’s trying writing in Galway where she is enrolled in the MA in Writing at NUIG. A writer of poetry and prose, she enjoys mixing genres and experimenting with light and texture.