Someday Find Me by Nicci Cloke Page B

not as if I wasn’t used to girlswho didn’t like to eat in front of people and so I said, ‘Best hurry up if you want any, I’m starving.’ And gave her a grin to show I was only messing. She smiled back and chomped down on her chip.
    ‘What’s your name?’ I asked, to try and get her out of her shell and make her feel a bit more relaxed.
    ‘Win,’ she goes, looking at the floor. ‘It’s short for Winifred.’
    ‘That’s an ace name,’ I said, and I did mean it. ‘Fits right in here, with the gambling and that, you know.’ She nodded like she wasn’t all that sure and then she popped the rest of the chip into her mouth. ‘I’m Fitz,’ I said. And then there was that bit of weird silence you get when you meet somebody new and the introductions are over but the knowing each other hasn’t arrived yet.
    ‘You come here often?’ she asked, and then she went a bit red again and laughed into her hand, like a weird chuckle. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. But do you?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I said, shaking more salt on the chips, cos we’d eaten the top ones and none of the salt had snuck through like it should do. ‘A fair bit, yeah. I like it here. You been working here long?’
    She shook her head and pushed some sticky bits of hair away. ‘I used to work at their other place. You know Wheel of Fortune?’ I nodded, cos I did, but I didn’t like it much. A bit posh for me. I like a place where your feet stick to the carpet if you stand still too long; where nobody’s pretending to be something they’re not and everyone knows what they’re there for and you know where you are. ‘I used to work there. But I kept dropping things and getting into trouble, so they sent me here instead. Same owners innit.’
    ‘Oh, right,’ I went. ‘You like it then, waitressing? I work behind a bar so quite similar really. I don’t mind it. The free drinks are good. Get to chat to people. Not bad really.’
    She poked at her fingers with the points on the little bendy plastic fork. ‘I’m not very good at it.’
    ‘You just need a bit of practice.’ I folded the lid over on the empty tray and brushed the salt off the table top. ‘Honest, it’s like when I started at the bar, couldn’t even pour a pint, you know, all fluffy and foamy like a cloud and people getting moustaches every time they even sniffed it. And now it’s like people come from miles around just for a fine golden pint poured by my fair hand.’ I gave her a little wiggle of the fingers so she could see. She was a bit of a starer, actually, like she’d forgotten she was meant to talk when you’d finished or she was just frozen into place waiting for the words to catch up.
    After a minute, she shrugged and said, ‘Maybe. Hopefully I’ll get better.’ And then she sat and waited for me to say something.
    There was a little telly up over the counter, kind of pointed so as we could see it and most of the empty tables could see and the guy scraping the silver hot bits you keep the food on could see it too. The news was on, same as it was everywhere, but it wasn’t the front door any more, they were playing this dodgy short clip of CCTV footage instead, to try and jog people’s memories, which I never understood really, as if you’d look at it and suddenly think, Actually yes, I did see that girl whose face is on all the buses and billboards and fag packets in the whole city and I’m just now remembering looking at this blurry little clip. It was playing on a loop while the presenters were reading headlines we couldn’t hear because the volume was turned all the way down. It was like we were being hypnotised with this black-and-white video of a blonde-haired girl walking out of the pub, down past Wok Around the Clock and the Funky Chicken and then disappearing behind the bottom of the screen. I watched her go down the screen ten or twelve times and the whole time I felt more and more that I really needed to cuddle Saffy, and to kiss her, and to