Katy is a writer from London. The below story explores relationships, communication and power and is part of a collection focussing on the lives of queer Londoners. Katy has a Classics degree from the University of Cambridge and currently works for a health charity. She shares her home office with her housemate, an avocado plant and a bowl of marbles.

Contact details: katycastle @ gmail.com

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Eggs

Harris hung his jacket on the back of the chipboard chair and adjusted it until the waxed cotton sleeves fell in two straight lines. He sat down opposite Grace and shifted closer to the café’s matching chipboard table. There was a sour taste in his throat and a queasiness in his stomach, which suggested, unfortunately, that he’d ended the party last night with whisky shots.

Grace flipped the wire mechanism on the glass bottle that stood on the table, tipped it and poured water into two glasses. The water made a tinkling sound as if applauding itself. ‘So,’ she said, as she pushed one towards Harris, ‘We made you an action plan last night. Do you remember?’

It was worrying that she was already asking how much he remembered. Before replying, Harris gulped down the whole glass. His hands seemed larger than normal. The glasses were so small in this café he had a sudden image of himself as André the Giant. He had an odd memory of telling the thick-eyebrowed woman the night before that André the Giant carried the script of the Princess Bride wherever he went. Why did he say that? And why couldn’t he remember the woman’s name? He placed the glass back on the table and cleared his throat.

‘I remember. According to you, I should try and join a community,’ he said. ‘I thought I might start supporting a women’s football team. I hear you can go to matches quite easily.’ Harris enjoyed being friends with women. Emotions were expected. He quit watching football years ago because it hurt too much when Liverpool lost. Women’s football felt different, safer. ‘Do Liverpool have a women’s team?’ he asked.

Grace took a sip of water. ‘Who gave you that idea?’ she said. ‘Pretty sure Liverpool aren’t doing well. If you want feel-good vibes maybe support a local team. But most of the women are queer, you realise, in football.’

‘Alright. I see,’ Harris rested his right elbow on the table and pointed his forefinger at Grace. ‘You want me to back off out of your territory.’

Grace rolled her eyes.

‘I’m joking,’ he said, smiling and raising his hands in a gesture of innocence. ‘They can’t all be queer.’ Harris had been seriously considering women’s football ever since one thirty that morning – ever since the woman with thick eyebrows had mentioned it. Was that before or after she used her teeth to pop the lid on his beer?

‘True, I mustn’t generalise,’ Grace replied. ‘I guess you want me as your wingwoman? I’ll try not to steal them all for myself.’ She clasped her menu with both hands. ‘What are you getting? I haven’t been here for ages. I told you I dated a woman who worked here? The one who had a rabbit and was obsessed with astrology. She moved to Brighton I think.’

‘Astrology is a joke,’ Harris said, resettling himself on the flimsy chair. He didn’t remember any rabbit-owning woman.

Harris had met Grace at a rainy music festival a couple of summers ago. They were working the bar, serving overpriced Red Stripe to spangled and sparkly punters. Both were newly single, and both were up for going out and having fun. But whether he approached them on nights out, dating apps, or by writing his number on a receipt, the women Harris wanted rarely wanted him.

Except, maybe, eyebrow woman from last night. He bet Grace would have remembered her name. It was irritating, the way Grace picked up girls endlessly. It was typical as well, that she would take him somewhere she had romantic history. This wasn’t the sort of café he liked to go to. They were playing music that Harris, hating himself, recognised as Spotify’s Lo-Fi Café playlist. Absolutely every piece of furniture was chipboard – chairs, table, counter. It was like a set in a pretend café being watched by a studio audience. Or some kind of platonic alcohol-free First Dates. He preferred Joe’s, the wifi-less greasy spoon at the end of his road. Joe’s had more substance. It took cash. Coins had substance. A piece of paper taped next to the iZettle read ‘CARD ONLY’. It made him inexplicably enraged, so he avoided looking at it. His wallet sat, leather and proud, on the table. He patted it. He had recently read that cash might disappear in two years’ time. He always made sure he had a twenty-pound note on him. Just in case.

‘Of course, astrology is a joke. And she had a rabbit! It would never have lasted. But you know, queer women are everywhere!’ Grace said. ‘Especially in this area.’ She stretched her arms out wide.

Harris was distracted by the drone of a woman singing along to guitar. A misguided employee had decided now was the time to play Tracy Chapman. Would it be homophobic to ask for a return to the empty chill beats?

Grace, seemingly unaffected, was still talking. ‘But today, I hate everyone, queer women and all. I feel kind of hemmed in, you know? I want to be somewhere without people, like a field, or something. We’re so densely packed. Like in the bagel shop last night. I hated so much that there was a queue of people who also wanted a bagel at four in the morning. I wanted to get home.’

‘That bagel shop is probably one of the last places on the street that’s not only there for the entertainment of drunk people,’ Harris said, feeling disagreeable because along with the depressing music there was now an unusual gurgling in his lower stomach. What was Grace saying? That he’d kept her at the party too long? Surely, she hadn’t seen the woman give him her number. What was the woman’s name? It was a shame he’d saved her in his phone as ‘Hot Eyebrows’.

‘The shop’s been there since before,’ Harris continued. The stomach gurgling was very unpleasant. ‘There’s a queue because people go there. People go there on their way to work. It’s real life.’ Real life, the life Harris imagined when he said this, was one where he no longer woke up alone on Saturday mornings, downed paracetamol and texted friends in the hope one would be free. In this imagined reality, Harris laid in till midday, coiled in bedsheets with a regular and inventive lover. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and scrunched it into a ball. If only someone else had replied before Grace this morning. He had forgotten she could be so twitchy on a hangover. ‘Thanks for meeting me for brunch,’ he said. ‘I hate lying in bed on my own.’

‘Any time,’ Grace said, still reading the menu. ‘Maybe not everyone in the queue was on their way home. That girl who was saying they should give her the bagel for free was fucked though. I think she was on mushrooms or something. The staff there must get so much of that shit. I feel for them.’

The waitress arrived. She had a tattoo of some kind of animal – a whale? – which crept out of her sleeve. Harris envied people who had tattoos. The certainty! The confidence! He would have a tattoo if there was anything good enough to get inked on his body, but he hadn’t found it yet.

Grace looked up and smiled. She rested a hand briefly on the waitress’s tattooed arm before ordering the vegetarian breakfast, with tomatoes instead of mushrooms and an extra poached egg.

Harris cringed. Why did she have to order something that wasn’t on the menu? He studied his laminated menu carefully, as if looking for a spelling mistake. He had in fact noticed a spelling mistake, but he wasn’t the kind of person who pointed it out.

‘I’ll have,’ he said, ‘the vegan breakfast with scrambled eggs please. Plus a flat white and an orange juice. And – is it possible – the music is making me feel quite downbeat.’

The waitress scribbled their order down as she replied. ‘Our chef loves this album. Once it’s over we’ll change it.’

‘Right,’ Harris said. He’d bet anything the chef was queer.

After the waitress left Grace did something that made her eyes expansive and laughed. ‘Harris, I can’t believe you don’t want Tracy this morning! For God’s sake. You love to be morose. Also, that waitress was working here when I dated the rabbit astrology woman. She might give us a discount if you’re nicer when she brings our food.’ Grace stretched, hooked an arm over the back of her chair and turned to survey the café.

Harris wriggled his shoulders. He was only morose because nothing good had happened to him recently. Sure, he had a job and a place to live and no one close to him had ever died. But those weren’t the things that gave him sustenance. He checked his phone. It was too soon to text Hot Eyebrows. He’d wait until Sunday evening, when the weekend was done.

Grace leant forward. ‘Come on. Don’t be a grump. Look at those two over there.’

Harris made a pretence of looking at the specials board so he could see them, though really, he wasn’t interested in what some strangers were up to. ‘Those women? What about them?’

‘Such intense chats! I don’t like the body language of the curly-haired one with her back to us. They’re definitely queer. Look at that jacket. One of them is being dumped, I think.’

‘Right,’ Harris said. He still felt queasy. Grace was obsessed with spotting queer women. If he mentioned Hot Eyebrows she’d jump on him, tell him the woman was queer, though her reasons would be vague, at least. The length of her fingernails or size of her bum bag. He’d heard it all.

Grace was still whispering. ‘I think the one in the jacket is being dumped. Yes. I hope she’s OK.’

‘Grace. I bet one of them is just telling a sad story. Leave them alone.’

Grace turned back to the table and glanced at her phone. ‘I’m not being nosy, I’m being concerned. Let’s hope she’s OK, shall we? I’m taking a responsible interest in the world around me.’

‘That’s what you kept saying last night,’ Harris said. The paracetamol he’d taken earlier was wearing off. It felt like André the Giant was thwunking him on the head with a rock.

‘Me? I said something?’ Grace replied, pushing the tines of her fork into the chipboard.

‘You kept saying it was your responsibility to take an interest in this woman with amazing eyebrows because she was so fit.’ Harris said this very fast, at the same pace as the thwunking in his skull.

‘I did?’ Grace was holding the fork tightly. She pressed it into the table again and again.

‘Yeah, we made a whole plan for you in fact, how you were going to try and make a move,’ Harris said. His fingers were tightly interlaced. He knew he remembered this correctly. Grace had been more drunk than him at this point. That was probably what encouraged him to do those whisky shots, to get on the same level. He liked being friends with women but they were a lot when they were drunk.

Grace pointed the fork at him. ‘I did?’

‘Yeah, then I don’t know where you went but she was in the kitchen for a while with someone else.’ Harris unlaced his fingers and rested his arms on the rough chipboard. It wasn’t important right now to mention he was the someone else.

Grace put down the fork. ‘Oh yeah, she was pretty hot. Such serious brows. But I’m pretty sure I was chatting to you most of the night. Then again, my period is due next week. I always go on a mad one the week before. Ovaries just popping off.’

Harris nodded, unsure if he was allowed to agree.

‘Did you get with anyone?’ Grace asked, with a half-smile. ‘Oh no, I wasn’t fanny-banning you was I?’

‘What the fuck is that?’ Harris gripped his fingers together again. Had he accidentally jogged her memory?

‘It’s like cock-blocking but for women. I just invented it. What do you think?’ She flung her arms out in emphasis and knocked over the saltshaker.

‘Please. Never say it again,’ Harris said, grateful for the saltshaker and Grace’s limited spatial awareness. He took a napkin from an industrial-sized old bean tin and wiped up the spilt salt. It had fallen into all the fork holes Grace had made in the table. ‘And no,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t anyone there I was interested in.’ He blinked too hard and felt another sharp pain in his head.

Harris had been too scared to approach any of the women at the party. They were either with boyfriends or had the sort of haircut and facial piercings that read Fuck Off Man. But Hot Eyebrows had spoken to him for a while in the kitchen. The emphatic way her brow framed her face reminded him of a girl in his Year Eight maths class who would stick out her tongue when she beat him in tests. Hot Eyebrows said she supported Arsenal Ladies. Feeling smooth, Harris said he was already a fan and asked if she wanted to watch a match with him. He took her number, sent a wave emoji (sea wave – it’s a pun, he had said). He just couldn’t remember where Grace was at the time. He had maybe kind of stolen her girl.

Finally, the waitress came back with their drinks. She had pushed up her sleeves so Harris could see the whole of the tattoo. It was cheaply done. It wasn’t as nice as he’d thought. The lines had blurred. He used the teaspoon to scoop the top layer of frothy milk. ‘So, you do remember most of last night?’ he asked, licking the spoon clean.

‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘I wasn’t that drunk.’

They sat in silence. Harris considered Grace’s tone of voice. He enjoyed being friends with Grace, but she was hard to read sometimes. But if she knew, she’d have said something. He was now pretty sure that she hadn’t been in the kitchen. He relaxed his shoulders.

‘You don’t always know what I’m feeling!’ The cry rang out above the clamour of the café. Unnerved, Harris looked up at Grace, but she was scrutinising the far corner. ‘It’s that couple,’ she said.

Harris contemplated turning, but looking up had hurt his head, so he sat still.

‘It’s hard to tell which one it was,’ Grace said. ‘I knew something was weird. Maybe the one with curly hair? She’s standing up. Now she’s putting her coat on.’

Grace’s narration was more painful than his headache. Slowly, Harris twisted. There was a dull thudding in his temple. The curly-haired woman was saying something to the other one – ‘That’s definitely her girlfriend,’ Grace said. ‘I hope she’s OK,’ – and walked out of the café. The other one, who was definitely her girlfriend, stayed, shrunk into her jacket.

Their breakfasts appeared. Harris made a point of smiling at the waitress, but only because of her good timing, rather than to wangle a discount. He felt betrayed by the measly-sized portion. His scramble was at risk of getting drenched in his beans and there was a curious slice of radish on top. Joe’s café served huge greasy spoon platters. Harris tried to block out the sounds of Tracy Chapman as he ate. It took him approximately three minutes to eat it all. He stroked a piece of sourdough around his plate to soak up the last of the bean sauce.

‘I feel a fraction more human,’ he said to Grace, who was eating bizarrely slowly. ‘Wasn’t enough though. I could eat that over again.’ He stood up and made his way across the room. The hangover made him feel like he was an astronaut walking through space. The toilets were downstairs. To get there, he passed the woman who was potentially an abandoned girlfriend.

‘I don’t have my card on me,’ she was saying to the waitress. ‘I left it at – .’

Harris pushed open a chipboard cubicle door and sat down with relief. The food and coffee had finally set his bowels in motion. He checked his phone. He had replies from the others now, the ones he had messaged earlier. He left them unread. He would explain later he had already made plans.

Feeling lighter, he climbed back up the stairs. The abandoned girlfriend was still sitting there, hunched in her jacket, typing furiously on her phone. Every so often she glanced at the door.

‘Did you see what was going on over there?’ Grace asked as soon as he sat down. ‘The waitress was with that woman for ages and now she’s back behind the counter looking worried –’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, drinking the last of his juice. He wished he’d brought paracetamol with him. ‘She might have lost her card.’

‘Harris, come on. We should pay for her,’ Grace continued. ‘You never seem to care about other people. I know I was saying earlier that I can’t deal with how busy this place is, but she’s clearly been dumped by a girlfriend who is some kind of control freak. Or, she’s ended the relationship herself. What if she was being financially abused?’

Grace sounded like she thought she was the woman’s social worker, or something. It was really none of their business. Harris was ready to go home and get back into bed. ‘I do care about other people,’ Harris said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I think everyone is in crisis all the time. Like I said, probably she lost her card somewhere.’

‘I saw their body language. You’re so obtuse. There was some serious power play going on. I’m going to go and talk to her.’ Grace pushed her chair back and sped across the room.

Harris was insatiably thirsty. He poured himself more water and examined the tiny glass. What would it be like to be André the Giant? When he looked up, the waitress was standing next to Grace, who had taken the empty chair and was sitting beside the abandoned girlfriend. Was Grace holding her hand? For fuck sake.

‘She said she accidentally left her wallet at home,’ Grace explained when she returned. ‘Her friend was meant to pay but forgot because she was late to her yoga class. She said she’d pay me back but it’s literally five pounds so I said don’t worry, we’ll cover it in our bill.’

‘So there,’ Harris said, taking a napkin from the bean tin and ripping it into long strips. ‘They’re just friends. No need for drama. And maybe you’ve got yourself a new girl.’ He laid the strips on the table. The rock-thwunking in his forehead was back.

‘Harris. Shut up. As if that’s my motivation. I don’t know if I believe her. It’s kind of shit, isn’t it, that you have to pay on card here. I hadn’t thought about that before. I mean, she didn’t have her whole wallet so she didn’t have any cash either, but if she was being financially abused, and someone was controlling her spending, they could have tracked her here. Do you have any cash? I think we should give her enough to cover her Oyster and maybe some food for later?’

Harris looked at the ceiling and took a slow breath.

‘Harris, I know you’ve got cash, you got some out last night for the bagels. I’ll split it with you!’

Maybe it was because Harris privately agreed about the payment system.

‘Why do you care so much?’ he said, picking up the napkin strips and tearing them into pieces. ‘Why do you always care so much about what strangers are doing at other tables. You’re always imagining things. Your imagination is crazy. Crazy. She’s one of those stupid women who lose things all the time, and that’s it. If we give her money she’ll never learn. We should have gone to Joe’s Café. It’s cheaper, the meals are bigger and everyone minds their own business. If we all just went to Joe’s we’d have a quiet time. Why can’t it be coffee and brunch and that’s it. It’s like last night. Why did you keep telling me you fancied that woman with the eyebrows? It’s not fair. You lay claim to things. You just lay claim, and because you’re a lesbian it’s OK. If you were a man you wouldn’t get away with half the things you do. You know that, right? You’re too much.’ Harris stopped. He had the sensation of watching himself from above. Had he become André? But no, his tongue felt dry. It was definitely his tongue. He held his breath, waiting for Grace to speak.

Grace was typing something on her phone. ‘You can pay for me and her,’ she said. Her hand shook slightly, but her voice was steady. The phone wavered to and fro. ‘I paid for the Uber last night. I met you for brunch because you texted that you were feeling anxious, because you wanted company. I remember last night. Do you remember last night? You trapped me in a corner, talking about how hard it is for you to find the soulmate you need, as if a soulmate is a woman to prop you up – and as soon as that eyebrowed woman, who happens to be called Zoe, as soon as she spoke to you, you physically turned your back on me to flirt. And I’m there thinking, should I tell her? Should I warn her about how you take and take and don’t give anything back? No, I thought, fair play to him, I fancied her but she’s interested in you. But now I’m like, I can’t stand by and let her get used. So, I’ve messaged her on Instagram.’

Grace pulled on her jacket and dropped her phone into the pocket. She picked Harris’s wallet up from the table, took out his twenty-pound note and walked over to the woman in the corner.

Harris’s throat felt stuck together. His hands were clammy. He stared at the pile of napkin bits on the table. What the actual fuck. She knew? The whole time? She fucking knew?

‘Grace!’ he called out. ‘What do you mean, you messaged her? How do you know her Instagram? What did you say?’ He tried to ignore the people in the café who were staring at him. His forehead pounded.

Grace was halfway to the door. ‘Fuck you, Harris.’

‘Grace, don’t make a scene. Come back!’ Harris was sweating all over now. He looked down at the table. It was a mess of salt and napkin scraps. Harris dragged his fingers across the chipboard in an effort to tidy up. He was unpicking salt grains from his fingernails when the waitress came to put their bill on the table. She stood over him, brandishing the card reader.

Harris kept his eyes fixed on the reader’s electronic screen. There did not seem to be a discount. He picked up his phone, double tapped the home button, waited for his card to appear and held the phone to the reader. A tick. Staring at the waitress’s whale tattoo to avoid eye contact, he gave a half-nod. Thanks for taking my digital money.

With his phone clutched in his hand, Harris leant back in his chair. The chipboard creaked. Sweat trickled down his temple. He opened WhatsApp, scrolled down to his wave emoji message. Hot Eyebrows had already blocked him. Harris liked women, but they were petty. He sat in the chair for a long while, stroking the salty napkin pieces. Grace didn’t come back.