Printed from WriteWords - http://www.writewords.org.uk/archive/9821.asp

I`m not a liar

by  Arezoo

Posted: Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Word Count: 3040




Content Warning
This piece and/or subsequent comments may contain strong language.


I’m not a liar
****
No I’m not a liar; I mean I don’t very often lie about common issues. But once you tell one lie there is an inevitable chain of lies which follows, one dragging you to the other and you simply can not help it. There was this young guy in his thirties, coming every afternoon to the café where I was working as a waitress. He was meticulously well dressed up but at the same time without any single sign of extravagant arrogance or pretension. What made his appearance even more pleasant was the extremely indifferent and detached look he had on his face, the delicate way he held his neck, slightly bent to the right and a phantom smile occasionally creasing his face and quickly disappearing before being noticed. You see that I carefully studied his face and did it day after day in the most attentive way and this is not something which happens very often with me in regard to the customers.
It is not rare for us to have smartly dressed up people in our café, given that we are one of the best locales situated not far from the town college. So you often see one or a couple of them holding a book or a newspaper entering the café choosing the most isolated and least lighted up corner, starting to read and drink one coffee after another. Most of them also have this indifferent air in their looks as if nothing of what is going on around really concerns them. But all this contemplative detachment could be easily challenged by a good-looking, feminine scented lady customer passing their table. Then they start not to be at ease with their reading, with the way they were sitting, with all the gestures they had achieved so far to carry on.
Anyway about this special guy everything was so different. Each day he entered the café at exactly the same time about 3 p.m., without carrying any unnecessary object such as a newspaper or a book, for God’s sake he didn’t need any of those, so profoundly taken by his thoughts and not in need of artificial means of keeping oneself busy and he was so genially detached from all the surrounding that even if some nasty thieves broke into the café with their guns pointing at the customers and threatening them to hand out their wallets, as has happened in a lunchroom downtown, he wouldn’t have been least distracted. He would have sit down as in peace as before, ordering perhaps his next coffee while quietly putting his wallet on the table and after having his one hour of stay in the café would have slid out of the door without turning his head back to have the final look at the scared faces of the customers and triumphant smiles of the thieves! God’s almighty he was so original and you shouldn’t be one of those fucking educated intellectuals to notice his genuine ways, even me a simple waitress, sometimes pleased by some drunk guy pinching my ass or saying dirty words in my ears,could notice his thoroughly distinguished personality.
Anyway I’m not a particularly romantic girl and as I have more important things to tend to rather than being in love with a guy customer whose name I hardly remember now, I didn’t intend to make a fool of myself by trying to have any kind of affair with him. There was this queer sense of curiosity though to somehow see something inside him, to figure out what gave him such an assured untroubled distraction and all these aroused a hell of an excitement in me when he was there. That is the worst that can happen to a waitress, to be excited and then you are in big trouble, you are frustrated and move about in a funny careless manner, you lose all your graceful acts of serving the drinks, collecting the money and putting the nice final smile on your face. You become an old lame cat, faltering clumsily about. This is exactly what happened to me eventually resulting in a tray full of drinks to slide out of my hands and fall down exactly about where he was sitting. There came a heavy silence about in the café so pressing that he finally gave up the hidden spot where he was staring at and for the first time our eyes met each other. I told you that I am not a romantic girl and you can never make up a story out of what I’m just telling you to suggest otherwise. But at that somehow embarrassing moment, intensified by the odd silence around, his gaze touched something very deep inside me, something which came all the way up as a lump in my throat and I broke into the most awful cough.
There is something in the awkwardness of some incidents I assume, which has kind of a resolving power for those taking part in or witnessing it, as if pointing to a yet unnoticed safe bridge over a seemingly un-crossable deep valley. So the guy which hardly ever moved out of his seat, knelt down besides me and helped me to clean up the mess. The next moment I was sitting opposite to him, sipping the tasty coffee he had ordered for me and listening to his silky tender voice. He had just moved to this town and in the first day had found our café which he described as being so tastefully cozy. He didn’t mention his profession though but asked about mine as if he had not fully realized that I was a simple waitress. That is when I was forced to fabricate a fake story, to make my position more comprehensible or maybe appealing for him. I told him that I was actually an actress, playing in one of the town theatres but as is the case with the acting profession, you never have a permanent job, so I had to take an extra to make the ends meet. If I had not seen that peculiar shine in his eyes when I told him about it, I wouldn’t have been pushed to tell more lies. Then I told him that the theatre season was about to start the week after and I would stop working in the café and would be busy as a full time actress. He said that it was a pity because he couldn’t see me anymore; I assume that this was more of a polite comment than a seductive compliment but it somehow kindled the courage in me for the next lie. I was about playing in an adaptation of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard as my next act and I would be really happy if he could attend the opening day play, I suggested. As I had already seen the advertisements about Cherry Orchard all over the town, this lie was at least a thoughtful one. He should be somehow into the theatre or some kind of art business because again that lovely shine came to his eyes, uttering that it is an honor for him to see me playing in such a masterful piece of art. I don’t know how long this conversation took, whether he finally departed or I was called back to my service. All I know is, that day, that very simple day of late summer when people move gaily around trying to breathe the last gulps of the generous summer warm air in, I was left in such a miserable situation that I presume was the worst that could happen to one’s life. I had to quit my job, there was no doubt about it, you can not move about telling idle lies to a man of such a refined personality. I had to quit my job and even worse I had to somehow find a role in this damned Cherry Orchard play, whatever rudimentary role it is, I must have it. So now I’m here and I hope you are kind enough to grant me with a trivial role on stage not to leave me with everlasting embarrassing feeling that I have played a nasty trick on the loveliest man I have ever met.
*****
While listening to her I was all the time wondering where the hell this long nonsense fabricated story is going to end. I could hardly guess though that it is one of the odd tricks armatures play on you to get into the acting business. I had experienced hundreds of thousands of those so far, given the unprecedented unemployment problem in the country and the growing public interest in becoming actors which if you ask me I’d say was due to some global change in climate or diet that fortifies those suppressed ambitions such as becoming a famous actor! For God’s sake, why else should a mature person dare to head for one of the most difficult but least paid and prosperous professions? You should either have a genuine talent or an enormous passion to ever dare to become an actor.
Anyway I’m not about analyzing our society’s psychological complexes, all I want to say is that we had this busy season of autumn and a very difficult piece of theatre before us, I had to recruit the old actors and hire some newcomers to fill in the vacant roles and it was no time to fool around and flirt with an insane girl who was a cheap liar as well. So without a moment of hesitation I was just about putting her off and I had even half opened my mouth to say so when she made this fascinating movement of her hands as of a prayer or a ballerina, murmuring softly “just an auxiliary role”. Everybody has his weak points and I should admit that a graceful gesture or move can really drive me out of my sensible mind. So I was lured to examine her on one of the yet vacant supporting roles.
Gee-wiz, she was so utterly brilliant, probably because she was so good a liar as well. Anyway if it wasn’t for some other back-stage considerations, I might have even offered her one of the main roles! When you are led off to the road of insanity there is no limit for how far you can go astray. So far though it was not a big deviation of my position as a well-established theatre director, I had offered an armature but talented actress an auxiliary role and on her side it was fair enough as well, she was no longer unemployed and was saved of all its consequences, say even those related to her deceitful love-story. If you have any doubt about whether my decision was sensible or not, you should have seen the other movement she made to show her gratitude, that of a swan spreading its wings before rising to fly and for God’s sake I was not only moved but was trembling with excitement all over my body .It
wasn’t one of those exaggerated gestures that kids learn in drama school, it was something original, something genuinely beautiful. You consider me as being a sentimental fool perhaps, but I should declare that you are either a helpless skeptic or absolutely ignorant about faculty of drama. This profession makes you sensitive to the nuances of human-beings facial expressions and body movements and I wasn’t an exception of this common inclination among the theatre professionals. What made me an exception in making a fool of myself though came afterwards, when after all our rehearsal sessions, pretending to go for a walk to shake off a hard day tiring work; I followed her in the streets all the way to her house. Watching her swing about in the streets had kind of inspiring effect on me, there are some people with an inherent grace in every single move they make and she was one of those and I had no doubt about it. This is all about my story with this lady and now I was just taking my time to think about the details of my observations today, when you suddenly jumped on me as if I have somehow intruded your privacy or that of hers and if I’ve done such a terrible mistake, please accept my deepest apologies.
******
It was all crap what he was saying. It was all bloody crap, nothing else and he kept on saying it over and over again till it came that moment that his voice was not anymore outside me, but emerging from somewhere inside my own head and bloody hell it was all crap. Then I became furious and I fancied battering his face down, and smashing all his bones and tearing up his flesh into pieces with his filthy blood covering all the filthy pieces and dig a big hole for him in the back-yard garden and burry him down there with all those greedy warms waiting for him, all crawling to his eyes and feeding out of his stinking brain. It was all this voices and many others coming from somewhere inside my head and he kept on saying that he was a fucking theater director and had hired my sister and was only seeing her to home. I wasn’t listening to his junk neither to those coming from inside my head, I was all waiting for him to see that look in my eyes, that reddening and the dilated pupils and the small twitch around the eye-lids when a fellow should realize that he should keep his fucking mouth shut and should flee without fucking looking back. If he had done so no one was so fucking fucked up and we were all having our luncheon or dinner by now, whatever is proper for the sun as being in repose or in rising position. But as an adult should know which one is the case by simply looking at the fucking sky, he should have reckoned that look in my eyes and should have taken the fuck out of that place. But he stayed there, talking about his fucking director job and my sister, my dearest, little swallow being a servant of him. What a fucking shame for her and for me as her brother, as every adult should have a fucking decent job of his own and shouldn’t serve any fucking moron boss. And if it was for paying my treatment expenses that she was doing that horrible job, if I only had known about it I would have broken her neck as well as that of all fucking theatre or whatever else fuck of a directors not to let her doing it. But I fucking didn’t know about it till that very moment and even when I knew what the shame she had brought to our family, I still kept quiet waiting for the guy to see that look in my eyes and go away. But when you are a moron, you are all the time a fucking moron and you can not stop being a moron even for a single fucking moment. So he not only didn’t stop his incessant babbling but raised his head toward the fucking window of my sister’s room, at the same time his bloody hands being busy with tightening the knot of his tie. That is when I
loose control of my nerves and I have all those voices in my head telling me to beat him and beat him hard and I beat him and he falls down and I beat him and he fucking screams and I beat him and there is blood covering all his body and I beat him and he can not move anymore and I remember the big hole in the back-yard garden and I remember all those hungry warms and I want him to be down there, deep down in his fucking grave. All this and you ask me why I fucking beat him, all the sounds and the hungry warms and you say what the harm he did to me that I beat him so bitterly. Shall I bring that look back to my eyes for you to know why I fucking beat him?
*****
Well, listening to him there was no doubt that it was some strong anti-hallucinogenic shot he needed. There are some instances when I’m not pretty sure whether the case in hand is really an indication to prescribe such medications. They have all their side-effects you know. But when a guy is brought to the emergency room that has beaten out a poor fellow to death, it is no time to fool around checking the indications and the side effects. There was this young pretty girl accompanying the guy though who was incessantly murmuring something as if when someone is preying or is memorizing something. People said she was one of the guy’s neighbors having a job as an actress and God knows maybe she was practicing her role right then, they have such odd habits you know. I called her inside the examination room to ask a few questions about that day and all the precedents and antecedent to what had happened. Nevertheless she was the subject of all that fight and should have some information about the motives of the two sides. But the moment she entered the room she burst into a horrid laughter, crying loud that “I’m not a liar, I’m not a liar”. It was definitely some strong shot that she needed as well and if someone questions me on the accountability of my decision, I would tell him that when you are in the emergency room with all those duties that you should tend to, there is no time to fool around checking the indications and the side effects. You should keep everything under control and give a strong shot to anybody who disturbs the peaceful atmosphere and an insane woman shouting any nonsense is the clearest indication for a shot and for giving it as soon as possible. Nevertheless she was a liar, if not insane and there was no doubt about it, you know!