Sadie wants the bagel with salt beef and plenty of mustard. She wants it hot, but not so hot she’ll burn her mouth. She says she wants the bagel sliced in half, do they do it sliced? Can she have pickles, and also can she have two shakes of pepper?
‘Two shakes?’ asks the woman behind Beigel Bake's counter. Her hand hovers near the pile of fresh bagels. Each is open and plump, layered with tongues of meat. ‘I’ve worked here for fifteen years,’ she says, ‘and no one ever said exactly two shakes.’
Sadie whoops and clasps her hands together as though she’s won a prize. Her necklace catches Brick Lane’s sunlight shining through the glass doors. People along the queue comment and smile. Two men in high vis jackets call to her.
‘What can I say?’ she replies, scrunching her hair on one side. ‘I know what I want.’
I’m sixth in line and, like everyone else, like everyone always did, I’m watching her. We haven’t seen each other since school.
I’d arrived in the middle of term, moving from my parents’ house in Luton to my cousin’s place on the edge of London. I was small, shy and played the violin. Unexpectedly and swiftly, lots of girls singled me out as their friend. Many wanted to be in plays or on television. I would watch them arrange their hair by their lockers and listen to their complaints about others. When I first saw Sadie, I thought she was beautiful. She noticed I was from out of town. ‘I like new things,’ she said, linking arms one day. We were fourteen when we started to spend time out of school together.
Sadie liked to create alternative versions of me. I remembered one time in particular. We sat in my front garden and she spat into a palette of mascara, the kind they made in the sixties, to mix a black paste with the tiny brush. She drew the wand along my lashes. ‘The trick is to work slowly,’ she said. ‘It builds up with each application.’ After blowing on my eyelashes, she said, ‘I have five layers on today.’ She held up a mirror to my face. ‘Do you like it?’ I nodded, turning my head from side to side. ‘You look amazing. You look like a different person.’
The woman says, ‘Two shakes.’ Opening the bagel, she adds the pepper and the pickles, then spreads mustard on top. Sadie steps backwards from the counter, digging around in her purse. Her eyelids are pastel-coloured with a meticulous dark arch of eyeshadow in the socket crease. She has radiant red lips. We’re both in our late thirties, and she’s tremendous with it.
‘Hey,’ I call over as casually as I can. ‘Sadie?’
Sadie snaps her purse closed and looks at me. She says nothing.
‘Your hair looks great,’ I say. I didn’t think I’d see her again but if I ever imagined the moment, this was always my first line.
‘You really think so?’ She tucks a strand behind her ear. ‘Juliet,’ she says. ‘Been such a long time since I thought of you.’
I was dedicated to Sadie. I kept notebooks of everything she liked (pink lipstick, peonies, greyhounds) and what she didn’t (rabbits, strong tea, eyebrow piercings). On weekends, it was the two of us. We played her parents’ vinyl in her bedroom, listening to every song. Or, we’d watch videos. Her favourite was The Graduate. It wasn’t only the mascara: we loved everything from the sixties. I’d read Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow and made us watch the film version again and again. I wanted to be like the main character Joy, who pushed her pram across London pavements with her backcombed hair and a sad, but hopeful, internal monologue. ‘All any woman wants is a man and a baby,’ says Joy in the film.
Sadie’s eyes drift across my body. She is searching for something to say. ‘You know, I like your top,’ she says. ‘Classic styling.’
Read More: Londonist
From Ways of Living by Gemma Seltzer. Available to buy now at Influx Press.
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