Nice One, Hen
When I was 18, I got a job in a fish and chip shop in Dumbarton, just north of Glasgow, on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. This was a mistake. Dumbarton has a picturesque ruined castle and views of the Highlands, 3196-foot-high Ben Lomond and the River Clyde. I did not see any of these things. I did see a lot of lard.
Until I started the job, I thought success was measured by good grades, exhaustive knowledge of Eurythmics lyrics and whether or not Maria McGinty’s posse acknowledged your existence at Tiffany’s Rollerdisco on Saturday afternoons. But on my first morning at the Chip Chik Inn I learned that this was not the case. It turned out that success was measured by how many children one could produce before the age of twenty.
My teenage mentors — or tormentors, as fate would often have it, Mee-chelle and Chel, were 21-year-old mothers of a boisterous combined herd of what sounded like at least 29 urchins. They simply didn’t believe I didn’t have any children.
“You sure?” they questioned, looming menacingly over where I sat cowering on an upturned mayonnaise bucket, as if the fact of my having given birth might have fallen from my mind into a nearby vat of congealed lard.
Soon astonishment turned to suspicion. They thought I was holding out on them. All their pals had reproduced at least once by my age.
“But you’re eighteen,” Mee-chelle puzzled.
“What’s wrong wi’ you?” Chel heckled. “I’d two by your age.”
“No even one wean?” Mee-chelle pleaded.
One dim bulb fizzled overhead in the post-apocalyptically grimy kitchen. Frothing oil troughs gurgled in the shop beyond. I shrugged apologetically and peeled my 462nd potato. The three of us sat on our buckets and silently whittled our potatoes.
“Think she’s daft in the head?” Mee-chelle whispered to her friend.
“Aye,” said Chel whirling her potato peeler aggressively around her left ear.
My lack of offspring worried Chel and Chelle. They huddled in dank, greasy corners by the deep fat fryer and talked about me. They scoped me out from behind teetering mountains of unpeeled Golden Wonders. Chel shook her head darkly whenever I approached, lightly dusting trays of withered haddock with cigarette ash.
Having failed to get me to crack with tales of prodigious progeny-production, Chel tried a new approach.
“My maw was a granny by the time she turned 33.”
“You’ll be the same, Chel,” Mee-chelle fawned.
“Maybe younger. My Jacinta’s a right wee looker.”
“How old’s wee Jac?” Mee-chelle asked.
“Just turned three.”
Eventually, toward the end of my first day of oil-saturated initiation, I relented. If I was going to stick this out, I reckoned, I was going to need to fit in and, other than Andy, the stoic fry cook, the Chel(le)s made up the entire staff roster.
So, a few boiling spuds short of my 1000th Golden Wonder, I invented a six-month-old called Joseph.
The heavy hydrogenated oil and lard-filled air seemed to lift, the ominous bubbling of the fryers seemed to relent and Chel and Mee-chelle leaned back against the peeling, sweating wall, finally satisfied.
“She has got a wean!” Mee-chelle screeched.
“I knew it,” said Chel, stubbing out her cigarette on an adjacent potato. “I telt you she wasn’t that ugly!”
“Nice one, hen,” Mee-chelle crowed.
“What age is he?” Chel asked, offering me a cigarette. “Six months, aye? A bit young, but if he’s no a total minger, I’ll set him up with Wee Jac.”
