Tucked beneath the weighted folds of the blanket, the cat sleeps with his head rested on the pillow. She gazes at him with eyes stung from fatigue. The skin around the sockets is drawn and dry. If there was any energy left fizzling around her exhausted aspect, it’d have been channelled into a strange envy of the sleeping beastie. That’s all he does; sleep. Sleep and dream. He eats, he drinks and he is completely without concern in his tiny little life.
She, however, is wasting away the sole hour of the day left to her. The first was spent blindly assembling herself from unconsciousness to functioning human, ingesting calories and caffeine to stock her up for a day of forced niceties and the unrelenting suck of mindless conversation. The next is spent in the momentary freedom of travel. A flit of air and space and the clanking volume of the city and the voices that crowd it and make it anonymous.
Then she is there; a ten hour stretch of scheduled behaviour broken only by twenty minutes of glaring into the sad confines of the pasta she made last night. If there is a guilt about feeling so sorry for herself about this labour - for surely most work is equally draining and degrading, regardless of the vocation - then it is overwritten by the understanding that at least most jobs have a measure of honour in them, if not social prestige. The nurse may take their life in their hands, which is not compensated by the admiration, but at least their contribution is noted as worthy. What does a waitress have? Nothing more than contempt and ridicule. Perhaps flat apathy if she is lucky. Her kind are many and cheap. Easily replaced. Their value is liquid.
The remaining hours of the day are spent in a cheap box of drywall intended to keep the rain and the wind off her back while she sleeps. There she prepares meals, extracts the value of her labour and passes it along to faceless corporations in exchange for her basic needs, scrolls the sad and immediate history of this dismal race, feels the unsated anger and guilt at the failures of the best and the passions of the worst and ties it all together by eroding all social ties through negligence. Then she makes herself blackout for six hours so that she can awake and do it all again the next day.
So she does feel her chain being yanked a little by the small cat. He doesn’t have to put up with any of this shit. But then, she thinks, resting her head on the pillow to feel the soft vibration of his slumbering purr, he is very cute.
Paddy Dobson
22nd July 2020