Typecast

Based between Edinburgh and Glasgow, Extra Teeth is a literary magazine publishing stories and essays that may not find a home elsewhere. Today’s selection features a staged meeting in a cafe, and a memorably tense and dark encounter. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did…

He chose the table out of earshot of the café’s high-traffic areas. Avoided the one by the till where customers queued to pay; declined the snug two-seater by the kitchen’s swinging door through which the waitress had traipsed back and forth about a hundred times in the last fifteen minutes. She gave the first customer of the day, him, the kind of look you give someone you suspect is a bit mad. That’s when he knew he’d nailed the brief.

Her eyes shot straight to the pathetic excuse for facial hair he’d cultivated over the last month. His girlfriend hated it. A smattering above his upper lip and on his chin: pubescent, gross, Cindy said, refusing to snog him. But it was accurate, alright. The client who’d hired him didn’t specify that he should go to such lengths. Still, he needed the creative freedom, or it would feel too much like the kind of job that pays well but does a number on your self-esteem. Television adverts for cold sore cream – herpes, really, though no one wants to call it that – a gig turning on the Christmas lights for some depressing, scummy town in the arse-end of nowhere. He’d done both in the five years since the show. It was why he’d taken this job, to find his way back to something meaningful. A callback to his breakout role. 

Typecast, his agent had said with a phony look of regret. It happens, eh? Especially with roles as memorable as the one you’ve just played. Played the hell out of it, that’s the problem. Give it time. Let them forget, then the next role will cancel this one out. It made him think of an episode of Goosebumps that had creeped him out as a child: a haunted Halloween mask that won’t come off, gradually becoming part of the kid’s face. The boundary between the mask and her skin a slippery blur. Acting could be like that, if you played the part well enough. 

Give it time. Let them forget. But that was the problem, they had forgotten. Not that he’d nailed the starring role in a hit mini-series, but that he was a serious actor for hire, capable of playing more than just depraved psychopaths and practised liars.

When his drink arrives, he dumps four sugar cubes into his mug; a tongue of hot tea shoots out, and on its way down, makes a right mess. He wipes his fingers on his trouser leg, leaves the rest, figures the state of the table is part of it too: the aesthetic surrounding the kind of man he’s playing. Nasty, lazy bastard. Lets others clean up his messes, even the big ones.   

It hasn’t been that long. He hasn’t forgotten how to be him. Be him, not play him, because whether he liked it or not, that’s what had happened. Dirty looks in the street. Shouted insults. Once, a man punched him square in the face and didn’t back down even after he’d explained he wasn’t him, not the real deal, just the actor who played him off the telly. Such reactions were the kind of validation he didn’t know he needed at the time. No one attempts to knock him about anymore.

“Can I get you some grub?” the waitress asks, pen poised. One of her eyebrows is higher than the other. Over plucked. She chews her gum like a schoolgirl – open-mouthed, loudly – like she’s trying to prove something. Prove that her mouth can move all sorts of ways, can reek of peppermint or candyfloss depending on her mood. He watches her chew in silence, waits for the bubble to expand then pop.  

The way he’s focusing on her mouth gives him a horrible pleasure. Not that he’s thinking of her mouth and feeling it in his pants, just that he’s in the right frame of mind. He would have had those thoughts: young girls’ mouths and what they’re capable of. He wonders whether he, the real deal, still experiences desire, or if prison time is a kind of castration.   

“Nothing yet,” he says finally. He doesn’t say “thank you”. Let the room feel him. Give the paying customer the full service, background extras completing the picture without knowing it. 

The waitress stops chewing and tongues the tasteless wad of gum into her right cheek. “Alright. I’ll come back in five.”

“No. I’ll call you over when I’m ready.”

He picks up the clean knife sitting pretty on top of the napkin triangle and uses it to stir his tea. Its serrated edge glints in the yellow overhead light. That clown Trump’s on the telly affixed to the café’s wall, being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. He doesn’t know how his character should feel about such a man leading a nation. It shouldn’t matter, but it does, throws him right off for a moment. 

The waitress looks at the tea-wet knife with a pained, haunted look. She’s attractive, he decides. Not more than Cindy, but decent enough. 

The knife and fork smell faintly of the vinegar solution she’d used to polish the cutlery before close yesterday. When he scouted the venue out, she was sat there, on the table by the window, polishing away while her manager counted the till’s contents.

“I’m waiting for someone.”

“Whatever,” the waitress shrugs and walks away, cursing him under her breath. She should be more careful, he thinks. 

Lucky for her, this getup is temporary. 

One hour and he’ll be two grand better off. The client settled on a tidy sum for his efforts, insisted on it even though he thought it sounded steep himself. More than he’d ever earned turning Christmas lights on, that’s for sure. Cindy thinks he’s filming a pilot episode for a new cop drama. She wanted to know if he’d be in uniform, if he could take it home after. It would be easy to explain the fake pilot away. Only a quarter of all pilots make it to the series stage; since the show, he’d exclusively shot those in the seventy-five percent that never made it. 

9.05am. She’s late. He could bill her for that but probably wouldn’t. 

He’d kept the receipts for the items he’d bought to bring the look together: one navy polo shirt and matching trousers; coloured contacts; one of those retro phones he’d had as a teenager and a belt to stick it to. He got some of that colour-depositing hairspray Cindy uses to darken her roots, strategically left the odd grey peeking through. He’d done a job that wasn’t far off what the professionals worked up in hair and makeup on set. He would leave the client the receipts when the scene was over. (He’d started calling it a scene to manage the pre-performance jitters which had started up weeks ago.) Best not to break the spell with talk of expenses. An envelope pushed across the table when the time’s up, and he’ll walk away. 

Other customers arrive to fill the café out. Two builder types a few tables over slurp tea and scoff bacon sandwiches. Every table has squeezy tubes of off-brand ketchup and brown sauce, their openings crusted shut. He works the dried ketchup off the bottle in front of him with his nail, flicks what comes away onto the floor. 

Then the door goes, and with it the little bell. 

She’s here. 

He can tell because there’s no way a woman like that would be caught dead here otherwise. She clocks the tea-slurping builders first and raises a hand to her neck, caresses the skin below a delicate scarf. Silk? Her skin is blotchy; there’s a sheen of sweat on her upper lip. She loosens the buttons on her coat and answers the waitress’s advances by saying something like, "I’m here to meet someone.” 

After she’s batted the waitress away, she sees him. 

Sees him. 

The look on her face is not like she’s seen a ghost. That expression doesn’t work. It would be better if she had, if the person she was looking at was dead and she was haunted only by the lingering outline of him, not the material person sat on a chair in a greasy spoon toying with a knife. She looks hungry: jaw set, nostrils flaring, hands fisted at her sides. She reminds him of a bird. Small and fragile. All angles. Her short hair is stuck out in places like dislocated feathers.  

He raises a hand, then remembers himself and looks down. Smirks. His trousers are too big on purpose, gathering in excess material about the crotch. 

During rehearsal, the voice he’d given her sounded soft and yielding in purposeful juxtaposition to his, which was pure gravel.  The voice she uses now is part growl. 

“I don’t know what you’re smiling for.”

Fleetingly, genuine confusion usurps practised arrogance. He opens his mouth to utter an apology, then remembers what she had said in her email: “He doesn’t care. He’s a cold, calculating sort. At the trial, his tears were only for himself. Bring that man to life, get me the closure I need, and I’ll pay you extra.”

Sat before him, she places her hands down flat on the table and takes deep, practised breaths. Cindy breathes like that when she’s meditating before bed. It annoys the hell out of him when he’s trying to sleep. He uses this annoyance, scowls, takes a scalding swig of tea and sets the mug down hard.

She flinches when the mug hits the table, blinks real slow like it’s her face he’s struck. She looks so damn wounded he clamps his hands between his thighs to check the urge to reach out and offer some reassuring gesture, but she’s not paying for his sympathy.

“Get to it then. Say what you’ve come to say. You’ve waited long enough,” he says, urging the scene back on track. 

As if on cue, she toys briefly with the silver locket hanging from her neck. Clicks it open and looks inside.

“She’d have been twenty-five next Thursday.”

He cranes his neck to see what she’s looking at, but she snaps the locket shut and lets it go. 

“You know what drives me mad most days? Wondering what she might have been. She always liked animals. Might have made a vet, but I don’t think she could have put them down. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. I know people say that, but she wouldn’t. Made me relocate spiders when they found their way into her bedroom. She might have made a teacher. Used to love her teachers at school. But you knew that, didn’t you? It made a convenient detail in your lies to the police.” 

Thatta girl, he thinks. Dig in. 

He lets her speak her lines, which are just as he imagined them – wonders whether she wrote them down in advance and learned them off by heart. He acts by reacting: a haughty tilt of his head to look down at her. He inspects his fingernails, chews off a hangnail and smears it onto his serviette. 

She looks down at the jagged crescent moon of fingernail and her words begin gathering momentum. The nail-biting was off book, but it works. He can feel how disgusting he is. It’s the shove she needs to take it up at notch and match his energy.   

“I wrote you letters. Hundreds of them over the years but you never wrote me back. I wondered whether you even read them. My therapist said it was the writing that counted. Getting it down and out until I had nothing left to say.”

The bell goes and an elderly couple slide into a booth. He watches them over her head, figures not making eye contact while she bleeds her heart out is a nice touch.

“The problem was there was always something more. A threat I hadn’t yet threatened. A nightmare I’d had since the murders which I hadn’t written down. You should know all of it, I thought. Have to sit with it as I did. One time, I included a photo of my girl as a baby, thought it might pierce through to your conscience, open the floodgates of remorse once and for all. It was a copy, but I always regretted sending it. You might have opened it and kept it as a keepsake. Got off on it.” 

She shudders and wipes her runny nose, wet from the cold, with her forearm. 

Again his humanity lurches forward. The desire to comfort her an elbow against the inside of his ribs. If this were a real set, she’d be playing a blinder. 

He goes to deliver his next line but the waitress is back, poking her nose in again.

“Can I get you both something?” She says, considering them a strange pairing, then shrugs and stands with her pen poised.

“Just water for me,” says the client. She doesn’t look at the waitress, keeps her eyes trained on him.  

“Nothing to eat?” the waitress asks, incredulous. The gum she’s chewing pops and the sugary-sweet scent of bubblegum washes over him. His belly rumbles.

“I’m starving. I’ll have The Belly Buster with extra chips.”

“No. No food for either of us,” the client interjects.

“You sure?” The waitress asks, unsure of who to address.

"He’s sure,” the client says, waving the waitress off.

He thinks regretfully of the full English he’d rehearsed scarfing down. Lips greasy. Mouth full of salty meat. Grunting as he went. The actor in him wants to press the need for the scene to evolve sensorially. Doesn’t she understand how impactful the juxtaposition would be, of her skinny frame and thin hair set against his unfaltering appetite, the bulge of his food-filled cheeks? 

"I wanted to meet you here today to tell you that it’s over.”

"Over?” He laughs.

"This power you’ve had over me and the memory of my daughter. You’re nothing. You’re no-one.” She’s really worked up now, huffing like an animal gearing up to charge. 

And he’s riled up too, doesn’t like being told he’s no-one. It cuts too close to the bone, to the bones below the mask he chose to put back on, the one he let sink into skin and stick. It won’t come off easy. It never does. He thought he’d shed the skin of the part years ago, a reptilian slip, all in one go – yet now he realises it had clung to him all that time. Clings to him still. 

"You don’t mean that. I’m all you’ve got. The last connection to your little girl,” he says. He knows it’s a low blow, but the ball’s back in his court now, as it should be.

Her eyes are so black they’re opaque. 

"You know what I think?” she says, recovering quicker than the moment demands. She’s ad-libbing. He can see the seams of the scene coming away. But as his agent, a big Queen fan, always says: the show must go on.

"Enlighten me.” If there was room, he’d put his feet up on the table. 

"I think all those letters, the families begging you at the trial, it was exactly what you wanted. The attention. The infamy.”

He laughs the laugh he rehearsed and nails it: the one from the show, the one he allegedly gave the police when they told him he was suspect.

"I wanted the opposite,” she continues. "To disappear. My doctor prescribed drugs to cope, and I felt better for a while. Sat and rotted in the house whilst I clung to her things – the proof she had existed. Until, one day, her room no longer smelled of her and I locked it shut. A tomb for my dead daughter. Me, the ghost haunting the house. I don't know where I found the strength to break out. Something deep inside me rose up, I guess – the need to live for her. If she was dead, the least I could do was not die as well.”

She drinks her water down in three huge gulps. Gasps afterward, as if she’s been underwater for a long time and is just now breaking the surface.

"I had to see you to know for sure. See your aging, god-awful face and know what my therapist promised me had finally happened: I’m over you. I’ll never be over not knowing my daughter as the woman she should have been. Not ever. But you’re done. Do you hear me? You’re done!”

And he sees it in real time: the storm blowing over, clouds parting, and the sun – the brightness she’s cultivated all these years – spilling out. Her peace is an affront. 

"You'll rot in jail,” she says serenely. "Life means life.”

He knows cognitively that he isn’t locked up, but for a moment he feels a spark of panic. The sensation of a noose around his neck. The button on his shirt collar, too tight. Prisons aren't always built with walls of stone, he thinks. Sentimental crap. Something Cindy must have said catches in his brain. It’s instinctual, the fear this woman has woken in him, distracted lately by the acting job but wide awake now. You’re done. You’re no-one. 

He shoots up. The chair scrapes back and calls the eyes of the other diners to them. 

"Leave,” she says and she’s smiling now. "Please”. He expected soft and yielding and wet. Wet eyes. Wet face. A pack of pocket tissues worked through; not this. Sunlight. Retribution. Being upstaged by a grieving mother.   

"But it hasn’t been an hour. I’ve got more material I can use,” he whispers, like whispering off-script won’t count as breaking character. "I haven’t even got to the best part yet.”

"No, you’re alright. I think we’ve got all we need.”

She sounds like every casting director at every audition he’s been to in the last six months. 

"Thank you for your time.” She unhooks her coat from the back of her chair and starts to dress for outside. 

"I can do something else?” he says, desperate now. He knows it’s a step too far, but he does it anyway, reaching over to stop her from doing up her coat. "Please, I need this.”

"Is everything OK?” the waitress asks, addressing the woman, not him. This time, both of her overplucked eyebrows are raised in a high arch. He snatches his hand back. He knows how it looks. 

"Everything’s fine. He was just leaving.”

"But this isn’t how I rehearsed it. I thought we could have it out a bit more. You said yourself; he wouldn’t give you what you want this easily. He’s cold. He’s… he’s, unfeeling.”

She looks at him closely, her gaze unflinching, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t feel the mask unclench; slip away. "Can I give you some advice?” she asks, a treacherous proposition now that he is so disarmed. "From someone who came close to letting that man kill me. Move on. Let him go.”

She’s nothing like the kind of bird he imagined when he first saw her. Her compact form deceptively small. If she was anything like a bird, it was the harpy eagle. He’d seen it on the telly once, lifting a monkey clean off the ground with its huge talons. 

"Let’s reset, have another go –”

"Lower your voice,’ she hisses. "You’re causing a scene.”

"But that’s what I thought you wanted?”

She ignores his protestations and asks for the bill. When the waitress hands it over, she pays for his tea. 

He doesn’t have the heart to slide his envelope of receipts across the table. Not anymore. He’s not a monster. He can’t even get that right.

Extra Teeth is a literary magazine that places a special emphasis on new writing coming from writers in Scotland, but with an international outlook.

Katie Huttlestone is a disabled author and English Literature teacher from Hertfordshire. She was long-listed for both the Blue Pencil Agency Pitch Prize and the Lucy Cavendish Prize for Fiction for her debut novel “A Healthy Appetite” out this August with Dead Ink. You can see more from her on Instagram.

Mark Zheng is an illustrator based in Toronto. His work spans editorial, publishing, surface design, and advertising. His peers describe him as someone who is very good at creating chaos, and they love the humour he brings into his work. You can see more from him on Instagram.