If You Don't Know Me By Now. A. Michael L.

whirled around to face the door, an eyebrow raised at the tall, brown-haired man with the scraggy beard and bright eyes. She watched with some satisfaction as the smile fell from his face, and his eyes widened.

      ‘Oh no, no, no!’ He stepped forward, hands raised. ‘I thought you were Liza …’

      ‘Who?’ Imogen frowned, arms crossed.

      ‘No, you don’t understand,’ he said, his Irish accent emphasised as he moved swiftly across the cafe, unbuttoning his coat. Some of the customers looked up with interest.

      ‘What are you –’

      ‘See?’ The man pulled open his coat dramatically. To reveal a maroon BeanTown apron. ‘I’m a member of the resistance,’ he whispered dramatically. ‘I’ve been sent by HQ to procure more drinking receptacles. The plan for world domination via caffeine is going better than expected.’

      He leaned in on the counter, grinning at her expectantly, his eyes a deep blue in contrast with the reddish tinge of his brown stubble. Here was a man who knew the effect he had.

      ‘Emanuel?’ Imogen called, not taking her eyes away from the man, ‘were we expecting any strange people today?’

      ‘No more than usual,’ Emanuel replied, shrugging, until he looked up and saw the other barista. ‘But we make an exception for this one. Hello, my friend.’

      The men shook hands, and the stranger gestured at Imogen. ‘What happened to the she-devil?’

      ‘Left to become a fashion blogger, or something,’ Emanuel said with distaste, then pointed at her. ‘This is Imogen. She’s an improvement. Imogen, Declan. He works at the BeanTown in Notting Hill. He often comes to bug us for things that his idiot manager was not smart enough to order enough of.’

      ‘Hey, you ever expect a truckload of Japanese tourists to want vanilla frapshakes in winter? Give the guy a break,’ Declan shrugged. ‘Nice to meet you, Imogen. Sorry about the heckling. I was used to Little Miss Vogue looking down her nose at me.’

      ‘Does anyone get away with looking down their nose as a barista?’ she asked, blinking at the intensity of Declan’s gaze. He was an active listener.

      ‘Not if they don’t want hot coffee thrown at them,’ he replied.

      ‘Someone threw coffee at her!’

      ‘No, customers threatened to. I dreamed about it a few times,’ Emanuel admitted.

      ‘Me too. There’s no place for ego here. You’re being paid for people to emotionally beat the crap out of you. But I’ll tell you a little secret, Imogen.’ He leaned in against the counter, eyes hypnotic, the vaguest smell of cinnamon and Columbian blend as he spun her a tale, his voice soft. ‘You are terribly important, because you are the Guardian of the Gate. You are the thing that stands between them and their working at maximum efficiency. You have the most incredible power …’ He dropped his voice even lower, and Imogen felt herself drawn in. ‘If you so choose, you can give them decaf. And royally fuck up their day. And they’ll never even know.’

      Imogen grinned. ‘Well, that sounds infinitely more reasonable than stabbing them in the eye with a stirrer.’

      ‘It’ll actually be more painful. But with great power comes great responsibility …’ He winked at her, and she found herself drawn in, her pulse fluttering, just a little.

      ‘I’ve already had to warn her about being more careful about giving the skinny bitches whole milk. They have a sixth sense,’ Emanuel sighed.

      ‘Hey, never whole milk! Even I’m not that mean. But if a bitch calls me incompetent, then she’s getting the semi-skimmed at the very least.’

      Declan held up his hands. ‘Preaching to the choir, love. No justification needed.’ He turned to Emanuel. ‘Has she encountered Nigel yet?’

      He sighed and turned to her. ‘Small skinny three-shot half-caf semi-dry cappuccino – let me weigh it.’

      Imogen rolled her eyes. ‘That turd of a human being made me remake that drink four times on Tuesday. I even weighed the damn drink on the scales and he didn’t believe it was heavy enough. A semi-dry cappuccino isn’t even a thing!’

      ‘How long have you been here, three weeks? My darling, you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ Declan grinned at her, holding her gaze a little too long. ‘But I’m pretty sure you can handle it.’

      ‘I’m glad someone thinks so.’

      ‘Well, that scowl on your face when you turned around almost made me shit myself, so I think you can handle a couple of pompous wanker bankers.’

      Imogen twitched her mouth into a smile. ‘Well, I don’t take kindly to strangers talking about my cups.’

      ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

      Emanuel returned with a stack of large takeaway cups. ‘When you’ve quite finished being your usual self, maybe you should get back to work before your boss starts calling here in a panic?’

      Declan took the cups and smiled at Emanuel, who wore a look of saintly patience. He nodded and buttoned up his coat, heading for the door. He turned back. ‘Was lovely to meet you, Miss Imogen. You should stop by my store sometime. I’m sure I could teach you a thing or two.’

      Imogen was so torn between saying ‘I’m sure you could’ or ‘I sincerely doubt it’ that she simply rolled her eyes and said nothing.

      Not a bad day at all.

      *****

      Imogen couldn’t bear to stay in the tiny studio all the time, and instead sought out solace in a little pub on a backstreet behind her flat. The Hope and Anchor, it was called, and she spent that afternoon with a pint of pale ale and her laptop. Soul music whispered from tinny speakers, and occasionally she’d nod her head along with Etta or Aretha as she tried to scratch the coffee grounds from under her fingernails.

      ‘Y’all right there. darlin’?’ the barman, a slim, grey-haired man called out across the empty bar. She stared up at him from the blank page.

      ‘Yeah, just … blank.’

      The older man grinned, his bright eyes enhanced by his red cheeks. ‘Finish your pint, love. That’s liquid inspiration right there.’

      ‘I’m trying to savour it, or I’ll only want another,’ she shrugged, fingers stroking the keys.

      ‘So what? Worked for Hemingway,’ the man laughed. ‘I’m Keith. Just bottling up out back; give us a shout if you need anything.’

      ‘Cheers, Keith!’ Imogen grinned back, relieved that the rumours of Londoners not being talkers was clearly a myth. The pub was empty at four-thirty in the afternoon, but then again, it was a Shepherd’s Bush side road on a Tuesday. She loved how these pubs just seemed to appear out of nowhere on the corner of residential roads, as if they had been put there for the locals, and no one else would find them if they didn’t know where to look.

      Imogen took in the worn blue wallpaper and sticky dark-wood tables … no one had been looking for the Anchor for quite a while, it seemed. Which was a shame, because those stained-glass windows gave the whole place a warm glow.

      Imogen managed to squeeze out a few small articles – about London pubs, about moving to the big city from the north, about what London property agents had the audacity to call a one-bedroom flat. None of it was very good.

      Maybe what she needed was to write herself a fairy tale. She’d spent years researching them, after all. Her English MA dissertation was on representations of femininity in fairy tales … which everyone was really fucking sick of hearing about. The blokes who worked at the pub had been nice enough, but when they’d made the mistake of asking her about it, and she’d made the mistake of answering, their honest response had been, ‘Huh, didn’t know you were one of them lezzers. Cool.’

      What fairy tale