I’d known Gina for about eight years, short for Virginia as I found out after hundreds of mugs of tea and bacon rolls in the café where she works. I’ve found that waitresses in greasy spoons are always good meat for a story, they ooze back history from every pore, it must be something to do with all those fry-ups, the way some of them seem to disappear into back kitchens for days, reappear with something changed about them, if you watch them closely enough. Gina was tall, about mid forties I guess, not good looking, a little overweight if you go by the fashion yardstick, but she had something about her, a kind of grace. She made the checked nylon overall she wore look classier, almost grateful to her for deigning to inhabit it. Women who hold themselves well can sell you a version of self-containment that sucks you in, makes you wonder how they got here, how they would be in bed. Don’t get me wrong she wasn’t exactly sexy but sometimes I had this urge to just reach up and stroke her cheek, pull her in just a little closer, as she slid the plate in front of me. I always sat at the same table, if it was free, number six. It was well away from the window, the inside always interested me more than the outside, it gave me a view of every other table, the counter and till, even if I stretched my neck a little, a view through the ribbon curtain into a small section of the kitchen. It gave me a glimpse into the wings off-stage, that threshold space where faces recompose, the spine straightens just a fraction before actors emerge to give their performance.

     She wasn’t local, small fen towns know their locals; their parents, the school they went to, their husbands and wives, kids, their failures at Slimmer’s World, their vasectomies. Gina arrived, ready formed, pre-packed and the packaging remained intact, she’d not opened up to anyone. She lived in a small flat over one of the shoe shops, why such a small town needs three shoe shops always puzzles me but they survive, sell enough sandals and boots to justify their existence. She was seen in the local pubs now and then, mostly with girls she worked with, on occasions like birthdays; once a year, her own. I gave her a ‘Sorry it’s late’ birthday card once, she thanked me, slid it unopened into her uniform pocket. She wasn’t unsociable,  she’d chat with customers, on market day Mondays, old women resting swollen legs and bags before catching the bus back to the villages, the rest of the week the usual types that ease themselves down onto vinyl benches for something to do when going home yet isn’t an option.

     I once had what you might classify as a conversation with her, just after 9-11. We talked about the people who were driven to jump from the towers, the passengers on the planes who knew they were probably going to die, those who phoned home on their mobiles to speak to loved ones, one last time. I asked her who she would phone, if that had been her, she shrugged, probably God to ask what he was playing at she said. She didn’t ask me who I would phone, I got the impression it wasn’t of much interest to her, or maybe too serious for a game over stained formica and plastic pots of brown sauce. I felt stupid, shallow, avoided watching her for weeks.

     Every summer she disappeared for a fortnight, her annual holiday. I never knew or asked where she went at Christmas, Easter, her day off, Sundays when the café was closed but I would make some comment on her return from this break about whether she’d had a good time, where was her sun-tan, had the weather been bad? ‘Yes’, ‘She never sat in the sun’, ‘It was mixed’. Roughly the same questions, the same answers every year. A Saturday girl behind the counter told me she went up North, she thought she had family up there. I listened for some trace of an accent, definitely not Scotland or Newcastle but perhaps Yorkshire, given years down south to even out vowels.

      I wouldn’t say she became an obsession, for weeks, even months, she was only someone I saw regularly, wallpaper, but then there would be the odd day when she seemed different . Others would not have noticed but I did, something about how tight her skin was over her cheekbones, or the fact that she moved just a little slower, more deliberately. I even started looking at her pupils, searching for signs of drugs, anti-depressants maybe. I smelled her breath, when she bent close enough, for booze, I prided myself on spotting the closet alcoholic, having lived with one for years. I considered the menopause, how that could effect women, they didn’t call it ‘The Change’ for nothing.

     Our neighbour, when I was eleven, had been arrested for shop-lifting a packet of Daz, my mother felt sorry for her, said over Sunday lunch to my father that even Methodists could fall victim to that certain time of your life. It puzzled me for months, what she meant, that women could reach an age when everything they believed in could go out of the window. Christine told me on the school bus that her mother had started to sweat and forget why she had gone upstairs and it was down to not having periods anymore and not being able to make babies. The small bits of information I’d gleaned about periods made me think that their loss wasn’t such a bad thing and as for making babies, well parents and sex seemed too nasty to think about. Stealing stuff from shops was what we did on wet Saturdays, sweets or make-up, Daz didn’t strike me as something worth the fear or the fun but as Christine told me it was hormones ( she was a year older than me ) and of course that was in the bad old days before pills and patches. Gina could be menopausal but it was more than that, it had to be more than that, I needed it to be more.

     Last year I began asking people about her. I wrapped it up in social chat of course, nothing too personal, the sort of low-key gossip normal for small towns. One or two came up with tit-bits that were unexpected, well unexpected as I hadn’t thought to think about them. She went to church, the United Reform one, had a parakeet, that she boarded out with the local pet shop when she went away, hired a car occasionally from the garage behind the market place, sang in a choir, didn’t own a television ( this from the man who mended my washing machine and who had once mended hers ). She was registered with the same doctors as me, but I’d never seen her in the surgery and, surprisingly, was a vegetarian. I thought of all those bacon rolls she had served me, the meat pies and sausages she had placed on countless plates and wondered how this fitted into her world view, why she had never sought work at the tiny wholefood café at the far end of town.

      It was October when I passed her coming out of the Heel Bar, a brown paper bag tucked under her arm. I was having the most comfortable shoes I possessed soled yet again, I really needed to buy new ones but the thought of breaking in new shoes seemed too tedious when the old ones would see me through another winter. ‘Gina’s shoes falling apart as well?’ I commented to the lad who had been there since leaving school five years ago. ‘Broke the heel on those green high heels again’ he mumbled sliding over the ticket for my shoes. She didn’t seem the sort for high heels, they would take her up to at least six foot , vegetarians and high heels didn’t quite gel, well not in my world. ‘Funny, she saw you coming and asked if you had your shoes mended a lot’. I was half way out the door and suddenly a lot of things in my world didn’t gel anymore. I tried to forget this comment, then the washing machine man came back because the part had arrived and it turned out he’d told her I had a cat. I seem to recall this cropped up in a conversation we were having about people looking like their pets and the fact that a Border Terrier at his previous visit had peed on his tool-bag. “Did she ask you about me then”, I tried to sound throwaway as I handed him a coffee. “Can’t remember really, it just sort of came up”, he echoed, extracting his head from the drum.

     I watched Gina more closely the next day, she seemed her usual self, not overly interested in me just polite and friendly. I thought of saying something to try and hook her in, like “I hear you found out I’m a closet cat lover.” I decided to wait, perhaps she was simply making conversation with people, perhaps it wasn’t about me, perhaps it was just something to say but I knew how good I was at making things sound that way.

    I left her alone after that, not physically alone, I saw her most days but I left her alone in my head, put her in the pigeon-hole marked pending, I’m good at doing that with people I meet, taking them out when I need flesh on the bones of a character. Then July came and the deadline was looming. I’d already spent the advance on a new roof and a second hand Saab. I’d always wanted a Saab, lots of coats of paint, sturdy in the face of endless wet winters; the car of choice for global warming and the Fens, my little Swedish Ark. I needed just one more short story for the collection, so up against the calendar Gina was pulled out of her pigeon-hole. I dusted her off, wrote her into life, into that moment when something happens, that tiny pivot that the story turns on. She gave me what I needed, bacon rolls and enough of a secret to make her slip down the throat of a reader, make them feel they’ve had something substantial. Of course I altered the details enough to make her created, not given but I knew it was her, it smelt of her skin , I’d just inhabited it for a few thousand words. When I saw her then she seemed to grow into the words, she felt owned.

      I had to go up to London on the Tuesday for a meeting with my editor, young, enthusiastic, all lap-top and wine bar. She had a few nit-picks as usual but nothing we couldn’t agree on, couldn’t fix quickly. I was feeling good, a little smug even, pleased with how those pigeon-hole people had come up trumps yet again. I stopped to light a cigarette, an unappealing habit, smoking in the street, I can still hear my mother’s voice whispering ‘common’ but I choose to ignore it, something I have made into an art form. It was then that I saw Gina’s photograph in the book-shop window, bigger than life size, my reflection overlaid on her face. Her hair was a little different, the eyes much more knowing. Propped up beside her was a thin book, a fan of them laid out around her like offerings. ‘The Woman at Table Six’ the award winning poetry collection by Virginia Holstead. The first thought that came into my head was that poets didn’t wear high heels either, then something that felt like betrayal tore at my stomach. Someone in that rush hour street failed to see me stop, cannoned into me from behind, I felt myself beginning to come apart.