Dear Catastrophe Waitress A Novel

PHILIPPA 1983 She's wearing a white T-shirt with the artwork from the first Clash album on it. The sleeves are cut off. She drinks a St. Pauli Girl dark and sits on the hood of Brad Worthington's Camaro. She watches as a circle of stoners, fellow members of the Walnut Prep class of 1983, the last class to enter high school in the 1970s, pass a bong around, shed an occasional tear, and sing along with the words they can understand from Yes's "Starship Trooper," which is blaring from inside of Bobby Shiffer's house. She hates Yes, but she finds that she has kind of warmed to her Yes-listening classmates in the last few months. There are, after all, only fifty of them here at Walnut Prep, and they've been together since the first grade, and the fact that they are not as cool as she is no longer seems like a reason to openly scorn them. In fact, Philippa finds as she looks down into the grass at her stoned classmates that she feels real tenderness for them simply because she remembers them all as little kids, and because she's never going to see them again after tonight and they are the only people who knew her before her parents split, before Mom started drinking, before she became the punk rock chick, back when she was just that little girl who really liked H. R. Pufnstuf. She opens the graduation program again and runs down the list of the names of her classmates and where they are going for college. She doesn't know if Denison University is a stoner school already, but it certainly looks like it will be next year. She finds her own name: "Philippa Jane Strange: London Academy of Music." She smiles to herself, unable to believe she got away with this. It's her little private joke to herself, because what she's going to do next year is what she's done every summer since the seventh grade: go live at her dad's flat in London and go to clubs and hear punk rock. It's one in the afternoon. Philippa staggers down to the kitchen of her dad's flat, turns on the electric kettle, puts a PG Tips tea bag into a cup, and sits down at the table. She's only mildly hungover. Dad, as he does whenever he spends the night here and not at Ella's, has left Philippa this morning's Telegraph, Times, and Guardian on the table. Once the kettle whistles, Philippa pours the hot water out and sits down to read the Telegraph. From there she'll move to The Times, and finish up with The Guardian. She and her dad have a joke about how she reads from right to left. Dad does the opposite, but with the same impulse: begin with the one you disagree with the most and work your way over to your side to see what the real story is. Philippa's continued presence in her dad's flat is a rebuke to both of their political convictions. Philippa, like her friends, fumes with outrage over what the Thatcher government is doing to the welfare state. Unlike her friends, she lives for free in a very smart flat and has food and booze money supplied to her by Simon Strange, an investment banker who belongs to the class of people that benefit most from the economic policies of the Tory government. Simon, like his friends and co-workers, yearns for the dismantling of the welfare state, for a more Americanized system where the government doesn't act as nanny and people are forced to show a little personal responsibility. Unlike his friends and co-workers, Simon runs a little mini welfare state of his own, with an endless reservoir of guilt over the divorce and his subsequent return to the UK fueling a micro-economy that would disgust him on a macro scale: Philippa pays no rent, is not expected to work, and drinks up her spending money. Philippa is oblivious to any political irony in herHalpin, Brendan is the author of 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress A Novel', published 2007 under ISBN 9780812977028 and ISBN 0812977025.