six
The café was empty. We walked inside and took a seat at a small table for two by the window. A bored-looking waitress looked up from her fingernails and walked over to our table. She stood over us, waiting for us to speak. The taint of fried egg and chip fat followed her. I liked her, there was no fuss about her persona; she was plain and simple. She existed and that was enough, there was no need for anything else because everything else was superfluous to her. I raised my eyes. I could see straight up her nostrils.
“I’ll have a black coffee and …”
I turned to my companion. She was looking at the menu, furrowing her eyebrows into a tight V. Then she looked up, smiling.
“I’ll have a hot chocolate and a baked potato with chili, please … May I have lots of butter on the potato?”
The waitress shrugged, as if to imply that ordinarily she wouldn’t give out extra butter to customers. Then she turned to me, but I’d been observing them and wasn’t prepared.
“Are you not eating? I thought you were hungry.”
“I don’t know what to have …”
“Have the same as me …”
“Okay, I’ll have the same again, please …”
“Extra butter for you, too?”
“Er … Yes, please.”
The bored waitress walked away to the kitchen. As I was about to open my mouth to speak, two more people walked into the café. A man and a woman. I didn’t recognise them at first, probably because it was the first time I had seen them up close. But after a moment it hit me — it was them, the couple from the whitewashed office block. The same man and woman who had been smoking out on the company esplanade. The man in the tight shirts and cardigans, the woman who sits at the desk that he walks back and forth to throughout the working day. It was definitely them. They eventually took a table opposite us after looking up at the menu boards above the counter. They sat down after he carefully removed her coat for her, smiling, giddy, happy, sitting close together, huddled.
She wouldn’t look at them. She stared down to her feet. I knew that she knew who they were. She had seen them enter the café and eventually recognised them as I had. A deathly silence descended upon our table. I didn’t know what to do to defeat it. I felt completely powerless. She was hunched over, staring down at our table, at her feet. Something to concentrate on, something to divert her eyes and mind away from the couple from the whitewashed office block sitting directly opposite us, close enough to hear, to smell. I tried to listen to what they were saying but they were purposely talking in whispers, sensing the quiet, aware that they could be heard, lending the situation the feeling that it was some sort of clandestine tryst.
Suddenly the man leant over their table and kissed her. It was a lingering, open-mouthed kiss on her lips, intimate and sensuous. There was no movement in front of me, although I could detect a fierce rage building inside her. She definitely didn’t want the man and woman there, at the table opposite us, and she obviously didn’t want there to be any physical contact between them. She knew who they were, or at least him. It was her sole reason for sitting on the bench each day. Her sole reason: him.
I tried to gain her attention by pointing to a cat out through the window. It was crossing the road from the opposite side where the Duke of Cambridge pub was.
“Look! A cat using a zebra crossing! How clever!”
“…”
She shrugged. She did it without looking at me. Then she yawned. I began to speak some more; I couldn’t handle the situation, the silence. This wasn’t how I had envisaged it to be.
“What do you think they’re building?”
She looked up immediately. I asked this already knowing the answer, but it was all I could think of to ask her.
“Who? Them?”
She raised her eyes towards the table opposite.
“No. No. No. Not them … No … The space. Where our bench used to be. What do you think they’re going to be building? The health centre will be knocked down and everything …”
“Building?”
“Yes. Where our bench used to be …”
“Flats.”
“Do you reckon?”
“I don’t care, to be honest.”
“Oh. Why?”
“It’s a pointless and boring question.”
“Oh.”
“I really don’t care.”
She continued to look downwards, towards her feet, the floor, a speck of dust. She looked uncomfortable, as if she didn’t want to be recognised. The man and woman were laughing, sharing a secret joke or something. They were sitting closer to each other, and he was stroking her cheek with the back of one hand. She was blinking, blushing a little, not coquettishly, but knowingly, as if they had planned something devious together. The woman was wearing a tight black skirt and black, thin tights that were thin enough to give a hint, a sniff of pale flesh underneath. She was almost bursting out from her expensive-looking white blouse. She was clicking the heel of her right stiletto on the tiled floor — like an old clock ticking down the hours. In the silence that had now descended upon the whole café, her clicking heel was all that could be heard.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
I noticed that my own right leg had begun to shake furiously — as if in synchronicity with the sound of her heel. I tried to stop it but I couldn’t. Then our food came, the bored waitress almost dropping each plate onto the table. I stared at my plate of food. I couldn’t eat it. I looked up and she was tucking in, eating it like it was her last ever meal.
“You’re hungry.”
“Yes.”
“Are you in a rush?”
“Yes.”
I took my knife and fork and dug into the hot steaming potato covered in the thick, indistinguishable chili. I swallowed it quickly. It was way too hot for the roof of my mouth. On any other day this would have been a great little meal and I’d have probably wolfed the whole lot down, but the sudden appearance of the man and woman from the whitewashed office block had put an abrupt halt to any such thing.
His hair was perfectly groomed in that ruffled, just-got-out-of-bed look that seemed popular with males of no imagination who still followed the fashions. His shoes looked expensive. There wasn’t a blemish on his face. It was a happy, good-looking face, contained and unaware. She had recently dyed her hair it seemed; it looked healthy and in vogue. By her clicking heel was her expensive-looking bag — large, garish, open and stuffed with three thick, glossy fashion magazines. She looked happy, too.
seven
“Why aren’t you eating your food?”
Her plate was empty and she was looking directly at me, holding her mug of hot chocolate in her cupped hands.
“I don’t know … It’s just that …”
“That what?”
“Well, that as soon as those two people walked in … that man and woman … something changed.”
“Something?”
“You. You changed, you turned inwards …”
“Why would those two people affect me?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell …”
“Yes, there is. But you explain things only when you want to, it always seems …”
“…”
I was beginning to feel quite angry. I wanted to shout something out. I wanted to shake her.
She began to yawn, quite openly, looking back down towards her feet, avoiding the man and the woman on the table opposite.
I have often thought that cafés are strange places — especially if you frequent them alone. A kind of nothingness can be created, seated as you invariably are at your preferred table by the window, watching the world pass you by outside, or the rain trickle down the pane. It is as if you are floating, completely suspended in nothingness.