Café

By Paul Marshall

Nocturne No 20; in C Sharp Minor.

I rehearse my order – I always do – whispering beneath the licensed sonata of a deeply troubled composer: a regular latte and an almond biscotti.

The woman and the man in front mean business. No stress of choice overload for these two, mid-thirties, he in a white shirt, precision-ironed, for her a poplin long sleeve blouse, pastel blue. Crisp is her work persona, her modus operandi. But what do they do? Measure, process, and communicate financial information, I suspect, related to economic entities. How are their soft skills, empathy, and emotional intelligence to elevate customer interactions? In dealings with them, I’d want to know.

An eye on where to sit, the tables empty save for one. In the far corner, tears rest on the eyelids of a young man reading messages. He mops his cheeks with a distressed denim cuff. His head nods, shakes, nods again, not like a glove puppet, closer to a marionette. A victim of emotional manipulation, affection confusion?

The barista places a black jug under the steam wand. She’s completed this action six hundred times this week and it’s only Wednesday morning – early. There’s some way to go before putting to bed this week of not living her best life. In a queue, I predict, pretend, think of a word, develop a faith in a small thing, discard another, jump to conclusions, my mind a storage locker, dishevelled, on occasions left open, sloppily, passers-by thwacking its door with a shoulder.

I look preoccupied my sister told me last night, markedly so. ‘That’s Zoom for you,’ I said. ‘My lighting makes me seem so.’ She’s not fooled, she insists, all the way from America.

The sound frequency up there with thin snare strikes of sticks on skin, the frothing of the milk denotes where I am, a Wordle, Globle, Nerdle journey from home, a Tesco Express, one Pret, two Costas from work, but here, now, in this disconnected, indie location, the coffee’s aroma trapped within these walls, but never the strength we copywriters claim with our chancy realism – what I get up to, what I’ll be doing in fifteen minutes or so. I’m going to take the stairs, not the lift – my worries concerning wellbeing, a complex combination of physical, mental and social health factors.

Next up: me. A change of heart: with my biscotti, a hot chocolate with sprinkles, for swathed warmth consolation. I sit by the window, sort myself out and assess the grey pallor of the streets set to linger throughout another dawn-to-dusk, a far cry from full forced recovery.

For me, these moments of alleviation, this radius of space between myself and others spreading their disturbance of stability: what a relief, albeit temporary; what a respite from my chronic agitation.

I shift my position to watch over the young man messaging once more. His mask drapes limp on a paperback obscuring its title – maddening. He rubs his eyes too hard, unkind to himself. One thing he could do is reframe his unhelpful thoughts by practising some self-compassion. But here’s the thing: he and his heart-throb lust for each other but are experiencing lacerating issues because they have for too long rested on imprecise, conflicting definitions of the concept of ‘love.’

To my right sits the couple from the queue, a two-shot scene having arranged itself: face-to-face in taut counterbalance, their croissants untouched, their cappuccinos scorned. With hesitation I have her as Gabrielle. He is Jon, Jonathan to his parents. At 3 mins. 50 secs. Gabrielle begins to pick at her croissant with the tip of her thumb and forefinger and places tiny pieces into her mouth. Dark green nail varnish. Does it work? I look it up. It’s a top ten colour trend, my research giving rise to an invasive wave of remorse for this sifting through the light web of trivia, my first such foray of the morning. Oh my days, have I nothing better to do with my more-than-mere survival? Jon slaps a hand on Gabrielle’s wrist with uncertain pressure. Gabrielle Campbell, spooked, grounds the squashed remains of her croissant onto her plate before swiping it away with a back-hand down the line. It seems for the pair of them, there are no words to hand, no will to forage through their respective, saved-in-the-brain thesauri. How do they themselves see it? They’re the important ones in all this. To what degree is their separation? How, across the table’s wipe clean laminate, do they perceive the way things lie: between her ultra-thin nail tips and the knuckles of his fists, a vast and featureless dust-free surface of a sci-fi star from a 3.30 a.m. streaming? I guess they couldn’t sleep. It's…it’s everything. Relentless.

I ask the barista how she’s bearing up: ‘How’s it going, honestly?’

She’s swirling around, spraying tables with SurSol: ‘Honestly?’

It’s not me alone then and it really is okay to feel as we do, here in this café, as incidental representatives – not a target demographic but nevertheless – of the general mood, forlorn, so very low. I raise to my lips my luxury hot chocolate and a sudden quiet is sprung upon us, as if all power has failed. I close my eyes. I pray, from an agnostic point of view, for Me, Myself, I, others, and open my eyes. The young man is laughing at something on his phone, sweeps up his stuff. He’s highly amused, heads for the street, a zip and bounce in his step. Gabrielle is stretching across the table, her blouse straining taut along the straightness of her back, to kiss Jon on the mouth. ‘For now and forever,’ so she says.

The Barista is chatting to a new customer, who knows absolutely what the barista means: ‘Agree, yes, agree again.’

Deserted. Me and my rubbish thoughts. Then I pick up on the music. Chopin.

One of the graphic designers, Janet – I liked Janet a lot but she disappeared during lockdown – said to me one time: ‘When I’m sad and lonely, lost, obsessed by the images, the statistics, I listen to Chopin and I am more sad, more lonely, more lost in the melancholy of the music but lost too in the beauty of the melody, the miracle that it exists.’