The steaming coffee urns could only compete with the samovars infusing tea. The windows were misty with competing temperatures either side of them.
Late afternoon and Jack lounged back in the upright chair as he watched the waitress deliver coffee. In the old days, there were several of his old cronies at the same table but they had gradually expired (some in mid-chatter). Jack was alone with his thoughts … and dying dreams. The waitress smiled at him, a girl (far too young for him) with pleasant curves perceived under her long day’s dishevelled overall, but revealing a demeanour that suited the rather ‘posh’ ambiance that this particular café provided. The place was a bit too good for Jack, but he always relished spending more than he should on his refreshments to suit aspirations for a degree of classiness otherwise tantalisingly beyond his grasp. A top of the range café, for his means, was as unsuitable as Old Mother Hubbard coming to her cupboard and finding over-rich food for which she no longer had appetite. And nobody left to talk to him on equal terms. But habits died hard.
He overheard the start of a conversation even though he did not directly listen to it. “When’s your next mental session?” The speaker was a rough-looking man — in his mid-twenties, Jack guessed. Standards were surely slipping. High time for Jack to percolate at home, perhaps. Cheaper, too.
The man’s companion was a woman in dungarees. Jack was surprised she had been allowed entry. The two of them were seemingly, if unseemily, sharing a single all-day breakfast. She noticeably had teeth missing when she smiled. Perhaps, she was missing them, when she cried, too, Jack thought, whimsically. The dungarees were slightly shop-soiled despite her claim that… “I’ve just bought these brand new. Do you like them?” She fingered the arm.
The man winced and replied: “Better than a boiler suit or track suit or, what do they call them, shell suit, or any suit that suits you…” The man laughed at what he thought was a joke. Jack’s own secret joke was to turn a blind eye to the couple and imagine them gone, which became quite an easy process as they soon left the café, the waitress with the neat behind then quickly wiping their table down and clearing the used dishes as if they harboured germs beyond the norm of smeared yolk.
Jack had earlier watched the waitress talking to the other staff behind the counter when the strange rough-looking couple had still been present. Jack assumed the staff had been tutting together as co-workers tended to do in any office, shop or café. Too proud to admit they were just a glorified greasy-spoon. Or bucket shop. Or backstreet lock-up for sweated labour. This café surely owned up to all their VAT returns. A cut above most other establishments. Jack was confident that his judgement of many years’ customer-service was well-grounded.
Jack’s train of thought took a downward turn. Time he called it a day. His pension could hardly stretch to this waitress service. His eyes filled with tears. A self-service sadness that took him unawares. He was usually such a chirpy, cocky individual, it was a strange experience for him to feel depressed – and he suddenly recalled the shell-suit’s companion talking about her next ‘mental session’. What multitude of sins did that expression contain, Jack wondered. Care-in-the-community on the brink? Or merely another attempt at the Times crossword?
The tears in his eyes were a direct result of this mental-session expression having lingered in his sub-conscious rather than having been caused by the sudden dawning upon him that his life of ‘café society’ was now drawing to its inevitable conclusion, and that this had been happening for some years … a sudden awareness of a gradual process. The couple’s reference to a ‘mental session’ had been a catalyst for something quite separately pre-existent within his mind, although the two events would remain forever inextricably linked by hindsight.
His was the mental session that mattered. He had no control over such sessions held by other people. He could not be responsible for any mind but his own. Meanwhile, the waitress was now hovering round Jack’s own table, thus making him initially fear any approaching hints that he had been nursing his coffee long enough, ready, as she appeared to be, to start clearing his table next. But, no, she was intent on making at least small talk last, it seemed. “Hello, Mr Clark, how are you today? Weather getting you down?” He had hardly noticed the weather through the steamed-up windows. It was hardly worth giving it the time of day. Habits died hard, he thought. Put a hat on it. Or the hot tin roof. He smiled back at the waitress who was relatively new and unnamed. He just heard her called Pet, short for Petula possibly. A pet name, indeed, used by her co-tutters behind the counter. Petula was too Sixties. She must have been born in the late eighties, even nineties.
“How did you know my name?” he asked. He bit his tongue. It came out all wrong, too sudden. He should have been conspiring with her, or at least accepting the small talk rather than countering it with a sharp-drawn breath of a question.
“It’s just I know you from before.” Her voice was lilting in Welshness. Or French.
He looked casually into one of the top corners of the steamy room. Vaguely perceived within was an irregular shape that he could not reconcile with anything that had gone before. A tangle of material or garment-smalls: end-of-line bargains from a market-stall floating improbably or caught upon a nail on the inside café wall. An irregular shape because it should not have been there at all. This was a classy joint. Cast-offs or hand-me-downs represented a commodity in which a café could not possibly deal. He sweated, unsure if this was what was meant by a ‘mental session’. If so, he had never experienced one before and, therefore, could not compare it with anything else in his life.
“You knew me from somewhere else?”
She nodded. “You helped my Mum once. You were very kind. Don’t you recognise me? I was the little girl who sat on the couch when you were there. I was a bit shy.”
“Errr… Was that when she had called out for help – a premature birth…?”
“Yes, that was my sister. Or would have been my sister, had things been different.”
“I know… sorry…”
“It wasn’t your fault, Mr Clark. You did all you could. And if it hadn’t been for you, I’d’ve lost my Mum, too.”
He wondered now if this was a true memory being conjured into the open by a trick or entrapment of conversation, whereby he had been drawn into the girl’s own ‘mental session’, a mutual conspiracy of small talk grown too big for truth. He had a sense that he had already lifted himself up from the chair several times, motioning as if to leave the café, while simultaneously offering a generous gratuity, but the waitress held him fast by conversational means, cheeping and chirping about trivialities which he was too polite to ignore. Some independent strangers were wiping the café windows from outside in the street, although Jack felt – somewhere at the back of his mind – that to clean steamed-up windows one would need to do this from inside the café, not from outside. Nothing made sense otherwise. He remembered a nursery rhyme: Jack be nimble. Jack be quick. Jack jumped over the candlestick. He was uncertain what it meant. Or rather, implied. The meaning was quite simple, the implication less so. As in all stories and rhymes and other similar mental sessions, the searching for some holy grail of purpose or message was counterproductive for most conscious people who lived through them. He fingered her arm.
Jack eventually left the café society, intent on never crossing such boundaries again. Like all people, he saved lives, or killed lives, by the merest trivial action, of doing or not-doing the same thing.
James Clark saw the waitress trying to peer through the clouded café window, as he marched downtown, too old for any Juliet to mistake him as her Romeo. He vanished amid the other ragamuffins.
#
“Upon examining the primary sources concerning the Coffee House society of the 17th century, there is a feeling among peers that Pepys was only the tip of an iceberg. Bigger, better diaries were kept telling of bigger, better fires and bigger, better plagues. It’s just that others of the time (rough diamonds in the main) had the good sense to seek to destroy these diaries before historians were able to take them as their own. Subsequent brainstorming and other similar mental sessions of posterity’s academics and intellectuals upon the existence or not of such rogue diarists out-doing Pepys were also thankfully destroyed by not writing them down in the first place. A good example of academia as cultural ‘suicide bomber’.” From ‘Café Society from Samuel Pepys to Edgar Degas’ by James Clark (Emeritus Professor of History – University Of Rhyme and Reason).
When I stumbled upon the now disused café that Clark had once frequented, I thought it was anything but. The building seemed full of life; the air sounded with jiving ghosts from the fifties when the place was a would- be Lloyds corner house; the walls only needed a lick of paint to bring them back to life. My wife needed a similar lick of paint, too, but priorities were to earn a living from property development, hopefully with a TV show following our efforts at renovation work, useful as a spur to progress as well as a fateful backhander by means of a fee. My wife would only be able to afford her mud-packs, toning-up weekends and mental sessions with an expensive shrink as soon as a real income was rolling in from a new property development. She had to get stuck in, too, meanwhile. No point in manicured nails when she had to spend the day sandpapering.
It was a disused café, however. The deeds told a million stories … of its past, its period as a middle-class restaurant during the war years when they served three-course meals quite reasonably but only for people with manners. How they kept the riffraff out remained a mystery. However, it soon went to seed, before being revived as a milk bar with a juke box, then more latterly, a café with an eye on the passing lorry trade, then a café with posher pretensions but with no fail-safe method of deterring the everpresent onset of the riffraff again, then final dereliction as an empty Ligottian shopfront always being bill-posted, and that was when my wife and I stepped in. We were riffraff ourselves, of course. But we had pretensions to property-owning grandeur following a reasonable lottery win scooping us from the gutter. The building itself had a massive mansion roof with chimneys stacks to match, I noted with delight. And I turned to the camera to show my delight.
I was now unsure about the TV show. There was only a single camera that followed us round. We had effectively given up hope of proper sponsorship by a major ‘peeping tom’ outfit wanting to sneak glimpses into our business trials and tribulations for eventual broadcast to the world, revealing our innermost marital quarrels over the building project and how it affected the rest of our lives; but there was, however, this little guy with a shoulder-shoot who did turn up on the first day of our building work; we assumed he was starting out himself in business as a TV programme creator, surely hoping to see the finished reels ending up in the hands of a big Channel 4 producer. So we turned a blind eye to him. We just allowed him in on most things regarding the café renovation and on our daily habits short of personal ablutions. We got used to his presence shadowing us with his whirring lenses, a sort of visionary overview becoming such a regular feature of our lives that he almost melted into the background. Forgotten, if pervasive. A cameraman we called Sam.
My wife did at first try to hold a conversation with Sam. But he was rather taciturn and we were really too busy to pay him much attention. We could have asked him what he did for a living if that was not already obvious. The circumstances of his sole purpose obviously being to film our actions on a day-to-day basis indeed cancelled out any opportunity for small talk other than the rather stylised interviews-to-camera that he arranged. I called them ‘interviews’, but it was rather Sam simply pointing the lens at us and letting us talk, spilling all our dreams, fears, setbacks, rages (with the café project itself and with each other), even eliciting from us (by his silence) several gratuitous comments on current affairs and our taste in contemporary entertainment. Perhaps we were eventually to be shown on other light TV programmes unconnected with building projects.
We started to suspect that Sam wasn’t all that he seemed to be when, one day, he started pointing his camera obsessively towards the top corner of what had become our main showroom for future commercial use as a lounge bar. He was particularly interested in the uncharacteristically pre-renovated white ceiling that seemed to spook him out with its ready ‘newness’.
“What are you actually renovating this place for?” he suddenly asked, as if thinking he had now spotted our first attempts at stocking the place with goods to sell instead of table covers at which to serve unruly pork dinners disguised as nouveau cuisine.
I stopped the hammer in mid-air; my wife halted sandpapering in mid-scrape. We had automatically assumed he must have known. Even a half-hearted pre-research or a cursory glance at our video diaries would have told him at least what our business plan happened to be. And how could we have ignored such ignorance when we knew full well that we were indeed renovating the disused café to … well, wasn’t it obvious…? James Clark haunted it and so it would have its gimmick of an attraction in bearing such a ghost.
I scratched my head in my own form of mid-scrape. My wife went into one of her famous televisual rages….
A clothes shop for riffraff. That was it. Boiler suits. Shell suits. Dungarees. Cheap tracksuits. Hand-me-downs. Nearly New garments. Seconds. Run-ups. Ready-mades. They were all the rage. Rail upon rail of hangers simply waiting for their own dressed ghosts swinging to the earth’s daily spin. Doing the empty hand-jive. What a business we would have, a million miles from being a posh café.
Sam’s own spectacle lenses continued to spin as we returned to the job in hand. Soon be time for a coffee break from the steaming percolator. Meanwhile, just the gentle scrape-scrape of wall against wall. A café society of ghosts re-living the high days of a Lyons Corner Houses or posh restaurants accompanied by palm court violins in mute bowing.
I don’t know when I first realised it. None of us riffraff were there, of course. It was almost as if I were a figment of the medium in which I was being filmed. A TV portrait of a TV portrait. A fabrikation of a fabrikation. My wife and I were merely temporary stuffing in a concoction of the future that the past had prematurely programmed for any rogue historians or history-makers (watching out for the onset of a peak viewing time) to wrap around costly commercials.
But these thoughts of my own non-existence as riffraff (or as a diary-reporter of riffraff masquerading as riffraff) were only premonitions of what once might have been our destiny, given the ability to film us for wider audiences at home with streaming internet services rather than for the dirty Mackintosh brigade of men like Clark in a backstreet cinema during London’s wartime of impending blitz. Or given the ability of putting us in expendable film rushes for later excavation and examination by modern shrinks who got rich from filming ‘mental sessions’ in readiness for home viewing on TV before TV was invented, still just a pure white screen with no signal, nor even snowy static to fill it. But, rhetorically, is true emptiness an expanse of black or of white? Meanwhile, Samuel peeps on…
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