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Café Street (complete short story)
Recently, though I can’t remember when, this was a busy road, dirty and loud and choked with cars. Now it’s open-air coffee shops as far as you can see, with tables dotted on the blacktop. And girls in black, with ash-grey aprons and breathy smiles, dart all around.
The terraced houses lining Café Street are modest things with freshly painted sash windows, and sparkling panes, and lacy net curtains. Their window frames are white, but their doors are maroons, hot pinks, sea greens, sky blues, earthy browns, and fire-engine reds. Front gardens, all with creosoted fences, overflow with flowers, echoing the planters in the road. And each house has a number, bright and easily seen, screwed onto its gatepost. There’s no getting lost in this street, although I can’t recall its name—not all of it, anyway.
Then a little dog, all pert and fluffy, trotted by and yapped, and broke my reverie.
A waitress with raven hair arrived clutching a notepad and pencil. She wrote something, tore off the page and slammed it down as if it were an old-fashioned check in a movie diner. I mouthed a hasty pickup line, but she turned away. At the next table, a blond sipped a fruity shake and burbled at her sprog. On the other side, a fat man slurped a milky brew and giggled, snorting in his glass. A buck-toothed kid prodded a cactus in a rusty barrow near the kerb. Prick your fingers, I willed, prick them. Then I grabbed the note. “It’s time to leave,” it said, not in a waitress’s quick scrawl but in the round and carefully formed letters of a child.
She leant on the nearest gatepost, watching me. The street number, screwed to the post’s dark wood, was bright but strangely blurred and shifting. “Come inside the house,” she said, her features swimming. “It’s time to go.”
New carpet lay in the hallway. Thick-piled and the same maroon as the door paint, it continued up the stairs to a landing full of golden light.
“Are we going up there?” I asked, sniffing the carpet’s chemical scent and breathing in the coal dust.
She shook her head and led me to the lounge. A fire burnt in the grate, cards festooned the walls, and a Christmas tree, decked with coloured lights, stood in the corner by the curtained windows. An Advent calendar with open flaps was on the wall. And a TV—an early colour model with an artificial wooden case—played a variety show, where the nodding, dancing men told muffled jokes.
“I remember this,” I cried. “But it can’t be Christmas in the house when it’s summer in the street.”
“Look outside,” the pretty waitress said.
I pulled back the drapes. It was dusk, sleeting, and the tables and all the waitresses had gone. Traffic choked the road and right in the middle of the jam, a pale cream van with a coffee cup painted on its side was stopped.
I let the dusty curtain fall across the mess outside and backed away from the window. The dream-logic shift from bustling café to snarled-up street didn’t bother me at all, and I went over to inspect the Advent calendar. It was a classic snow scene, sparkly and charming, with a huddled cottage nestled in the woods, and robins singing on the branches. Each little cardboard hatch opened on a richly coloured miniature picture, as if someone had pierced the winter’s surface to show the cosy clockwork underneath. I wanted to climb in, but I closed a flap, and then I closed them all.
I sloped into the hall where the girl waited at the foot of the stairs, resting against the newel post with her arms crossed.
“You left your café post, and then you propped yourself against two other posts,” I said, and grinned. “And you did it all for me.”
“I’m glad you noticed,” she said. “Posts are everywhere: staging post, pillar to post, the last post, post hoc, bedpost. Wordplay always helps.”
“Always?” I asked. “Have you done this before?”
She drummed her fingers on her elbows and smirked.
“Do you deserve,” she asked, and licked her lips, “the bedroom or the cellar?”
“Which do you prefer?”
“I’m dressed in black,” she said, and brushed her sleeves. Coal dust sprinkled everywhere, and with grubby fingers, she daubed her cheeks, like a soldier readying for night battle.
“Cellar it is, then,” I said.
“It always was,” she replied, her eyes as bright as Advent doorways. “It always was.”
Read the others: fiction.red/cafe-street.ht…
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