Cafe Girl

 

What is her name, that cafe girl? All speckled colours and avoidance, woolly scarf, student face, reading a grey green book in a grey grey cafe by a grimy station in a washed out city. She's still reading, still not looking up from the book, still sucking the glowing life from a cigarette. A cheap little coffin nail of a cigarette from a cheap little carton. The kind too mean to include coupons or vouchers. There is no upside to this smoking, it's just some vaguely nihilistic activity that feeds nothing as you breathe it in and mix it with those rippling, cranky words you're pulling from the page. 

 

He wonders how long he can sit here. He looks at the other customers. They all form some jagged edged composition framed by his view of the slippery world. His Irish perspective distorts the scene with a cruel familiarity. A Liverpool made of both simple and complex atoms spinning and blundering that will slowly cough up a Lennon or a McCartney or a Cilla type or some football player hero a time or two in every generation. The crowd cheers and chants. Those relentless Mersey Beat jingles, now tired and overtaken, more like rain in a bucket than Ringo grooving on a snare and tom tom. The golden days are gone, evapourated when the genius left the bottle and the bottle fell from the wall.

...................................................................................................................................... 

 We're over on left wing now, proper and it's a manky ill-fitting day and the Beatles are some shattered thing that lives on in teenage memories, pop art, charts and frenzied tabloid excitement. A situation only destined to get worse as you get older as it's relentless tailspin mirrors that of your own life. And now, waiting on the train he can't pull his stupid eyes away from the sad girl pretending to be deep reading bloody Kafka. Everything is so obviously temporary, feelings and ideas float in and out, like tide water in a frustrating cycle. He gets up and heads over to the station as the cafe girl slowly disappears in a silent puff of her own frail white cigarette smoke. A half crown coin, she'd balanced on it's edge on the Formica table top flips onto it's face with a clatter that goes unheard.