Sitting on the sunny side of the street, outside Breaks, I am waiting for my coffee to arrive. Late Friday morning, and already the feeling of another weekend yawns far and wide within languid daydreams – somehow stretching the confines of a week into an expanse of extra time. The sky is clear, blue and endless. Outside this café, people are walking through the sun-shined, sea-port town, leaving their half-caught conversations here and there for others to listen and love; streets are already filling up with day-tripping tourists keen to mooch along through the weekend markets further up on South Terrace. Scents of perfume hang heavy in the drifting breeze. A man with a fridge trolley pushes past everyone in his way labouring with a cargo of orange crates. Large groups of lunchtime students drift – some going this way, some going that way – are meandering in conversations. The sun shines along the length of High Street. A feint moving breeze blows down from the Town Hall and out towards the sea.
The café was filled inside with the sound of female laughter and coffees being made – the hiss and rush of frothing milk. It was busy in and around the café. The High Street was full of noise and people. Almost all tables were taken at the café as well. I sat near the door and had the sun on my back. A girl with a coloured pencil case was writing something down on the table I normally wrote at. Some guy sat at the adjacent table, back turned slightly, almost facing the sunshine. He said good morning to some other guy called Ian who walked past. To my right were three young people talking in French. An old woman dressed like an English Vicar muddled past. An office worker walked quickly then dropped to his knee in the middle of the pavement to tie up a shoelace, then carried on walking, swinging his arms: grey shirt white pants. Lovers of all ages sauntered past arm in arm, hand in hand, sharing the sunshine and the moment of this morning.
A plane, low plane light aircraft fluttered overhead in the endless blue. An old man with short grey hair and an angry face grumbled past my table, limping with a stick. Behind him three youngsters walked past, oblivious to anything other than the delight of their own laughter as each jumped up to touch the awnings and overhanging shop signs. Across the road I saw my friend Shane the archaeologist walking down towards the Round House.
At the corner of the next intersection a street artist was painting a large purple elephant in chalk on the floor.
Everyone around me seemed to be reading – heads down in books and newspapers reading. A guy with a white ponytail sat nearby staring at a crossword. The crossword was large and took up most of the half-folded page of his newspaper. He bobbed his head and tapped his feet to music being played from the record shop next door. A watch on his wrist clearly told the time of a quarter past eleven. Nearby, a lady sketching sat in silence, drawing something with great care, crafting slowly, watching her ideas manifest in pictures. As she continued to draw, she leant on her left hand, elbow resting on the table. A giant pink stone sat in the ring on her finger. It matched the pink hue of her fingernails which shone in contrast to her olive skin. She coughed suddenly and turned her sketchbook: she was drawing rings.
Next door, the record shop had just finished playing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” I had missed most of the song when ordering my coffee but caught its ending. The record shop already had its doors open before I arrived. They had a big, yellow sign telling the whole of High Street who they were: Record Finder – Specialists in New & Quality Used Records and Cassettes. The interior of the shop looked dark and eclectic – hosting the entire body of music in all its forms. Theirs was a portal into another world – a voyage into new dimensions of Time hitherto unknown and undiscovered; music shops, like bookshops, offered up the opportunity to glimpse into distant corners of the universe and come face to face with something utterly unexpected which somehow aligns with your soul, strikes a chord and eventually changes how you see the world forever (such is the magic of music and poetry).
A large, plastic crate of vinyl records balanced on a stool, guarding the shop doorway. Books about jazz sat alongside vinyl in a glass cabinet with words written on a note. Rows of compact discs ran from the entrance into the darkness inside – each with a small, white label in the right-hand corner (like a postage stamp). The ceiling was high. Behind the posters, behind the stacks of records and compact discs, the walls were painted jade green. In the window there was a large poster of Johnny Cash; below it, a box with the name ‘Tchaikovsky’ printed on it. Sunlight fell inside the shop floor, arrowing in through the gaps at the shop’s front and searing the patches of carpet in long, horizontal cuts. A lone seagull moved about the doorway. The bird had flown down out of the sunshine to land at an outside table where people had been eating. The bird landed in silence grabbed a large crust of something, swallowed it whole in one gulp. It then jumped to the floor and moved as if to enter the music shop (loitering in the shadows of the threshold).
One of the record shop owners, sat outside the café on a table, watching the world walk by (offering out a greeting to whoever stopped to talk with him). As I took out my pen and paper and got ready to write on an adjacent table, he ordered another coffee from the waitress with blonde hair.
The humming thunder of a Harley Davidson purrs past us, hammering down towards the Round House and elsewhere. Van doors slam shut as morning deliveries are made. A young woman walks up towards town, carrying a book in one hand, with sunshine bouncing through each curl in her brown hair.
My pen cast a shadow on the table in front of me as I wrote. I watched the way it seemed to weave and dance in front of me on sunlit pages; my will, my ideas scorching blank paper forever.
This is all I have today – ten minutes here at the cafe. This is all I have. And this is enough. This will work. With a flat pavement beneath your feet and the sun on your face. This is the place to be: sunshine on a wooden table, a coffee on its way and a ticket to ride. Writing on a wooden table, watching people passing by, blessed by the freedom of an empty page. Casting aside the irritations of seeking out a perfect time and place to write; there are no conditions worth pursuing (all are either absent or elusive). We need nothing more than to enjoy this moment: watching ink flow.
My coffee arrived. The blond waitress brought it. She told me to ‘Enjoy.’ Midday sunshine was in abundance.
I looked around the High Street. Opposite me sat an artist doodling and sketching something in oranges and greens. He had a glass jar of short, coloured pencils on the table in front of him. Eyes closed I could feel the warmth of the sun. The breeze moved past the skin on my face and hands. It was nice to have the sun on my face. I recalled the lines in Hunter S Thompson’s The Rum Diary where Kemp and Chenault have made love just as the novel begins to end, and the two lay together in the darkness of his apartment in Old San Juan – her head resting on his chest – drinking rum in the moonlight, listening to the clink of the ice in their glasses in the total silence they shared; it sounded loud enough to wake the whole of Puerto Rico.
I thought of the beach and began to write again. I began to think of the way that the ocean had looked and felt earlier that morning. Swimming in the endless blue. The feeling of saltwater all around. Floating in the waters of the Indian Ocean as they sparkled with summer’s sunshine. The waters had been sculpted and flat, moving slightly, here and there, broken only by the black dorsal fins of two dolphins coming up for air moving far out in the deep.
A scented candle burning somewhere filled the air with perfume.
Richard the journalist walked past my table and said hello. He stopped and we chatted about some news he had seen overnight in Europe. He told me about the new book he was writing. Told me how difficult the process was. Told me that it was a lot of effort for nothing. Told me the only reason you’d want to write something because you are passionate about it. I wished him luck (knowing he’d complete it and succeed – some people are so committed to their art that all the wind they need within their sails is always blowing near by).
The record shop began to play The Beatles. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club. After the eponymous track opened, the sounds of ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ filled the air – and as the chorus tells the whole of High Street how to get high with a little help from our friends, an old man with a bulky, blue backpack appears from nowhere and begins to dance across the pavement, zig-zagging in fleet-footed fox-trots.
Everything was as it should be. Everything felt good. Everything was magic.
There was nothing but clear blue skies.
The sun was getting stronger. I sat still for a few moments more. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the sun on my back and heard laughter. It would be time to go soon. I failed to notice my friend, Liz, approach my table from out of my range of peripheral vision. She’d been watching me write as she walked up the High Street. She came to say hello. We spoke for a while (she was on her lunchbreak, she had a cold and had to hurry as she was on her way to get something to eat).
Eventually it was time for me to leave. I finished what was left of my coffee and packed up what I had written. A customer entered the record shop as I stood up and the lone seagull scuttled out of the shadows back into the sunshine on High Street. Almost immediately they began to play ‘There’s Frost on the Moon’ by Artie Shaw. I walked down away from the café, down towards the Roundhouse and the sound of a clarinet followed me all the way down to the corner of Pakenham Street.
The Round House basked in sandstone sunlight.
*
siesta del somewhere 