STONE CHIP
Sat wedged in the café window, as it were, on my usual leather perch. Sipping boiling tea in all the brightness of the day. Sweating through my anorak whilst peering through the wide plain glass, onto the wider plainer street. Catching little glimpses of the wider, plainer world beyond. Beyond all this, beyond all that.
There were chips in the street I closely, or idely, observed. Here and there, scuff-marks, cracks. Dents and holes in the sun-baked road, in the hot iron rails, in the lamp-posts and drains. Scratches and knocks in the vehicles closely parked or, yes my eyes were quick, in those whizzing passed. While women and men sauntered about, jittered about, quite sightless. So it seemed. They touched one another with fingers and words, or whistled nameless tunes, unknown by my ears through the separating pane. The hanging sheet of boundary.
I ceased counting dents to put things again in their place. The people all had names, I knew. All of them.
No. All except one.
A clock attached to a church by the river struck a quarter past three in the afternoon, causing the cafe window to lightly shudder. As it happened, as it struck, the sun shon very well indeed. All about was yellow.
No. Not all.
Two women in skirts walked by holding hands. As they entered the sidewalk-stage before me, one casually kicked up a sharp little stone, which spun in the dry city air. Though close as all that, I could hardly tell if it had been dislodged merely by accident. The thing shot towards my face and I blinked...
During the time my eyes were closed, my hands withdrew from the table and settled to rest on my knees. I straightened my hunch and drew a breath, steady and long, as I had recently been taught.
I drew four more breaths, deep and strong. Then readied for the moment.
Upon the opening of my eyes a chink had appeared in the glass before me. I wondered, but only for a moment, whether the chink, the fault, the crack in the glass, had always been there. Had it always been there? The prettier girl smiled: then I knew she knew what she had done. Then the other, something like her sister, spat something like venom onto the paving stones between us.
I put out my finger to test the glass and its newest jewelled defect, six inches from my nose. On my side, at least, I determined that the glass was still smooth. A superfitial wound then.
On the heels of the sisters in skirts, if they were sisters, two heavy-set mothers staunched into view, laden with packets in several string bags. Each pushed a rickety pram, sprung on large rickety wheels. Oddly, I thought, (but only for a moment), the prams were tethered together with a swinging iron chain, the links of which, I immediately noted, were rusted and chipped. The babes, one in each buggy, barely known beneath heaps of motorless toys and pictureless books, were peaceful and pale. As their eyes locked on mine, each held an end of the chain, tighter than tight, in little white fists.
A short time after, two men who looked alike, each of them faded like a photo of Jesus Christ, hauled in the opposite direction a third man, who appeared to be shocked. They carried him roughly, as they probably would have carried any old bit of wood. This third, who was shocked, was not faded. I could see his texture, I could see his grain. Soon enough it was clear to me (as clear as I could tell) that what they hoisted aloft was exactly that. A large bit of wood - merely hacked into the shape of a third man. They all stumbled when a pair of dogs ran about their legs, apparently in a hurry to reach the Royal park, which sprouted and sprawled at the end of the street from whence the men had come. Shitting time! I crudely deduced; and I swigged from my boiling hot tea.
Across the street, black trash collectors in orange dungerees inspected briefly, and then carried away, a green corduroy sofa. In the direction of the river. My eye was sharp as always. The sofa suffered badly from a cigarette burn; its iron castors rusted into useless, solid lumps. I could hardly tell why, but I was pleased to see the back of it. As the men zig-zagged stupidly down the slip road, their shiny brown faces were turned in my direction. They remained thus, those faces squared to mine, until they with their quarry had sunk out of view. I looked after them: later that day they would return. Their eyes had been large, the lips deep red, slightly parted; but the faces, as I read them, told me nothing at all.
In the street on that day, others had gawped as keenly. The sisters in skirts were two who had stared, and those mothers, their babes, and the Jesus Christ men. Even the eyes of the man made of wood had pinned themselves on me: or regarded at length, the chink that blemished the pane and hovered, as they must have seen it, like distortion across my face.
Later, a bright yellow tram rattled by, one of the newest. Inside, the passengers, all of whom were turned towards the café in which I sat, clung on with their fists through the new plastic straps. Their right fists, they used; all the right arms thus shoved high in salute. Each face that trundled by, beginning with that of the driver, cooly examined the little stone-chip between us. Their features were vague, for they were gone in a hiccup of time; but somehow or other I knew each of their names.
I spooned plenty of honey into boiling tea, and immediately solved a puzzle. The eyes had not been fixed on the kink in the glass. They had been drawn to the television screen above the serving counter, directly at my rear. As I witnessed the clear sky fill and darken, the screen flickered in reflexion in the glass above the reflection of my head. Though reluctant to turn from the act on the street, I did then turn.
The television was hung from parcel string, tied to a hook in the foam-panelled ceiling. It pendulated in response to some deep vibration in the ground. Someone had quoted once somewhere: someone is beating a drum. The ancient TV was housed in greasy Bakerlite, impregnated with decades of dust. As I watched I deciphered a scene in an epic film. With a wide format camera panning in reverse, the scene was that of the aftermath of an historic battle. The battle had taken place in a pine forest, at the height of summertime, in the late afternoon. The forest floor could not be seen under a blanket of tangled bodies, three or more layers deep. The men wore the uniforms of all the armies which had at one time trampled the earth. Some scarlet jerkins, starched breeches and garters, with polished buckles and clips, were stylish. The modern outfits remarkably dull. Heavy armour, breastplates and helms glistened in the keeling red sun, causing rainbows to arc and dance amonst the neat slaughter. And the slaughter was neat. No part of clothing, nor weapon, nor backpack was soiled; all blood held in. These men had not suffered or relished a terrible fight. They lived on, eternally posed: and all the names were known to me. The field of eyes, wide in upturned faces, looked out of the grease-coated screen as if they looked upon me; but no. With envy I realised that the cast of that war, of those wars, had been observing, as I had not, the mundane events of the steet-scape beyond me.
Recapturing my own pose I returned to my tea. It boiled still; and the stone-chip spangled at the end of the sun.
From a rack I picked out a torn magazine, a charity supplement, which I had no inclination to read. I would experiment instead. I held it up to blot out the chink, and peered over to observe the pavement. In the road, two cops on horses clopped into view, ahead of a convoy of vehicles, sirens and lights a-blazing. They filled my screen for a deafening, blinding moment; the four of them, two cops and two horses, sternly regarding the flaw in the pane. The officers wore helmets with tinted visors and the eyes of their mounts were dark - but I knew their names. I read the magazine. It was crumpled, the print smudged, the pages tacky between my fingers. Unwilling to drown in tales of aids among child prostitutes living in sewers; bent doctors, immigration conflicts, famine and further varieties of premature death, I considered instead the centre-page poster. But this I also refused to enjoy. I recalled a similar image, equally faded and torn, which I had seen on a billboard that morning, near the river and the quarter-past-three church.
A curry-coloured teenager with no legs grasped tightly a shiny pink action-man doll. Behind him, crowded in front of a crumbling street clinic in a third world village awash with river sludge, a hundred more children flaunted stumps of limbs, and laughed and jostled in self-conscious play. I knew the kids' names, but wondered what joke the photographer had recently told. For in the magazine which I did not read, the picture was almost the same, but had been taken a moment sooner. Or a moment later perhaps. There the children did not grin. The faces were vacant and dreadful and blotched, while every head, including that of the doll, was turned towards the camera; or that joker behind the camera.
Glancing up, I saw that the riders with their convoy had passed on. I dropped the magazine back in its rack, and drank some tea, which boiled and burned.
From a road parallel to the slip-road which led to the river, a giant approached. He was all but transparent but I could see that his eyes were fixed with intent upon my bit of the café window. I swivelld to meet him in the flesh. Instantly the man, who had been sitting at a table on the other side of the room, and whose name I knew, interupted his course and walked instead to the exit. He passed out of the door, his head slightly bowed, but continued to look in my direction until he stepped into a betting shop some yards down the street. Ever since my arrival at the café the man, now throwing his wages at a Saturday dog, had stared my way as though I were something he had almost forgotten. But my appearance had recently, perhaps drastically, altered, and there were few in the street who would recognise me.
I turned to look about the neon lit room in which I sat. The drab interior was always brightly over-lit with strips of neon, even on such a glorious day as this had been. I guessed they were switched on at the mains first thing each morning, coming alive with the coffee machine, the television and the little microwave which propped up a beverages shelf. With a very slight tremor of, I could not tell what, I saw that the café was now almost empty.
A cook in a spoiled apron stood beneath the swinging TV, now switched off. She stood quite still, watching the traffic behind me. I remembered the name which belonged to her right at the moment I saw the faint scar that divided her head into two equal parts. It rose from her open blouse collar to cleave her chin, pressed lips, sharp nose, and pale, worried forhead. Then it vanished beneath the roots of her fringe; the red hair was centrally parted. It seemed to me that she was finished for the day, but that she would not rest.
At the largest table, a hexagonal table covered in a shiny pink cloth, a man in a pullover sat. He held delicately an old vinyl record whose surface he caressed with an index finger. His head slightly tilted to one side, he too regarded the brick and glass landscape which I partly blocked. Fine cuttlery and plates were laid out for six places; one arranged at the centre of the table. An odd tradition. Each setting was reserved with a card, the names on which I could not read over the distance: but I knew all the people who would come.
One other person occupied the café as it approached closing time, but I could not clearly see his face. His table was bare; he neither ate nor drank. I imagined him the owner, but he was non-descript and could have been anything at all.
Out there the street was momentarily deserted. I cupped the mug of tea, still full, still boiling, between my hands. The day had quickly subsided and the air, which had previously stifled, was now cool.
The summer never lasted long. Not in the city. Each time one passed a darkness descended to blot out the details of that easiest of seasons. Now was precisely such a moment of change.
A barber appeared biefly from his shop to drag in his painted sign. The sun-tanned man in the picture had grinned too widely for too long and I was glad to see him go. According to a clock hung above a jewelers shop it was six o'clock. The air had turned grey and the sun, though not thoroughly doused, had lost every useful purpose.
A child then materialised and looked through my window, nose to the glass, hands pushed deep into the pockets of a blue school anorak. The words sprang to mind, I do not know his name, but were quickly replaced: why should I? Of me he took no notice at all. He regarded the young man whose face and name were not clear to me. He, the man, was the day's last customer. The other who had waited at the pink-cloth table had given up on his guests and left. He had scrutinized the chink in my part of the glass as he had done so.
The last customer wore a thin suit which made him, to my mind, a financial salesman early in his training, or a ministry clerk. He might have fallen asleep, as low as he was bent across his cleared table. I had never yet seen him move. Locks of longish, uncombed hair fell about his face to obscure the features. The boy entered, then bolted the door in a practised movement behind him. He smiled and waved to the cook, who at last shifted to acknowledge him with the merest smile of her own. She watched him join the drooping man, then retreated to the back rooms.
It was time to pay for the boiling tea and leave. I went to the counter and placed the correct coins beside an over-filled ashtray on the top of the till, which was open and empty. Moving to the door I unbolted it and signaled to the boy that he might lock it again behind me. He did not look up or respond in any way; simply sat opposed to the man, neither of them speaking. Into the chill, dingy evening I stepped. I buttoned my collar and turned to home; but then my eye was caught by that chink in the window. I had to test with a finger the curious impression I received; that the glass in that place was smooth. It was. The stone-chip was now on the inside of the window. How could that be? I doubted myself. This would be a second mark, a second chip; and I had simply lost track of the other. In the café the boy sat still across from the man in apparent silence.
It began to rain, very soon to rain hard. Then came pellets of sleet. The season was decaying fast. I wore no suitable clothing and hungered for any manner of supper. Eager as I may have been, or may not have been, to return to my appartment, I was halted there, quite as if chained, a yard or less from my usual seat on the other side of the glass. And, as things went in that place, I hardly moved again until the sun returned. I wished to know the last customer's face. From that I would know his name.
In the constellation of my vision at that moment, the chink, on the other side of the glass now, was a substabtial gem captured in the air above the table between the man and the boy where they sat, sideways on to me.
Then the interior lights flickered out and I saw nothing until a figure appeared from the rear with a candle and placed it on their table where, to my sight, it was completly obscured by the chink. The female cook was that person. She stood for a moment between them, resting a hand gently upon the crown of the boy's head. Through the shifting wet glass the jewel which hovered between them shimmered and throbbed, illuminated as it was from behind by the flame of the candle. The woman faced me directly. For the first time I understood that her features were pleasant, although from here I could not see that terrible scar. But those features shifted also, through the rainy glass; and it quickly grew long with sadness.
In the wings of my vision, two faces dissolved into view. They were the faces of twins, at least brothers: fair haired and fair skinned. As I studied the room, the heads appeared crammed between the ceiling and the dark linonium of the floor. When the mouths moved the voices reached my ears from either side of me, very close, and I was aware that these men stood at my sides. The two reflected heads looked in at the scene as I did. They wore thin shirts and grey trousers, the creases ruined in the worsening storm. One wore a bootlace tie. He said, "The boy is wrong; but what else should he be? Above all else, he is only a boy."
The other wore a peculiar thing, almost a cravat. He said, "Then let us let him be," and he rapped a knuckle sharply on the glass. The boy turned, hesitantly waved, and rose to let them in. He bolted the door behind them and they seated themselves, opposed from one another at a separate table. When the boy returned to his place the woman had gone, but soon returned with a second lamp which, without a word, she placed between the two men. She then merged again with the shadows beyond the counter. The man with the cravat grasped a hand of the other: and they remained so, like reconciled lovers, wordless and still. It appeared to be of no matter when no drink or food arrived, and soon I too ignored them.
As I watched I turned over the words these two had exchanged, the words they had carefully placed into each of my ears. They were the Jesus twins I had earlier witnessed carrying the wood like a man.
Once again, as a frame to my vision, two faces loomed large in reflection where the others had appeared. These two were dark. They were the faces of the garbage men who now stood beside me, a little behind. They too spoke to one another, as if through me, but I hardly registered the meaning. My attention fixed on the man beneath the locks, whose face was darkest of all.
"You said, 'I imagined in my mind that they were gone, turned to dust. All of them.'"
"Yes, I did."
"How would alone feel then?"
"The same. No worse."
"But no better."
"There would be far less thinking to do."
"You are wrong on that score."
The boy saw my new companions who were watching him. He recognised them and let them in, leading them to a third table. They did not hold hands; they glared at one another. The woman, now wearing an evening costume and looking splended, if yet sad beneath the makeup - though less sad than before - brought them a lamp. They curtly nodded, then continued to glare at one another as if some terrible argument played out beneath the surface. That was all with them: they neither ate, nor drank, nor moved; and I lost interest.
When the woman retreated this time I saw that her dress was cut very low at the back. I had known a dress like that. The thin back too.
My own clothes were soaked through and through and I shivered uncontrollably. I may have appeared some type of fool; but the street had emptied and none of the people I watched within the café were concerned with my presence. Perhaps they could not see me in the darkness. I stepped back to look up at the windows above and on either side of the café. There were no lights. As a rule, the street lights would go out at twelve. The buildings across the street were dark too, except for one brightly lit window directly opposite the café. This place I did not recognise. All transport had ceased and all noise but that of the wind. The moon, new and thin, could occasionally be glimpsed, captive within the lowest cloud.
But the wind now dipped and the sleet turned to light snow. This was preferable but I was no less bitterly cold. My lips, as I touched them with my numb fingers, were frozen and raw, and the burns in my mouth were strange when I thought of boiling tea. I hated tea of any kind, no matter how much I drank of the stuff. It was a habit of spite, as a terrible woman close to me for a short time had once reckoned.
Wrapped in shawls, those mothers with their prams arrived through the quiet snowfall. As the boy saw them he was sullen, but bid them in. As they entered one woman said, "They grow fast alike, those two. It always happens that way." The other smoothed the boy's hair, but he shook her off. He guided them to an empty table at which they sat facing one another. They, also, recieved a lamp from the lady, who moved now with elegance. Nothing was said. The boy rejoined the man and all had occured as I had anticipated.
Now I fully expected the sisters in skirts to appear, the smiling one and the spiteful sister, and I hoped they would do so soon. I determined to speak with them. I would say something common and ask if this were a private affair, or whether someone might enter for tea, or a meal. My empty stomach convinced me that all the guests, if guests they were, awaited a marvellous banquet.
I saw for the first time that an open fire burned in an alcove in the wall. It was modest, but impressive to me, frozen from ground to flesh. I had felt in my life the pain of absolute cold only once previously. Now as my teeth chattered uncontrollably, I tried harder than ever before not to know that time.
The sisters in skirts never came. Rooted in the icy street, held by the spell of that diamond in the window, the welcome early morning all but never arrived.
In spite of the night the sun at last rose in strips of green, violet and rose to make the day bright. The usual traffic, metal and flesh, massaged the street into usual life. My eyes stung in the cold, new light. I wanted to move on, to find my home, but could not decide upon the route I should take. A figure advanced into the limits of my altered vision. It approached for an age. I forced my blood to return with shudders and stamps. By the time the figure removed its jacket the day had thawed. The name of this face was known to me.
My father hardly smiled, but smiled he did on seeing me.
"Good God, up with the pests!" were his words on our meeting. He grabbed my hand and shook it, making a face to share the cold of it. "You've not been in then?" Just then the neons clicked on inside and the room lived again. He bashed the door impatiently.
The boy opened the shop. He was pale. He yawned when my father ruffled his hair. "They're having breakfast," he vaguely said. "I have to go for the keys." He ignored me again and ran into the street as we entered. From then, for some time, I was so blasted with warmth and exultant in it that I understood little else. We came to the hexagonal table where three people, whom I thought knew, sat eating bacon and drinking coffee, tea, juice, milk and thimbles of schnaps.
The dark man saw my father and nudged with a rough elbow the fair man, who half rose. The young mother, with wide eyes, breast fed her baby. A familiar voice, that of my mother, spoke into my ear. She would take our coats and we should sit, that was all. She had the face of the cook woman. She wore no apron; had no scar that I could tell. She took them to hang with my father's long scarf. He sat as if for the hundredth time that day and began to speak to all at once of mundane topics. When he stopped at last the fair man, my brother, spoke. The new sign had been a bugger to hang, he said. He had recieved no assistance, had managed it alone and had injured his back. The dark man, also my brother, scoffed and spoke of a waste of funds which were better directed 'upstairs'. The woman was my sister. She half listened, half smiled, and looked whistfully at me the whole time, as though we kept a secret from the others. The baby dozed more than it sucked. I took breakfast from the various plain dishes and poured myself a mug of boiling tea. I returned in some way to myself, but did not speak.
My mother never sat but hovered as she always had, serving, replenishing, smoothing tempers.
After food I felt restored. I thanked my mother as always and easily took leave of them. I stepped into the day, which was brisk but not bitter, and turned to see the sign above the doorway. I thought it Kitsch, perhaps tasteless, perhaps not. But I gave my brother the benefit of the doubt and decided, if asked, I would support him. He had hung a wooden jesus there, roughly carved, where once our lettered plaque had been nailed.
I walked in a new direction. After a hundred paces bumped heavily into the boy as he emerged running from a side street. I recognised him first by the thin plimsoles that he wore, which he had painted as they were old and which he adored. Something caught in his eye, a zipper of mine I feared, for he winced. But he would not hear my questions, or know me at all. He walked towards the café, stooped, fingers held to his eye. Others would think him rude, especially later, but I knew he was hurt. As I looked he vanished behind the morning crowd, and we would not meet again. Although neither of us had heard it fall, he had dropped the key he had run to fetch. Without a thought I took it myself.
Before my father had died he had given me something which had belonged to my mother, which she had recieved as a child. She had spent an aweful childhood among religious people, had known little luxury. The thing she had treasured as a girl had been the glass droplet of a chandelier. It had been rescued from a country house destroyed in the last week of the war. She had kept it safe, as had my father had done after her death, in a little crimson-lined box especially made for the purpose long ago by one with whom she had shared her intimate secrets. I had never opened this box. The key had been lost so long ago that even my father had never seen the droplet. But he, and my brothers and sister and I had always quite naturally accepted my mother's word that this was what it contained.
Now, as I arrived at the appartment, I fetched the box from its place in a chest of relics I had no use for, but had never parted with. I sat on the end of my bed and held it in my hands. I flipped off my shoes which dribbled into the carpet where they lay, for it had rained again on this last journey home. As I sat, the bed grew damp to the mattress. I inserted the key and turned it as though I had turned it a thousand times. I lifted the lid and looked upon the contents, which were numerous. I pondered the photograph of twin girls. Red-heads they had been. One of them had been closer to my own secrets than anyone had ever guessed. Her sister had always been jeoulous and at last had become my wife. Other photographs I did not care to look at. I turned in my fingers instead a matchbook with no printed image on its cover. Only one match had been broken free. A child's bracelet, or anklet, of plastic dipped in gold paint occupied me for a while. At the bottom of the box, unharmed in the bombing, the chandelier droplet lay.
I held it up to my weakest eye. The eye I had damaged as a schoolboy, which had never been treated and had never improved. This had been the cause, I always assumed, of occasional headaches capable of laying me up for days or a week at a time. Now, through the glass, the front door opened. It eventually jammed on the clothes it shunted across the carpetted floor. People entered in pairs. I knew them all. At least, I knew their names. They moved to various tables where they sat as couples, some holding hands; none of them speaking. A tired woman who worked as a cook served them.
Her eyes were quietly glad. They met mine as she worked. They covered much pain, for there were many blemishes upon her, beneath her apron, beneath her clothes. I alone knew of these secret wounds. Now they were mine. The box in my hands was filled with them. The box I now closed, as if for the last time.
