A Little Coffee

Fay led them straight to a café a couple of streets past the square, stopped in front of the door, sat down on the step and waited.

“That cat of yours knows exactly what he wants,” said Axel.

“Always.”

Axel had a theory about bars, and it was this: never mind what the coffee costs, what you want to look at is the floor in front of the counter. If it’s worn down in exactly the strip where people rest a foot, then people have been resting a foot there for forty years. And where people rest a foot for forty years, you’re all right. That floor was polished smooth as a river stone.

Inside there were two builders with their toast, a young couple giggling about something, an old man reading the paper and mouthing the words, and somebody shouting an order for a cortado from the back. Everything old and a bit past it, but spotless, and with that smell of fresh coffee and warm bread that fixes anybody’s morning. Fay crossed the room and jumped up onto a chair in the corner, the one by the window.

Not everybody in there was quite so content.

At the next table an older woman was sitting alone, well dressed and well done up, one of those people who sit with a straight back without touching the chair. She looked at Axel’s muddy rucksack, and then she looked Eva up and down, slowly, paying particular attention to her bare feet. She twisted her mouth and went back to her pastry.

Axel didn’t even notice. Eva did. Eva always noticed looks like that.

The waiter came over, a lad with a filthy apron and a kind face.

“Morning, what can I get you?”

“Black coffee for me and toast with oil, ham and tomato,” said Axel. “And you?”

“A glass of water.”

“Water? Come on, have something. A coffee at least.”

“No, it’s just I don’t really fancy coffee.”

She didn’t say it very convincingly.

“Go on,” Axel insisted with a smile. “A little coffee and a bit of toast. My treat.”

“There’s no need, honestly.”

“Well, if you don’t eat it I will.” He turned to the waiter. “Two coffees and two proper rounds of toast, please.”

Eva put a hand up to stop him, and at that moment a sour voice came from the next table.

“Look, love, if you can’t afford a coffee there’s no need to make a scene about it. You say so and that’s that.” She said it slowly, with a thin smile, looking at the waiter the way you share a joke with somebody of your own standing. “Because nobody comes to me with stories, all right? Not having is one thing and coming in here to have it bought for you is another. And barefoot, on top of it. Barefoot, in a place of business. Where are we going to end up?”

She said it good and loud, so that everybody would hear, and everybody did. The builders turned to look at the girl’s feet, the young couple stopped giggling and the old man lowered his paper.

Eva’s face went to stone. Not red, not furious. Stone.

And two things landed on Axel at once and both of them boiled. One was the old woman. The other was that he had just worked out, late and all at once, why Eva had asked for a glass of water.

He was going to answer her. He had the whole sentence built and it was a good one. And then he felt Eva’s hand on his arm.

“Leave it, it doesn’t matter.”

So he turned back to the waiter and raised his voice a notch, just enough to carry across the room.

“Sorry, mate. Put two orange juices on there as well, nice and cold. We’re celebrating being alive today.”

He winked at Eva, and half a smile got away from her.

“You’re off your head,” she muttered.

“So they say.”

“I’m putting that on the tab, all right?”

“Put it on the tab.”

“Mug pays for everything,” said the old woman, to nobody, going back to her coffee.

And that was when Axel saw it.

At first he thought it was a rat, something small crossing the floor tight against the wall.

It wasn’t a rat.

It was a little figure shaped like a little person, about the size of a beer bottle, dressed in a jumble of rags, and he had time to see that its feet were bare and that it was heading straight for the old woman’s table.

Again. Not again. Again, and in a bar, and at ten in the morning.

Like the one in the woods last night. Like the one that tipped tomato sauce over an awkward guest at the hotel reception. Like the ones he’d been seeing since he was a kid. He looked round for somebody, anybody, who was looking at the floor, and nobody was looking at the floor, and that was the part that turned his hands cold, because that was the part he knew off by heart.

The little figure climbed the leg of the chair where she had her handbag, leaned in over the top and came back out hauling at a leather purse with both little hands. It got it over the edge with a tremendous effort, let it drop with a dry little sound and started dragging it backwards between the chair legs, pulling with its whole small body. The woman noticed nothing. She was still taking sips of her coffee with her little finger out, very pleased with herself.

The purse disappeared behind the bar.

Axel wasn’t breathing. He had seen the whole thing. Every step.

He turned his head towards Eva.

But Eva was already looking.

Not at the floor. At him.

“Listen… tell me you saw that too.”

Eva took her time answering.

“I saw something,” she said slowly. “Crossing down there, along the wall. A rat, or I don’t know.”

“It wasn’t a rat.”

She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She just kept looking at him with her eyes very still, waiting, and Axel had the strangest feeling that the one who was scared out of his wits was him, and that on her it showed less.

“God. I’ve been seeing things like that for ages. At work, playing cards, in the street. And I always end up telling myself the same thing, that I’m tired, that I’ve lost the plot.” He dropped his voice further. “But never in broad daylight. And never with somebody sitting there.”

Eva was quiet for a while, and when she spoke she did it slowly, the way you leaf through an old diary.

“The night I cleared out of my house there was one.”

“What?”

“The night I left everything and went without telling anybody. I’d had my rucksack packed under the bed for three weeks, and every night I told myself tomorrow, and in the morning, no. And that night I was sitting on my bedroom floor in the dark with my trainers on and I couldn’t get myself to stand up. I’d been like that for an hour and a half. And one appeared on the windowsill, outside, with the blind half up. Barefoot, in his little coloured rags and with a mischievous face that wouldn’t come off him.” She looked at her cup. “And he stayed there without moving, watching me very carefully. And then he spoke.”

“And what did he say?”

Eva raised her eyes and looked straight at him.

“‘Now or never. Give your life a good kick!’”

They both went quiet.

“And I got up, and I went down the stairs, and I didn’t lock the door because I didn’t want to hear the noise.” She took the weight off the most important thing that had ever happened to her with a small movement of one shoulder. “I did what a brownie told me, just like that. And I’ve spent ever since wondering whether I made it up. Whether I was so desperate I put on the whole show so I’d dare. Because that’s what your head does, isn’t it? When you can’t bring yourself to do it, it finds you somebody to order you.” A crooked half-smile. “I’ve never told anybody. Who do you tell? ‘I left home because a brownie told me to.’ They lock you up and throw away the key.”

Axel was watching her without blinking.

“You’re not mad,” he said. “And if you are, then we both are. Which is a great deal better than being it separately.”

A laugh got away from Eva. A real one.

The waiter arrived with the bill. The woman opened her bag, put one hand in, frowned, put the other one in, and ended up emptying the whole thing out onto the table. Out came a fan, a wad of old receipts, a boiled sweet stuck to a hairpin and a little plastic case that fell on the floor, sprang open and let a set of dentures out.

Half the bar turned to look.

And this time they weren’t looking at Eva.

“But… I had it right here.” Her voice was fading out. “It’s gone. I can’t find it. I… I haven’t got any money on me.”

There she was, the one with the straight back and the deluxe pastry, scarlet to the ears, without a penny to pay for her own coffee. Exactly the scene she had been laughing at two minutes earlier.

Axel reached across the little gap between the two tables and put some coins in her hand.

“Here. This one’s on me.”

The woman looked at the coins in her palm. Then she looked at him. Then she looked at the barefoot girl she had just humiliated.

Her chin trembled. And that very upright lady burst into tears right there, with the coins squeezed in her fist.

“I’m sorry. Please forgive me, I’m not like this.” She looked for a tissue in the mess on the table and didn’t find one. “It’s just that I’ve been coming here every day for four years at the same time, to this table, to have this. Every day. And today you two come in with a cat and a heap of rucksacks and you sit down there, and you talk to each other, and you laugh. And that came out of me.” She pressed her eyes with her wrist. “And it came out because it was the only thing I could think of that would make you look at me.”

Eva pulled her chair over and sat down next to her.

“Go on, eat your pastry, it’s sitting there half done.”

The woman let out a horrible laugh, the kind that comes with snot, blew her nose on a paper napkin and lifted her head with an idea that had been switched off for a long time and had just come back on for very little.

“I live just here,” she said. “I’ve got an enormous house and nobody to show it to. Come. Let me buy you lunch, a shower, whatever you like. Please. And if you don’t want to come I understand completely, all right? I’d have said no myself.”

Axel looked at Eva. Eva looked at Axel.

“Have you got hot water?” said Eva.

“Love, I’ve got two bathrooms.”

“Then let’s go.”