Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘Would you like this chair?’ he says, turning to me. Quite normal. His teeth are good, he’s old, quite safe. We can play elderly man and young woman, though I’m the wrong side of thirty. They’ve changed the chairs in this place again. The chairs, the lights, the décor and the staff. Eastern Europeans; a different face each time. It’s ok, I don’t want to get friendly. Don’t practise your English on me. Not that kind of person. No small talk. People who do small-talk amaze me. How they think of so many things to say. I wonder what would happen if I stopped talking for a year or two years. You can’t. It wouldn’t be possible. Not here, in London. You still have to say something everywhere you go.

   But I’ve got my stock phrases like everybody else. A day return. Zones one to four. A double espresso. What time do you close?

   He gives up his own chair, which is a surprise. He wonders as I do, how to get the other chair over his side. Now I feel a kinship with him; we are caught in the problem of the chairs. The lady next to me carries on reading. It’s the unshavenness that gives him away. I know I look fine today. I’m wearing my best dress. Black and white with polka dots. I couldn’t afford it, but I look expensive. Disguises. People treat you by your appearance. Smarten up. Don’t forget to wash and wear deodorant. Cut your hair. Make an effort. Here we are all making an effort. The shoes, good shoes, polish well rubbed in. A tie, red, old as well, but well looked after. A suit, dark. He offers me a light for my cigarette. Where is this going? Smartly lit, deft. A gentleman. He’s known better days. Expensive restaurants, lights and the smell of freshly pressed powder. But then comes the laugh: he stares at me for a long time, then breaks into guffaws. I am the funniest thing he has seen all day. Ha ha ha ha ha.

   A summer day is an age when you’ve no way to fill it. Sit in a coffee shop. Be laughed at by old men. What is he doing here all washed up? On day release from the community centre perhaps? Roll up tobacco. We could be in Greece, looking out onto the port, rolling tobacco, thinking about home. We could be watching the girls pass and then the older girls like me, not girls anymore. We could be there, or somewhere like that, when the heat of the day has gone down, while the dusk is snuffing out the day and you thumb the felt underside of night. But we’re not. We are adrift somewhere else, in one of the few places you can still drift in London, not entirely monopolised by the young and trendy, not so many people with laptops and business meetings, though that sometimes happens, but people like him and me, waiting in between times, pretending it’s a railway station and we are back in the old days or in another country when you sit and wait for a train and have a reason to be in between destinations. But it’s not a railway station, it’s a shopping mall and the café is divided into shoppers with their bags, fags and lattes and the rest of us, that are comforted and discomforted by the rhythms of other people.

   We are in Hammersmith Tube station, Costa’s coffee shop and I am wearing my best dress. I know I look fine today, smoking cigarettes, waiting for something, not someone, I’ve given up on the someones. And not so young anymore. Not that air of strength that makes men mad for you when you don’t want them that much, when the difference between having a man and not having one is just a tiny little question mark that points to some undefined moment in the future. You can say no then and not care, you can say no, go to hell and you get offers all the time. So many other things to say about youth, but certainly a day is not an age with nothing to fill it, but like a velvet wave with a rolling little promise of a crest at evening and sleep is just something you have to do, get over with, like brushing your teeth. And now he’s smoking quietly and so am I and this is quite pleasant. But it doesn’t last, the guffaws are starting again.
This is a fantastic joke. He’s brave to laugh like that. He doesn’t give a damn. Not completely mad either. Just let me have one more laugh, he’s saying. All of you. The joke’s on you. No one asks him to leave. Everyone gets on with their chitchat and their coffees and they don’t see the joke’s on them because if they did they would call security and have him removed, if he didn’t have an air of authority about him. The shock of grey hair, the polished shoes. Not a wastrel. Ha ha ha ha.

   There’s a group of turks who looked and nodded their heads at me when I came in. Shift workers that sit in groups. They always look as if they’ve been up all night. No women. Smoking. Plenty of coffee on order, but still, saving for home. A cheerful bunch. Once I got into a conversation because I was crying. ‘Don’t cry,’ said one of the old men. ‘You’re not mad. You just see a long way ahead,’ and he gave me a cigarette to have with my coffee and his eyes seemed kind. The man next to me, if we were in Greece, he wouldn’t be laughing like that. No we’d be enjoying the sunset. God, its ages since I saw a real sunset. Sitting outside, comforted by a wide sky and a shot of colour plummeting. Counting the minutes idly till there’s no time left, till there’s no light left, till the night flies come out and the boats bob and there’s a hustle and bustle of people moving on to the next part of twenty four hours. He reminds me of a painting I saw once. The two of us could be in a café, two old men, that’s how I like to think of myself when I’m looking fine, wearing my best dress. I’ll turn into an old man and spite you for thinking I am what I’m not in this getup. In the daydream, we’re in this painting, you and I, two old pals with not much left to say to each other. Cast in our moulds. Strange, his eyes are so clear for an old person. Blue and sharp like the detail of a seashell.

   The story going through my head goes like this: a long time ago, I was eight or nine and I was on holiday, playing with some shells with my shoes in the sand. I wore, I think, brown leather sandals and a yellow dress. A man sat nearby with all the others. Young, tanned, with hair dyed almost white by the sun. Because he was watching me, I curled my hair around my ear. I wore my serious gaze. He called me over. Then he said the words I willed him to say all the time I was playing in the sand with my shoes and the shells: ‘When you grow up,’ he said, ‘I am going to marry you.’ I want to tell someone, the old man, because he is there at hand, that I know that
moment was the beginning of all the someones, of conjuring up the future, of all the looking ahead. When I grow up and wear long dresses and go to parties and smoke cigarettes. But now I’ve finished my cigarette. I’ve spent on my coffee. I’ve worn my gaze. ‘Thank you for the chair’ is all I say as I walk away. But now he’s off again. Ha, ha, ha, ha, following me out of the café.

   And I remember just as I swing the door: ‘A touch of the sun’ was what my parents said. ‘That man’s had a touch of the sun.’