Café dreams

Dave Chislet

I stand, shifting from foot to foot, on the hot tarmac, and regard the dirty, white-painted wall before me. The car behind me ticks and pops in protest at being pressed into service on a day like this. The trip to the corner shop on a Saturday afternoon, another slow urban ritual.

A faded Coca Cola sign peels from the cement in blisters. The front window is rent by a long jagged crack, from the lower left-hand corner, right the way across to the top right-hand side. It splits my reflection into two half-men in the heat, one with no legs, the other with no body. The striped awning lets more glare through its gaping rents than it stops, and the pavement exudes heat in undulating waves while a scrawny, nondescript dog huddles in the slightest pool of shade, not even lifting its head to question my arrival. The gloomy, cool interior beckons me in from the glaring heat outside.

The interior is lit by only the dim neon flicker of a Coke fridge in the back of the shop. I cross the threshold and stop in the entrance to allow my eyes to adjust to the gloom. Push my shades up onto my head and look slowly around the room. I feel the gritty dirt on the soles of my bare feet, pressed into my flesh by the cool linoleum.

The scent and scene of my youth. To my left stands the Asteroids machine blinking one coin, one play — Morse code to my memory. My oldest brother casually shooting rocks, UFOs, cigarette hung negligently from the corner of his mouth. He speaks in sharp bursts to the machine, to his cronies by his side. I lurk hesitantly in the doorway, not wanting to be seen, but trapped by this image of my brother as a member of the pack, amazed at his coolness, the skill with which he manipulates the machine. All those other older boys are watching him, not playing themselves. His hands so sure on the controls, even the half-smoked fag drips elegantly out of his mouth.

To the right, the shop stretches back into darkness and a back-room. Chewy, pink-wrapped sweets, fizzers, niggerballs, gum, Coca Cola toffees and banana squares. Behind that rack, the dusty tins of baked beans, plum tomatoes and vegetable curry, their rims going slightly rusty with age. The shelves are of ancient cream-coloured steel, bolted together slightly skew in some distant age when business was so good it all had to be put up in a hurry. Running my hand along the edge of one, it comes away with a thick layer of something halfway between grease and dust.

Like a twenty-year-old snapshot the café lies open to my dreaming memory. The scene in which all indiscretions were considered, and many acted out. The venue for bicycle race-offs, skateboard stunts and the endless eyeing out of girls we were not yet supposed to be interested in, the occasional fist-fight behind the shops in the loading yard. Paying for a can of Coke, sneaking two in the front of my jeans, stealing sweets and flavoured yoghurt, putting stolen coins in the machines...

The old Greek woman behind the counter is watching me as I scan the extent of her shop. I watch her in return from the corners of my eyes. She is wearing a pink, striped crimplene overcoat, and her hair is drawn up into a bright pink headscarf. From under this shockingly bright headgear she surveys my every move, her eyes magnified by the old-style cat's-eyes glasses that perch nimbly on the edge of her very large nose. My eyes adjust slowly to the gloom, registering half-loaves of white, dry, three-day-old rolls, the meat cutter, deli meats in the fridge. And so I wait, until surely she must tire of watching my hesitant form.

Yesterday roars in my ears like skateboard wheels on concrete pavements, like bicycle tyres thrumming on tar as I raced along with my friends. I remember the fast blood of embarrassment as I walked up to the most beautiful girl in school outside that shop and asked her out to a movie, and the furious flood as she said yes.

The half stale, half cold air resuscitates my ten-year-old wonder, my ability just to stand and stare for hours. I forget just what it is that I came in here to buy. My mind is stopped up with these fleeting ghosts of the old neighbourhood café. Whole provinces removed from where I grew up, this uncanny spectre rivets my adult confidence to the floor. Captured by fleeting shots of what I used to go to my corner café for.

Uncertain, I look back to the counter and I smile at the owner as she steadily regards my hesitating presence. She stoically remains frozen with the same expression on her face, not swayed, not even interested. Then I remember the loaf of bread, half-litre of milk, block of butter and the lost two-rand note. All sweated up from a fast bike-ride up hill, my young mind a-panic at the lost money — so much money to lose, so much trust to misplace — what an agony of anger and embarrassment at myself. With my new bicycle, so fast and so sure, to be so unable to finish that simple job. My now much bigger ears burn again in remembrance while I stall at the fridge — pinned moth-like in its watery glare. A cool blast from the fans wakes me with the milk in one hand and the butter in the other. My car keys jangle as I pace back to the counter and place my things down and smile.

“Good afternoon,” I say.

“Eight fifty,” she says.

I remember the bread. “Hang on a moment,” I say.

Brown, white, half-loaf or full. Now they have sliced, granary or health bread, too. Choices that would have terrified me twenty years ago I now ignore as I reach with shaking ten-year-old hands for the half-loaf of unsliced government brown bread and smell its warm, musty, old friend odour.

The school sandwiches my mother insisted on making, with healthy Bovril and cheese, or salad and cold meat. While all my friends had trendy, thinly sliced white bread with Cheezo spread, and crisps and chocolate bars or triangles of Melrose cheese. I had a little red water-bottle, filled with Orange squash, while they had Liqui Fruit and cans of Coke. Sometimes I would be able to barter my nuts and raisins for these more exotic things, crisps to stuff into my nice healthy sarmies. Other times I would just watch as all those unique, denied delights disappeared down very keen young throats.

Back at the counter, I pay my ten rand and something, getting back a little bit of change.

On the way out of the door I am arrested by the SPCA dog with the slot in its head, and I do the adult thing with my change and give it away. As I hear the coins plinker plunker into the pile already inside the plastercast beast, my gaze wanders to the high-tech pinball machine against the wall, and it is all I can do to stop myself from asking for twenty-cent pieces to blow the afternoon away with.

The joy of clocking up that first free ball as I strove to achieve the exact stance I had seen my bigger brother adopt, my skinny hips pressed too low down against the cold steel. My lips drying out as I reach slowly towards the elusive free game score, hoping to equal the score next to those initials, so like mine on the leaderboard, but with a different first name. The slow, nonchalant walk away from the blinking lights when the last coin has gone, checking a non-existent watch to confirm the fact that, despite appearances, I was leaving ’cos I had somewhere else to be right then. I look back one more time, to see those old eyes watching me still from behind the till.

Only when I have pulled out of the parking bay and am already driving down the road, do I pull the two Bar Ones I've just stolen out of the front of my jeans and eat them in the old familiar way: chocolate coating first, then the caramel, leaving the thick nougat until last.

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