STILL LIFE AT THE CIBO
The High Street, Saturday 8.30am.
The café is in an arcade that leads through glass slider doors, into the never-ending bustle of small retail surrounding a supermarket.
It’s already busy, another of those franchise places, this one with an Italian theme, walls a-scatter with framed black and white photos of mid-fifties Fiat Topolinos and Berlinas, of leggy girls on motor scooters, of outdoor settings with hanging baskets of geraniums, of old pushbikes leaning against even older stonework.
The place is powered by ever-smiling nubile youths, taking orders, issuing table numbers, brisking in and out, but a more senior lady hovers, marshalling the traffic. Front and centre there’s a large display cabinet of ready-to-toast focaccias, croissants, Turkish breads, and an array of sweet temptations. To the side is the barista, which never rests, whurgling, gurgling, steaming, dripping black aromas.
It has alfresco seating under red umbrella canopies out in the arcade, a rack of smallish tables and chairs inside, and across the end wall six or eight tables in single and double arrangements, fronting one continuous bench seat in red vinyl. But the mural above these is the café’s defining centrepiece.
It covers the entire wall, one huge black and white photo of an Italian back street, with a very red Vespa motor scooter parked at the ancient flagstone kerb. Across the top of this scene it says...
“There was a time when we considered the joys of life to be riding a Vespa without a helmet, or leaving a long-stemmed red rose on a stranger’s seat.”
... and at the arcade end of the wall (before extolling the soul-sustaining qualities of good coffee), it says...
“What happened to creating the beautiful life? When we weren’t too busy, too serious, too damn scared, to live?”
This tends to take hold of the eye. It simply cannot be ignored. It is surely part of the reason why this is a popular café.
Today there’s a cold wind out in the street and at times it tends to swirl into the arcade, but even though there are several empty spots inside, three of the alfresco tables are taken, against the plate glass divide.
Inside in the best seats – the padded ones under the mural - are the regulars who arrive at opening time, and quickly take up ‘their’ positions, as is the way of any morning café.
One of them is a woman about forty, nose a little sharp, but attractive in a lean-faced way. She sits on her own at a double table. In her lap is a small white ‘designer’ dog, well-groomed, with big soft eyes. It wears a tartan jacket. She holds the dog close to her, crooked into her left arm, hand continuously fondling one of its ears, and sometimes the dog’s eyes droop, as if half dozing. Her hands are long and narrow, each with several rings. She exudes ‘style’.
There are two coffees in front of her, in takeaway cups, and from time to time she picks one up with her free hand, sucks through the cap, then puts it down to flick over pages of a newspaper, but she seems a touch vacant, uninterested, detached.
A big man, about sixty, with a shock of grey flyaway hair that looks as though it’s been left unbrushed for the last two weeks, ambles in and eases into her table-for-two. He sits oddly close, but, as if she’s not there, he’s talking to another older man to the side of him. They converse, back and forth, with animated hands, in the way that two Greek or Italian male friends might. The big man holds a pen, and he sometimes wiggles it at his friend in emphasis, and they laugh. Without breaking conversation he half turns and gently scridges the woman’s dog under the ear.
His friend finally gets up and leaves, and he then shuffles up along the bench seat even closer to her, pats her hand. She doesn’t react in any way, except to let the dog down, and it wanders off into the café. One of the girls stops her table clearing to squat down and talk to it, ruff it under the ears. The dog’s eyes half close in pleasure.
At the table, the big man lays his hand close to the woman’s, but says nothing. She moves hers away, just about imperceptibly. He seems to be waiting.
He gets up, speaks to her, and there is a suggestion of a reply, but the stillness of her face never changes. She puts on a fat white puffer jacket, follows him out the door, and the dog follows too.
They turn up the arcade past the alfresco, towards the supermarket but, barely turning his head, he says something to her over one shoulder, and she stops and sits on an arcade bench by some plants. The dog makes a move to go with him through the slider doors but he says – “Stay, you stay here with mum...” – and the dog stops and turns to her, looks up, and as it waits the woman’s eyes go even more blank, taking on that thousand-yard stare. But then she returns from where she’s been, leans down and picks up the dog, holds it close.
A man at one of the outside tables, who had been watching through the plate glass wall, watching from behind his coffee cup, is now studying her, as she sits frozen there in front of him in semi-profile. He puts down his cup, and with some urgency, shuffles in the haversack at his feet, finds a pen, and starts scribbling on his serviette.
He looks up, writes, looks up again, writes some more and some more... but then his pen hovers, makes small circles over the paper, like it’s looking for somewhere to land. This is when the woman turns her head, aware of him, aware of him and his pen, and for a moment their eyes lock, and he imagines that hers ... flicker ... as if she knows him, but then she turns away, and holds the dog even closer, and the man looks down at his serviette, folds it slowly, and puts it in his pocket.
© T. R. Edmonds 2024
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