The barista
‘Two cappuccinos for…’ She frowns at the writing on the cup. ‘Lawrence?’
‘Right here,’ he says.
‘Cappuccino for…’ She drags her eyes downwards, to the cup on the counter in front of her. ‘Clara?’
A young woman steps forward. Could she be the one?
She’s neither a Minnie Driver nor a Julia Roberts.
Her hair is so blond it’s almost white. She reaches out to take the coffee, rings on every finger of her hand.
Each of her ears is pierced all over. Her nose is pierced, too, and it twitches like a squirrel’s when she smiles.
There’s something skittish about her, like she’s already caffeinated enough.
But the smile is disarmingly genuine. It seems at odds with the rings, the studs, the armour.
‘Thank you,’ says Clara.
But the barista is once again looking at the tall man, because the tall man is looking at Clara.
His eyebrows have relaxed, and suddenly, his face does indeed look like one that could yearn, one that could find itself bewitched.
As if automatically, he pulls off his headphones, leaves them dangling around his neck. Could it be?
‘It’s you,’ says the man.
Clara looks surprised, at first, to be approached. She stiffens. She tilts her head, narrows her eyes.
‘Thank you for the picture,’ he says.
Suddenly, she seems to remember. Her freckled cheeks flush red. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘My pleasure.’
There’s a silence between them. Not an uncomfortable one, but a silence, nonetheless, filled with the sounds of churning coffee machines and chattering customers.
If the man is doing his best to look cool and carefree, his dog is giving the game away.
It stares up at Clara, its intense little eyes bulging out of its matted black fur as if it’s really, truly, fallen in love.
Clara crouches, makes a fuss of saying hello, scratches the dog under its scraggly chin and strokes it on the top of its rough head.
The man mouths something to himself, something that seems to say, what am I doing?
He takes up space, and everyone who walks past jostles him, finds him in their way.
By the time Clara straightens up, he looks like he’s come up with a question.
But when she pierces him with those eyes, it seems to escape him.
The barista has been so caught up in the ‘will they, won’t they’ of it all that she forgets she’s holding a coffee, until she sees her colleague at the till looking at her with a face that says will you, won’t you get on with your job?
So, when the man finally goes to speak, the barista ends up interrupting him.
‘One double espresso for…’ she says, hurriedly, trying her best to read the illegible scrawl on the cup. ‘Jed?’
Both of them turn to her, the moment punctured.
‘Seb,’ he says, politely, taking the coffee. He turns back to Clara, extends a hand. ‘Seb.’
She raises one of her dark eyebrows a little, shakes his hand lightly. ‘Nice to meet you again.’
There’s another silence. The barista looks down, pretends to neaten a stack of paper napkins as she waits for one of them to speak.
‘What are you listening to?’ Clara asks, eventually.
Seb touches the headphones around his neck. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Nothing much.’
‘Is that the name of a band?’
‘Ha,’ says Seb, a single bark of a laugh. ‘No.’
Clara, meanwhile, speaks with a little more ease. ‘You’re taller than you seemed,’ she says. ‘On the floor.’ She hesitates. She flushes. ‘That sounded weird.’
Seb is the one to save her, this time. ‘Not at all,’ he says, quickly. ‘You’re shorter than you looked, up there.’ A pause. ‘Not that that’s a bad thing.’
They laugh awkwardly.
‘Do you work around here?’ he asks.
‘Kind of,’ she says. ‘You?’
‘Something like that,’ he replies. ‘Auditions.’
‘Are you an actor?’
‘Trying to be.’ He winces a little at the admission.
She nods. She looks him up and down, as if studying him in light of this new information. ‘I’ve wondered about you,’ she says. ‘These last few weeks.’ Her fingers travel to her mouth, as if trying, too late, to stop the words.
‘You have?’ says Seb.
The barista hears in his voice what he wants to say. I’ve wondered about you, too. But he doesn’t say it. Clara just smiles, then turns to leave.
On her way out of the door, she casts one last glance over her shoulder. ‘See you around,’ she says. Then, as if committing the name to memory: ‘Seb.’
And she’s gone, already on the other side of the glass.
Seb stands for a while, looking at his own hand in disbelief, flexing the fingers like he’s trying to work out why a man in his right mind would ever have decided to shake her hand.
He clenches his fist, sets his jaw, shares a look with the barista.
He moves quickly, putting his coffee down, taking one of the paper napkins and pulling a pen from his jacket pocket, scribbling a number and departing the café with such velocity that his dog is practically dragged along the floor after him.
His double espresso is left, steaming, on the counter.
The long, wide windows look something like a panoramic movie screen.
Through the glass, with the ambient noise of a silent film viewed in a packed cinema, the barista watches Seb catch up to Clara, touch her lightly on the elbow.
She turns. She looks up. Lips move, though the words are lost to the cacophony of the city.
Against a backdrop of red buses and hurrying commuters, he hands her the napkin, shrugs almost apologetically.
He walks away before he can see her reaction.
If he’d stayed, he’d have seen this: a smile, a disbelieving shake of the head. And a napkin, folded, put away safely in the back pocket of a pair of ripped jeans.