Baked Beans On Your Shirt...

The café is almost empty now, as the light of another grey day fades into the yellow-orange of the street lights outside. A thick, greasy steam still lingers in the air over the imitation wood tables as the lady in the grubby apron bends over the mop, trying to clean decades of nicotine and cooking fat from the sticky linoleum floor. She shoots a frustrated glance from under wrinkled brows at the last customer – the girl in the glasses leant over a notebook in the corner with a cold cup of coffee sticking itself to the table in front of her, untouched in its chipped mug.

Rewind, and watch the light change back from artificial, sodium yellow to a dull, flat grey, watch the people scurrying past the window with their shoulders hunched against the fine, depressing rain…

The corner table has changed – its tenant now a middle aged man in a dark suit, the fabric shiny from age and bad washing, riding up around his armpits in a testament to cut-price manufacture. His brightly-coloured comedy tie does little to distract from the yellowing of his straining white shirt and the little dots of baked beans from the fry up now discarded, scraped clean on the table in front of him. He stares blankly, face instantly forgettable and ordinary, at the sticky rings on the table from cups put down carelessly, deaf to the raucous laughs and scraping of cutlery on plates.

His cheap mobile phone, long obsolete in its fake leather case, vibrates along the table top. He shakes himself out of his reverie quickly enough to pick it up before the tinny, falsely happy ringtone shrills embarrassingly. His face is a mask of apprehension as his stubby fingers fumble for the button, and he answers with more than a little reluctance. The not-quite tuned radio blaring happy songs on the counter obscures his voice, but as he speaks his broad shoulders slump further and further downwards, until even his too-tight suit is slack around his neck. He drops the phone to the table with little care for its cheap casing, and slides out of his plastic chair, his tread heavy as he drags himself toward the toilet, groping in his left pocket with a grubby hand.

The much-abused door for the unisex toilet remains closed for some ten minutes. A small queue has formed outside when the businessman emerges, walking tall and with a spring in his step, smiling at the people outside. The corner of a plastic food bag protrudes from his left pocket, and he is stuffing a credit card into his right. He breathes heavily as he reaches into his pocket, putting a pair of dirty pound coins down on the table too hard, so they click loudly.

As he steps out of the door, he shakes his head a little bit, like an animal bothered by flies. He’s a little red-faced and sweaty, and as he walks past the window with its filthy net curtains, he staggers a bit, bumping into someone on the street going past. They swear at him, but he doesn’t notice, limping out of sight.

Sometimes purity can be a bad thing.

Fast forward half an hour, see the people hurrying around the table, unimportant faces in the background with their own lives…and then stop.

When he walks in, everyone stops for a second and looks in disgust, as if he’s the bad guy in a western. He’s tall, but not lanky – heavy set with a stoop that must have come from standing head and shoulders above everyone else. The clothes he is wearing weren’t even good quality new, and with weeks and weeks of unwashed grime on them, they aren’t looking any better. His unwashed black hair hangs limp under the battered knitted hat and the circles under his eyes are dark. He hasn’t shaved, but the scrubby attempt at a beard does little to disguise he is not yet twenty and lacking the hollowed look of most people in his position. He smells terrible; of nights spent outside and unwashed hair.

He reaches the counter and speaks to the tired old lady slumped on the stool behind the till. She looks surprised – perhaps she didn’t expect someone so clearly homeless to actually order food – and it turns to downright incredulity when he pulls out a fifty-pound note, putting it on the table as if it was going to fly away. He looks shocked at the amount of change he gets back, and counts it back into his pocket so slowly and carefully…

A child on Christmas Day couldn’t smile happier as he sits down at the table in the corner as if it were a throne. When a man in a food-stained apron, jowls loose around his aged face, slams a full breakfast on his table with the job satisfaction of the overworked and underpaid, the grin widens even more. The homeless man throws manners completely out of the grimy window and shovels the food down as if someone were going to take it away at any second. People on other tables throw him looks of disapproval, but the plate is clean so fast he doesn’t notice. He, too, gets baked beans on his shirt, but it is already so stained that he gives it no thought.

As fast as he’s appeared in this greasy café, he pushes his table back – you can see the white patches in amongst the yellowed lino on the floor – and strides towards the door with an obvious sense of purpose. He pulls the door back a little too hard, and it slams into its hinges and bounces back, catching him on the shoulder. With an embarrassed and apologetic glance at the slumped woman on the counter, he leaves a little more carefully. People watch him pass the window, almost childlike as he jingles the cash in his pocket.

Watch the light fade once again into that harsh yellow glare, throwing the seats inside into sharp shadow. The old lady is creaking over her mop, and throwing her annoyed glance at the corner, hoping the girl with the notebook will leave if she doesn’t put the lights on – but I’m not going anywhere. She hasn’t wiped the table properly, and the edge has put that horrible orange baked bean juice on my shirt, but still I’m not leaving. This is my last chance to get this horrible, dirty little café down on the paper that’s thick with biro smudges before I have to hand in my work. At first I thought it was a shame I couldn’t afford to sit in a nice café to write, but even here some people are on the up – and some people are in a downward spiral.

Wonder which way I’m going?