Breakfast On The Day That It Happened.

The current assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on the photograph below.

Breakfast On The Day That It Happened.

Deux crèmes et deux croissants, s'il vous plait.

Breakfast of champions.

I sit.

Here's the tray. Smiles. Merci.

A deep breath, inhaling coffee and letting it out in a long, shuddering sigh.

Watching Clothilde at work is always a pleasure. Her smile infectious and unbreakable, even faced with the dismal onslaught of old JD.

JD's the butcher from across the street. That's him, sitting glumly in his usual seat, keeping a baleful eye on his premises before opening time. As if someone's going to break the shutters down and steal a pig's head.

Of course, being christened Jacques Derrida never helped with his mood. I remember his scowl the day I leaned across his counter and asked him "Jacques, must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?" I'd been hoping for a torrent of creative profanity but all I got for my trouble was "What of it?"

I shrugged and bought some boar sausages. Maybe Jacques Derrida hasn't died but has assumed a new identity as an elderly deconstructivist butcher.

Who knows?

JD sits glaring, staring over his coffee, inscrutable as a whelk.

I check my watch. Check the street. Shrug.

Breaking the end off my croissant reminds me of shelling prawns; that lovely fat crescent, crispy at the tail, as soft and warm as a woman within. Clothilde's croissants are invariably perfect.

I eat.

Whelks, prawns, I must buy fish before the best of the day's catch is gone from the market.

Black, blue, grey. Parisians at work. An occasional bright colour. The flash of a scarf.

She's late.

As always.

I frown.

Not because she’s late but because the radio behind the bar starts playing an old song: Scritti Politti’s “I’m in Love with Jacques Derrida.” Embarrassed that I’ve got that on vinyl somewhere, I look at Jacques. He’s out on the street tables so he can’t hear the lyrics. Probably just as well.

Sip.

First coffee of the day. All’s right with the world.

Except that she’s late.

Again.

Thierry is stacking pomegranates in le Palais des Fruits.

The Clash. That’s better. Rock the Casbah. In England I listened to French talk radio; here Clothilde plays old British music.

I finish my coffee and start on hers.

Scrape of chair legs on cobbles. Jacques grunts, stretches, rolls his neck around until it cracks, nods in his desultory way toward Clothilde, lurches across the street to unlock his shutters.

Clothilde cleans his table and pockets his tip.

I check my watch, shrug, slip her croissant into my bag. The butter makes a see-through patch on the front of le Parisien.

Counting coins onto my saucer. I call to Clothilde on my way out. Merci, au revoir.

Crossing the street I buy three pomegranates from Thierry.

Here she comes at last. Breathless. Kisses. Couldn’t you wait?

I’m sorry, I drank your coffee.

I offer her the croissant.

And then it happens.

Disappointment And Ketchup

This week's sentence was taken from John le Carré's short story, 'Call For The Dead.'

It was: 'Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as "My Friends".'

Disappointment And Ketchup

Turn off the Wash Road at Guyhirn and drive for miles out across the endless godforsaken peat-black plain. If you have committed sufficient sin in your life you might well find at last looming through the fog a dismal, yellow-grey building of squat, unappealing proportions surrounded by clinging, coal-black mud and fronted with a peeling-painted wooden sign: 'Pub Food. Car Park. The Greyhound. Polly Adam.'
Inside: Stygian gloom. Formica and brown linoleum. Faded. Worn through in places. Twelve tables. Forty-eight wooden chairs.
No two legs the same length.

Signs prohibiting:
coach parties,
spitting,
food not bought on the premises,
credit,
back-packers,
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Kevin.

Promised exotic delights:
steak'n'kidney pie,
chips,
gravy,
peas,
scampi in a basket,
lemon meringue pie,
and ominously: "more".

The reality:
congealed fat,
gristle,
uncertain wobbly brown things,
watery gravy,
burnt bits,
disappointment
and ketchup.

And behind the bar:
Miss Adam herself dispensed the nastiest coffee south of Manchester and spoke of her customers as "My Friends."
Smeared glasses and stale ale served warm and flat joined the dreg-rich stew of her bitter, brackish, days-old coffee. Regulars wiped the oily film from their top lips between sips and spoke, when they spoke at all, in hushed monosyllables.
Polly Adam ran, with iron discipline and a grease-grey pinnie, the only pub (in fact the only social establishment of any kind whatsoever) for forty miles around. Locals grew up on her foul fare, and knowing no better, accepted it with the same grim stoicism that allowed them to live out here in this soulless, mirror-flat, drenched wasteland.
Miss Adam had inherited the place, and her dubious culinary skills, from her parents, who had in their turn received the same blessings from Miss Adam's grandparents, and so on down into the dim, damp and decidedly Dickensian distance.

Not conventionally attractive, even to the untrained eyes of the local lads, schooled as they were in more porcine pleasures of backfat and bristle, in her youth she had for one brief and wonderful week thrilled to the throes of wild romance, surrendering her innocence to the smarmy wiles of Mister Eve, a middle-aged travelling seed merchant whose own seed had mercifully not travelled, though he himself had, with unseemly haste upon discovery of his dastardly deception.

Now past her prime and fading fast it had begun to dawn on Polly Adam that the true love she longed for might never find its way out here to her cold haven in the bleak and empty fens. That perhaps her own Mister Darcy was not going to appear suddenly in the bar one evening and sweep her into his arms. That maybe it was time to start collecting cats.

Midnight. The last of the Greyhound’s regulars squelches disconsolately away into the inky mist. With a sigh, Miss Polly Adam locks up and climbs the twisting stair to her room. Afraid of what sleep might bring she sits weeping long into the night, shoulders softly shaking, salt tears falling, pat, pat, pat into her lonely lap.



Background note:

The Greyhound at Guyhirn now sadly no longer exists. Unlike poor Polly Adam, however, it was not fictional.
I stumbled upon it one foggy evening, lost on a forty mile detour after an accident blocked the only decent paved road across the flat, featureless fens: that endless dank pismire of squelchy peat bog and empty misery.
It beckoned in much the same ominous manner as a bat-bestrewn castle might in a Transylvanian thunderstorm, but at least it promised something different than the usual greasy-spoon roadside cafés and it has exerted a perverse fascination on me for years afterward. I was genuinely sorry to see it closed down.
The description in the story is pretty much spot on. I ordered a coffee and a sandwich and quickly regretted it, settling later for a flat, stale beer and a packet of soggy, out-of-date crisps. I left as precipitately as Mister Eve, though not - I am glad to say - for the same reason.

These days, the only remaining rest facility on that long, lonely levée stretching despairingly across the unending bleak waste is a tacky filling-station "Caff" dispensing chalky burgers to bored lorry-drivers. I stopped in once for coffee and petrol (not an exotic local cocktail … the coffee was to drink; the petrol for the car), returning from a conference with my old boss, Terry, who had refused to believe my tales of Guyhirn being the kind of place that would scare the crap out of the banjo playing backwoods freaks of 'Deliverance.' We were served by a girl of around fourteen with one eye and not many more teeth (every word of this is true), who took a fancy to Terry and kept leaning on him and giggling, offering up her gap-toothed grin to tempt him away from the outside world and into the nightmare haunt of fenland folk.
Needless to say we got the hell out of Dodge.

Guyhirn is now by-passed by an almost decent road so nobody from the real world need visit any more, leaving its denizens to live out undisturbed their lost and lonely lives of furtive incest and pork porking and whatever the hell else they get up to there. It truly is a place of palpable aching despair; driving past you can feel it clawing at you with a terrible emptiness that chills the heart and leaves damp, smeary fingerprints lingering in your soul. My own theory is that Guyhirn exists as the result of a sharp corner of our own universe accidentally puncturing the lowest circle of Purgatory (the one next to Hell). The suffering souls have been leaking into our reality and populating that part of the fens for hundreds of years. They now haunt the place, wailing and weeping as they wait in the sodden, mist-shrouded peat-bogs for Judgement Day to come at last.

Milwaukee’s Finest

This week's sentence was taken from line 532 of Beowulf ("beore druncen ymb spræce …"), using Seamus Heaney's translation:

The sentence was: "But it was mostly beer doing the talking."

Milwaukee’s Finest

Bass River Motel. Route 542. Jersey.
Piney country.
Kent insisted on these "night out for the boys" sessions after work; he felt the need to go over all the details of the day and look for ways to improve things. You got the feeling he would have liked to bring a flip-chart into the bar if he could. But it was mostly beer doing the talking. As the evening went on Kent would get progressively more maudlin until Mackinson would have to half-carry him back to the motel room and leave him to puke out his remorse.
On nights like these, Mackinson slept in the car.

Kent called for another round, sluicing down the remains of his fifth bottle, whining and pining after some trailer trash waitress who’d served them breakfast that morning. Mackinson just nodded and ignored him. He was a scotch man, beer made him bilious. After two shots he’d stick to water and let Kent ramble on and get it out of his system, bottle by bottle. It usually took about an hour for Kent to wander off topic and start hitting on the barmaid. He never got lucky. Drunk, miserable and boring is not generally what a barmaid looks for in a man, though it’s pretty much all she gets to see.

Kent bored the shit out of Mackinson. He also worried him.
Take today, for instance. The hit had gone smoothly, but as always Mackinson felt Kent enjoyed his work a little too much. A single shot to the back of the head would have sufficed, yet Kent insisted on shoving his gun in the guy's face, feeding off the terror in his eyes before blasting away like Clint fucking Eastwood.
And then the drunken remorse afterwards.
Distasteful. Inelegant. Amateurish.

He had made his feelings clear in debriefings: Kent was a liability. Mackinson preferred to work alone, but now here he was again, holed up in some backwoods motel room with a drunk and weepy psychopath. It was getting like a broken record.
Mackinson fetched a glass of water from the basin. Kent was hunched over the toilet bowl, puking up a gallon of Milwaukee's finest.
'Jesus, thanks, Mac. I'm sorry. I don't know why the fuck I always do this.' Kent took a sip, rinsed his mouth out and spat it into the pan while Mackinson wrapped a towel around his pistol and shot him once in the back of the head. The towel muffled the gunshot and caught the blood spray; the rest went down the toilet. Mackinson threw the body in the bath and let it bleed out while he fetched the cleaning products from the trunk of the car. He hummed while he worked: Roy Orbison's 'Only The Lonely'.
Bartleby had an arrangement with a meat packing plant outside of Hammonton. By morning, Kent would be shipped out in the latest batch of gourmet pork sausages. Maybe he’d get inside that barmaid after all.

The Gentleness Of Bees

This week's sentence was taken from The Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It was: 'We must act, and act quickly.'

The Gentleness Of Bees

'Janine?' Ted leaned across the counter, waved and hollered, 'Keep 'em comin' sweetie.'
'You got it, hon.'
Truth be told, nobody needed to yell in here, but some of Janine's older regulars tended toward deafness and a surfeit of caffeine with the excitement of the sports pages didn’t help. Ted and his gang spent most mornings here, putting the world to rights and reminiscing about their imaginary pasts, the stories growing taller with the telling.
Janine poured Ted’s refill without interrupting the flow of debate down at the ladies' end of the room which currently concerned itself with the advisability - or otherwise - of orange plaid slacks on a woman of Beulah's build. 'Otherwise' seemed to be the way the wind was blowing, but then Beulah was currently across the street at Krystal's Kurlz having her roots done and so not privy to the conversation.

Janine smiled. She loved the chatter of her regulars, the drone of conversation as it rose and fell like the reassuring song of her other 'children' going about their busy lives around the neat row of hives in the orchard out back.
Their honey flew off the shop’s shelf quicker than her beloved bees taking flight in the early morning sunlight.

Everett had never understood the gentleness of bees. Anxious, impulsive, rarely satisfied with anything for long, it had been his idea that they use Janine's mother's inheritance to buy the coffee shop.
'We must act, and act quickly' he'd said. Everett, as ever, had wanted a change and thought that this would be it, and so a few hectic weeks later Janine was proudly serving her first customer at The Hive ("Come on in and get your buzz on").
Not long after that of course, Everett realised the change he really wanted and took off for Florida with a girl fresh out of high school. Janine, after a period of adjustment, found she had never been happier.

"Mornin' ladies!'
A chorus of 'Beulah, your hair looks beautiful, honey. Love your slacks'.

Janine checked her watch. Carole would be in soon to help with the lunchtime rush. Carole, whose wild hair was dyed a shade of red not usually seen outside a circus; Carole, who had that kinda Stevie Nicks gypsy thing going on with her clothes that kept the men ordering top-ups they didn't really want just so they could watch her willowy hips sway across the room or peek down her top as she leaned teasingly over their table.
Carole, whose fingers had brushed across the back of Janine's hand one evening with a touch as soft as the flutter of a bee's wing and sent a thrill through her the like of which she had never known. Janine remembered that moment of pure terror, the sudden realisation, the overwhelming 'yes' from her heart; Carole’s nervous smile widening as their eyes met and stayed locked together; that first, hesitant, devastating kiss.
And after that it had all been good. Boy, howdy, it was good!

Dungeons and Dragons

This week's sentence was taken from Émile Zola's laugh-a-minute 'Germinal'.

It was:
"So, you fancy going over the road for a bit of looting and pillage?"

Dungeons and Dragons

Having decapitated her muffin, Janie extracted the juiciest-looking blueberry, popped it between immaculately glossed lips and treated Marcia to her most wicked smile.
"So, you fancy going over the road for a bit of looting and pillage?"
Marcia glanced at the crowd outside.
"D'you know, I rather think I do."
"Excellent! Though they open in five so we'll have to rush coffee."
She applied the coup de grâce with the usual twist, elongating the 'i' of his name into a sneer:
"Because Brian didn't see fit to get us here early."
She graced him with a condescending nod and a nasty, tight little smile. He knew better than to argue.
"Yes, dear." and returned his attention to the Guardian Review.
"And do get your nose out of that paper, darling."
Brian looked up, startled.
"Eh? What?" and suddenly noticed the near riot outside.
"What in Heaven's name is going on out there?"
"Shoe sale, darling. It's why we needed to be early today. Don’t you remember?"
"God, Janie, does he ever listen to a word you're saying?"
"Not knowingly, do you darling?"
"Er, yes dear. Could you not at least wait until the crowds have died down? It looks awfully unpleasant."
Marcia enunciated her words slowly, as if to a child.
"It's a S H O E – S A L E, Brian. Manolos? Jimmy Choos? The crowds won't die down until the place is stripped bare."
"Well, if it's alright with you two I'll just stay here and finish the paper while you do whatever it is you need to do."
"Oh, no, darling. You're coming, too!"
"Yes, Brian. We need you to carry our swag."
"Be our native bearer."
Their laughter scraped fingernails down the blackboard of his soul.
"Yes, dear."
"Besides, you're always lingering in here with your bloody paper; it's almost as if you'd rather mope about alone than enjoy the pleasure of our company."
"Yes, Brian! How could you?"
"Honestly, darling. What could you possibly find in here that's more scintillating than our repartée?"
Marcia cackled and leaned forward.
"You know, Janie: I think your Brian might be having some kind of sordid liaison with that floozy, Vampirella."
She nodded toward the counter where a sullen, disinterested goth girl gave the coffee machines a desultory wipe.
Janie almost shrieked with laughter.
"Marcia, that's just too delicious!"
Then, glancing across the street, "Sharpen your elbows, Missy, they're about to open.
Brian! Pay the floozy, then hurry and catch up. We're going in!"

Up at the counter Brian paid the goth girl.
"Girls' night out tonight?" she asked and he nodded.
"They're off to see some appalling musical full of ghastly z-list soap stars."
"See you at The Dungeon at eight then. Miss Whippy will be waiting."
She handed him his change and Brian bit back a yelp as she pinched the palm of his hand hard between her sharp, gloss black nails.
When he turned and followed the rioting mob of elbowing, kicking and scratching women into the shoe store, he was smiling.

Passing Through

This week’s sentence was taken from ‘American Notes’ by Charles Dickens.

The sentence was:
"He had ordered 'wheat-bread and chicken fixings,' in preference to 'corn-bread and common doings'."

Passing Through

New Providence. Just a wide spot on a dirt road. 'Jo-Beth's Family Diner. No Dogs. No Coloreds.' was a lean-to tar-paper shed hanging off the side of a clapboard wreck that looked for all the world like a tornado had simply dumped it there in disgust.

Mackinson parked up and stared for a while, as if he half-expected it to sprout legs and walk off, eventually reaching the conclusion that he was hungry and this was the only diner he'd seen in the past fifty miles.
He ducked under the lintel and let his eyes adjust to the gloom.

"Halp Yew?"
A scrawny woman in a faded shift dress and the filthiest apron he had ever seen stood with one hand on the kitchen doorjamb and hefted her weight from hip to hip.
Mackinson faked southern-polite: "Ma'am, I'm kinda hungry. Any chance of something to eat?"
The woman pointed with her chin.
A child's blackboard that had seen better days leaned on a shelf behind the counter. Chalked between peeling paint was the menu.
It was brief.
He had ordered 'wheat-bread and chicken fixings,' in preference to 'corn-bread and common doings'. There were no other options except the single word, "Koffee."
Klan town.
The woman disappeared into the kitchen and Mackinson amused himself in a vain quest to find a chair or table with four legs the same length.
He found one close enough and sat.
Looking up he saw her leaning in the doorway watching him. Something spattered in a pan behind her.
"Y'ain't local." She drawled.
"Can't say that I'm local to anywhere, ma'am."
"Name's Jo-Beth."
Mackinson nodded and smiled.
"Mac."
She was gone for a few moments. Clatter and sizzle from the back as she dished up.
“Smells good." He lied.

The food was passable. There were recognisable traces of chicken. His coffee was as bitter and raw-boned as the woman. He liked it.

Jo-Beth watched him eat. She took off the apron and let her hair fall loose from her barrettes. Streaks of grey in the brown. He guessed around forty-five. For all his first impressions she looked pretty good in the available light.
"Passin' through?"
Mackinson nodded as he ate.
"Coulda guessed. Ain't nobody ever stays."
She sighed.
"Don't blame 'em, neither. New Providence? Ha!"
Her voice suddenly sad. Resentful, like a pouty child.
"Godforsaken flyblown hole. What's to stay fer, anyways?"
He swallowed and grinned. "Well the food's pretty good."
Her laughter seemed to take her by surprise, like she hadn't laughed for a long time and had forgotten what it was like. It subsided only gradually and left her cheeks flushed.
She smiled. It suited her. He told her so.
Finishing his coffee, Mackinson slowly stood and reached for his wallet.
Flustered now. Fiddling with her hair. Suddenly shy.
"Mac." She paused, uncertain. "I …"
He walked over to her, touched her arm and felt her tremble.
His voice soft.
"Jo-Beth."
Her voice a cracked whisper.
"Stay a while."

Blue Bayou

This week's sentence was taken from Bruce Chatwin's 'The Songlines':

At the bar, a big man with a purple birthmark on his neck was methodically swilling Scotches through his rotted teeth, and talking to the police patrolman whom we had met the day before at Burnt Flat.

Blue Bayou

Taking a booth by the window, I eased my ass into the pink bucket seat, flicked open the wipe-clean menu and checked the room.

Chrome and plastic; neon beer lights; sizzle and clatter through the kitchen hatch; the short-order cook preparing to load the arteries of the half-dozen early-bird diners dotting the joint and coughing smoke into their newspapers.

Mackinson nodded in time with the ancient jukebox and smiled.
"Roy Orbison. Nice."

At the bar, a big man with a purple birthmark on his neck was methodically swilling Scotches through his rotted teeth, and talking to the police patrolman whom we had met the day before at Burnt Flat.

"Scotch for breakfast. That's gonna kill him."
I had to chuckle.
"Jeez, Mac. Keep it down."

The waitress glided over: pink gingham, name-tag: 'ARLENE', good legs.
She oozed class - of a sort I liked - from her mousy roots to her plastic boots.
Sepia-stained teeth and fingertips clashed with ‘Harem Nites’ lips and the kind of pink, sparkly nails and turquoise eyeshadow that little girls used.

She popped her gum and slapped her mouth at us a couple of times.
"Ready to order?"
I smiled. A regular trailer park princess. I wanted her so bad.

Mackinson friendly: "Two coffees, honey; two OJ, two specials; eggs over easy.
Do you have a payphone I can use?"

"End of the bar." she tilted her head and a sudden wave of bottle-blonde ponytail cascaded onto her shoulder. The blinds painted her in stripes of sunrise and I winced, watching her wiggle back across the room and wishing I'd come here under different circumstances.

"Mac." I glanced upward and he stopped scratching his head, heeding my warning. These wigs were getting itchy. I suppressed a grin; he looked kinda distinguished with grey hair, glasses and moustache.

“I’ll call him.”
As he rose I shook open the Post to distract myself from the ache of Arlene.
Jeez! Gas just hit 64¢ a gallon! One of these days we're gonna have to do something about those fuckin' Arabs.

On the phone to Bartleby, Mackinson watched the fat cop waddle out into the car park and mount his patrol bike. It was quite a balancing act.
When the engine noise receded he gave me the nod.

I got up and stretched. Mackinson was easing his pistol from his belt and checking the room for backup. I walked over to the big man at the bar. He glanced up and saw me.
Too late.
As he stiffened in shock I shot him twice in the face then once behind the ear when he fell.

"Done." Mackinson hung up the phone on Bartleby, yanked the wire from the wall and we sauntered out while the other diners were still struggling to get under their tables.

I took a last glance back at Arlene where she crouched, weeping behind the bar.
Shame.
We drove away with Mackinson humming Blue Bayou; Arlene's cheap perfume mingled with cordite on my breath.