Anyway, I’ll come back to that in a moment.
I’d been in The Greenhouse for breakfast, a place I usually avoid because I was once served an inferior and overpriced coffee there about six or seven years ago. I do harbour grudges . . . but not for ever.

This time the coffee was fine, no problem at all, but they were stingy with the bacon so I won’t be going back there for a while.

Next to the pharmacy to collect a prescription, but they were busy and told me to come back in fifteen minutes. If it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have started browsing the thrift shops.

I like second-hand books. I’ve listened to all the horror stories about them, but I still get a kick out of handling them, feeling and wondering (not too graphically) where they have been.

And I usually find something I’ve been meaning to read but which has successfully avoided me for the last several years.

But this morning there was nothing interesting among the books; more copies of McEwan’s Atonement or that Bridget Jones woman I do not need.

So I drifted along to the bricabrac section and poked about among the trinkets, knickknacks, baubles, gewgaws, thingamabobs and whatchamacallits.

The shop had metal shelves and up on the top was what looked like a porcelain butter-dish, blue, almost ultramarine, perhaps from one of the caves of the Pharoes (if they used butter?). I reached for it and as I brought it off the shelf the lid separated itself from the base and both parts leapt from my hand. I caught the base and clung onto it but the lid bounced back onto the shelf and dislodged a clunky wooden biscuit barrel, which fell to the second shelf down.

Two women, one on either side of me jumped with fright at the noise and walked down into the belly of the shop to dissociate themselves from me.

The wooden biscuit-barrel in its turn crashed into an oval meat plate which had been standing betwixt shelf and wall and this slid over the lip of the shelf and scrambled a pair of hand-carved stags with antlers.

By this time, though I was fully employed trying to quiet the carnage, I was aware that everyone in the place was wondering what would fall next.

The domino effect continued with the stags careering into an ancient and badly damaged squeeze-box, which leapt from its place, bounced off my knee and landed, playing some kind of cacophonous tune, dangerously close to a small pomeranian pup on the end of a tartan leash and attached to a large lady swathed from head to toe in electrified synthetics.

I believe the pomeranian pup was actually already close to insanity before the squeeze-box pushed it over the edge. It’s the way they breed them.

It quickly savaged the instrument and wound itself up in its owners legs. This had the effect of sending the large lady into a spin. While she span the dog found its voice and yapped away at full volume while trying to extricate itself from the tartan strapping and sending me threatening glances, from time to time making a run in my direction, only to be stopped abruptly by the limit of the leash or the spinning of its owner.

Throughout this whole scene the lank-haired volunteer who was obviously in charge of the shop did not so much as look up from her newspaper.

I thought of many things I could do to ease the situation. Primarily I would have liked to rearrange the items I’d caused to leave the shelves, secondly I thought of helping lady with dog, and somewhere down the list there remained a moment when I would apologise to volunteer for disrupting her shop and to the remaining customers for ruining their day.

But I just left.

From February, 2003 until August, 2006, we lived in Berlin. I found my favorite café there, but not without a number of months trying to find the right one. I tried out the Café Bliebtreau and it worked all right until the owner, who was always present, figured out I was an American and I was instantly persona non grata. (These were not good times to be an American in Germany, to be an American anywhere, really.) Then I found a great student place across the street from the Berlin Technical University, Café Hardenberg. It could have become my place, except the food was mediocre and, unacceptably, the coffee was weak. One day, bending against a cold wind surging through the tunnel-like lane called Savignyplatz, I popped into Café Aedes for something hot and bracing: a caffé corretto (espresso corrected with grappa). It was perfect, the best, most honestly Italian coffee I had found in Berlin. So I kept going back for the coffee, then discovered the affordable and delicious tramezzinis, and began to notice that all the staff spoke Italian with each other, noticed that most of the other customers were regulars and frequently sat for long periods of time with a book, a magazine, a notebook. I sensed a fit.

One of Clark’s great strengths in Starbucked is in exposing the almost fanatical level of calculation that goes into every corporate decision, from the colour of the walls to the layout of the stores to the music on the stereo, “which changed in mood throughout the day to reflect the needs of customers in each ‘day part.’” While Schultz speaks in artificially elevated, New Age language about the vaunted “Starbucks Experience” and about Starbucks as a mythical “third place,” separate from home and work, where customers can retreat to rejuvenate their spirits and to feed their souls — Schultz claims that the chain was “built on the human spirit” — the entirety of the company is the result of relentless planning and constant focus groups, the quizzing of potential customers about their “need states” and their “lifestyle segments.” The soulful experience that Starbucks patrons putatively crave is the result of a carefully micromanaged plan that systematically erases any kind of individuality or the flaws that allow for uniqueness. The “Starbucks Experience” is the apex of cookie-cutter corporate sameness.

The five characters approached me, a little diffidently to be sure but also with a certain purpose. The wild child, naked, seated himself at my table, the chair opposite, while the others kicked their heels a little way off, one or two looking our way, the others taking in the protesters and pretending not to be interested in me at all.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked the wild child. ‘I don’t want to be bothered with it just now.’

‘You may not, but I need to have this out with you.’

‘You can’t speak,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have language.’ He’d been adopted by a set of badgers when he was a baby and raised on a dell near Scotch Corner, a couple of miles from the A1. He was ten years old, thereabouts, maybe as much as twelve, but to all intents and purposes still a child. Large hands and a short neck and fully developed genitalia were his allotted features. Had we been in Tehrān or Kabul he would have been arrested and stoned or whipped for his nakedness. But we were in York, England, an outpost of liberty and sexual enlightenment and it was more likely that it would be me who was arrested for my association with a ten year old naked child in the centre of the city.
‘Language?’ he said. ‘This is one of the problems. I’m not happy with the way I’m being drawn. None of us are. The colonel’s wife wants to be more than a sex object.’

‘Your happiness is not part of the equation.’

‘That is obvious.’

‘And why should it be? I need you to illustrate something in other, major characters. You are a cipher.’

‘With no potential?’

‘None.’

‘You arrogant bastard.’

‘Listen. I’m in charge. It’s my novel. I draw characters how I like. I think about what is needed and I add a character here or there, whenever needed. It’s up to me. I’m concerned with a developing narrative, if every character had a say the thing would spiral out of control. It’d be like real life.’

‘I’m not every character and in any case I’m undervalued more than many of the others. A wild child, indeed. I don’t even have a proper name.’

‘I’ll give you a name. But please go away now. I want to enjoy my coffee.’

‘I’m not going away. I just got here. I want answers.’

I tried to ignore him but he was not about to give up.

‘I’m not leaving.’

‘I’ll answer three questions,’ I said. ‘Then we’re finished.’ I liked that, giving him three questions. Three times more than he expected. Deep within me the tide turned.

‘OK. I’m feral, afraid of everyone, but I respond to cuddles. What is that supposed to say?’

‘It says exactly what it says. You have only known the wild. Your instinct to flee is highly developed. It’s a survival mechanism. That you respond to cuddles when you can’t avoid them is also a survival mechanism. The cuddler is given what he or she wants when you respond, so he/she is less liable to harm you. You either outrun them or outwit them. Those are your possibilities.’

‘Why don’t I have a past? I want to be like other boys.’

‘You have a past. You were raised by badgers. You were loved, in a way.’

‘No, not like that. I want a human past. I must have a mother somewhere. A father. I’d feel better about myself if I knew who they were.’

‘That’s not important in the book.’

‘Maybe not, but it might be interesting for some of your readers as well as me. The colonel’s wife could do some research, look for babies that went missing ten, twelve years ago; it would be easy enough to give some indication where I came from.’

‘I’ll think about it. No promises.’

‘And I fight and spit and bite the colonel’s wife when she bathes me; but later I’m tender towards her.’

‘That’s because you’ve learned. The less opposition you put up against these people the more they take care of you. You learn to give them a little so that you gain a lot.’

‘Where did you find me?’

‘That’s the last question.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘You were in my consciousness. I didn’t know you were there. I stumbled over you in a dream.’

‘Can we talk again, another time?’

‘That was your last question.’

‘You’re mean, you know that?’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t like the idea that I’m interested in anal scent glands.’ He scrambled down from the chair and returned to the other characters. They all looked my way. It was obvious they had problems.

Celia Gallagher, tall and leggy with a heart-shaped face, took a step in my direction and one of the others gave her a push. She took another two steps towards me and glanced back at the others.

I guzzled the dregs of my coffee and moved away from the table, dodging between the banners and flags of the protesters and striding across the road towards home.

They have wide wooden shelves against the windows and walls, and high steel-framed stools. Seems like most of their business is take-away sandwiches and drinks for the local office and shop workers, but there were several customers sitting with drinks or food when I arrived. A few more standing, waiting for a baguette or some kind of wrap.

I took a stool on the back wall next to a tall woman with a beard eating baked potato piled with shrimps and pink mayo. She caught a dribble of the sauce on her chin with her little finger and spooned it back over her bottom lip. She glanced at me and made her eyes bigger.

Swinegate Court is a covered passage. People use it as a short-cut from Swinegate to Grape Lane and there are often cars and vans parked head to tail. Maybe the owners leave them to unload stock into their shops.

There’s another restaurant in the passage and a Parisian style boutique called Giselle, which sells posh frocks. There were several on display in the window, on models without heads, lined up ready for a girls night out. Frothy creations reminiscent of a landscape anticipating the approach of spring.

One of the standing customers had been to see Celine Dion. ‘What’s she like now she’s had twins?’ her friend asked.

‘Like a stick. But she didn’t have twins. Just the one. A daughter.’

‘Lovely.’

The woman next to me pushed away the remains of her baked potato and started on her chocolate pudding.

Later she was joined by a tall man with a beard wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: ‘My Peace is Growing’. Being literal I stalled for a moment, believing the guy was a Christian or some other kind of religious.

But nothing is perfect.

I’d finished my coffee when I saw Sue Sainsbury come out of the library and begin padding towards my cluster of tables. She lives a few doors from me, in the same street. She has had something taken away from her in life and never got it back. I don’t know what it was she lost, or how she would be different if her catastrophe had never happened.

She sits beside me, draping her shapeless body over the table, her arms and hands mingle with the debris of past customers. She crosses her legs and one of her shoes falls off.

‘What’re you writing now?’ she asks. ‘Another novel?’

While I’m composing an answer she continues, her voice louder than necessary, intrusive even to the people at the far table who glance behind them, wondering who she is.

‘I’m writing a poem,’ she tells us. ‘A sonnet, actually. Maybe an ode. I haven’t decided yet.’

‘Interesting,’ I say, pulling off an irony-free delivery.

‘Yes, about life’s spirals.’

Deep inside me there is the howl of a huge maimed beast.

I’d forgotten about him, believing him to be tamed. But he’ll be out again tonight, seeking fresh flesh under a wispy moon. Those around us have some intimation of the stiffening cartilage in my joints, the broken blood vessels staining the whites of my eyes. There is nothing obvious, but a shift in atmosphere takes place, something inevitable and impossible slithers among us. Without knowing why everyone, even those who have not yet had their coffee or croissant, want to be at home.

Sue Sainsbury is oblivious to all of this. When the others have left and we are sitting alone with the the sun dipping below the horizon, she asks me about the challenges of using an omniscient first-person as the narrator of a novel.

The clock nibbles away at the minutes of my life.

I can never forgive her. She reminds me that I am without compassion.

I could feel the difference as soon as I walked into the place, though it looked the same. The teapots were still up there, squeaky clean; the décor, a faint pink blush to everything, had not been tampered with. But there was something in the air.

Enough to put me off ordering the breakfast. When the girl came to take my order I asked for coffee and when she delivered it a couple of minutes later I detected something either added to it or, perhaps, taken from it. I don’t mind change in itself, but in this instance the coffee had not improved, it had rather moved infinitesimally closer to the edge of bitterness.

Business was not particularly brisk and I was jotting down some thoughts in my notebook when a couple arrived at the adjoining table. I recognised both of them but neither gave me a second look. I pressed myself further into my notes and anonymity. I had not seen them together before and would not have identified them with each other. She was the midwife who had delivered our daughter twenty years earlier. In the interim I had not seen her but she was instantly recognisable. She had a dodgy eye, which we, unreasonably, I suppose, worried would unsettle the baby. We had christened her Hawkeye.

The man I had seen once or twice recently, both times in the changing room at the pool. He was unremarkable. You would never guess he dried his feet with the hair-dryer.

They ordered breakfast and when it came I was glad I hadn’t bothered. Not so fat-free as it had been before. And there were two eggs on each plate.

Some clues to the change in atmosphere were forthcoming when a tall, gaunt woman with stiff hair came from the kitchen area and occupied a tall table by the door. She might have materialised from the pages of a Conrad novel. She adjusted her spectacles and started work on some kind of ledger. From her briefcase she took a mobile phone and calculator. The girl brought her a coffee and she barely nodded when it was placed close to her right hand.

In my notebook I added a last phrase: perhaps it was like this at the divine withdrawal? An experiencing of God as deus absconditus.

As I left the tall woman caught my eye but did not smile. In the background Hawkeye suddenly looked around her, as if she had lost something. I walked away in search of my elusive breakfast.