While he was negotiating with the cook, we got this beautiful Polish girl who had started work at the wagon this morning, all white teeth and blonde hair and not a whole lot of English. ‘We’d like two breakfasts,’ I told her and she flashed a smile and asked, ‘You want sauerkraut with that.’

Took me a minute, it wasn’t a question I’d been asked before. ‘No sauerkraut,’ I said. Then I said, a little louder and that way you talk to foreigners when you forget everything you ever learned about them, ‘Two breakfasts. English.’ I gave her the whole five syllables and I could see in her face that she didn’t like me, but also, in the same face was total recognition of what we were there for, and it obviously didn’t involve, even in a remote way, sauerkraut.

She was conflicted about Tom because he has the body of a young god and he hadn’t said anything to upset her but was obviously with me.

‘They want two breakfasts,’ she said to the cook, a crooked little man with the ability to smile on just one side of his face.

‘About ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I’m up to my ears here.’

‘The Pole turned back to us. ‘Ten minutes?’

‘That’s fine,’ I said, beginning the process of worming my way back into her affections.

‘You want coffee?’

‘Two, please.’

‘Sugar?’

‘No thank you, and no milk. Black coffee.’

She hesitated and I realized I’d got close to giving her more information overload, but while I was still wondering she’d already got over it, put it down to cultural differences, and was slapping the coffee machine around.

Tom claimed a table behind the kids of the old guy’s two daughters and I brought our coffee over to him. ‘Two hamburgers, one hotdog,’ the cook shouted and the old guy got to his feet and collected the food and sorted out which of the kids it belonged to. He had his camera in one hand the whole time, not ready to shoot or anything, but well protected in a fancy case. I thought he probably had a bad experience with a previous camera, put it down one time, maybe even on a trip to York, and someone had it away. With this one he wasn’t taking any chances.

‘I didn’t want onions,’ the eldest kid said.

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘I said a hotdog. I didn’t say onions.’

‘Hotdogs come with onions. If you don’t want onions, you have to say you don’t want onions.’
‘I can’t eat it with onions.’

‘Jesus.’ The old guy took the hotdog and brought it to the bin behind our table and emptied the onions out of it. Then he took it back to the kid. The kid opened it up again and inspected it for onion remains, found some and scattered them on the pavement under the table. At the same time the second youngest kid was emptying the ketchup bottle onto his hamburger. ‘Stop that,’ the old guy said, snatching the ketchup bottle away and putting it on the other table where the two daughters were stolidly ignoring anything that went on with their offspring. The little girl who must’ve been the youngest of them all was crying because she was the only one who didn’t have any ketchup and that was the main reason she’d wanted a hamburger in the first place, that and some chips, but they didn’t have any chips.

‘The chips’ll come in a minute,’ her grandfather said. ‘They’re not ready yet.’

‘I don’t want ‘em now,’ she told him. ‘You’ve took the ketchup.’

Another customer arrived wearing badly designed camouflage clothes, a vest and long shorts in some kind of synthetic material. In the field it would have made him look more visible rather than less. His enemy would have been able to pick him out at almost any range. In addition to the camouflage gear he wore a moustache and white ankle socks with open-toed sandals. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend now,’ he told the cook, over the counter. ‘Living with me in the same house and everything.’

‘Jeez,’ Tom told me. ‘I’m beginning to remember why I moved away from this town.’

‘Two chicken burgers,’ the cook shouted, and the old guy started up out of his chair again, his camera swinging on its strap. ‘Chicken burgers,’ he said, ‘Who ordered chicken burgers?’

‘They’re ours, dad,’ one of the daughters said. ‘Ask him for mustard.’

While he went to the counter two women shoppers parked themselves at the table on the other side of the kids.

The old guy came back with the chicken burgers and mustard and one lot of chips. He gave the burgers and the mustard to the women and the chips to the small girl. But the other kids at the table all dived for the chips. ‘Stop that,’ he shouted. ‘These chips are for Melany. Yours’ll be ready in a minute.

The eldest lad took another chip and the old guy took it off him and put it back in Melany’s polystyrene bowl. The lad didn’t think about it. He reached forward and got the same chip again, long one. ‘Put it back,’ the old guy said menacingly.

The boy threw it in the air and it sailed up and away and came down in the bag of one of the lady shoppers at the next table. She retrieved it and dropped it back in Melany’s bowl. ‘Can you please control your children,’ she said to everyone at large, the old guy, the two daughters, Tom and I and the cook and the Polish girl and even the man in the camouflage gear who had moved over to an adjacent stall and was explaining his love life to the traders there.

‘More chips,’ the cook shouted philosophically, as the two women shoppers marched off to find an easier source of coffee.

The old man was flexing his fists by this time, and there was a little vein in his forehead which had gone into constant twitch mode. He said to the children, his voice controlled, even hushed. ‘This is my holiday as well, you know. Not just yours.’

He went for the rest of the chips and shared them out between the children. ‘Try and eat in a civilized manner,’ he said.

He sat with his daughters and composed himself. When one of the lads dropped his chips and hamburger on the floor under the table he didn’t even move. Eventually, when the two eldest lads began to fight and one of the metal chairs got overturned he collected all the remaining pieces of food and marched with them to the bin. ‘I’m terribly sorry about this,’ he explained to me and Tom. ‘They’re savages.’

‘Come on, we’re leaving.’ The whole extended family were on their feet and we watched them drift away into the crowds of shoppers in the market.

‘Two breakfasts,’ the cook said, and Tom got to his feet and brought our food to the table. As he sat down the old man returned, his face red. He pulled the chairs away from the tables they’d occupied. ‘Has anyone seen a camera?’ he asked, hysterically. ‘I must’ve put it down.’

We shook our heads.

He went to the counter and asked the cook and the Polish girl, and they shook their heads.

‘Day trippers,’ the cook said when the old guy went looking for his family.

‘He wasn’t having a good day,’ Tom said. ‘You could see it was gonna end bad.’

Robin – everyone else called her Rob because her second name was Berry and they liked how it sounded, especially when she took up with a guy called Nick King – looked me in the eye and with no sense of irony, said, ‘Be careful, I’m just emerging from my second-longest relationship.’

There’d been a time before when I’d said something she didn’t like and she’d clattered me round the head with an ashtray, so I’d got into the habit of not reacting when she said something, even if the something she said was bizarre or outrageous.

Keeping a straight face, I said, ‘That’d be the second longest after Nick?’

‘Right.’

‘How long?’

‘Fourteen months. I was with Nick for three and a half years. This guy, though, towards the end he was staying out all night long. It was humiliating.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I was gonna stick his mobile down his throat. Got it into his mouth, but he was too strong for me. Smashed one of his teeth and cut his gum, though. And even after he broke my nose I still bit him in the thigh, hung on in there until I tasted blood. I would’ve killed him if I could.’

I held the eye contact, pursed my lips and shook my head. Anyone could see where my sympathies were. ‘He broke your nose?’

‘Cartilage, not the bone. I was in A&I but it was worth it. All for some scrubber he met in the gym. Fucking drum-stick legs, no arse to speak of, and I’m sitting home smoking all night while he’s spooning it out to her.’

I’ve known Robin for fifteen, maybe twenty years, though ‘known’ is probably exaggeration. We’ve been acquainted for a long time. We were on opposite edges of the same scene shortly after I arrived in York, part of the fallout that followed the Thatcher revolution and the disintegration of the trade-union movement. For a brief moment of time it looked as though we were on the same side, and neither of us have taken the time to formally dissolve the relationship in the intervening years.

When I think over the times we have met up, Robin has been either drunk or in love. Once she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and another time she was sitting on a kerb weeping, never said a word.

She had a daughter, Ellie, who is around fifteen, sixteen years old now. A hollow-eyed child, Ellie has grown into a teenager with a loud voice and hair in different coloured braids. She lives in a squat, a house that belongs to the church and believes that Jesus wants a legal transfer of ownership to take place.

Robin never asks me anything about myself. Our relationship consists of me asking concerned questions about her and she giving me sketchy information. The story is one of Robin, the vulnerable individual, battling the overwhelming power of destiny and the world and losing, but only marginally, always finding enough second wind to come back for one last try. My role, that of story-teller and sympathetic liberal onlooker, is only marginal.

‘I’ve gotta go,’ she said. She walked out to the street and I watched her walk out of the frame of the window.

A second later she walked back, opened the door and stuck her head into the café. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘You’re fucking weird.’

His smile was the same and I watched him over the table as the girl served up our breakfast. When she had finished she looked down at the spread, and from my face to T’s and he reached to pat her hand. She let it happen, though something in her recoiled. For a moment she didn’t know how to handle the situation, but recognized there was no harm in him. T didn’t recognize that a situation had occurred, and now passed.

‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said, when she’d returned to the kitchen. He split the yoke of his egg, guiding it with his knife as it smeared one side of the toast and bacon. ‘If it’s too much to ask, that’s OK. But if you can do it I’ll be grateful.’

‘You know me,’ I said. ‘I’ll help if I can.’

‘I need to see Louisa. It’s been too long.’

‘Louisa.’ A name I hadn’t heard for some time. A wraith-like picture of her formed in my head. Louisa in her red dress, a painter and a dancer, seemingly always by his side. But a woman who inhabited a battle-ground; ostensibly offering hope and nurture while concealing a psychology that led her adrift, where no one could follow.

‘I need you to ring her for me, just tell her I want to meet up.’

‘Why me?’

‘I promised not to contact her. Her parents, her mother, they’re so against it. If I ring there’ll be an almighty row, and they wouldn’t let her speak to me, anyway. She’s trapped there, in that house.’
I ate slowly, taking a sip of my coffee, waiting to see where he would go next.

‘You tell them, whoever answers, you just tell them you’d like to speak to Louisa. They’ll probably put her on the phone. If they ask who you are, you tell them your name, you’re John, and you used to work with Louisa at her school, you were teachers together, and you’ve been away and come back and you’d like to see her again. Then when Louisa comes on the phone you tell her you’re ringing for me and I want to meet her, but you’ll have to speak quietly because her mother’ll be somewhere close, trying to listen in.’

He’d stopped eating by this time, though he still clutched both knife and fork. He’d thought long and hard about this, tried to foresee and cover anything that may get in the way of his plan. His Louisa had been stolen away from him or he had somehow agreed to give her up and the stark realisation of that was eating him away.

‘Once we’ve met it’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll be back where we were. OK, we’ll have to be careful, but we can do that, we managed before.’ He laughed, relaxed for a moment, looked down at his plate and cut off a sizeable portion of toast and bacon, carried it to his mouth on the fork. ‘It was ridiculous, thinking we would manage apart. Louisa’ll be the same, just like me, pining away.’

The serving girl came back to the table, tall like a young maple. ‘Everything all right?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ T told her. ‘I’m good. We’re good.’

We parted outside, T going to collect his car while I headed towards Fossgate and the walk home. My last glimpse of his back before his disappeared into the morning was of a portly man, somewhat unsure of his footing. A poet still, in his depths.

It must be fifteen years since Louisa slipped away from us, shortly after her parents died. I remember being surprised at the time, not that she had taken her own life, but because T himself was surprised. Everyone else who had known her had expected it for some time.

But none of us knew her as well as he.

And none of us, apart from T, had managed to keep part of her alive. We were too busy maintaining our own illusions.

‘Are you all right?’ the daughter asked, standing in the entrance to light her cigarette.

‘I’m OK,’ the mother replied, sitting at the table. ‘I’ve been thinking about things, that’s all. I’ll get through.’

‘Thinking’s fine,’ the daughter said. ‘Dwelling’s something else.’

‘That’s true.’

I’ve taken to using my mobile to jot things down in public. I used to use a notebook but in recent years people are more suspicious of notebooks, pens, recording equipment, where the mobile is ever present, always in someone’s hand, the innocent bystander.

Some things are written down and others forgotten. Forgetting is a failure of memory. We make lists (we write) in order to remember. Technology comes to our aid, it allows us to separate out those pieces of experience we want to remember from everything else we are willing to let go.

A single man enters the courtyard, middle-aged, balding, overweight, blotchy. The mother knows him and her countenance brightens. ‘We’re going to see each other later,’ he says. Some kind of get together, most likely. A drinking party? I can’t imagine a lovers’ liaison.

‘We certainly are,’ she says.

‘Don’t forget.’

‘I wouldn’t do that.’

‘We have to go now,’ the daughter tells him.

‘Just a swift one, this,’ the mother explains, finishing her pint, getting to her feet.

He brings a drink from the bar and sits behind me on the top of three stone steps. ‘The mountings,’ he says.

I half turn to confirm he’s speaking to me.

‘These steps,’ he says. ‘Called the mountings. This was a coaching inn, way back, and the steps were for people to climb into the coach.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Before that it was a pigsty,’ he said. ‘And they used it as a market to sell chickens. Fifteen hundred and something, medieval. Think about that.’

He went back to his ale.

I went back to my mobile.

I wrote:
‘Writing is a struggle against silence,’ something I’d read in the work of Carlos Fuentes.

When I got to my feet the man on the step said, ‘Watch how you go.’

*

Silence is knowing: like in this poem by John Haines:

Poem of the Forgotten

I came to this place,
a young man green and lonely.

Well quit of the world,
I framed a house of moss and timber,
called it a home,
and sat in the warm evenings
singing to myself as a man sings
when he knows there is no one to hear.

I made my bed under the shadow
of leaves, and awoke
in the first snow of autumn,
filled with silence.

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.