Word arrows
An older piece, polished up in lockdown because I am missing the simple pleasures of a coffee shop.
After school, he likes to visit a coffee shop before going home. This is partly to satisfy the urge to appraise and check on our local community of hand dryers, the subject of his current special interest. But also, I think, to effect a transition between home and school.
When I meet him at the gates, he is coiled and tense. He bolts from the playground like a startled horse. I jog after him, his heavy bag bouncing on my shoulder and link my arm through his. His pace slows.
“How was school?”
“It was good.”
This is a stock response and all I will get from him. I know that if things had gone particularly awry, he might reply, “It was BAD.” But, it is too soon. He is not ready to talk.
We step into the coffee shop, through the glazed doors and the curtain of dry, warm air and assume our position in the queue. “This used to be two shops: Frae Frozen Yoghurt and Crispin’s Food and Wine. Now it is one shop.” Spike informs me. The iterations of the high street over the past decade have been studiously compiled in the formidable banks of Spike’s memory. The queue is long and he hangs on my arm, causing the bags to roll off my shoulders.
Eventually, refreshments in hand, we head for comfortable seats, the ones with the “good view” of the toilets (and the hand dryers secreted within). He sits and bounces as I arrange our belongings and distribute the cups and plates. The bounce is a stim, a self-stimulatory kinetic behaviour. Each stim serves a different purpose and this one seems to charge him up a little. It is preparatory, the bounce acting like the key on a clockwork toy, storing energy for future release. He will have bounced like this all day, in school. He is not relaxed, yet. He politely asks for his iPad (school manners still on display, I note) and I hand it over. He sinks into his chair, selects YouTube from his toolbar and locates a section of dialogue from his favourite video game.
His skin is still faded bronze from summer days spent under the wide Kent sky. I look for something of myself in him. His short hair lies in flat whorls around his crown, like dark crops flattened by pranksters. His eyes shine with the rich brown warmth of conkers. My blue eyes and fair hair lost a genetic battle in the fizz and drama of conception. His posture is enviable, even now, as his muscles soften and he relaxes into the warm felt of the armchair. I drop my shoulders and my joints crackle a complaint.
Coffee shops are a kind of in-between place that Spike enjoys. Sometimes the liminality of a location, like entrance halls or the seaside, can unsettle him, setting him adrift without an anchor, but the familiarity of a chain coffee shop renders it a good space. As a toddler, when the world was even more confusing and uncertain to him than it is now, he loved them for their logos. The balanced blue and the blocky letters of the Caffe Nero logo, for example, were a beacon on the high street, signalling safe harbour.
He is talking now, about hand dryers. I think I must be a susceptible sort of person, because I am vulnerable to other people’s passions. I find them contagious. Thanks to Spike, I have amassed an unusual amount of knowledge about London’s transport infrastructure. I am not quite sure what I am meant to do with it now he has moved on to sanitaryware and washroom devices. It was the same with old boyfriends: we parted ways, and my ability to tell the difference between a Fender Jaguar and Jazzmaster, or to discern the soaring whoosh of a flanger guitar pedal were rendered obsolete. They float like mental flotsam, occasionally surfacing in liquid memory.
It is also a deliberate act, opening myself up like this. Spike’s special interests are a torrent and damage is wrought, leaks spring, if you put up too much resistance. So I go with the flow. But despite my willingness to jump in the river, I’m finding hand dryers hard work.
I renew my focus and try and get some traction on Spike’s words but, instead, I find myself lingering on the shape of them. They emerge from his mouth like figures on their way somewhere, and proceed idiosyncratically, alternating between the unrushed pace of a tourist, and a harried commuter. Perhaps mindful that his words do not always have their desired effect, he gesticulates often. Finger writing fragments of his words which seem to hang in the air, like the trail of light that lingers when a sparkler is pulled through the dark.
He moots the possibility of inflicting a small act of violence on an undesirable model of hand dryer and he must feel the need for discretion, because he is cupping his words with his hands. The heel of his hand rests on his chin, fingers curved, holding on to the words a little longer, before releasing them in a cloud like butterflies. He concludes that the likely consequence of this hypothetical destructive act is that the hand dryer will “go bang!”, and his hands perform the neat curve of a mushroom cloud in the air for emphasis.
Sometimes, when he is excited or amused by his words, as he is now, he will speak with his index finger extended and held near his cheek. He targets his interlocutor with the digit, like a sight on a bow, directing his word-arrows. His eyes sparkle and dart to mine, to see if his words have hit their target, to see whether I am also amused.
He addresses my shadow, mainly, or the negative space to the right of me, but having conveyed the substance of his point, his eyes briefly connect with mine. The fact of his gaze is electric and I am startled - taken aback by its fullness and its search for evidence of understanding.
Read something else >> Thoughts on dying
