Normally,
the café is too busy to overhear customers’ conversations, but today is deathly
quiet.
There’s a craft festival in St John Street. His workmates have been sent
there to man a pop-up café and most of his regular customers have defected too,
so Markus can hear every word the only two punters in the place utter. Every.
Sodding. Word. They’re in their sixties – or maybe their seventies, it’s hard
to tell – and they’re ladies dressed to lunch, even though it’s late in the
day. A talker and a listener. The talker, who’s white, is well curled into the
chat, like such types always are, and the listener – a black woman – is taking
it like it’s medicine.
The words roll
over him at first, but then something in the monotony of her tone makes him
tune in. Just to see what could be that dry. Dry, yet pulsing. Pressing. And
Jesus. It’s all about her oil-fired central heating boiler. The listening one
can’t steer the conversation. She has a feeble try every so often, but BOILER.
BOILER MAN. SERVICE AGREEMENT. BOILER just steamrolls her.
Markus wipes
the counter down in rough, zig-zagging sweeps and wonders why the boring one
wants an audience when a wall would do. He shoves the cloth onwards to the sink
sloppily, thinking of his colleagues, Doog and Mali, who will be well underway
by now. They were chosen to run the pop-up café at the festival because they
out-hipster him. Jacob, the manager, has left Markus in charge – yet again –
because he says he’s solid and dependable. It wasn’t his ambition to be
dependable. Jacob says something about dependable Hungarians, but that’s bullshit,
because Markus’s British Hungarian mum lost touch with the Hungarian side of
the family, so he knows embarrassingly little about Hungary. He just pictures
the Danube and all the lights in Budapest, like everyone else.
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