The Roman waiter at our favourite Italian cafe calls out for you again. I’m lain against our birch tree smoking, if I remember correctly, considering a blade of grass and trying to look more than melancholic, all drunk on lack of sleep, but still more than impartially sad.
“149,” the man from Rome bellows out up the square, swindling plates of carbonara between both hands and your absent face plays peekaboo amongst the tangled-up branches. A convenient raindrop falls on my head in a similar hunger. I still wonder if pasta here, in Russell Square, is your favourite pastime and if you still grin from ear to ear with your round finished plate as you look at the unkempt corners of the square wall round the whole park. This place is green as ever and damp with spring rain, ready to grow into that nasty split between us: an imperfect full stop; a flower about to bloom.
“53,” the man from the cafe peals like an angry seagull, fed up with the ballet show he’s been forced to perform without an audition. He’s doing remarkably well, taking the grey out the sky and shuttering light onto the cafe window behind him, making some tap dance of sun rays appear on the glass.
It becomes hard to focus on everything I want to remember about you with the tap, tap, tapping, on the glass. The dog still runs around the perimeter, avoiding the railing that bends in or out of the wind. Pret coffee won’t ever not taste appalling. The old man wearing a navy cap has stopped coming to that bench we sat on where you said ‘Yes’, but it’s not like I want to sit and pretend we’re all shipshape and hunky-dory anymore. Nothing’s changed from the clink of glasses, the musty smell of Bloomsbury air and the population of daffodils, which mark the earth like a dog ear does a page, back to when the grass bore our prints instead.
You work that job as a clerk in the city and I mope around on my journalism masters looking for a lack of bluebells, good roots to perch on, or newish news with a good hook that happened yesteryear or yesterday, or the day before, or whenever really.
“25,” echoes again around this puzzle of a park square which once held the cacophony of all the times we met, but instead, reminds me blankly: you’re broke, but still young and unemployed, unemployed, unemployed.
(Note to self, does Chat GPT understand the power of three, if not, I must use more in my writing)
I decide to probe Russell Square for questions:
1. If I walked round in a straight line, would the pressed lawn form a shape and inspire someone to make this green into a proper box?
“15”, reads the man from a kitchen ticket as I think about all the things I want to straighten out between us.
2. How long must you haunt a place to become a ghost and, according to the laws of ghostliness or any other authorial text upon spirits, do spirits prefer inside or outside settings and is this a matter of taste?
“9,” slurs Mr. Ticket Man with shouts of ‘biglietti’ as I remember that this short story needs to have some relevance to nature, fitness and the outdoors, if ever to be included in publication – without some serious edits.
3. What do all the cafe waiters think of this wily bearded boy in tattered trench coat, writing this whilst equal parts crying and laughing to himself?
“1,” the man from Rome shouts even louder in a weird kind of eulogy to the pattern of birds overhead, the woman smiling in the smallest crinkle to her baby, the silent snap of a beer can into place by two first year undergrads, who could be, but still aren’t, me and you.