ambulance drivers and their vehicles, still between marked lines.
Eventually I crossed the river again and walked up to Soho. On the corner where Frith Street cuts across Old Compton Street at an exact ninety-degree angle I noticed one of those Seattle-theme coffee shops I’d bought that cappuccino in while waiting to meet Catherine at Heathrow. I remembered that I had a loyalty card, and that if I got all ten of its cups stamped then I’d get an extra cup—plus a new card with ten more cups on it. The idea excited me: clocking the counter, going right round through the zero, starting again. I went inside and ordered a cappuccino.
“Heyy! Short cap,” the girl said. It was a girl this time. “Coming up. You have a…”
“Right here,” I said, sliding it across the counter.
She stamped the second cup and handed me my cappuccino. I took it over to a stool beside the window. It was one of those long, tall windows that take up a whole wall. I sat up against it and watched people going by. It must have been around eight o’clock. Media types were leaving offices and club types were heading into bars and restaurants. Some people were wheeling a screen along the street—one of those baroque old folding screens with oriental decorations on it. There’d been screens like that in hospital—without the decoration, of course: just white folding screens they pulled around your bed when they wanted to turn you over or undress you. The people pushing the screen along Old Compton Street were maybe two or three years younger than me, in their middle to late twenties. They must have been taking it to or from one of the production company studios that are dotted around Soho. They looked like television people: they had short, dyed hair and Diesel and Evisu clothes and small, colourful mobiles in their spare hands and back pockets. I wondered if their phones were helping to project an imaginary future for one of the stocks I was buying into, to propel it upwards.
I went and bought another cappuccino, got my card stamped a third time and came back to my window seat. The media types pushing the screen had paused in the middle of the street because they’d bumped into another group of media types who were sitting outside one of the other coffee shops. They were all calling over to one another, walking back and forth between the screen and the second coffee shop, waving, laughing. They reminded me of an ad—not a particular one, but just some ad with beautiful young people in it having fun. The people with the screen in the street now had the same ad in mind as me. I could tell. In their gestures and their movements they acted out the roles of the ad’s characters: the way they turned around and walked in one direction while still talking in another, how they threw their heads back when they laughed, the way they let their mobiles casually slip back into their low-slung trouser pockets. Their bodies and faces buzzed with glee, exhilaration—a jubilant awareness that for once, just now, at this particular right-angled intersection, they didn’t have to sit in a cinema or living room in front of a TV and watch other beautiful young people laughing and hanging out: they could be the beautiful young people themselves. See? Just like me: completely second-hand.
I bought a third cap, got the fourth cup on my card stamped and came back to the stool by the window. The media types and their screen had gone. A car alarm went off a few streets away and continued beeping intermittently, at intervals of three or four seconds. Beside my bed in hospital there’d been a monitor and a plastic lung that had beeped and rasped at roughly the same interval. During the lightening of my coma—that’s their word for it, “lightening”—when my mind was still asleep but getting restless and inventing spaces and scenes for me to inhabit, I’d found myself in large sports stadiums, either athletics venues with tracks marked out on clay and
Eventually I crossed the river again and walked up to Soho. On the corner where Frith Street cuts across Old Compton Street at an exact ninety-degree angle I noticed one of those Seattle-theme coffee shops I’d bought that cappuccino in while waiting to meet Catherine at Heathrow. I remembered that I had a loyalty card, and that if I got all ten of its cups stamped then I’d get an extra cup—plus a new card with ten more cups on it. The idea excited me: clocking the counter, going right round through the zero, starting again. I went inside and ordered a cappuccino.
“Heyy! Short cap,” the girl said. It was a girl this time. “Coming up. You have a…”
“Right here,” I said, sliding it across the counter.
She stamped the second cup and handed me my cappuccino. I took it over to a stool beside the window. It was one of those long, tall windows that take up a whole wall. I sat up against it and watched people going by. It must have been around eight o’clock. Media types were leaving offices and club types were heading into bars and restaurants. Some people were wheeling a screen along the street—one of those baroque old folding screens with oriental decorations on it. There’d been screens like that in hospital—without the decoration, of course: just white folding screens they pulled around your bed when they wanted to turn you over or undress you. The people pushing the screen along Old Compton Street were maybe two or three years younger than me, in their middle to late twenties. They must have been taking it to or from one of the production company studios that are dotted around Soho. They looked like television people: they had short, dyed hair and Diesel and Evisu clothes and small, colourful mobiles in their spare hands and back pockets. I wondered if their phones were helping to project an imaginary future for one of the stocks I was buying into, to propel it upwards.
I went and bought another cappuccino, got my card stamped a third time and came back to my window seat. The media types pushing the screen had paused in the middle of the street because they’d bumped into another group of media types who were sitting outside one of the other coffee shops. They were all calling over to one another, walking back and forth between the screen and the second coffee shop, waving, laughing. They reminded me of an ad—not a particular one, but just some ad with beautiful young people in it having fun. The people with the screen in the street now had the same ad in mind as me. I could tell. In their gestures and their movements they acted out the roles of the ad’s characters: the way they turned around and walked in one direction while still talking in another, how they threw their heads back when they laughed, the way they let their mobiles casually slip back into their low-slung trouser pockets. Their bodies and faces buzzed with glee, exhilaration—a jubilant awareness that for once, just now, at this particular right-angled intersection, they didn’t have to sit in a cinema or living room in front of a TV and watch other beautiful young people laughing and hanging out: they could be the beautiful young people themselves. See? Just like me: completely second-hand.
I bought a third cap, got the fourth cup on my card stamped and came back to the stool by the window. The media types and their screen had gone. A car alarm went off a few streets away and continued beeping intermittently, at intervals of three or four seconds. Beside my bed in hospital there’d been a monitor and a plastic lung that had beeped and rasped at roughly the same interval. During the lightening of my coma—that’s their word for it, “lightening”—when my mind was still asleep but getting restless and inventing spaces and scenes for me to inhabit, I’d found myself in large sports stadiums, either athletics venues with tracks marked out on clay and
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