Misbehaviour by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2009-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Alley Cats

Jennie Treverton

This is a midnight café in the middle of the city. Hiding among high street retail outlets and pubs that used to be theatres, it’s been run by the same Italian family for three generations. The tablecloths are yellow gingham PVC and each table carries a fake cyclamen in a plastic pot. At a certain time of afternoon someone takes all the pots away and replaces them with Chianti bottles-cum-candleholders with wide mantles of wax trickles. At ten-thirty or so someone takes the bottles away and the tables are left bare until the last drunk has gone home, whereupon the cyclamens come out again.

I’m what you might call a regular. A few weeks ago, I was in here when I met the most astonishing man.

The interior walls of this café have a colour and texture like skin on a bowl of cold porridge. There are framed faded landscapes of windmills and haymaking peasants, and behind the counter is a black and white photo of the family patriarch, Matteo Nerone, clinking wine glasses with a British film star who came here once. The wall around it is bare, anticipating further photographs of celebrity clientele, but so far nobody else has come in.

You can come here after clubbing at five in the morning, bang down an espresso doppio or two, then stroll to the office while eating a sugar-dusted croissant to soak up your excesses. Not that I’ve done that for a while. At thirty-two I don’t have that kind of stamina any more. I’ll come at other times of day, such as Saturday afternoons, when I sit and read a novel, legs crowded by shopping bags, or after an evening out with friends, as a final, selfish, solitary treat before I go back to my flat, a fifteen-minute walk from here.

This place hasn’t changed much since I first discovered it. The coffee machine is new, the ashtrays have disappeared since the ban, but everything else is exactly the same. These days, whichever Nerone happens to be working when I visit will show me to my favourite table and pull the chair out for me, and if it’s Matteo he’ll use his towel to beat any crumbs off the seat with a flourish and a wink. I sit facing the window, taking velvety sips of the best hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted, made with grated dark chocolate from Italy. No gritty powders here, not at Matteo’s. In the grand old days I’d smoke a cigarette too, but these days I hold on to my craving until I leave.

So I sit here and I watch the people outside, the hardcore drinkers, the tarts and the lovers, the wandering innocents, the perverts, the pugilists looking for an excuse to throw a punch, the desperadoes looking for true love in the wrong place, wrong time; I see them all. And they always see me, because this window is warm and bright at night and because I am an unusual-looking woman who stands out in any situation.

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