Of course I should have known. I hadn’t thought it through. So here I am, outside Miro’s and all the blinds are down, and the glass door is covered in paper on the inside. Sellotaped probably. I mean, I don’t think it had blinds before, the cafe. These blinds are not the ones you use to dress up a place. Make a room look dusk pretty. Convivial. No, the new garments give the locked down café a hooded, sombre feel, like it was scuppered years ago and now sits, derelict, waiting for some disaster capitalist to turn it into student flats. So I just stand here, staring at the interloping blinds. It’s the sort of confusion you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re not in your own bed. In a hotel or a friend’s house or even in the other bedroom in your flat because you fancied a firmer mattress or the for-the-guests-only eye-blue Egyptian cotton sheets and you put your hand out, feel around in the dark, groping for the familiar to touch and fix you in a point of place or time, until you catch the smell of the hotel shower gel, or the flash of the amber street light through the thin spare room curtains, and you sink back, reassured. Outside the café with the closed blinds a couple stand beside me, blinking. Three of us blinking as one. Passers by might think we are together, two households out for coffee, a woman who favours her right leg along with her elderly parents, or her aunt and uncle given the lack of shared familial facial features. Do strangers look at each like this? Or is this paranoia? A slippery slope. No, I’ve seen them. Checking, counting, judging. A whisper to their husband. A post on social media. Did you see them? Definitely more than two households. They weren’t even social distancing. And the state of her! Not even a mask.
I look like my father, not my mother. I tested this once twenty years ago. More by accident than design. Goa, India, in a tie-dyed village in a coconut-palmed shack that smelt of scratching dogs and incensed ashrams. Sharing the on-the-road far-too-long-almost-out- of-money beach hut with a cat, three hand-sized filigree moths that clung to the thatched roof and twitched and fluttered, and two young Swedish women. They bewitched me those women. If you change your mind I’m the first in line. Honey, I’m still free. You should do it, they said, stroking each other’s naked scalps. Look at us, we were beautiful before but now we’re so beautiful. Hair is just another word with nothing left to lose. They were. Beautiful. Sinead O’Connor beautiful before she did the habit thing. So they flanked me to the barbers and they sat me in the sweaty plastic chair and giggled as my blond curls grifted, pale, wanton, in amongst the hennaed orange moustache clippings that piled the corners and sank, heartless into discarded clay cups of heavy sweet chai. The mirror, I recall, was greased up with steam and lather and I couldn’t see the new me until I paid up, a handful of rupees, walked out into the mug of the street, and looked at myself in the pharmacist’s window. I was not myself. I was my father. My father with a shaved head.
There’s a cafe up on the High Street, hen, the blinking woman who isn’t my mother or my aunt says to me. Not as flash as them ones here but it’s only one fifty for an egg roll and as much coffee refill as you like. Thanks I say to her, smiling. See that one there, I point to the cafe next door, seven pound fifty for an egg roll. Really, I say as her eyes round, and not even a sprig of parsley. I haven’t forgiven my father for my ugliness. I couldn’t forgive Sweden either. Take a chance on me. My hair grew back in. There is beauty outwith and beauty within. To not have either is a price I continue to pay. I like my eggs sunny side up, the yolk melting sun across a soft white buttered Scottish morning roll.
SANDERLINGS 