The Bluebird Café (6 page)

‘Sugar,' she said. ‘That's 50p.'

‘On the house,' said Paul.

‘Do you like birds and animals then?' said Gilbert.

‘Yes. I'm doing my PhD on climatic change and hedgehogs' prickles,' said Paul. Gilbert looked blank again, but Paul didn't notice.

‘But why don't you do breakfast?' Gilbert asked.

‘We do brunch,' said Lucy. ‘And Vegetarian All Day Breakfast.'

‘But too late,' said Gilbert. ‘I could come if you opened early.'

‘Perhaps you should open up earlier, Lucy,' said Paul.

‘I don't think so,' said Lucy, standing behind the counter, Happy Shopper J-cloth in hand, looking fierce. ‘There wouldn't be much demand.'

‘Well, I'd come. And some of the men on the bins. And from the hotel.'

‘Hotel?'

‘The Wayside. Where I live.' For Lucy the name conjured up
men sitting on steps with cider bottles, mattresses rotting, and regular fires reported in the local papers: DERELICTS' DEATHTRAP and LANDLORD BROKE RULES.

‘Well, since my baby left me …' hummed Paul.

‘Paul!' hissed Lucy. ‘We work so hard in the evenings,' she told Gilbert. ‘I couldn't get up early too.'

‘Not that early,' said Gilbert. ‘I could help …'

‘But you've got a job,' said Lucy very quickly.

‘Aren't you writing to the council then?'

‘Oh, she never writes to the council. Don't worry,' said Paul.

‘I have brought you some bags now,' said Gilbert. ‘And I'll always give you yours now.'

‘OK,' said Lucy. ‘Thank you.'

‘That goldfinch …' said Gilbert.

Ten minutes later they were all sitting round a table writing letters to the council.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to you about the city council's use of deadly chemicals in areas of natural environmental importance. Recently I witnessed a person, whom I assumed to be a council worker, dressed in a spacesuit and spraying the area around the Six Dials' car park. This, as you should be aware, is an area that, despite being scrubby and somewhat littered, supports a number of interesting and beautiful plant species including poppies, thistles, grasses, ragwort and willowherb, and a number of garden escapees. I saw the council worker deliberately spraying the thistledown on which the goldfinches feed. I shudder to think of the short- and long-term results that the council's cruel,
expensive and unnecessary actions will have. I remind you that children as well as plants, birds and animals are to be found in the Six Dials area.

I am utterly disgusted by the council's behaviour and have realised that the council's ‘Greener City Campaign' is nothing but a farce, an immoral and squanderous public relations exercise.

Paul was tempted to sign himself
Concerned Council Tax Payer,
but he signed
Paul Cloud
instead.

Dear Sir,

I am a council worker and don't want you killing birds in a car park. You will lose the votes on it.

Paul and Lucy advised Gilbert to remain anonymous in case he lost his job. Lucy wrote
Dear Madam or Sir,
then she drew a man in a spacesuit with a butterfly net and a gun, and made a shopping list.

Paul posted two of the letters that evening on his way to a talk on urban apiarists which he'd arranged at the Badger Centre. A week later a man who'd recently exchanged his wacky red-rimmed glasses for a pair of frameless oval ones read the letters to his secretary who was called Delilah. She stood no nonsense, but moved by her devotion to the city, the council, the voters and the environment, she dropped the letters into a bottle bank on her way to lunch.

Gilbert stayed for lunch at the Bluebird. He enjoyed his potato salad and his first ever garlic bread, but disliked the brown
pastry on the spinach and feta pasty. He wasn't a great fan of cranberry juice either. He liked the carrot cake and the hazelnut ice cream. He declined coffee, but had tea with three again. Paul didn't charge him. Finally, Gilbert left. He had to hurry to make it to the last sitting, 2.30 p.m. at the canteen.

As the door closed behind him Lucy growled, ‘What the hell do you think you're doing?'

‘What?' Paul couldn't see anything wrong. He looked down at the table he was wiping. Did she mean his cleaning technique?

‘You can't just dangle intimacy and friendship in front of people like that, and then have to snatch it away. He'll never leave us alone now.'

‘I liked him. He was really interested in the goldfinches.'

‘He's a nutter. Anyone can see that. He lives in that dreadful hotel!'

‘I thought this was a café for everybody. Why shouldn't he come here? I thought you wanted some more business.'

‘He didn't pay.'

‘A loss leader, Lucy,' said Paul. ‘Like the cheap bread in supermarkets.' Paul hated conflict. He tried to make her smile. ‘He wasn't that crazy, and he ate loads, he really liked your cooking. Anyway, he probably won't come back.'

‘Good,' said Lucy.

‘But he might bring his friends,' said Paul.

‘Great. All stinking of bins and damp.'

But Gilbert never did get into the habit of paying. He looked on Paul and Lucy as his new-found friends. He would come to the café every day after his rounds and talk to them while they worked. Then he'd look mournfully at the food. In the end
they'd offer him something. He'd eat a great deal and then say, ‘You really must let me give you something for this,' and before they could reply he'd slide 50p or occasionally a pound coin across the counter at them. If it was Lucy she'd say, ‘Oh, thank you, Gilbert,' and put it in her pocket, as though it wasn't worth putting in the till. If it was Paul he'd put it in the Cats' Protection League collection tin. Abigail refused to talk to him. She stayed in the kitchen when he was there. She thought he was creepy and shouted, ‘It's him! It's him!' at every police photofit she saw in the papers. Gilbert would sit in the café for hours. He'd look longingly at cakes and the urn, and tap his fingers against his mug when it was empty. He often told them that he was so pleased to have them as friends. He tried to help. He cleared tables and wiped them in great soapy swirls so that they'd need rinsing and drying afterwards. They couldn't tell him to leave. There was nothing they could do.

Sometimes at night Lucy turned into a Chagall woman. She flew around the flat, downstairs into the café, and around the kitchen. She could see the dirty tops of the cupboards and dust on the door frames. She circled the paper-moon lampshades and floated above tables. Sometimes Fennel caught a claw in Lucy's nightdress and jumped up for a ride. The ceiling was covered by a thin film of oil and cigarette tar. Paul's huge workman's boots were by the back door, their tongues lolling out in repose: dried mud was flaking and chunking on to the mat.

Sometimes Lucy wanted to fly out through the top half of a sash window, out into the beautiful night; but somehow she didn't, and she always woke up back in bed. Often when she woke she was thinking about the pond.

The pond embodied everything that Lucy thought was wrong with her life. When the environmental health officer gave them their first certificate he tut-tutted at it. It was too near the kitchen window, he said. Paul couldn't understand what the problem was. What were they worried about? Malaria?

‘Oh, stagnant water, diseases, you know …' Lucy explained.

‘I don't know,' said Paul. But they were told that if they wanted to put tables outside, the pond would have to go, and that new European legislation was coming in which governed the proximity of ponds to food preparation areas. (This was
according to Paul's dad who was an expert on new European legislation that was coming in.)

‘Safer for frogs in France,' Lucy said.

The pond would have dried up each summer, but Mr Snooke had ensured its survival by tipping saucepans of water into it. The water had sloshed down the front of his trousers and he'd heard the neighbours laughing at him. He had trudged backwards and forwards between the pond and the kitchen with his unwashed pale blue enamel pan, a hopeless contestant in a qualifying heat of a regional
It's a Knockout
that would never be screened. It hadn't occurred to him that the pondlife might not appreciate the fragments of coley and boil-in-the-bag cod in butter sauce which had burst from their plastic and were tipped into the pond with the tepid tap water.

Paul, of course, knew that it was wrong to put tap water into a pond and resolved to buy a butt to collect rainwater. He had seen one with a special attachment to connect it with a down-pipe. £49.95 seemed a bit steep though, when the café was barely breaking even, but meanwhile, the dry weather continued and the pond was getting shallower and shallower.

‘What if we put Highland Spring into it?' Lucy asked.

And then the last of the fish was discovered slashed and floating. The claw of suspicion pointed to Fennel.

The pond dried, the liner cracked. The frogs seemed to have hopped away and the irises wilted and died.

‘Brown flags of our indecision and failure,' Lucy told Paul.

‘Hmm,' he said, and looked away.

‘At least we can fill it in now,' she added.

‘But in the spring the frogs will come back here to spawn and find it gone.'

‘It must happen in nature.'

‘Lucy!'

Lucy caught herself thinking, Perhaps we'll have moved by the spring.

Paul used the
Thompson and Morgan
seed catalogue to get to sleep. A soft lawn of tranquillity grew from the shiny pages and enfolded him. As he read from abutilon to zinnia, from artichokes to zucchini, he saw the Bluebird's garden, and Giverny came to Southampton. He saw Lucy and himself sitting in faded green deckchairs drinking Pimms, or homemade lemonade, or pastis; ginger beer perhaps. There were sections on Chinese vegetables and herbs, pages and pages of tomatoes, gluts of cucumbers, more than a hill of beans. He was wearing a white cotton hat and listening to the cricket. A butterfly settled for a moment on Lucy's hot, tanned arm. Her skin smelled like snapdragons, like popcorn. Fennel stretched out on the tiles. He added ‘nepeta' to his mental order form.

The Bluebird's garden had a fine crop of willowherb. Anonymous enemies threw used condoms over the wall. Paul sometimes found dirty nappies – disposable, ha! – and had to put them in carrier bags and dump them in their trade waste bin. In the flower beds were lumps of strange concretey stuff and broken bricks, but they had the original terracotta rope border edges. Nasturtiums thrived in the dusty earth. He was growing basil, parsley, chives, sweet marjoram, apple mint and lemon thyme for the café. He wouldn't mention the condoms or the nappies. There was a successful crop of purple sage, but Lucy wasn't sure what to do with it all.

Green fingers ran in Paul's family. Maggie Cloud's father was
a champion pumpkin grower. Paul's earliest memories were of the pumpkins; being weighed in the balance against the year's finest (the pumpkin always winning), riding in the wheelbarrow, the terrible time when he'd thought that pumpkins bounced like space-hoppers, afternoons watering and weeding. Grandpa's name was engraved on the Pumpkin Trophy for twenty-two years in a neatly hoed row. When he died the village horticultural society brought wreaths of fruit and vegetables, as well as flowers.

The pumpkin-coloured banner outside the Sikh temple made Paul think of his grandfather. Perhaps they could have a PumpkinFest at the café. They could host an exhibition about The Role of the Pumpkin in Art, Architecture and Culture. He thought of banners, minarets, Hallowe'en, drinking vessels … he must discuss it with Lucy.

It was a Bank Holiday Monday and the café was closed. Paul was in the garden, sitting in a plastic chair which had once been white, but which Lucy had painted blue with paint that cost more than the chair itself. She had seen it done on
Home Front in the Garden
. He was listening to the cricket but every so often his ears flipped channels and he heard the sounds of B. J. Coles Funfair music thumping across from the Common. He hoped that the Badger Centre creatures wouldn't be upset. Fennel jumped up on to his lap and butted him with her warm, furry, precious head. Paul was having an almost perfect afternoon. Upstairs Fred and Ginger had been dancing cheek to cheek. Now they were in a snowstorm. Lucy was lying on the sofa and thinking, ‘Huh. This is a fine romance.'

And when the credits rolled, she vowed to make a bit more
effort with Paul, to let him know that she loved him, to put some romance back into their relationship.

‘Tulle, sequins and silhouettes are required,' she told herself. Perhaps she did need some more clothes. She wished that Paul liked to dance. She switched off the TV and went out into the garden.

‘Paul,' she said. He held up a hand, gesturing silence.

‘He runs up … blah blah blah … bowls … and he's out!' said the radio.

‘Yes!' shouted Paul.

‘Paul …' said Lucy.

‘Bowled,' he told her, ‘fifty-three for four. What?'

‘I thought we might go out somewhere; the cinema, or out to dinner.'

‘OK,' he said. ‘After the cricket. You can choose where.'

‘Decide where, you mean. Sort it all out …' she snapped, thinking that he couldn't be bothered. ‘Aren't you interested? I want to go somewhere lovely, get dressed up.'

‘Fine with me,' he said, and reached to turn the radio up.

Paul had been in the bath for fifty-four minutes. His watch was propped on top of the loo, but without his glasses he couldn't see its misted-over face. He had been doing the crossword but it was now too damp to be safely written on. He had two clues to go. He thought that he might even send it in, but he didn't want a leatherbound dictionary. He already had
Chambers,
the first shot in an exchange of fat reference books. The progress of their relationship was plotted in non-fiction along the bottom shelf of the bookcase.
Chambers, Roget's Thesaurus, The Times Atlas of the World, Atlas of the Stars, The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations,
and its brother,
Modern Quotations. British Flora and Fauna
. Claudia Roden's
The Food of Italy,
which was given special status.