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There is a conference. The Society for Independent Cafe Retailers Annual Conference and Dinner, which sounds very formal but does not actively prohibit Guinea Pig Cafes so you have a ticket. You’re not exactly sure how you got the ticket, it might have been a gift, but either way there’s a free dinner with wine and it’s not like you had other plans. You sit in the back of a panel about getting the maximum value in offerings from the humble toaster, taking out your phone, unlocking it then shoving it back in your pocket in an endless cycle.
There was a fox on the pavement when you walked to the tube this morning. Like an omen, but you don’t know if it was good or bad. “Not that I’m thinking about it,” you say, mid-flashback.
“Because I’m not,” you say, in the conference room, before turning to look back at the stage, take your phone out of your pocket, put it away again.
The panel ends and everyone mills into the main hall for ‘networking.’ You look out and say, “Do people actually say networking in real life?” and no one laughs because you’re not in the mood. You’re talking to Alan-or-maybe-Martin who has a revolutionary idea for a coffee shop that’s - get this - industrial themed. Bare bulbs, exposed piping, lots of bronze and brown. He is the first person who has ever thought of this.
The last six men you spoke to were the first person who had ever thought of this.
The wine is cheap. Martin-or-it-could-have-been-Herman offers to get you another glass and you lean out with a grin and say, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
There’s music.
You drop back into the main hall, looking around like you might see a band somewhere. Probably-Owen frowns after you but the music is gone, replaced by the low hubbub of too many conflicting conversations about concrete furnishings and ‘a pop of colour.’
You must have imagined it. You lean out to say, “Well, that was weird,” and it’s there again, echoing in your ears. Strings and piano in a melody you half recognise, like a cover of a parody of a song you know.
And then someone sings.
"And you’re in London, for some reason,
“Well, because you booked a conference
And a flight, with the last of your savings,
Like it would change things.”
You turn back to Brendan (“It’s Colin,” he says, like it matters). “Did you hear that?”
There’s nothing to hear, not in this room, except for fake appreciation of truly shitty wine and a thousand men thinking they’re special.
You turn back to that invisible audience and it’s there again, piano music playing behind you. You turn on the spot, somehow without dropping back into your conversation with… Ryan?, and see a woman dressed in something flimsy - a short busty Taylor Swift singing into a microphone in an otherwise empty room.
“But it’s all just the same, except for the driving,
And the accents and the cheese,
You’re still you, doing the same things,
Like it’ll change things.”
“Um,” you say. “What the fuck?”
She jumps and spins around, dress flashing up in all sorts of places, cough-cough hem-hem etcetera. “Oh god, gosh, hi, sorry.” She’s American. Why is there an American at a conference in London? Why is there an American in your head at a conference in London.
“How did you get in here?” you ask, which is a sentence that launches a thousand other questions like ‘what is here’ and ‘who are you’ and ‘why is there still a band playing?’
“Ohhh,” she says, nodding her head. “Yeah, I saw a sign about this.”
“You saw a sign about… this. This specifically.” Where even are you?
Ms American pulls a coat out of… somewhere? tugging it on over the dress. “Yeah, something about ‘there’s a lot of quirky people at a cafe convention so you may have to double up on metaphysical dream spaces for the duration’.” She looks around the seemingly endless expanse of grey nullspace. “This isn’t so bad, seems pretty roomy. Sorry, was I interrupting your flow?”
“I’m sorry, double up on metaphysical what now?”
“Huh?” She looks back at you, taking in your carefully selected Smart Outfit and your hair that absolutely refused to cooperate with anything you tried this morning. “You’ve never had anything like this before? Man, I was once on a plane with three different dream ghosts, talk about exhausting.” She holds out a hand. “I’m Rebecca.”
And you… backtrack. Take half a step back, turn to see where you’re going in this meta-whatever and you’re face to face with that same guy whose name you really don’t know (Vernon?) who is still talking like nothing happened at all.
But that’s normal, that’s fine, no one ever notices. No one has ever noticed, except…
Anyway it doesn’t matter. You told yourself you were going to stop doing it, and you haven’t exactly stuck to that, but new… hour, new leaf and all that. You’re going to be a better person and live in the moment and stop being sarcastic about people in front of their faces.
“Watch me,” you say.
And Rebecca says, “Hi… again?”
It turns out you are bad at resolutions.
No one is surprised.
You shake your head and give into it. “Do you want to get a drink?”
The hotel where the conference is being held has a bar. Rebecca in the real world does not have a glittery dress and heels, she has a T-shirt that says ‘Rebetzels Pretzels’ and is proportionally your polar opposite in every way. She has a room and a bar tab, since apparently she is actually from America and has crossed an ocean to come to this tiny little run-down British cafe conference.
You would ask her to explain but there is a fragment of a song caught in your head and you think you might already know.
She also has a notebook which she’s scrawling the lines you half remember into. “I forget all the good rhymes if I don’t get them written down straight away,” she explains while you order two martinis, and then a third in case she also wants one.
“And that’s what you use the… space for? Singing songs?”
Rebecca shrugs. It’s a familiar shrug, the one that says ‘I care very much about this thing but I’m pretending I don’t so that you can’t take it from me.’ You have shrugged that shrug. “Yeah. Yes. I write songs, and I sing them. In there but also -” She waves a nebulous hand. “Out here. Sometimes. I’m getting better at it.”
“So you’re a singer.” This feels more like solid ground. Musicians are allowed to have weird quirks, like whole imaginary worlds that other people can accidentally stumble into.
“No,” Rebecca says. “Kind of. I run a pretzel stand,” she gestures to her T-shirt, which makes a kind of sense because she is here at this conference that you are also attending. “But I like writing songs, it makes me happy.”
You are not sure you’ve ever eaten a pretzel.
You are not sure you have ever said with such confidence that anything makes you happy.
“What about you?” Rebecca asks. “What do you do in there?”
Up until twenty minutes ago it was never an in there. It was a momentary trick of the mind, making eye contact with a crowd that never existed, taking a private moment in a public space. “I make sarcastic comments about people in front of their faces without them knowing about it for the benefit of an audience that doesn’t exist.”
She takes a moment to process, then nods a few times like this makes perfect sense. Which makes no sense. “Uh huh, okay. An audience?”
“You don’t have one of those?”
She shakes her head, then hesitates. “Sometimes? It really depends on the song. But they’re not real.”
“No, god, of course not.” You glance out at them, almost like you should be apologising, then there’s a flash of that grey space around you and you quickly drop back into the room. God, this is dreadful. “You’re the first real person who’s ever… I mean, someone noticed but no one’s ever been there.”
“Someone noticed?”
This is exactly what you wanted to be distracted from, isn’t it? And yet you find yourself replying because you’ve always been a glutton for punishment, for living and reliving all the worst moments. “There was this man, he used to say I’d gone somewhere. He kept asking about it, wouldn’t let it drop.”
Rebecca snorts and lifts her glass to toast you. “There’s always a man,” she says in a voice that suggests there’s a story there. “Too many stories,” she says, at your look. “Too many men, frankly. I’m on a break from men. There are rules.”
“I tried that,” you say. “The break. I thought it would help.”
“And did it?”
You laugh. It’s brittle, but she doesn’t know you well enough to tell. “Turns out you just have all the same problems, plus you’re super fucking horny all the time.”
She laughs. It’s brittle. “Amen to that, sister.” She takes a sip of the martini and makes a face. “I haven’t had a martini like this since I lived in New York.”
“Is that good or bad?” you ask, and she shrugs and takes another sip. Back in the conference room there are cheers as someone calls a toast, and you could go back but you don’t.
“I met this woman a while back,” you say, because the longer you avoid talking about the elephant in the room, the longer it is until you have to call Claire and say she was right, you’re hallucinating, you do actually have a problem. “She’d won this award for women in business and we went for a drink and she was so goddamn cool, you know? I didn’t know if I wanted to be her or be with her, I thought if I could grow up and become that person, my life couldn’t have gone too far wrong.” You tilt your glass, the cocktail stick clinking into the side. “And now I drink martinis.”
Rebecca saves her olive stick, sucking them off one at a time.
“She said everything’s better when you get to menopause.”
Rachel smiles. “I actually have a friend who went through menopause recently.”
“And?”
“She’s a hot shot lawyer making bank at a big firm without selling out her soul, her eldest son’s doing some amazing overseas volunteering thing and her marriage has never been better.” She frowns like she hadn’t put all of this together before. “The menopause. Huh. Who knew?”
You start your second martini. The world is slightly unsteady, which makes the ground feel firmer to bring up the subject you’ve been avoiding. “So. Metaphysical dream spaces?”
Rebecca casts her gaze into the distance. Your eyes follow instinctively and you’re there again. This time the room is smaller, Rebecca is wearing normal clothes although her make-up is on point. You need to learn how to do that. “This place. It helps me process the world. I guess for you too, since I didn’t bring you in.”
You stop examining the walls of the room. “You can bring people in here?”
“I did once.”
You flash back to the conversation at the bar. “One of your many men?”
That startles a laugh out of her. “No, god, no. My friend Paula, the lawyer. It was weird, I’d been coming here forever and then one day she snapped me out of it and straight up asked. That was the first time I’d ever had to put it into words, you know?”
You shake your head, you don’t think about him in the cafe, him looking over your shoulder, him asking while you tried to find somewhere to put your eyes that wasn’t coming back here over and over. “No, I’ve never… there was that man I said before. And I loved him and I thought maybe... But I didn’t.” You say it quickly. Like snatching a pan from the oven onto the counter before it can burn you. “He was a priest.”
It doesn't work with pans, either.
“And for the Jewish lady at the back,” Rebecca says. “That’s bad because…?”
“There’s a vow. Celibacy. They’re supposed to love God above all others and he said if we had sex he’d fall in love with me.”
“So you didn’t?”
On your knees on a church floor. Him at your front door. Him coming back over and over again. The look in his eyes when you kissed him, the touch of his hands on your skin, reverential. Like your breasts and your hair and your cunt could be holy, were due worship. “We did.”
Rebecca fixes you with a wide eyed gaze like a tween at a sleepover. “And?”
“He didn’t choose me. He didn’t…” You’re here in this nowhere space surrounded by smokey grey walls and a stranger and somehow the words keep coming out. “He chose God, and he told me to stay away and now it’s months later and I haven’t seen him since but I can’t get him out of my head. I saw a fox earlier today and I almost asked if it had seen him, like I’m going crazy. Every person that comes into the cafe I want to tell them to go to his church just to see him, just to tell me if he’s okay.” You sound crazy. You feel crazy, and Rebecca isn’t saying you’re wrong but maybe she’s crazy too.
“Do you want him to be okay?”
“Yes,” you say.
“No,” you say.
“I don’t,” you start to say but it’s a lie because you do know, you’ve always fucking known. “No. I don’t want him to be okay. I want him to be broken up inside and hating himself and questioning everything he ever did to try and figure out how it all went so wrong. He knew me, better than anyone, he knew everything there was to know about me and he loved me anyway and it still wasn’t fucking enough.”
There’s music swelling from nowhere, from everywhere, like the fucking climax of Les Miserables. The grey walls shimmer into a stage, a chandelier of shattered glass fragments spinning overhead, fracturing light down across your arms and legs.
A voice sings. “You ruined everything, you stupid bitch.”
And isn’t that it. Isn’t that just it, right. The sum fucking total of it all. You weren’t good enough, you fucked it all up and you ruined it and look at you now with nothing and no one all over again. “Look at that,” you say, laughing and brittle and breaking. “This place gets me.”
You look for Rebecca to share the joke. It’s a joke, this stupid dramatic song tearing you up inside, but she’s not laughing. She’s standing beneath the chandelier wearing a sparkling cream ball gown and looking at you like you’re breaking her heart.
“No,” she says.
The music stops, the moment shatters and you’re sitting at a shitty bar in a shitty hotel holding a semi-decent martini. Rebecca is wearing a Pretzel T-shirt instead of a gown, but her face is exactly the same.
“I wrote that song years ago,” she says. “When I was trying to convince my childhood sweetheart to love me back by chasing him down, then lying and cheating and tricking him into spending time with me.”
“Well I haven’t done any of those things,” you say, and you don’t think about going to the church, going over and over. About pushing every time because it wasn’t enough that he saw you or that he talked to you, it had to be more.
Maybe that shows on your face too, maybe it’s hard to lie to someone who can linger inside your head. “You can’t force someone to love you best,” Rebecca says. “As much as you might want to. It took me a long time to learn that. All you can do is be who you are. And the people who really love you, the people who matter, will stay.”
“And what if you do that and there’s no one left at all.”
She puts a hand on yours. She’s got all the usual small burns on the backs of her fingers from coffee shop life and you find yourself comparing them, thumb to thumb. “Then you go out and find more people. Move to a new town, start a new job, open a cafe.” She squeezes your hand. “Also therapy. Cannot recommend therapy enough.”
“Oh,” you tug your hand away. “No that’s… I did that once. She said I had no friends and an empty heart, so, bit of a downer. Didn’t help much.”
“That’s pretty much what you just said to me though.”
God, there’s more than one of them. “Well, anyway it’s expensive, and I run a cafe, so I’m obviously not overflowing with disposable income.”
She doesn’t drop it. “Could you get a referral? If your doctor says you should see someone.”
“Why would he say that?”
Rebecca frowns at you. Like maybe you’re missing something.
“I had a friend,” you say. “One of the good ones. But I fucked up and she died, it’s kind of my fault but not enough my fault that there were ever any consequences so I just have this guilt and the constant feeling that I should be doing something more, but I need someone to tell me what.”
Rebecca laughs. Like for some reason all your jokes failed to land but your dead friend is where the party’s at. “I get it,” she says. “And I know that’s the worst thing to hear and you think no one ever does but…” she shakes her head. “I went to prison.”
This conversation was never going to be a good idea, you should have fled while you had the chance and yet for some reason you stay. You stay.
“I’d done all this shit and I thought I should be punished, but the world doesn’t work like that and prison is meaningless and at some point you have to get over yourself.” She kicks at the bar. “Go to therapy, take antidepressants, then if you still want to do good, do some fucking good.”
Woah. “I’m a good person,” you say. Decisively. Only you’re not sure. You put money in charity boxes when you have it and you helped at that church fete. Not entirely altruistically, but it’s still a good deed if it’s done for bad reasons. “I just want…” You don’t know what you want. Isn’t that the whole damn problem? “I want to be happy. I want to know how to be happy.”
Rebecca raises a glass, “I’ll drink to that,” she says, knocking back the remainder in one and waving the bartender back over, ordering more drinks and trying to tip him which he mostly seems bemused by.
It’s kind of fucking hilarious: her face as he lets her down gently, her earnest attempts to order cocktails when she clearly knows nothing about cocktails. You want to step out and say something, “nearly got one there,” or “Americans,” but you know you can’t without her following so you’re stuck in the moment and all you can do is laugh.
She pushes you then laughs back, the bartender brings something tall and fruity and you say, “Do you want to have sex?”
Rebecca blinks over her glass. “With you?”
Oh god, this is Belinda all over again. “You don’t have to, I know not everyone’s into that and you probably want to get back to the conference, I just thought…” You just thought it’s been forever and she made you laugh and after this you have to get on a bus and go home to an empty flat.
“No, I’m not…” Rebecca stops, collects her thoughts, downs half a cocktail in one go and tries again. “I’m not gay. I might be curious, there have been moments, but I think if I was going to try it I would want it to be a real thing, not the last night at a weird convention in England.”
Right, yeah, of course. “Makes sense,” you raise your glass. “To better choices.” and Rebecca clinks it. The bartender comes back and you take the cocktail menu and order a whole selection of better choices.
Half an hour later, you are drunk enough to dread the moment when you will have to stand up but not as drunk as Rebecca who is swaying. “The thing is,” she says. “The thing is, I could go upstairs with you. I could… because you’re right, there’s a million people in the world. I thought it was just Josh but then there was Greg, I thought it was Josh and Greg but then there was Nathaniel. You had your - who was it?”
“The priest,” you say.
“Yes. Him. God, do people not have names where you’re from?”
Weird question. “Where I’m from like...England? People have names in England.”
“But you’re - whatever,” she waves whatever point she was trying to make away. “Where was I?”
She’s a mess, but this is vastly more entertaining than any of the crowd of men outside and Citymapper is saying there’s still fifteen minutes until you can catch a bus home, so, “Nathaniel,” you say.
She sighs like a Disney princess. “Nathaniel. Then there was Nathaniel and I got so caught up in those three men but there’s a million men. So many men! In the world!”
“Three point seven billion,” you say. “Give or take.” And get a finger stabbed between your eyes for your trouble.
“Exactly. And somewhere in that three point seven billion is man number four. For me. And for you, person number…?”
Awkward. “Let’s not count them.”
“Josh met someone else. My first boyfriend, he was madly in love with me, there was a competition for my love but then he went out into the world and met someone else and she’s lovely and they’re great and Nathaniel has a monkey and Greg has a restaurant and I have music, and I came here and I met you and you’re great,” she looks up from her glass to stare earnestly into your eyes. One of those heartfelt intimate moments that you would typically slip away from only you can’t with this woman because she’ll follow you. “What do you have?”
You have a guinea pig. And a hamster. And a sister in Sweden, and chatty Wednesdays, and a father who is married and in love and happy, who you are trying occasionally to be happy for.
“What time is your flight tomorrow?”
She frowns at her glass, like this is the hardest question she has ever been asked. “Five… o’clock,” she says, dragging the words out like she’s waiting for you to contradict her. “Or later? It might be later.”
You reach into your pocket and pull out the business cards that Claire sent you to bring to the conference so that you could hand them out to network. It is the only one you have handed out, and you suspect a pretzel seller from Los Angeles was not what Claire had in mind.
But hey, it’s something. “This is my cafe. Tomorrow’s Scrabble Saturday, which is where people come early in the morning to have arguments and tear up a dictionary. You should come.”
Rebecca takes it, reading it slowly then turning it over to take in the truly terrible cartoon art on the other side. “It’s a guinea pig cafe?”
“Yes,” you say. “Don’t look it up on google. Some people are very strongly opposed and they like leaving reviews.”
“And you want me to come?”
She doesn’t need to keep going on about it. “Well, people keep telling me I have no friends and you’re…” You can’t say ‘great.’ “Fun, this has been fun.” You are too British for this much sincerity. “And I watched the 3:45 seminar on active marketing and taking the initiative.”
How do people make friends without flirting? Is this why you have a string of sexual conquests but no friends, god maybe the priest was right and you’re just a terrible person.
Rebecca snorts, but keeps the card. “I don’t know if I’ll be capable of movement in the morning, but I’ll try my best.” She lifts her head to look at you earnest and sincere and you want to step out, but you can’t, you can’t. “I’ll try.”
So you look away instead, grab your purse. “I have to catch a bus. Maybe see you later.” And you don’t run out because there are people but you aren’t exactly walking either. And you can’t quite resist the urge to pause at the bus stop, look off to the side and say, “Well that was -”
And there’s music behind you. You look back and see Rebecca in a nice blouse but no ball gown, sitting at a keyboard before an invisible audience, unaware of you.
“And you’re still you, but the people are different
They tell different jokes and read different parts
You only see the journey you’ve taken
When you meet someone back at the start
There’s a whole world, and this is one moment
There’s something amazing wherever you go
Sometimes it takes a stranger in a strange land
To bring you home.”
You clap and she startles, spinning on the chair to find you. “I thought you’d left.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” you say. The bus is pulling up, you’re aware of it as much as you’re aware of Rebecca standing up from the piano stool, the distance between the two of you stretching out further as you climb on board.
“If I can,” Rebecca says, taking two steps after you. “But I might not come.”
“You will,” you say, and the space breaks apart, she’s gone and you’re sitting on a bus looking at patterned carpet seats and a scratched up windowpane and smiling. You look up once to meet their eyes. “She will,” you say, and wink.
Cut to black.