A Solitary Man

Ewan liked watching people, eavesdropping on conversations when he could, extrapolating from the revealed puzzle pieces of other lives to distract himself from his own.

Lately, as the days got colder, he just liked being inside and warm. Sleeping in the woods beyond the town was not going to be sustainable when winter arrived. Spring and summer had literally been a walk in the park in comparison.

The sole waitress in the small café did not begrudge him lingering after his fry up breakfast since it wasn’t a Market Day. His eyes tracked her as she delivered a fresh cup of tea to the only other customer, a solitary man, nondescript and forgettable, several tables away from his own preferred corner.

Ewan watched them chat, decided the smile she provided was warmer than politeness. Did they know each other? Maybe a regular customer so they had established a rapport. 

Only in his many visits to the one café that tolerated him, he had never come across this man before, so perhaps a traveller just passing through.

He studied the haversack that sat under the table. Slightly smaller than his own backpack which held all of his earthly possessions, but possibly this man, also, had a wash, when needed, in the disabled facilities at Tesco or Morrisons early in the morning when few shoppers were around. No obvious signs of homelessness, but then Ewan hoped he passed muster as normal, too.

When the bell jangled over the door announcing the entrance of a mother with two well-bundled children, the waitress turned toward them and the man began to lay cards on the table again. He seemed addicted to playing patience.

Wait. This time it wasn’t patience. Even at this distance, Ewan recognised the familiar outlined cross of a Tarot spread followed by four cards laid in a column along the side. 

Interesting. How would one compensate for the fact that Tarot had the Major Arcana as well as the cups, pentacles, swords and wands which equated roughly to an ordinary deck? He remembered pawning his own deck so that he could eat and then, when he could afford to go back to liberate it, the devastation that someone else had bought it.

***

Joseph turned over one card at a time then sipped his tea while studying the completed layout.

His free hand hovered over but did not touch the Knight of Swords, represented by the more mundane Jack of Spades. A prediction of the future, so perhaps this would be the next person he would encounter. Like any oracle, the insights from the cards provided a gateway to deeper knowledge because he kept his conscious mind from getting in the way.

The central card, the significator, merely a five of diamonds, shifted into an image of the Wheel of Fortune. Interesting.

Every other card clicked into place, connecting in a pattern imbued with angelic significance. He acknowledged and accepted this as he set the tea cup back on the saucer. If asked, he couldn’t have provided a summary of his new understanding, but he trusted it was all there in his subconscious to be drawn upon as needed. A guiding premise on which to act.

***

Abandoning his usual habit of keeping himself to himself, Ewan rose and walked over, maybe only motivated by the desire to ask about reading Tarot from an ordinary deck, more likely needing to ease his constant feeling of being set apart from, and therefore being less than, everyone else. 

But as he approached, those two hands that he had observed all morning swept the cards together into a heap and reunited them with the rest of the deck.

“No, don’t!” Ewan protested though it was already too late.

He stopped still as that imperturbable gaze met his, a slight smile which also lit those blue eyes welcoming him without judgment. One hand gestured him toward a seat, the other hand raised as the man turned to summon the waitress.

Free from that look which saw him much too clearly, Ewan hesitated, then returned to retrieve his backpack and sat down where invited. Curiosity hindered him from escaping the café. 

To occupy his hands, he unfastened the rolled up blue yoga mat from the side of his backpack and secured it more snugly. Always best to be ready to move on at any instant.

***

“Another cup of tea, please,” Joseph told the waitress as he gestured toward his guest, “and two of those cinnamon swirls.” Though no longer particularly hungry, breaking bread together always felt better than merely providing sustenance.

When the waitress left, silence stretched between them, but he only shuffled the cards more thoroughly and then placed the deck near the sugar bowl. He knew the cards had nothing more to say as yet.

Without moving his lips, he invoked Archangel Michael, the familiar prayer embodied in Welsh which told him what language the work required. Golau yn galw i olau ac atebion golau.

Taking advantage of how the man had folded his hands on the table and was staring down at them, Joseph reached over as though merely to attract attention.

***

Ewan startled at the touch, so unexpected after months of isolation, almost regretted when it stopped. He didn’t want to meet that blue gaze again, but needed to try and understand the gesture.

“Joseph dw i,” the man said. “Popeth yn iawn.” A reassuring voice that brought to mind a wave caressing a pebbled beach before retreating.

A lump in his throat got in the way of providing his own name when it had not mattered for so long. “I am called Ewan,” he finally said, deliberately choosing English to put some distance between them. Besides, he always found it harder to lie in Welsh, maybe because he grew up speaking it and had not found any reason to lie to his parents or Tadcu.

The waitress brought his new cup of tea and set down the small plate with two cinnamon whirls in front of Joseph.

Ewan swallowed the saliva that this sight evoked, picked up his teaspoon and added two heaps of sugar to the steaming brown liquid before stirring it more than was needed.

***

Joseph had seen the hungry glance, already feeling the pervasive chill, the bone weariness from lack of sleep and that unusual instinct summed up by the mental picture of a small creature hiding under a rock. He slid the little plate toward the middle of the table and invited Ewan, in Welsh, to help himself.

The reply came in English. “That’s kind of you.” But the homeless man only sipped his sugared tea.

Ordering two pastries had been the right choice. The swell of pride underlined no desire for a handout of any kind. He toyed with and abandoned the half-rhyme. This was not the moment to compose a poem. Serving a much higher muse, he reached for a cinnamon swirl through realising this would make his fingers sticky. Not ideal for handling cards.

***

With his hands locked together in his lap, Ewan watched Joseph bite into the cinnamon swirl and had to swallow back saliva again. He wished the waitress had brought the two pastries on separate plates, but how was she to know the kindness of a stranger?

He could imagine the white icing melting on his tongue, combining with the cinnamon and the flaky pastry. He sipped his tea to wash away more saliva, felt tempted to add more sugar, but the teaspoon was dirty now, so he refrained. He never liked a dirty sugar bowl, so why inflict that on someone else? Or the waitress would have to sort it out.

If he wanted sugar, there was an entire cinnamon swirl with his name on it. Back in his lap, though, his hands had a death-grip on each other. 

***

Such a struggle, Joseph thought, over such a trivial decision, but a sign of how difficult Ewan’s life had become. In Welsh, he explained, “If you don’t want that, it’s fine, but the waitress will only throw it in the bin otherwise.”

He took another bite of his own cinnamon whirl, focusing on the movement of teeth and tongue, the taste and texture, hoping the other man would partake, unsure if he would.

The left hand emerged slowly from underneath the table like a wary creature venturing out of its burrow, a rabbit perhaps who had many predators to avoid. It hesitated, approaching the plate, then acquired the pastry and carried it toward the mouth where saliva must be pooling.

Joseph did not watch Ewan eat, affording him some privacy to recover from the embarrassment of being given nourishment by a stranger. 

***

Ewan ate slowly though part of him wanted to stuff the treat in greedy mouthfuls like a toddler might and then clamour for more. He washed each well-chewed bite down with sips of tea to keep his pace measured. Needn’t have bothered as Joseph seemed lost in his own world, gazing into the middle distance.

Should make polite conversation but the unusual situation and his lack of practice in doing that kept him from the attempt. So far, he had only spoken English, but surely it was rude when his benefactor only spoke Welsh, except for when he addressed the waitress.

Benefactor. The word bothered him. Very few people gave without expecting something in return. What did Joseph want from him? Though the cinnamon whirl was a small expense, it loomed large in his mind. Or could it be just that instinct for the satisfaction of doing a good deed?

Ewan was thankful that he always paid for his meals in advance, partly in case he needed to leave before he finished eating. This had only happened a few times and never here. Sometimes his worst thoughts overcame him, like they had in the beginning when everything started to go wrong.

***

Joseph saw, in his mind’s eye, the image of Archangel Michael. Not the stained-glass window at the abbey which sometimes occupied his inner vision, but the living, breathing martial angel whom he had sometimes met or perhaps only imagined meeting.

Blue feathered wings, the flowing robe, sheathed sword, the shield that glinted in sunlight but most of all that remote yet compassionate regard so unlike the gaze of any human being.

To clear his mind of any distracting thought, he repeated his customary prayer slowly like a mantra. Light calls to light, and light answers. He almost murmured aloud, but this did not feel like the right time or place to do so.

***

Ewan swallowed the last morsel and followed it by draining the remainder of his cup of tea.

He found his gaze fixed on the partially eaten cinnamon whirl sitting on the small plate. Joseph had only taken a few bites. Would the man who seemed lost in thought notice if he ate this abandoned pastry?

But that would be tantamount to stealing. And possibly the waitress would witness him sinking to a new depth. He had recently sat down at a table where dirty plates had not yet been cleared away, not knowing or caring if anyone saw him help himself to an untouched sausage and dipping it in a puddle of egg yolk.

Ewan felt as if he was gazing down through dark waters into a subterranean chasm where possibilities lurked that would force him to do things that would shame his family if he had any kindred still among the living. He wasn’t sure if those departed watched the world they had known or merely ceased to exist.

To escape the morass of worry, he resorted to the first conversational gambit that rose to mind and asked, “So what do you do, Joseph?”

“I serve,” the man began, finally using English then, seeming to recollect himself, added, switching back to Welsh, “I was working at a bookshop until last week.”

“Sorry to hear that you lost your job,” Ewan said, pushing away memories of his own losses.

***

Joseph brought himself back to the present moment with an admonition not to lose himself in reverie when work needed doing. He understood that asking the same question of this homeless man would embarrass at best, so he shifted the conversation. “Sounds like your origins are Welsh?”

He felt he might be gaining ground when Ewan replied in Welsh and, better yet, this led to an almost natural discussion about the Cymro’s birthplace and the surrounding area. 

Feeling a hollowness inside that didn’t belong to him, Joseph said, “Could you possibly finish that pastry? I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.”

***

Ewan accepted the invitation without bothering to demur. He didn’t usually eat anything so frivolous, though the sugar attracted him with its empty promises. 

As Joseph requested a glass of water from the passing waitress, he remembered his interest in that Tarot spread and set himself to working out how to broach the subject while he ate.

 But when the water came, the man, whom he realised had actually not mentioned where he was from, sipped and then dipped his fingers in the water before drying them on a paper serviette.

Ewan felt soothed, watching him shuffle the cards, but also that edge of anticipation. 

***

Joseph was not surprised when the Jack of Spades turned up as the significator. He crossed that card with another, face down, then added a card behind and before, above and below, then, starting at the bottom, the line of four cards to the right-hand side.

He glanced across the table and saw that Ewan’s focus was entirely on the Tarot spread.

Without feeling a need to explain, Joseph turned over the other cards, one at a time. He was enmeshed enough that he shared the other man’s relief to discover that the ten of spades was behind him. Interesting that the Queen of Swords was ahead.

***

As Ewan listened to Joseph murmuring in Welsh, he couldn’t look up from the cards. He almost felt this must be a magician sat opposite him because the cards shifted, sometimes taking on the vivid details of a scene glimpsed through an open door.

Yet in the next instant, they became merely an ordinary deck of playing cards again.

He felt as though a marble was rolling through his brain, finding a random way through some convoluted maze and then dropping down to another level beneath.

When the marble hit a hollow and circled around the rim before sinking through the hole, Ewan nearly fought back up to the surface, but the sensation of smothering did not trigger enough alarm to support a rebellion. And was it not better to drown and satisfy his curiosity than to escape and always wonder afterwards what he had missed out on?

***

Under storm clouds that mostly blocked the starlight, Joseph heard waves rushing up smooth sand and ebbing again before his eyes detected the slight glisten. Barefoot, he walked forward so that the salt-water embraced his ankles. 

A breathing space, so he took full advantage and breathed so deeply that he felt the stretch of his ribs as his lungs expanded. He always found himself again with water, though he preferred a river.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

I breathe therefore I am.

I serve Archangel Michael.

He tried to feel the incandescence of light flowing to him and through him.

Only an intermediary, never the source.

Ordinary and flawed, but devoted to serve as best he could.

The ragged cough interrupted his meditation.

Joseph opened his eyes, assessed the entire café as easily as if he was the mother and each of her children, the waitress, and the Welshman sat opposite him, yet maintaining strongly his sense of self. Collapsing himself into anyone else except on a strictly temporary basis would not help.

His gaze alone summoned the waitress who brought two cups of tea.

Joseph added three heaped teaspoons of sugar to Ewan’s cup and stirred before instructing him in Welsh to drink the whole cup as if he was speaking to a child.

When their gazes met, he recognised he had thrown a rope to someone floundering in deep water. He tolerated the attachment this created, but reminded himself it could not continue beyond what was absolutely necessary. He always had other work to do, that was why he was a traveller.

***

Ewan sipped the sweeter than normal tea steadily, as if Tadcu had told him to fill his belly. He drifted. Was he not sitting at the kitchen table with his grandfather? Just the two of them, as it should be.

Then the bell over the café door jangled and spoiled the illusion.

He kept drinking, anyway, as he watched the man opposite gather up all the playing cards from the table and shuffle.

Watching the repetitive motion soothed him like listening to the lapping waves along a beach where he used to walk with Tadcu in a childhood that no longer seemed so distant.