Bemusedly musing over muses

I’m sat in a coffee shop, writing a story about the girl next to me sat writing a story. I know she’s writing a story because she just said so, on the phone to her friend, in an impossibly Southern London accent. I learn too, that she’s here for a writing workshop. I cringe as she talks about her excitement for it, and how they’ll exchange prompts and compare poetry. As I do so, a calendar notification pops up on my phone, a reminder of the writing workshop I’m attending in Leeds this weekend, the one I’d come to the cafe to prepare some writing in advance for. 

Having finally trudged to the end of the chapter I was reading for uni, I get up to go to the loo, not feeling guilty enough that I’ve paused my headphones, despite leaving them on my head, to eavesdrop into the conversation of the girl next to me. It turns out that her friend is having some sort of “house situ”. As I stand up to make my way to where the bathrooms are, I hear that on the other side of the phone her friend is in the midsts of “stressful vibes”, poor thing. 


At the back of the cafe, a circle has formed and a young man is reading something out from his phone. At first I can’t tell whether he’s part of the workshop the girl is meant to be at—what are the chances of there being more than one in the same cafe on the same night—or whether he’s just monologuing to a large group of friends. As I shut the loo door behind me, I hear him utter a syncopated line about getting off the bus near Hampstead Heath and my wondering is immediately answered. I laugh to myself at the irony of my involuntary scorn towards the undeniably middle class writer’s circle just outside the door as I calculate how much time I’ve got left before I need to head to my Spanish language exchange on the other side of town. 


Ironically, a combination of the writing circle and learning that the girl sat next to me is some type of writer as well, prompt me when I get back to my seat to open my laptop and do some writing of my own. Except, instead of opening the unfinished novel, or the sprawling google doc of my latest feminist ramblings, I find myself selecting my notes page, and writing about the self-perplexing situation I’ve found myself in. What was initially meant to be a hastily jotted down idea quickly becomes a fully fledged piece of writing, and I’m humbled by my own hostility towards the people on the other side of the room who I am both exactly like, and would probably actually quite like, if I got to know them. The only difference being that I would never dare to read this aloud to a crowd of people in the backroom of a cafe, not one that I quite like and plan to come back to anyway. 


As I write, the girl is still next to me, across the other side of the small coffee table perched between the armchairs we occupy. They are the ones placed at the front of the cafe, by the window, so that we can people watch the wet Manchester street outside whilst pretending to be doing something more important. I try to subtly tilt my laptop screen away from her when she stands up, presumably having realised she was late for the writing workshop, so that she doesn’t see that I’m writing about her. Surely it must be what all writers who go to cafes do, but somehow it seems ruder if you’re caught in the act. 


As I’m imagining a scenario in which she did notice I’d been detailing her accidental tardiness and inculpable intonations, I think of the man me and my dad saw in a cafe in Amsterdam a few years ago. It’s a memory that comes to my mind often, almost any time I go to a cafe under the pretence of “working”, always with the ulterior motive of overhearing snippets to store and save for later.  


As we breakfasted together in a dutch cafe on our last morning in Amsterdam, my dad had pointed out an old man sat on a sofa nearby, his back to us so that his view was of the man sat with his friend at a table on the other side of the cafe. The man in question, the third one of this paragraph, was unaware that he was being used as a muse. As we, my dad and I, marvelled over the man’s really rather realistic drawing of the oblivious breakfaster, he had suddenly ripped out the drawing and scrumpled it up. Subjected to the gravest scrutiny of the artist's own eye. We were shocked. 


Afterwards, as we left the cafe to go and see some more of the city before catching our flight home, we speculated on why he could possibly have done that. Maybe he just didn’t think it was very good, I suggested to my dad, who was as baffled as I was. Or maybe he was faced with the moral crisis of sketching a stranger. 


It’s funny, although I think of that man all the time, I can never remember whether he started again, or whether we stayed long enough for his muse to realise that he was being used as a muse. I think I would have been quite bemused, to find out I was being used as a muse, my dad had mused. I had rolled my eyes. 


I hope, although it’s highly unlikely, that the girl who was sat across from me isn’t now back there, in her writing workshop, reading aloud a story about a girl who was obviously writing a story about her. And if she is, I hope I’ve gone before anyone realises it’s about me. 


I quite like this cafe, and I’d quite like to come back. 

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