Downloadable PDF: Chapter 3
Coffee in a cup that belongs to me sits unsugared by the jar of cubes, spoon unused, as I take in the coloured chairs that surround the two tables, pushed together as one, all as yet mere potential and needing someone to be manifest. An accordion and a clarinet once danced together before a set of drums, and the aural ghost of their exchange is frenzied as it floats around the café room. As it exorcises itself it leaves behind a silence, and, as if queued up to take its turn in recreating an explosive life, the haunt is performed again anew swiftly by a fadeless memory of a set of strings, slow and heavy beneath a female voice. Through a set of varied, intertwined senses and mastered motions, I take in the music, take in the empty table, and – in a parade of multi-layered and astonishing complexity – I take in the coffee too.
I sit at a circular table in the corner of the arthouse café that Cabot forever turns his back to. A somewhat aimless wander has mapped out a heart and gateway the city centres on and has set the start and end adjacent, sewn together seamlessly across the vanishing distinction.
william altoft 