Page 4 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“Keep it down, Greeney. We’re in the real world now.” Rob turned back. “Don’t forget, it’s Halloween Formal tonight! Don’t come as some poet no one’s ever heard of.”

“Don’t worry, I will.” He turned, fingering the competition flyer in his pocket. A day and a half to write a love poem so unprecedented it would determine the course of his future. The thought made him quail with inadequacy. He walked on up a street that could have been anywhere, lined with convenience shops and run-down cafés: hardly the stuff of poetic inspiration. He was on the point of turning back when something caught his eye.

It was a Halloween display in a café window. It depicted a sack of coffee beans that was under attack from espresso cup vampires. The vampires had googly eyes and drawn-on pointy teeth, and they were swarming the poor beleaguered sack, spilling its blood in gushing coffee-bean rivers. The sack had distressed eyebrows and a mournful, gaping mouth. The overall effect was so charming that he caught his reflection smiling. He brushed his chronically messy hair aside and frowned, leaning closer. The Joe in the window didn’t look like the sort of person anyone would want to turn into a statue. He looked pasty, and dishevelled, and tired. Maybe a coffee would help.

He went inside. The café was cosy but shabby: the chairs, the tables, and indeed the entire structure appeared to be held together with duct tape. He edged past the bookshelves to the counter, where a girl with high cheekbones and warm dark brown skin was cleaning the espresso machine, her short braids swaying as she filled up the water tank. “With you in a second,” she said without looking.

“No bother, take your time.” He looked around: a couple holding hands across a table, a teenage girl frowning over her laptop. No one was paying him the slightest bit of attention. He felt ashamed. Stupid to think the tour group had been following him. Rob was right: he was just a random undergraduate, of no interest to anyone.

“Sorry about that,” said the girl behind the counter. “What can I get—”

He turned round. For a moment, he was lost in her wide-spaced, deep brown eyes. Then he realised she was staring at him, and not in a way that suggested she was lost in his. She was wearing an expression of utter, consuming horror.

“You,” she said, like the universe was about to end and it was all his fault.

Chapter Two

“What?” said Joe.

The girl flinched, like he was a timer on a bomb that had just ticked down to zero. When he failed to explode, he saw her rethink. “What?” she echoed.

He groped for the source of his confusion. “You said, ‘You.’ Like—like—” He couldn’t find the words. “Like I’m the last person you wanted to see.”

“No, I said, ‘What can I getyou’?” Her fingers were clenched so tight on a napkin that she was tearing a hole in it. “So? Are you going to order?”

“Uh—yeah.” He scanned the chalkboard behind her, barely registering the options. “Can I get a latte, please?”

She punched some numbers into the till with trembling fingers. He paid—it took a while, as she seemed confused by the coins he gave her—and waited awkwardly for his coffee. When she saw him hovering, she shooed him away. “I’ll bring it over.”

Still reeling, he sat down at the table that looked least in danger of immediate collapse. He took out the Love Poems for Tomorrow flyer and opened his notebook to a blank page. He sat and stared at it, pen in hand, but he couldn’t get the girl at the counter out of his head. She had looked at him like he was something dangerous,something vital. He glanced up, expecting her to be watching him like the tour guide, but she was steadfastly ignoring him, head bent over the espresso machine, braids parted around her slender neck. She looked around his age: he would have assumed she was a student, if having a job during term time wasn’t forbidden for undergraduates.

She was coming over. He looked away. As she leaned to put the coffee down, he reflexively closed his notebook.

She swallowed a laugh. “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to read your poetry.”

He looked up in surprise. She flinched, like she was afraid of his attention. He felt wounded, and compelled, and so curious he could barely stand it. “You don’t like poetry?”

She hovered, leaning back towards the counter. He got the impression that she wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible. He got the second, conflicting impression that she couldn’t resist answering his question. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “There’s this one guy I had to study at school, and I thought he was so overrated.”

“The stuff they make you learn in school is always the worst. I think there’s some kind of rule. Only shite poets end up on the syllabus.”

“Mmm.” Her cheek was trembling, like she was fighting some strong emotion.

“But you shouldn’t let him put you off,” he continued. “There’s some great stuff out there.”

“Oh yeah,” she said in the same unreadable tone. “I bet some of the best people haven’t even been published yet.”

He tilted his head, unsure if she was mocking him. “Right.”

Her cheek twitched again. She looked away, briefly closing hereyes. Seeming to recover, she cleared her throat. “I guess I don’t get the point of it. Poetry, I mean. Like, why not just write a song?”

“You wouldn’t be asking that if you’d ever heard me sing.”

Her smile, mobile and generous, transformed her face. She crossed her arms over her shapeless black sweater. “Okay. So poets are just tone-deaf songwriters?”

He leaned back in his chair. “I mean, I could go off on one about how lyrics are always parasitic on the melody, and how in poetry, the music comes from the language itself. But that would be a boring, pretentious rant, and no one wants to hear that.”

“Right.” The gap between her front teeth gave her smile a conspiratorial sweetness, like they were sharing a private joke. “That’s why you’re not going to say it.”

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