Almost // And It Stoned Me
On the way back home we sang a song
But our throats were getting dry
Then we saw the man from across the road
With the sunshine in his eyes
There it is. My usual spot. I can almost see it, there on the other side of the window. The scuffed green leather of the wooden bench. The dull brass cymbals hanging from the ceiling above the wobbly old table. I can almost hear my hips creak as they navigate the gap between bench and table. I can almost imagine the view, from the scratched blackboard above the brushed zinc of the bar and out through the blue window frame to the mass of tables under a rubenesque summer sky.
Almost. But not quite. Instead, I'm on the outside looking in. It's a hardship easy enough to endure from a wicker chair perched tentatively on some dishevelled paving stones. From this terrace vantage point, it feels as if normality is creeping gently out from under the melancholic winter fug it's been hiding under.
There's the familiar, boisterous Franco-English-Dutch patter of conversations. There’s cigarette smoke carried on the wind from nearby tables, and cars still rumble through the square accompanied by tire squeals and futile gesticulations. The sky remains stubbornly a bureaucratic grey, threatening to wash out the exuberance being released on the square below.
Jacques Brel is still there, head cocked and face frozen in the same grotesque bronze grimace. Cautious tourists are once again posing underneath his outstretched arms. But there are fewer now since our last terraske. And where once Brel’s open embrace was an expression of joy, in recent months he’s appeared more like white-shirted central figure in Goya’s Third of May 1808, arms raised impotently against impending doom.
Our tables are a little further apart then maybe they used to be. And they’re crowded by furniture that wasn’t there before - cotton facemasks, small plastic bottles, laminated QR codes. The beer menu scrawled in chalk next to the entrance is a little sparse, and underneath it in big letters and followed by a clutch of exclamation marks are the words “CASH ONLY”. Even the Taras Boulba in front of me is altered, its characteristic sparkle subdued for its being served through an old English beer machine.
I exchange hellos with the owner, our voices an octave more effusive than they ought to be, our greetings more fulsome, and the pauses between them more stilted. We know our lines well enough, and we deliver them as best we remember, but we’re rusty. It’s been some time since we’ve stretched these muscles and we’re finding out how much they have atrophied during dark winter months spent indoors. And anyway, why spoil this first day out with talk of bar charts and r numbers.
In any case, the terrace is soon full, and with no other staff behind the bar, there’s not much time for idle conversation. Sparkle or not, I slump back into the wicker and enjoy my pint. On a far terrace, the wind picks up a struggling parasol and deposits it on unappreciating drinkers on the next table over. A police car crawls through the square, and through crackled static the driver shouts ‘Santé!’ to the cheers of passersby. A little to the north the sun makes a crack in the clouds and shoots several rays in our direction. I’ll be back on the green bench of the snug soon enough. But this will do until then.
And it stoned me
And it stoned me to my soul
Stoned me just like goin' home
And it stoned me