"Is it Classics Day over at the library or something?"
Jeanette glances at me in her mad rush towards a recently vacated table, puts the dirty crockery into a pile and pushes it to one side so she can clean the table's surface. She blows a strand of greying hair out of her eyes. "What? No. Why?"
She's wearing a dark green Victorian dress complete with lace collar, bustle and a multitude of tiny buttons up the front.
"No reason. Apart from the wholeLittle Dorritthing you've got going on."
She peers down at her front and laughs. "Ohthis." Jeanette’s laugh has the hint of a giggle to it, which is very sweet and endearing in a middle-aged woman. Given she laughs at nearly everything, Jeanette is sweet and endearing most of the time.
She balances the crockery in both hands and staggers towards the kitchen as if the whole thing weighs twenty pounds instead of her needing to compensate for the pile's lack of stability. "Just thought I'd air out my Sunday best."
Jeanette is a raging atheist and therefore has no need for a Sunday best, let alone a Victorian one, so it's anybody's guess as to what her proclivities might be on a Sunday. Playing parlour games, or steampunk karaoke maybe.
I've told her at least five dozen times not to hurry, and at least two dozen times more than that to bring a tray with her so that she doesn't make a liability of either herself or my not inexpensive serving ware, but Jeanette is admirably committed to chaos.
"I think you look very nice, Jeanette," says Lutek as only Lutek can. Lutek is exceptionally lovely to everybody, all the time, regardless of whether they deserve it or not. Even me.
He sensibly wears a black T-shirt, black jeans and a black barista's apron. Spooning some jam on top of a clotted-cream scone in the Devonshire way, he pushes it to the front of the counter.
"She looks very nice for someone happy to celebrate the repression of pre-suffrage women," I say to her disappearing back.
Lutek laughs. "Bess. Your brain is sharp as always. It's charming."
It's not charming. At best, it's on the abrasive side of moderately witty.
Either Lutek is dredging perilously close to a new 'insufferable' depth in his brand of niceness, or he's brown nosing on account of me being his boss and someone who scares him a little bit. I give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to be gracious. "Thank you, Lutek."
Jeanette takes longer than usual delivering her stack of used crockery. She is no doubt caught up in some minutia that has little consequence to the everyday running of the café, like arranging the goods in the refrigeration unit in colour order.
At some point she'll remember she has more important tasks, like serving customers, that are probably the priority and then the panic over the stuff that she now needs to urgently haul arse over will set in.
I sigh. I actually have nothing to do and could probably help out a bit.
The most exciting thing to have happened that morning since I emptied my water pistol into a couple of randy pubescents was the post-Story Time rush, which the café experienced and the gallery didn't.
A stroller filled with little, sticky, grabby hands has no place in a large room filled with pottery figurines and glass pendant earrings. And thankfully everyone understands that without the need for me to glower passive-aggressively. If I didn't own the gallery, I'm not sure I could justify my existence for the last two customer-free hours.
Picking up the scone Lutek's finished dressing, I take it to Carlos.
Carlos is our weekday regular, resident poet, and an original of the Port Derrum creative set.
The town, quaintly clustered between two headlands on the south Devon coast, has a reputation for nurturing the artistic temperaments of people like Carlos. The rep is courtesy of the hippies that gravitated to the area in the 60s due to the notoriety of the 'shrooms that grew symbiotically with a particular species of tree in the Port Derrum woodland. And also because of an earl who fancied himself a white Jimi Hendrix and the next great musical messiah. He had land. He wanted followers. A commune was inevitable. It also helped that his property bordered the mushroom-laced woodland, so it was win-win for everyone.
The commune no longer exists, but the mushrooms are a cottage industry now that everyone wants their drugs free-range and organic.
It isn't the only thing to have survived.
Just like all good cockroaches in any kind of political apocalypse – Thatcherism, Brexit – the artistic movement in Port Derrum refuses to roll over and die quietly despite everyone's best efforts.
If rural Devon is a great, white, Tory whale, Port Derrum is the rainbow barnacle stubbornly clinging to its left arse cheek.
"Darling girl," Carlos says as I place the scone on his table. "You bring light to a fractured and stultified world."
Ordinarily ‘Darling girl’ might trigger my allergy to being patronised, but because Carlos is very old, frequents my business more than anyone in Port Derrum, and like all nobs is an unconscious slave to the verbal tics of the very posh, I let it slide. Also, I'm distracted by mentally noting to look up ‘stultified’ on my phone.
This is the problem with poets. They speak a language that's impenetrable to normal people.
"I'll have to take your word for it, Carlos."
