Day Dreams
by Enya Ettershank
It is a Sunday and, like anyone’s Sunday, the first few hours of the morning are quiet. But gradually the pace builds up, and it is no longer quiet. The cafe has a constant soundtrack of grinding beans, a pinging till, clattering mugs and boiling water. It takes many steps and hands to make a coffee in the way that people in this area respect enough to pay nearly £4 for, delivered in a paper ‘biodegradable’ cup. I time each and every step, including how long it takes for the customers to smile and say goodbye. One customer tells me they love the ‘simplicity’ of a fresh coffee and I find myself wishing I was in Twin Peaks at the Double R Diner where the coffee actually is simple. I imagine serving black coffee made through a filter machine, pressing one button and simply pouring to the delight of an Americana man with a big appetite and grin. But here everyone rushes out, coffee is served within two minutes. I wonder if this is an enjoyable experience, but I gather most people here don’t want to stop to chat. I am simply a pair of hands, no mouth for talking or even drinking.
It’s 10:45am and the pace will only intensify, hands swapping and dancing across the kitchen counter like puppets, until close. It is a Sunday and I have been up since 6am. I’m running on little sleep, because I kept waking from intense dreams. I dreamt of being at a rave in an abandoned tunnel. The ground was covered in potholes filled with sewage water that splashed across my legs as I jumped up and down, too exalted to care. I danced with my boyfriend and friends and strangers whose tender hands would emerge from the smoke machine, laughing as the sewage water flicked across our faces. Everyone’s faces were muddled, I kissed my boyfriend whose face belonged to my friend and then turned into a dog. I watched the sunrise crawl up against the tinfoil buildings and shiver like a halo as we all sat atop a hill. And then I ran to work, to open, smiling with a dancing jaw and handing over coffee with jittering hands. My manager, who does not know how to manage people and I’m sure has never misbehaved once in her life, fired me on the spot. I wonder what she dreams about. And if it’s cruel of me to assume that her dreams are probably mundane, about checking the work Whatsapp or boiling potatoes. In the dream I was too high to care, I gave out free coffees to all the customers before crowd surfing my way out. Then, I woke up in a puddle of my own sweat that was reminiscent of the sewage water, terrified I’d missed my alarms. I rolled over, dismayed to find that it was only 4:30am. Moments later keys jingled like a wind chime down the hall, my housemate making her way back from a night out.
I look around the cafe to try and determine if anyone has been out since 4:30am or hasn't slept at all. Most of the customers are fresh faced, moisturised, with crisp linen clothes and clean shaven. Sometimes they make me feel embarrassed that I don’t own an iron, the ones who dress the most chic and glamorous in matching two pieces. Most are in their late twenties to mid thirties, and I assume have stable salaries and support from their families if needed. But I try to remind myself that I’m making assumptions, and surely everybody should be allowed a nice coffee.
People do stop to chat outside the cafe, and there I listen in on two mothers’ conversation as I clear the tables methodically. Spring is making its way, the air feels as fresh as a glass of water. One mother is asking the other if her pram is ‘worth it’, it's black and seamless and I guess it costs about two weeks of my wages. The mother who owns the pram answers in we’s. ‘We find it good for getting into the car’. ‘We find it easy to clean’. I’m not sure if it’s fair how much this pronoun frustrates me when couples use it. I can’t tell if I just hate how it makes me think of the nuclear family or if I just hate the idea of someone talking on my behalf. I think that maybe that is what this city does to lots of people, you find someone to split the rent with, unable to sustain yourself alone, end up sharing the bed, mugs and then pronouns and all your thoughts and opinions. The only way to survive is by becoming both host and parasite. They go on to discuss their babies’ sleep training, another kind of parasite-host situation. The baby needs to be weaned, but also needs the right amount of sleep, the right amount of blankets and the right amount of milk. I think about how we all need material things to sleep: a bed, enough food, sometimes hot air and sometimes cool air, sometimes a drink or a spliff. When I get home I plan to wash my sheets and dry them outside on the balcony, for the first time this year, and I hope that the spring air will make them feel fresher and make me sleep deeper.
One thing about weed, drink, xanax, or other things adults take to sleep, is that it stops them dreaming. I look at the baby, who looks drunk off milk, and wonder what it dreams about. A giant breast that will never run out of milk or run away or turn hard. I look at the mother, her deep set eyes match a striking streak of grey hair, and imagine her having nightmares that her breasts go ugly: turn a raw pink, sag, or completely dry up and fall off.
Behind the crisp white counter I don’t have many opportunities to daydream, and I look at people in the distance staring at their phones and am jealous and annoyed at their missed opportunity. A man busks in the far left corner of my window view, his voice is beautiful, strung with an earnestness that matches the way his eyes look up to the sky. People scurry right past him with their headphones in, making his cup of coins shake. There are small moments throughout the day, when I’m just folding napkins, that I get the chance to make little songs up in my head. Some friends come in, hungover, and I slip them a coffee and if the boss isn’t watching a pastry. I steal as much as I can, slip some sandwiches into my bag. I hope they can go sit in the park after, sun washing over them as they reminisce about the night before and I hope they don’t feel anxious and that their fun was pure even, or especially so, if disgustingly hedonistic. A few customers smile at me throughout the day, announcing ‘It’s the weekend!’ or ‘It’s Sunday!’ gleefully and I shout this back to them enthusiastically although the weekend doesn’t make me feel any more free than any other day in the week.
On the weekends, customers look at me pitifully, some of them grimace in embarrassment when wishing me a nice weekend, remembering that I am stuck here. However, I can see the false constructions of freedom that they nestle in, as if I am looking down at a model city. The rhythm of the cafe is shaped by everyone else’s work time and leisure time, we all bend to accommodate this divide. On weekdays it's busy from 7am and then quiet after 10:30am and on weekends quiet until 11am and busy after. An organised slice of two consecutive days off, two weeks holiday, or the chance to do the laundry while working at home in exchange for most hours of their life. Even when they’re not at work, at the cafe, I overhear them talk about their workload and watch as they interrupt their conversation with a friend to frantically check emails. And besides, the museums and galleries are all too busy at the weekends for anyone to really enjoy. I wonder if this is all they have dreamed of: the terraced house, two fat babies, holidays across Europe and enough surplus income to get these expensive coffees. I think about cafe culture and bar flies and wonder where they all frequent these days.
Not everyone spends their Saturdays in rushed museums or walking dogs. Sometimes protesters head to catch the train into central London. Their banners and Palestinian flags dance in the air like shooting stars and I make a wish for peace, and more than that, for the end of empire and end of hatred and for freedom. I wish I could follow them, and on the days I don’t work I do. Often when marching I’m overcome by a dark cloud of melancholy, as if I’m at a funeral, which, in part I am, but I see some hope in the throngs of people here to resist. I keep on having this dream that I’m at a protest, somewhere very arid, in a huge tent made of gauze. There is an officer, I think a British officer, commanding me to salute him. I am overcome with dread because I don’t want to and everyone at the protest has stopped to watch what I will do. For some reason, my hand slowly creeps up against my own volition. It takes half an hour for my hand to move, my muscles ache. The officer doesn’t look at all interested in this, he watches me as if I’m in a play. Then he announces, ‘I don’t care for you’ and walks out. The protesters' eyes pierce at me like arrows, and I feel completely crushed.
I feel uneasy whenever I awake from the dream, and wonder how it can coincide in my subconscious with dreams of raves and free coffees. But I remember that as much as I loathe the empire with all my heart that I live alongside it, at its root. I operates in business deals and handshakes and the way we police each other and have been taught to think. And it, like work and capitalism, touches everything, even dreams. We must listen to these dreams, and all these entanglements, to best assess how we fight them.
Lots of customers don’t even turn to look at the flags, they rush off, absorbed with their lives. Then it’s Wednesday and it's 2pm and very quiet and, again, the air feels fresh. Bike bells and car horns occasionally punctuate the air as a reminder that people are working at things elsewhere. I wipe the table for a regular, who tells me how she commits benefit fraud, and give her a coffee for free. She has papers spread across the table, scribbled with poetry and sketches and she stares out at the sky daydreaming, ahead at all the time stretching out across her.
She tells me about a dream she keeps having and is trying to write about. She says how she is lost at the top of a mountain range, circling around ridges, seeing mirages of water. Eventually she comes across people, their features hidden by the blinding sun. She runs towards their matching silhouettes, and sees that they have matching faces, they are twins. With freckles and moles and beautiful faces and thick black braids. They tell her, in unison, that they will give her a map. They begin to knit the map using thick needles, their needles click in a way that feels foreign in this natural, rocky landscape- metallic. She realises that they aren’t knitting a map, but an olive tree. One twin knits the leaves and the other twin the trunk and branches. They hand it to her and she holds it, confused, staring at the intricate patterns. The woman tells me that she doesn’t know what the dream means, but she thinks it's a message to keep searching for the truth. She returns to her poetry, which references olive trees, the sun sets her ablaze like an angel. I’m glad that her coffee is free, and that she doesn’t have to spend all her hours working so she can pay attention to her dreams and make poems out of them.
I’m also grateful that I’ll finish in an hour. I can go sit in the sun, watch the sparrows scrabble over chicken bones, and drink a beer with a friend while everyone sits at work pushing pens and typing on smooth, silver keyboards. I’ll be out late, I’ll collapse into my warm bed and dream of jasmine, which is the scent of my sheets, and a city overgrown with wild flowers and a subverted, broken economy where everything and everyone feels lighter. I will write it out in the morning, or on my break at the cafe, or on the bus, and I hope it will lead me to act.
Enya Ettershank is a writer based in London. She was the recent recipient of the Montez Press writers grant. Her work focuses on desires, dreams and ways of living.
