The Incomprehension

The café bell sounds. The newly-arrived is a young girl who carries a baby on her hip holding it there in the crook of her arm. The café remains quiet after the bell has died away. Couples sit at their tables and gaze out of the window as before.

Two girls are sitting at one of the green marble tables turning their heads together and they start tittering. A middle-aged man stands behind the girls. He looks down and sucks on his cigarette. At the café counter sits a well-groomed and freshly-shaven boy with his collar turned up and his cuffs turned back. He has a cigarette and every so often turns his face to the ceiling and blows out a thin wisp of smoke from the corner of his mouth.

The newly-arrived girl shifts her baby from her hip to her lap, with one hand pulls her shirt over her head, then pulls down a little of her bra and offers her nipple for feed. When her child is done she says something to the woman who owns the café - she seems to know the girl - and soon a bowl of water is brought and put down on the table. She seems in no hurry.

The boy, previously at the counter blowing a wisp of cigarette smoke from the corner of his mouth, now stares troubled at the girl. He moves over and sits with her - at first she does not notice for she has her head bent over the face of her child - he touches her free breast, and she looks up. He is clearly troubled. He gazes into her eyes, removes his hand which had been holding her very gently, and she sees his lip begin to tremble. Narrowing her eyes, she brings her face closer to him and presses her lips together into a hard thin line. He gazes at her bare shoulder now.

She laughs quietly but coldly at the boy, raising her eyes to meet the gaze of the other customers, and gathering in the other women in the room she shrugs her shoulders. 

The café men who have been glancing over at the two of them and trembling a little, now cold and clear-headed all of a sudden, back away from her, splaying their fingers though the hands aren't necessarily held up. The women, the girls and the wives, the attached and the unattached, stand up and follow their menfolk, yet they look back at the girl to shrug their shoulders with her. She, determined to ignore the inexplicable behaviour of the boy still in front of her, pulls the bowl towards her and sponges her breasts in the cold water with fast, ungentle, movements.