Cafe Confidential

“In other disciplines,” I said, “I would copy and emulate people I admired, but in writing I sounded like myself. It represents my quickest route to honesty, and honesty is originality. My book was about trying to find a lost pop art painting and I got probably closer than anyone else. I wrote about it and got an agent and tried to make it into a book but I wasn’t good enough. So now I’m trying to fix the book and eventually get a new agent, but in the meantime I need something to do. I need to be busy.”

Latte Art, Alexey Demidov, 2022

I stopped speaking, plunged the mop into the bucket and looked up at my colleague. Vape in hand, she looked at me through wisps of electric smoke, then turned away while I mopped around her. I was a few days into a new job, working at the cafe downstairs from my flat. It had the ideal commute (short) and freed me from the self-imposed stress of my previous year. I needed structure, money, and social interaction, and I found all three next to the coffee machine. Despite that machine constantly leaking and some shifts being so quiet they resembled an endurance test, the cafe represented a new phase of my life. It was a platform to build on.

An empty cafe, Mariya Muschard, 2022

Once the dust had settled and I was comfortable at work, I had an idea to make the opening hours more bearable. The cafe was full of art you wouldn’t look twice at, and I wanted that to change, so I started an art initiative. I went to degree shows and emerging artist exhibitions, and got in touch with artists I liked. To my surprise, quite a few people agreed to lend us their work. My crowning achievement came when Corbin Shaw agreed to take part. He had the largest following of any cafe artist, and I thought if he got involved then the floodgates would open. Bigger and bigger artists would flock to my corner of south east London, and I would become the world’s first dealer-barista. Shaw gave us two pieces. One was a to-scale print of an old iPhone lockscreen set in a large silver frame. The other was called The English Dream, a print of the St George’s Cross, the kind you’d see at England games. In the top corners were eyelets where the flag could be secured to the terraces. In the white spaces left by the red cross were words in thick, black, sans-serif font. Clockwise from top left they read:

GET A JOB / GET A CAR / GET MARRIED / GET A MORTGAGE

The English Dream, Corbin Shaw, 2021.

I liked it and I liked what Shaw said about his England flag series, which began when he first thought about masculinity and “the art I’d grown up around – like flags on the terraces and the ones we had made to take to Wembley or wherever else we’d go on buses … I started to use flags with the St George’s Cross on as my canvas to write these messages to my dad.” As for me, Shaw’s series made me appreciate those flags when watching England play. This can be a function of art, allowing us to notice beautiful things that were always there. The painter Jules Olitski liked to say that “before Monet painted sunsets, no-one looked at them.” Instead of associating those flags with drunk lads chucking white plastic chairs around charming town squares on international matchdays, I saw them as a part of an English artistic tradition.

I hung the print so it was immediately visible as you walked into the cafe. I couldn’t have been happier, but my bosses looked at the piece less favourably. They said nothing and didn’t smile. If anything, they looked uneasy. Their uneasiness had nothing to do with Shaw’s artistic talent or the pithy-serious power of The English Dream. They saw a red cross on a white background with black words. A company director muttered “get a job, get a car, get married, get a mortgage,” under her breath. I knew what they were thinking, but I was taking a broader view. I was taking art’s side. The next two days passed in relative, if nervous, silence. Maybe I’d got away with it, I thought.

At the Cafe, Edouard Manet, 1869

During a day off, I looked at the news on my phone. I tapped on the main headline and watched a video in which a piece of concrete shatters the window of a hotel in Rotherham. Misinformation about a tragedy had motivated hundreds of angry people to destroy a place that housed asylum seekers. A man named Abdullah was hiding inside, speaking into his phone. “Inside is all fire,” he said. “We couldn’t breathe and... we all have stress because we think today we will die.” He looked out of his window at the mob. Many were draped in flags or proudly holding flags aloft, the kind you’d see at England games. A red cross on a white background. One of them featured black markings, but instead of musings about modern life there were four anarchy symbols. The next morning, I opened the cafe as normal and served the people I always serve. I heard my boss’ footsteps coming towards me. She looked at The English Dream and then looked at me. “Take it down,” she said.

Rotherham Rioters, Hollie Adams/Reuters, 2024

My interest in the cafe’s walls faded. An all-powerful dealer-barista I was not, really I was just a man serving mediocre oat flat whites. I told Shaw’s team and they requested the return of both pieces. The usual quiet days followed, accompanied by a regular who always wandered in on the quietest days. Sometimes she held a big stick, other times she’d be joined by a group of conspiracy theorists. She would look at me, look at the empty chairs and tables and say, “You’re wasting your life here, aren’t you?” I didn’t want to explain to her that I was trying to get a book off the ground. But I did anyway. “In other disciplines…” I began.