Watering – Part II

There is a plant on the kitchen window sill that he waters every night. It’s only small – it’s still in the original flimsy plastic pot – and he keeps it in a little ceramic bowl. But he waters it every night, pouring water into the plant’s centre until the water rises up out of the bowl. Usually, by the next day, the water is gone, consumed by the plant. It loves the water. It’s green and healthy and a little patch of verdant moss grows on the soil. It’s a tiny patch, but it is always moist and so green it almost isn’t green.

The plant sits next to two salt and pepper shakers in the shape of penguins. The penguins’ black coats are faded at the back from days of afternoon sun, faded smooth, almost to white.

Back when he used to work he used to have a coffee at 9.30, on the minute, every morning. At first he bought it from a little sandwich shop that had a side window for the people who back then drank coffee, and there weren’t as many then as there are now. It was an unspoken rule that this side window was for coffee and you didn’t go into the shop to order coffee. It was like it was a secret part of the business, like there was something not quite legal about it. Of course, this window looked out on to a street, not a main road – he worked on the main road – but a busy enough street, always busy with couriers and post vans and taxis. It wasn’t as busy as those kinds of streets are today – this was back in the seventies and eighties when he worked there and got morning coffee – but it was still busy. Today those streets are out of control. You’d be mad to drive into town today.

They had a big silver coffee machine, it almost looked like some sort of industrial coffee maker, right next to the window. A little, apronned woman operated it and dispersed the orders in styrofoam cups. The machine reminded him of a factory, whenever he saw it. One of those factories where they have big silver machines and people who wear hair nets and stir things in large vats with paddles which by all appearances look like oars. Whenever he saw the machine, which was every day, that’s what he thought of.

The coffee was 25 cents a cup, back when you could still buy things in cents. He took a caramel brown briefcase to work every day, opening it on the kitchen table the night before work to unsort then sort his things. Pens and pencils, notepads, documents, manilla folders. On the inside of the top of the briefcase was a little pocket with a zip where he put his coffee money. He never broke a note for a coffee – it was only 25 cents. In the kitchen light, every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night, he slipped some coins into the little pocket so he could buy his morning coffee, then zipped it closed, the money coming from his wallet or his money box or change from that day’s coffee.

He stopped getting coffees from the shop. They didn’t have those little plastic slip-on lids with the hole in the lip for easy drinking and carrying like they do these days, so walking it back up the stairs to his cubicle was always a challenge. But he didn’t stop because of that – he just stopped. They had instant coffee in the office kitchen which was only one level below his. Level two, he was on level three. So he, every morning at 9.30, after he’d been at work for almost exactly an hour and finished his morning tasks and filed them away, got up from his desk and walked down the cream-coloured stairs with flecks of some shiny silver material in them just below the surface and made his way down the hall to the kitchen to make his coffee.

Watering the plant on his kitchen window sill is a bit like coffee time when he worked. It is a marker by which to navigate the day.

The ceramic bowl – the reason he chose this bowl to put the little new plant in in the first place – has an ugly black crack that runs diagonally down its side and fades just before the bowl’s base. It’s common to describe lightning as a ‘crack’ - this crack does look like a permanent spindly black lightning strike.

Lead Igloo

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