NOT NOW

The cafe in Manchester is busy, a hubbub of people talking and the clink of cups and the fierce hiss of the espresso machine, like a dragon. You spot a table in the corner though, so join the queue and keep your fingers crossed that everyone in front of you in the queue is getting a take-out or is buying coffee for a table where their friends have already sat down.
You’re lucky, and when you reach the front of the queue that little table for two in the corner is still empty. You order a flat white, oat milk please, and one of those vegan cinnamon swirls. The barista nods and puts a cup under the spouts and hits go on the espresso, and starts steaming your milk.

Right at that moment, everything stops.
The coffee running from the spouts of the espresso machine hangs in mid-air, like a brown icicle. The steam stops hissing, the barista does not move. All the conversations and the scrape of chairs and the clink of cups or plates and knives stops. You look around, and one woman is half-out of her seat, caught in the moment of reaching for her phone on the table. A man near you is holding his cup to his mouth. At another table, someone had just dropped a knife, and it hangs there, in mid-air. You can hear the sound of traffic outside, but other than you, everything in the cafe is silent. Every one in the cafe is silent. Nothing moves.
Nothing apart from you, and one man sitting on his own near the window. He puts down his newspaper and says urgently, but not unkindly, “This place is not for you. Not now, not at this time. It is very important that you go now, because at this time you do not belong here.”
Almost as if in trance, you move away towards the door through the silence and the statues, and then in one motion you open it and step through, and there you are in the street, a bus wheezing past, a Deliveroo rider on a bike scattering pedestrians on the pavement. You know if you looked back through the windows of the cafe you would see everything in movement again.

But you do not look back.