The Tea Man

Fetch me my feathers and amber

This week’s The Crow is a contemplation on history, power, work and identity, all folded through a very short slice of time.

Photo by Aqib Ahmed on Unsplash

1.

The morning queue stood a few meters up-road, as if the bus stop itself had edged away from them of its own accord.

The tiny roof and glass wall were transformed from shelter to lodge, the bus stop’s transitory nature turned homely by a gas stove and a boiling kettle.

On the bench a cup and saucer were carefully laid out on a tea towel beside an egg sandwich still enclosed in its plastic triangle, the seal unbroken. The man brewing his breakfast tea wasn’t waiting for any busses.

As the kettle began whistling, he extinguished the flame and released an arc of steaming water with the flick of his wrist. He didn’t take milk, so there was nothing more to do but wait and enjoy the view, which he did with an enviable serenity.

The Tea Man, who had abandoned society, and had himself been abandoned by society, lived as if he were already in some post-apocalyptic future. He ignored the tyranny of conformity and refused to queue on a Monday morning.

So he was made to pay.

He was ignored and ostracised, offered no respite or relief. If he didn’t play nice he wouldn’t be allowed to play at all. After all, the Tea Man was committing a brazen sin. It was perfectly acceptable to buy oneself free from the shackles of conformity. But it was offensive to be poor and reject those shackles. There was plenty of room for a spoilt rich man, but no place for an enlightened poor man.

Through all this the Tea Man carried himself with a patient and tender transcendence as he navigated his way through this broken world.

It was the queue of people, waiting to be transported to their work-places who seemed awkward, delusional perhaps, oblivious to some obvious truth. These people wouldn’t be pointing out any nude emperor’s. Not them. Whereas the Tea Man, who had rejected the entire spectacle and refused to clamour for greater distractions, exhibited an admirable sage-like singularity that woke the heart and set free the mind.

The bus pulled in, slightly up-road, to haul in its daily catch, and the people dutifully filed aboard. As the bus rolled away the Tea Man, oblivious, sipped his brew, gently broke the seal on his sandwich and watched two crows tumbling and playing as the morning slowly woke into day.

2.

I sat in my usual seat on the port side of the bus. The estuary stretching toward the low morning autumnal sun on the left, the 14th century castle ruin, like a broken tooth emerging from the hill, on the right. The streaming sun casting a silvery warm light onto the stones that gave the ruin a strange shimmering lightness, as if it were trembling slightly in the wind.

“Fuckers,” I whispered, as I do every time I pass the castle. It being Friday, I improvised a little, just for the hell of it, “Pheasant-fucking porridge-munching feudal-fuckers.” It wasn’t my best, but the insolence was still comforting.

I hated that castle, that deceptive and hypocritical little fortress, that lingering manifestation of cruelty and ignorance. It wasn’t just some historical ruin, it was where that special class of egomaniacal imbeciles retreated when their avarice overflowed and revolt was brewing. It was the physical manifestation of greedy violent men imagining they were gods. It was inequality built in stone.

I wrote this latest insult down in my note book and numbered it, 312, 6 years worth of freshly improvised castle-based vitriol. Nice.

I put the book back into my pocket and, glancing toward the estuary, once more felt the scream of history drowning out my minuscule insubordination. I imagined demanding the bus to stop, and stalking up the hill to scream at the top of my lungs, “If you think feudalism’s dead, you’ve never had a fucking job.” But of course I didn’t. I just stayed in my seat.

Lately, I could feel my coping mechanisms wearing thin. I was being drawn toward the edge of the light, nose to nose with the darkness. The previous evening I had read Gary Snyder’s poem, Civilisation, which kept knocking about in my head;

Those are the people who do complicated things.

they'll grab us by the thousands

and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these

villages and trails.

Wild duck flocks aren't

what they used to be.

Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

Oh please, fetch me my feathers and amber (what would I do with feathers and amber?) I don’t want to do complicated things. I want an abundance of aurochs. I don’t want to be grabbed by the thousands.

“I want my fucking feathers and amber.”

Unconsciously blurting out “I want my fucking feathers and amber” can really change the attitude of a confined space. Also, fellow passengers don’t like it.

It was the Tea Man who had unbalanced my equilibrium. Every time I saw him I felt acutely embarrassed. I felt shame. I felt a terrifying insight and a compulsion to tear my life down. I could see myself standing there in the bus queue, waiting, once again, to be transported to work and spend yet another day in my private agony, robbed of dignity and pitchforked into terrible behaviours I’d never normally contemplate. And then there’s him, the Tea Man, at the bus stop, brewing his tea, watching the crows, ignoring the castle. It was unbearable. I want to be free of the castle too. I want to be the Tea Man.

3.

The bone china tea cup on the bus stop bench glistened in the streaming sea of photons that had travelled 150 million kilometres from the sun. Like a tiny geyser, the hot tea ejected its tannin molecules of earthy muscatel odours that mingled with fresh seaweed and tar carried on the sea breeze. It was the exquisite aroma of morning and ritual.The Tea Man took a deep inhalation and lifted the cup to his lips.

A little up-road there were the usual people, again, standing and waiting for a bus. The Tea Man felt their disdain and irritation and fear wafting about. He knew they preferred to stand beside the bus stop. They were acclimatised to their rituals too. They didn’t like change, comforted as they were by the vinegary orange-zest smell of diesel layered into the shrill agony of brake pads as the bus slowed, then stopped, and they, up the one, two, three, steps, blipped their cards and turned left to take their seats as the bus heaved itself away to deliver them to their fate.

“A journey that might be infinite, reduced to but eight minutes,” he thought, as he watched the light bouncing from his cup, “A journey that might be infinite, and yet there they stand in pointless agony,” he thought as he felt the radiating anguish of the bus queue floating past on the breeze.

Up on the hill, the castle ruin, like a tombstone, not yet weathering and eroding away, cast it’s shadow upon them all.