Genevieve walked alone into her favourite café, it was a little out of the way but that was what she liked. It was a kind of hotch-potch of a stylish old restaurant from the thirties and an old shop that had used elaborate devices to weigh god only knows what. It remained an effigy of old service industry that was sadly laid to rest under a film of dust. Its high ceilings held by epic sad beams and adorned in black steel hooks. Couches strewn in chaotic punctuations about the room like buoys amidst a calm dark wooded wave. The café obviously feeling that it not only wanted to be a dusty amalgam of times past but a dusty salute to kitsch had adopted a rather strange habit of hanging silver balls from the ceiling. And so they hung, windows on a weird spherical shaped universe of coffee drinkers lethargic readers, musicians and poets. A kind of rhythmic balance was struck in the air, as twee indie pop played through the 'seen betterdays' speakers in the corner and the rather strange addition of a washing machine, which swirled and whirled its way through a cycle. It had been put there for the benefit of students in the area living in bed sits for whom this had become a second home. She went to the long dark wood counter and asked the girl for a double latte. She nodded before she spoke, to acknowledge her regular 'status', a girl sitting on the couch by the big fireplace, suddenly looked up from her piece of paper reverie and said 'how do I say, "I miss you"'

-I think its 'je manqué de vous' said the waitress
- thanks, said the girl.

Genevieve sat down in a secluded table and yet one with the advantages of watching the people in the café. She reached into her bag and drew out her latest in tattered books, she was interested in its content but also interested in the reaction the title evoked. 'A defense of masochism'. She likes to stare at people on the DART as they stared back at this disturbing side to her personality. However in this place people were more likely to strike up a conversation about her choice in literature than be horrified. Which of course didn't matter to Genevieve, all she ever wanted was to be noticed. Not exactly the centre of attention but perhaps just left of it.

A young couple were sitting at a table not far away from her. This seemed to be the early stages of a romantic involvement, all the tell tale signs were there. There was his awkward body language and his failure to maintain eye contact. And of course this need to fill every natural silence, this sometimes happened in parallel. Which results in that awkward 'no go on -sorry'. She was pretty, hazel deep eyes and an all-knowing smile. The kind that made him question his every move. Her eyes were compassionate though and framed by a deliciously theatrical attempt at eye make up, which looked quite cool thought Genevieve. She looked too pretty for the boy, he seemed to be aware of this, she however was not. He made a valiant effort though; if love were about effort he would see all fair in true love and war. Genevieve felt sorry for him actually, if by some twist of fate effort did blind the girl, he would spend his days trying to hold on to her. She fidgeted in her seat her head tilted toward him, curling the tips of her hair between her fingers. There was a tiny insignia written on her t-shirt, he was trying to read it without outrightly looking at her chest. 'been there done that' the t-shirt quietly whispered. Genevieve smiled and looked away. The door squeaked open with mellow delay, the boy who they called Efrim entered. He was strange outside, but inside he was like everyone else.

He was a friend of the owner and it was he who had suggested the washing machine to be installed. He had heard from a friend of his that that there was a launderette in America that doubled as a café and had become very exited by this concept. Efrim was obsessed with washing machines. He had told Genevieve in one of his more friendly moods, how this had come to be.

He had been a very strange young child. Early on he had been very charming and had wide smiling eyes, but as he got older he began to get this vacant look. His mother eventually brought him to specialists who said he was mildly autistic. From this stage on he had developed this fascination with washing machines. It was the hypnotic predictable beauty of it. The swirl would always make a certain item fall in the same place. Repetition, beauty, chaos, sometimes it was too much for him to bear; yet he never could communicate this to anyone. His mother like all mothers only wanted him to be happy. Instead of taking him to the park to play with other children she would take him to different launderettes and electrical stores in the area. Its rhythmic tone helped calm his tortured soul and he would compose the most amazing sentences out of snatches of conversation he heard. He would sit in his room (where his mother put her washing machine) and would compose poetry all day long. Until one day he just woke up, as if he had slept the first thirteen years of his life, he no longer spoke to people through a frightening fog, he communicated, articulated and even looked people in the eye. He remembered everything of his former life, trapped inside a shell, he had been aware the whole time just disconnected.

He was now a beat poet, he organised poetry slams in different areas and performed his hypnotic rhymes. Hipster like he moved through his environs. He would come to the café nearly every day and sit by the washing machine and compose his poems to its laborious beat.

Genevieve watched him gracefully navigate the tables to his usual couch. He wore a grey wool hat, with flaps over the ears, a long black coat and a long out of control beard. Genevieve thought how lonely he must have been before he was granted access to reality. His perception of beauty was so intrinsically ordinary and dull to everyone else; it was like he had a window to a different world that is somehow blocked from our view. Like a dream. She thought of her dreams.

She suddenly was finding her thoughts being eaten away, her concentration drawn to what was on the stereo.

Please help me find my way I'm lost, please help me. Please help me find my way I'm lost. Please help me, please help me find my way I'm lost.

The words of the song repeated over and over, acappella twining the beat of the drum in the corner in stressing converge. Like an epic voyage the backbeat grew to catharsis, rough through the waves of sound and beat and melody. And suddenly let go. Thrust anchorless in the white horse sea of non-reality. She, cast to a dream she had. Where she had sat in an open-air cinema theatre, like the kind on those cheesy American sitcoms - a drive in. She was self-aware and yet she watched herself on screen. She was lost at sea in a storm the white water gathering and breaking around her ship, turbulent, confusing in its mass destruction of all around her. She wondered what was the significance of having a dream within a dream.

She had just read a book about Karl Jung and how he believed that you could tap in to the shared knowledge of mankind in your dream state.

At the front of the café there was a window that curved outward onto the street, a table was set into this curve. Genevieve had never liked this table; it was like being in the street and having your coffee and yet being in a goldfish bowl. What went on in the café never really seemed real, it was like halting time and conventional noise. In the curve it seemed like paradoxically straddling two worlds. There was a woman sat there, she was reading a book. She seemed so involved Genevieve wondered if she was really there at all, only in body perhaps.

The couple got up to leave, the boy his painted smile and averting gaze, in repose until needed again.

He would go home and decide how best to seem confident, seem interesting, seem different. The girl in her diffident charm let the boy pay for her coffee and banoffi pie, she let him hold the door for her, she watched as his tentative hand made contact with her shoulder. Genevieve thought he was melancholy, why did he play a part? Although in his stride, his gait, his demeanour there was something that hadn't been there before, a flash of him perhaps. He looked as though he was entranced by her aesthetically and chemically but was in some way betraying himself by what lay beneath the surface. With that Genevieve thought she would leave just after them. As she left the café on to the street the white noise, the white shiny chrome and plastic of the city startled her. A greasy amalgam of American franchise plastic and sleek minimalism, a ghastly cacophony of cultures if ever there was. T

here was a quote on the tip of her mind's tongue that had repeated over and over but had not quite reached her thoughts. It came to her. "Seems Madame nay it is I know not seems"

^