Starting Low but Looking Up

There’s a helmet on a stool beside a red tiled bar with a stainless steel top. There’s a teenage girl waiting beside a coffee for someone to finish playing water polo in a very hot swimming pool.

Out here in the bar the young people play with coffee spoons in empty coffee cups. They’ve eaten their croissants and drunk their coffees. Now it’s back to conversation. Helmets lie on the ground beside swimming bags stuffed with gear. Some helmets have fluorescent lightening strikes and fins out the back, others are sober, cheaper, whiter.

The girls on the left talk of study and sports clubs. The short haired young men at the next table cannot be overheard but stretch and sit sideways on their chairs. Some speak Catalan while others speak Spanish. Some switch constantly, borrowing words from both languages.

Last week’s elections have passed and the coalition government is showing signs of solidifying. Talks are underway and are reported everyday on the news. Here in this swimming pool café there is no talk of politics among the young. They have a vote but whether they voted or even thought of it is not clear on this Saturday morning at 10am.

The girl with the helmet at the bar is jigging her leg like she wishes something would end. She is more wrapped up in warm clothing than is necessary indoors. Not two days ago we entered that time of the year when motorcyclists dress out-of-synch with the rest of the population. The cold felt on a speeding bike is many degrees below that felt by a stroller with a shopping trolley.

The volume rises as parents come up from the pool where the water polo match has ended. Discussion of play and neighbourly conversation is in the air while the cook and the waiter emerge from the back room where they have been resting. Perhaps the rush hour upon us.

And just now all the young people who have been seated around me have stood up, taken helmets jackets bags and natter and left for the dressing rooms. I am alone with the parents who are ordering sandwiches, coffees and small glasses of beer. The coffee machine is grinding and squealing like a conscript forced into the fray.

A teenage boy and girl are standing together at the bar now. He has seated half of himself on a bar stool that tilts his body towards her. She adjusts her trousers and wiggles a little. It is an early start, indeed.

The weekend promises.