voices faces voices

There are stories everywhere in Brussels. Especially in the cabines, little shops where you can make a phone call or use the internet. I haven't seen any recently in the UK, but here there are many of them. I suppose here there are still people who don't have a land line or a computer at home. In the windows - usually dingy and cracked - hand-written or home-printed A4 sheets laconically list places and prices. It's like the Dow Jones of the poor world. Kinshasa is up two cents against Dakar.
Behind these cabines there is often a back room where the family hang out, drink tea and watch TV. I was once ushered into one to wait while my friend checked her emails. There was a huge wide-screen TV and a vast sofa, so close together that I had to edge between and then the sofa bumping the back of my knees made me fall into it whether I liked it or not. I happily watched MTV for ten minutes. People round here do often furnish their corridors. I suppose sometimes a sofa is bought and can never be got any further in than the hall, and so it goes.

Locally there is an up-market cabine painted the colour of strawberry ice-cream, run by a grizzled man of Middle Eastern appearance. He is softly spoken to the point that I can never understand him when he says how much I owe him (hardly anything, as a rule; they ask a euro per hour). He doesn't meet my eye and has an attitude of mild impatience as I shuffle coins trying to work out if he said 'vingt' or 'quatre-vingt'. They also sell penny sweets and cigarettes, and he once shyly gave me a free bubble gum, which I have kept to remind me that people are loveable. I often notice him sketching on a note-pad, and it struck me only recently that the rather well-executed ceramic bust on the shelf may be a self-portrait. It makes me wonder what he thinks of this place he runs. Mothers with bawling children bawling down the phone themselves to a husband or mother who knows where; the more clued-up Skyping for hours, chatting away on head-sets to friend after friend who replace each other, laughing, on the video tab. When my partner dumped me out of the blue I got the email in this very cabine and cried down the phone to my friend a moment later. If you have any kind of sense of story, it must be an incredible place to work. But I wonder why he always seems so sad, so collapsed inside himself.