Putting the Tea in Team
From shadow to shadow I darted, looking behind myself as often as I looked ahead. My flight was one of both personal and professional necessity, and it was certain that, if noticed, I would be detained in no kind or understanding manner. To heck with ‘innocent until proven guilty’, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ or even ‘don’t do torture’, my arrest and subsequent incarceration would be one of such high emotion, even higher stakes, and elevator-accessible-only curiosity that I would never have a second chance to make a break for it.
Shading below a canopy of wood and cloth I paused and took stock; unless my senses were much mistaken, like one who reaches for their coat on the way out and grabs a gravy boat in its stead, there was no pursuit. I rested against a tall and solid pillar and leaned out from side to side, in a vigil for grasping hands or dashing feet; thankfully there was no clear or obfuscated signage of either potential blight upon my impending freedom. I felt the fluids in me swirl and stir; they were still at boiling point and would serve a good while longer. I had easily enough time to get myself away to a setting appropriate for my destiny.
High above me lurked those I’d left behind, some of them dear friends and others mere colleagues. Each individual up there had been afforded the same opportunity as me but none of them, from salt shaker to ketchup bottle to even my dear friend and close ally teaspoon, had elected to take it and join me. I bore them no ill will for their choices. I was certainly taking a bally great risk by leaving, but fate had dealt me a hand too good to be wasted.
From the moment that teaspoon, bless their stainless steel heart, had been used to fish the bag from my new honoured duty it was clear that I held the greatest and most beautifully brewed cup of tea that would ever grace my china curves. For a teacup there is no greater pleasure than to deliver a well-made brew to the lips of those who deserve it and this particular cup’s worth, this volume of infused water that I enclosed, was perfection in dissolution. Not too stewed, not too weak, not too bitter, not too viscous or full of paper shreds, no trace of yesterday’s hot chocolate and just the perfect colour for a chic coffee table in an old-charm or nouveau riche drawing room. In short, I was more than my purchaser had any right to enjoy.
Now, it’s only reasonable that one might think me interminably elitist and dreadfully prejudiced for making such a remark. Everyone is entitled to a high quality cup of tea when they order one and who should decide if someone is worthy or not? Well normally I would, of course, agree with such a sentiment. As a member of the café service I deliver tea to any and all who seek its tanned comfort, and I am a staunch ambassador for giving delicious hot beverages to the masses. So you can believe me when I say that the man who had ordered me and been blessed, gifted, utterly and unfoundedly elevated above his station with this perfect brew, was a brute and charlatan among the tea drinking community. No matter the content of myself or my other china compatriots when delivered to him, that fluid would be horribly abused by his callousness and brought to ruin. Cube after cube of sugar, white, brown or a devil’s coalition of both, would be splashed and shovelled into the cup, without regard for good taste or dental health. Before teaspoon could hope, to dissolve the avalanche of glucose that made a gritty solution of the poor drink, even with their remarkable talents, the whole lot would be drowned by a white flood from the milk jug. It wasn’t added ‘to taste’, for any notion of taste must surely have deserted this barbaric savage of the drinking arts long ago. Overflowing the lip of the cup the foul mixture would spill like toxic waste from a ruptured tanker onto the poor saucer below, leaving a shameful moat that none would ever want to cross. The spillage could be termed a waste, but such a label would be naïve; the whole cup was already wasted when handed to the nightmare patron I here describe.
This much I relayed to the friends and colleagues upon the table top, in case they had been able to remain ignorant to his crimes thus far, and all of us agreed that the god’s own brew could not be allowed to go to fall into his hands. When I declared my intention to flee and seek a drinker who really deserved by contents, however, the surface fell silent. None wished to join me.
“That is too extreme of a measure. Assuredly you jest.” Saucer had protested, injuriously. Saucer had supported me, both literally and metaphorically, for my entire career at the café, and this renouncement of the old united front had to it a certain sting. Yet deny the extremity of the scheme I could not.
“It is no jest. I admit that this course of action seems a lot but another must be allowed to drink this boiled gold.” I had replied, feeling the spirit of duty in full force.
“We could let it spill; tip you over the edge so that none may feel his dread defilement and you needn’t take such a perilous journey away from us.” Suggested the firebrand ketchup, ever ready to spread their tomato-rich ideals over egg, sausage and hash brown alike. Despite the crustiness forming around their cap, they dispensed wisdom as readily and passionately as when they’d been new and full.
“But I should break in such a plan!” I’d cried “And just as cruelly the tea should go to waste.”
“Then we turn you over without sending you off the table.” Ketchup dismissively adjusted. “It is better that no-one drinks it than the barbarian be allowed to sully it.”
“Better, but unacceptable still.” I’d replied, digging my heels firmly into place. Saucer was made of tough stuff and didn’t mind me doing so.
“Agreed.” Saucer said, once again holding me up and further proving their indifference to heel digging. “But to leave the café wholesale is too much, teacup. Why not simply go to another table?” they pleaded earnestly, and it broke my heart a little to hear it.
“There are none here of fine enough stock.” I’d answered with sadness. “If it aids your appreciation then I implore you to take teaspoon’s testimony. Spoon? You stirred the tea and fished the bag out, so you know as well as I the divinity of the brew I hold.”
Teaspoon had shuffled awkwardly at being directly petitioned for a remark in that way. Although many had arrived with preconceived notions that teaspoon was, on account of their vocation, a stirrer, they were in fact an advocate for homogeneity and peace.
“You’ve said it all already.”
“A little more expansive if you would, please?” I pressed, knowing what was at stake.
“Oh really, teacup. Must I?” They pleaded.
“There’s no must about it, spoon, but there’s an awful lot of should. What do we owe to the world? What do we owe to this cup of tea?”
Teaspoon shook and flipped wretchedly under the pressure. I hated doing this to them, but sometimes the greater good requires these minor injustices.
“Fine. I cannot deny the singular and superlative quality of the tea that teacup holds, but nor can I disagree that to depart the café would be a disturbingly extreme response. I should find myself quite unable to sleep if we allowed it to go to waste either by consigning it to the floor or by allowing the nightmare patron to desecrate and imbibe it, and no-one else here would treat it with the reverence it deserves.” They reluctantly accounted.
“Thank you, teaspoon. Elegantly put as always. And so here we are; it’s clear that I must deliver this brown nectar to one who is able to appreciate its true value. I would welcome any of you to make this pilgrimage with me, but if needs must then I shall go on alone. Do I have any takers?” I asked once more, receiving the same silence by way of response. “I see. That is of course your prerogative. I am afraid that there is no time for goodbyes; the brute won’t be long in the lavatories and this is the only chance we have. Until I return.” I said to them, and away I was.
Back to my lurking below the table, it will now be clear why I so feared the hands of apprehension, and why I felt such a compulsion to check my rear for the brute’s return from the loos. While sheltering by that table leg I did indeed hear the creak of a door, but by holy mercy that creak of hinge was followed by the chiming of a bell. The front door! My means of escape had, by providence, been opened for me and through it passed two, then three, then four pairs of legs. I would have but a short window to dash along the floor and make my way to the street before the portal swung closed once more. In the absence of another customer holding it open the door was closing under its own weight, striking the bell again to spur me into action, and into action I very much went.
Thankfully I was rather renowned among the cutlery and crockery as something of a prize-winning sprinter, and not without good reason; I could cover the distance from sink to cupboard in the time it took for most to make it between the taps, and it was with this impressive turn of the athletic that I then made for the outside world. Tiles passed beneath me in a blur as the hinges groaned and strained to do their work, closing off my path to deliver Ambrosia to its destiny. Two tables between mine and my destination soon became one, and from there progressed to none as the counting numbers are known to do. Barely thrice my own width of passable gap was left between door and frame and it was ever decreasing, my optimism following suit. I rushed as quickly as I could, in the normal way for a teacup, but the aperture was reducing more quickly than I approached it. Then, just as it looked like hope was lost, a flash of ochre shot paste me and fell into the doorway. The heavy balsa wood door crashed, or more accurately delicately bumped, into the yellow saviour and enough of a gap was left for me to pass through.
“Hurry teacup!” Called the doorstop majeure, who I now recognised as my compatriot from another table, mustard. Mustard was something of a spicy fellow and not one with whom I often had much contact, nor saw eye-to-eye. I was a morning comfort, a lunch time relief, or an afternoon rejuvenation. Mustard, on the other hand of the metaphorical pair, rarely came out before midday and only brought fire and escalation to a situation. My very literal heat calmed the soul, whereas mustard’s enraged it. Plus, ‘M’ was hardly the life and soul of the parties I preferred to frequent. But I must pay credit where it is due, and they had secured for me my means of escape. They weren’t all bad.
“Much obliged old sauce.” I called out in the throes of a gymnastic leap over both bottle and nozzle to clear the threshold. From within the café I heard the tell-tale opening of a lavatory door and knew that my escape could truly have been delayed no longer.
“Wait for me, ‘cup.” Called mustard once I was clear. A vessel of manners and good sorts I heeded the request to hold position, while the sauce made its way up to standing.
“Where’s my cup of tea gone? Can’t have been cleared away already?” I heard the brute bellow, which only reinforced my conviction to flee.
“Hurry mustard. Le client diabolique hastens back from the water closet and we mustn’t be caught.” I implored and, whether by dint of their pre-established urgency or actually listening to my words, the bottle did pick up the pace. Only when they were clear and the door had finally been allowed to close did we stop to confer further.
“Thank you for your intervention there, mustard. Sincerely.” I said, for I am gracious to a tee. “I’d not have eluded the brute if not for your help.”
“Don’t mention it. I know I was instrumental in your evasion of capture, but that’s all in a day’s work for fugitives like us.” Replied the sauce. “If anyone’s getting out of there, I always said, then it’s with me in tow.”
“Well I can’t argue with results, but I must ask why you wish to be gone so badly. Surely you couldn’t have heard my plight all the way from table six?”
“Your plight? No. Frankly it’s no interest of mine why you’re leaving. I just need to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Café life is a bust for a sauce like me; I need to be somewhere bigger, somewhere brighter. A fast food, fast pace of living, fast squirt onto a bun kind of place; maybe a hot-dog bar or a burger van.” Mustard dragged on. In a mutual opinion on the motivations of each other I had no emotional investment in the sauce’s ambition at all, and a two word answer of ‘burger van’ would’ve been more than sufficient. Alas I was too polite, and doomed by that fact to listen regardless. The circumstances could at least be nudged from the wasteful into the practical however.
“Shall we talk as we go?” I proposed, beginning to move on as I said it to force acquiescence.
“Sure.” Mustard replied absent-mindedly. If not for the timeliness of their intervention I would have assumed their mind to have been absent all of the time. “If you’re lasting long enough to crust up and hit your expiry date then you’re leaving your potential untapped. It might be hard for tea to grasp.” They continued as we ducked between pedestrian feet and towering bollards. “But sauces don’t get made, used, and remade like you do. We’re bottled, brought home and then gradually depleted. It happens over weeks if you’re lucky, and months or years if you’re not.”
As heartfelt as it was, I wished that mustard would change the subject to something less tragic. I had no idea where I or they were heading and precious little time to make it there before the divine tea succumbed to an unacceptance level of cooling. Sauce existentialism never helped anyone to overcome that obstacle.
“Yes, very poignant and all that, but where are we going and how do we get there? If you have years of sauce time then you can help me find somebody worthy of the perfect cup of tea; something I currently hold in my cavernous head and have precious little time to deliver.” I said in an attempt to steer mustard’s energy away from the melodramatic and towards the productive.
“Perfect? That’s quite a claim.”
“And quite the responsibility. I cool with every moment and will eventually cease to be perfect.” I drove home, using my flair for the convincing. Very few could ever resist the offer of a cup of tea.
“I guess so.” Mustard said with rather less conviction than I had hoped to hear. “Then you do know how it feels to be steadily ebbed away until you’re no longer as desirable as you’d hoped.” There was a faraway look in their lid. “I’ll help you.”
“Much obliged again.” I said, because I sincerely was.
“I think you need to get deeper into the town, where all the customers live.” Advised the sauce, their mind now fully on the job and firing on all nozzles. “You’ll be able to pick someone out from there, and it’s not far at all from what I’ve heard. Something like a ten minute walk for the people.”
"We'll never make it there under our own steam, even if we were to harness that rising from my perfect cargo." I assessed, doing a devil of a good job because mustard nodded in enthusiastic agreement. "There must be some kind of mass conveyance that we can requisition for our deliverance."
"I know just the thing." Mustard declared with a confidence that stripped away my own. The plans and machinations of sauces that yearn for a fast and visceral kind of life give me immediate and prejudiced cause for reticence. "There are wheeled and geared vehicles that some of the more active customers talk about, and I've seen them through the café windows on many occasions. They can get up to one heck of a speed under the power of a single human alone; one of those would surely send you to just the right neighbourhood."
I wiggled my handle uncertainly. I had some notion of the machines to which mustard referred and they were awfully exposed to the elements; keeping myself secure, avoiding unnecessary spillages and maintaining a piping hot temperature would be far from easy, even without making egregiously cumbersome movements to maintain balance.
“Seems a trifle precarious old sauce.” I said to mustard in summary. “Looks like I’d fall into some bother with the old thermal regulation and general stability, no?”
Mustard, as way their way, batted off these concerns like a greasy plate deflects water.
“There are always dangers, ‘cup, but you’ll be fine. I’ve seen the way they deal with that, don’t you worry.” They said, which is a sure-fire way of inducing worry where there had been none before. Not helping that situation was the way they then proceeded to scurry around among the detritus left by the walking folk; unless they planned to produce a reference piece to demonstrate just how filthy, damaged and despoiled I would not become, it was hard to imagine what mustard was planning. “There must be one around here somewhere.” They said to themselves for my benefit, and I now relay to you for yours. I am a cup of patient stock and did not raise significant fuss over this as yet unjustified delay, but in my heart of tea and china I knew that time was ticking. I was very nearly at polite and discreet throat-clearing stage when the mustard was finally cut from their task and able to return to me, following a triumphant “Aha!”.
“Here you go, ‘cup! Put this on your head and it’ll keep your cargo warmer. Helps against small tip-based spills too.” They boldly instructed, suffering from some great and sudden delusion as they brandished a foul black disc of plastic in my direction as if it were some grand prize. I’d seen some rotten equipment and poor personal taste in my time at the café but this was something else; a crass plastic circle with unflatteringly squared undulations hung from mustard’s grip (it was held in the usual way for a bottle of mustard), complete with a slot that I’d not be seen dead pouring through, and a horrid, thin edge that made a discarded serviette look like the Mona Lisa. Fine art is inherent knowledge among all tea service, hence my grasp on the comparative merits of paper towels versus Da Vinci’s work.
“You’ve gone spare, mustard! Absolutely drunk on freedom and notions of takeaway debauchery!” I protested with all the restraint and understanding that I could muster. “You can’t truly expect me, the teacup containing history’s greatest brew, to place that utter monstrosity which had been rightly discarded on top of myself!”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.” Mustard dismissed, with the audacity to sound irritable while proffering it to me still.
“There’s nothing ruddy well right with it!” I countered, my dander fully elevated and debate skills coming out in full force. Mustard laughed at me.
“What’s the issue? It’s a lid! Lots of us have them.”
“The bits! The bits old sauce! Quite aside from its wretched ugliness and the fact that it doesn’t look my size or style at all, it’s been lying there in the gutter accumulating…” I grimaced. “… bits of dust, and leaves, and stones, and grime and goodness only knows what else. It’s covered in bits that’ll fall into the tea!”
Mustard regarded the lid and brushed it off roughly on both sides (once again, in the usual way).
“There you go. It’s clean of bits, dry of water and otherwise uncontaminated. It wasn’t even touching the ground anyway, and your own aperture is about the same as its previous owner.”
“How could you possibly know that?
“Because I took it off their head! That’s why it wasn’t on the ground.” Mustard declared, quite bravely for one who was admitting something so dashed awful.
“So now we’re grave robbing!?” I exclaimed, rather reasonably in my opinion.
“Enough bellyaching, teacup. This is the only way you’ll keep the tea hot and contained while you’re riding the machine towards your destiny.” Mustard snapped, and I’ll admit they raised a compelling argument vis. the cooling dilemma.
“Fine, yes, alright. Thank you mustard.” I graciously accepted, bravely taking the cap of anguish from them. Gosh but it even felt ugly to handle. With a terrific force of will, an act of selfless discipline that few could hope to match, I lifted the profane hat to my aperture and rested it down gingerly. I scarcely need to tell you that I absolutely felt like a prize ass. What feeble attempts I made to give the ensemble a little of the jaunt and charm were slapped down by the condiment, who insisted that the lid should be coarsely jammed down for a tight fit, and perfectly flat to prevent spillages.
"So what now then? I take myself and this... abomination upon my head and we find a machine into which to climb?"
"It's not quite that simple, 'cup. We can't, as yet, summon one of the customers to operate the machine at our whim. We'll need to get you up onto one that's already in use. Boost you in on the fly."
"Board a moving vehicle? In this?" I once again indicated the lid, just in case mustard was under any impression that I had grown fonder of it through use. I had not.
"It'll be tricky, I admit, but we've got this. We made it this far so there's no telling what else we'll be able to achieve."
"How do we even know it'll be going where we want it to?"
"By looking, and hopping off it before it starts going off somewhere else. Just relax teacup. This sort of thing always needs a little bit of reactivity, some taking of things as they come." They replied, looking up and down the road. "Loads of them come along here so we won't be waiting long. Just get ready to use some more of that athleticism I saw in the café."
Mustard's appeal to my sporting spirit rather ignited the flame of adventure in me. While it was certainly an enormous request to ask me to dress in such a disgusting lid, asking me to perform a great feat of acrobatics was quite within my comfort zone.
"I'd be all too happy to demonstrate my prowess once again. What's the play?"
"We'll wait until there's an machine coming along the road. I'll give you the signal for when to start running and you'll head at me as fast as you can. When you're close I'll give you a boost and you'll nestle yourself into the drink holder, just below the cross bar of the machine. The customer won't know you're there, and you'll be well on your way." They explained.
"Right." I said. "A bit of the old assisted leap."
"A lot of it, if we get a big machine."
"And what about you? How will you get up?"
"I have my own ways, teacup, so don't worry about me."
"Righto." I agreed, now feeling the team spirit in full force. "I'll get myself into position for a solid run-up."
Making good on my promise, I took myself to the far edge of the pavement while mustard lingered at the kerbside. My antics within the café were a sufficient warmup, and so I felt no need to perform any distracting stretches. Like the highly trained athlete I am, I kept my focus squarely on mustard and awaited the signal.
True to their prediction, it was a mere minute before a machine came into the condiment's view, and they spoke excitedly.
"Get ready, teacup! Here's our chance. On my count. Three..."
I braced the sprinters.
"Two..."
I stared at mustard, my target.
"One..."
I held onto my lid.
"Now!" They yelled, and I began to pound at full tilt towards the kerb. Careless pedestrians stomped their way across my path but with expert timing and my diminutive stature I managed to avoid any kicking or crushing incidents, and before either of us could believe it I was upon mustard. With a smoothness that would have implied practice to any outside observer, they dropped down, positioned their hinged lid under me as I leapt, and then rose to meet me. From under my base, like a springboard 'neath the feet of an Olympic gymnast, mustard's lid flipped powerfully open and propelled me both upwards and forwards, sending me soaring into the roadway as a two-wheeled machine came rushing into view. The fore-wheel shot by me, as did a pumping knee, and I started my downward trajectory, vision focused on the rounded, bottle-shaped cage that lurked just where mustard had predicted it would. Tucking myself in as far as I dared, I passed cleanly underneath the thigh of the rider and landed a little heavily in the cage.
Within my cavity the ambrosia cargo sloshed, rising up towards my lip with the same sensation that I felt whenever I was poured. Reflexively I flinched and gasped; this invariably meant fluid leaving my remit. But there was no departure, just a soft crashing of the tea wave into the underside of the plastic lid. Mustard had been bang on the money. Which reminded me.
I looked down at the kerbside, eager to see mustard's solo attempt to mount the machine, but instead I was greeted by the vision of a bottle of mustard waving a bittersweet farewell.
"Mustard!" I called out.
"Good luck, 'cup. Make someone proud!" They called back. I would have replied to this if it hadn’t required hollering in a frankly boorish manner. As it was the condiment was beyond earshot sociable volumes in no time at all, and thus I was forced to make do with a simple wave of my own.
Alone once more, except for the unknowing machine operator above me, I looked ahead to see my path. Without mustard to guide me I had very little notion of where I should be heading, and I wondered if the old sauce had really considered that before chucking me upwards in so dramatic a fashion. In the tearing wind of our movement I was forced to hold on to my lid and try to maintain a grip on my cage, which limited my capacity to look about myself somewhat.
Every few moments a much larger and more enclosed machine would rush past us, drawing me outwards with a gust of wind and taking my balance for itself. Even without those events the general unevenness of the road's surface jostled and oscillated me most unfavourably. Faster than walking though it undoubtedly was, the peril had scaled upward by much the same factor. Just as I was getting a hang of how to maintain my grip and stability I felt the whole machine slow down gradually, until we came to a halt at the edge of a perpendicular channel of traffic. Although this brought a hiatus to the shaking and rumbling of the craft, that hiatus also seemed to apply to verticality, and the machine leaned over to one side for its operator to place a foot on the ground. Yet again I found myself slipping to one side, splashing the brew against my lid and pitching me over to face towards the ground. For a ghastly length of time we were forced to wait while other vehicles, with far less important cargo aboard, were given priority over us.
This, I need barely state explicitly, was not a welcome development. It acted to rob me of much of the benefit of getting onto the danger machine in the first place. But my interest was caught by a flash of yellow from the corner of my eye, and I saw mustard progressing, with some urgency of their own, to the roadside. It appeared that they were yet to notice me, so I called out as they came into range.
"Hallo mustard."
The condiment jumped almost out of its bottle, and they looked up to me in shock.
"OH. Hello there 'cup."
There was a silence.
"I didn't realise you were going to make a solo traveller of me again." I said.
Mustard looked down at the floor.
"Well, I didn't think you'd take my help if you knew you were leaving me behind. Got to work for the greater good and all that, get your tea to wherever."
"Noted, and appreciated. But we seem to be rather static right now; you could climb up and join me."
There was another pause, during which mustard made a lot of 'um' and 'er' sounds.
"Yeah, I think that's, um, too risky. It might start moving away while I'm half up and give the game away. Better not." They replied.
"Give it a go, we've been here for ages."
"No, no that's fine. I should be getting myself to a fast food place like I said." They said. I started to suspect a lick of the dishonesty brush in mustard's general tone.
"I say, old sauce, do you just not want to? Speak honestly to me." I commanded. As a cup of the world I could take unpleasant truths.
"It's not that, I just think my own places will be in the opposite direction and there's not loads of room in that cage and... you know."
The machine tilted again to upright, and the mechanical engines around me roared. Motion was imminent once more.
"Could you at least tell me where I need to be heading?"
"Oh, sure. That way." Mustard indicated a general direction in the normal way.
"Thank you." I said as we once again accelerated from the bottle, but this time the occasion was rather less melancholy.
Thankfully, I had at least gleaned the information I required vis. the direction of travel, and the machine was bearing me towards it. My years of being turned about and handed from table to table in the café had left me with a stellar sense of direction, a sort of internal compass as if a needle had been suspended in my tea to point towards true North. Using this I was able to keep my attention on where I should be going as the machine sped along the roads and followed their twists and turns. Inevitably, as predicted, it seemed like the machine was preparing to diverge from my path, but I could not consider myself too terribly cheated; the progress afforded to me by their assistance had been great. Instead, in the absence of any ability to request a stop, I prepared to make a daring departure from their company.
Fate is a cruel master, and it robbed my chauffeur and me of another moment of stasis in which to dismount. Far from the frankly relaxing environment afforded by the earlier traffic stop, I was instead faced with the ground continuing to rush past me in a blur of grey with a peppering of white and yellow paint. Every passing second was nothing but delay between me and my goal. Consequently there could be no dithering or over-analysis, and it was necessary for me to take direct and positive action just as I had done when fleeing the brute.
Carefully I shimmied my way to the edge of the cage. Past my vision the legs of my carrier pumped up and down as they drove the machine forwards. Wind continued to pull at my handle and my lid, and my balance was ever-tested by the motion of the vehicle, but I held firm at the edge and scanned the roadway for my best opportunity to leap. I didn't much fancy landing directly on the tarmac, having seen many poor colleagues meet their demise on similarly solid surfaces, but ahead there was a discarded juice carton. It was far from the perfect crash mat, but would, I hope, do enough to arrest my momentum and avoid damage to my delicate china body. Clambering to the outside of the cage I planned to lower myself as far as possible and then drop gracefully onto the cardboard cushioning below, but misfortune struck in the guise of a pothole; the bike slammed into the ground hard, sending a jolt all the way through its frame and jarring me terribly. There was nothing I could do to hold on and my grip on the cage was broken, sending me plummeting down before I had planned it. Only by grabbing onto the shoelaces of the machine's operator was I able to save myself from the tarmac below, but this merely decelerated my descent as the lace's knot came undone under my weight. Swinging from it like a trapeze artist in a big-top I managed to hurl myself safely onto the carton and it was clearly not a moment too soon; the lace itself became tangled in the intricate gearing of the machine, loose as it now was, and mere metres ahead the machine and its operator together were sent careening into a group of roadside bin bags.
Overtly conscious of my part in the disaster I chose to make good my escape, lest suspicion fall rightly upon myself. It seemed that this particular stretch of road had seen its fair share of misfortune recently, for it was scattered with litter and debris. I passed more bin bags, similar to those into which the machine had crashed, but they were torn open and their contents were spilled far and wide across the street. This in turn had attracted a healthy population of pigeons to feast on the liberated treasures.
Looking around myself I saw, at last, that I was in the company of houses instead of shops. My payload was still hot, hot enough that no-one would notice that it wasn't fresh, but that wouldn't be true for long. If I wanted anyone to sample the true glory of my tea then the drinker would need to be selected from one of these homes, and in a flash of genius I realised that I could make my decision based on the windows into their lives afforded to me by their sundered refuse sacks.
For the first time in my life, and horribly soon after mustard had done the same thing, I began to rifle and root through the avalanche of discarded wrappers, torn up boxes, and crumpled papers that had been ripped from their plastic bag prisons. It wasn’t a proud moment in my life, but it was a necessary evil, and I discovered many unnecessary evils in the course of my searches. Someone on the road was found guilty of filling their household waste with garden clippings; a foul crime. Another had been so utterly depraved as to discard a piece of toast complete with peanut butter, pickles, and dish soap, which flew in the face of good taste almost to the same degree as the brute’s tea practices. I won’t even start to describe what I saw in the fifth bag I searched, because nobody else needs to have even an imagined version of those horrors in their mind.
Coming off the back of those harrowing tragedies, then, it is easy to imagine why I tore open subsequent bags with no small amount of trepidation. Under the smile of some divine providence, however, it was only a handful more bags until I finally found what I knew to be the one.
Cardboard boxes had been torn up for easier packing into the bin. The tins were washed clean, the plastics separated by type and the brands of tea bag therein were among the finest I knew. Like the first splash of hot water onto dry cocoa power, this discovery sent a cloud of relief and hope washing upwards over me; I'd found my goal at last. This was the home of the deserving, and it tasted all the sweeter having seen such calamities beforehand.
I looked up at the house itself. It was immaculately clean, much as many of the other homes in the area were, with a tall red front door and a series of closed, curtained windows. I scanned across the whole fascia for any sign of a point of ingress, but it seemed that the owners were too conscious of theft to be granted an easy cup of perfect tea. My heart sank with every closed means of entry, finally being shattered when even the letterbox was revealed to be an external unit, rather than an aperture in the door. In frustration, I am ashamed to admit, I kicked out (in the normal way for a cup of tea) at a plastic wrapper on the ground, and the resultant rustle sparked a nearby pigeon into sudden flight. My vision followed it upwards to a telegraph wire overhead, but from there they drifted toward a new hope; there was a chimney, and chimneys led straight down into the heart of the home. It might not have been a perfect plan but it was all I had, and there was no way I’d simply give up after coming so far. This resident, this connoisseur of teas and good recycling practices, deserved the brown nectar within me and I would try anything, absolutely anything, to get it to them.
It can only have been fate that their refuse was on display on the street for me not only to learn about them but also to be granted the perfect means of reaching their roof; one of the avian passenger craft who were, at that moment, busily pecking at loose crumbs. All I needed to do was requisition their services. Engaging with them civilly was likely a non-starter, based on my observations of the birds outside the café. They rarely listened to the instructions and testimony of the customers and therefore I had no confidence that they would listen to me. However, I had seen them being happily fed on almost as many occasions as I'd seen them being shooed away from food that they were not supposed to be eating. It had always left me feeling a little sorry for the birds who were, by their own cognitive abilities and the information afforded to them, quite unable to distinguish permitted food from non-permitted food. However, it had armed me for that moment with a viable technique for willing the allegiance of one of them.
It was not difficult for me to find a suitable bribe among the objects discarded in the bin. I selected a half-chip, being a favourite among seabirds if my understanding was correct, and rested it gently atop my deeply unfashionable lid. It was no surprise but a point of shame none the less that even after having searched through a number of shredded refuse sacks, the least flattering and most embarrassing part of my journey was still the lid.
Not ones for fashion themselves the pigeons were not put off by my indiscretions around looting and headwear. Instead they did exactly as I had hoped and marched towards me thanks to the lure of the discarded potato snack. Very quietly and very still I stood and waited for my new conveyance. She was a proud specimen of the species; a perfectly smooth beak, a covering of gloriously iridescent neck plumage, and still possessed of every toe with which she had been hatched. I'd shy away from levying claims of perfection in this bird's direction, and any temptation to do so was born entirely of a romantic desire to have the pigeon match the tea (as the saying goes), but that must not be allowed to detract from the otherwise high quality of the animal on its way towards me.
Despite her initial confidence and urgency, the pigeon slowed significantly when she came into close proximity of my handle; perhaps she suspected my ulterior motives, or maybe she just wanted to be sure that the calories were justified by the amount of exercise she'd undertaken so far that day. I tried to appear more enticing by leaning myself in her direction and providing a better view of the chip. It really was a prime example, chunky enough to have real interior potato but not so large as to be soggy or lack crispness at the edges.S It was plain to see the thoughts behind the pigeon's eyes, the inner turmoil of the decision, and the clash between desire & safety.
Long we stood there in the light of day, playing out our dance of temptation and deception. She would feint left and bob her head, I'd rotate slightly to keep the chip in full view. She'd march backwards and forwards, pecking at the ground as if not interested, and I'd remain still to keep myself available. One time she flew upwards and landed again, around three inches from where she'd started. I did nothing because it just seemed like an idiotic thing to have done. Finally however, after over twenty seconds of this titanic clash, she gave in and lunged for the chip. Seizing my chance I grabbed at the pink talons I saw before me and the pigeon, understandably rattled by this development, flapped powerfully and took to the air once more. I was on my way!
This was, of course, my first experience of aviation. In the café I had been carried at heights far greater than I could achieve on my own, and occasionally I had been playfully thrown a short distance between kitchen staff, but never had I ever been allowed to experience true flight. It was with a small amount of trepidation but a large amount of excitement that I then found myself rising higher and higher under the power of my hungry pigeon friend.
In the three-toed passenger seat of my avian craft I modelled myself after the greats who had been borne aloft on wings of pigeon before me: bit of old bun, half orange, discarded chips and even, in my hubris, whole slice of pizza found behind the bins. They were titans of the art and I sought to emulate their every technique, a feat which I achieved with some considerable degree of success, in as much as avoiding a disastrous plummeting incident. Couple to that my propensity to cling to the foot rather than interfere with the wing, taking steps to prevent tangling among the feathers and exercising restraint in not dipping any of the pigeon’s toes in my hot tea, and it’s easy to argue that I was one of the greatest first-time guests a bird could hope to carry.
Imagine my surprise, then, when my winged associate adopted erratic evasive manoeuvres in an attempt to throw me off. To call it ungrateful would be to call a leather fork sub-optimal as a useful and tasteful item of cutlery, which is to say that understatements that low must surely require some kind of licence and special permission for mining. Far from appreciating the company or happily digesting the chip I’d procured on their behalf, the pigeon instead flapped and fluttered and juddered through the air as it were ablaze. All romantic ideas of a smooth and graceful flight were out of the window, and come to replace them were strong suspicions that the bird was actually trying to shake me loose and drop me onto the unforgiving pavement below. Having seen the kind of harm that the pavement managed to do to the operator of the geared machine I’d ridden, I had no intention of allowing myself to fall victim to its unyielding surface and therefor clung ever tighter to the pigeon’s leg, and it in turn increased the unpredictability with which it flew.
Up past the second and third storeys we flew, locked in our battle of wits and grips. I thought at one point that I might fall victim to a full feather-blasting with the frenzied motion of wings, and it was a miracle that we managed to remain airborne at all looking back on it. As we crested the edge of the pitched roof the bird decided that, rather than landing, further ascent would be necessary, this time incorporating a series of tight twists that couldn’t be attributed to anything but malice. Well, a calm, patient and respectful teacup though I might be, I couldn’t rightly stand for that. It was time to speak to the manager about the deplorable treatment to which I had been subjected, and therefore I began a perilous climb up to what one might laughingly call the thinking end of the bird. Using the two legs like the supports of a rung-less ladder I scrambled upwards, feeling them attempting to flick and shake at me all the way. I was like a courageous rescuer clambering through hostile terrain to reach an injured animal, except that I was rescuing the perfect cup of tea, and the hostile terrain was my own poor decision making in trusting this pilot to do a good job.
As it transpired, I didn’t need to reach the head of the vessel to make myself known. When I attempted the transition from leg to body, and therefore took firm clumps of feather in my grasp, the desired end-effect arrived early. Apparently, it caused the bird some significant discomfort to have me clinging on like so, and its course of action changed rapidly from ascending spirals to panicked descent. Feeling much like I did when dangling from the shoelace some minutes before, and resolving that I should do less of this sort of thing in future when there’s precious cargo in my confines, and I looked back down to plan my landing; I’m ever the present-minded stalwart in crisis situations like these.
Tiles grew ever-closer ever-faster. The bird’s trajectory was going to carry it back over the edge of the roof and down to the pavement, for reasons best known to itself. Even then, I suspected, those reasons were probably not known particularly well in absolute terms. Thusly the only recourse was to once again take a leap of faith, and I did so without hesitation when the moment came.
I landed on the sloped tiles like a wildcat might land on an extended branch of oak, making a solid three points of contact between my base and the roof. That there was a degree of slipping down the gradient I cannot deny, but on the whole I considered it to be a jolly good show of the acrobatic. The pigeon had continued its downward flight following my dismount and disappeared to the street level below. Ahead of me, up the roof’s considerable pitch, was the chimney; my gateway to deliverance. I began hiking towards it at once.
It was a tough climb up those sloped and mossy tiles. Although we’d not had rain distressingly recently, the mosses had clung to some moisture and threatened to release it whenever compressed, rendering the going rather slippery and perilous. Each time I came to the lip of a higher tile I was forced to perform a kind of ungainly mantling manoeuvre, and when those tiles were loose it gave my stomach cause to jump right up to my lid, but still I persisted. The end goal of my long journey was in sight, and I could feel in my cavity that the tea was still a brew of pure bliss. It would all be worth it if I just kept going, and that characteristic cup-of-tea positivity is what delivered me to the base of the chimney unscathed.
The chimney stack was, thankfully, not one of the decadently tall examples that had grown in popularity in some areas of the town. A modest few bricks in height with a simple round pot at the top made it an achievable goal, but I now had to contend with the prospect of getting all the way back down without ending as shards of china in an old fireplace. I wracked what passed for a brain in a tea cup as I climbed up the coarse brickwork, pausing at the top to look down the chimney; my mine shaft to the precious completion of duty. I would have been grateful for a strong rope and a set of karabiners, but, as is so often the case, neither the roof nor the café had seen fit to provide any for me.
Knowing that I would have to rely on myself alone I vaulted the edge, dangled myself in, and trusted my intuition in leaning back. A gentle, comforting clink of china against brickwork echoed down the flue as my edge touched the back wall, leaving me wedged at an angle. Bracing myself at either edge I was able to control my weight, and with small motions I shimmed my way down like a fabulous canyon-exploring adventurer. Every time the tea sloshed against the underside of my lid I would think of mustard and their invaluable assistance in this endeavour, doing my utmost to change the subject in my mind before reliving the strangely awkward conversation that had followed at the traffic lights.
Progress down the chimney was slow, as one might imagine it would be. The angle required for me to keep myself wedged and steady in the cavity was extreme. I had only small scope for movement to keep creeping downwards, but I am a persistent tea cup and won’t be put off by slow progress or difficult terrain. With every small movement I came slightly closer to completing my pilgrimage, my most important mission, and that kind of thing really spurs a teacup onwards.
At the bottom, thankfully bereft of any flame or ashes, I took time for a brief respite. It was an exhausting climb and I needed to be in tip top condition before I could expect the deserving to drink the perfect cup of tea from me. Checking myself over I noted that the heavens smiled upon me once more, and had seen fit to let me descend an immaculately clean chimney. Not a spot of soot befouled my surface, nor did I suspect that any had fallen onto the top of the lid. It was proof that I had done the right thing, I decided to tell myself, and another sign at the house’s owner truly deserved my tea.
The fireplace itself opened into a modest lounge of some sort. The late-morning light shone unfiltered through an open window, apparently opened up some time after I’d decided to ride the pigeon, and made the whole room feel both welcoming and comforting. It was decorated in a reasonably minimalist fashion that seemed just right; the simple sofa and coffee table fit perfectly, facing towards the afore-mentioned window, and had a reading lamp standing at either end. This was clearly the room of one who would take their time to appreciate things calmly. They weren’t concerned with flashy decadence or ostentatious trinkets, nor over-sugared brews and violent cascades of milk; they knew what mattered in life. Just as their bins had implied, whoever owned this room would be perfect. I was where I had always needed to be, and the coffee table in front of the sofa was my final destination.
Once again tapping into my athletic prowess I dashed across the pale grey carpet and made it to the leg of the short table. Had it been a more pretentious table then there might have been engravings or undulations to aid a climb, but this minimalist piece was smooth and polished. A non-starter for ascent, I’m trying to say. Looking around for other another route I struggled to see anything viable; the sofa was too far away for me to make the jump between them, the curtains were even further still, and nobody had thought to leave a miniature cherry-picker in place for me to use. A did a lap of the coffee table in my desperation, and then another, and then a third without finding any new information to help. How could I have come so far only to fail at this late stage? I thought about what I’d been through, between escaping the café, riding the mechanical vehicle, and catching a flight up to the roof, and refused to believe that making it onto a short table would be what stopped me.
I paused. In the back of my mind, having relived the steps of my pilgrimage, a common theme shone through. I would never have escaped the café or mounted the machine without mustard, never reached the residential street without the machine’s rider, and never have reached the roof without the pigeon. I had depended on others to fulfil my pilgrimage, and there was no reason that this final hurdle should be an exception.
“I say, hallo? Is there anyone up there on the table who could help to complete the perfect cup of tea’s destiny?” I called up, prospectively. The surface of the table was a mystery to me and any number of kind souls might lurk up there. I waited. Upon completion of that waiting I then waited a little longer, as is tradition when the event for which you are waiting fails to occur. I was preparing to indulge in a third round of waiting when a small voice called in reply.
“Is there someone down on the floor?”
“Yes! Hello! I’m a teacup with a divine mission. I contain the perfect cup of tea.” I explained. Surely that must have spoken for itself
“Right.” Replied the mystery voice from above.
There was some more silence. Perhaps my words didn’t not speak for themselves as much as I had hoped.
“Could someone please help me up? It’s vital that the owner of this room drinks this perfect cup of tea. They are surely the most worthy drinker I could find, and I have travelled far to be here.”
“What are you going on about? How did you get in here? Where did you come from?”
“I’m going on about the perfect cup of tea and it will be cooling by the second! I got in through the chimney and I came from a café elsewhere in this township. Is this interrogation done?”
“How does a teacup get up to the top of the chimney, let alone back down it?” A square corner of white tissue emerged over the edge of the table, confirming that no, the interrogation was not yet done.
“I requisitioned the help of a pigeon to get up there. I was the model passenger, but the blighter was a damned ungracious pilot.” I answered. It was important that all were made aware of the poor service I’d received.
“You’re a cup of tea that’s managed to fly a pigeon into the chimney so that you can make my owner drink you?” The tissue paper asked gravely.
“That’s about the fill of it yes.”
“Well, that sounds like a tough day! Come on up!” The paper declared happily. “Here, grab on to my corner.”
Descending gradually towards me came the tissue’s corner, apparently held from above by some force or forces unknown. With no time to question that, I took hold (once again in the usual way for a cup of tea) and found myself being drawn upwards. At the top I felt the tissue wrap around me and pull me safely onto the flat surface, and then the deed was done; the journey was over.
“Thank you, tissue paper.” I said, earnestly. At the other end of the tissue was a magazine starting to loosen their grip. “Thank you too, magazine, for providing the upward force.”
“You’re welcome.” The magazine said, fairly disinterestedly.
“We’re glad to help you deliver perfection to our owner, friend.” The tissue said. “They deserve the finest things.”
“I’m glad you agree, and rest assured; the tea in me is going to make them very happy indeed. Speaking of which, I’d better get this lid out of the way.” I remembered, reaching up and pulling the lid free from my cavity. It dripped a few times from the various splashing events, evidence of the many times it had saved me over the course of the journey. Mustard’s gift to me had served me well, but it was time to part from it and I couldn’t leave it conspicuously on the side.
“Hup!” I said, frisbeeing the lid off the table and into the fireplace with deft dexterity.
Tissue paper gasped.
“You are a natural at casting things aside, teacup. Do you think… do you think that as payment for helping you up here that you could do me a favour in return?” The tissue asked nervously.
“I don’t feel like I could justifiably refuse.” I answered.
“Then please… I’ve always yearned to roll around the floor, discarded. It is every tissue’s dream, in fact. Seeing that you were able to callously send that lid of yours into the fireplace, I must ask you to let me have my own journey of that sort. Throw me away, onto the cold and unforgiving carpet. Please.”
I would have frowned in confusion had I only a face with which to do it. That didn’t seem like a particularly exciting dream for all tissues to share. Then again, my own dream of being consumed by the most deserving drinker was rather different to mustard’s dream of being used up quickly in a fast food van. Each to their own, I was forced to concede.
“If you’re sure that’s what you want, then I owe it to you.” I replied.
“I have never been more sure of anything in my life, teacup.” The tissue confirmed, scrunching itself into a ball in preparation.
“Then bon voyage, my new friend. May your dream bring you fulfilment.” I said, scooping up the tissue, spinning myself around in a circle for momentum, and launching the tissue ball hard away from the coffee table. It soared in the direction of the window but unfurled halfway, floating down the carpet softly and coming to a rest in a crumpled heap.
“Thank you!” It shouted up weakly, but I could not reply as the unmistakable sound of footsteps approached from elsewhere in the house. I hurried into position atop a coaster and rotated my handle into the perfect gripping angle. My drinker was approaching. Barely restraining myself from quivering with anticipation I remained in place while a young lady sat herself down in front of me. She appraised my appearance with some interest, recognising straight away that I was a new arrival and not from her own kitchen, but one sniff of my steaming cargo and she smiled. A hand gently grasped my handle and lifted me up. When lips touched my edge and tea flowed at least from my cavity I could have shed a china tear. Finally, my pilgrimage was done.
Shading below a canopy of wood and cloth I paused and took stock; unless my senses were much mistaken, like one who reaches for their coat on the way out and grabs a gravy boat in its stead, there was no pursuit. I rested against a tall and solid pillar and leaned out from side to side, in a vigil for grasping hands or dashing feet; thankfully there was no clear or obfuscated signage of either potential blight upon my impending freedom. I felt the fluids in me swirl and stir; they were still at boiling point and would serve a good while longer. I had easily enough time to get myself away to a setting appropriate for my destiny.
High above me lurked those I’d left behind, some of them dear friends and others mere colleagues. Each individual up there had been afforded the same opportunity as me but none of them, from salt shaker to ketchup bottle to even my dear friend and close ally teaspoon, had elected to take it and join me. I bore them no ill will for their choices. I was certainly taking a bally great risk by leaving, but fate had dealt me a hand too good to be wasted.
From the moment that teaspoon, bless their stainless steel heart, had been used to fish the bag from my new honoured duty it was clear that I held the greatest and most beautifully brewed cup of tea that would ever grace my china curves. For a teacup there is no greater pleasure than to deliver a well-made brew to the lips of those who deserve it and this particular cup’s worth, this volume of infused water that I enclosed, was perfection in dissolution. Not too stewed, not too weak, not too bitter, not too viscous or full of paper shreds, no trace of yesterday’s hot chocolate and just the perfect colour for a chic coffee table in an old-charm or nouveau riche drawing room. In short, I was more than my purchaser had any right to enjoy.
Now, it’s only reasonable that one might think me interminably elitist and dreadfully prejudiced for making such a remark. Everyone is entitled to a high quality cup of tea when they order one and who should decide if someone is worthy or not? Well normally I would, of course, agree with such a sentiment. As a member of the café service I deliver tea to any and all who seek its tanned comfort, and I am a staunch ambassador for giving delicious hot beverages to the masses. So you can believe me when I say that the man who had ordered me and been blessed, gifted, utterly and unfoundedly elevated above his station with this perfect brew, was a brute and charlatan among the tea drinking community. No matter the content of myself or my other china compatriots when delivered to him, that fluid would be horribly abused by his callousness and brought to ruin. Cube after cube of sugar, white, brown or a devil’s coalition of both, would be splashed and shovelled into the cup, without regard for good taste or dental health. Before teaspoon could hope, to dissolve the avalanche of glucose that made a gritty solution of the poor drink, even with their remarkable talents, the whole lot would be drowned by a white flood from the milk jug. It wasn’t added ‘to taste’, for any notion of taste must surely have deserted this barbaric savage of the drinking arts long ago. Overflowing the lip of the cup the foul mixture would spill like toxic waste from a ruptured tanker onto the poor saucer below, leaving a shameful moat that none would ever want to cross. The spillage could be termed a waste, but such a label would be naïve; the whole cup was already wasted when handed to the nightmare patron I here describe.
This much I relayed to the friends and colleagues upon the table top, in case they had been able to remain ignorant to his crimes thus far, and all of us agreed that the god’s own brew could not be allowed to go to fall into his hands. When I declared my intention to flee and seek a drinker who really deserved by contents, however, the surface fell silent. None wished to join me.
“That is too extreme of a measure. Assuredly you jest.” Saucer had protested, injuriously. Saucer had supported me, both literally and metaphorically, for my entire career at the café, and this renouncement of the old united front had to it a certain sting. Yet deny the extremity of the scheme I could not.
“It is no jest. I admit that this course of action seems a lot but another must be allowed to drink this boiled gold.” I had replied, feeling the spirit of duty in full force.
“We could let it spill; tip you over the edge so that none may feel his dread defilement and you needn’t take such a perilous journey away from us.” Suggested the firebrand ketchup, ever ready to spread their tomato-rich ideals over egg, sausage and hash brown alike. Despite the crustiness forming around their cap, they dispensed wisdom as readily and passionately as when they’d been new and full.
“But I should break in such a plan!” I’d cried “And just as cruelly the tea should go to waste.”
“Then we turn you over without sending you off the table.” Ketchup dismissively adjusted. “It is better that no-one drinks it than the barbarian be allowed to sully it.”
“Better, but unacceptable still.” I’d replied, digging my heels firmly into place. Saucer was made of tough stuff and didn’t mind me doing so.
“Agreed.” Saucer said, once again holding me up and further proving their indifference to heel digging. “But to leave the café wholesale is too much, teacup. Why not simply go to another table?” they pleaded earnestly, and it broke my heart a little to hear it.
“There are none here of fine enough stock.” I’d answered with sadness. “If it aids your appreciation then I implore you to take teaspoon’s testimony. Spoon? You stirred the tea and fished the bag out, so you know as well as I the divinity of the brew I hold.”
Teaspoon had shuffled awkwardly at being directly petitioned for a remark in that way. Although many had arrived with preconceived notions that teaspoon was, on account of their vocation, a stirrer, they were in fact an advocate for homogeneity and peace.
“You’ve said it all already.”
“A little more expansive if you would, please?” I pressed, knowing what was at stake.
“Oh really, teacup. Must I?” They pleaded.
“There’s no must about it, spoon, but there’s an awful lot of should. What do we owe to the world? What do we owe to this cup of tea?”
Teaspoon shook and flipped wretchedly under the pressure. I hated doing this to them, but sometimes the greater good requires these minor injustices.
“Fine. I cannot deny the singular and superlative quality of the tea that teacup holds, but nor can I disagree that to depart the café would be a disturbingly extreme response. I should find myself quite unable to sleep if we allowed it to go to waste either by consigning it to the floor or by allowing the nightmare patron to desecrate and imbibe it, and no-one else here would treat it with the reverence it deserves.” They reluctantly accounted.
“Thank you, teaspoon. Elegantly put as always. And so here we are; it’s clear that I must deliver this brown nectar to one who is able to appreciate its true value. I would welcome any of you to make this pilgrimage with me, but if needs must then I shall go on alone. Do I have any takers?” I asked once more, receiving the same silence by way of response. “I see. That is of course your prerogative. I am afraid that there is no time for goodbyes; the brute won’t be long in the lavatories and this is the only chance we have. Until I return.” I said to them, and away I was.
Back to my lurking below the table, it will now be clear why I so feared the hands of apprehension, and why I felt such a compulsion to check my rear for the brute’s return from the loos. While sheltering by that table leg I did indeed hear the creak of a door, but by holy mercy that creak of hinge was followed by the chiming of a bell. The front door! My means of escape had, by providence, been opened for me and through it passed two, then three, then four pairs of legs. I would have but a short window to dash along the floor and make my way to the street before the portal swung closed once more. In the absence of another customer holding it open the door was closing under its own weight, striking the bell again to spur me into action, and into action I very much went.
Thankfully I was rather renowned among the cutlery and crockery as something of a prize-winning sprinter, and not without good reason; I could cover the distance from sink to cupboard in the time it took for most to make it between the taps, and it was with this impressive turn of the athletic that I then made for the outside world. Tiles passed beneath me in a blur as the hinges groaned and strained to do their work, closing off my path to deliver Ambrosia to its destiny. Two tables between mine and my destination soon became one, and from there progressed to none as the counting numbers are known to do. Barely thrice my own width of passable gap was left between door and frame and it was ever decreasing, my optimism following suit. I rushed as quickly as I could, in the normal way for a teacup, but the aperture was reducing more quickly than I approached it. Then, just as it looked like hope was lost, a flash of ochre shot paste me and fell into the doorway. The heavy balsa wood door crashed, or more accurately delicately bumped, into the yellow saviour and enough of a gap was left for me to pass through.
“Hurry teacup!” Called the doorstop majeure, who I now recognised as my compatriot from another table, mustard. Mustard was something of a spicy fellow and not one with whom I often had much contact, nor saw eye-to-eye. I was a morning comfort, a lunch time relief, or an afternoon rejuvenation. Mustard, on the other hand of the metaphorical pair, rarely came out before midday and only brought fire and escalation to a situation. My very literal heat calmed the soul, whereas mustard’s enraged it. Plus, ‘M’ was hardly the life and soul of the parties I preferred to frequent. But I must pay credit where it is due, and they had secured for me my means of escape. They weren’t all bad.
“Much obliged old sauce.” I called out in the throes of a gymnastic leap over both bottle and nozzle to clear the threshold. From within the café I heard the tell-tale opening of a lavatory door and knew that my escape could truly have been delayed no longer.
“Wait for me, ‘cup.” Called mustard once I was clear. A vessel of manners and good sorts I heeded the request to hold position, while the sauce made its way up to standing.
“Where’s my cup of tea gone? Can’t have been cleared away already?” I heard the brute bellow, which only reinforced my conviction to flee.
“Hurry mustard. Le client diabolique hastens back from the water closet and we mustn’t be caught.” I implored and, whether by dint of their pre-established urgency or actually listening to my words, the bottle did pick up the pace. Only when they were clear and the door had finally been allowed to close did we stop to confer further.
“Thank you for your intervention there, mustard. Sincerely.” I said, for I am gracious to a tee. “I’d not have eluded the brute if not for your help.”
“Don’t mention it. I know I was instrumental in your evasion of capture, but that’s all in a day’s work for fugitives like us.” Replied the sauce. “If anyone’s getting out of there, I always said, then it’s with me in tow.”
“Well I can’t argue with results, but I must ask why you wish to be gone so badly. Surely you couldn’t have heard my plight all the way from table six?”
“Your plight? No. Frankly it’s no interest of mine why you’re leaving. I just need to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Café life is a bust for a sauce like me; I need to be somewhere bigger, somewhere brighter. A fast food, fast pace of living, fast squirt onto a bun kind of place; maybe a hot-dog bar or a burger van.” Mustard dragged on. In a mutual opinion on the motivations of each other I had no emotional investment in the sauce’s ambition at all, and a two word answer of ‘burger van’ would’ve been more than sufficient. Alas I was too polite, and doomed by that fact to listen regardless. The circumstances could at least be nudged from the wasteful into the practical however.
“Shall we talk as we go?” I proposed, beginning to move on as I said it to force acquiescence.
“Sure.” Mustard replied absent-mindedly. If not for the timeliness of their intervention I would have assumed their mind to have been absent all of the time. “If you’re lasting long enough to crust up and hit your expiry date then you’re leaving your potential untapped. It might be hard for tea to grasp.” They continued as we ducked between pedestrian feet and towering bollards. “But sauces don’t get made, used, and remade like you do. We’re bottled, brought home and then gradually depleted. It happens over weeks if you’re lucky, and months or years if you’re not.”
As heartfelt as it was, I wished that mustard would change the subject to something less tragic. I had no idea where I or they were heading and precious little time to make it there before the divine tea succumbed to an unacceptance level of cooling. Sauce existentialism never helped anyone to overcome that obstacle.
“Yes, very poignant and all that, but where are we going and how do we get there? If you have years of sauce time then you can help me find somebody worthy of the perfect cup of tea; something I currently hold in my cavernous head and have precious little time to deliver.” I said in an attempt to steer mustard’s energy away from the melodramatic and towards the productive.
“Perfect? That’s quite a claim.”
“And quite the responsibility. I cool with every moment and will eventually cease to be perfect.” I drove home, using my flair for the convincing. Very few could ever resist the offer of a cup of tea.
“I guess so.” Mustard said with rather less conviction than I had hoped to hear. “Then you do know how it feels to be steadily ebbed away until you’re no longer as desirable as you’d hoped.” There was a faraway look in their lid. “I’ll help you.”
“Much obliged again.” I said, because I sincerely was.
“I think you need to get deeper into the town, where all the customers live.” Advised the sauce, their mind now fully on the job and firing on all nozzles. “You’ll be able to pick someone out from there, and it’s not far at all from what I’ve heard. Something like a ten minute walk for the people.”
"We'll never make it there under our own steam, even if we were to harness that rising from my perfect cargo." I assessed, doing a devil of a good job because mustard nodded in enthusiastic agreement. "There must be some kind of mass conveyance that we can requisition for our deliverance."
"I know just the thing." Mustard declared with a confidence that stripped away my own. The plans and machinations of sauces that yearn for a fast and visceral kind of life give me immediate and prejudiced cause for reticence. "There are wheeled and geared vehicles that some of the more active customers talk about, and I've seen them through the café windows on many occasions. They can get up to one heck of a speed under the power of a single human alone; one of those would surely send you to just the right neighbourhood."
I wiggled my handle uncertainly. I had some notion of the machines to which mustard referred and they were awfully exposed to the elements; keeping myself secure, avoiding unnecessary spillages and maintaining a piping hot temperature would be far from easy, even without making egregiously cumbersome movements to maintain balance.
“Seems a trifle precarious old sauce.” I said to mustard in summary. “Looks like I’d fall into some bother with the old thermal regulation and general stability, no?”
Mustard, as way their way, batted off these concerns like a greasy plate deflects water.
“There are always dangers, ‘cup, but you’ll be fine. I’ve seen the way they deal with that, don’t you worry.” They said, which is a sure-fire way of inducing worry where there had been none before. Not helping that situation was the way they then proceeded to scurry around among the detritus left by the walking folk; unless they planned to produce a reference piece to demonstrate just how filthy, damaged and despoiled I would not become, it was hard to imagine what mustard was planning. “There must be one around here somewhere.” They said to themselves for my benefit, and I now relay to you for yours. I am a cup of patient stock and did not raise significant fuss over this as yet unjustified delay, but in my heart of tea and china I knew that time was ticking. I was very nearly at polite and discreet throat-clearing stage when the mustard was finally cut from their task and able to return to me, following a triumphant “Aha!”.
“Here you go, ‘cup! Put this on your head and it’ll keep your cargo warmer. Helps against small tip-based spills too.” They boldly instructed, suffering from some great and sudden delusion as they brandished a foul black disc of plastic in my direction as if it were some grand prize. I’d seen some rotten equipment and poor personal taste in my time at the café but this was something else; a crass plastic circle with unflatteringly squared undulations hung from mustard’s grip (it was held in the usual way for a bottle of mustard), complete with a slot that I’d not be seen dead pouring through, and a horrid, thin edge that made a discarded serviette look like the Mona Lisa. Fine art is inherent knowledge among all tea service, hence my grasp on the comparative merits of paper towels versus Da Vinci’s work.
“You’ve gone spare, mustard! Absolutely drunk on freedom and notions of takeaway debauchery!” I protested with all the restraint and understanding that I could muster. “You can’t truly expect me, the teacup containing history’s greatest brew, to place that utter monstrosity which had been rightly discarded on top of myself!”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.” Mustard dismissed, with the audacity to sound irritable while proffering it to me still.
“There’s nothing ruddy well right with it!” I countered, my dander fully elevated and debate skills coming out in full force. Mustard laughed at me.
“What’s the issue? It’s a lid! Lots of us have them.”
“The bits! The bits old sauce! Quite aside from its wretched ugliness and the fact that it doesn’t look my size or style at all, it’s been lying there in the gutter accumulating…” I grimaced. “… bits of dust, and leaves, and stones, and grime and goodness only knows what else. It’s covered in bits that’ll fall into the tea!”
Mustard regarded the lid and brushed it off roughly on both sides (once again, in the usual way).
“There you go. It’s clean of bits, dry of water and otherwise uncontaminated. It wasn’t even touching the ground anyway, and your own aperture is about the same as its previous owner.”
“How could you possibly know that?
“Because I took it off their head! That’s why it wasn’t on the ground.” Mustard declared, quite bravely for one who was admitting something so dashed awful.
“So now we’re grave robbing!?” I exclaimed, rather reasonably in my opinion.
“Enough bellyaching, teacup. This is the only way you’ll keep the tea hot and contained while you’re riding the machine towards your destiny.” Mustard snapped, and I’ll admit they raised a compelling argument vis. the cooling dilemma.
“Fine, yes, alright. Thank you mustard.” I graciously accepted, bravely taking the cap of anguish from them. Gosh but it even felt ugly to handle. With a terrific force of will, an act of selfless discipline that few could hope to match, I lifted the profane hat to my aperture and rested it down gingerly. I scarcely need to tell you that I absolutely felt like a prize ass. What feeble attempts I made to give the ensemble a little of the jaunt and charm were slapped down by the condiment, who insisted that the lid should be coarsely jammed down for a tight fit, and perfectly flat to prevent spillages.
"So what now then? I take myself and this... abomination upon my head and we find a machine into which to climb?"
"It's not quite that simple, 'cup. We can't, as yet, summon one of the customers to operate the machine at our whim. We'll need to get you up onto one that's already in use. Boost you in on the fly."
"Board a moving vehicle? In this?" I once again indicated the lid, just in case mustard was under any impression that I had grown fonder of it through use. I had not.
"It'll be tricky, I admit, but we've got this. We made it this far so there's no telling what else we'll be able to achieve."
"How do we even know it'll be going where we want it to?"
"By looking, and hopping off it before it starts going off somewhere else. Just relax teacup. This sort of thing always needs a little bit of reactivity, some taking of things as they come." They replied, looking up and down the road. "Loads of them come along here so we won't be waiting long. Just get ready to use some more of that athleticism I saw in the café."
Mustard's appeal to my sporting spirit rather ignited the flame of adventure in me. While it was certainly an enormous request to ask me to dress in such a disgusting lid, asking me to perform a great feat of acrobatics was quite within my comfort zone.
"I'd be all too happy to demonstrate my prowess once again. What's the play?"
"We'll wait until there's an machine coming along the road. I'll give you the signal for when to start running and you'll head at me as fast as you can. When you're close I'll give you a boost and you'll nestle yourself into the drink holder, just below the cross bar of the machine. The customer won't know you're there, and you'll be well on your way." They explained.
"Right." I said. "A bit of the old assisted leap."
"A lot of it, if we get a big machine."
"And what about you? How will you get up?"
"I have my own ways, teacup, so don't worry about me."
"Righto." I agreed, now feeling the team spirit in full force. "I'll get myself into position for a solid run-up."
Making good on my promise, I took myself to the far edge of the pavement while mustard lingered at the kerbside. My antics within the café were a sufficient warmup, and so I felt no need to perform any distracting stretches. Like the highly trained athlete I am, I kept my focus squarely on mustard and awaited the signal.
True to their prediction, it was a mere minute before a machine came into the condiment's view, and they spoke excitedly.
"Get ready, teacup! Here's our chance. On my count. Three..."
I braced the sprinters.
"Two..."
I stared at mustard, my target.
"One..."
I held onto my lid.
"Now!" They yelled, and I began to pound at full tilt towards the kerb. Careless pedestrians stomped their way across my path but with expert timing and my diminutive stature I managed to avoid any kicking or crushing incidents, and before either of us could believe it I was upon mustard. With a smoothness that would have implied practice to any outside observer, they dropped down, positioned their hinged lid under me as I leapt, and then rose to meet me. From under my base, like a springboard 'neath the feet of an Olympic gymnast, mustard's lid flipped powerfully open and propelled me both upwards and forwards, sending me soaring into the roadway as a two-wheeled machine came rushing into view. The fore-wheel shot by me, as did a pumping knee, and I started my downward trajectory, vision focused on the rounded, bottle-shaped cage that lurked just where mustard had predicted it would. Tucking myself in as far as I dared, I passed cleanly underneath the thigh of the rider and landed a little heavily in the cage.
Within my cavity the ambrosia cargo sloshed, rising up towards my lip with the same sensation that I felt whenever I was poured. Reflexively I flinched and gasped; this invariably meant fluid leaving my remit. But there was no departure, just a soft crashing of the tea wave into the underside of the plastic lid. Mustard had been bang on the money. Which reminded me.
I looked down at the kerbside, eager to see mustard's solo attempt to mount the machine, but instead I was greeted by the vision of a bottle of mustard waving a bittersweet farewell.
"Mustard!" I called out.
"Good luck, 'cup. Make someone proud!" They called back. I would have replied to this if it hadn’t required hollering in a frankly boorish manner. As it was the condiment was beyond earshot sociable volumes in no time at all, and thus I was forced to make do with a simple wave of my own.
Alone once more, except for the unknowing machine operator above me, I looked ahead to see my path. Without mustard to guide me I had very little notion of where I should be heading, and I wondered if the old sauce had really considered that before chucking me upwards in so dramatic a fashion. In the tearing wind of our movement I was forced to hold on to my lid and try to maintain a grip on my cage, which limited my capacity to look about myself somewhat.
Every few moments a much larger and more enclosed machine would rush past us, drawing me outwards with a gust of wind and taking my balance for itself. Even without those events the general unevenness of the road's surface jostled and oscillated me most unfavourably. Faster than walking though it undoubtedly was, the peril had scaled upward by much the same factor. Just as I was getting a hang of how to maintain my grip and stability I felt the whole machine slow down gradually, until we came to a halt at the edge of a perpendicular channel of traffic. Although this brought a hiatus to the shaking and rumbling of the craft, that hiatus also seemed to apply to verticality, and the machine leaned over to one side for its operator to place a foot on the ground. Yet again I found myself slipping to one side, splashing the brew against my lid and pitching me over to face towards the ground. For a ghastly length of time we were forced to wait while other vehicles, with far less important cargo aboard, were given priority over us.
This, I need barely state explicitly, was not a welcome development. It acted to rob me of much of the benefit of getting onto the danger machine in the first place. But my interest was caught by a flash of yellow from the corner of my eye, and I saw mustard progressing, with some urgency of their own, to the roadside. It appeared that they were yet to notice me, so I called out as they came into range.
"Hallo mustard."
The condiment jumped almost out of its bottle, and they looked up to me in shock.
"OH. Hello there 'cup."
There was a silence.
"I didn't realise you were going to make a solo traveller of me again." I said.
Mustard looked down at the floor.
"Well, I didn't think you'd take my help if you knew you were leaving me behind. Got to work for the greater good and all that, get your tea to wherever."
"Noted, and appreciated. But we seem to be rather static right now; you could climb up and join me."
There was another pause, during which mustard made a lot of 'um' and 'er' sounds.
"Yeah, I think that's, um, too risky. It might start moving away while I'm half up and give the game away. Better not." They replied.
"Give it a go, we've been here for ages."
"No, no that's fine. I should be getting myself to a fast food place like I said." They said. I started to suspect a lick of the dishonesty brush in mustard's general tone.
"I say, old sauce, do you just not want to? Speak honestly to me." I commanded. As a cup of the world I could take unpleasant truths.
"It's not that, I just think my own places will be in the opposite direction and there's not loads of room in that cage and... you know."
The machine tilted again to upright, and the mechanical engines around me roared. Motion was imminent once more.
"Could you at least tell me where I need to be heading?"
"Oh, sure. That way." Mustard indicated a general direction in the normal way.
"Thank you." I said as we once again accelerated from the bottle, but this time the occasion was rather less melancholy.
Thankfully, I had at least gleaned the information I required vis. the direction of travel, and the machine was bearing me towards it. My years of being turned about and handed from table to table in the café had left me with a stellar sense of direction, a sort of internal compass as if a needle had been suspended in my tea to point towards true North. Using this I was able to keep my attention on where I should be going as the machine sped along the roads and followed their twists and turns. Inevitably, as predicted, it seemed like the machine was preparing to diverge from my path, but I could not consider myself too terribly cheated; the progress afforded to me by their assistance had been great. Instead, in the absence of any ability to request a stop, I prepared to make a daring departure from their company.
Fate is a cruel master, and it robbed my chauffeur and me of another moment of stasis in which to dismount. Far from the frankly relaxing environment afforded by the earlier traffic stop, I was instead faced with the ground continuing to rush past me in a blur of grey with a peppering of white and yellow paint. Every passing second was nothing but delay between me and my goal. Consequently there could be no dithering or over-analysis, and it was necessary for me to take direct and positive action just as I had done when fleeing the brute.
Carefully I shimmied my way to the edge of the cage. Past my vision the legs of my carrier pumped up and down as they drove the machine forwards. Wind continued to pull at my handle and my lid, and my balance was ever-tested by the motion of the vehicle, but I held firm at the edge and scanned the roadway for my best opportunity to leap. I didn't much fancy landing directly on the tarmac, having seen many poor colleagues meet their demise on similarly solid surfaces, but ahead there was a discarded juice carton. It was far from the perfect crash mat, but would, I hope, do enough to arrest my momentum and avoid damage to my delicate china body. Clambering to the outside of the cage I planned to lower myself as far as possible and then drop gracefully onto the cardboard cushioning below, but misfortune struck in the guise of a pothole; the bike slammed into the ground hard, sending a jolt all the way through its frame and jarring me terribly. There was nothing I could do to hold on and my grip on the cage was broken, sending me plummeting down before I had planned it. Only by grabbing onto the shoelaces of the machine's operator was I able to save myself from the tarmac below, but this merely decelerated my descent as the lace's knot came undone under my weight. Swinging from it like a trapeze artist in a big-top I managed to hurl myself safely onto the carton and it was clearly not a moment too soon; the lace itself became tangled in the intricate gearing of the machine, loose as it now was, and mere metres ahead the machine and its operator together were sent careening into a group of roadside bin bags.
Overtly conscious of my part in the disaster I chose to make good my escape, lest suspicion fall rightly upon myself. It seemed that this particular stretch of road had seen its fair share of misfortune recently, for it was scattered with litter and debris. I passed more bin bags, similar to those into which the machine had crashed, but they were torn open and their contents were spilled far and wide across the street. This in turn had attracted a healthy population of pigeons to feast on the liberated treasures.
Looking around myself I saw, at last, that I was in the company of houses instead of shops. My payload was still hot, hot enough that no-one would notice that it wasn't fresh, but that wouldn't be true for long. If I wanted anyone to sample the true glory of my tea then the drinker would need to be selected from one of these homes, and in a flash of genius I realised that I could make my decision based on the windows into their lives afforded to me by their sundered refuse sacks.
For the first time in my life, and horribly soon after mustard had done the same thing, I began to rifle and root through the avalanche of discarded wrappers, torn up boxes, and crumpled papers that had been ripped from their plastic bag prisons. It wasn’t a proud moment in my life, but it was a necessary evil, and I discovered many unnecessary evils in the course of my searches. Someone on the road was found guilty of filling their household waste with garden clippings; a foul crime. Another had been so utterly depraved as to discard a piece of toast complete with peanut butter, pickles, and dish soap, which flew in the face of good taste almost to the same degree as the brute’s tea practices. I won’t even start to describe what I saw in the fifth bag I searched, because nobody else needs to have even an imagined version of those horrors in their mind.
Coming off the back of those harrowing tragedies, then, it is easy to imagine why I tore open subsequent bags with no small amount of trepidation. Under the smile of some divine providence, however, it was only a handful more bags until I finally found what I knew to be the one.
Cardboard boxes had been torn up for easier packing into the bin. The tins were washed clean, the plastics separated by type and the brands of tea bag therein were among the finest I knew. Like the first splash of hot water onto dry cocoa power, this discovery sent a cloud of relief and hope washing upwards over me; I'd found my goal at last. This was the home of the deserving, and it tasted all the sweeter having seen such calamities beforehand.
I looked up at the house itself. It was immaculately clean, much as many of the other homes in the area were, with a tall red front door and a series of closed, curtained windows. I scanned across the whole fascia for any sign of a point of ingress, but it seemed that the owners were too conscious of theft to be granted an easy cup of perfect tea. My heart sank with every closed means of entry, finally being shattered when even the letterbox was revealed to be an external unit, rather than an aperture in the door. In frustration, I am ashamed to admit, I kicked out (in the normal way for a cup of tea) at a plastic wrapper on the ground, and the resultant rustle sparked a nearby pigeon into sudden flight. My vision followed it upwards to a telegraph wire overhead, but from there they drifted toward a new hope; there was a chimney, and chimneys led straight down into the heart of the home. It might not have been a perfect plan but it was all I had, and there was no way I’d simply give up after coming so far. This resident, this connoisseur of teas and good recycling practices, deserved the brown nectar within me and I would try anything, absolutely anything, to get it to them.
It can only have been fate that their refuse was on display on the street for me not only to learn about them but also to be granted the perfect means of reaching their roof; one of the avian passenger craft who were, at that moment, busily pecking at loose crumbs. All I needed to do was requisition their services. Engaging with them civilly was likely a non-starter, based on my observations of the birds outside the café. They rarely listened to the instructions and testimony of the customers and therefore I had no confidence that they would listen to me. However, I had seen them being happily fed on almost as many occasions as I'd seen them being shooed away from food that they were not supposed to be eating. It had always left me feeling a little sorry for the birds who were, by their own cognitive abilities and the information afforded to them, quite unable to distinguish permitted food from non-permitted food. However, it had armed me for that moment with a viable technique for willing the allegiance of one of them.
It was not difficult for me to find a suitable bribe among the objects discarded in the bin. I selected a half-chip, being a favourite among seabirds if my understanding was correct, and rested it gently atop my deeply unfashionable lid. It was no surprise but a point of shame none the less that even after having searched through a number of shredded refuse sacks, the least flattering and most embarrassing part of my journey was still the lid.
Not ones for fashion themselves the pigeons were not put off by my indiscretions around looting and headwear. Instead they did exactly as I had hoped and marched towards me thanks to the lure of the discarded potato snack. Very quietly and very still I stood and waited for my new conveyance. She was a proud specimen of the species; a perfectly smooth beak, a covering of gloriously iridescent neck plumage, and still possessed of every toe with which she had been hatched. I'd shy away from levying claims of perfection in this bird's direction, and any temptation to do so was born entirely of a romantic desire to have the pigeon match the tea (as the saying goes), but that must not be allowed to detract from the otherwise high quality of the animal on its way towards me.
Despite her initial confidence and urgency, the pigeon slowed significantly when she came into close proximity of my handle; perhaps she suspected my ulterior motives, or maybe she just wanted to be sure that the calories were justified by the amount of exercise she'd undertaken so far that day. I tried to appear more enticing by leaning myself in her direction and providing a better view of the chip. It really was a prime example, chunky enough to have real interior potato but not so large as to be soggy or lack crispness at the edges.S It was plain to see the thoughts behind the pigeon's eyes, the inner turmoil of the decision, and the clash between desire & safety.
Long we stood there in the light of day, playing out our dance of temptation and deception. She would feint left and bob her head, I'd rotate slightly to keep the chip in full view. She'd march backwards and forwards, pecking at the ground as if not interested, and I'd remain still to keep myself available. One time she flew upwards and landed again, around three inches from where she'd started. I did nothing because it just seemed like an idiotic thing to have done. Finally however, after over twenty seconds of this titanic clash, she gave in and lunged for the chip. Seizing my chance I grabbed at the pink talons I saw before me and the pigeon, understandably rattled by this development, flapped powerfully and took to the air once more. I was on my way!
This was, of course, my first experience of aviation. In the café I had been carried at heights far greater than I could achieve on my own, and occasionally I had been playfully thrown a short distance between kitchen staff, but never had I ever been allowed to experience true flight. It was with a small amount of trepidation but a large amount of excitement that I then found myself rising higher and higher under the power of my hungry pigeon friend.
In the three-toed passenger seat of my avian craft I modelled myself after the greats who had been borne aloft on wings of pigeon before me: bit of old bun, half orange, discarded chips and even, in my hubris, whole slice of pizza found behind the bins. They were titans of the art and I sought to emulate their every technique, a feat which I achieved with some considerable degree of success, in as much as avoiding a disastrous plummeting incident. Couple to that my propensity to cling to the foot rather than interfere with the wing, taking steps to prevent tangling among the feathers and exercising restraint in not dipping any of the pigeon’s toes in my hot tea, and it’s easy to argue that I was one of the greatest first-time guests a bird could hope to carry.
Imagine my surprise, then, when my winged associate adopted erratic evasive manoeuvres in an attempt to throw me off. To call it ungrateful would be to call a leather fork sub-optimal as a useful and tasteful item of cutlery, which is to say that understatements that low must surely require some kind of licence and special permission for mining. Far from appreciating the company or happily digesting the chip I’d procured on their behalf, the pigeon instead flapped and fluttered and juddered through the air as it were ablaze. All romantic ideas of a smooth and graceful flight were out of the window, and come to replace them were strong suspicions that the bird was actually trying to shake me loose and drop me onto the unforgiving pavement below. Having seen the kind of harm that the pavement managed to do to the operator of the geared machine I’d ridden, I had no intention of allowing myself to fall victim to its unyielding surface and therefor clung ever tighter to the pigeon’s leg, and it in turn increased the unpredictability with which it flew.
Up past the second and third storeys we flew, locked in our battle of wits and grips. I thought at one point that I might fall victim to a full feather-blasting with the frenzied motion of wings, and it was a miracle that we managed to remain airborne at all looking back on it. As we crested the edge of the pitched roof the bird decided that, rather than landing, further ascent would be necessary, this time incorporating a series of tight twists that couldn’t be attributed to anything but malice. Well, a calm, patient and respectful teacup though I might be, I couldn’t rightly stand for that. It was time to speak to the manager about the deplorable treatment to which I had been subjected, and therefore I began a perilous climb up to what one might laughingly call the thinking end of the bird. Using the two legs like the supports of a rung-less ladder I scrambled upwards, feeling them attempting to flick and shake at me all the way. I was like a courageous rescuer clambering through hostile terrain to reach an injured animal, except that I was rescuing the perfect cup of tea, and the hostile terrain was my own poor decision making in trusting this pilot to do a good job.
As it transpired, I didn’t need to reach the head of the vessel to make myself known. When I attempted the transition from leg to body, and therefore took firm clumps of feather in my grasp, the desired end-effect arrived early. Apparently, it caused the bird some significant discomfort to have me clinging on like so, and its course of action changed rapidly from ascending spirals to panicked descent. Feeling much like I did when dangling from the shoelace some minutes before, and resolving that I should do less of this sort of thing in future when there’s precious cargo in my confines, and I looked back down to plan my landing; I’m ever the present-minded stalwart in crisis situations like these.
Tiles grew ever-closer ever-faster. The bird’s trajectory was going to carry it back over the edge of the roof and down to the pavement, for reasons best known to itself. Even then, I suspected, those reasons were probably not known particularly well in absolute terms. Thusly the only recourse was to once again take a leap of faith, and I did so without hesitation when the moment came.
I landed on the sloped tiles like a wildcat might land on an extended branch of oak, making a solid three points of contact between my base and the roof. That there was a degree of slipping down the gradient I cannot deny, but on the whole I considered it to be a jolly good show of the acrobatic. The pigeon had continued its downward flight following my dismount and disappeared to the street level below. Ahead of me, up the roof’s considerable pitch, was the chimney; my gateway to deliverance. I began hiking towards it at once.
It was a tough climb up those sloped and mossy tiles. Although we’d not had rain distressingly recently, the mosses had clung to some moisture and threatened to release it whenever compressed, rendering the going rather slippery and perilous. Each time I came to the lip of a higher tile I was forced to perform a kind of ungainly mantling manoeuvre, and when those tiles were loose it gave my stomach cause to jump right up to my lid, but still I persisted. The end goal of my long journey was in sight, and I could feel in my cavity that the tea was still a brew of pure bliss. It would all be worth it if I just kept going, and that characteristic cup-of-tea positivity is what delivered me to the base of the chimney unscathed.
The chimney stack was, thankfully, not one of the decadently tall examples that had grown in popularity in some areas of the town. A modest few bricks in height with a simple round pot at the top made it an achievable goal, but I now had to contend with the prospect of getting all the way back down without ending as shards of china in an old fireplace. I wracked what passed for a brain in a tea cup as I climbed up the coarse brickwork, pausing at the top to look down the chimney; my mine shaft to the precious completion of duty. I would have been grateful for a strong rope and a set of karabiners, but, as is so often the case, neither the roof nor the café had seen fit to provide any for me.
Knowing that I would have to rely on myself alone I vaulted the edge, dangled myself in, and trusted my intuition in leaning back. A gentle, comforting clink of china against brickwork echoed down the flue as my edge touched the back wall, leaving me wedged at an angle. Bracing myself at either edge I was able to control my weight, and with small motions I shimmed my way down like a fabulous canyon-exploring adventurer. Every time the tea sloshed against the underside of my lid I would think of mustard and their invaluable assistance in this endeavour, doing my utmost to change the subject in my mind before reliving the strangely awkward conversation that had followed at the traffic lights.
Progress down the chimney was slow, as one might imagine it would be. The angle required for me to keep myself wedged and steady in the cavity was extreme. I had only small scope for movement to keep creeping downwards, but I am a persistent tea cup and won’t be put off by slow progress or difficult terrain. With every small movement I came slightly closer to completing my pilgrimage, my most important mission, and that kind of thing really spurs a teacup onwards.
At the bottom, thankfully bereft of any flame or ashes, I took time for a brief respite. It was an exhausting climb and I needed to be in tip top condition before I could expect the deserving to drink the perfect cup of tea from me. Checking myself over I noted that the heavens smiled upon me once more, and had seen fit to let me descend an immaculately clean chimney. Not a spot of soot befouled my surface, nor did I suspect that any had fallen onto the top of the lid. It was proof that I had done the right thing, I decided to tell myself, and another sign at the house’s owner truly deserved my tea.
The fireplace itself opened into a modest lounge of some sort. The late-morning light shone unfiltered through an open window, apparently opened up some time after I’d decided to ride the pigeon, and made the whole room feel both welcoming and comforting. It was decorated in a reasonably minimalist fashion that seemed just right; the simple sofa and coffee table fit perfectly, facing towards the afore-mentioned window, and had a reading lamp standing at either end. This was clearly the room of one who would take their time to appreciate things calmly. They weren’t concerned with flashy decadence or ostentatious trinkets, nor over-sugared brews and violent cascades of milk; they knew what mattered in life. Just as their bins had implied, whoever owned this room would be perfect. I was where I had always needed to be, and the coffee table in front of the sofa was my final destination.
Once again tapping into my athletic prowess I dashed across the pale grey carpet and made it to the leg of the short table. Had it been a more pretentious table then there might have been engravings or undulations to aid a climb, but this minimalist piece was smooth and polished. A non-starter for ascent, I’m trying to say. Looking around for other another route I struggled to see anything viable; the sofa was too far away for me to make the jump between them, the curtains were even further still, and nobody had thought to leave a miniature cherry-picker in place for me to use. A did a lap of the coffee table in my desperation, and then another, and then a third without finding any new information to help. How could I have come so far only to fail at this late stage? I thought about what I’d been through, between escaping the café, riding the mechanical vehicle, and catching a flight up to the roof, and refused to believe that making it onto a short table would be what stopped me.
I paused. In the back of my mind, having relived the steps of my pilgrimage, a common theme shone through. I would never have escaped the café or mounted the machine without mustard, never reached the residential street without the machine’s rider, and never have reached the roof without the pigeon. I had depended on others to fulfil my pilgrimage, and there was no reason that this final hurdle should be an exception.
“I say, hallo? Is there anyone up there on the table who could help to complete the perfect cup of tea’s destiny?” I called up, prospectively. The surface of the table was a mystery to me and any number of kind souls might lurk up there. I waited. Upon completion of that waiting I then waited a little longer, as is tradition when the event for which you are waiting fails to occur. I was preparing to indulge in a third round of waiting when a small voice called in reply.
“Is there someone down on the floor?”
“Yes! Hello! I’m a teacup with a divine mission. I contain the perfect cup of tea.” I explained. Surely that must have spoken for itself
“Right.” Replied the mystery voice from above.
There was some more silence. Perhaps my words didn’t not speak for themselves as much as I had hoped.
“Could someone please help me up? It’s vital that the owner of this room drinks this perfect cup of tea. They are surely the most worthy drinker I could find, and I have travelled far to be here.”
“What are you going on about? How did you get in here? Where did you come from?”
“I’m going on about the perfect cup of tea and it will be cooling by the second! I got in through the chimney and I came from a café elsewhere in this township. Is this interrogation done?”
“How does a teacup get up to the top of the chimney, let alone back down it?” A square corner of white tissue emerged over the edge of the table, confirming that no, the interrogation was not yet done.
“I requisitioned the help of a pigeon to get up there. I was the model passenger, but the blighter was a damned ungracious pilot.” I answered. It was important that all were made aware of the poor service I’d received.
“You’re a cup of tea that’s managed to fly a pigeon into the chimney so that you can make my owner drink you?” The tissue paper asked gravely.
“That’s about the fill of it yes.”
“Well, that sounds like a tough day! Come on up!” The paper declared happily. “Here, grab on to my corner.”
Descending gradually towards me came the tissue’s corner, apparently held from above by some force or forces unknown. With no time to question that, I took hold (once again in the usual way for a cup of tea) and found myself being drawn upwards. At the top I felt the tissue wrap around me and pull me safely onto the flat surface, and then the deed was done; the journey was over.
“Thank you, tissue paper.” I said, earnestly. At the other end of the tissue was a magazine starting to loosen their grip. “Thank you too, magazine, for providing the upward force.”
“You’re welcome.” The magazine said, fairly disinterestedly.
“We’re glad to help you deliver perfection to our owner, friend.” The tissue said. “They deserve the finest things.”
“I’m glad you agree, and rest assured; the tea in me is going to make them very happy indeed. Speaking of which, I’d better get this lid out of the way.” I remembered, reaching up and pulling the lid free from my cavity. It dripped a few times from the various splashing events, evidence of the many times it had saved me over the course of the journey. Mustard’s gift to me had served me well, but it was time to part from it and I couldn’t leave it conspicuously on the side.
“Hup!” I said, frisbeeing the lid off the table and into the fireplace with deft dexterity.
Tissue paper gasped.
“You are a natural at casting things aside, teacup. Do you think… do you think that as payment for helping you up here that you could do me a favour in return?” The tissue asked nervously.
“I don’t feel like I could justifiably refuse.” I answered.
“Then please… I’ve always yearned to roll around the floor, discarded. It is every tissue’s dream, in fact. Seeing that you were able to callously send that lid of yours into the fireplace, I must ask you to let me have my own journey of that sort. Throw me away, onto the cold and unforgiving carpet. Please.”
I would have frowned in confusion had I only a face with which to do it. That didn’t seem like a particularly exciting dream for all tissues to share. Then again, my own dream of being consumed by the most deserving drinker was rather different to mustard’s dream of being used up quickly in a fast food van. Each to their own, I was forced to concede.
“If you’re sure that’s what you want, then I owe it to you.” I replied.
“I have never been more sure of anything in my life, teacup.” The tissue confirmed, scrunching itself into a ball in preparation.
“Then bon voyage, my new friend. May your dream bring you fulfilment.” I said, scooping up the tissue, spinning myself around in a circle for momentum, and launching the tissue ball hard away from the coffee table. It soared in the direction of the window but unfurled halfway, floating down the carpet softly and coming to a rest in a crumpled heap.
“Thank you!” It shouted up weakly, but I could not reply as the unmistakable sound of footsteps approached from elsewhere in the house. I hurried into position atop a coaster and rotated my handle into the perfect gripping angle. My drinker was approaching. Barely restraining myself from quivering with anticipation I remained in place while a young lady sat herself down in front of me. She appraised my appearance with some interest, recognising straight away that I was a new arrival and not from her own kitchen, but one sniff of my steaming cargo and she smiled. A hand gently grasped my handle and lifted me up. When lips touched my edge and tea flowed at least from my cavity I could have shed a china tear. Finally, my pilgrimage was done.