The cafe with five faces, p.10
The Café with Five Faces, page 10
Mark and Lois seemed about to question the pragmatic difference between ‘illegal’ and ‘slightly illegal’ and whether the latter was even possible but thought better of it.
“She was detained overnight and not allowed to leave the room; she had to ask permission to go to the toilet and, even then, had to be accompanied, and was only allowed to make one phone call or send one text message during the entire time. She was threatened with handcuffs, only escaping because she was ‘nice’ and ‘no trouble at all’ but she still had to watch others being handcuffed and chained together just to move from one part of the building to another – that’s what happens if you’re not from a supposedly friendly nation, to answer your initial question. To bring a sad end to the story, she was deported, having the embarrassment of being escorted onto the next flight out twelve hours later and not allowed her passport until the plane landed in London, at which point she found a deportation notice handwritten into her brand-new, ten-year passport, forcing her to fork out for another brand-new one.”
“Blimey! That’s disgraceful! Absolutely shameful!” I wasn’t sure who said what, but it was close to being in unison and in harmony.
“Meanwhile,” Matthew hadn’t finished his rant, “I was thrown back into the airport in Calgary and left to my own devices for getting back to England, which, at one point, seemed almost certain to involve buying a new ticket for 1,200–1,400 Canadian dollars, which I wouldn’t have been able to afford. After spending fourteen hours in Calgary Airport and reduced to begging Air Canada for help, I finally got re-routed to Toronto, which had been my original arrival airport in Canada, and then after twelve listless hours in Toronto Airport, I found the human face of British Airways who allowed me to change my JFK–London flight booked for nine weeks later into Toronto–London for four hours later. Not only that, they upped me to the next class. I tried desperately not to, but I admit to crying tears of relief in front of the rather surprised check-in guy. I was just so grateful to dear old BA! All in all, it took me thirty-nine stressful and sleepless hours door-to-door from Calgary to London. Maybe the US considers that appropriate punishment but for me, the whole thing was so ridiculous, I just never want to see the country again, nor have anything to do with it.”
“Neither would I,” came the heartfelt endorsements of both listeners.
“And what is the result of all this?” Matthew showed no signs of letting up. “A perfectly normal – according to most people, anyway – respectable, maybe respectable-ish, Brit, now hates America with a passion. I had and still have many American friends and all of them expressed at least sympathy with me, but most apologised profusely on behalf of their country and some expressed anger similar to my own.”
“That reminds me,” Mark interrupted, figuring out that Matthew might need to take a breath at some point. “I met an American in the former Soviet Union once who told me, ‘We just want everyone to like us.’ I just said that, ‘Lovely though all the individuals I know are, as a nation you go about it in a very strange way, succeeding only in alienating so many.’”
“So true,” agreed Lois. “And then they elect a president who doesn’t bother with ‘so many’ but goes for everybody!”
Matthew, having taken a longer breather than he had intended, decided to wrap up the conversation to spare his blood pressure. “So, if you ever want to feel like terrorist scum, try entering the US looking a little edgy, and ‘the face of America’, as the customs guys have the nerve to call themselves, will all too readily oblige!”
“I think it’s time for a beer.” Lois could not have been more accurate.
It tickles one a little to imagine Matthew trying to escape a determined Arab with local knowledge in these souks in Tunis!
2018: 19: Hebden Bridge: The Odd Couple and the Rat
I had acquired another regular couple in Hebden Bridge, couple used in the friend sense of the word rather than the relationship version. The Odd Couple, perhaps, although I am recalling a TV series long before the lifetime of many; even I wasn’t deemed of sufficient age to watch it during its original run.
John-Jeffrey, understandably known as JJ to his friends for the sake of simplicity, but quite definitely as John-Jeffrey to those not awarded such a proximate status, was around sixty, with a bald pate overshadowed by a mass of black hair behind, usually tied back in a ponytail but often allowed to roam loose to augment his mad-professor appearance.
His friend Robbie was a few years younger, very earnest and sincere, and often bound to listen to John-Jeffrey’s depressed ramblings and bear them with great fortitude. I often got the impression that John-Jeffrey (I’m not a member of the JJ circle) had had a great life but now feared the best was behind him and so dwelt, to an often worrying extent, on regrets.
Robbie was a regular beer drinker, at least once it passed midday. John-Jeffrey loved coffee and as great a variety of it as possible. The two of them therefore sat in the comfort of the leather-effect sofas in Hebden Bridge, but raided the Cape Town drinks menu with the enthusiasm of an invading army deprived of liquid sustenance for far too long a period of time.
So, there they were, on their now-usual sofa, one late afternoon, drinking a local real ale and a Guatemalan V60. John-Jeffrey seemed to be in drone mode, with Robbie listening with his frequent owl-like, rarely blinking expression. It was clear they had known each other for a long time, as the 1990s were frequently mentioned as a shared experience and John-Jeffrey spoke with an openness which had to be borne of great familiarity and trust.
A couple had just wandered into the room, with their two young children in tow. They took one quick look at the menu, ascertained that drinks for the youngsters were in less than short supply and consequently wandered out again. I am sometimes left to wonder if my limited sugar policy for customers is one of my better commercial ideas…
“I always said the good thing about teaching young learners was being able to hand the students back to their parents after sixty or ninety minutes,” mused John-Jeffrey, looking at the empty doorway recently vacated by the two children.
Robbie silently acknowledged the truth of this statement. As with a good few of my customers, they had both worked, or were still working, in the overseas teaching of English. In fact, my café sometimes felt like a rest home for ex- and currently-between-jobs TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teachers, which occasionally produced remarkably drunken arguments about such riveting topics as grammar.
“But now, I’m starting to think I may have made a mistake.”
The depressed tone stirred Robbie into speech. “A mistake? Meaning?”
“Don’t you ever think, now we’re reaching later middle age…”
“Speak for yourself.” The slightly younger interlocuter seemed affronted.
“…now we’re reaching later middle age,” John-Jeffrey repeated as though he had registered the interruption but not the hurt tone, “that we have missed out on the joys of children?”
“Joys.” The word led to a few moments of deep contemplation with a slight dose of confusion.
John-Jeffrey finally resumed. “I mean, I’ve had such a good time – mostly – over the past twenty-five years that I never really wanted the responsibility of looking after children. But now… now I don’t know, I feel as though I might have missed out on something good.”
This wasn’t the conversation Robbie had been expecting. “And when did this change of heart and mind happen? Over time, or was it a light-bulb moment?”
“Quite a while ago, without it being a fully conscious decision,” John-Jeffrey replied, after some thought, as though it was a struggle to remember so far back into the annals of history. “We” – I assumed at this point Robbie had shared knowledge of who the other part of ‘we’ was – I didn’t – “stopped trying not to have children without actually planning consciously to have them.” Brains, including my own, were heard audibly whirring, trying to work out what this convoluted statement meant.
“I see,” said Robbie in a neutral tone which probably meant he didn’t. There followed a period of silence which allowed both of them ample time for three sips of their respective beverages.
“And evidence suggests, unless you have a suspicious cellar, that there has been no product as a result,” Robbie finally continued.
“Nope.” John-Jeffrey’s tone was final and sad, unless his attention was focused on working out the ‘suspicious cellar’ reference, especially as he lived in a third-floor flat. “The ultimate cost of a misspent youth, I fear, although in my case, it was a misspent thirties and forties. Partially your fault, of course.”
Robbie looked over the top of his horn-rimmed specs in shocked bemusement, as would any man accused by his friend of being the root cause of a childless old age.
“The day after I first met you, you took me to a sailors’ bar somewhere in the deep south of Poland and made me drink more beer in one session than I’d ever had before. And from there on, it was all downhill.” I got the idea John-Jeffrey might actually be making an attempt at humour. I was more focused on why there might be a sailors’ bar so far from the nearest sea.
This statement was, understandably, however, too much for Robbie to take. “I don’t think I’ve ever made you, or anyone else for that matter, drink! I rather think we have been a mutually bad influence over many years in that respect, JJ.”
John-Jeffrey didn’t bother arguing but allowed himself a brief smile of acknowledgement of the obvious truth. “The problem with me was bingeing – no idea how to drink responsibly, as the adverts go – once I started in an evening, occasionally afternoon, I didn’t know when to stop.”
“But there have been some very good times in there, haven’t there?” Robbie asked, knowing there would be no argument. “At least, when we have been able to remember,” he added as an aside.
“Do you remember Berlin?” The reminder seemed to have woken John-Jeffrey from his negative reverie. “The rat bar?”
“Seifen und Kosmetik!” Robbie also brightened up and, unlike his friend, was able to intone the name in a passable German accent. “Soap and Cosmetics – what a name for a bar!”
“And what a bar it was. Shame it’s not there anymore.”
I couldn’t resist asking. “Why do you call it ‘the rat bar’?” This seemed like a much worse marketing ploy than banning fizzy drinks, but my curiosity was, nevertheless, aroused.
John-Jeffrey looked more animated than I could hitherto recall seeing. “We were only in Berlin for a weekend, but we’d decided to visit all the cafés and bars which the Rough Guide to Europe at that time recommended.”
“All six of them,” interjected Robbie. “I can’t imagine why any guide book only included six cafés in a city the size of Berlin!”
“Anyway, on the Saturday evening, we took the S-Bahn to Prenzlauer Allee just to go to this bar on a street I can’t now remember the name of, but about a fifteen-minute walk from the station…”
“Schliemannstrasse,” prompted the ever-useful Robbie.
“That’s the one,” said John-Jeffrey appreciatively. “It was a wonderful place, a real dive, just as I like it, and something of an increasing rarity in modern-day Berlin.”
“Yeah, it’s become a lot more civilised these days; too civilised in some respects. One of the few downsides of East rejoining West.”
“Tacheles was another really positive dive of a place,” mused John-Jeffrey with an utterance many might find conflicting. “Anyway, we digress. I can’t remember how many beers we’d had. Maybe two?” Robbie made a higher gesture with the hand which wasn’t nursing his current beer; John-Jeffrey reluctantly nodded in assent. “There wasn’t much light in the place, just a few candles or lamps on the rickety tables which didn’t really give off that much light to speak of. There was this guy sitting on his own on the opposite side of the room looking like a silhouette – we couldn’t see his face at all and we just ignored him for a while, as you do with total strangers! I do remember glancing over though from time to time and on one such occasion, my eye was caught by this shadow on the wall. And on the table behind the lamp, the guy was exercising a rat! Enormous thing, it was.”
“I suppose, in hindsight, its size might have been exaggerated by the lamp,” Robbie suggested, almost timidly.
“Well, it sure was no mouse,” John-Jeffrey countered rather ungrammatically and looking slightly perturbed, as though his anecdote had had its dramatic effect cruelly reduced in its prime. “I think I only went twice more and then it had gone, replaced by something called the Gun Club, as I remember. But it was and will always be ‘the rat bar’ to me. I could never understand why a Polish girlfriend I took there a couple of years later wasn’t in the least bit fascinated by my reminiscences of the place.” He sighed in a tone of complete bemusement and shook his head sadly at his ex-girlfriend’s apparent lack of interest. And taste.
“Good times.” Robbie suddenly sounded closer to eighty than fifty.
Silence prevailed once more as drinks were drunk and refills ordered by hand gestures, John-Jeffrey surprisingly not bothering to change either brewing method or coffee origin. Unless he was merely distracted, this was quite a compliment to one particular Guatemalan coffee producer.
“Anyway,” said Robbie, returning to the present day, “you intimated something was my fault – remind me what I am being blamed for this time.”
“Directly, my misspent thirties and forties,” responded John-Jeffrey demurely. “And indirectly, my childlessness.” He realised this was a rather unfair accusation, so changed tack. “Nah, it’s my own fault, I know, but too much alcohol for too many years doesn’t do anyone any good – and we were of no mutual assistance in that case, you’re right. And then I also started watching too much porn. It was freely available every night after 11pm on Hungarian TV and it became an addiction,” he explained in response to Robbie’s surprised expression. More deep sighing and tuts of self-disapproval followed. “Have you any idea how much harm that can do?” The question was asked as though he was the innocent victim of passive smoking and totally unable to avoid the distasteful activity. “The more you watch, the harder it is to get turned on by normal sex and eventually, well, I became, you know?” Robbie didn’t. “Impotent.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t Robbie’s most insightful response ever, but what do you say when a good friend tells you he’s impotent? “So, erm, what happened next?” This question was little better than the original ‘oh’.
“Viagra. Once it became cheap enough. Too little, too late.”
“Oh,” said Robbie and I together. I wasn’t sure John-Jeffrey knew he had had an audience of two.
Moody and magnificent. Just the adjectives to describe John-Jeffrey and Robbie. Not… I hope JJ (excuse my familiarity) doesn’t see the chimney as some kind of sarcasm-motivated phallic symbol…
2018: 20: Cape Town: Drifting to Extremes
Mike, James and John seemed to be in a combined mood of reflection one evening in mid-September. I was busy in the kitchen making them a manouche (from the Beirut menu, but no one cared, not even me). When I returned with two zaatar versions and one with halloumi cheese, the mood had swung to football and early-season depression.
“It’s a bit sad really, innit?” Mike was rarely happy when talking about football these days. “End of November last year, we already knew Man City, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and PSG had won their leagues. The only interest was in Juventus against Napoli in Italy and even that finally went the predictable way. And, to be honest, this season, even at the beginning, especially now Juventus have taken Ronaldo from Real Madrid, any one of those five not repeating their league wins would be a source of major surprise. It’s made football boring, really, and for the first time since I was five, I’ve almost lost interest.”
James and John, only slightly less fanatical fans of Manchester United than their friend, concurred in fairly muted tones, although they could see little reason to argue.
“Anyway,” Mike continued, “the only thing I’m bothered about this season is getting Brexit beaten – some say that’s impossible, but it’s more likely than one of those five not winning their leagues!”
“Well, we can certainly hope on that score,” agreed James.
“So why do you think people voted to leave in the first place?” asked a stranger, who had come to the bar to order a drink rather than receive a lecture, but he wasn’t to know the dangers implicit in that particular question. Three manouches were replaced on plates with the precision of synchronised swimmers as the stranger withered under the collective gaze of the three regulars.
“I can give you five clear reasons without any hesitation,” said Mike, as though he had been preparing for this opportunity to deliver a monologue on the subject for some time and was glad of the chance to unburden himself on someone he had not already ranted to. “One: everyone knows that health is most people’s prime concern, so why not invent a huge lie and stick it on the side of a red bus? I mean, if you thought the health service was going to benefit by that much – what was it, 350 million a week – wouldn’t you be tempted? Especially when it was offered by two at-the-time seemingly respectable politicians?”
“Well, yeah, I would,” uttered the stranger, feeling his common sense was being called into question.
“But we all know better now, don’t we?” John offered Mike his support. “Now it might be too late. Lying bastards.”
“Two: the Labour leadership offered, well, no leadership. Watching Jeremy Corbyn talk about Brexit is one of the most embarrassing things in politics. Just stuck between his old anti-EU values and the modern-day reality even some of his most ardent supporting unions recognise.”
