The cafe with five faces, p.14
The Café with Five Faces, page 14
“A little extreme, but he has got rid of people for sure,” James acknowledged. “Although, to keep things in perspective, Hitler murdered, Trump just removes.”
“Anticipated problems: James Comey, Rex Tillerson, Andrew McCabe. Solution: fire them. Anticipated problems: Michael Flynn, HR McMaster, Scott Pruitt. Solution: get them to resign.” John was quick with the names and the wit. I detected rehearsal, although John wasn’t the type to stand in front of a mirror reciting lines. I could be wrong, of course.
“And,” Mike was still on his soapbox, “and now, he’s started to remove privileges from people who criticise him – it’s autocracy at its worst!”
“I don’t know about that,” James pointed out. “He could have them murdered.”
“True,” Mike mused. “That might be the next step, if he’s allowed to stay there much longer.” We all hoped this would never happen. The murders or Trump staying in office – in case there was any ambiguity.
At this point, I have a confession to make. I have, apparently, never allowed myself the time to take a photograph of a complete board as ordered by Mike, James and John. The temptation to tuck in tout de suite seems to overcome me. So here is just one of the components of said board: jamón serrano left hanging in a café somewhere in the north-western part of the city of Granada.
2018: 26: Granada: Under the Weather
The sun was setting over Granada – my outdoor space, not the city in Spain, although it could have been both – and Matthew and Mark were reaching the pleasantly tipsy and slightly verbally incontinent stage when Lois joined them after a hard afternoon’s work online – doing something useful, we presumed, or she could have just whiled away the hours preparing a list of questions with which to embarrass her two companions. The latter looked increasingly likely as the evening wore on, or even at the outset as she was in possession of an eye with a wicked twinkle.
“You two seem partially well gone,” she commented with her occasionally strange use of contradictory language, after ordering a Cruzcampo.
“Just happy,” said Mark, with an unnaturally large smile, displaying a weakness which apparently gave Lois free rein to unleash her questioning.
“So, tell me,” she began with her most annoying interview technique, “what, amongst all of your many hundred examples, has been your worst drinking experience?”
“Lebanese vineyard,” responded Mark, without giving the question the attention it perhaps merited. “As far as I remember, and I don’t actually remember all that much, we’d gone for a buffet lunch on a vineyard which included drinking as much of the produce as one liked.”
“How very unwise with a Brit in the vicinity!” Lois looked a little envious.
“So, you did,” Matthew commented, stating the obvious.
“Oh yes, to the eternal embarrassment of the then-girlfriend. My straight line leaving the lunch veered from one side of the path to the other, and the path was about three metres wide, but we did get to the main road and we did order a taxi to the right place, so I can’t have been that bad…” The memory was either cloudy or painful, but the former seemed more likely. “And then, when we got back to our flat, I started having hallucinations about money which I thought was in my wallet but wasn’t.”
“Missing money? That must have been particularly galling for you.” Matthew’s tone was teasingly sardonic. Mark’s look in response was teasingly hostile. “And was there anything missing?”
“After twenty minutes of panic, we decided, erm, no. I’d miscalculated.” Mark looked suitably embarrassed. “I think one plus one equals two was stretching my numeracy at the time.”
“OK, so I have loads of room to talk, I don’t think,” Matthew continued, diverting attention from his friend, perhaps by way of apology. “Worst experience, let me think… Well, one came after a very civilised wine tasting in Budapest. I used to organise them when I lived there.” This came as surprising news to Lois and me, as the sight of Matthew quaffing wine was unusual, although he had ordered the occasional Lebanese red from my ‘cellar’.
“And you tasted to excess, I presume,” guessed Mark.
“Perhaps a little, but the tasting was quite refined by our standards, and the cheese had been fantastic as well and had soaked up a lot of the wine,” recalled Matthew. I was unaware cheese soaked up wine but was eager to hear more so I decided not to challenge. “The problem was the home-made Georgian liqueur I had brought with me from Tbilisi as a special end of evening treat.”
“Sounds like a nasty mix to me.” Mark cringed a little at the thought of fine wine, assuming it had been fine, being followed down the gullet by some home-made, presumably very high-strength, Georgian spirit.
“I remember only two things from the rest of the evening,” said Matthew, with a resigned expression of guilt, either due to the post-consumption abuse of some splendid wine or due to his subsequent actions. “Sitting on my friend’s floor having an intense conversation with a girl’s legs and then having the same girl pick me up out of the gutter when she was kind enough to walk me to the tram stop.”
I’m not sure Lois heard point two as she had dissolved into hysterical laughter at point one.
“Nice legs, yeah?” taunted Mark.
“Couldn’t be sure; I think so, but she was wearing jeans,” murmured the culprit.
“Wow! Sober enough to remember what she was wearing! Impressive!”
“Oh, I also remember that the last tram had gone and we had to wait for ages for the night bus to turn up. The following day was lost to one of the worst hangovers ever. And I had to fly home in the evening.”
Sympathy was not forthcoming.
“No hallucinations or delusions of grandeur, though?” teased Lois, winking at Mark.
“Not on that occasion, no. The only time I remember that happening was in Minsk and I can state with categorical certainty that in that case there were no delusions of grandeur!”
“Well, the beer there can be quite strong,” said Mark. “But some of it is fantastic – I can never say it with much accuracy, despite being drilled by several friends, but my favourite is the Alivaria Beloe Zoloto – ‘white gold’ by name and nature – unfiltered and mmmmm.” His final adjective was wonderfully descriptive. Who needs flashy language?
“It wasn’t the beer’s fault.” Matthew defended himself. “It was the food I ate, either the previous night in Budapest or on the flight over. Either way, I started feeling queasy coming through customs – this was back in 2003, long before Minsk Airport became ultra-civilised, so I made a conscious decision to avoid the bathrooms. Big mistake. The school owner picked me up and was his usual friendly self, but I could barely bring myself to respond to anything he said or asked. It’s a long drive from the airport to the city and eventually I had to beg for the toilet. Nothing by the roadside at all. So poor Vladimir had to phone ahead to the Director of Studies of the school, who lived en route, and ask him to open every door from street to bathroom so I could get there as quickly as possible.”
“That’s some way to announce yourself!” Lois was suppressing giggles again, and again, not doing it very well.
“So embarrassing in so many ways,” said Matthew, contorting his facial features at the memory. “And that’s to say nothing of the stink I left behind – must have taken a week to clear.”
Lois didn’t bother hiding her amusement. Neither did anyone else within earshot.
“Where do the hallucinations come in?” queried Mark, not forgetting the inspiration for the story.
“Later the same day,” Matthew resumed. “As the inspector, I was a special guest on this visit and they had organised tickets to see a show in the evening. It was Anna Karenina, but I’m amazed I can remember that much, because I can’t even recall if it was opera or ballet. I was drifting in and out of consciousness, slipping out to the loo whenever convenient and seeing things on the stage which I’m sure were not happening and which I couldn’t even ask about later because I’d forgotten!”
“Nasty,” said Lois, without a trace of laughter. “But I assume you recovered quickly enough?”
“I was a bit tender, to say the least, but I was at work on time the following morning.”
“My hero,” said Lois, quickly back to the mischievous giggles and twinkles.
“OK, you deserve a break,” said Mark kindly. “This is another embarrassing moment from my murky past.” Matthew, recovering from his Minsk recollection, and Lois, who thrived on the embarrassment of others, turned to face him in more than mild expectation. “It happened in South Africa in one of the most obscure backpackers you can imagine – miles and miles off the main road in a place confusingly called Coffee Bay in the Eastern Cape.”
“Confusingly?” interrogated Lois.
“Well, you might expect something related to coffee, and actually there are coffee trees there, but the main pastime seemed to be drug-related – I suppose Marijuana Bay might have been going a step too far in openness. It was all fairly mild stuff, from what I could tell, but you know me, no drugs unless the doctor orders.”
Lois raised a questioning eyebrow.
“No, no, I tried twice at university and felt I lost some control, and I’m a control freak, so that was the end of drugs as far as I’m concerned.” Matthew’s nod indicated he knew this statement to be true and Lois didn’t press further.
“Anyway,” Mark resumed. “There I was, possibly the only person in a very full, sort of campsite who wasn’t at least partially stoned, and who was the only one to fall over a lurking tree trunk and cut themselves? Yeah, yours truly, much to my friend’s amusement.” And Lois’s.
“And then…” There was more. “And then, the day after, I innocently ate some mushroom scones or something and it was only afterwards my friend informed me they were made of magic mushrooms! I was a bit like Bridget Jones in the second film on the Thai beach – naive and sky high!”
Lois was having a really good time laughing at her friends’ expense. Matthew and Mark were equally enjoying each other’s embarrassment, if not their own.
“And the hallucinations followed?” Matthew wasn’t going to let his friend off the hook easily.
“Ah, yes.” Mark might have been regretting linking his anecdote into this topic. “They happened in the middle of the night when I woke up and started frantically searching for my wallet…”
“Aha!” exclaimed Matthew. “Money is the first thing to enter your mind once again!”
“I think I’d put it somewhere safe,” said Mark, doing his best to ignore the taunts. “But I was in a panic, according to my rather overly relaxed friend, running around inside and outside, and at some point during the night, like around 3am, I allowed a strange man to come into our cabin. And to this day, I have no idea why!”
“I could hazard a guess,” said Matthew with a very exaggerated wink.
“Hmmm, I got good mileage out of that question,” said the self-congratulating Lois. “Now, let’s see.” She seemed to be consulting a mental list of provocative questions.
“I have another food poisoning episode,” Mark interrupted, as though he wanted to control the direction of the interaction rather than allow Lois carte blanche. “Not quite as dramatic as Matthew’s Pakistani and Belarusian experiences, perhaps, but worth telling, in my humble opinion.”
“Do go on,” encouraged Lois, sipping her Cruzcampo very slowly, so as to remain the chief pilot of the conversation when the chance re-arose.
“It comes from my Jakarta days,” began Mark.
“After the nights with the ladyboys,” teased Matthew.
“Not, as you know full well.” Mark pretended, unsuccessfully, due to alcohol, to be annoyed. “I’d been there two or three weeks and was trying to eat some local food, but not always very enjoyably. There was one restaurant, though, which I liked, and we went there one Saturday after the course we were doing. ‘We’ means the school owner with the penchant for showing me the ladyboys, and her friend, who had driven the car. I can’t remember what I had, but I remember thinking it wasn’t as nice as usual. The day after was just surreal.”
“Hallucinations again?” asked Lois.
“Not this time, but I was definitely out to lunch,” Mark continued. “I remember getting a Bluebird taxi, which I was always recommended to do, so I was still in possession of some of my faculties and common sense. I was going to one of those parks I went to in the Philippines…”
“Considering you said you don’t usually go to places like that, twice almost constitutes a habit,” reprimanded Matthew.
“Yeah, weird,” concurred Mark. “Anyway, I think it was called Taman Mini, which I only remember because one of my local friends, Diana, made fun of me for weeks afterwards – for being taken ill in a theme park.” He sighed at the intimated cruelty of one of his friends, however good-humoured the intention may have been. “I got there, walked around a bit and then started to feel really uneasy, you know, sick and dizzy. I was about to get on one of those cable-car things which transport you over large parts of the park, but eventually, after a few minutes of dithering, I decided I just couldn’t face it. I felt like the would-be bungee jumper who gets to the top of whatever and walks straight back down again. By the time I got back to ground level, I was really feeling bad and went to some official-looking office, I can’t remember what exactly, and I semi-collapsed against the wall. They told me afterwards they thought I’d had a heart attack.”
There was no laughter at this story at all.
“And, what actually was it?” asked Lois, showing genuine concern, although still sipping Cruzcampo, if rather mindlessly – her glass seemed to be lasting forever.
“They looked after me really well, I have to admit,” said Mark in appreciation, “and fortunately, if that’s the right word, it turned out be gastroenteritis.”
“Still not pleasant.”
“Absolutely not! I could barely eat for a week!” Food was one of Mark’s greatest pleasures and this clearly pained him. “And even once I felt better, I couldn’t actually face Indonesian food again, which was really sad. At first, the school owner took me to familiar western eateries like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, but eventually she found me a really nice Italian place with a name which actually reminded me of the park where I was taken ill – Tamani.”
“Not good, apart from the Italian, obviously,” Lois adjudicated.
“There was another negative, though,” said Mark, and it wasn’t really an afterthought as he seemed rather freaked by the memory. “When I was starting to get better, I smuggled some biscuits into my bedroom, and not long afterwards, the cockroaches followed.”
“Urgh!” Lois’s reaction was predictable and Matthew also pulled a face.
“I actually think that was the first time I’d met one,” said Mark, at least making slightly light of the event. “I’ve seen loads more since, but these were enormous and a couple of them even marched across my bed towards the biscuit crumbs.” Lois squealed. “I haven’t eaten biscuits in bed ever since.”
“Did you get rid of them?” Matthew was smiling at the biscuit reference.
“The landlady provided me with a spray which worked, and stank,” replied Mark. “Strange place, it was. She was a lady of Dutch colonial descent living in a large house in the suburbs with no hot water – the latter was a bit of a shock initially, but one gets used to it. She was quite kindly at first, I thought, but I remember her throwing a complete wobbler when my parents phoned me from England, as though she was paying for it. I was banned from using the phone thereafter. And she had this maid…”
“Let me guess,” Matthew interrupted. “About ten years old and a virtual slave?”
“Close,” said Mark. “She was nine and I knew very little of her conditions, other than that she was from the country and was occasionally allowed home to see her family; otherwise, she lived in a small room next to the kitchen. One thing I do remember, though, was when I came to leave and had to pay for my laundry. The maid had done all this by hand, so I assumed I would have to pay her, but the house owner insisted on me paying her instead and was quite open about keeping fifty per cent for herself.”
“Exploitation,” commented Matthew needlessly.
“After a month or so, I was moved on from that place,” said Mark, by way of conclusion. “I was sent to live by myself in a partially renovated five-bedroomed house in another suburb, which had a gecko or two for company and a mandi in the bathroom.”
“A female mandi?” joked Lois, hoping it was indeed a joke.
“Nope. It was a bowl into which you poured cold water before pouring it over yourself, in place of a shower.”
“One way of waking yourself up in the morning!” Matthew seemed to have had a similar experience and shuddered, or shivered, at the thought.
“The house was supposedly in a nice part of town and, in hindsight, I appreciate the experience, although walking the final part of the journey home each night in the virtual pitch-black with the occasional rat crossing my path wasn’t the best way to end the day.”
“I think it’s time we moved on to my next question,” said Lois. “More drinks?”
This was a good question to ask with no embarrassing answers.
The Massaya vineyard in the Beqaa Valley, where Mark believes he mislaid some money…
2018: 27: Budapest: Break-Up Breakdown
Jimez ordered a glass of Spanish Tempranillo and sat down to contemplate his navel.
Jen followed, as she invariably did, some five minutes later and ordered another Chemex, again with milk. At least she had liked it, so who am I to complain about filtered coffees and whitening? She sat down and contemplated her waistline before deciding a slice of cake was permissible and ordering some Meggyes Rétes. With cream.
