The cafe with five faces, p.15
The Café with Five Faces, page 15
“I have great taste in women,” declared Jimez. This utterance came out of the blue with no prompting from anyone outside his own head, and none of us knew who resided therein. “Basically, anyone who likes me.”
Jen did a mock double-take and tried, jokingly, to see whether there was indeed a third party under the table. Realising they were two and no more, she decided, reluctantly, it would be impolite to ignore the statement. She then decided impolite was fine by her and opted to nod, even though Jimez was still in visual contact solely with his navel.
Jimez, in turn, decided a conversation with himself, if that was what it took to allow him to express his latest feelings, was equally acceptable. “Can you tell me what it is about me which makes girlfriends who seem to like me go back to their exes?”
Jen made a thinking noise, as if to prove Jimez was not, after all, alone, but didn’t really know what to say. She was pretty sure she didn’t need to ask for an explanation and she was quite correct, as more information was quickly forthcoming.
“Four times!” Jimez exclaimed. “Hardly an accident, is it?”
Jen was forced to admit this was unfortunate and even previously unheard of, although she kept the latter thought to herself to spare her friend’s feelings.
“Two long-term girlfriends have gone back to either an ex or even a previous ex, and two short-termers I thought might become long-termers did the same, both in quick succession.”
“Quick succession?” queried Jen. “You mean you had them on the go at the same time?”
“Yeah,” confessed Jimez, “but I had to keep my options open, didn’t I? Either of them could have said ‘no’ – I just didn’t expect them both to do so at almost the same time. And they didn’t know I had two ‘on the go’, as you so romantically put it.”
“Hardly the point,” muttered Jen under her breath, although a slight reddening of the cheeks suggested Jimez had heard the verdict. Jen covered the silence by tucking into the recently delivered Meggyes Rétes with exaggerated gusto.
“Lovely scran,” came the declaration through a mouthful of pastry and cream.
I winced a little at hearing my Hungarian strudel referred to in dialectal terms, but it was a compliment nevertheless and probably a half-decent attempt to change the subject. I disappeared to finish making her coffee.
When I returned, Jimez was finally looking up and looking brighter. “It’s given me a new idea for a book,” he said, with an almost inspired tone.
“About?” Jen’s question was tentative and, given Jimez’s record of product, this was hardly surprising.
“The anatomy of a breakdown of a relationship.”
“Hasn’t that been done before?”
“Oh yeah, but has it ever been done by anyone who has persuaded four women their exes are better?” I made the mistake of laughing at this pseudo-question and immediately feigned a coughing fit to cover my guilt, consequently turning as red as the cherries in Jen’s dessert.
“Fair point.” Jen thought agreement was better than any other course of action at that particular moment in time.
“I’ve even got a title,” enthused the author. “Break-Up Breakdown. What do you think?”
“A slightly more relevant question,” Jen said, with a determination destined either to motivate or destroy the confidence of the listener, “is, have you written anything other than the title?”
“Well, I have enough experience to produce some ideas.” Jimez defended his apparent inactivity on the ‘pen-to-paper’ approach to writing.
“Well, why don’t you come back next time and show us something,” challenged Jen, much to Jimez’s surprise and possible chagrin.
“OK, I will!” We had both seen this level of determination before, but coming from someone who had been producing ideas for books for as long as he could remember without actually producing anything resembling much more than a chapter, we both took excessively large pinches of salt with the promise of action.
“Another glass of Tempranillo, Chaelli, and then I’ll go and make a start!”
He was still there three hours and three glasses later. The trials and tribulations of being a professional writer…
As Jimez, hardly surprisingly, didn’t have any pictures he was willing or able to share of the women he has driven back to their exes, here is an equally dramatic image of the Danube in Budapest.
2018: 28: Cape Town: How to Keep Attention Focused on You
Sometimes, you had to think Mike, James and John just pressed a pause button in their conversation when family necessities forced them to leave the café in the evening, because they just seemed to start where they left off the next time they came in, not that they ever really deviated much from their subject matters of sport and politics. And so it was on this occasion; after a brief reference to Manchester United’s dismal result earlier that week, tempered only by the fact Liverpool had suffered a rare defeat, the topic returned to the leadership of the western, increasingly less-free world.
“Why less-free?” queried John.
“Well, as we said last time, Trump is removing people who speak out against him, while in England, May is denying people the right to a second referendum on the EU, actually having the dumb audacity to call the idea ‘a betrayal of democracy’. What kind of logic produces a statement like that, I ask you?”
Silence spoke a thousand words.
The ordered beer was then delivered and more silence ensued while vocal cords were appropriately lubricated. Hardly surprisingly, it was Mike who broke the silence.
“Have you seen who Trump’s supporters are in the UK?” he demanded rather suddenly, causing spillage in the case of one companion’s beer.
“I didn’t know he had any,” said James, whose beer was happily intact.
“Didn’t you see earlier this year, when he had the brazen cheek to show his face in the UK?” Mike liked delving into recent-ish history to make current points. “There was a joint march in support of Trump and the jailed leader of a British fascist party.”
“Well, doesn’t that say it all?” John asked rhetorically in a dreadfully fake Texan accent, while still mopping beer up off the bar with a dubious-looking tissue he had produced from somewhere about his person.
“I suppose the Donald saw this as a positive?” James, likewise, didn’t think an answer was necessary, but he got one anyway.
“Well, it keeps nationalistic politics and, more importantly to him no doubt, Trump in the spotlight,” Mike suggested, and it was a suggestion which didn’t invite or expect a counter point of view. “You know how Trump sulks when something puts him out of the limelight – that’s when the tweets start – to bring the focus of the world’s attention back onto him.”
“A bit like a baby throwing his or her toys out of the pram,” commented John.
“Beautifully expressed.” Mike looked mildly surprised at being beaten to a punchline. “Of course, Britain has its own mini-Trump in the form of Johnson,” he continued. “Do you remember that disgusting Islamophobic article he wrote earlier this year? He wasn’t aware of how insulting it was; he just knew it would endear him to Trumpsville and the public would keep talking about him for another day or two.”
“Rather like you’re doing,” interjected John.
“Erm, yeah.” Mike realised, with a degree of shame, that he was indeed keeping Johnson an open subject, even if it was with hostility. He was still trying to work out how he had fallen into such an obvious trap when John took over.
“How on earth has multicultural Britain been reduced, in the space of a few years, even months, to a country where one of the main political parties suffers from Islamophobia and the other from anti-Semitism?” It was a valid question and one with an unfathomable answer. This made it the perfect moment to swill down some more beer.
Unable to answer the previous question and hoping it had been forgotten, Mike continued his tirade against the Anglo-Trump. “I think it’s appalling the way Boris Johnson can just come out and criticise other people like Theresa May, the poor sod he’s partially responsible for de-ballsing as a prime minister, without offering anything constructive himself as an alternative.”
“Well, isn’t that what you’re doing just now, though?” John was in a provocative mood, almost repeating his previous question, even though he agreed as fully as matters with his friend’s opinions.
“In a way, yeah, I suppose so, but I’m not being paid obscene amounts of money to issue vacuous profanities in a once-respectable newspaper. Johnson ejaculates crap like…” Mike seemed engaged in a rare struggle for the words required to express his feelings about Johnson’s excretions, while James and John looked at each other with eyebrows which raised thorny questions about their friend’s correct use of collocation, “…like Trump twats tweets.”
“Erm, don’t you mean ‘tweets on Twitter’ or ‘fires tweets’?” James thought Mike had lost the power of coherence.
Mike’s eyebrows, in turn, suggested his original word was the one intended and that he was quite happy with his choice of word partnership, although my reference to a dictionary later that evening did rather cast some doubt on his accurate use of the said lexical item.
“And,” continued Mike unabashed, “he actually referred to Northern Ireland as the tail which wags the dog! The lack of respect at times really…”
“Beggars belief,” John finished, bringing a momentary smile from the belligerent Mike, although he had by no means finished his daily rant; rather later than usual, however, it now incorporated his pet hate.
“I understand the thousands of reasons why Johnson writes for The Telegraph, but why on earth do The Telegraph want him to write for them? It really questions any kind of press neutrality, although I suppose that principle died out long ago. Some are just appallingly biased, though. You know, you see papers like the Mail and the Express waving the flags and slagging off everybody who dares to challenge Brexit, but all they’re really doing is mirroring the 1930s German press, and look what a fine mess that got us all into.”
“Yeah, and my grandparents, aunts and uncles fought to rid the continent of that type of tyranny, so why on earth are we letting those kinds of ideals seep into society again eighty years later?” James was being more vociferous and Mike-like than usual.
It was another question which demanded beer, as answers to serious issues were simply not forthcoming. Rather like with Brexit in the government, I thought to myself.
“Did you hear Rees-Mogg and his family have been targeted with abuse?” John reopened the conversation some minutes later.
“Yeah, that’s wrong,” said Mike, breaking what had seemed, in relative terms, to be something akin to a vow of silence. “I’ll verbally abuse him all day long because, politically, the man is an idiot, but he deserves the right to be an idiot without the threat of physical violence and his family should certainly never be brought into it.”
“I totally agree,” added James, “although when you think what his fellow extremists in the press do any time Brexit loses a vote or someone threatens its progress, you can understand where the motivation comes from, however wrong.”
Silence won the day and I poured three more beers, hoping they would appreciate the unrequested change of brew and focus their attention on the products of my café rather than the weird and not-so-wonderful processes of government.
I think relaxing with a coffee in a peaceful, atmospheric café might be an alternative meriting some consideration at the moment. This was taken in La Spezia, Italy, although you would never guess!
2018: 29: Hebden Bridge: The Nutshell
John-Jeffrey looked tired with his hair let loose in mad-professor mode, but he was alert enough to choose his coffee wisely, freshly roasted and ground Burundian beans from Mutana Hill made with an AeroPress filter. It’s nice when people can make the transition from alcohol to caffeine so happily, and if John-Jeffrey was miserable in any way, it was not due to his beverages.
Robbie came in some fifteen minutes later, thought twice and then ordered a beer anyway. John-Jeffrey’s influence had not yet had any effect; neither had the time of day.
“You look rough.” Robbie was back to Yorkshire bluntness.
“Cheers, mate!” John-Jeffrey was used to Yorkshire bluntness and realised it was often an exaggeration of reality and even a sign of deep-rooted affection. In this case, he wasn’t sure. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he explained. “Just back from an overnight drive from Gatwick.”
“Flight, I presume?” asked Robbie, unaware of any other reason for a northerner to go to Gatwick. John-Jeffrey didn’t bother answering. “So, erm, how goes the non-drinking?”
“Eight months,” came the reply with an odd blend of despair and pride which didn’t actually answer the question.
“Any effects?”
“Well, yes, although not all I expected for sure. On the plus side, I’ve lost a lot of weight, which has noteworthy advantages, such as my right knee not buckling under the strain whenever I go up or down stairs, and not breaking the toilet seat quite as often as I used to.” Robbie gave his friend the once-over but couldn’t corroborate the weight-loss claim given his slouched position on the sofa and his loose attire. “But another friend who gave up drinking got over his lifelong insomnia within a month, and another has felt so energised, she’s never going to start again. I still go to bed knackered, sleep erratically, sometimes erotically, in my dreams, and wake up feeling knackered, so they’re the minuses. And, before you ask, assuming you dare to be so personal, my performance downstairs hasn’t improved either.” Overall, this was not the most positive advertisement for abandoning alcohol and Robbie felt strangely encouraged.
“I’m sure your insides are better,” said Robbie comfortingly.
“You’re the third person to say that, so I hope there’s some accuracy in it! It’s true to say, at least anecdotally, that my insides must have been becoming pickled.”
Robbie looked at his drink and momentarily put it down, wondering if his liver was on the silver skin onion route.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” he continued with a polite cough, if a cough can be considered polite, “is Viagra helpful?”
“Depends what you want it to do,” answered John-Jeffrey. “I’ve been assured it’s completely safe, which is a good thing. Characters in the Hungarian porn videos I used to watch claimed a gust of wind could give you an erection if you’d taken one – I really have no evidence to support this, but yes, it does work in terms of, you know…” I assumed Robbie did know because John-Jeffrey had reached the threshold of embarrassment and Robbie didn’t interrogate further. “But in terms of helping you, or rather someone else, get pregnant, of course it does nothing, although at least they probably enjoy the process more.” He took a sip of coffee. “One hopes.”
“How do you feel about taking them?”
“Initially, as some kind of insult against my manhood, as one is given to think,” came the honest reply. “This isn’t helped by comic references on satirical TV, comments made by guys who may well use it themselves. I mean, it isn’t the type of thing you talk about, is it?” I looked over my glasses to make sure I’d heard this correctly (why do people do that? – it doesn’t help you hear any more clearly) as he seemed all too happy to talk about most aspects of it. “I was nervous at first, but the effect, shall we say, led to a lot less frustration and a lot more pleasure for two people, so any misgivings I had quickly went out of the window.”
“So, how goes the surrogacy project?” Robbie was curious, and I had no lack of interest in this either and so lingered in the room without the vaguest of attempts to hide my nosiness. “Are you still sure it’s a good idea at your age?”
“Well, I know what you mean about how long I’ll be around for them,” said John-Jeffrey, frankly, “but we can give them loads of love and we can give them a helluva lot of experience and maturity.”
“You’re not joking on the last point,” commented Robbie, although I interpreted this as an attempt to keep the conversation good-humoured rather than rudeness.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m just back from Gatwick – my first attempt at providing sperm for actual use.”
“How was that?” I got the impression Robbie was desperately trying to restrain his curiosity and, to be honest, not scoring highly in the success stakes.
“Just slightly embarrassing, but not really humiliating, despite the obvious potential,” John-Jeffrey adjudicated. “I’d been before to be checked out, as I’ve told you, but this time, I went all the way to spend four hours in a hotel room before being taken to the clinic.”
“And then?” Robbie was edging closer and closer to the edge of his seat, which, by now, John-Jeffrey had noticed with some amusement and was trying hard not to comment on.
“In a nutshell, I was put in a room with a small sterilised container and a screen showing porn movies and had to wank off.” I adjudged this to be a fair enough nutshell. “The embarrassing part, other than the miniscule amount produced, was knowing there were three other men outside the room, also armed with sterilised bottles, awaiting their turn in front of the TV.”
Robbie laughed as he finally sat back in his chair. John-Jeffrey looked as if to say, ‘What the hell are you laughing at?’, which resulted in five seconds of stony, embarrassed silence before John-Jeffrey himself laughed out loud. This could have been due to the relief garnered from having completed the story without too much damage to his sensitivities, or the complete delirium induced by so much sleepless travelling, or just by having got one over on Robbie. Whatever it was cheered him up, anyway.
