The cafe with five faces, p.16
The Café with Five Faces, page 16
“I’ll let you know if I’m pregnant.” John-Jeffrey’s sense of timing was perfect as Robbie was mid-swallow of a mouthful of beer which did not consequently reach its intended destination. “Two-nil,” he said to himself, with sadistic self-satisfaction.
Chuckling impolitely to myself, I went to fetch a mop.
Sometimes, it’s worth getting up early. This is one of my (many) favourite pictures of the Hebden Bridge area, and a particularly calming one.
2018: 30: Granada: We’re on the Road to Somewhere
“Don’t ask me why,” began Lois, so we didn’t, “but I had a dream last night about a sheep on a motorbike.” I wondered if this was one of those utterances which had never before been made in the entire history of spoken English. “It must have been that story of Matthew’s with the rigid one in Lebanon,” she continued, answering her own question, as television presenters are sometimes prone to doing when faced with recalcitrant interviewees. “It made me think,” she said as her friends silently admired the stream of consciousness, “what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen on a motorbike?” She had finally got to the point.
“Me, for one,” answered Matthew. “I never thought it would happen, having promised my mother I would never do such a thing, but in Hanoi, the alternatives are few and far between, especially when a trusted friend gives up his helmet to enable you to ride pillion.”
“I remember my first trip to Vietnam,” said Mark. “Helmets weren’t compulsory and I can’t remember seeing anyone wearing one. By the time I went again, it had become law and almost everyone had one. Imagine the money that some entrepreneurs made by jumping on that bandwagon!”
“Strange thing is,” Matthew continued, as though Mark had kept his thoughts to himself, “I really enjoyed it. I keep looking at Chaelli’s Vespa and wondering…”
“Mid-life crisis,” jeered Lois. I took this rather personally, even if Matthew didn’t.
“You really don’t have to leave Vietnam to answer this question over and over,” said Mark, returning to the point. “Hanoi has so many motorbikes, they’re used for just about everything.”
“It isn’t much of an exaggeration,” concurred Matthew. “I once met a teacher there, Canadian, who accused me of being culturally insensitive for showing a picture of a car to Vietnamese students, as though they’d never seen one or could even relate to one!”
“The city’s alive with taxis as well,” commented Mark in support of his challenged friend, “although it is true that many bikes replace the family saloon in Hanoi – I should say at this point, we’re talking moped, not Harley or Kawasaki! I think the record in my experience, but I wasn’t there for long, is a father driving, a mother hanging onto the back and three children squeezed in between. It’s quite a sight. Thankfully, the engines aren’t big, so speeds are relatively restrained.”
“The strangest load I saw wasn’t actually on the bike,” said Matthew, “although it had been milli-moments before. The crash was deafening, even above the noise of a thousand mopeds. I turned around, along with everyone else within earshot, and there was this poor guy surveying about eight crates of Heineken which were now scattered and shattered all over the central lane of a main road. I often wonder if that came out of his, no doubt miniscule, salary.”
“You stayed and helped clear up, of course,” Lois stated with a fair degree of probably feigned certainty. Matthew averted his gaze and drained his beer.
“Talking about people hanging on to things,” Mark said suddenly, although this seemed like quite a substantial subject tweak to me. “I went on a day trip from Jakarta once with the school owner. She let me drive, which, outside the city, was pretty cool – different, you know, varying between dirt tracks and motorways and most points in between. Anyway, it was towards the end of the day, driving back into the city on the motorway, and we were, embarrassingly, overtaken by a bus.”
“You were still driving?” asked Matthew in some surprise, as personal experience informed him that Mark liked pushing the boundaries of speed limits.
“I can’t actually remember,” said a rather pensive Mark. “But that isn’t the point; to say the bus was full would be an understatement of near-criminal proportions. Remember this was a motorway, and the bus was doing a fair rate of knots; the door was open and there were people hanging out of the bus, about five or six of them holding on to the vertical rail for dear life. The guy most in danger of falling off, or out, or whatever, must have been about seventy!”
“Blimey!” was the unanimous evaluative, and deep-meaning, response.
“I can remember seeing the angst on his face, although that might have been caused by the air speed contorting his features! Mind you, without wanting to be racist or ageist, he may actually have been closer to fifty – it was very hard to tell at that speed and some nationalities just age more quickly.”
“No need to spoil the story,” said Lois. “It was a good one!” She took a sip of the ubiquitous Cruzcampo. “Next?”
“Well, sticking to transport, I had a couple of slightly different experiences in Jakarta,” resumed Mark, “one relating to what I’m sure I used to call a bemo, but I’ve checked on Google since and I can’t find much reference to them, at least not in the form that I knew them.”
“Not tuk-tuks?” Mark suggested helpfully. Or not, as it transpired.
“No, no, no,” retorted Mark, quite emphatically. “I know what a tuk-tuk is, although they call them Bajajs in Indonesia. You have no idea what you’re inhaling while you’re in one but at least you can see the light of day and feel a little bit safe! Well, at least you have a chance of seeing danger coming. I’ve seen various names for what I remember using – minivan taxi sounds too normal, so I’ll go with angkot – rather more of a sinister image. Seriously, if you get in the back of one of those, you wonder if you’ll ever see the aforementioned light of day ever again. Fortunately, if you knock on the roof or scratch it with your fingertips, it will stop and let you out. Unfortunately, you need to have a sense of where you are in order to make whatever noise at the right time, and that isn’t easy, especially when I only ever took them at night.”
“They sound dodgy,” commented Lois, looking at her fingernails and thinking she would never risk them on the roof of an angkot or any other such mode of transport.
“Not recommended for foreigners, apparently,” Mark said, “but you’ve probably got a good idea by now concerning my employer’s sense of humour! She didn’t actually tell me how to get them to stop either; I learned this quickly by seeing others do it, fortunately before I was due to get out.”
“Ah, the joys of travelling,” said Matthew wistfully, almost as though he had never been anywhere, although this notion was quickly dispelled. “I remember a journey in Libya once – in a very safe four-wheel drive.”
“Hardly sounds like an adventure,” Mark commented, slightly mockingly.
“Have you ever been to Benghazi?”
“Erm, nope.”
“The vast majority of this story is really positive,” Matthew continued. “I spent the day with the owner of the school and his friend and it began by buying fish on the dockside, which was interesting in itself – it might be on the Med, but there were fish I had never seen anywhere before, including some you wouldn’t want to encounter down a dark alley. Or when snorkelling,” he added more realistically.
“Yummy.” Lois liked fish.
“And then we drove to the Green Mountains,” Matthew went on, “which are actually brown hills, but I won’t hold that against them. I had no idea where we were heading specifically, however, as there were virtually no road signs and the few there were, were only in Arabic. I asked the school owner about this and he told me it was a deliberate historical ploy to confuse the Americans if they ever invaded!”
“Pre-Google Maps and the like, I presume?” queried Lois.
“Er, yeah! Anyway, we found, or rather they found, as I hadn’t a clue what was going on, this isolated spot in the hills, or mountains, where they cooked the fish over a fire. It took ages and ages so by the time we came to eat it, we had to use the car headlights to see by.”
“Almost romantic,” said Lois dreamily.
“With two Libyan men, however lovely they are?” Matthew looked slightly aghast. “To continue, we ate as I was accustomed to by then in Libya, which meant all three of us digging our hands into the same pot and eating with our fingers. The fish, whatever it was, was fantastic; I couldn’t see the bones, though, and there were millions of them, so it took almost as long to eat as it had taken to cook.”
“Still sounds lovely,” Lois said.
“No arguments at all,” agreed Matthew. “And then came the drive back. There were no road signs on Libyan roads, as I’ve said, very few street lights outside of the cities, and apparently no speed limits on the country roads, although I can’t be sure of the latter. What I can say for sure is that the speed terrified me – and that doesn’t happen often!” He paused with a brief shudder and then remembered the highs rather than the solitary low. “Great day, though! And a superb host!”
“Like my Indonesian lady,” said Mark. “One or two questionable areas, but overall, great fun!”
“I sometimes think language-school owners are a breed apart,” Matthew sighed, but clearly with more fondness than despair.
Lois had to smile at the enjoyment which was evident in hindsight, even if it had not necessarily been the case at the time.
“One of my most frustrating journeys ever was actually by train in Europe.” Matthew was clearly enthused by the topic of travel experiences of almost any description. “Wrocław in Poland to Budapest in Hungary – easy enough, one might think. Not when you had a very slow-moving pociąg pospieszny, which translates ironically as ‘train fast’, and a connection in Kraków, which it soon became obvious I had no chance of catching.”
“Oops! A familiar story, though, rather than a revelation.” Lois was very demanding in her expectations of anecdotes.
“Perhaps, but let me finish,” said the frustrated narrator. “In the knowledge I was going to miss my train, or ‘lose’ it, as my Polish students used to say, I was advised by the conductor there was a later train from Kraków and my ticket would still be valid.”
“Result!” Lois was keen to move on to a more exciting anecdote, but Matthew carried on regardless.
“I was due to start work in Budapest the following morning at 9am, and the new train would get me in at 8.35am.” Matthew finally introduced the required jeopardy into his story, which piqued Lois’s interest a little. “So, I got to Kraków and went to the ticket office, as had been suggested, and were they helpful? Were they not! Apparently, the later train was ‘full’ and all I got out of them after that was a shrug of the shoulders. With some persistence, I was advised to go back to Katowice to catch another train, thereby missing out on my chance of dinner in Camelot, my favourite restaurant in Kraków. So, I bought another ticket to go back to Katowice – this was an osobowy, which translates as people’s train or slow train or stop-at-every-haystack train but, of course, left and arrived bang on time, as all Polish trains used to do.”
“All’s well that ends well then.” Lois had lost interest.
“The punchline is that the train from Katowice included a connection partway down to Budapest with the very same train I had been unable to catch in Kraków!” There was a slight laugh from Mark and a barely audible ‘wow’ from Lois, by which time Matthew had been forced to accept his storytelling skills had let him down on this one. “And I was an hour late for work the next day,” he finished tamely.
“I caught a train in South Africa once,” said Mark. Lois buried her head in her hands, clearly thinking train anecdotes were not the making of a pleasant evening in a café. “I’ll make it quick – don’t worry! I’d been to the races at Kenilworth. I can’t remember why, but I’d only bought a single ticket, rather than a return, and when I came to go back to Cape Town, there was no ticket office. Not wanting to get fined, I got in the final carriage, hoping to find the conductor and buy a ticket – this sometimes used to happen in Poland. The final carriage, however, was third class and cut off from the rest of the train. I think it was a bit of a throwback to the days of apartheid – this was in 2002, not recently. The only seats were hard wooden benches around the outside of the carriage, I don’t recall there being windows, but I could be wrong on that score, and I was the only white person in there; that much was a hundred per cent sure.”
“How did you feel?” asked Lois.
“Slightly out of place and uncomfortable at first, with different people making me feel either unwelcome, as though I was invading their space for dubious reasons, such as a dare, or, on the other hand, welcome. It wasn’t a very long journey and the strangeness wore off, but overall, I think I felt a little rude, but I don’t really know why.”
“And you bought a ticket, of course,” teased Matthew.
“Erm, no, there was no conductor.” Mark looked the other way, suspecting his tight-fistedness was about to be raised again. Matthew opened his mouth to speak and then settled on a mischievous wink.
Lois was also winking mischievously, although her reason was different. “So, tell me,” she began again, “what is the most unlikely place you’ve fallen in love with?”
“With or in?” queried Matthew, remaining mischievous.
“With! As a place!”
“I suppose Beirut is a fairly unusual answer, but I think we’ve been there and done that as a subject recently.” There was no doubting Matthew’s fondness for the city.
“Katowice is a fairly unusual place to declare your love for,” said Mark thoughtfully. “Most people think ‘polluted industrial nightmare’, but I really, genuinely, like it as a place to be, rather than a place to look at. There’s an artificial lake area called Trzy Stawy, literally ‘three ponds’, although it’s also the name of the shopping centre next door! It’s dissected by a motorway with a campsite right next to it – and I do realise what a lousy job I’m doing of selling this, but I have such fond memories of sitting in a lakeside restaurant called Pan de Rossa watching the sun go down over the lake and the adjoining agglomeration of residential tower blocks.”
“I can’t wait to go,” said a bemused Lois.
“The restaurant has moved about a hundred metres now so you can’t unfortunately see the lake or the agglomeration anymore, although you can hear the motorway more clearly if that kind of thing turns you on, but the steak in blue-cheese sauce and the draft Żywiec beer still make it more than worthwhile.”
“Any other reason for liking the city?” asked Matthew. “I mean, I’ve been, and I like the main party street, Mariacki, and there are some fantastic bars and cafés but also the ugliest rynek in all of Poland!”
“Fair point; the last time I was there, it was still a glorified tram stop,” acknowledged Katowice’s greatest supporter. “The rynek is the town square,” he explained to Lois, seeing the question forming on her lips, “and every Polish city has one, I think. Most, like those in Wrocław, Kraków, Toruń, Poznań and Opole, are beautiful. Katowice’s isn’t.”
“So, what do you like about it then, other than a restaurant with a motorway and a shopping centre for company?” Lois was sincerely intrigued.
Mark took out his phone. This struck Lois and Matthew as a rather rude manner of responding to a perfectly legitimate question and they spent the next two minutes looking at each other, trying to decide whether to change the subject or perhaps just leave. Finally, Mark said, “Aha!” and thrust his phone into their collectively lost facial features.
“This is something I posted online a while back,” he said, so we all read, inasmuch as three people can comfortably gather around the screen of an ageing smartphone:
…the one-time industrial nightmare of Katowice, a city where one of my students in 1998 was heard to remark on the clear sky – not an unusual comment, perhaps, but she was referring solely to the fact it wasn’t green. A city where, so it was rumoured, Poland used to play international football matches so the opposition would have trouble breathing. A city which spawned jokes such as the Katowice-born girl at green school (a camp in the country with healthy air) who had to be sat next to the exhaust of a car so she could breathe normally. These stories, well certainly the latter, are grossly unfair and the city’s place in my top-three Polish urban areas, if not occupying the number one spot, is genuine. It’s the ugly duckling of Polish towns but I just want to hug it better.
“Well, that really explains why you like it,” Lois remarked with a tone which indicated it did nothing of the sort.
“Makes me want to go back,” added Matthew, although his tone was far more affectionate.
“You really have to experience it, not read about it,” argued Mark, although he could tell he had lost his case to the point of flogging a dead horse as far as Lois was concerned.
“Moving on,” she said with some finality. “Do you watch a lot of sport when you’re travelling, or even take part in any?”
Matthew and Mark exchanged amused expressions at the afterthought to the question, with a clear reference to their common lack of fitness and their burgeoning beer bellies.
“Take part might be an overstatement,” began Matthew, “but I have been skiing and the last time was, erm, interesting!” It was also an interesting choice of adjective, as it transpired. “It was in 2007, I think, and I was inspecting a school in Kazakhstan. The owner, or his assistant, asked me if I liked skiing and I said, ‘Yes, but I haven’t been for ten years.’ Somewhere along the continuum of communication, this got misinterpreted as, ‘Yes, I’ve been skiing for ten years,’ so, quite naturally, they assumed I was an expert.”
