The cafe with five faces, p.29
The Café with Five Faces, page 29
“Beggars belief,” interjected John, a contribution which surprised no one.
“And then,” continued Mike, indicating clearly there was to be no respite, even though his train of thought seemed to have jumped a few lines, “having moved his frigging embassy to Jerusalem, he now has the fuckwittedness to recognise the occupied territory of the Golan Heights as being Israeli, once again giving the finger to the rest of the world. Wow.” The latter word was not, in any sense, delivered in tones of admiration; one detected little more than deep despair. “And guess who fawned all over him as a result?” Nobody bothered to answer as it was largely obvious, although none of those present seemed willing to admit they were clueless as to who had won the recent Israeli presidential election and therefore could not have answered with anything approaching complete certainty.
“It’s amazing how different leaders react to similar stuff, isn’t it?” asked Matthew, although his use of the word ‘stuff’ left his specific meaning in some doubt. In response to the odd confused frown, he elaborated. “I mean, look at the tragedy of Christchurch and the admirable response from the New Zealand Prime Minister in banning a range of firearms. That’s something Trump would never have the balls to do.”
“Or the feelings,” added James. “Although, even if he did, the wankers at the NRA would pull his strings in the opposite direction before one could say ‘massacre’.”
I may have forgotten to mention this before, but having the mental agility of a mountain goat sometimes helps to understand the wandering discourse which takes place in my café, particularly when Mike is part of the conversation.
“I’ve just come back from America,” said Matthew, in what initially seemed to represent a mood-lightening, but yet further tweak to the topic, although where his travelling anecdotes are concerned, positivity should never be taken for granted.
“I’d heard you were banned.” Mike had apparently been listening to gossip or reading my 2018 book. Hopefully the latter. I think.
“I was, kind of, but I was told if I applied for a B1 visa, I should be OK.”
“And?”
“Let’s say the adjectives easy, pleasant and cheap do not come to mind,” sighed the jetsetter. “I actually applied while I was in Lebanon, which came as quite a surprise for the Lebanese working in the American Embassy. ‘Why on earth does a Brit need a visa to visit the US?’ ‘Just one of those things,’ I replied, as vaguely as possible. I had to pay $160 before I even got to the interview stage, and that was non-refundable, so it’s quite a good money-spinner. After a stream of pretty general questions, they asked me if I’d ever been to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Yemen. Oddly enough, this quintet of ‘problem countries’ didn’t include North Korea, at least orally, so perhaps Trump’s love of Kim Jong-whichever is catching on. Anyway, after I replied, ‘Yes,’ to Iran and Libya, I was told I couldn’t be given a visa, ‘pending further investigation’ by a higher authority.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously, and I had almost given up hope, if hope be the right word, but eventually, I was asked to send in my passport and I got the visa. They warned me this was no guarantee of being allowed in when I actually arrived, and they were quite right. As on my previous attempted visit, I was travelling from Canada, Vancouver this time, and I was stopped by the front desk at customs and taken through into the back room for interrogation.”
“That sounds scary,” commented John.
“The nightmares of Calgary, 2009, came flooding back, I can assure you,” Matthew replied.
“I bet you were wearing all black again and looking suspicious,” Mark wagered.
“Coincidentally, yes.” Matthew looked momentarily embarrassed but decided not to dwell on issues of wardrobe. “And it was fifty-fifty for quite a while before I was stamped acceptable. They seemed concerned that my visit was taking away an employment opportunity for a legal American, even though this clearly wasn’t the case, at least in my mind.” He shuddered at the recent memory. “I felt about the size of a peanut by the time I was allowed through.”
“I can imagine,” said a very sympathetic Mike.
“There is some contradiction, irony or something, I can’t quite think of the right word, in the whole story, though,” continued Matthew. “I mean, they spent so much time and effort either trying to keep me out of the country or making sure I wasn’t a problem, and yet on the very day I was innocently touring San Diego coffee shops, one of their own was taking a gun to a synagogue in the north of the same, relatively safe, city.”
“We heard about that here as well,” Mike interrupted with a sad but engaged nod. “Talk about an example of getting their priorities completely wrong. They really need to refocus on sorting out their own shitty gun-owning laws before they bother themselves with preventing innocent foreigners coming in. That would be time and money well spent,” he concluded to a round of approval.
“One of my mates said I should feel at home in ‘a former colony’, although that isn’t a term I would ever dare use with any of my American friends,” Matthew went on, “but the simple fact is I feel a darn sight more at home in Lebanon or Belarus than I do in the US of A!”
“Well, being made to feel so totally unwelcome at the border doesn’t help, does it?” asked Mark, somewhat needlessly.
“Don’t you feel you’re being just a little bit negative, maybe?” asked John, perhaps more reasonably. “I mean, after all, they did just let you in!”
“True, but don’t forget, the majority of Americans actually agree with me on some points,” countered Matthew.
“Such as?”
Had Matthew had an answer, we didn’t get to hear it, as a loud disturbance suddenly emanated from the doorway.
“Oi!” came the none-too-gruntled tones of Lois. “What do you two think you’re doing? I’ve been sitting out there on my own for fifteen minutes! It looks like you haven’t even made it to the loo yet either.” Mark made as if to cross his legs, in the faint and ridiculous hope of earning sympathy from his abandoned companion.
“Oh, sorry,” mumbled Matthew apologetically, “we got, erm, held up by, erm…” He tailed off. Had he been trying to look the innocent party, he would have failed dismally.
“We were just exchanging stories about British and American politics and the like,” explained Mark, in the voice of a six-year-old absolving himself from blame after a playground mishap.
“Of course you were,” remarked Lois, dismissively. “You were talking to these three; ergo, you were talking politics, unless you caught them in a brief footballing moment, and that would be even more depressing.”
Mike, James and John looked mildly offended. Lois couldn’t have cared less.
“Anyway, I had my own experience of that last week while you were away,” she continued. “I was on the plane to Poland and, no matter how much you won’t want to believe this, there was a group of lads wearing ‘make Britain great again’ hats in the style of DT’s ‘make America great again’. And, of course, they were abusing all the other passengers by chanting Brexit crap at them and, in general, being as totally yobbish as a British stag party after a few ales.”
“Disgraceful!”
“So sad…”
“It just shows some of the type of people who support Brexit,” continued Lois. “I mean, is this what the people of Britain and America want for the future? Control by hate-filled, nationalist hooligans?”
“I’m afraid Trumpism is like a disease,” commented Mike, as one might have expected he would. “There’s a risk of it sweeping the planet like the plague. It’s time someone found an antidote and put the movement out of its misery for good.”
“The plague was carried by rats as well,” added James, to looks of general distaste, whether at the analogy or the reality wasn’t clear.
“We all thought Farridge had been dismissed into obscurity,” said Mike, “only for the fascist bastard to threaten yet another comeback. He’s like a rubber duck the way he keeps resurfacing with the same fixed sick smile.”
“You’re still banging that drum, I see,” said Matthew, with a smile which indicated support rather than despair. “Have you started talking to the people you know who voted Leave yet?”
“Of course not,” replied Mike, although no one really needed to ask. “To me, talking to someone who voted Leave is pretty much equivalent to talking to a member of the Flat Earth Society: no rationale and no evidence to support their viewpoint. I only know three people who voted that way, anyway, and we completely ignored each other at Christmas again, and it was they who passed on making any comment relating to a significant birthday I had last year.”
“It a two-way street, though, isn’t it?” asked James, perhaps more bravely than he intended. Mike spat on the floor without actually emitting any saliva. I took this more as an indication of frustration rather than contempt for the lack of communication from his Brexit-supporting friends and relatives, although, given his strength of feeling on the ‘B’ matter, the latter could not be discounted.
John, in a moment of inspired common sense, decided to tweak the subject. He knew that changing it altogether would alienate Mike but clearly felt some redirection was called for.
“Can someone define that increasingly misused and most annoying word in the English language – ‘robust’?” he asked. He continued with a rather bleak attempt at an impression of a certain prime minister. “As in, ‘Let me be quite clear – and possibly stable – discussions were robust as we pursued the goal of delivering on the result of the referendum.’ Guess who might have said that!” The italicised words were accompanied by sarcastically visualised quotation marks.
“How many times have we heard those three words?” Mark sighed in a demonstration of shared disdain.
“Well, let’s look on the bright side, shall we?” Mike, rather surprisingly, suggested. “At the end of this week, the Lib Dems and the Greens won big in the local elections, and the Tories and Labour were soundly thrashed for their tomfoolery of the past three years. The UKIP vote was apparently down seventy per cent, the Tories by twenty-five per cent and Labour by ten per cent, while the remain-supporting Lib Dems saw a 110% rise and the Greens a scarcely believable 550%. As one of my friends said on Facebook, ‘Is this the return of sanity in the UK?’”
“Makes a change from bleeding anarchy then, doesn’t it?” said John to the former fan of the Sex Pistols.
“Let’s see what happens now with the Euro elections,” continued Mike, ignoring his friend’s attempt at what I assumed was intended to be a joke. “It’s a shame the Lib Dems, the Greens and Change UK aren’t collaborating more. At the moment, in England, as opposed to other parts of the UK, we have three parties – the ERG-controlled Tories, the Brexit Party and UKIP – supporting Brexit, and three parties – the Lib Dems, the Greens and Change UK – supporting a People’s Vote and Remain, while Labour are sitting so precariously on the fence with the bloody-minded leadership balancing out eighty per cent of the membership to such an extent nobody has a bleeding clue, let alone themselves, which way they’re going to go.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it,” began James, before contradicting himself, “although, actually, it probably isn’t,” leaving his audience in a state of temporary flux. “I mean, like Matthew was saying before, how people view the same events. The Tories lose well over a thousand local council seats, while the anti-Brexit Lib Dems gain over seven hundred; yet, somehow or another, and God only knows how, our desperately confused Prime Minister hears the simple, and no doubt ‘clear’ message that she just has to get on and ‘deliver’ Brexit, and probably rather ‘robustly’. And Corbyn actually receives the same message, one can only assume through a lifelong hearing affliction!” James was displaying the incredulity which was normally the preserve of Mike. “On the other hand, Vince Cable, who obviously has substantially more than the half a brain required to participate in British politics, noted that, ‘Every vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for stopping Brexit.’” He paused momentarily. “There’s nowt so deaf as them that will not hear,” he concluded with his own Lancastrian version of a well-known proverb, which was just about grammatically accurate, or, at least, intelligible.
I don’t think I’d ever heard James speak for such a long time. It seemed to take his listeners a moment or two to take it all in as well.
“Given Theresa May’s renowned hiding from the truth and Jeremy Corbyn’s EU-blindness and -deafness, I agree with your revised opinion,” declared Mike, breaking the brief silence. “Not amazing at all. I broke the habit of a lifetime and voted for the Lib Dems this time and it was quite definitely, clearly and robustly against any form of Brexit.”
“Here’s to Vince Cable and common sense,” proclaimed John, and then, realising everyone’s glasses were empty, turned to me for help. The Granada group, Lois included, continued on their way to the solitary bathroom. I hoped at least two of them could hold it in a few moments longer.
Matthew spent just one day wandering around San Diego, but you would think twenty-four hours would be more than enough to produce a picture more city-specific than the sky, surely, however nice it might be?
2019: 49: Beirut: Uncorking the Bottle
There was a pair of shoes outside Beirut, which was something of a surprise as I hadn’t seen anyone going in. They weren’t carelessly discarded, so I ruled Jo out as a possibility. And they looked more like men’s footwear, in any case. Although, come to think of it, Jo did have a penchant for men’s shoes. As I hadn’t heard anyone falling over, I also decided Misha was not in the close vicinity. I opened the curtain, hoping for a new customer but expecting, with no offence intended, to see Micky. I was wrong on both counts.
I found Mark on the floor, slumped against the thick Arabic cushions, staring into some void far beyond the physical walls, possibly wondering how he’d ended up in a different ‘room’ where he was unable to see the sky. He stirred, with some effort, but sufficiently so to order a Chemex for two, using his weak and feeble indoor voice, the sort many men resort to when feeling a little under the weather and need (or want) looking after. I asked him who he was expecting.
“I was hoping you’d join me.”
“Fair enough.” I took my leave, feeling slightly concerned about his well-being, and how uplifting my next cup of coffee might not prove to be.
I returned a few minutes later to discover a statuesque Mark. It was momentarily hard to tell if there was life on planet Beirut, but the whiff of coffee fumes roused its inhabitant into action. Well, maybe not ‘action’ exactly. Let’s keep things in perspective; everything’s relative.
I had only recently found out that Mark was divorced and the slow disintegration of his marriage had reached its private, sad but inevitable conclusion in the not-too-distant past. This affects people in many different ways, not that I would know from personal experience, being a lifelong commitment-phobe, but in Mark’s case, it had made him feel very lonely and isolated. Fortunately, or otherwise, his best friend was often his ex-wife, but I wasn’t really sure who was clinging on to the past more. I suspected the male half, in this case. Some have tried to tell me it usually is the male half who suffers most, but as these pearls have all been born in the mouths of man, I doubt I’m getting the whole story. On the other hand, male suicide rates are three times higher than those for women, so there must be a root gender-related cause somewhere. To continue arguing with myself, however, the rates of depression and attempted suicide are higher in women – it seems men are just more ‘successful’ at it, if one can actually call dying at one’s own hands a success.
I think I’m over-thinking.
Mark’s saviours, without any question, were Matthew and Lois, but they had been away for a couple of weeks and Mark had been left sitting either in self-imposed solitary confinement or with someone whose feelings towards him were a long way from what they once had been or what might be currently desired. He was clearly thinking more of the former pair than the latter individual as he sipped at his filtered black coffee. “They’re a couple of sarky bastards,” he said, quite affectionately, “but in England, those two are really all I’ve got.” He must have decided to lighten the mood briefly as he continued, “Sometimes, I wonder, if I went on one of those buying property TV programmes like A Place in the Sun, who on earth I’d take with me. If it was Matthew, everyone would think I was gay. Nowt wrong with being gay, of course, but I just don’t want people thinking I’m something I’m not. And if it was Lois, she’d spend all the time interviewing the presenter.”
I was well aware of Lois’s yearnings to be a television journalist, asking probing questions of all and sundry, and the image of her taking over someone else’s show was vivid enough to provoke a smile in both of the present interlocuters.
One smile quickly dissolved into a sigh. “I’m not sure how I ended up like this.” There isn’t much one can say in response to such a statement, so I leaned back on the cushions facing Mark, put my hands together prayer-like, and supported my chin on my thumbs and my fairly big nose on my two forefingers in the manner of someone deep in thought with a profound wish to appear intelligent. I might also have looked like a shrink giving his patient time to think while charging a fortune for every second of silence.
“You know how it is,” he continued eventually, proving that the waiting technique might actually work in the process of self-discovery, if not self-help. “I’ve spent years travelling all over the world and seeing so many places at other people’s expense but without accumulating any money. Not that cash is everything; the experiences have always counted for more. At least up until now. I suppose there’ll come a time when I might start to regret the priorities I have lived by.” He paused, as if contemplating a lonely old age of poverty filled with regrets; I hoped I was wrong. “I’ve got friends in so many different countries whom I never see, and yet no one other than Matthew, Lois and the ex in England, so when those two are away, I feel so lost.” I wasn’t altogether sure if he was talking to me or to himself; there was certainly a complete lack of eye contact. “And I cling on, metaphorically and literally, to an ageing smartphone which rarely pings anymore.” Mark’s brow furrowed. I had never realised how far up a bald head a brow could furrow.
