The cafe with five faces, p.33
The Café with Five Faces, page 33
“There’s a book in there somewhere,” said Matthew, thoughtfully.
“How about, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Friend,” suggested Lois.
“That’s the one I was thinking of,” Matthew approved. The reaction was an uncomfortable blend of amusement with a strange kind of sadness, reflecting the discussion I had had with Mark recently in Beirut, in which the conflict between what seemed like a jet-set lifestyle and the comparative emptiness of the quiet life at home had reared its ugly head with little scope for ambiguity.
Lois used the prevailing topic and the moment of reflection to form her question for the day. “During all of your travels, when have you felt most lonely?” This required some thinking time because, for people who travel a lot, loneliness is an all-too-frequent friend.
“I think I’ve already told you mine,” said Matthew, rather too quickly for too much consideration to have been given. “Bandit country in northern Pakistan, for one, even though I had company, and heading towards the Syrian border in Lebanon with no one other than a non-English-speaking taxi driver, but that was quite brief. I’ll leave this one to you, Mark.”
“Funny you should say that,” said the newly good-humoured one. “I can think of two occasions, although they don’t really come with particularly good stories attached.” Lois, having leaned forward in expectation of amusement or despair (the latter usually leading to equal amusement) at her friend’s exploits and expense, sat back again, looking rather disappointed. “One was on the Trans-Siberian Express.”
“Oh, I always wanted to do that!” exclaimed Lois, shifting mood to jealousy.
“So did I,” concurred Mark, “and I was really glad I did it when I did back in the late nineties, although in the last two days heading towards Moscow, one did get rather sick of the sight of yet another silver birch. And the two Japanese guys I was sharing a cabin with didn’t speak much English, so there weren’t many distractions other than the samovar of hot water for making excessive quantities of tea and, perhaps, an American couple in first class who had the luxury of a shower and were quite eager to let people see it on request. More of a drip, in all honesty, but at least it was a private drip.”
“Your washing facilities must have been a right barrel of laughs, then,” commented Matthew.
“I didn’t find them till day three,” confessed Mark, as Lois wrinkled her nose in disgust. “And even then, I stuck to the bare essentials.” Fortunately, he didn’t elaborate on what exactly these were. Some things are just too personal.
“I almost lost my Japanese ‘friends’ as well,” Mark continued. “When we arrived at the Mongolian-Russian border, the guards noticed their visas weren’t live until the following day. The following day was in a few hours’ time so it all seemed a bit bureaucratic and pointless, bearing in mind we were locked in a train carriage crossing from the wilderness of the Gobi Desert to the wilderness of Siberia, but it was enough to cause a short delay.”
“Did you get on with them OK?” asked Lois, dropping her formal interviewing tone.
“One of them in particular, despite the language barrier,” answered Mark. “He used to come with me for meals in the restaurant car. This might not sound like much of an expedition, but it’s a very long train and I had booked early and had berth 001. The restaurant car was at the very far end of the train because it was changed according to the country we were passing through. I reckon it was close to half a mile from one end to the other, but that may be a slight exaggeration. I can’t remember going while we were in China, but the Mongolian car was really quite interesting food-wise. After that, without wishing to be too derogatory towards Russian cuisine, it went a bit downhill. One can tire of chicken and mash for every meal.”
“Hardly representative,” adjudged Matthew, to which Mark nodded in agreement.
“But I think the loneliest I have ever felt was in the company of one of my best friends from years ago.”
“How can you be lonely with a best friend?” queried a bemused Lois.
“It wasn’t the feeling I’d been expecting,” admitted Mark. “We’d been working in Durban for a month and had a few days off. Faced with a choice between Johannesburg and Lesotho, we made the last-minute decision to go to the latter by car. Once away from the main highways, it was so quiet. Even while still in South Africa, we stopped in this village and it just brought to mind that phrase Richard Hannay used in the last 39 Steps film – a ‘one horse dorp’. I hadn’t really thought what one was like until I went to this place.”
“What does it mean?” asked Lois.
“Apparently, it’s just an alternative way of saying a small town where nothing happens,” replied the intrepid traveller. “I had to google it,” he added, in response to a slightly raised eyebrow. “Anyway, then we crossed into Lesotho, rather unwisely ignoring any petrol stations on the way. The first night was a little surreal; we found somewhere to stay and then went for a drink. Not surprisingly, perhaps, we were the only white people in the place and the only ones drinking large quantities of Bacardi Breezers, our in-drink of the time, and consequently the focus of too much attention. I can’t say it was unwanted attention, although one older guy in particular was rather too keen on dissuading some of the younger customers, by which I mean mid-teenagers, from bothering us.”
“Why? Were you considered dangerous or a malevolent influence of some kind?”
“Dunno. They were asking us loads of questions about Man United, which we were happy to answer, but maybe the older guy thought they were being a nuisance.”
“It doesn’t sound very lonely so far,” remarked Matthew, recalling the initial question.
“Well, you can be lonely in a crowd,” Lois pointed out.
“True, but it really began the following day,” Mark replied. “We’d stopped in the first town in the country so we felt close to the more familiar South Africa, almost like clinging on to home, even though it wasn’t. But then we headed out into what really felt increasingly like the last place on earth. It became wilder and more beautiful by the mile and, other than a couple of guys on a pair of BMW bikes, we felt further and further from civilisation. It was a wonderful feeling, a powerful emotion, but also very unnerving. That’s why I say I felt lonely, even though my friend, Mick, was with me the whole time.”
“Wow!” Lois seemed unusually speechless. I was merely marvelling at the difference in Mark’s tone from my last conversation with him. What a difference a friend or two makes. Really.
“I’ve got to say, though,” Mark went on, “I have six photographs from my pre-digital travels enlarged and framed on my wall at home, and three of them, from a choice which runs well into thousands, are from that short venture into Lesotho. I may have felt lonely and a little scared at times, especially when we seemed about to run out of petrol miles from a corner shop, let alone a petrol station, but looking back on it, it was one of the best trips of my life. One of the pictures has just miles of empty roads, more like dirt tracks, really, wending their way into a fairy-tale oblivion, to depict the isolation; one was a fluke, a shot of a farmer taken from a moving car on a bumpy road which others think is blurred but to me is like an impressionist painting and is possibly my favourite photograph ever; the other contender just evokes so many memories.” He paused, as if suddenly lost in the Lesotho of late 2001.
“Such as?” pressed the impatient Lois.
“We’d found this hut, which turned out to be a bar. There were two rooms and a terrace, but literally, it was a shack in the middle of a field, even though it was little more than a mile above the capital, Maseru. There were a few locals sitting on the terrace drinking something, I can’t remember what. We were a little shy to ask if we could have a drink because it wasn’t initially obvious it was a bar. Anyway, this guy led us into a room which had a cooler at the back. That was it: a cooler and bare floorboards. I can’t remember if we had beers or Bacardi Breezers; the drink just wasn’t important. We sat on the terrace, with these local guys, and watched the sun go down over the hills. And that’s my pic. Beautiful to me, if meaningless to others.”
You could see and hear the emotion in the description; pure happiness with a sense of nostalgia and regret over times long gone. But that’s what fond memories are all too often about, unfortunately – knowing it happened and very unlikely ever to be repeated.
“And then we almost crashed off the Sani Pass the day after,” Mark added, awakening from the sublime and bringing the conversation, almost literally, crashing down to earth. “Mick thought it was good fun to speed in a two-wheel drive car down one of the most dangerous mountain passes in the world. He soon changed his mind after we span off on a straight stretch of ‘road’.” The final word came with air quotation marks to indicate quite clearly that ‘road’ was a very loose description. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” he concluded, however contradictory his last two or three sentences might have been.
“Time for a Cruzcampo, I think,” determined Matthew, as if Mark’s trip down memory lane had induced a severe incidence of thirst. There are times when I don’t want to leave a conversation, but a customer is a customer, and three customers are just as indisputably three customers, so a barman’s duty has to be done. Besides, I was pretty certain they would still be chatting three or four minutes later and, of course, I was correct, although the topic had moved on. Or, perhaps I should say, moved back to add to a tale of yesteryear.
“For some reason, while I was travelling the other day, I recalled another brothel experience,” Matthew was saying in the quiet tones of hoped-for confidentiality. “Or at least I think it was a brothel experience.”
“Do you mean you can’t tell?” asked Lois in a voice laden with scepticism.
“Well, I just wasn’t sure because, you know me, I always look on the bright side of things.”
“Well, for men like you, isn’t a brothel as bright a side as it can get?”
Matthew was affronted on a personal level, whereas Mark took offence on behalf of man.
Matthew, after a sharp intake of breath, decided not to rise to the bait. “It was on one of my first trips to Almaty. I was staying in a flat and I had been given some leaflets and tourist brochures recommending places to eat and other such stuff. One of the restaurants sounded pretty interesting and was just around the corner, so I made up my mind to go. There were no signs outside, except, I think, for one in Russian, which I didn’t understand. I decided to risk going in and, without wanting to sound too sexist, there were several very nubile young ladies literally draped all over the first room. I only wanted food – honestly – but, as a very obvious foreigner, they clearly thought I was there for other reasons. I think I asked a dumb question about what they had for dinner…”
Matthew wasn’t allowed to go any further, as Lois’s imagination had gone into overdrive and she had one of her hysterical giggling fits; hysterical in the sense that she found something incredibly funny, but also in the sense that everyone at close quarters couldn’t help but laugh at her. She finally calmed down. “And which one did you have?” she managed to say.
“I think I left and went somewhere else,” said Matthew in tones of mild but clearly tolerant rebuke.
“Awwww, what a shame!” Lois loved it when her friends were put in compromising positions. It made me wonder how she had any friends in the first place. She wanted more. “You didn’t tell us much about your American trip,” she prompted, hoping for more tales of embarrassment.
“All I can remember at the moment is the journey, which, to use an American term, was both a metaphorical and literal pain in the butt.”
“Well, it is quite a long way,” Mark pointed out, as if his friend was unaware of the blooming obvious.
“Imagine,” responded Matthew, as if trying to explain a complex concept to your average six-year-old, “you’ve been travelling for twenty hours from the north of England to London to the west coast of Canada. You’ve been confined for nine hours in the window seat of a jumbo jet packed full of people and their luggage. And then, in the late evening, when all you can think about is a bed, you arrive to be greeted by the labours of a one-man baggage-handling team in Vancouver airport. And no matter how often the announcements apologise for the inconvenience caused, forgiveness isn’t at the forefront of one’s mind, especially when there is still another two hours by minibus before the bed actually materialises.”
“I feel for you,” said Lois, although it was clear she was trying to repress a laugh as she rubbed the base of her spine. Or the top of her butt, I couldn’t actually tell. Either way, Matthew managed to ignore her.
“Too much time on a plane can be detrimental to one’s health,” Mark added by way of more sincere consolation, or a statement of fact, depending how you looked at it.
“The other thing I remember happened on the journey back,” Matthew continued, and then hesitated, as if unsure whether the looming confession was worth the trouble. He seemed to think, ‘Ah well; in for a penny, in for a pound’, before continuing. As if Lois would have let him off the hook, in any case. “I was watching the seatback TV and, for reasons I can’t quite remember, I started crying at a very predictable comedy film, secretly trying to dry my eyes so the six-foot six-inch macho man sitting next to me didn’t notice.”
“Awwww, you poor thing!” consoled Lois. At least, I think this is what she said; it was hard to tell, as she had another giggling fit and inadvertently spat some Cruzcampo at an innocent passer-by.
“It must have been tiredness,” Matthew defended himself.
“What else could it have been, you soppy old git?” Lois, after a momentary note of sobriety while she apologised to the victim of her most recent bout of hilarity, resumed her infectious laughter, which no one, not Mark, not me, and eventually not even Matthew, could resist joining in, even if it wasn’t clear whether we were laughing with her or at her. It wasn’t even that funny a story, but who cared?
Two of the three pictures from Lesotho which hang on Mark’s wall at home. I love these as much as he does.
2019: 54: Budapest: In the Presence of The Presence
Jimez and Jen arrived together, something of a first and an occasion which might have led the non-aware into thinking they were a couple, which they most certainly were not, despite the former’s valiant attempts. To be honest, such attempts were a thing of the distant past, as Jen had long since made it clear she preferred my cake menu to the attentions of a failed bohemian who resembled a basset hound on a bad day. Ears excepted.
Stopping at the bar in Cape Town, presumably in a bid to get served more quickly than had they waited for me to come to them (and I confess, this was a valid viewpoint to take), they ordered a cappuccino each, another departure from routine in Jen’s case, and two slices of Eszterházy, which represented no departure of any kind whatsoever.
They headed off into Budapest, my room for arty types, whether successful or otherwise. If truth be told, of course, artistic success on the part of my customers was as prevalent as snowdrops in Siberia on Christmas Day or common sense in the Brexit Party, but one lives in hope of a change of the positive variety.
I delivered their order pretty promptly, by my standards, and found them rambling aimlessly about this and that. Nothing new there.
“Did you know,” Jimez, so often quiet and reticent in the company of more than one, began in the style of a bod who was about to share common knowledge rather than impart anything novel or, dare I say, bordering on the relevant, “that conkers is being banned in schools?”
“Whatever for?” Jen was pretending (I think) to be outraged by the apparent affront to her human rights implicit in this question.
“I used to have a 160,” I reminisced, to the combined surprise of my customers.
“You’ve lost me,” Jen commented, although whether this meant she was cut adrift in the logistics of a schoolyard game from a bygone era or, more likely, in her piece of Eszterházy was open to a little questioning.
“Every new vinegar-soaked conker starts off life with a score of one,” I explained, not a hundred per cent sure where I was heading. Let’s face it, I haven’t played in nearly half a century. “And then if your conker beats another one, you add the score of the vanquished chestnut to that of your own…” I tailed off, acknowledging that I had little confidence in my own explanation and full confidence that Jen was so busy with her cake, she wouldn’t have noticed had I started reciting Shakespearean sonnets to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’. I turned to Jimez, who had, I believe, been nodding along in agreement with my interpretation of the rules. “So, why is it being banned?” I queried, opting for the easy way out.
“Apparently, schools are scared of being sued if someone is hit by a low-flying chestnut,” Jimez explained.
“Humph!” Jen’s noise came at an apposite moment, indicating that perhaps she could listen and eat at the same time. “That’s the nanny state for you,” she declared. I felt bound to concur, although my surprise at her ability to multi-task when one of the tasks under scrutiny was edible rendered me temporarily speechless.
“We’re not allowed to climb trees anymore either.” Jimez added more fuel to a fire in which my mind was redirected into conjuring up images of the slightly lanky individual with no visible evidence of muscle who was seated in front of me hauling himself up a trunk. It seemed he could read my mind; either that or my poker face was not performing to the requisite level. “Not me! It was a very generic ‘we’, meaning anyone of the appropriate age range.”
“But it’s true,” said Jen, finishing her cake before Jimez had even started and casting rather longing looks at the latter’s untouched slice. “All those things we used to do when we were young, there are now laws against. I know there are increased risks in modern life, but there is so much interference, it sometimes feels we’re not allowed to choose what we do. It’s an infringement against our personal freedom.”
