The cafe with five faces, p.37
The Café with Five Faces, page 37
“The funniest part was when he threw his toys out of the pram again and cancelled a state visit to Denmark when they said they weren’t interested in selling!” said Mike. “He actually had the rank stupidity to say no one treats the United States like that!”
“And changing the subject a little,” continued John, with something akin to a gathering storm, “he blamed some of the recent racist mass shootings in his own country on immigration. I don’t want to keep on saying ‘beggars belief’, but the man does. If he wants to blame someone, I’m sure he has more than one mirror to look into.”
“So true,” agreed Mike emphatically. “Another twenty-nine victims of gun crime, some possibly the result of the president’s own racial rhetoric; the ‘man’ has sunk so low, he doesn’t even know when he passed rock bottom. And still he criticises the mayor of London for doing a ‘bad, bad’ job on crime. It’s all so, so sad.”
Silence took its turn in the bar once again, as the three friends drank beer and pondered a new direction. However, when conversation resumed, so did the topic.
“The Trump is so desperate for Brexit to happen so he can get his grubby little hands all over Britain and grope it,” said Mike. “Surely that fact alone is enough to set alarm bells ringing and make everyone realise what a bad idea it is. And some news reports say the arm-twisting has already started. ‘No trade deal if you tax the tech giants’ or ‘no trade deal if you don’t help us against China’.”
“And then there’s climate change,” piped up John, a little randomly. “There was a G7 meeting on one of the most important issues in the world today, and the Trump couldn’t even be bothered to show up, presumably preferring to chat with his billionaire friends who are the ones making money from destroying the environment and whom he relies on for funding his 2020 campaign.” Evidence for this was not offered, but those present did not doubt the probable truth behind the accusation.
“Which do you think is the Trump’s real agenda?” asked James. “’Make America great again’, ‘make America white again’ or ‘make America hate again’?”
“Any or all of the above,” responded Mike promptly. “And then there are his proteges, like Bolsonaro, with what appears to be the wilful destruction of the Amazon for his own personal ends – pro-business and anti-environment. Where on earth have all these nutters come from and why all in the same period of history? The Trump, Johnson, Farridge, minor player though he is, Bolsonaro, Duterte…? Things have come to a pretty pass when you look at Johnson and Trump and it actually crosses your mind that Kim Jong-un is a half-decent leader.” There was a range of raised eyebrows around the bar at this latest suggestion. “OK, I’m joking.” A further pause. “I think…”
John resolved a change of topic really was the order of the minute. “It was a shame England couldn’t regain the Ashes, but the third Test made the whole summer of sport worthwhile somehow, don’t you think?”
The ploy failed. “Agreed,” said Mike. “I was just waiting for Rees-Mogg or some other Brexit wanker to claim it as proof we don’t need the EU. I was amazed when he managed to avoid further ridicule by remaining quiet this time, after his World Cup howler.”
“OK, you’ve made your point,” said James. “You clearly are a Tory no more.”
“Well, there’s nothing really Conservative with a capital ‘C’ about the current government, is there?” Mike replied with an air of genuine despondency. “They’re just the Brexit Party in all but name with some lessons learned from the Stalinist purges. Cummings pulls the strings and Johnson threatens: ‘do this and you’ll be got rid of’, ‘if we think you’ve done that, you’ll be got rid of’, etcetera. By the time of the next election, the Conservatives will in fact be the Brexit Party with a complete absence of true Tories. Unless Article 50 is revoked, as the centrist parties want, this nightmare will go on forever. Even a no-deal won’t be a clean break; it will just be the beginning of the next, even longer, phase. Most of us who voted Remain won’t live long enough to have even the slightest chance of being proven wrong – and I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not!”
“What do you think of my new marketing slogan, lads?” I asked, determined to change at least the tone of the diatribe by displaying some newly printed T-shirts. “‘Keeping Britain in Europe; keeping Europe in Britain’?”
“It sounds like the title of a political manifesto rather than something designed to sell coffee,” Mike pointed out.
“Well, it’s something of a political café, innit?”
I don’t think the Cape Town exchanges on this particular evening left anyone in any doubt on that score.
My new promotional material, ready to be made into a T-shirt.
2019: 58: Hebden Bridge: The Youth of Today
Mrs Tourist put down her cappuccino. “You do realise,” she said, addressing no one in particular, “I only come in here to avoid the drivel of daytime TV.” I can’t say, in all honesty, that I, as the proprietor, manager and barista of the place hitherto referred to as ‘here’, felt complimented. I waited for her to make it better. It was a vain hope. “I can cope with programmes about antiques and property…”
“Just as well,” I mumbled, semi-incoherently and, perhaps, a little grumpily.
“…particularly if they’re on the BBC, where there are no ad breaks every fifteen minutes reminding you of your own mortality.”
Mrs Regular, who had now become quite a friend to the frequent visitor, sipped her Darjeeling (milk first) and followed suit in replacing her cup on the rough-top wooden table, as though this was a pre-requisite for expressing an opinion. “It’s like the road down here, isn’t it, when you’re old enough to realise why the doctor’s surgery and the local funeral parlour are next-door neighbours.”
This something of a non sequitur began to sound like one of those television adverts promoting the benefits of life insurance for the over-fifties and planning one’s own final journey, which the former of the two female customers was justifiably so anxious to avoid.
Mrs Tourist decided to continue with her own train of thought rather than respond. “Some programmes have some good features,” she conceded, taking care not to name any in case my walls were listening, “but then they go into celebrity trivia, which I really don’t get. I mean, seriously, who really cares what a Kardashian thinks, wears or does?”
Mr Regular, up to this point as mute as ever, grunted in agreement. His wife patted him on the back – who knows why – and then returned to ignoring him. “But you are right,” she resumed, returning to a previous comment of her interlocuter, “I think people over the age of fifty should have the right to watch television without being told every so often that their days are numbered and they should start making sure their loved one are catered for in the event of their demise.”
My own opinion was that people over the age of fifty, of which I am proudly one, should follow established norms of conversational interaction rather than doing an oral impression of a mountain goat, but I kept this little gem to myself.
Mr Tourist had been sitting with his mouth comically open for somewhere between five and ten minutes – I hadn’t been timing him exactly. I had assumed he was engrossed in some meaningful reading, until I noticed he was perusing the Daily Mail. With a sudden movement belying his years, he leaned forward and slammed the newspaper on the table. His spouse slopped a bit of cappuccino on her knee, threw him a look which might have been described as nasty and tut-tutted audibly as she dried a little spillage.
As no one seemed inclined to ask him what the problem was, he decided to tell us without further delay. “I really thought Geordie Greig was going to make a difference to this paper when he took over from the overtly biased Paul Dacre, but it’s still full of anti-democratic hatred! All they can say about Lady Hale, our defender of democracy heroine, is that she is an ex-barmaid! So what if someone is trying to do some good for the country rather than conforming to their narrow-minded view of what should be happening?”
“And when they’re not talking about celebrities whom half of us have never heard of, they also tend to dwell on the negative aspects of life,” Mrs Tourist continued. I began to wonder if she had managed the art of being completely deaf to her husband’s output and speculated for a second or so as to how much money she could make if such a skill could be bottled and sold. Millions, I reckoned, before the ongoing conversation brought me back down to earth.
“I can never understand,” Mrs Regular was saying, remarkably picking up on something which had just been said, “why people can be famous just for being famous. I mean, what is the point of a reality TV star, if that’s what you call ’em?” I wasn’t keeping score, but I reckoned that was the third rhetorical question in a little over three minutes, a rate which might set a challenge to my regular Cape Town crowd.
In this case, Mrs Tourist decided it was a real question and was brave enough to answer, watching as her husband read the Fred Basset cartoon in his newspaper and giggled charmingly childishly before disdainfully casting the complete rag into the nearby bin. “No idea,” she said. “It just seems to be a way of catapulting people from nowhere to somewhere or dredging up people we’d forgotten about to give them a second round of fifteen minutes of fame.”
“And usually, we’ve forgotten about them for a very good reason,” added Mrs Regular, pouring herself another cup of tea.
“And some of those for whom it was the first moment of fame can’t cope and kill themselves,” came the sad response. “What a waste of a life, all for a bit of crap TV.”
Mr Tourist, who still wasn’t used to hearing his wife using even slightly taboo language, or perhaps he was just indulging in a bout of male attention-seeking, spluttered into what I thought was an empty cup of cappuccino. Clearly splutterings were as irrelevant as words, as his wife took not a smidgen of notice. Perhaps they’d had a row on the journey over, I hypothesised.
“It’s all crap.” It wasn’t often Mr Regular spoke, but when he did, you could be pretty sure it would be succinct, blunt and to the point. Apologies if I’m repeating myself. His wife would respond in one of two ways: either by casting a contemptuous glance towards her beloved, accompanied by an apologetic cough to those within earshot, or with an expression which seemed to betray pride at the effort made. It was hard to imagine what their home life must be like.
In this case, it appeared she shared the brief opinion expressed, as she patted her husband on the arm and hummed in appreciation. Mr Tourist looked on, wondering what on earth he had to do to receive such an affectionate response. He decided an olive branch might be the order of the day. “Another cappuccino, please,” he said in my direction, before coughing in a simpering kind of way. “Would you like one, erm, darling?”
Mrs Tourist fleetingly looked the other way, although I think she was concealing a laugh rather than perpetuating whatever marital dispute might have transpired in recent hours. “Yes,” she replied, a little tersely. “Please,” she added, more pleasantly.
I was happy to take my leave for five minutes or so, during which time all conversation was blocked out by the soothing noises of my espresso machine and milk steamer. I made myself one while I was there, hoping for peace and harmony upon my return, something of a rarity in these turbulent times. I made my careful way back, bearing three full-to-the-brim cups, and leaned against the wall, inspecting the health of one of my potted plants, a slightly ailing Aspidistra, while listening to the ongoing tittle-tattle. It had become more meaningful.
“Do you think Greta what’s-her-name ever goes to school?” the more regular of the two ladies present was asking.
The female tourist, not that she was really a tourist anymore, but the thought had stubbornly lingered in my hard-to-change mind, looked momentarily confused. “Oh, Greta Thunberg, you mean?”
“Ay, that’s the one.”
“Hard to say, really; she seems to be off campaigning all over the world most of the time.”
“It’s remarkable hearing someone so young tearing into the United Nations in a language which isn’t even her own.”
“And the look she gave the passing Donald Trump was worth a thousand words!”
“Probably the thousand words we would all like to say to the…”
“Stupid sod,” finished Mrs Tourist, ignoring the renewed spluttering emitting from her husband’s full cup. I have to say the rebuke was mild compared to how I would have described the hopefully-soon-to-be-impeached, so-called leader of the free world.
“Well, you have to give her credit for the positive stir she’s created,” said Mrs Regular, draining her teapot and possibly wondering why I hadn’t offered to make her another one. “And they say children these days are nowt but trouble.”
“You often do,” came the three-worded pearl of wisdom from her husband. This time, the look he received was laden with disdain and there was no patting of any part of his anatomy proffered.
“He will have his little jokes,” she continued, looking slightly embarrassed.
“Well, in many cases, you have a right to hold such an opinion,” said the less regular one, consolingly. “I went for a walk around the park here last week and half the people I saw under the age of twenty are not the sort I would want to meet after dusk.”
“Broad daylight is bad enough,” muttered Mr Tourist, who seemed to be getting weary of his exclusion. “All you have to do is walk past one certain teenage-populated bench and there are enough cannabis fumes to get high on, or whatever the vernacular is, without parting with a penny.”
“But going back to what you were saying,” said his partner, returning to the sprightly, goat-like interaction prevalent in the ongoing discourse, “I was reading, the other day, about a girl from Yemen who was forced into getting married at the age of eleven and now, at the age of seventeen, is a leading activist against under-age marriage.”
“That rings a bell,” I intervened, unusually and thoughtfully. “Where have I heard about that girl before?” Two pairs of female eyes looked at me in mild curiosity, Mrs Regular raising one brow in polite enquiry and Mrs Tourist, seemingly unable to raise just one at a time, raising both to give the effect of a rather startled rabbit, while two pairs of male eyes sought for an alternative form of diversion. “Matthew!” I bellowed, in the manner of one summoning a disobedient dog, causing some crockery to rattle as its temporary owners registered shock. Not really expecting a response, I was rather taken aback myself when, a few seconds later, said Matthew came trotting dutifully into Hebden Bridge.
“You called, Master,” he uttered with a fair dollop of sarcasm, continuing the canine analogy a brief moment longer than necessary.
“I heard you saying something yesterday about a girl you’d met who was twice married as a teenager. These two young ladies” – flattery can go a long way – “were just discussing a similar story. I wondered if it was the same one.”
“Well, I’m sure she isn’t the only one, but yes,” acknowledged Matthew. “I was observing some lessons in Jordan a couple of weeks ago and this girl, Nada, a seventeen-year-old from Yemen, was a student there, and bit by bit, from varying sources, her story came out. She seemed like a really normal, happy, outgoing teenager, but she’s been through a lot to get to where she is.”
“Well, do go on,” prompted Mrs Regular, barely giving the narrator time to draw breath. Even the male eyes in the room were now wide open and focused, if a little surreptitiously.
“I’m still researching the full narrative,” Matthew explained in defence of his apparently leisurely manner, “but, essentially, what Chaelli said is true; however, it’s far from being a comprehensive account. I was initially told she was forced into marriage contracts by her parents at the age of eleven and then again at thirteen.” Gasps of dismay rang (if gasps can actually ‘ring’) around the room. “Anyway, I got an email from her last night saying the ages weren’t eleven and thirteen, but nine and ten. She fought against it, though, and released a YouTube video which spawned some national debate and, as far as I can make out, contributed to the practice being made a criminal offence in her own country.”
“Bless the poor mite,” whispered Mrs Regular.
“Since then, she’s written a book, set up her own foundation to protect children and been nominated for international awards for her activity in the field of human rights. But it’s come at a cost; she’s been held prisoner in her own country and also by terrorist organisations, just for being a girl with what are seen as controversial opinions.”
A disbelieving silence ensued before Matthew continued. “Look, I’m still in touch with her and I’ll let you know if I find out anything else, but they’re the bare bones of the story.” A longer period of silence followed. Matthew looked somewhat awkward and clearly didn’t know what to say next, so shrugged his shoulders at me and slipped back from whence he had come.
Mr Tourist, known for being a polite individual in his use of vocabulary, broke the silence with a rather uncharacteristic but considered utterance, “Sometimes, one has to conclude that the world is becoming a veritable shithole.”
His partner’s facial features registered a degree of shock, but such had been the harrowing nature of the preceding few minutes, the transformation, such as it was, was minimal. After several moments of reflection, during which the assembled assimilated Matthew’s story outline while mechanically sipping assorted beverages, she seemed to recall their recent discord and resumed her feigned, or genuine, annoyance. “He needs to toughen up,” she commented, still referring to him as though he wasn’t there. “I sent him to the gym last week and he could barely walk for four days.” Eyes rolled to the ceiling made her verdict on that particular episode abundantly clear.
