The cafe with five faces, p.43
The Café with Five Faces, page 43
“You mean, she asked you out?” enquired Jo who, in quite an un-friend-like manner, seemed intent on making life as difficult as possible for her companion. I suppose, to give her the benefit of the doubt, it was just her sense of humour, with which Micky should have been thoroughly familiarised.
“I can’t remember, but she pushed more than me. I think. Anyway, we went out for around four years…”
“Blimey, is that a record?”
“Erm, yeah.” I was beginning to think a fire extinguisher might be called for, as Micky’s face turned an even deeper shade of crimson and the heat generated became almost palpable. “It was very pleasant for the most part.” I considered this an odd adjective to describe a long-term union, but Micky was odd, so I said nothing, so as not to cause him yet more embarrassment. I sensed more was on the way, in any case. It was like watching a long and slow skid into a brick wall, knowing you can do nothing to prevent it.
Micky coughed, half-hoping, no doubt, that the subject might change while he suffered. It didn’t. “Well, after three years, I gave up my job to go travelling with her, which was, erm, absolutely lovely. Unfortunately, I came back from those two months unemployed. My girlfriend persuaded me to invest most of the money I possessed in a business venture which I was interested in but hopelessly unprepared for, and so then I started haemorrhaging cash. The business quickly seemed doomed to dismal failure, which became a good excuse for her to leave me for someone rather wealthier.” He reflected for a moment. “Not that that took much,” he added, as some form of judgement.
It was hard to determine who was the most embarrassed: Micky for recounting a story hitherto untold or Malinka for her role in getting him to narrate it. Jo was in no way discomfited, but she clearly had some sympathy for yet another romantic disaster. “Was this girl, perchance, a stage manager in an amateur dramatics company?”
“That’s the one.” Micky looked surprised.
“And from there, you went to the Rebecca situation?”
“Ah, you remember.”
“How could I forget?”
Malinka looked curious, as she was clearly out of the loop with the latest twist, but it soon became obvious a further tale of woe was not imminently forthcoming. I wanted to tell her that the full account could be found in my 2018 book but decided it would be tactless to take advantage of the circumstances. Contrary to a section of public opinion, I do have some scruples.
Silence ensued. After a minute disturbed only by the sounds of sipping and slurping, the curtain opened and the shaded one known as Misha entered, for once not falling over Jo’s randomly discarded shoes. Pushing his sunglasses onto his forehead to allow us the rare sight of his rather bloodshot eyes, he smiled around the room before focusing his vision on Malinka, now scrambling to her feet. It was like watching in slow motion as the two of them took the solo stride necessary to reach the centre of the room and then throw their arms around each other. So, was Misha actually Mishenka after all?
This would require more than a slight reassessment of Misha’s character. So, he had once been too shy, or perhaps too aware of his position, to ‘do anything’ concerning a woman he was attracted to? This, to borrow a phrase from John in Cape Town, beggared belief. More unsettling, however, was the fact that Malinka considered him to be attached, something which we were completely unaware of. Was this purely a ploy to lure Malinka into a false sense of security which he could then take advantage of? This would be more like the Misha we knew and, occasionally, loved.
“A bottle of red?” I asked, when the embrace had run its cringeworthy lengthy course.
“Not today,” came the mildly astonishing reply. “We’re going somewhere with a little more privacy.”
‘More privacy’? I was quite offended.
As Misha and Malinka stroll off into the sunset – in reality, it was more of a ‘rush off’ – here is an appropriate picture for them from Montañita, Ecuador.
2019: 65: Granada: Offending Greta Thunberg
One early November afternoon found Lois and Mark sitting alone under the street-heater, Matthew-less. It didn’t seem quite right, although, fairly inevitably, given their nomadic professions, there were frequent occasions when a hundred per cent attendance was not going to happen.
“So, where is he this time?” I asked, without bothering with polite preliminaries. The autumnal chill had transferred itself to my manners.
“He didn’t say, for some reason,” said Mark.
“I reckon he’s gone on one of those trips no one in their right mind would ever consider and he’s feeling embarrassed or guilty.” Lois smiled, although there was a slight note of envy in her tone. She liked off-the-wall voyages into the unknown, or otherwise, as well. She also liked varying the theme, as she now, rather abruptly, chose to do. “How many languages can you speak, Chaelli?”
This was an uncomfortable question for the multi-nationalist I claim to be. “Why do you ask?” I chose to delay giving the answer which I always feel a little humiliated by.
“Just interested. I know you’ve travelled a lot.”
“And we had a bet on it last night,” added Mark, to the annoyance of his drinking partner, although, thus far, I hadn’t actually served them with anything of which to partake.
“The honest answer is one,” I sighed, somewhat ruefully. “A colleague once called me an ‘elementary polyglot’, which I could kind of see the point in, as I can get by in bars and restaurants in a few languages, but, frankly, little else.”
“The essentials, then,” commented Mark. Lois laughed, probably with Mark and at me, but maybe I was being paranoid.
“But, overall, I would say I speak English and foreign,” I concluded. “And sometimes all sorts of things come out in the foreign in any given utterance, even sometimes words of Arabic.” I paused to consider the logic of this statement. “Remarkable, really, because I don’t know any Arabic.”
Lois giggled again, this time, I think, with me. “It’s sad how bad most English-speakers are at learning other languages,” she commented, taking what I took to be a little dig in my direction. “I’m pretty much the same, though,” she added hastily, in response to my feigned hurt expression. “The dangers of speaking such a global language, I suppose, although where would us English teachers be if people didn’t need or want to learn it?”
“I know some Brits who can speak six or seven languages, so it isn’t a national lack of ability,” noted Mark. “Perhaps it’s more down to laziness, or a lack of prioritisation in primary and secondary education.”
“Agreed,” concurred Lois. “At least in my case.” Mark raised an eyebrow to save the effort of putting the obvious into words. “Education, not laziness,” she added, by way of clarification.
“Can I get you anything?” I finally enquired.
“Thought you’d never ask,” said Mark sarcastically, the way one does with people who know you mean it in fun. “Shall we share a Chemex?”
“Good idea,” said Lois. “We’ll let you choose the origin, Chaelli.”
“With pleasure,” I said, disappearing, having already decided to try out a new Kenyan coffee I had procured through South Africa. A circuitous route, perhaps, but worth it, I deemed.
The subject had moved on to hair by the time I returned, an unexpected trajectory to take, bearing in mind Mark lacked much of a thatch, as one might say.
Lois was being impertinent, and not for the first time in the confines of my café. “I bet you’re one of those guys with virtually no hair who still buys super-expensive brands of shampoo which promise to thicken what you have remaining, even when you are beyond hope, aren’t you?” I was very glad this awkward question was levelled at Mark and not at me; otherwise I would have had to confess guilt or deliver an outright lie.
Mark chose to ignore this latest request for personal information, which was a ninety per cent guaranteed admission it was correct. Not that he seemed to mind bald jokes, so long as he made them himself. “I remember when I arrived at a temporary flat once in Thailand,” he slightly digressed. “My host had never met me or seen a picture of me so, when buying some supplies for the bathroom, he’d purchased some Wash & Go shampoo for me.” He reddened a little, in a rather endearing way, I have to say, given the vast expanse of his forehead. “I told him, rather ungrammatically, ‘My hair washed and went a long time ago.’” Lois giggled in her customary infectious manner. Even the old jokes amused her. “It served to break the ice, anyway,” Mark concluded.
I swirled the Chemex a little, to even out the flavours, and poured two cups for them, leaving some to be finished off later.
Mark seemed to be in a self-deprecating mood, at least where his ‘hair’ was concerned. “I took a selfie from above last night to see if my skin complaint was getting any better.” We hadn’t been aware of any such disorder and elected not to examine the area at fault too closely. “I looked like a cross between a bowling ball and the Greater Bald-Headed Spotted Eagle, if such a species exists.” This reduced Lois to fits, which never took much to start and, on this occasion, took something approaching two minutes to pass. I think Mark was more embarrassed by Lois than he was by the content of his anecdote.
The discomfiture of Mark was brought to an unexpected end by the sudden appearance of a dishevelled Matthew, carrying two laptop bags and looking like he hadn’t slept for a couple of days.
“What-ho!” he greeted them, with an ebullience one was tempted to label artificial, while trying to stifle a yawn. “Sorry; I’ve come straight from the airport.”
“Couldn’t wait to see us, then?” Lois looked touched.
“Desperate for a good strong coffee, more like,” said Matthew, rejecting the opportunity to pay a friend a compliment.
“There’s one in the pot, if they don’t mind sharing,” I said, producing a third cup, as if by magic.
“That’ll do nicely,” said Matthew, without waiting for the purchasers’ approval.
“So, where have you been for the past fortnight?” asked Mark.
Matthew considered this for a minute, as though straining to remember, undoubtedly for effect. “Manchester, Paris, Mauritius, Paris, Manchester, Dublin, Manchester, Dubai, Karachi, Dubai and Manchester,” he finally recited.
“I guess you wouldn’t want to meet Greta Thunberg down a dark alley at night, would you?” asked Lois.
“Especially if she was wearing that same delightfully stern expression of thunder she adopted when Donald Trump walked past her,” added Mark.
“Ever heard of the phrase ‘carbon footprint’?” Lois was rubbing it in a little, as Matthew’s personally generated greenhouse gas emissions had been mooted as a contributory factor to the world’s climate crisis on a previous occasion already this year.
“Hmmm,” verbalised Matthew, whether out of appreciation for the coffee, of which he had just taken a mouthful, or out of shame, I couldn’t discern.
“I wonder if anyone else has ever done a round trip of Mauritius – Dublin – Karachi?” pondered Mark, getting Matthew off the hook. I considered this unlikely. “Answers on a postcard to The Café with Five Faces.”
“Email will do,” I added, anxious to save the trees whenever I could. I can be green. Well, greener than Matthew, anyway.
“Well, are you going to tell us anything?” Lois demanded. Of her many virtues, patience was not among their number.
“If I say it’s all a bit of a blur, will you believe me?” Strongly suspecting the answer to this would be in the negative and that Matthew, knowing Lois, would be well aware of the fact, I questioned his over-optimistic use of the first conditional. Lois took her turn in replying with her eyebrows. Why waste valuable breath when you have the ability to intimidate with non-verbal paralinguistic features alone?
“All I can remember with anything approaching clarity is jet-lag and the insides of a few classrooms and hotels,” Matthew protested in vain, before, accepting the futility of his defence, gulping down the rest of his coffee, shuddering himself into life and grinding his brain into first gear. “Mauritius wasn’t quite what I expected,” he began, “maybe because I’d got it a little confused with the tropical islands of the Maldives and the island of Madagascar, which I thought was formerly Portuguese, but is actually ex-French…”
“Poor confused sod,” commented Lois, more in fun than criticism. “Just because they all have the same initial letter and are all in the Indian Ocean.”
“An easy mistake to make,” Matthew growled. “OK, not.” He looked more guilty over this minor geographical error than he did over his much-maligned carbon footprint. “I was only there two days, and one and a half of those were spent recovering, working and then recovering again; and the hotel was in a shopping centre a few miles from anywhere of note…”
“Is this just going to be a long line of ridiculous excuses?” asked Lois in mild exasperation. It was a fair point.
“It all sounds very jet-set, I know, but even the customs official when I arrived made fun of me. ‘Where have you come from?’ he asked me in the early hours of Monday morning. ‘Paris,’ I replied. ‘And when are you leaving?’ ‘Wednesday.’ ‘Where to?’ ‘Back to Paris,’ I said. The look he gave me spoke volumes, ‘You stupid bugger, coming all this way for two days.’” Lois found this highly amusing, so much so, she couldn’t even enunciate her consensus with the now far-flung bureaucrat.
Mark had no such problems and even fewer qualms. “I think I might have thought the same, but actually put it into something more verbally concrete and overtly critical.”
Matthew decided it was easier to move on, rather than expend his waning supplies of energy in argument. “The first thing I noticed when I arrived on the island was that all the place names have a very clear French feel, but the traffic drives on the left, as we do in Britain. It was actually a real cultural mix; apart from British and French, there were influences from India, in particular, as well as China and Africa. Silly me never really got to taste the local food, though.”
Lois looked surprised at this unforeseen omission in the travel itinerary, as all three of them were rather fond of culinary experimentation when overseas. “So, what actually did you do?” she asked with a soupçon of confusion and annoyance.
“I went down into Port Louis, the capital, for a few hours, which involved taking a local bus there and back.”
“Too mean to pay for a taxi?” Money-conscious Mark smirked.
“Look who’s talking,” snapped a clearly tired and irritable Matthew, before smiling at the ‘joke’. “The buses were a little different from those in Jordan,” he continued, referring to another recent trip. “They left according to a schedule, regardless of how full they were, and they stopped at official stops, and the conductor didn’t scream at any and every passer-by, aka potential customer, and he even gave you a little ticket when you paid.”
“How delightfully traditional,” commented Lois, now listening rather than laughing. Matthew concurred with a brief nod before Lois continued. “And what did the towns look like?” she asked.
“I can only talk about Port Louis,” replied Matthew, “and that was like a mini Cape Town in some ways, you know, the shop names, like Woolworths and Truworths, and the mountains just behind the town and it being by the sea, but I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not, even though it should be. I don’t know Cape Town as well as Mark, but I really liked it, whereas Port Louis looks like it was never intended to be a major attraction and that’s reflected in what you see, I think. You need to look elsewhere on the island for the touristy stuff, and I just didn’t have the time.” He sighed in mild frustration at his own schedule.
“The other thing I remember is the pace of life. I was in Hong Kong once and I felt like I was surrounded by an army of busy ants with all these people who were so much smaller than me rushing here and there; in Mauritius, there was no rush to get anywhere and if the street was too busy with traffic, you just had to keep to the narrow pavements and walk on the spot virtually as the people in front took their time.” He thought carefully before adding, “And they were generally a lot wider than Chinese people.”
Lois choked a little on her coffee at the afterthought. “I suppose the pace of life is a positive, once you get used to it,” she said, after giving the matter a moment’s consideration. “And then Dublin?”
“Dublin was as good as ever. I managed to get to my favourite restaurant, Dunne and Crescenzi, and my favourite café, 3fe, so no complaints there.”
“Karachi wasn’t your first time in Pakistan, was it?” asked Mark, already knowing the answer. I think we could all remember Matthew’s recollection of his Lahore to Islamabad journey (recounted in the 2018 book).
“Nope,” came the emphatic reply, “but I was a lot more careful with the food this time and I emerged completely unscathed, largely thanks to a five-star hotel.”
“Posh git,” said Lois. She had a lovely succinct way of insulting people. “So, what were the highlights, other than your five-star lifestyle?” she asked with a renewed touch of envy.
“I was there for five days, but the place was so huge, I didn’t know where to start, so, like a silly sod, I spent too long in the hotel, debating with myself and Google over what to do.” Matthew was a very experienced traveller, but there comes a time when even they lose the urge to explore every new place they visit. “But once I got out, using remarkably cheap Ubers,” he added, with a pointed look at Mark coinciding with the word ‘cheap’, “it was a kaleidoscope of different colours and impressions. There was the insanity of the traffic you might expect, with cars, motorbikes, multi-coloured buses, rickshaws, donkey-drawn carts, random pedestrians and whatever else with or without an engine you can imagine all jockeying for position. And then, within a hundred metres or so of each other, you could see tree-lined avenues with gated villas, and people living in absolute squalor and begging off anyone who looked remotely like having more money than they did.
