The cafe with five faces, p.7
The Café with Five Faces, page 7
“I mean, is there anything more dangerous in the world than a madman who thinks he is right?” Mike was like a steamroller at times. Most times, in fact, especially after a modicum of alcohol. “I think I read that in some newspaper or other yesterday, I can’t remember, but it’s getting increasingly relevant in world politics.”
“Yeah, I saw something similar, a quote or something, in my diary the other day.” James had bravely decided to interrupt, rummaging in his briefcase (I have no idea why he was in possession of a briefcase in my café in the evening). “Something from a South African writer; let me find it. Oh yeah, here it is: ‘Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.’ Laurens van der Post said that. Not sure who he is, other than someone with a lot of common sense.”
“Are we talking Trump again?” John was unusually slow on the uptake, or pretending to be; I suspected the latter.
“And Johnson.” The response was delivered in unison by his two companions.
“These days, mention of one inevitably seems to bring to mind the other,” John responded.
“Well, just think what they have in common!” Mike was back in full flight mode. “Wayward blond hair, membership of the alt-right, bumbling incompetence, complete political ineptitude, interest only in self-aggrandisement, names which lend themselves to ridiculous piss-takes, a complete lack of respect for other people’s opinions and widely reviled! And God only knows how, but they both seem to have an active extra-marital sex life!” This was quite an impressive list to attribute to just two people but much of it was hard to deny, so no one did.
“When it comes to being widely reviled, Boris can’t really compete,” James pointed out, quite fairly. “Trump’s in a width of his own.”
There were a few moments of laughter at this point, but Mike wasn’t to be quietened for long. “And talking of self-aggrandisement and proof thereof,” Mike continued, “did you hear that Boris wrote two articles, one pro-Remain and one pro-Leave and claims he went with the latter because it made more sense? What a load of bullshit! He went with the latter because it increased his chances of becoming prime minister!”
“Hopefully not,” said John, with at least four fingers crossed and probably more besides.
“I’m sure what you’re saying is true,” James offered tentatively, “but I don’t think you could call it concrete proof.”
Mike looked mildly offended at being disagreed with, however slightly, but he wasn’t about to be derailed. “They act like best buddies most of the time, although the relationship can be very one-sided. Wasn’t Johnson forced to address Donald Dick through national TV when he was in America? It’s disturbingly like the way Blair fawned all over Bush – and look where that got us. And then when Johnson came out against May, it was Trump’s turn to laud praise on his ‘friend’ Boris.” The word ‘friend’ was uttered with deep sarcasm and accompanied by gestured quotation marks which almost knocked his beer over.
“Didn’t Johnson even recommend Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize?” John, taking advantage of his friends sipping their beer to get a word in, might have been feigning ignorance to provoke a response, as if any incentive were actually needed. One or two drinks got stuck in their owner’s throats; John’s timing was either unfortunate or deliberate. You can probably guess which.
Mike was first to recover, as though he couldn’t wait to say his piece, despite having some issues breathing. “Never in the history of mankind has one single prat thrown so many fireworks into so many raging fires as a certain so-called leader of the free world. If there is peace on the Korean peninsula, it’ll be down to the work of the presidents of North and South Korea; it’ll be nothing to do with a wanker in the White House who just shows off about how big his button is! And as for helping peace in the Middle East; yeah, right, come on! Moving a certain embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was just about the most needless inflammatory thing anyone could do, and it has inflamed just about everybody in the Middle East and the rest of the world, except the very, very few it was designed to please.”
“And who was it designed to please, anyway?” John asked, somewhat needlessly.
“Just Benjy Netan-yoohoo and his gang of Palestinian-murdering cronies who basically bring shame on Israel.”
“You don’t deny the right of Israel to exist, do you?” James interrupted with a sudden look of serious concern.
“Not at all,” said Mike firmly. “So long as they don’t deny the right of the Palestinian state to exist as well. The two-state solution is the only way forward, and that means a two-state solution where one is not the obvious winner and the other clearly loses.”
“Hear, hear to that!” James and John were united in sentiment and timing.
“I mean, I know there is good and bad on both sides of the line, as there are in most disputes, but how do they work out that revenge for one Israeli death is a hundred Palestinians? Doesn’t make sense.” Mike’s train of thought wasn’t always linear.
I put three more bottles on the table, using my powers of telepathy to understand what was required at such an important juncture in the conversation. At least, it precipitated thirty seconds of silence before Mike remounted his bike and moved it back to its original track.
“Imagine if two of the most powerful nations on planet Earth…”
“Are you including Britain in that rather limited group?” James asked cheekily, not expecting an affirmative answer and looking rather incredulous when he got one.
“Well, as long as it remains in the European Union, yes; once it leaves, if it leaves, it’ll become a small island of almost complete insignificance. But, at the moment, as I was saying, before being so rudely interrupted,” Mike continued with a wink, “can you imagine if two of the most powerful nations in the world were ruled by Trump and Johnson?”
“My mind has been duly boggled,” James agreed with an advanced range and accuracy of vocabulary and grammar.
“Oh, and did you hear Johnson’s other pearl?” Mike wasn’t about to be blown off course. “He actually had the gall to suggest the UK adopt a Trumpton approach to Brexit!” Gales of laughter rang around the room at this, even though everyone had already heard. There was a kind of sad inevitability about the statement, part amusement, part bemusement. One either had to laugh or cry, and in public, the former felt more appropriate.
“Did you use the word ‘Trumpton’ on purpose?” John seemed intent on winding Mike up even more. “I mean, isn’t that a rather charming and innocent children’s TV show from the 1960s? Trump is about as far from charming and innocent as it’s possible to get.”
“Yeah, I loved Trumpton as well, all twelve episodes of it, over and over again,” Mike concurred. “I just don’t think world politics should be run by someone who thinks at the same level of depth as a children’s TV programme and treats the world’s leaders as if they were on a reality TV show to be fawned over and admired one week, and dismissed, disrespected and fired the next.”
“One week?” James raised an eyebrow and dropped a peanut (bought off the premises, I noted, but decided this wasn’t the time to say so). “He changes his mind within a day or even an hour at times – compare what he said about Putin when he was in Helsinki against when he was in America, or what he said about May when he was in Brussels against when he was in the UK, or what he said about Trudeau when he was in Canada against when he was back hiding behind his own iron gates and domestic homeland security.”
“True,” Mike accepted, momentarily gracious in response to this well-reasoned argument before returning to full power and pretending the Trumpton digression hadn’t actually occurred. “As I was saying, Johnson seems to think Trump’s ideas for Brexit make for very pleasant thinking. Reading between the lines, and without much of the ‘between the lines’ about it, I think what Johnson really means is that he, BoJo, should be anointed president of the semi-United Kingdom so that he can go blasting into the EU à la Trump and cause the same sort of mayhem as that wanker does every time he dabbles his fat little fingers into anything.”
“What a balls-up that would be!” James beat John to the acceptance of the latest forcibly stated viewpoint.
“It already is; and that’s with just fifty per cent of the dreaded possibility being true. Unless that’s fake news, of course,” Mike finished to a round of laughter.
“I suppose you’re some shade of socialist?” John asked, without meaning it to be a question.
“Actually, no; I’m a lifelong Tory, but a true Tory,” Mike replied to a few varied expressions of more than mild surprise. “Unlike the likes of Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg and Duncan Smith,” he went on. “They’re not true Tories. They belong in UKIP but, of course, they would never be in power if they joined UKIP, so they just lie and stay in the Tory party, bringing it crumbling down. Not that lying is anything new to them, is it, even by politicians’ high standards in the art form? Was it 350 million pounds a week for the National Health Service post-Brexit?” He spat in disgust.
Good job my Cape Town floors aren’t carpeted.
In the absence of strictly content-related visuals, here is an image from Beirut highlighting contrast: the Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque with the tower of the Maronite Cathedral of Saint George just behind to the left.
2018: 16: Granada: Of Ladies of the Night and a Sharp Slap on the Leg
The afternoon was one of those gorgeous sunny affairs which are all too rare in the north of England, although 2018 produced far more than one has any right to expect. My outdoor space had therefore been full of unusually red flesh, as opposed to the regular white. It was still quite scary, though.
Matthew, Mark and Lois had been there since lunchtime. Lois had been slowly drinking her way through three pots of varying types of green tea and was perfectly sober, even if trips to the bathroom were more frequent than one might expect. Her two male companions, having started on some rather nice Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee made in a Chemex, had moved on to beer mid-afternoon and that, combined with the warm-to-hot sun, was starting to affect their clarity.
Lois returned from her latest bathroom trip with a mischievous grin on her face which did not bode well for someone. “I’ve got a new one, just for you two guys,” she said, giving me a wink, which tempted me to sit down and listen to the fun, so long as I wasn’t to be victimised as well. “What has been your best or worst… prostitute experience?”
Matthew and Mark awoke from their sun-and-beer-induced slumbers with a start.
“What are you suggesting?” Mark was aghast.
“I don’t mean, you know…” said Lois.
“No, I don’t know,” said Mark. “What else can you mean?”
“Well, with all your travelling, you must have had some close encounters of the, erm, kind.”
“I’ve got one or two in which I am almost completely innocent.” Matthew leaned forward in his chair, partially to indicate a willingness to answer and partially to make sure occupants of other tables didn’t hear too much.
Mark felt momentarily off the hook so also leaned forward to make sure he didn’t miss anything. Lois and I followed suit.
“Vietnam was one,” said Matthew, winding his mind back a few years. “It was in October; I remember that because the weather was amazingly similar to Manchester at the same time, kind of chilly and damp. I was walking back to the hotel and I just happened to be following two quite attractive girls at a respectable distance of around twenty metres… What?” He stopped as Lois and Mark giggled in a ‘yeah, yeah, we know’ kind of way.
“You just happened to be following?” questioned Lois.
“And why are you recounting it like a witness statement?” Mark asked. “‘At a respectable distance of twenty metres’, blah, blah?”
Matthew decided the interruptions were worthless and continued. “I heard this motorbike behind – hardly anything new in Hanoi, but this one pulled up next to me. The guy nodded at the girls in front and asked, ‘Can I take you to a woman?’ I was proper gobsmacked and spent around two minutes protesting my innocence and my sole desire to find my own bed as soon as possible!”
“And just how closely were you watching the girls in front?” Lois was back to teasing.
“It’s not my fault they were going the same way,” growled Matthew, although he was both mildly blushing and smiling a little as well. “Anyway, moving on…”
“You said you had others,” prompted Mark, who seemed unwilling to unburden himself of any similar experiences.
“Still my turn, eh?” Matthew gave his friend a knowing glance and considered his memory bank for a moment. “Moscow.” He took another drink of beer before letting loose. “I was staying in that big hotel just behind the Red Square – I think it’s gone now. You always had to pass through some kind of security and prove you were actually a guest of the hotel just to be allowed in the lift, and then when you got to your floor, there was a forbidding babushka in a box to make sure you belonged.”
“I remember those only too well,” Mark interjected. “Scary or what?!”
“You’d think you were pretty safe then, wouldn’t you?” Lois nodded, but Mark smirked as if he knew what was coming. “Anyway, I was lying on my rather small bed one evening when there was a knock on the door. I opened it and there were two girls standing there – one seemingly in charge and the other dressed to kill. Not much English but quite enough sign language for me to know what was on offer. And had I met them in the course of some normal social interaction, I might have been seriously tempted to pursue a conversation, but as it was, I shut the door as quickly as politeness allowed and returned to lying down and contemplating the rather plain ceiling.”
“And wondering what you’d missed out on,” whispered Mark, who seemed to know more than he was letting on about the workings of ex-Soviet hotels.
“I presume the babushka was in on it?” Lois asked, getting Mark off the self-imposed potential hook.
“She probably gave them a list of rooms with single men,” Matthew replied. “I didn’t hear a price, but whatever it was would probably have been split between the babushka, the hotel and some controlling guy before the two women saw anything.”
Lois turned to Mark. “So, there’s no escape, you know.”
“Yeah, that kind of sums up some of my Indonesian experiences as well.” Mark had a resigned expression on his face but covered it with some more sizeable gulps of beer. Finally, his resistance collapsed in the depth of his friends’ silence. “I think I had been in Jakarta less than a week when my temporary employer gave me a night-time tour of the city. She was a really nice woman but seemed to have this constant mischievous twinkle which, at this point, I hadn’t yet understood. In fact, I’m not sure I ever did. Anyway, she asked the guy driving us, a friend of hers, I think, to take us somewhere I didn’t quite catch the name of and then she started pointing out girls standing at the side of the road for what I took to be fairly obvious reasons. My memory gets a bit hazy here, but I think she asked me if I wanted one. It was a very strange offer to make to your newly employed consultant, I thought! I declined, obviously…”
“Obviously.” Lois had a tone which was most likely interpreted as disbelieving.
Mark ignored her. “The car was silent for a while and I really wondered if I’d offended her with my lack of interest. Finally, she asked me if I knew what I had just seen. I was completely lost and then she and the driver just burst out laughing. I was half-bemused and half-annoyed. They finally put me out of my misery by telling me they were ‘ladyboys’! All I remember saying in response was something pathetic like, ‘Oh, I thought they were rather tall’…” The story fizzled out as Matthew and Lois laughed in the same way the school owner and her friend must have done. Sympathy was in very short supply.
Mark decided the best way out of his embarrassment was to dig himself deeper. “The same woman, in a genuine show of kindness, booked me into a hotel a few weeks later. I’d been having problems with my accommodation, so she decided I needed a nice room with a proper shower for a weekend,” he explained. “I decided to take full advantage by booking a massage. In my naivety, I asked for it in my room. I have done this elsewhere with no follow-up, although I have to say the same thing has not been the case in other places. The massage was, how can I put it, cursory? Not too good, anyway. At the end though, she mimed oral sex.”
“Ha!” Mark wasn’t too sure what Matthew’s noise meant so pretended it had never happened.
“I again said ‘no’, and again, obviously,” he added pointedly in case any more sarcasm was forthcoming. “‘You no like?’ she asked. I assured her I did but… Well, I didn’t say anything else because I could see she didn’t understand. I paid her the advertised price for the massage, plus a tip, but she was really unhappy. It was clear the price I paid was for the hotel; her earnings depended on the tip and I suppose the tip increased in proportion to the number of sexual favours.”
“Sad,” Lois commented.
“It happened at two supposedly respectable gyms and spas as well, much to the school owner’s horror. Some didn’t even wait to be asked before touching you up!” Mark seemed a little uncomfortable and for once, no teasing ensued.
“That’s two stories each.” Lois was stirring. “Who’s next?”
“Georgia on my mind.” Matthew seemed about to burst into a Ray Charles song, but it transpired to be a different Georgia. “This was Tbilisi about ten years ago and was one of my very worst drinking experiences.”
“This must be really bad,” said Mark knowingly.
“It began over dinner with copious amounts of Georgian red – Saperavi to start with because that’s my favourite – but who knows where it went as the evening progressed. I just remember bottle after bottle until some people, sensibly, started to drift away.”
