The cafe with five faces, p.8
The Café with Five Faces, page 8
“The word ‘sensible’ implies you didn’t.” Mark was on the money.
“No, unfortunately.” Matthew reflected on his apparent stupidity for a moment and then continued. “I can’t exactly remember how old I was at the time but old enough to know better. I was already well gone when this young Aussie who was with us almost dared me to go on to a club. Daring me is the last thing anyone should do when I’m under the influence because I just cave in and willingly try anything.”
“That’s precisely why people do dare you!” Mark had a more than fair point.
“I’m agog,” said Lois jokingly. She had a good idea what was to follow, although she was actually rather wide of the mark.
“I have sound recollections of getting in the first taxi.” Matthew pretended to be having trouble remembering, but I think the incident was pretty well ingrained on the grey matter. “The next thing I knew was being in what I think was a brothel – I had never been in one before so I can’t be a hundred per cent sure.” The final phrase was drowned in the hearty guffaws of his friends and host, namely moi. “I then fell asleep over a table and was woken by the youthful Aussie who was still annoyingly sprightly. At least he was nice enough to tell me they were leaving, which was just as well because I’d forgotten my address. He was also ‘nice’ enough to ask me if I wanted a girl. I was just about sober enough to decline. So, we got in the taxi, the Aussie, a Brit, me and two prostitutes, one of whom sat on my knee in the back seat and slapped me because I didn’t know where to put my hands.”
“I think you win with that one!” Mark conceded defeat, as if it had been a competition, which it probably was.
“They finally kicked me out somewhere near my flat.” Matthew apparently hadn’t finished. “And I spent about twenty minutes wandering up and down, trying to decide which was my entrance. When I woke up the next morning, actually mid-afternoon, I was thankfully in the right bed and alone but also several hours late for a day trip I had really been looking forward to.”
“You’ll never learn, will you?” Lois winked as she delivered her judgement on the story. “Anything to rival that, Mark?”
“Hardly!” Mark had earlier seemed ready to impart further details of his sordid past but clearly thought he had lost this particular contest. “My last offering was a fairly run-of-the-mill story from Bangkok.”
“Patpong, perchance?” Matthew was apparently in the know.
“It began with a ‘P’, so probably!” Mark decided feigned embarrassment wasn’t going to work and carried on regardless. “I was taken by my hosts; it was just one of those sights you had to see. We went to a club of sorts and there were at least twenty girls dancing, or moving at least, on a stage in the middle, each with a number. You basically asked for a girl by number and bought her a ‘ladydrink’, which was really cheap, and she came to sit with you for a while. If you liked the girl, you paid to take her out of the club and then what you did after that was by negotiation with the girl.” Lois was starting to look a little shocked. “I was told the latter part – I didn’t find out by experience,” Mark quickly added. “In fact, I didn’t pick a number or anything; this rather attractive young lady just came and sat on my knee and my host, who clearly liked stirring, bought her a drink so she would stay.”
“Did you get her life story?” asked Matthew.
“Her English wasn’t really good enough,” Mark responded. “But she did tell me she was a trainee doctor, which my friends told me might well have been true, and that she was due to qualify sometime soon. There were also some institutionalised phrases such as, ‘It’s hot in here, because of you,’ and then, when we were leaving, genuine pleas of, ‘Please take me with you.’ I genuinely felt guilty leaving her there, but I didn’t really see any option which wouldn’t end in trouble.”
“You hear that a lot,” Matthew said.
“I actually went back again when I was really drunk later the same night.” Mark was now in shameless mode. “Bad idea in more than one respect. This was around ten years ago so I don’t know if things have changed, but when it’s quiet in that part of town, or even not that quiet, there are rats running around all over the pavement – it stopped being surprising after the first time or two.”
“Yuk!” Lois was not impressed. “And you actually went out again?”
“Yeah… Sad, I know. Earlier on in the evening, the area had seemed fun and playful, in its own rather strange way, but after the clubs had closed, it was very dark in both senses of the word. I was approached by a less than pretty lady with a mouth I wouldn’t want to get close to in any way who was upfront about the cost of whatever and pointed me in the direction of a flat. I just about had enough sense left to say no and leave very, very quickly.”
“Leaving quickly is a good idea sometimes, if not always!” Matthew spoke as the victim of more than one narrow escape. “I remember being in a Polish village once and being chased around by an older woman – she made me buy her a drink in the bar and I was so aware of everyone looking at us – I was obviously British, back in the days when Brits were a novelty in Poland, and she was very loud. I decided my train was due to leave and ran…”
The exploits of Matthew and Mark with various ladies of the night do not permit pictorial evidence, but let’s use the reference to Tbilisi – and the need of the aforementioned customers to crave forgiveness – as an excuse for a close-up of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in the Georgian capital.
2018: 17: Beirut: Me Too
Micky and Jo, unusually, ordered an ibrik each before disappearing into Beirut, looking set for a clandestine meeting, when I knew nothing could be further from the truth. I use the ibrik for my Lebanese coffee – the term ibrik is used there, even though it’s a Turkish word meaning something slightly different. The coffee is boiled twice in a sand box which sounds a lot more complicated than it is in reality. It takes a while to make, however, and, by the time I took the two jugs in to them, the pair were already deep into a conversation which, rather annoyingly, ceased when I appeared. I really should ban people from doing that.
I returned a few minutes later, ostensibly to check on their level of satisfaction with the coffee. I didn’t get the chance to ask.
“This coffee is dreadful, Kal!” Micky was sipping from the small cup with a look of intense distaste on his features and a few grinds on his lips. Jo handed him a serviette to cover her failed attempt at not laughing.
“It’s not dreadful,” I retorted. “It’s an acquired taste.”
“Can someone else acquire it?” The question was asked in feigned politeness.
“You will in time. It took me a while – in Armenia and then Lebanon.”
“Not sure I can wait that long!” I got the impression he was angling for a freebie.
“Keep trying, and maybe next time, try it without the cardamom. I love it, but it’s not to everyone’s taste.” I really do love the cardamom; in fact, for me, it’s what makes the drink.
“Next time?” Micky was more than dubious. “That’s the power of wishful thinking!”
“Actually,” mused Jo, “I quite like it.”
“There ya go,” I said, as though conclusive proof had just been presented.
“Can I have some water to get rid, erm, wash it down with?” Micky asked.
“Of course, sir,” I responded with whatever undue grace I could muster.
When I returned, the deep conversation was back in flow.
“I’m never quite sure what to make of all this ‘me too’ stuff,” Micky was saying.
“What do you mean?” Jo was looking a little defensive.
“Well, some of it is obviously serious, you know,” Micky responded. “But sometimes, I think it goes too far. You know, men can get misinterpreted.”
“Sounds like an excuse to me.” Jo wasn’t impressed. “And yes, you’re right; men can go too far.”
“I studied the workings of communication once,” said Micky, who was in a seemingly serious mood and ignored Jo’s latest contribution. “You know, in how many ways a message can go astray.”
“Try me,” Jo encouraged, recognising that Micky’s train of thought wasn’t intended to be a wind-up.
“Well, first of all, the message is born in the mind of the speaker,” Micky began. “Then, it gets put into words and those words are uttered. The listener takes the words delivered and has to interpret the intended message. You see the potential problems? Does the speaker accurately convey the message he or she intended? Does the speaker deliver the message audibly and clearly? Does the listener hear the actual words the speaker says? Does the listener work out the meaning from the words? Is this the meaning the speaker intended? This can be a real example of, not lost in translation, but lost in transmission.”
“Yeah, I can see that, and it does explain a lot of miscommunication in words, but how much of the ‘me too’ cases are about words, rather than actions?”
“Some, I think,” said Micky, warming to his theme, given Jo’s partial acceptance of an argument he had not expected her to see. “Even non-verbal messages can also be hopelessly misinterpreted, even if partially due to the naivety of the deliverer.”
“I detect you have a story to tell,” said Jo, guessing who the naivety-sufferer was. And it was soon clear that Jo was not wrong on either count.
“I used to belong to an amateur drama group when I lived in the south of England.” This took Jo out of her north of England comfort zone, to say nothing of her lack of appreciation of amateur dramatics, but she said nothing and allowed Micky to continue. “I was the producer of the plays and one of the stage managers was my long-term girlfriend. Yes, I have actually had one,” he retorted, without actually being given anything to retort to. “Anyway, as usually happens after a while – usually four years with me, strangely enough – I was unceremoniously dumped for reasons completely unknown – to me, anyway. You know how it is – or maybe you don’t.”
“I think most of us do, darling,” Jo muttered with tinges of recalled regret.
“I was more than a little distraught privately, but in public, I carried on as normal. This was made a little easier because the recent ex was working away at the time and was only in town periodically, so I just didn’t tell anyone.” Jo looked as if she was about to declare this an unwise policy. “Yes, I know, my usual way, shovel it under the carpet and suffer in silence.” Jo clearly didn’t need to speak, so she shrugged and waited for more. “There was one of the actresses who I liked personally, sort of fancied in a vague way, but without any even semi-serious feelings.”
“You like complex, don’t you?” This time, Jo couldn’t resist the interjection, if only to give her time to work out what Micky had just said.
“Well, I suppose,” Micky acknowledged. “But it would have been pretty pointless pursuing anything serious as I was due to leave town for long-term work a few weeks later.”
“Some men would see that as a golden opportunity.” There was a hint of sarcasm in Jo’s comment which wasn’t lost on her interlocutor.
“Yeah, I know, but, erm, at the time, I didn’t really believe in pre-marital sex.” The sentence was finished in the sort of rapid mumble that perhaps wasn’t meant to be heard. It wasn’t often Micky made mention of one of his, some may say, dated principles, but when he did, the room was usually left in stunned silence for a lengthy few seconds.
“Interesting.” Jo restrained herself from further comment with some difficulty, probably because she was intrigued as to where the story was going and didn’t want the discourse to get sidetracked. “Go on.”
“Anyway, I asked her out for a drink a couple of times and to the cinema once, but in my mind, this was only as friends, because that’s what we had been for a couple of years. The problem, going back to my communication model, was that the message in my mind was not put into words on my side and the wrong message was received by the other side.”
“Oh, I see,” said Jo.
“But you don’t go around saying things like, ‘I like your company and would be jolly appreciative if you went out with me without any pretensions of being more than friends,’ do you?”
Jo initially giggled at the prospect of someone saying something so unromantically complicated to her, and then reconsidered. “Life would be a helluva lot simpler if we did.” Her final answer was heartfelt. “So, what happened next?”
“I asked her to come to Brighton with me one Saturday,” Micky continued, as if glad to get the story off his chest with so little digression. “I got the feeling she wasn’t keen on coming. Maybe I was a little persuasive, though, and she finally agreed. I picked her up around midday and it was obvious she had a mega-hangover from Friday night. I really should have given up there and then, but the show must go on, as we used to say, and, foolishly, it did. Mid-afternoon, we were walking along the seafront and in a fit of theatrical lovey-doveyness, I took her hand. It seems I can’t help being tactile.”
“Not the best trait these days, maybe.”
“Sad but true. Anyway, it felt really weird; the situation, not her hand,” Micky added, as if clarification were really needed.
“But yet again, you carried on?” Jo enquired.
“Actually no, not really,” Micky answered. “For about ten seconds, maybe, and then, given the obvious coolness of the reception I was receiving, I decided we should start heading back home.”
“Unusually sensible for a man,” Jo said, lightening the mood a little, but only briefly.
“That’s what I thought,” said Micky. “But that’s when I decided to try to verbalise what I was thinking, and that’s when it went really wrong.”
“Any reason why you didn’t quit while you were ahead?”
“Nope, although, to be honest, I think the damage was already done.” Micky thought for a while, probably determined to make sure his communication model worked on this occasion. “I left it two days and then phoned her and asked if we could meet – I wanted to explain that I wasn’t really interested in anything more than friendship; she probably thought it was a request for another boring date with the older man. I didn’t actually communicate what I wanted, and she certainly misinterpreted what I wanted – there was just no communication at all, in fact.”
“And…?”
“The next thing I knew I was being accused of sexual harassment.”
“What?” Jo was initially shocked but then tried to consider both sides. “But she really didn’t know what you were thinking?”
“Not then, not ever,” said Micky. “I never saw her again. The drama company suspended me, even though there was no concrete evidence one way or the other, so I never went back, and within a month, I left town as planned.” He paused and took another sip of coffee; I wasn’t sure if the subsequent look of unconscious distaste was in response to the drink, the memory or both. “And without being a completely arrogant fuckwit about it, my opinion is the only one I am interested in, and I know I was innocent of all charges. I mean I do care if someone else was hurt or felt threatened by something I said or did, but I do know for certain that no pain or threat of any description was ever intended. Just a very sorry mess, really.” It was a fair assumption that Micky had been hurt every bit as much as his so-called friend, but this was hardly a unique situation.
“Anything else to divulge?” Jo, like me, had detected some bitterness in the preceding rant.
“There’s a little bit more which complicates the picture, as if it needed complicating further,” said Micky. “Apart from me and Rebecca – sorry, yes, she does have a name – there were third parties involved. You’ve heard of the politics in amateur drama groups, I suppose?”
“No, but I can only imagine.” It didn’t actually take a lot of imagination. “I did flower-arranging once.”
Micky did a quick double-take at the floral reference, probably facing some difficulty in imagining Jo with a flower, and then continued. “Well, some of them wanted me out; one in particular had some long-term vendetta against me and I think he manipulated the whole situation to get rid of me.”
“But I thought you were leaving, anyway?”
“I was, and I did.” Micky sighed in despair. “But it was all about scoring points and getting revenge on me over something really petty. Sad, really, as it broke several friendships and not just involving me.”
“And you put all this down to poor communication of messages?”
“Along with some vindictiveness and shit-stirring, yeah,” Micky replied. “But all it was on my part was some clumsy attempt at dating, or rather non-dating, based on my lifelong naivety with women. Although, Rebecca had actually agreed to go out for drinks with me two or three times, so it wasn’t as if I was pestering someone who was actively resisting – she clearly didn’t communicate her viewpoint to me either.” There were a few seconds of thought-gathering. “Going back to my original point, though; all this took place over twenty years ago, long before Harvey Weinstein was publicly known for anything other than money and films. Had this happened now and had I been well-known, I could have lost far more than an amateur drama group and a few friends.”
“True,” Jo agreed. “But it isn’t twenty years ago, and you weren’t and aren’t in the public eye, so I reckon you might survive.” She felt the subject was in need of a change. “Another drink?”
“So long as it’s not another blooming ibrik!”
Drinks, even non-alcoholic ones, can change the mood. And for that, we can all be very grateful.
A Turkish coffee served in an ibrik, generously accompanied by some Turkish delight – the latter not available in my café! – and water, ready in case of accidentally drinking the grains! This was at Rumi in Amman.
