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A very London story
Ralph Grayden
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Smashwords Edition
COPYRIGHT 2012 Ralph Grayden
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Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
- John Jacques Rousseau
Table of Contents
Chapter One: A well-documented welcome
Chapter Two: The pouf of shame
Chapter Three: The seven habits of highly effective husbands
Chapter Five: A question of class
Chapter Six: Some clouds have a southern-fried lining
Chapter Seven: The ethnomethodology of two unemployed Aussies
Chapter Eight: Pints and prejudice
Chapter Ten: Two roads diverged in a London pub
Chapter Eleven: Ladies who lunch
Chapter Twelve: How to win friends and influence people
Chapter Fourteen: A fine balance
Chapter Fifteen: Not everyone loves Paris in the springtime
Chapter Sixteen: A place in the sun
Chapter Seventeen: A man of action
Chapter Eighteen: The past catches up
Chapter Nineteen: The waiting game
Chapter Twenty: Come on you Spurs
Chapter Twenty-one: A meeting of minds
Chapter Twenty-two: A confessional
Chapter Twenty-three: A pay cheque
Chapter Twenty-four: A short but crucial chapter
Chapter Twenty-five: Divine intervention
Chapter Twenty-six: The bottom of the barrel
Chapter Twenty-seven: This time it’s personal
Chapter Twenty-eight: The cold, hard facts
Chapter Twenty-nine: Acting on impulse
Chapter Thirty: Waking up in hell
Chapter Thirty-one: Panic on the streets of London
Chapter Thirty-two: Back to the future
Chapter Thirty-three: While the cat is away
Chapter Thirty-five: The only thing worse than being talked about
Prologue
I would like to think that at the age of thirty I knew a thing or two about myself.
I knew, for instance, I was a lawyer - a senior associate - at Australia’s most prestigious firm. I knew I had a career path, a European car and a very healthy salary. I knew I had a mortgage on a two-bedroom apartment in Bondi, Sydney’s most fashionable and most expensive beachside suburb. And I knew I had the love of Sarah, a gorgeous woman who, despite having the choice of any man in the world, had chosen to marry me.
What’s more, I knew that the future would only get better. A few more years of solid work almost certainly guaranteed partnership in the firm. And that, in turn, guaranteed a very comfortable life indeed.
It meant the chance to settle down to a bigger house in a more traditional suburb. It meant an annual overseas holiday. It meant an in-ground swimming pool and dinner party conversation about real estate and rugby and school fees. It meant ski lodge membership, a permanent seat at the Sydney Cricket Ground, weekend wine courses and a Southern Highlands hobby farm.
In short, it meant the chance to give my as yet unconceived children exactly the same upbringing my parents had given me.
And that knowledge was depressing.
Even though I was still a young man, I could more or less foresee how every day of my life would play out from now until I breathed my terminal breath in a private nursing home on Sydney’s upper North Shore.
Certainty was sapping my will to live.
I wasn’t the only one who knew what was happening to me. Sarah did too. She knew it because she knew me better than anyone else and, even if she didn’t, my open and incessant whinging to her - about how desperately I needed a change - would have been clue enough.
Yet every time I complained she did the same thing. She took my hand, looked into my eyes and told me how it was.
“I agree with you, Paul. You’re creative. In order to be happy you need to make something. But I also know exactly what you’re like and I know you’re just not ready just yet. We still need to eat, you know. We still needed to enjoy ourselves. These things are impossible without a job - especially given the amount you like to spend.”
“But I can’t take this anymore. You don’t understand.”
“Are you not listening to me? I was just telling you I do understand. Completely. But what you need is a plan - a plausible one - that makes sure we have money coming but takes you closer to what you want to do. Until you think it through properly, I’m just not convinced you’re ready.”
The other person who knew was my dad. At least that’s the only reason I can think of to explain why he - a man who rarely deviated from being straight down the line - took it upon himself to give me some philosophical advice.
It happened during a barbecue my parents were hosting as a way of thanking their closest friends and business associates for attending Sarah’s and my wedding.
*** *** ***
“Son, there’s something I want to say to you,” he said when we had escaped the fussing over the wedding and were alone in the backyard with only raw meat and Mum’s steak marinade for company.
“What?”
He took a swig from his Crown Lager and placed it on the tiled bench of the barbecue area he had built. “I just hope you can learn to be happy now that you’ve settled down. I mean you’ve done pretty well for yourself snaring the best looking girl in Sydney... Your mother excluded, of course,” he winked.
“Don’t be a pervert, Dad.”
“Oh gees, son. Just because I notice your wife’s attractive doesn’t make me a pervert. You don’t lose your ability to appreciate these things just because you’re an old fella.”
“Is that what you brought me out here to say? That you think my wife’s hot? Because I’m not sure you really want to share stuff like that with me.”
“Point taken,” he laughed. “But I did have something more important to tell you - something of a story.”
I rolled my eyes. “Do you have to?”
“I’d like to. I think you might get something out of this.”
He reached for his beer again and I snatched at my own drink in the hope that alcohol might dim the awkwardness I felt at listening to him suddenly attempting to impart wisdom.
“This had better be good,” I said.
Possibly in an effort to add to the drama of the occasion, Dad finished the next gulp of his own lager and poured the marinated steak onto the grill. The barbecue’s flames shot into the air and he didn’t speak again until we had both watched them settle.
“In America,” he said eventually, “in the early days, before people knew what was out there, if the explorers came across a river they didn’t want to cross because it was too wide or too dangerous, you know what they’d do?”
“What?”
He looked up from the meat he was now placing carefully onto the hot plate. “Hear me out, son. I’m giving you a bit of help here. Well... do you?”
“Swim?”
“They’d throw their hat across to the other side.”
“How interesting,” I mocked.
“When their hat was across the river they’d have no choice but to go across and get it. If they didn’t they’d die a long, painful death from exposure to the sun.” He looked up from his work again and took another short sip of his beer. “You see what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“That’s what you have to do, son. Throw your hat across the river.”
I tried my hand at stealing a taste of some of the marinade Mum had made and instead received a rap across the knuckles with the barbecue tongs. “So you’re telling me that they threw their hats eighty kilometres across the Mississippi?” I asked.
“Grow up, Paul,” Dad replied. “Sometimes you really should take things a bit more seriously, you know. Sometimes you’ve got to be an adult. Because you’re being juvenile you’re missing the point of everything I’m trying to say.”
Whatever that point was, Dad never got to fully explain. His attempt at a heart-to-heart was broken by the arrival of two more men - my uncles and his brothers-in-law - who had come to help with the meat. And there was no way Dad would ever be seen trying to utter anything so heartfelt in front of them. Instead, he went straight back into his comfort zone.
“Did you see the price of West Texas crude has gone up,” he asked.
Then, on a Monday morning almost six months later, the truth of Dad’s analogy was spelled out in a much less subtle way.
While sitting at a mahogany desk inside the solicitor’s offices that bore his name, his heart stopped working during a major cardiac arrest.
He was in the middle of dictating some amendments to a commercial lease.
*** *** ***
My shock and grief at Dad’s death hadn’t subsided before I resolved to make the change I had been threatening to make for years. Life, I realised, was way too short to waste on a job that brought me so much misery. And it seemed Sarah had now come to exactly the same conclusion.
“Maybe we have to be selfish,” she announced over dinner at the Icebergs Dining Room. “Maybe we have to forget about family and friends and doing the right thing and just do what we want.”
“And what exactly is that?” I asked.
Sarah chewed her fettuccine quicker than I had ever seen her do so, and when she reached a point where she felt she could respond without appearing indecorous, she spoke again. “Well, I have some ideas but I’d like to hear yours first. What would you do if you did give up the law?”
I put down my knife and fork and, with the words from that barbecue still turning over in my mind, I became bold. This was no longer the time to talk about gradual change at all. It was the time to tell her exactly what I needed to do.
“I’d like to write.”
To my surprise, though, my wife didn’t flinch. She simply proceeded wiping the excess sauce from her next spoonful of pasta. “What kind of writing do you mean?” she asked. “Like journalism? Or are you talking about a novel or something?”
“I haven’t really thought about it that much. But, yes, I think I’d like to write a book.”
As she continued her sauce-removing ritual, Sarah squinted the way she did when deep in thought and did not speak again until the forkful of food had disappeared into her mouth and was some way into her digestive track. It was a practice I was used to watching: the removal of as many calories as possible followed by very deliberate mastication to ensure her body knew exactly when it had had enough. Thirty-two chews was scientifically proven.
“Interesting,” she said at last. “I’ve always thought you might have a crack at this and I think if you really want to do it, you should give it a go. But you do still have to earn some money while it’s being written. Speaking from experience - and I know a lot of authors, you know, having worked in publishing for the past seven years - you can’t just go and write a book; especially if you don’t have anything to write about.”
“I know. I’ll do something to bring in the money still. But I do want a complete break from the law.”
“I don’t care what you do,” Sarah replied.
“Really?”
“Really,” she confirmed, returning to the first step in her pasta eating procedure - spiralling - all over again.
“So you wouldn’t care if I were a garbage man or a toilet cleaner or something like that?”
“If that’s what made you happy, no. But I could never see you being happy cleaning someone else’s shit.”
“Well then,” I said. “What about your plans. You said you wanted a change too. Don’t tell me you’re going to write a book as well?”
“God no. I would never put myself through that.”
As it happened, Sarah had been very successful in her own more interesting but markedly less well remunerated career. Just over a year younger than me, she was the senior publicist for a Sydney publishing house, and had already climbed about as high as she ever hoped to in her chosen field. And yet she was still paid less than a high school teacher. The money we burned through to maintain our lifestyle was overwhelmingly the result of my endeavours.
“I know I’m in the right field but there’s nothing left for me to do here. I can never get another promotion because there’s no job left to be promoted to. I think we need to go overseas.”
“Where?” I asked, genuinely taken aback. I had always thought that, given how happy she was in her field and how cautiously she had made any previous changes in her life, her horizons were well and truly limited to Sydney.
“We need to go somewhere English-speaking obviously - we don’t want to make it too hard for ourselves. America’s off limits because we can’t get a visa, Canada has a publishing industry no bigger than ours and New Zealand is, well, New Zealand. So that only leaves one place doesn’t it?”
“Does it?”
“Yes it does,” she said leaning towards me and speaking so precisely it was as though she thought me a little simple. “London.”
“You really want to live there?” I asked.
“Well it certainly has a lot more to offer me career-wise than here. And if you get to do what you want by writing a novel it’s only fair that I should choose where we should be don’t you think?”
I said nothing as I reflected on the logic of her statement.
“Well think about it,” she continued. “The visa’s pretty easy to get and we could stay with Lisa until we’ve set things up. We’d be mad not to give it a go.”
Her reasoning seemed to be flawless. Lisa, a very close friend of both of ours, had been living in London for the past few years. And, given her generosity and the size of her house, she would be more than happy for us to stay. But I suddenly found myself the voice of caution.
“What if it doesn’t work out?” I asked.
“Well, if it doesn’t work out we can always just come back here. A fare from London to Sydney costs nothing these days and, I know you probably don’t want to hear this right now, but you could always return to the law, you know, even if it’s just for a bit. I don’t think that will be a problem at all.”
I thought for a moment longer but I could find no hole in Sarah’s plan at all. She was right on every point.
“All right, you’re on,” I said, reaching out to shake her hand.
“Let’s at least toast it,” she replied, picking up her wine glass. “Here’s to London and the quickest decision we’ve ever made.”
I lifted my own glass and toasted with my wife. “To London,” I said. “And to finally taking a chance.”
As I drank to that sentiment, I wondered whether my father would ever have imagined the journey he had inspired.
We were about to throw our hats across the river.
And they would be landing on the other side of the world.
~ ~ ~
Book ONE
NOTTING HILL
~ ~ ~
Chapter One
A well-documented welcome
God had been very kind to our friend Lisa Routledge. He had given her looks, likeability and - as the only child of a prominent Sydney barrister - access to a lot of cash. They were the characteristics most people spent their lives trying to compensate for a lack of; the kind which should have made it impossible not to succeed in life. But instead of using her natural good fortune to improve the world or even herself, Lisa had devoted her life so far to squandering it.
She had spent every one of the twelve or so years since leaving secondary school enrolled in a university course but she did not have a degree, diploma or even a certificate to show for it. Instead, and with relentless consistency, she had switched classes, courses, universities or countries at least once every two years.
Lisa had studied law, literature and theatre at Sydney University, medicine and communications at Newcastle, business at some school in California and philosophy at Cambridge. Now she was relying on her father’s advice and getting serious about life by returning to the path she had abandoned first of all. She was once again a first year law student, this time in London. And, as with every time she changed her mind, she was busy telling anyone who would listen that she had finally found her calling.
“Now I know I’ve said that to you before, Sares, but this time’s different,” she said when Sarah had called to let her know we were moving to her city. “This time I’m more mature. It just takes longer for some people to work out what they want to do but I know now. I’m not doing law for my family like the first time. I’m doing it for me.”
With no formal qualifications whatsoever and still devoting herself full-time to the pursuit of them, Lisa also had no chance of supporting herself in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. Not from the proceeds of her own labour at any rate. So she was still reliant entirely on her parents’ generosity in order to fund her existence.
Lisa’s parents (particularly her mother Kay) complained constantly about the drain their daughter was placing on their wallets. But it wasn’t difficult to tell, deep down, they were content to let this state of affairs continue indefinitely. If they were not, they would not have purchased a three-bedroom house in Notting Hill and have given Lisa free rein over it - the only exception being the one month a year they spent in London in order to be near Jonathan’s mother. They might also have considered asking their daughter to pay some form of rent, no matter how token, just to prove that she was making some small effort towards self-sufficiency.
But what Lisa’s parents were not aware of was that their daughter was sharing their house (and the tasteful, wooden-framed Conran bed for which Jonathan had forked out several thousand pounds) with her girlfriend, Tabitha.
Not that Kay would have been too alarmed by her daughter’s sexual preference. Both Lisa and I had already endured the mutual gloating of her and my mother when their reading group discovered that Karen Gosby’s son, Jack, was gay. (In an attempt to shock, Kay had broken to the news to Lisa by saying that Jack had chosen “cock over cunt”, but the deliberate way she used the words made her seem even more middle class.) By having raised a daughter who had no emotional or physical need for men, Kay would have even been one level up the coolness scale.
On the other hand, it would have broken her poor Jonathan’s heart. That said, with his barrister’s ability to see both sides of any argument, I’m sure Jonathan would also have welcomed the upside of Lisa’s choice. He would no longer have to interrogate any of his daughter’s male suitors on their ability to look after her should the relationship progress. Being an old-fashioned sort of bloke, he had no such expectations for women, regardless of their sexuality.
Still, Lisa couldn’t go on living her lie forever. She knew her father would eventually find out. The reason she hadn’t summoned the courage to tell him just yet was because she hadn’t yet needed to. She had, after all, been a lesbian for just six weeks.
She had once been an enthusiastic participant in the heterosexual world and I knew just how enthusiastic, because I had also once been her boyfriend. In fact, she was the last girlfriend I had before Sarah, and I sometimes still felt the pangs of guilt over the manner in which Sarah and I had commenced our relationship behind Lisa’s back. Thanks to Lisa’s vagueness and natural lack of suspicion, she was probably the only person in the world who wasn’t aware that, for weeks before breaking up with her, I had been sharing Sarah’s university dorm bed.
Now Sarah and I were two of the first people to find out about her conversion. If only because, on our arrival in London, we were to stay with Lisa in one of her two spare bedrooms - albeit only until (as Sarah reminded me on every possible occasion) we had found a place of our own.
“I know you’re not prejudiced or anything Sares but I just have to let you know something,” Lisa had said down the phone line. “You know how I’ve been telling you that I was kind of interested in someone. Well, it’s more than that. I’m living with them. And she’s a girl; a girl named Tabitha. I’m only telling you because I know you won’t mind but I thought I should bring it up just to make sure you were comfortable with it.”
But when the cabdriver who had picked us up from Heathrow’s terminal four dropped us of at the white front door of the address we had been given, there was no Lisa and certainly no Tabitha. We were instead greeted by a handwritten sign welcoming us to the house, apologising to us on Lisa’s behalf for a study group that she could not afford to miss, and advising us that the keys to the place were in the flower pot to our right.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Sarah said. “Why didn’t she just leave the key in the door; or just leave the bloody thing open with a big neon sign above it saying ‘take everything, please’? I’ll be very surprised if there’s anything left in her place at all.”
Fortunately there was. Inside, the house was decorated with the same elegant simplicity as anything Lisa’s mum got her hands on, including herself. But the dignity Kay Routledge had given to the place had been sullied by a multitude of sticky yellow post-it notes that our hostess had attached to every surface she could.
The notes gave us instructions on how to use each appliance in and around the dwelling, from the kettle to the leaf blower in the back garden. They encouraged us to eat any foodstuffs we could find in the kitchen cupboards, instructed us to feel very comfortable about doing so and, to make certain that we would, provided detailed recipes on exactly how Lisa liked to put together the ingredients we would find in the kitchen (and many that we would not).
Another group of notes was marked solely with arrows. These traversed the length of the kitchen bench and then joined together to point the path towards two large hand-drawn maps fixed to the fridge by magnets. On closer inspection, the left one revealed itself as a carefully drawn floor plan of the house. The second, an aerial depiction of the entire neighbourhood, pointed out each of the nearby shops with details of what could be bought there. And in the case of one of the antique shops, the map also showed precisely which items of furniture within the house had been purchased from it.
The detail didn’t cease there either. Above the maps she had fixed an extensive list of her movements for that day: a catalogue of study groups, tutorials and lectures that concluded with an evening meeting with us at a nearby pub, The Prince Bonaparte (with the proviso “as long as you guys are up for it, of course. See map for how to get there”). And, just in case that caused any confusion whatsoever - and in the event that she was not available because her mobile was switched off (she would try to leave it on during class but didn’t think she could get away with it) - she had also given the contact numbers of virtually everybody in the city.
“How long did it take her to do all of this?” I asked.
“You know what she’s like,” Sarah said, already beginning to search for somewhere to move the two backpacks I had dumped on the floor of Lisa’s kitchen. “She’s a strange girl, our Lisa. Lovely. But strange.”
I really hoped that you couldn’t sum up a person in three words but Sarah kind of had. Perhaps it was because Lisa’s faults were so obvious that it made it that much easier to look beyond them. Or perhaps it was just because she was, at her core, a thoroughly decent person. And I’m not sure you can say that about too many people.
“You know what I feel like?” I said to Sarah when we had located the bedroom and commenced moving our belongings into it.
“What?”
“I know it’s out first day in our new city and we have the whole place to explore but the only thing I really want to do is sleep.”
“Me too,” Sarah said.
~ ~ ~
Chapter Two
The pouf of shame
Six thirty pm arrived with the force of the ocean - at least the feeble computer-generated imitation of the ocean that the manufacturer of our travel alarm clock had optimistically called “crashing waves”. The calm-o-clock 900, which Sarah had purchased duty free while our 747 was refuelling in Singapore, was capable of three distinct alarm themes, all of which were intended to give the user a natural start to the day. However, we took the view that “babbling brook” and “mountain stream” would be much too gentle to rouse us from the sort of deep but dreamless sleep that resulted from flying through half of the world’s time zones in one day.
That said, it still took me quite some time to recognise that the annoying, crackling noise that woke me was the clock’s best impersonation of the beach. And it seemed Sarah needed something even less therapeutic to get her moving again.
“Sarah,” I said, pulling the doona off her and placing my cold hand on the small of her back. “It’s time to wake up. We’ve only got fifteen minutes before we have to be there.”
She blinked. “What?”
“We’ve got to be out of here in fifteen minutes if we want to make it on time.”
I allowed her a brief moment as her eyes struggled to stay open.
“It’s cold,” she said eventually. “And dark.”
“That’s what London’s like in winter,” I said. “Now come on. We have to go.”
“To meet Lisa?” she asked, after another short moment.
“No, the Queen Mother. What do you reckon?”
Despite my best endeavours to get us to our engagement on time, it was never going to happen. And for once, it wasn’t entirely Sarah’s fault. When I did manage to force myself out of our sweaty bed and into a modified upright position (ie, one which required the aid of a wall or a large item of furniture in order to be maintained), I found the same sluggishness that had been affecting my thoughts was now affecting my actions. A whole hour disappeared in the time it took to remove my pyjamas, wash my face and dress into clothing suitable for a night in a pub. And by the time we had finally figured out how to lock the front door and were making our way through the crowded and unfamiliar streets outside, time was just slipping away.
As we moved slowly past the stone and stucco houses and the shop interiors of Westbourne Grove, pedestrians were zooming past us like aeroplanes. Even the litter strewn across the footpath appeared to be moving more quickly than we could. We had never expected Lisa to be on time for the meeting she had arranged with us but now we were running very late.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing Sarah’s hand tightly and doing my best to help us both through it. “We can do this.”
I think the only reason we did reach our destination was because Sarah was clutching the map Lisa had drawn us, and it contained a level of detail which made it impossible to get lost. We needed only to follow the pink line past the numerous antique shops onto Chepstow Road and straight into the oak doors of The Prince Bonaparte. And there, sitting on a gilt-edged faux-Victorian couch which matched the black walls of the pub, was Lisa herself. Dressed in blue jeans and a green singlet, she was waving frantically in our direction and stamping her feet with excitement.
“Sarah,” she called when we were close enough to hear her over the noise of the crowded bar. “Sares!”
Before we had the chance to take off our overcoats, she had left her seat and was grabbing my wife with both arms, rocking her from side to side and splashing the half-full pint of beer she was still holding. As she did, I noticed that, despite being in the midst of a northern winter, her skin was so olive and her hair was so blonde that the glow from the fireplace reflected from her.
“I can’t believe you’re finally over here. I never thought you guys would ever make it. I thought you’d be back in Sydney having babies by now.”
By the time she had let go of Sarah, the only thing left in Lisa’s pint glass was froth. But, undeterred, she gave me exactly the same welcome, and when she had enough, directed us both towards the couch we had seen her vacate. In front of it was a small coffee table which she put her now empty glass upon. It was adorned with a reserved sign in her name.
“Really sorry to hear about your Dad, Pauly,” she said, pointing towards a small leather pouf next to the table and gesturing for me to sit on it.
“Thanks,” I said. “It was pretty unexpected. But then I guess that’s the way with heart attack. If you know it’s coming, it’s not going to kill you.”
“Are you okay about it though?” she asked, taking my wrist as the three of us sat. “I mean I know that’s a silly thing to say. Of course no one’s going to be okay when their father dies. I’d be devastated if it was me... How’s your mum?”
“You know what mum’s like. She’d always been pretty reliant on him and all but my sister’s family’s just moved back from America. So I don’t feel too guilty about not being around.”
“It’s good she still has someone.”
“And even better it’s not me,” I said.
Lisa smiled sympathetically, just long enough to get the sad business of my father out of the way. Then she leaned across towards me and, clutching my left hand in her left and Sarah’s right wrist in her right, returned to the subject of how excited she was to have us stay. While she did, and in as skilful a move as I had ever seen, she simultaneously used her head to motion the drinks waitress to her.
“What will it be, Lisa?” the waitress asked.
“Sarah?”
“Whatever you’re having is fine, thanks,” Sarah said.
“Two Frühlis then, please.”
“What’s a Frühli?” Sarah asked, only to be ignored.
“I’ll have a Guinness, thanks,” I added, as Lisa picked up her last sorry glass of beer from the table and handed it to the waitress.
“And can I get a glass of water also, please?” Sarah asked.
“Still or sparkling?”
“Tap,” Lisa jumped in. “And the three beers as well, thanks.” She turned back to Sarah. “Don’t think you’re getting out of it that lightly - we haven’t seen each other for what, two years or so it must be now. Actually, maybe in honour of that, we should be having champagne instead. Actually... that would be a great idea. I’ll call her back.”
Lisa stood. But her attempt to amend our order was frustrated by the fact that the waitress could no longer be located. She had disappeared somewhere behind the bar and was now lost behind a wall of thirty-something men all of whom seemed to sport an identical uniform of skinny jeans, five o’clock shadows and long hair, and all of whom were also doing their best to give me the impression they were not watching my female companions.
“Bugger,” she said, sitting back down. “Beer it is then.”
“I’m more than happy with that,” I said.
Sarah wasn’t though. “I don’t know if we should even be drinking alcohol now I think of it. Not with this jet lag.”
She may have had a point: the cigarette smoke trapped inside the pub’s shabby chic interior was combining with the beat of the dance music playing on the sound system, making my jet lag return with a vengeance. My head was beginning to feel so heavy that I wondered whether I could prevent it from falling forward and cracking against the coffee table. Drinking alcohol certainly didn’t seem like the most sensible course of action right now.
But I wasn’t going to let that deter me.
“Rubbish,” I said. “I’m fine… And even if I wasn’t feeling so rosy a couple of beers would be just the thing I needed to steady me.”
“Yeah, come on, Sares,” Lisa said, supporting my spurious theory. “A couple of drinks is probably good for you.”
Before Sarah had the time to mount any defence, Lisa began firing off a series of questions, not waiting for any answers as she did.
“So, did you find the house alright? Have you been asleep? Did you find the key? Did you get my directions? Did you find the pub okay? Wow, Sarah, you look pretty good for someone who’s flown half way around the world, but then again you always do. How was your flight anyway? Did you get one of the seats by the emergency exit? It’s so much better when you do. Oh, this is so exciting.”
The soliloquy only stopped when the waitress rematerialised with our drinks. And I used the opening that gave me to ask the only question to which Sarah and I really wanted an answer.
“So where’s this girlfriend of yours?”
“Tabitha?” Lisa answered. “She’s at work.”
“What does she do again?” Sarah asked. She took of her coat and folded it on her lap, revealing her bare shoulders.
“She’s another lawyer. Just like you and me, Pauly.”
“You haven’t qualified yet,” I replied.
Lisa laughed at my lack of humour. “I am so sorry to get ahead of myself like that. How naughty of me.”
“But she’s coming, right?” Sarah asked. “We are going to get to meet her?”
“Actually, I don’t think she’ll be able to. She’s got a major piece of litigation going at the moment in Switzerland. She works in IP.”
“IP?” Sarah interrupted.
“Intellectual property,” Lisa and I said simultaneously.
“Anyway, it’s something to do with drug companies and patents and that kind of thing. Can’t say I’m too interested in that part of law - it’s still boring property law even if it does have a sexy prefix - so I don’t remember too many of the details. But she’s been working almost non-stop for the last couple of months on it.”
Sarah began flicking something from her jeans. “Why does it seem that everyone in the world is now a lawyer, except for me?”
“Hey, I’m not anymore,” I said.
“Yes, Sarah mentioned that,” Lisa said, clapping eagerly. “Tell me about it. It’s so exciting.”
Before I had the chance to explain anything - not that there was particularly much to explain given I had not yet put pen to paper - Lisa’s mobile phone beeped into life with a polyphonic rendition of Men at Work’s ‘Land Downunder’.
She wedged her right index finger deep into her ear as she took the call, and then immediately sprang to her feet to replicate the enthusiastic wave she had greeted us with just moments before. “Can you see us?”
Waving back from the door, his ear also pressed to a phone, was a man about our age. He was wearing a beanie and duffle jacket and a pair of old Blundstone boots, and looked as out of place as possible in our trendy surrounds. Lisa skipped a few steps towards him and hugged him almost as generously as she had us. Then she led him over to us by the wrist.
“Sarah, Paul, I want you to meet Davo... Well, his real name’s James.”
“I prefer Davo,” he announced in a broad Aussie accent. He shook Sarah’s hand before stretching his arm towards me.
I wiped the condensation from my glass across my best cashmere jumper, as Sarah watched disapprovingly. Then I reached across the table to grab his hand in the firmest shake I could. “Strange nickname for someone called James.”
“Hey, nothing’s normal about me. Then again, my surname is Davidson - that might have something to do with it.”
Davo made fleeting eye contact with Sarah, who had laughed at his barb, and he left immediately for the bar, arguing that any more time spent hanging around the table any would eat into his valuable drinking time. I suspected, however, that his quick departure had much more to do with his effort to leave the conversation after having made a strong first impression than with any pressing need to consume alcohol. He was competing with me. Not that the girls noticed that, of course. Something else occurred to them.
“There’s absolutely nothing between us, you know,” Lisa said.
“Really?” Sarah asked.
“Really. I’ve already told you I’m going out with Tabitha. I’m even living with her. And even if I wasn’t, I sure as hell wouldn’t be interested in Davo.”
It was not that she was no longer attracted to men, she explained (she claimed to be attracted to the individual rather than the gender, if we could understand that in any way - to which I said I couldn’t and to which Sarah was arousingly non-committal). It was Davo in particular. He was, she said, exactly the kind of insular Aussie bloke she had come across to this side of the world to escape in the first place. The reason she couldn’t was that he was the younger brother of another of her many friends: a social worker she had met from her time at Newcastle University and didn’t really know that well.
“But I promised her I would look out for him so I have to keep my word,” she justified. “I’m practically the only other Aussie he knew when he got here - even thought I’d only met him once before - and I feel kind of obligated. Anyway, at least tonight he’ll get to meet some Aussies who are a bit more, well, I don’t like to sound snobbish - but I guess ‘stable’ is the right word - than the crowd he usually mixes in. That’s got to be a good thing. And if you do find anything in common with him, that will kind of make him less dependent on me.”
Davo came back into view, carrying two pints of beer and smoking a cigarette. He pushed through the now packed bar area, unaware that he was spilling much of his drink or that much of the drink he was spilling was landing over the patrons he was pushing past. As a consequence of this, he was being cursed by a suited man who sat on pouf identical to mine and mopped beer from his receding hair with a handkerchief.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can’t see any common ground yet.”
Still oblivious to the wake of destruction he had left when he reached us, Davo nodded towards his beers. “It was so slow up there I thought I’d save myself another trip. What is it with the bar service in this country? You would think a man had all night to wait for his drink.”
“You could have just held out for the waitress,” Lisa said. “You would have had five pints by now.”
“Still, you never know these things till you try,” Sarah offered.
Davo plonked his beers down on the table beside mine. “That’s right,” he agreed pointing his cigarette towards me. “Fortune favours the brave.”
I pointed towards Davo’s disgruntled victim, who was still looking in our direction. “You do realise you spilled your drink over that guy’s head.”
“Sorry, mate,” he mouthed across the room, giving the man the thumbs up. He looked back towards us. “Still, he shouldn’t have got in my way should he? Besides… what kind of a bloke sits on a pouf anyway?”
To emphasise that kind of bloke was certainly not him, he motioned for Sarah and Lisa to shuffle along the couch and he squeezed himself onto it in the corner closest to me. But that was about as much interaction he would be having with the females for a while. Lisa, who was sitting next to him, had turned her head away to face Sarah and the two were talking at a level which, given the noise of the pub, was impossible for either Davo or myself to hear. I took it as an unsubtle sign that it was me who was charged with finding that elusive common ground.
I stared blankly for a moment and thought of a few ways to break the ice: what was his opinion was on the Arab-Israeli conflict; did he believe in the existence of a deity or deities and, if so, what nature did he or she or they take; or what were his thoughts were on the merits of Elizabethan as opposed to Aristotelian tragedy? But in the end, I took the view that to resort to such childish forms of intimidation would serve only to stoop to his level. Instead, I would take him on like a man in the twenty-first century way by talking about work and money. And in the meantime I would drink him under the table.
“So, what do you do for a living then, mate?” I asked, just after he had watched me attempt to call the drinks waitress over to our table again, giving up only because I recalled that Lisa had just ordered another round.
“Are you talking to me, mate?” he yelled back.
I called out more loudly to make myself heard over the noise of the pub and succeeded so completely that Sarah furrowed her brow in my direction. “What line of work are you in?”
“Guess,” he said, running his hands through the front of his hair in an unsuccessful effort to quell the severe case of hat head he had uncovered when he removed his beanie.
“I don’t know. Brickie?”
“Nope.”
“Sparkie?”
“Nope.”
“What then?”
“Guess,” he said again.
“I’m not guessing anymore, mate. Just bloody tell me.”
Davo leaned back into his seat, his dirty outfit clashing horribly with the black and white fabric of the couch on which he was sitting, and he took a small sip from his lager. Then he positioned the glass back on a coaster on the table and twisted it slightly with his hand. “I’m an exterminator,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m an exterminator. I kill stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Birds.”
“Birds?”
“Yeah, birds.”
“What birds?”
“I dunno. Pigeons, gulls, shit like that.”
“Why?”
“Because someone pays me to.”
The waitress appeared with Lisa’s round and, when she did, I thrust a twenty quid note in her direction before Lisa could.
“Oh, you don’t have to, Pauly,” Lisa complained.
“I can afford it,” I said.
I made something of a show of leaving change on the silver plate the waitress handed back to me because, as much as anything, a break in our conversation gave me the thinking time I needed to come up with something that would give me the upper hand in our conversation. And, after the waitress had left and after I had let Davo watch me make a sizeable dent in my Guinness, I let him have it.
“Are you worried the Buddhists might be right?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever thought that the Buddhists might be right - you know about taking the lives of other animals? Because if so, you’re gonna be in for a shit load of bad karma next time you come back.”
I smiled confidently and attempted to adopt a pose not dissimilar to the one Davo had when he announced his profession just moments previously. Then I realised that, as I was sitting on a pouf, I had nothing to lean back on and was about to fall off it altogether.
“I have actually,” he said, as I hauled myself back into an upright position with the aid of the table.
“And?”
“And killing stuff’s so much fun I reckon it’s worth it. Anyway, how many jobs are there where you’re not fucking things over? At least my victims are just stupid animals. What about yours?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Oh come on. What do you do?”
Before I had the chance to respond I was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder. It was one of the faux-scruffy men in the group next to us excusing himself as he pushed past. He placed his skinny-jeaned bottom right in front of my face so that my view of the couch, which sat half a metre from me, was obscured.
“Are you right, mate?” I asked.
“Oh sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I just came across because I couldn’t go any longer without telling this lady here just how beautiful she was.” He gestured towards Sarah, who smiled politely at his comment.
“Well, this beautiful lady is married to me,” I said. “Now if you don’t mind…”
“Sorry, mate, sorry…” he said, smiling back at Sarah before patting me on the head and returning to his friends. “I didn’t mean to be stepping on anybody’s toes - literally or metaphorically - I just couldn’t let her not know it. I have rarely seen such a beautiful woman in all my life... I’m sure you understand.”
“Whatever, mate,” I said as he left.
Davo smirked. “Well, now that we’ve got that out of the way, you still haven’t told me what you do.”
Even in the state of annoyance I had been whipped into by our intruder, I was acutely aware it would have surrendered the moral high ground entirely if I let him know I had earned every dollar in my adult life as a lawyer. So I told him only of my new career.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“What kind of writer are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fiction, non-fiction, what?”
“I haven’t really decided yet.”
“What do you mean, you haven’t decided yet?”
“Just that… I haven’t worked out what I’m going to write about.”
“But you earn money from writing, yeah?”
“Not exactly. Not yet, anyway.”
“And you’re calling yourself a writer?”
“Well, I’ve got to start somewhere. A book takes a while to write, you know.”
“Well, what did you do before you were a writer then?” he asked.
Now that I already looked silly I couldn’t stretch things once more. I had to tell him the whole horrible truth.
“I was a lawyer,” I confessed.
He sat back in his chair once more and lit a new cigarette. “And you reckon you don’t have any victims?” he laughed, shaking out the flame from his match. Then he rubbed it in even further by hitting on a question I’m certain he knew there was no logical explanation for at all. “So what made you want to write then?”
I did my best to put on a brave face. I set about explaining my father’s story: about how he had died sitting at his office desk; about how he had devoted his life to work which, although I’m sure must have given him some kind of strange pleasure, really didn’t amount to much; and about how he had died without ever having the chance to enjoy the fruits of his labour.
“I guess,” I said. “The reason is that I don’t want to end up like that.”
Davo thought for a minute when I had finished. “You know what?” he said. “I reckon you’re afraid of dying. I reckon this is the one way you think you won’t be forgotten like the rest of us.”
I didn’t bite. I just drained the contents of my pint glass and immediately called the waitress over to order myself another pint of Guinness.
“So what are you going to do for work while you wait for this book to be written?” he asked.
“Well, I’ll write articles and stuff. I’ve got contacts at newspapers. I’ll get work.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second,” he replied. “You’re obviously a bright guy and all, but I hope you’ve got some serious cash behind you. It takes a while to get started here. Then again, I’m sure you must have put something decent away from your time as a lawyer.”
I shrugged my shoulders, trying to look non-committal and/or unconcerned about my financial situation, even though I had what was best described as a meagre bank balance for someone who had given the best years of his life to the pursuit of corporate law.
“You see,” he said, “London - the way it operates - it’s like a catch-twenty-two. You can’t get a flat on your own without a job, even if you are a lawyer. And you can’t get a job without a bank account. But then, you can’t get a bank account without a place to live... You’re fucked no matter how you look at it.”
“So how do you get around it?”
“Live in a share house,” he said. “Then you knock over at least one thing.” He screwed up his face and it revealed prematurely deep crow’s feet forming around his eyes. “Why would anyone want to live alone anyway?”
“But I’m married,” I said.
“So? I’ve lived with heaps of married people while I’ve been over here. I even shared a room with a married couple for a while.”
“Are you serious?”
“Why not?”
I didn’t have the chance to explain why that was wrong on many levels because Lisa was hitting me on the arm and pointing to the caller display on her ringing mobile phone. “It’s Tab,” she said. But before she took the call she introduced Sarah into our conversation. “Hey Sares, has Davo told you what he does for a living yet?”
Well done Lisa, I thought. How come I didn’t I think of that earlier?
As a committed vegetarian barely comfortable in leather shoes there was no way Sarah would be on Davo’s side in any ensuing discussion. So before he even opened his mouth I seized the opportunity be the bearer of bad news.
“He’s an exterminator,” I said.
Sarah screwed her face up. “Think of all that bad karma.”
“That’s exactly what Paul said to me,” Davo replied, meeting my eyes.
“Well what do you exterminate?” Sarah asked.
“Mainly pigeons.”
“Oh,” Sarah said. “That’s different then.”
“What?” I interrupted, so amazed that a small amount of sputum launched itself from my mouth. “What about your animal rights stance?”
“What about it?”
“How can you condone the killing of poor innocent pigeons but then get mad at me for eating pigs or sheep? Birds are much less offensive animals.”
“Not pigeons,” she answered resolutely as my next drink arrived. “They oust native birds from their feeding grounds… And they’re dirty.”
“More dirty than pigs?”
“Much more. They carry diseases - meningococcal, hepatitis, stuff like that, and who knows about this whole bird flu thing? The world would be much better off without them.”
“Too right,” Davo said, holding his glass in cheers towards my wife as he celebrated his victory. “Little fuckers.”
And yet Sarah wasn’t content with simply turning against me on that front. As I retreated back to my beer, she launched a new point of attack.
She pointed at the alcohol rapidly disappearing from my pint glass. “Hey, isn’t that your fifth drink?”
“Yep,” I confirmed proudly. I stretched my neck from side-to-side like an athlete limbering up before a big race. “Sure is.”
“Do you really think you should be having it?”
“Why not?”
“You’ve had enough, Paul. I mean, you’ve been in bed all day suffering from jet lag. Our bodies think it’s, like, five o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t even finish my first drink.”
“Oh come on, I’m pretty sure I can handle five drinks,” I said, smiling confidently in Davo’s direction and receiving no response.
“You’re already starting to slur your words. And these are pints, not the schooners you’re used to drinking back home.”
“You look green too, mate” Davo added.
“I’m fine,” I said. I downed the remainder of my beverage as rapidly as I could just to emphasise exactly how fine I was and, as I did, Sarah shook her head.
“No you’re not, Paul,” she snapped. “Go and have a look at yourself in the mirror. You’ve gone green.”
“It’s just the lighting,” I said. “Everyone looks green to me. Look…” I took Sarah’s bare forearm and held it up to the light. “You even look green.”
“She’s not the same shade of green as you are, mate,” Davo said.
“I feel much better than I have at any time since we arrived here,” I continued. “It’s only five beers - hang on less than five beers for Christ’s sake. I’m still on my fifth. Even Lisa has had more to drink than I have. In fact,” I said, starting to stand. “I think I’ll take my glass to the bar and get another one.”
I grabbed my glass from the table and Sarah grabbed my arm and tried to wrestle the drink from me. “Give it here, Paul,” she said, rising from her seat and digging her fingernails into my forearm.
“Fine,” I said and sat back down. “I don’t need to take my old glass in order to get another one. I was just helping the bar staff out. Now you’ve selfishly made them come here to collect the dirty one.”
“Oh, grow up,” Sarah replied.
Davo pressed his hands to his knees as though he was about to stand up and leave us to it. “Should I be leaving you two to continue this?” he asked.
“Sorry,” Sarah apologised. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”
“No worries,” Davo said. “It’s not your fault.”
There was no way I could let them get away with treating me like this - as though I was some derelict who couldn’t help himself. But before I had summoned the energy needed to stand again Lisa had returned. And fortunately, she was far too preoccupied to join in the anti-Paul aggression that had been stirred in her absence.
“Bad news I’m afraid, guys,” she said. “Tab’s gotta fly out to Geneva tonight. Something about a whole lot of documents she’s got to go and have a look at. I’m afraid you won’t get to meet her for at least the next few days.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Sarah commiserated. “But I guess we’ve waited this long anyway. What’s another couple of days?”
“I know. It’s just a shame,” Lisa agreed, apologising as she pushed against my leg and tried to get past. “I had this really kick-arse restaurant planned for us tomorrow night, one that Tab loves and now she’s got this stupid discovery. What is a discovery anyway, Paul?”
When it quickly became apparent to her that I was neither responding to her question, nor moving out of her way, Lisa bent down and looked into my eyes. “Paul? Pauly? Are you okay?”
“Look, I’m fine.” I said.
She tilted my chin up towards her and the light caused my eyes to close involuntarily. “Have you seen yourself? You’ve gone a funny colour.”
“It’s green,” Davo added.
“I think you’re right,” Lisa replied. “It’s the same colour as my top.”
Everybody has a defence mechanism - an instinctive response programmed into us through biology and genetics and evolution that kicks in whenever we’re vulnerable. It’s why when a dog is confused it always bites, a fox always runs, and an English football fan always starts a riot. For me, whenever I’m bamboozled or scared or angry (or like as I was then, a combination of all three), I demand answers. I don’t really know why, or what to. I don’t even really care. I just need the reassurance of a factual solution to something. Anything.
“What the hell is this all about?” I said, shaking free of Lisa’s hold on me. “I want answers.”
“Stop raising your voice, Paul,” Sarah said. “We’re only trying to help you.”
“Watch then,” I replied.
I attempted to rise to my feet once more and make that trip to the bar I had been threatening. But, as the force I needed to stand was now so great, verticality could only be achieved by leaning heavily on a support. And the only thing I had in this regard was the wooden coffee table on which our drinks were resting.
With eighty kilograms suddenly thrust onto one side of it, the table flipped over and sent its contents flying through the air and onto the hard concrete floor.
Still, the noise of one glass ashtray and five pint glasses shattering as they hit the ground was only loud enough to draw me to the attention of those tables in close proximity to ours. What focussed the gaze of the entire place - patrons and bar staff alike - was that, as soon as I had made it to my feet at the table’s expense, the combination of jet lag and alcohol fighting it out inside of me began causing the whole room to sway recklessly beneath my feet. And, after a few brief seconds of desperately clinging to my composure in the face of such adversity, the forces of gravity became too much to bear.
I was thrown to the floor as though tossed from a rodeo bull.
I went down and, as I did, I instinctively reached out and took hold of the person standing beside me - a person who just happened to be the man who had also attempted to chat up Sarah.