The menu itself was sheer poetry – everything was marinated in this, delicately steamed in that, its spiciness tempered with the other, but I had a hunch that it would all taste like re-heated bull’s testicles in masala-flavoured sperm.
I’d forgotten how much of Central London was all style and no substance.
‘Paul! Welcome back to civilization!’
Chris snapped me out of my gloom. He was my best mate when I was working in London, but we’d lost touch over the past few months. It was the price of being a nomad.
I stood up to shake his hand but he grabbed me in a bear hug and slapped my back as if I needed consoling after losing my teddy bear. And we Brits make fun of French guys for kissing each other, I thought.
‘You’re looking good, Chris.’ He was, too – expensively neat brown hair, three-facials-a-week complexion, a sort of inverse Jake, a young cufflinks-and-formal-overcoat City slicker with a flat leather shoulder bag to show that here was a businessman who was too active to monopolize one of his hands carrying a briefcase.
‘Yeah? Well you look like shit, Paul mate. What are you doing in London?’
It took me two beers and an age-long wait for our re-fried starters to explain.
Once he was up to speed, the first thing Chris did was insult me again.
‘Christ, Paul, you are what is known in the City as a prime wanker. Why don’t you just call her and say you’d like a chance to explain?’
‘Tell her I’m in London?’
‘No, don’t do that. From the sound of it she’d just bugger off with this guy to Reykjavik.’
‘Reykjavik?’
‘Or Minsk.’
‘The capital of Ukraine is Kiev, you dork, don’t you know anything about geography?’ Jake would have been proud of me.
‘Whatever. Just call her, say you’re still in Paris – you don’t want to scare the shit out of her – and give her a bit of the old Paul West bullshit.’
‘No, I’ve finished with bullshit. I want to tell her the truth.’
‘Then you’re even more of a wanker than I thought, mate. You don’t tell women the truth.’
The trendy young Indian waiter, who was dressed and coiffed as if he couldn’t wait to go out clubbing, came and slotted a group of six women on the bench beside us. Instinctively, Chris and I had a sly look to see which of the six we’d sleep with if given the chance.
The girls, though, had other ideas.
‘Hi guys,’ the one nearest to me trumpeted. ‘You’re cute. I might shag you later.’
All six of them hooted with laughter.
‘We promise not to have anything with garlic in it, then,’ Chris said, determined not to lose the fight for sexual supremacy.
‘Who said you were going to be kissing my mouth?’
Which sounded like a knockout punch to me.
The girls, like Chris, seemed to be fresh out of the office. They were in formal work gear, and had just undone a blouse button or three to give their boobs and navels room to enjoy some fresh air.
Two of them were very attractive, in a slightly overweight, over-made-up, fussy-hairstyle way. And all of them, after a year of svelte French women, who rarely go out in gangs of more than two, seemed somehow larger than life to me.
Louder than life, too. They killed off any chance of Chris and me discussing my problems, because they were listening out for the slightest word that could be turned into sexual innuendo and throwing it back in our faces.
‘Exhibition? You an exhibitionist or what? Gonna show us your dick?’
My God, I thought, we are being sexually harassed. We couldn’t say a word without being reminded of what went on below the belt. I was just glad that I was taller than them. If we’d been two demure girls getting that much hassle from a gang of six male Viagra addicts, we’d have started to get scared.
We battled on with more general subjects, and Chris filled me in (luckily I didn’t actually ask him to ‘fill me in’) on what he’d been doing for the last few months.
His employers, an Internet travel agency, had gone bust, so he’d moved to a phone company. This had been bought out by venture capitalists who’d laid everyone off and then taken back on a skeleton staff, including Chris, on short-term contracts. They’d then sold on key parts of the business, making everyone redundant again. Chris had seen the way things were heading, leapt on the bandwagon with the venture capitalists, and was now merrily asset-stripping his way across the country.
‘Lot of job satisfaction, is there?’ I asked.
‘Hey, don’t knock it,’ he said. ‘You know all these programmes we have on TV at the moment – they find some poor bastard counting traffic cones in Wolverhampton, relocate him and his family to a village in the Dordogne and then have a giggle when he tries to learn French so he can . . . I don’t know. . .’
‘Open an English tea room?’
‘Right, yeah. Well, everyone wants to be on those shows. Half of the UK wants to bugger off and live in the sun. So I reckon, why not help them on their way? We downsize them, free them from the rat race, they move abroad and live happily ever after. I’ll be heading out there myself one day. Meanwhile, the lemmings leave room over here for the rest of us to make shitloads of money.’
‘Or work in call centres and take shitloads of anti-depressants.’
Normally I might have proposed a toast to earning shitloads of money, or buggering off to live in the sun, but Chris’s economic analysis was getting me down. Even further down, that is.
Apart from the fact that somewhere in what he was saying there was an insult directed at me and my tea room, he was having to yell his sociology lesson over the Indo-Danish background music and the squawking hen party next to us.
Chris started to chat up the woman next to him, who was, I had to admit, a very nicely rounded girl with hair a cheesecake shade of blond that I hardly ever saw in Paris. Amazingly, she turned out not to be a mud wrestler or a bricklayer, as her skill with obscenities suggested, but a business analyst like Chris. Soon they were sharing the kind of business analysts’ secrets that had to be giggled in each other’s ears.
The woman next to me, who would also have been pretty attractive if she didn’t insist on yelling like a soldier and flaunting her excess kilos (or pounds) by wearing overtight clothes, took the cue and began chatting to me, but I am proud to say that, even though we were all now several pints of lager further down the river to drunkenness, I resisted any temptation to ask for more details of this garlic-free non-mouth kissing they had been talking about.
Instead, I gave my neighbour, and those of her friends who weren’t busy canoodling with Chris, a quick run-through of the events of the previous evening that had brought me across the Channel. I was, I made it clear, in London on a mission of lurv.
‘Oh. My. God. That. Is. So. Sweet.’ My neighbour was practically sobbing into her aloo saag.
‘So you’ve given everything up for her?’ This came from the most attractive of the girls – another blonde – for whom on another night I might have offered to give up everything.
‘No one’s ever given up everything for me,’ my neighbour wailed. ‘My Keith never even gave up wanking.’
This seemed to wipe my predicament from the girls’ collective memory, and they joined forces to pour vicious female scorn on poor old Keith, who, it seemed, had been caught watching a lesbian-action DVD one weekend when he thought his girlfriend was away, which could happen to anyone.
The one thing the waiter was good at was keeping us supplied with liquid refreshment, presumably to cover up the food’s taste and consistency, or lack of both. So it came as no surprise to discover, at some point later in the evening, after saying a heartbreaking goodbye to several large-denomination banknotes, that I was parading towards Piccadilly, arm-in-arm with two women who, although this was now – what? November? December? Greenland? – bloody cold, anyway, were dressed for an August night out in Cyprus. One wore an off-the-shoulder top, the other a blous
e thin enough to show off the stitching in her white bra. They each had an Indian beer in their free hand, and now and again one of them would bottle-feed me with it, which seemed to be the only way to stop me laughing and shouting.
I don’t know what I was laughing and shouting about, but everyone else in the world seemed to be doing the same thing. The street was packed with us. There was probably more alcohol than blood in the bodies charging up and down that pavement.
Gangs of us were milling about with that same determined randomness you see when you look at an ant colony. And on one street corner, two soldier ants from rival colonies were trying to punch each other’s heads while their queens spat at the males to ‘give the cant a slap’ and ‘fakkin twat im one’.
We cheered them on for a few minutes, only losing interest when a howling siren came to spoil the fun.
I noticed that my own two queen ants and I were following a set of small bare footprints on the pavement. So women were not only coatless but shoeless out here? Or maybe after midnight, everyone just stripped off and had a sex-and-boxing orgy. I pulled my two companions along in pursuit of the feet, but the trail dried up. Girl Friday had apparently gone into a club.
Chris was trying to drag his new ladyfriend towards one of the several million taxis that had gathered to evacuate casualties. She either didn’t want to go or couldn’t work out how to get her body to follow him, because she sprawled headlong in the gutter, pulling Chris down with her, and they decided to stay there, cackling up at the street lights.
‘Give us a snog before you go,’ someone bawled in my ear, which suggested that maybe I was meant to be leaving with Chris and his new lady love.
Yes, I had something very important to do. A mission. I couldn’t remember what it was, but it was there in my mind and it did not involve being in Piccadilly.
‘Chris! Why am I here?’
‘Why is any of us here, mate? To get pissed and have a bit of fun before we die.’ From his relaxed location in a London gutter, he gave me an answer that would have done a French existentialist proud. He was then violently sick into a drain, before washing his mouth out from the bottle of beer that he had somehow managed to keep from spilling or smashing when he fell.
No wonder, I thought, that coming into the West End in the daytime feels like visiting a hangover.
4
MY BLURRED EYES squinted at the writing on the little screen. My brain made a courageous attempt to enhance the image, and failed. After a superhuman struggle, it finally concluded that in my phone’s opinion it was seven o’clock. Which meant that it was either six or eight, because there was an hour’s time difference between Paris and London. Which way did the time difference work? No, it was too early and too painful to figure that out.
Anyway, I had to concentrate on more important things.
Like, how exactly should I kill myself?
Just stopping breathing seemed to be the easiest option. Every time my ribs moved to let air in or out, I was reminded that my liver had been soaked in pure alcohol then set alight. The charred remains were sending SOS messages echoing through my empty skull, where my dehydrated brain was lolling like a dead bat.
Yes, it was another one of my deadly mornings after. With a twist, though, because this time I still seemed to be drunk. A whole new set of gods had apparently decided to kick me when I was down.
I was lying on a carpet in the ‘won’t choke if he vomits’ position that I trained myself to adopt at the end of drunken nights out. The carpet was still white, and remarkably dry, which was encouraging.
The only trouble was that the architect who had designed this building – and from what I could see of it, a lot of designing had gone on – had forgotten to include foundations, and it was wobbling about like a sumo wrestler’s backside.
Luckily, as a kid I did quite a lot of skateboarding, so I was not afraid to stand up on a surface that was trying to pull itself out from under me, and I skated, with only two or three topples, towards what looked like a door. It was hard to tell, because everything in the apartment was made to fold away so as not to clutter up the three cubic inches of living space. The whole place was made of doors.
I was, I realized, in the two-room Docklands apartment that Chris had so wisely bought when the rest of us were saying, Who wants to live in a designer shoebox in the East End? And now he would have been able to sell it and buy a whole French village, because lots of people wanted to live in a designer shoebox this close to the River Thames.
I eventually found myself in a bathroom that was so damn ergonomic that I had to open the laundry basket, shower cubicle and toilet before discovering a medicine cabinet. This did not, unfortunately, contain a booklet giving hints on how to give myself a head, liver and kidney transplant, but it did offer up tubes of fizzy stuff that gave me back the will to live.
What a great thing his shower was. On, off, fast flow, slow flow, hot, warm, cold. I almost wished that Florence’s mum could be there to witness its beautiful simplicity. Though thinking about Florence’s mum was bad enough sober, so I hit the cold button and shocked her out of my system before she could do any permanent damage.
Before leaving the apartment I stopped off to peer into the bedroom. There was Chris, on his back, twisted up in his duvet, his mouth wide open as if he was hoping to swallow any falling light bulbs. Next to him lay the large, cream-coloured body of a woman wearing nothing but a Chinese tattoo at the base of her spine.
For a split second I felt envious. Then hugely pleased with myself. The complications of waking up with yet another woman were just not worth it.
As far as I could recall (which wasn’t very far at all), we’d gone to a club with the girls from the restaurant, and I could probably have wangled my way into someone’s bed. But then there’s no great merit in scoring when everyone is so drunk they would shag a dustbin.
Dustbins, yes. Now I remembered what my real mission was – to get to those dinky dustbins in Notting Hill.
I wasn’t feeling at my best when I staggered out into the street at Notting Hill Gate. That London Tube jiggles about a lot. And it’s very considerate warning people to mind the gap, but did it have warn me so loudly? The canned voice gave me such a shock that I nearly fell down the gap I was supposed to be minding.
It was still before eight London time. Why is it, I wondered, that during a hangover, when my body most needs healing sleep, it always wakes me up so bloody early?
But at least this meant there was less chance that Alexa had already gone out for the day. I’d only have to hang about for a few hours before being able to confront her and beg forgiveness.
In fact, though, I didn’t have to wait for hours at all. My first breath mint had only just had time to turn my tongue into an ice floe when a large man came out of Yuri’s front door.
As students of perspective will know, when objects come towards you, they get bigger, so by the time he was right in front of me, this large man would only have needed a dab or two of green makeup to audition for the Incredible Hulk. He’d have needed a black wig too, though, and stick-on eyebrows, because his head was totally hairless. He was Humpty Hulk.
I was standing quite innocently at the entrance to the mews, and could easily have been an undercover yucca-plant inspector, but the man didn’t even ask what I was doing there. He reached out a massive green arm (or was the colour just my imagination?) and with what felt like one single movement, propelled me past the silver Mercedes and into the house.
Before I knew what was happening, I was sitting at a scrubbed-pine kitchen table with a mug of coffee in front of me.
Everything in here except my mug seemed to be made of stripped pine – table, chairs, wall units, an enormous dresser. I wondered whether the Ukrainians weren’t somehow related to the Welsh. I’d have to ask Jake, if I ever got out of here alive.
‘You not shout, OK?’ Humpty Hulk warned me. Much more quietly than the Tube people, I had to admit. ‘Every buddy aslip.’ He spoke as
if he’d trained at the Arnold Schwarzenegger school of English diction.
‘Shout?’ I felt my testicles trying to hide up inside my pelvic bone. It sounded as if there might be some violence on the cards after I’d finished my coffee.
‘No. You shaddap.’
‘OK.’ Although I couldn’t really promise. I’m not generally good at receiving violence.
‘You want spik wid Alyexa, you wet mebbe one hour.’
‘Alexa?’
‘Yeah. You want spik wid air, no?’
‘Yes. How did you know that?’
He grunted a laugh through clenched teeth and beckoned me to follow him with a jerk of his tree-trunk-sized neck.
In one corner of the kitchen there was a little computer desk. Hulk woke the computer up, clicked with a surprisingly light touch on some icons, and soon we were watching a black-and-white film of a woman urinating. It was a rear view, and the girl had hoisted up her skirt, pulled her thong to one side, and squatted down right outside someone’s townhouse. The camera focussed in on the white glare of her backside. Just above the cleft of her buttocks she had a Chinese tattoo.
The film was silent, but when the camera pulled back it was obvious that one of the two men with her was laughing loudly. He was bent double and his whole upper body was shaking so hard that his bag slipped off his shoulder and got tangled round his neck.
Next to him, facing the camera, was a guy I recognized from Alexa’s photo show. Moi. I was shouting something that we couldn’t hear, and the Hulk provided the soundtrack.
‘Alyexa, Alyexa,’ he crooned plaintively, his smooth face registering something close to amusement.
He hit the space bar and the film stopped.
‘We know you want spik wid Alyexa. You want spik wid air at tree o’clock dis morning.’
‘Oh God. What a dickhead.’ So this was what my drunken inner self considered to be good diplomacy? ‘I didn’t actually talk to Alexa last night, did I?’
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