doorstep challenge

I pocketed my keys and glanced down the stairs to the building’s front door.  Through the clear pane of glass I saw feet and legs, horizontally splayed across the doorstep. 

Erm. 

Was someone trying to extract a letter from one of the flat’s letterboxes?  Was it a labourer working at a meter I didn’t know was there?  I descended the short flight of steps and opened the flimsy door.  Ours was a block of flats tucked into a missable corner of the court, but it had long concerned me that the lock was weak, the door easy to break if you wanted to.  One not especially hard, well-placed kick could see you inside without much problem.  

On the doorstep I discovered a man in his mid twenties, lying prone across the doorstep.  He wasn’t addressing the letterboxes or any concealed meter.  He wasn’t addressing anything at all.  Closely cropped hair, unshaven and wearing dark clothes – a black shellsuit-type top, he wobbled unsteadily on his knees, neither conscious nor unconscious. 

“Hello mate!” I addressed him, wondering if he posed me any immediate threat.  I didn’t want to touch him but carried on talking loudly at him, trying to rouse him.  “What’s going on here?!  You alright pal?!”

Gradually he stirred, facing away from me, heavily concussed, never looking directly at me but aware I was there.  His face was bleeding; crusty red, caramelised-marks scarred his face from a beating he’d taken maybe an hour or two earlier.  He slowly found his unstable feet and staggered away from the building. 

I followed close behind.  This wasn’t good but did it merit an emergency call?  I gestured the sign of telephone to him as he sketchily looked back at me, tottering off in zigzags, knock-kneed.  He walked squarely into a bush and bounced out of it.  “You sure you’re all right?  You want me to call anyone?  Ambulance?”  He found the narrow gap out of our courtyard and away, towards the canal, perhaps retracing the same route he’d used to get in.

Maybe it didn’t warrant blocking up an emergency phone-line, but it needed reporting.  I remembered seeing an Ambulance parked out the back before I left the flat, just over the footbridge.  It struck me as peculiar because if it had been for a hotel resident – the only building in that immediate vicinity, it would have driven into the hotel car park, not outside.

Compelled to report it I decided to walk in the direction of town, rather than in the direction of the bay, as planned.  I’d find a policeman or car or ambulance soon enough.  A police van overtook me and stopped at a set of traffic lights fifty yards ahead.  I broke into a run to catch up with it, knocked on the window and, faintly embarrassed to feel breathless after what was a short run, quickly explained my findings to a distinctly nonplussed looking driver.  “Oh yeah, we’ve just come from there,” he said, looking pissed off.  “I’ll turn round now.”  Clearly something had happened but he wasn’t going to tell me what.  Our short exchange concluded before the lights changed from red.

While I’d clearly judged the character as unsavoury from the outset and might have extended more basic human sympathy had he not fit a certain type quite so well, I’d done my bit.    

As I was headed in that direction, I walked on into town, a taste of unsettling violation permeating within.  Whatever criminal violent shit had brought that guy to my doorstep?  What actually goes on a stone’s throw from where I live, work and sleep?  A cosmetically safe, respectable place where other singles, couples and families live?  It’s city living. 

Even so, you don’t really want those things happening so very close to home.  They’re just for films and fiction.  Not for what happens when you open your flimsy front door.

Vietnam arrival

1. 08:25 - 04/10/2005

“Whath that?  Nuclear physicth, ith it?” a young voice says a little too loudly from above my left shoulder.
  
Four hours before arriving in Hong Kong, most of the plane is in darkness, its passengers restlessly trying to grab some economy class sleep.  I gave up long ago as I have a Korean Jabba The Hutt character sprawled and gurgling next to me.  My only blessing is an aisle seat.
  
I’m reading an entertaining, untaxing novel requiring minimal attention.  At the beginning of each chapter there’s a small italicised question and answer blurb which forms the central theme of the novel.  All of these are heavily ironic, poking fun at an immature narrator.  The one on this page has something about physics.
  
Bold opening gambit, nuclear physics, I think of the lisper above my shoulder.  And one dismissed as not possibly being serious.  How could someone begin a conversation in a quiet, darkened aircraft at an indistinct but deep night time, about nuclear physics?  I decide to banter.
  
“Well, no, it’s quantum physics actually: my speciality,” I say in a low, quieter tone, hoping his pitch will follow mine, although the effect is also that I sound less jovial than I’d intended.  He’s a year or two younger than me in his earlier twenties.  It’s possible mild drunkenness exaggerates his lisp.
  
“Really?” he says, still uncomfortably loudly.  It’s like he can’t control the sound level as it blurts from the back of his throat.  Some people nearby shuffle in their seats.  He’s fascinated, apparently believing that nuclear physics really is my speciality.
  
I’m forced to concede my jest when he points at the small section at the top of the page of my book.  After I explain, he stays to chat, somewhat awkwardly, still too loudly, nursing his thimble of spirit.
  
He’s going to Hong Kong for the first time to meet his Japanese girlfriend, who he sees every six months in various places around the world.  It’s a cobbled notion of mine that any western man, particularly British or Americans - can easily land eastern girlfriends.  It’s not difficult.  To do with the difference / novelty factor which leads to many a holiday romance.  You often saw gawky looking guys at university with eastern girls, because they’re less aware of their gawkiness.  I tell him I’m just passing through Hong Kong on my way to Saigon.  He asks if that’s in China.  Vietnam, I correct him.  Still he prolongs the scene with his travel tales and profound observations that I’m largely unresponsive to, smiling politely until he’s finished, then he plods back up the aisle.
  
Will I have to meet and be pleasant to many similar types of over confident, over loud, well-travelled, yet slightly empty seeming?  I could dream up a sneering name for them like my Dad would - an oh-so-clever acronym.  He and I had parted with the regular rushed clasping tangle at Terminal 3’s pick up/drop-off bay several hours ago.

Now Hong Kong is beneath me, looking impressive and strangely accidental.  As if somebody has haphazardly scattered numerous well developed skyscraper families across a beautiful landscape intended for cute wooden huts and not many people.  I’d like to go back and see more than the airport one day. The city’s formation over a series of jagged coastlines and islands, often too large to be connected by bridges, is spectacular.  When we landed into the airport, I couldn’t stop looking out of the panoramic windows at the landscape.  I’d heard that landing in the old Hong Kong city airport was a spectacular experience and had been disappointed to learn it had relocated to a small island a short distance away, but this was impressive too.  I’m flying out now, away from Hong Kong, its surroundings and this breathtaking expanse underneath me.  Hong Kong will frame my time away as I’m due to stop through it again on the way back, but I’ll know practically nothing apart from the almost arrogant charm it commands from arm’s length.  “What, just because you came all this way, you expected us to live in wooden cabins?  We live better than you, you mugs,” it yells from the ground.   

At the gate to this flight onto Saigon there was a lady reading a book I’d recently finished.  I wanted to say something, speak to her about it, having enjoyed it despite myself, despite thinking it all implausible and rather silly.  I wanted to speak to someone, and speak to someone about that book because I hadn’t spoken to anyone about the book.  And, apart from the chap on the plane, I hadn’t spoken to anyone about anything for a while.  She got up and went to another gate for another plane.

I remain worryingly ignorant of what awaits me in the southern Vietnamese capital of Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City: its official title.  It won’t be as developed and westernised as Hong Kong, I’m sure, but how much less?  Will there be pavements?  Boarding this aircraft, I began to feel more conscious of being western.  A handful of other tourists, but we were in the minority.  The natives looked bored to be going to Ho Chi Minh.  It’s not something to get excited about, judging by the look of them.


2. 18:16  04/10/05

During the descent through Vietnam, everything grows brown: bare, charred fields with strips of scorched yellow offsetting the dominant brown rivers.  Then the city: exposed blocks of vulnerable greyness, growing nervously.  Unlike two hours previous, no sparkling skyscrapers, no stylishly shimmering sea; a sluggish fat brown river and a clutch of average sized tower buildings mark what must be the centre.
  
Excited and scared to be exiting the last aircraft of my long journey, to be staying somewhere so incredibly alien, I trailed my fellow passengers into the disorganised immigration area.  Straggled queues led.. presumably.. to somewhere, outside?  I wasn’t sure.  It was impossible to tell exactly where or even if you were in the right one.  Britishly, I joined one and hoped.  Other western people were in it, but they were in ones to the sides of me too.  A pretty young eastern girl in the queue next to me selected Robbie Williams from her silver mini iPod.  A toddler bumped into the back of a short, sweaty young man with a large forehead who looked vaguely eastern European.  He looked surprised by the bump, and travel frazzled.  I exchanged a weak smile with him then selected Ian Brown’s F.E.A.R on my own ageing iPod, whose battery I was oddly proud to see was still hanging in there.  The American couple in front of me were gently reprimanded by the immigration official when they went up to his desk together.  He ordered her back.  She said something to me I didn’t hear because of my music, but I smiled anyway and half shook my head at the maddening beaurocracy of it all.  The immigration official had a frighteningly long hair sprouting from a facial mole.  He didn’t smile.

I was eventually passed through, collected my luggage and went to join another queue, which I wasn’t alone in being frustrated to see appear ahead of me.  What now?  One final baggage scan.   Half a dozen young men wearing identical T-shirts and baseball caps jumped the queue, unabashed.  Disgruntled murmuring amongst us patiently waiting folk, an effeminate western boy rebuked them in fluent Vietnamese.  They looked mildly apologetic, but not much, before still going on ahead of most people.  Bags scanned and passport checked a final time.  There was daylight ahead.
  
At a currency exchange counter I swapped forty quid I’d taken out at Heathrow.  Musty, mainly pink currency in return.  Then the searing blast of heat and a heaving swarm of people outside the main Arrivals door.  There must have been hundreds of people staring at anyone who walked out.
  
“Hey, taxi?!” a uniformed man emerged from the dense pack and shouted at me.  I looked up from studiously examining the floor, avoiding hundreds of pairs of eyes.  Yes, he had been shouting at me.  What other choice did I have?  I didn’t know anything.
  
“Mm, ok,” I muttered, offering the first example of my bristling Vietnamese language.  I’d half-heartedly tried learning token phrases for each country I would visit and now relied on a pocket phrasebook, knowing it was unlikely I’d develop the confidence to say anything more than hello, goodbye and thank-you.  I was already uncertain of the approaching character as he weaved through the crowd towards me, knowing he’d be out to fleece this stupid dumb westerner who clearly knew nothing, who would need two hours and a large calculator to do any currency conversion.  He appeared to be an agent of some sort and led me away from the doors, across the forecourt, away from the incomprehensible throng of people, to a taxi which already had a driver in.  He quoted a price I knew to be way over the odds.  I’d heard that the centre was only about twenty minutes away.  He said thirty-five.  Perhaps he was expecting a haggle but I conceded anyway; the taxi company had no competition.  I forked out one of my largest notes to him, still ignorant of exactly how much I was being fleeced for.  Better not to think about it.
  
He unceremoniously threw my backpack into the boot, then shut the rear passenger door behind me.  My driver was a young man with few English skills.  We spoke anyway, without understanding much each other said, both nodding and smiling frantically, picking up and dropping our own tangents between long periods of silence.  The view from the window of my taxi was mesmerising.  My first wholesome, mindbendingly rich flavour of Vietnam.   I didn’t want to miss anything.  I wanted to suddenly attain photographic memory powers, to remember each detail.

When you go somewhere new, anywhere you haven’t been before, however close to home, you’re naturally sensitive to differences.  Here, somewhere so far away, so different, it was more natural trying to look for things that were the same.  Sameness in such an alien, distant place was novel and kooky - Coke signs, aha!  A few dominant global, capitalist names, but difference was king.

Traffic apparently isn’t in need of order or rules, anarchy reigns, everybody has the innate ability to thread their bike or vehicle through the eye of a needle.  Even where squeezing through a gap doesn’t seem possible, where a fatality seems so inevitable you daren’t look.  These drivers need only a millimetre of space around them.  Any more than that is a luxury.  The drivers look accordingly concentrated and serious, yet never stressed or hurried.  Cars are few, with motorbikes and scooters ruling the road, packed tightly together, riders never with a helmet - a smog mask the most protection they have, chatting across the road with each other as they go, smoking, occasionally on mobile phones - despite the constant intrusive engine drones they’re immune to or have learned to speak over.  Most have motorbikes: scooters and Vespas, and laughably tatty machines which appear barely capable of making a sound or staying intact if you were to sit on them.  Less so of actual movement.  Not a Harley Davidson in sight.  Pedal bikes come a close second to their motorised siblings although few look what we would call modern.

The more people on a motorbike the better.  Young and old, friends, lovers, whole families nonchalantly cram on, babies looking out glazed over the handlebars of speeding, precariously weaving cycles.

Beeping isn’t an aggressive act.  Hello, I’m here, is all it means.  Road rage appears extraordinarily non-existent.  Buildings vary wildly from the ramshackle corrugated iron hut, just about upright, to the recognisably regular, sturdy modern bulk.  Little glitz, no neon, but an intensity of frantic bustling dusty life that, in my experience, had no comparison.  I sat in the back of the taxi staring out, petrified, hypnotised.  Sometimes a passing biker would see the pasty-looking westerner in the taxi window - did locals ever use taxis? - and take a second look.  I sensed our nearing centrality by the rosing height of buildings and an increase of western looking people.  Still not many: the occasional couple, or a single young person.  Then I passed a war museum, outside which an obvious clutch of them waited, adorned by cameras, sunhats and shades.  The taxi swung into the forecourt of my hotel after a ride of about twenty minutes.
       
*
 
Now I’m irrationally seething following a protracted tour of Ho Chi Minh City, getting fleeced for the second time in a number of hours.
  
My journey finally at an end, I reached my hotel room in the plush hotel I’d been advised to book by my travel agent, at around midday local time.  In the context of Vietnam it was an expensive room, with an en-suite, mini bar and television.  Determined not to even consider napping, I freshened with a shower, a shave and fresh clothes, before braving the manic streets.
  
For the first few minutes I could only summon enough courage to walk around the blocks, only crossing the fearsome, permanently jammed roads when strictly necessary.  I swore I’d be killed if I tried to be too clever, tried to cross too many roads.  The odds were surely stacked against me with the swarming volume of traffic as it was.  It brought to mind a childhood computer game where you had to cross a river packed with crocodiles, stepping on safe logs to reach the other side.     
  
Climbing into the seat of a large pedal cycle, I wondered if I had been wise in succombing to the fourth offer of a tour.  “3 dollar for hour,” he had reasonably quoted, before pummelling me with measured, luring questions as he pedalled alongside me, pitching his sale.  “Oh, ok then,” I finally submitted, willing to defer the responsibility of my direction and lower the chance of getting run over.  
  
The hour elapsed, but he continued showing me authentic Vietnamese pagoda after pagoda, temple after temple.  Some more impressive than others, many a fair distance apart.  The smell of incense in most of the square buildings lulled my senses, relaxed my already jetlagged mind.  This combined with my unerring sense of over-polite Britishness and I delayed telling him: Enough, I’m tired, take me home now - even when the second hour passed.  A tall, self conscious and over flamboyant temple with little artistic substance, claiming to be the tallest; then another,  smaller, flatter, red block with a wondrous amount of detail, locals on their knees, praying to Buddhas.  My guide sat in his cycle, relaxed, smoking, pointing me in the direction of other buildings of interest, although I’d lost enthusiasm long ago and wanted to go back.

I brainlessly agreed anyway and went plodding dopily off to the next temple.  Beginning to lose track of the number of temples I’d seen, I grew weary of getting rinsed of money again.  He pedalled, standing behind me as I sat fretting, between short, sporadically vicious thunder storms.  He had cycled around more blocks than was necessary to get back to my hotel, I was sure.
  
It had been around two and three-quarter hours.  I’d been stupid for letting it go on so long and was as much annoyed at myself for that as I was at him for overcharging me.  Amidst another torrential storm soaking us to the bone, we had a confrontation outside the hotel.  I was reluctant to give him as much as he asked, claiming he should have told me at the beginning how long the tour would be.  A local lady manning a nearby streetside drinks stall saw our stand-off, came over and mediated, successfully knocking his price down better than me.  Reluctantly, I handed over a still inflated fee, and stomped dripping wet into the plush hotel, attracting confused looks from the staff.

(I later guessed that this was because they would have expected to collect my room key from them, but I had accidentally contravened rules by taking it out with me).
  
I’m irrationally angry now because it was a decent, occasionally fascinating tour, taking in many different corners of the city - possibly ones less chartered by tourists.  And the traffic remained consistently captivating, terrifying, tipping back and forth like an hour glass, each vehicle a grain of sand, on each junction a hundred miracles, never even a scrape.  Several near-miss swerves when collisions appeared a certainty.  Heart regularly in mouth as I sat in my little priveliged shell, I’m amazed not to have witnessed a single accident.
  
My energy levels, momentarily boosted by the adrenaline of conflict, are now dipping again.  Ridiculously so for six o clock.  But I’m jet-lagged so it’s excusable.  My writing is dipping in and out of focus.  I should stop.

stupid blanker

Mmm, she’s crazy hot, purred my sleazy drunken brain.  Across the table, Friend’s droopy eyes looked over at me, disapproving, telling me not to be quite so obvious in my admiration.  We were sitting down on the bar’s comfy seats, her bottom and legs were cutting and thrusting and swooping around at my eye-line.  I couldn’t help admiring and didn’t care.

From there the evening became blurry, and remains so now.  Virtually no words remain; only faint outlines.  Trying to remember is like visiting a gallery where the paintings become gradually soiled and obscured to the point that all you see are the frames, the parts around the edges.  Memory is like that of a silent film I half dozed through.

We’d had a good night up until then across a number of different central venues.  Friend had done his usual painfully tortured ‘oh I really shouldn’t..’ – although we both knew what was on the cards when he unexpectedly called in on my flat at 6pm.  It was Saturday night, his fiancée had gone out with a friend who was visiting.  He was free and notoriously weak where alcohol was concerned.  Opportunities to go out like this are rare for me now, chances to behave like a drunken idiot who’s perhaps a little younger than I am.  I fed Friend a couple of tantalising beers at the flat before suggesting we go the pub.  We hadn’t played any Xbox at all, which must have meant we were growing up.

After attending the birthday party of another friend’s friend in an upstairs function room – a place populated almost exclusively by well dressed, enviably good looking, shiny-faced homosexual men – we made our way back across town into the mainstream district.  We stopped in two pubs before coming to our final destination: a highly swanky looking late-night bar.

We’ve intermittently enjoyed nights like this, here in this city for over ten years; impromptu, long, fuelled to the point of memory blackouts.  While I knew they wouldn’t happen as often as in our early twenties, the chance of them, even if only now and again, incentivised my decision to move back here.

“Five quid entry,” a doorman said as we walked enquiringly towards him.

“Or is it four?” his female colleague asked.

“Three!” I interjected, charged by several large whiskies.   “Two fifty, one pound ten?!  Let’s barter!”  Friend glared disgusted, what-the-fuck-are-you-doing? daggers at me.

But something incredible happened.  They laughed, relented and simply waved us through.  “Go on., before I change my mind,” she said.  We walked in, giggling incredulously.

Memory holds reasonably firmly for an hour or so, before the dancing girl with the body.  Then she’s sitting next to me and we’re chatting.

How did you do that, you genius?

Not a clue.  And I have absolutely no recollection of our conversation.  She’s German and has a German accent.  That’s it.  No memory of her face either.  A loose recollection of her outline and basic, impressive dancing shape, dark wavy hair, but my memory stubbornly refuses to colour in a face of any kind.  There’s only fuzziness around the edges.

Friend is around, maybe chatting to her friends, or sitting on his own in a drunken stupor.  Both are plausible.  She stands up to dance again and there's a time lapse before she prepares to leave.  Her handful of friends (could have been three, could have been seven), male and female, look all set and mingle around the top of the stairs.  I’m sad she’s leaving.  She approaches me again to say goodbye and I stand, smile, possibly leer, disappointed.  Words must be exchanged but I have no idea what they are.  (I'd guess "nice to meet you").  I kiss one cheek and pause, then decide to go continental and kiss the other, and pause.  Something must happen in this pause: a raise of her chin, a smile or a look in her eye.  Or maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe I’m just drunk and fearless.  Either way, we’re suddenly kissing properly.

Me!  Dowdy loner bloke!  In a hip late night bar on a Saturday night, drunk, snogging a German female who I’m positive is really quite attractive!  She’s kissing me back!  Quick, someone take a picture to show to my Grandchil.. um, well: Great Niece or Nephew!  (See, I wasn't always like this).  This might never happen again!

We must break off and smile coyly, no numbers or details exchanged.  Why the hell not?  Did she say she had a boyfriend?  Was she just visiting friends here?  So what?   What was her name?

ANYTHING, brain?  Anything at all?  One slender grain of detail?

Nada, zilch, a big long flatline bastard.

She follows her friends down the stairs and presumably out of the bar.  I make no attempt to follow. (Again, WHY?  Prick.)  I sit back down with Friend, who’s talking to new people.  My intoxication means I’m now riding the crest of legal chemicals and temporary confidence; I’m surprisingly not dumbstruck.  I enter this new conversation with a cocksure gusto, like nothing just happened and I’d forgotten it already.

From here even the edges of memory start to blur.

*

Knowing that I don’t have a clue what she looks like annoys the hell out of me.  I privately pride myself on being good at remembering faces, being able to quickly identify people even if I only see them for a second.  Earlier that evening a Swashbuckled follower sat behind me in a pub and, not having too many followers, I felt curiously smug.  Then strange and uncomfortable.  I tried explaining this to Friend, who I don’t believe has ever visited a Twitter page.  I couldn’t argue with his deduction, “..fucking weird mate.”

Point is I enjoy my ability to tell immediately who someone is with a half second glance at their mug.  And I’m a decent listener, attentive, and will remember the key details of a conversation and usually more besides – especially if the interlocutor happens to be an attractive female.  I don’t forget.  And I imagine I came across as attentive and interested and not a complete moron, or she wouldn’t have come over to say goodbye.

But it’s academic.  Despite plaintively scrolling through my phone numbers more than once (why are you doing this, you wanker) the upshot is that I have nothing at all.  We must have spoken for a while and were attached at the face for several seconds.  Yet she could plausibly pass me in the street and I wouldn’t have a clue.

This irks me.

whatever that means

“I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you,” she murmured into my ear.  Shit, really? Nobody’s ever said that before.  And this city’s been slicing my face into scabby pieces lately. Not wanting to alter the atmosphere in any way, I kept quiet and kissed her.

Conversely, I hadn’t wanted to fuck her straight away.  It was the Alice Band: an immediate issue which made me annoyed by my own fussiness with jewellery and accessories.  Back home Alice Bands were exclusively the staple of 12 year old girls or girly-haired European footballers.  Not women.

But by the time she breathed those words into my ear, the next morning, naked in my hotel bed, I did want to fuck her, very much. And I even liked her too.

She’d entered the bar and sat down next to me, wearing that Alice Band – worn to hold curly red hair.  She seemed nice, chatty, human and smart; neither of us perturbed by the unorthodox meeting, the loose online acquaintance but not actually knowing the first thing about each other.

We drank pints and ate burgers, drank more, conversation flowing easily.  She spoke amusingly and with the manner of a charismatic, obviously homosexual man: lots of back and forth shoulder tilting, flappy hand gestures and much use of air quotation marks, which I teased her about.  I was enjoying having company, conversing.  She was fun, the bar was cool and low key, the music good.  Although I wasn’t sure if this was just a pleasant couple of hours and we should be getting back: me to my hotel a few blocks east, her to her small flat a short train ride north.  It was more of a date than I’d anticipated when I suggested meeting up.  But that was fine, and became better than fine.

“Well.. I’m having a fun time,” she said, leadingly, so we moved on elsewhere.  In the next dark sports bar we had tequila and further strong liquors, discussing drinking, local politics, religion and family.  An hour later we tired of that bar and headed out, considering a next venue but not knowing where.  On the street it was bitterly cold.  She shivered and I put an arm around her.

Despite being the local, she was unsure where to go next. “Nothing.. funny, but we could just go back to mine, or..” she trailed away.  I suggested we go back to my hotel, a shorter distance away, just a few blocks.  Nothing.. funny either, I added, chuckling in my head.  She agreed.  In the room I generously poured from the bottle of Sour Mash bourbon bought from Moe’s Liquor Store in Sheboygan Falls earlier that week.

She flopped down onto the near-side of the bed.  I made to leap over and rest the other side of her, louche and athletic: a poor idea made worse by a misjudged leap and bounce off the far side of the bed and onto the floor.  It was clearly unintended and less than smooth.  She laughed.  We were both drunk and fuzzy.  I clambered back on the bed
and lay next to her, embarrassed and flustered, any cool I had extinguished in that moment.

We breathed and sipped at the bourbon.  What now?

“We could get naked and get in bed?” she nonchalantly suggested.

“But what would my wife say?” I whispered straightfaced.

A nervous giggle, a pregnant pause for thought.

My turn to laugh.  I assured her, agreed to her suggestion and hoped she’d take off the Alice Band.

*

Around midmorning, that stupendously filthy murmur suggested her headache had eased.  These were times of therapy for a man of fragile ego.

Midday saw glaring Chicago sunlight punish the curtains.  She rested warmly against me, now freshly showered and slowly preparing to leave. No great urgency.  I played with her hair.  The night before had been made easier by the transience of the situation: the time-sensitive One Night Only Offer.  Nothing had mattered all that much, nothing had any real consequence.  In two days’ time I’d be gone, a long way away, unlikely to ever return.

That’s unless feeling develops, if there’s any sense of mutual feeling, if raw is courage acted upon.  This is less likely with sober, pragmatic characters already encroached on their thirties.  Those who know they should stop playing games and start being serious, whatever that means.

Let it go.  Frivolously skim back across the ocean and remember it fondly.  Accept it for what it was: a night with someone you found you liked, albeit for a brief period, someone you had a good time with.  Be content to smile at the memory: that spectacular death of your cool; that you were both naked in bed before you’d even kissed; the quirky unorthodoxy of it all.  Be grateful for her unknowing illumination of your ridiculously unsuitable previous female hope.

Use the knowledge to go forward and hope that these type of meetings – for this isn’t entirely without precedent – isn’t as good as you can ever hope for.  Hope that you stop being so pathetically grateful for attention from any female with a combination of looks and intelligence.  Learn to stop excitedly sledgehammering square shapes into round holes like an overzealous recruitment consultant.  It’ll be fine, it can work, IT WILL WORK!

Move on now.

Let it go when you kiss her for the last time and smile and say something meaningless and she leaves the room and the heavy hotel door clunks shut behind her.  Let it slide and blur and fade.  Just like that.  Easy.

Lying there together in those final minutes, absently twirling one of her curls around a forefinger, perhaps it was because nothing mattered all that much, because nothing had any consequence: perhaps that made it sadder.

unfinished books and a nice excerpt

I've been starting too many books lately with only a faint commitment to finishing, or even reading much of them.  This has been born from completing but only enjoying two thirds of my book before last (Emma Donoghue's rightly acclaimed 'Room' – doesn't it essentially end two-thirds of the way through? Isn’t the rest filler?)  And only around a third of my last book (Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘The News Where You Are’ – quite saggy, scant momentum).  Both of these were Christmas gifts bought for me at my request, so there was an obligation to finish them.  Another request, Paul Auster’s latest, ‘Sunset Park,’ is now waiting.  I’m nervous after hearing mixed reviews.

Wanting a short break from feeling obliged to finish everything, I frivolously binged from the library – albeit not successfully.  A Costa shortlisted book of poetry, a serious looking Emile Zola novel I’m unlikely to get too far into but felt like a worthy idea at the time, a Graham Swift novel I’d never heard of, and an Alan Sillitoe book of short stories entitled and containing “The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner” – partly selected after loving the film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which Sillitoe wrote.

Our excellent new library sits squarely on the quickest route from my flat into the city centre, so I often fail to resist a quick scan of their New Books or Quick Picks sections.

Today, neither needing nor wanting new material, yet knowing I wasn’t being grabbed by anything I had, my feet wandered in there again.  My hand selected a book called “Travel Writing – A Story,” by Peter Ferry.  My brain was attracted by the simplicity of the title and cover, and was won by a cover quote from Dave Eggers and a compelling inside sleeve.

I spent an hour or so with the book and a coffee, and a band called Pepper Rabbit playing in my headphones, occasionally glancing out onto a high street bulging with Saturday afternoon shoppers.  I grew more committed to this book than I had to anything else I’d read in a while.  I particularly enjoyed the following.

“…I became interested in what we do and where we go to give our lives meaning when we don’t or can’t find it at home, when life there becomes too staid and certain and we have to create challenges – even dilemmas – for ourselves because problems are interesting and important and life without them is neither.  It is the reason that people join the circus, I think, drink too much, drive too fast, jump off things, jump into things, climb things, run away from home, and paddle into the wilderness.  It is also the reason they tell stories.”

Peter Ferry – Travel Writing: Chatto & Winduss 2008

I thought this was quite neat.  Of course, there’s no guarantee I’ll finish it.

Wisconsin Wander: Day 2

Grey mist and drizzle met me as I pulled apart the curtains the next morning, any remnant snow finally dribbled away.  Having plotted a loose south-easterly diagonal return, I trailed the westerly edge of Lake Winnebago before pressing further south.

Around mid-morning I stopped at the town of West Bend.  (It seemed to me from the map that the river bore East at this point, but who was I to quibble?)  This place reminded me of an hour spent in Fort William, Scotland.  It was based next to a river, there was a lingering grey mist, the size of the place was small and there was almost nobody else on the streets.  However, there were no surrounding mountains here.   The place was ghostly but part of what these trips are about: the missable in between places as well as the big, swaggering ones.  I took a coffee and read my book in a small diner where I was served by a Hispanic waitress.  She wrongfooted me with a “gracias” when I handed over the money.  “Cheers” was my charmless reply.

Several wrong turns and U-turns alongside large fields finally put me on the freeway back south towards Milwaukee.  Driving with only a loose sense of direction means you tend to make plenty of quick decisions.  You beat yourself up for taking a wrong turn, before finding that you weren’t wrong in the first place and in trying to correct a perceived error you’d totally screwed yourself.  Then you go momentarily mad and angry, which never helps anything.  Darkness unavoidably invokes a greater sense of jeopardy, panic and uncertainty, as it did during my previous evening’s acquaintance with the suburbs of Oshkosh.

The freeways were simpler.  I let myself be sucked into the heart of a misty downtown Milwaukee over the freeways, not a little smug that I was reading all the signs correctly here and everything was going smoothly.  You just need to be cool and focused, I pompously applauded myself, entirely forgetting the numerous U-turns and frustrated wails while sitting stationary next to desolate fields the previous evening.  The large freeways better signposted, more intuitive.

I parked at the lake-front art museum with little intention of going inside the museum.  Has the internet killed museums?  There’s a sense of stumble-upon discovery which perhaps isn’t as possible when browsing online, but it’s not like you can touch anything and the exhibits are often predictably samey.  Narrow, inhospitable stone corridors led me up from the car park, offering a sense of the forbidden, and up towards the museum entrance.  I walked past it, marvelling at an impressive white bridge structure which turned into a walkway above the road, and led into downtown.

With its clutch of tall tower buildings, Milwaukee had the sense of a scaled down Chicago, and was also bisected by a fat, Lake Michigan-fed river.  Big but not that big.  I paced round awhile, took pictures, took a coffee, then headed back to the car, wanting to give myself at least two hours to make it back to Chicago.  And I needed to top up on gas in order to ensure I returned the vehicle with a full tank.  Stress was simmering.

The ride back in was fraught, the density of the rush hour traffic immense.  After avoiding the tolled routes by taking smaller roads, I headed back towards the freeway, laboriously programming the SatNav system with my final address.  It delivered the route, but not before further stress and panic.  The car was due for return at 5pm.  At 4.40 I was still some way out of the city, and still needing to get gas.

I exited the slow, by now almost bumper-to-bumper freeway, which erased my route from the SatNav, found a gas station in a suburb and failed to figure out the prepay credit card system.  I wanted to ask a customer on the other side of my pump but he seemed to be chatting, possibly flirting with the woman in the vehicle behind him.  I finally secured his attention; he looked and shrugged.  Ask inside.  Thanks.  I asked inside the kiosk and a guy swiped my card, before realising it wouldn’t work because the petrol nozzle wasn’t in its holster.  I went to return the nozzle into the holster and the payment went through, allowing me to buy the ten bucks’ worth of gas.  I felt stupid and panicked.

Having re-found the freeway, I painstakingly re-programmed my route: C-H-I-C-A – while weaving between traffic.  Yes SatNav, it was the passenger at the controls, not the driver.  As if.  Once finally programmed (about four minutes which felt like an hour) I repetitively tapped its View button to reassure me I was heading in the right direction.

Gradually the city loomed up through the darkness around me, a gigantic, sparkling, throbbing, beautiful, terrifying urban monster.  Its dazzling scale made me feel proud of humans, as if approaching a space station.  Wow.  Look what we’ve done!

Lulled by my reverie, I grew confident.  SatNav lady seemed sure everything would work out, it’d all be ok.  It was only 4.50.  It might be ok.  I hit downtown proper at about 4.57.  As the crow flies it would’ve taken two minutes from there.  As the traffic moved, jerked, honked and crept, it took about thirty.

“The tank full?” asked a young girl at the Hertz desk who I hadn’t encountered before.  She didn’t mention I was half hour late.  I said yes and she wished me a good night.

‘Stoked’ by my success, not dying or crashing or having too many people beep me, I paced off back down Michigan Avenue, ever-teeming with shoppers and tourists.

Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.

Wisconsin Wander: Day 1

As on the previous day, when I’d visited the large hotel to check my reservation, the Hertz car rental desk was unmanned.  A young black guy joined me to form a two person queue.  He mentioned out loud, to himself but not really to himself that he really needed to move to a warmer climate when he graduated.  I was happy enough to nibble at the conversation bait and he told me about his study in Chicago, a general degree which would allow him to teach.  He ultimately wanted to build his own school for under-privileged kids in Central America and strongly believed in a hands-on method of teaching employing music and touch.

A harried Hertz man returned to the desk and with minimal fuss, printed out forms for me to sign and told me to go wait outside for the car.  This was the quickest, least paperwork-intensive car hire I’d ever experienced.  So much so that when the Hertz man’s colleague brought down a small red Toyota Yaris from the car park, I just got in.  Then I realised I didn’t know what any of the main controls meant, never having driven an automatic vehicle before.  I beckoned a parking attendant over for a quick overview.  Drive, Reverse, Park – was apparently all I needed to know.  Don’t worry about the rest.  With that I pushed the stick into drive and took my foot off the brake, which itself seemed to roll the car forward, gently easing myself into downtown Chicago traffic.

It was fine, all fine, keep on the right, it was all going to be fine, just concentrate, keep on the right, head for the Lake, hug it and head up the one side, simple, easy, cool.  I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary.

I slowly grew into to the Yaris and understood that driving it was easy; boring in fact.  Automatics neuter the driving experience; they do everything for you and give you less control, like holidaying with a tour guide.  Not once did I go to depress an imaginary clutch, although I did flap my left hand into the door from time to time, flailing for an imaginary gear stick.  I also kept approaching the vehicle from the wrong side, expecting the driver’s door to be where the passenger door was, which didn’t make me look too clever.  On a freeway I was momentarily alarmed to be overtaken by someone casually reading a newspaper, before realising it was a passenger.

With the assurance of an appropriate section of map spread haphazardly out across my lap, I covered minor roads skirting Lake Michigan, up through suburbs with Scottish names, Highland and Glencoe – where I stopped for a coffee and to applaud myself that I wasn’t dead.  This Glencoe wasn’t much like the Western Highland mountain range where I’d driven a couple of years ago.  Like much of the drive over the two days, it was a flat and unremarkable landscape.  The later plains of Wisconsin mimicked this and chided me, as if I’d landed in London and decided to take a trip round East Anglia.

Still it was experience and the towns were interesting, many with a makeshift retail park feel to them, quirky stores like the dogs’ hairdresser ‘Canine Coiffeurs.’  The welcome signs also amused with their exact population figure: CITY OF NEENAH, Population 56,723.  (That one isn’t accurate).  They made me want to add a few tally marks to the sign or run to the Police station screaming I’VE FOUND ANOTHER ONE!!

Priority at open crossroads without traffic lights also foxed me.  It often seemed that nobody moved at all, so I did.

Next stop was a small park on a tip of Lake Michigan near the city of Kenosha.  Thick snow still lay on the ground and the closest edge of the water speckled with mini icebergs, as had been the case all the way down in the city.  When the tide swept in, lapping sounds twined with the clinkling of ice, like rippling shattered glass or a wind chime.

From here I found the highway and ignored numerous junctions to drill on through Milwaukee, an impressive cityscape not on a par with Chicago but still not inconsiderable, before eventually stopping again at the small Wisconsin town of Sheboygan Falls.  This was a very small town, replete with a Simpsons-esque Moe’s Liquor Store, where I bought a bottle of bourbon.  Moe wasn’t very chatty when I complimented him on his strong range of liquor, or he didn’t understand my accent.  A middle-aged lady assistant in a neighbouring gas station where I took a leak and got a cup of tea was much perkier.

It was hit or miss whether people understood my accent or not.  Earlier in the trip I had to say ‘beer’ to an American air stewardess three times.  She looked at me like I was retarded.  I don’t have any strong regional English accent and don’t know how else to pronounce the word.

Now the light was beginning to fade beautifully.  It had been a clear, cold, blue-skied day despite constant radio warnings that cloud was heading in.  The radio stations had offered a strong sense of the locals, particularly a warm, mumsy DJ improbably named Robin Rock.  She kept thanking her listeners for “working with” her and spoke a lot about her teenage daughters and how they’d do backflips if they won the station’s big competition prize of a trip to Disneyworld.

This reminded me of the chatty old lady sitting one seat along from me on the short connecting flight from Minneapolis to Chicago.  She’d been excited to tell me and the girl sitting next to me how she was going back there soon, this time to see ‘the adult things’ which the kids don’t like.  Interest piqued, I had bitten my lower lip slightly and enquired further about what exactly ‘the adult things’ at Disneyworld were.  Apparently reading descriptions in the galleries and things like that.

The radio songs didn’t range too widely:  old classics to Americana, with edgier stations going for tracks with indulgent, rapidly boring guitar solos.

Fearing darkness, and the distance I had to cover the next day, I impulsively decided not to go as far as the next big city, Green Bay.  Instead I took an A-road to chase the dipping golden sun across a wide expanse of plains towards Appleton, on the other side of Lake Winnebago.  Although I missed out Appleton itself and found a couple of small, hospitable seeming towns with a pleasant buzz of life about them: first Menasha and then Neenah, where I stopped.  Disappointingly no motels or any places of accommodation other than a Holiday Inn could be found.  So, after a brief stroll I headed on.  Growing faintly edgy about a final destination with the draping darkness, I flicked on an internal light in the car and studied the map to see Oshkosh was the next large looking town.  There was bound to be something there.

By this point I was tired and not thinking straight.  I spent about ten minutes finding the correct direction out of Neenah, then at least twenty more getting lost in the suburbs of Oshkosh, eventually finding its downtown area and only hotel.  It was more than I had wanted to pay for a room but my will to look further had evaporated.

Later in the trip it was explained to me that the place-names had connections with the native Indian past and weren’t, as I had suspected, made up by drunken infants. You often forget about the historical significance of the Indians to these parts.  Or at least I did.  There’s a theory that the word “Chicago” has native Indian origins, while the overtones in Milwaukee are even more obvious.

An evening stroll up an icy, sludgy Oshkosh Main Street suggested more life than I’d imagined from my route into the downtown area: plenty of samey dark bars with neon signs advertising the same drinks.  One dumping of snow seemed to have lingered for days across a vast global latitude.  I stopped in one and chatted to a welcoming barmaid who served me a small bottle of Newcastle Brown of the type they don’t serve at home.  A symptom of the tipping culture is that it makes you think naturally friendly people are just playing for their tip, even when they might just be naturally friendly.  Young guys sat round watching sport.  I intermittently chatted to the barmaid, watched the American Football and Basketball playing on the screens, (however much I tried, I was unable to cultivate any genuine interest), and flicked through a Harry Hill jokebook app on my iPod.

Another bar further down the street had more people and a faux urban kind of buzz about it.  I took a Guinness and again sat at the bar, this time with a music fanzine – it seemed the area had a vibrant scene.  I spoke to nobody and shortly after headed back, nothing challenging my suspicion that I was one of about four guests in the large, deeply uninspiring hotel.

Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.