Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (23 page)

'I thought you'd come,' she said.

I wasn't even going to bother asking whether she had actually thought that, and if she had, why she had. It was hardly the strangest thing of the past few months.

'You look great,' I said.

She nodded and didn't return the compliment. Having looked at myself in the mirror that morning, I'd have known she was lying if she had.

'You picked the perfect morning,' she said. 'I'm not needed around here until late afternoon. Thought I'd just be stuck here all day in this dreadful city with nothing to do.'

'I thought it was nice. I mean, the city.'

She laughed. 'God, you were always so positive. That's what I love about you. Come on, I found this great little café the other day and they do a killer breakfast. I'll get one of the production drivers to take us.'

She turned to someone standing close by, handed them the cup, then shrugged off the coat and let them catch it as it fell. I didn't even notice if this other person, who seemed to exist in order to catch things as Jones dropped them, was male or female. Jones was the centre of everything that happened, her opalescence blocking out everyone and everything around her.

'Look out for dog shit,' she said. 'These people have absolutely no idea.'

I trailed after her, staring at the grass.

*

S
he took me to Café 6/12, a restaurant with high ceilings and fans and plants with huge leaves, and a few absurdly attractive waitresses in black. The place was busy, the fashionable crowd. I couldn't hear anyone else speaking in English, but I imagined the other customers were talking about literature and liberalism and art. I felt out of place. I felt like I should be back in my comfortable Starbucks talking about last night's television and where we were thinking of going on holiday in the summer and the likelihood that after months of discussion we'd end up back on Nairn beach.

And there it was, right there, coming back to me, while Jones had excused herself to go to the bathroom. I missed Baggins. I wanted to see my daughter. That was all.

I couldn't think straight about Brin; it had been so uncomfortable for so long, I found it hard to imagine that she was unhappy not to have had me around.

I also wondered if she'd been able to collect the insurance money. Would she then have to pay it back when I turned up alive? Would the money already have been spent? Would my return, if it was ever to happen, precipitate a family crisis?

I'd been so taken aback and put on the defensive by the female agent getting into the taxi that morning, that I hadn't thought to ask anything about the plane crash and about Brin. My life was as it ever had been, getting pushed around from one thing to another.

Nevertheless, I missed Baggins.

Jones sat down, immediately reached out and squeezed my hand. The electricity of the touch brought me back at once from my maudlin thoughts.

'It's great to see you,' she said. 'You chosen yet?'

The menu lay unopened on the table, where it had been when she left. She shook her head in answer to her own question, then opened the menu, scanned it quickly then gestured with her eyebrows to the waitress who was passing, a tray in each hand.

'Can we have two grapefruit, papaya, spirulina and acai, a couple of glasses of water, two coffees with milk, and toast, goat's cheese and figs twice?'

The waitress smiled and nodded. Everyone smiled at Jones. She had that way about her that made people grateful she'd included them in her life. The waitress was heading to the kitchen thinking that, more than likely, Jones could have given any one of the four waitresses her order, but had instead chosen to go specifically to her.

'You were looking for me last week?' I said.

'Sure,' she said, nodding. She looked so perfect sitting there, beautiful and interesting, impossibly elegant yet without the slightest bit of effort seeming to have been made. 'I had some things to do. I said I'd get in touch, didn't I?'

'You're serious?' I said.

She looked slightly nonplussed.

'Sure,' she said. 'Why?'

'That was seventeen years ago.'

She laughed and her perfect, beautiful teeth showed briefly behind her lips.

'You weren't waiting all that time were you?'

'Married with one kid,' I said.

She nodded, her eyes dropped briefly, the permanent smile and relaxed assuredness seemed to temporarily vanish. Was she hurt? I chided myself, hoping the look wouldn't show on my face. Of course she wasn't hurt. She was never hurt. She was impossible to hurt. If you care about something, you don't disappear for seventeen years.

'That's nice,' she said. 'I'm pleased for you. What age is your daughter?'

'Eleven,' I said. Paused. 'How did you know I had a daughter?'

The smile was back, and she had recovered from her moment of melancholy, just as the script demanded.

'You look the type,' she said. 'Men like you always have daughters.'

'Whatever that means,' I said, shaking my head, and she laughed.

'So, how does your wife feel about you running after me the second you heard I was looking for you? You couldn't have been very popular.'

There was an impishness in the question, but the look in her eyes demanded an answer.

'I haven't seen my wife in a while,' I said. 'I don't know, ten months maybe. It's a long story.'

'Wow,' she said. 'And your daughter?'

Shook my head.

She reached out and touched my hand again, squeezing it softly.

'Jesus, that must be tough,' she said,

She was instantly so concerned and so caring that it made me feel worse than I had at any time since the plane crash, so many lifetimes ago. Ten months? It could have been ten thousand years. I wanted to cry.

'Tell me about the movie,' I said quickly.

'You're not interested in that,' she said, which was extremely perceptive of her, but neither was I interested in talking about me.

'No, really, tell me. Saw you in
Spooks
,' I added, and then felt like that was such a stupid, dull thing to have said. I was talking to Jones. I had to be interesting!

'God, yes, that was a blast. I mean, I didn't get to do much...'

'You were great,' I said, barely managing to leave the
darling!
off the end of the sentence. She waved away the compliment, then rolled her eyes in a beautiful, affected manner as she switched to talking about her latest role.

'Met this Polish chap on a small American movie. I guess we were both out there hoping it would be our big break. Anyway, my hero, such as he is, is big in Poland – don't ask me why – and he's rather been pursuing me since then. Married of course. Just wants me for the sex.'

She leant her chin in the palm of her hand and looked longingly at me across the table, as if the mere mention of sex took us back to those two days in a small flat in Glasgow. She didn't know that I had never left those two days.

The waitress placed the coffees and the water on the table.

'The juices will just be a minute,' she said, and left, bathing once more in Jones's acknowledgement.

'So, this movie is just some whimsy. Set during the Cold War. 1970s Soviet-era love angst. We get to kiss a lot. Which we do anyway, but you know... he seems happy.'

She smiled again and lifted the water to her lips. Took the smallest sip. Probably, in fact, didn't take anything at all.

I'd always wondered. What would I do with time alone with Jones, and Jones in front me as gorgeous and flirtatious as always, and as available as she'd been the last time I'd seen her? And here she was.

'So, what d'you think?' she asked, as if she knew what I was thinking. As if sensing weakness.

Sensing weakness? God, weakness oozed from me.

'About?'

I knew what she meant. This was her at her magnificent, flirtatious best.

'You and me. Alone in a city, no attachments. You still find me attractive?'

'Of course,' I said.

I wasn't going to get into some sort of denial on that, at least. Yet, right here, I knew it. I knew I wasn't going to be able to do anything. I'd felt so guilty for so long about those last two days, how could I do something now? No matter how much I wanted to, no matter how beautiful she looked and no matter how available she made herself.

It didn't feel like strength on my part, however.

'Hmm,' she said. 'You're not sure, are you?' She looked compassionate, as if understanding of my internal, heartbreaking dichotomy, yet at the same time filled with the same longing.

The waitress appeared with the drinks, two large glasses filled with virulently green, thick juice, placed one each before us and then left with, 'Your food will be ready shortly,' passed lightly in the direction of Jones.

Jones gave her another one of those smiles, then turned back to me. She leant over the juice, and put her lips round the end of the straw. Took a short sip, then licked her lips in the most discreet and erotic fashion imaginable.

'We should eat,' she said. 'You can think about it. Where are you staying?'

'The Hyatt.'

'I usually like the Hyatt.'

And so we ate breakfast at Café 6/12.

*

'I
t's all so affected, isn't it?'

'What d'you mean?' I asked.

Brin looked at me with those withering eyes; it seemed a while since she'd looked at me in any other way. I still didn't know what I'd done wrong, and all I could think back then was that she'd somehow discovered about me and Jones and those two days, or was able to look inside my head and knew that I still thought about them. That in some ways seventeen years wasn't so long.

It was a couple of months before I got on that plane and everything changed.

'This whole coffee thing,' she said. 'This culture that's suddenly appeared in the last ten years in Britain.'

'I know what you're referring to,' I said, 'but what d'you mean it's affected?'

She passed the salad bowl. Baggins was eating a sandwich, arranging crisps on her plate to make a picture. Modern art. If only she'd studied at the Glasgow School of Art, rather than being an eleven year old, then the plate of crisps could have been worth several thousand.

'You used to be able to go into a café and order a coffee. Now there's fifteen different ways to have coffee. Excuse me, I'd like a Mocha Chocca Frappe Latte Ramalanga Dingdong...'

Baggins giggled.

'But you know, it's not just that,' she continued. 'It's the whole thing. It's those ridiculously large coffee machines and the whole damned performance.'

'You think we should be serving Nescafé?'

She shook her head. I concentrated on my lunch because I knew the look that would be on her face, and I didn't want to see it. I didn't know what to make of it.

'You can sell filter coffee without all the performance. Like in American diners where the waitresses walk around with those coffee pots topping people up.'

'American coffee's rotten,' I said.

'Not to them,' she said, 'and that's not the point anyway. They have the coffee in those pots that they want, so why don't you just have the coffee in a pot or a flask or whatever that your customers want?'

'We don't serve at tables,' I said, pushing her pedantically further into the argument. I caught Baggins' eye, then finally glanced at Brin.

'Fine,' she said. 'Have the, whatever, the flagon of coffee on the counter. Someone asks for a coffee, you pour them a cup of damned coffee, put in a bit of milk, take their money and it's all over in about ten seconds. Job done. Instead you get this whole palaver, this bizarre ritual, with its associated lengthy queues.'

'It's what the customer wants these days.'

'And could any of them tell the difference?'

'Between an Americano and a cappuccino? Yes, I think they could.'

'Americano,' she said, the word tossed out dismissively. 'Yes, all right, they could tell the difference between a black coffee and something with a bit of froth on it. Coffee connoisseurs, the lot of them. But seriously, pour them a black coffee from a flask, and one from your apocalyptic machines, or a coffee from the flask with a bit of frothed up milk in it against a...' and she made the air quotation marks, 'flat white,' uttering the words with wonderful contempt, 'honestly, how many of them are genuinely going to be able to tell the difference? Sure, you might bet fifty per cent make the correct guess, but that's just the odds. Chances are virtually none of them are going to know what's what. It's affected.'

I finally held her gaze for a few moments. She was right, of course. I used to think exactly the same thing. It was just something else that had swept in and taken over British culture, like mobile phones and reality TV. However, unlike those other things, the rise of the affected café wasn't a bad thing. People stood in orderly queues, they got their coffee, they sat at tables, probably for longer than they would otherwise, because the coffee had been so long in coming, and they chatted over their affected coffee, which is better than texting or Facebooking or chatting over alcohol.

I thought all that but didn't say it. These last few months it seemed that with every discussion we had, I engaged for a while, and then very quickly decided that I'd had enough.

'It's theatre,' said Baggins.

I smiled, but did no more than glance at her.

'What is?' asked Brin.

'People just like a little bit of drama in their lives, even if it is just making a cup of coffee. Maybe it is a bit silly, but isn't there enough bad things in the world that you shouldn't be getting worked up over how people like their coffee served? I think dad's job's brilliant. Look, a face.'

She turned her plate around. The crisps were ordered so that they resembled a face apparently, although it wasn't immediately evident.

I caught Brin's eye. Baggins, as usual, had cut through the tension.

'Been here before,' said Brin, smiling ruefully. 'My mum said it the minute she was born.'

––––––––

I
lay in bed on a Warsaw afternoon, staring at the ceiling. The curtains were open, the day bright but overcast. I thought about Jones, remembering every moment of the sex we'd had all those years earlier. The positions, the feeling of utter euphoria, the desperation to climax juxtaposed against the desire that it should never end.