The 2084 Precept (25 page)
"I need something to remember you by," she
continued with that impish smile of hers, "in case you change your
mind in London and you don't want to see me again. Perhaps you
could write a poem for me? Please?"
"I don't write poems anymore, Céline, and in
any case I couldn't write one spontaneously. It would be pure
drivel, nice drivel maybe, but red wine drivel. Here, here is my
card, it has my mobile number and my email address. Good for
arranging when and where to meet in London—that is, if I don't
change my mind of course."
She laughed, she was happy, she took the
card, she inspected it, she took a huge gulp of wine, she emptied
the
pichet
into her glass and drank some more.
I emptied my glass as well. I paid the bill
and we headed back towards the hotel, she was clinging to my arm,
she was a bit tipsy.
"I love you Peter. I want a poem," she said.
"A poem from Peter. Please."
"I don't think you need a poem. I think what
you need is another liter of wine."
"A poem."
Cheeks still glistening from the tears. What
a girl. And she deserved a poem, no doubt about it. She deserved
anything as far as I was concerned, just for being who she was and
how she was.
"The only poem you could get from me would
be one of the strange ones. The two published ones are still more
or less in my head. But not tonight, Céline, not now, they are
weird poems. They are about as unromantic as you can get and I am
not going to do it."
We reached my car and stopped.
"O.K. Peter, I will try to understand. But
on two conditions."
"Two conditions?"
"Yes. First you have to promise to send me a
poem when you reach London. I need to have a piece of you until I
see you again. Or in case you change your mind."
"And secondly?"
"And secondly, we need to get inside your
nice car and you kiss me goodbye."
"Both conditions agreed," I said.
And we got into the car, and I wrote down
her email address on my insurance certificate, who cares about an
insurance certificate. And we kissed goodbye, and it wasn't just
kissing, and it went on for a long time and then I watched her walk
into her hotel and then I drove away.
* * * * *
I drove for a few streets without worrying
about the direction, and then I stopped. There was virtually no
traffic, the city was quiet, the neon lights were making yellow
shadows out of the night's ground mist, hundreds of thousands of
people were asleep around me. A dog was barking somewhere far away
and the noise of a lone motorbike dwindled slowly into the
distance. I lit a cigarette and then a second one and, yes, a third
one and I sat there for about half an hour, thinking about today,
about Céline, and about where life's ocean waves could take you
sometimes if they felt like it, suddenly and without warning. And I
was thinking about her curled up in her bed right now. And I felt
good. That was the very best way to describe my feelings then. I
felt good.
And then I put the car into gear, found a
sign to the autoroute and headed north on the E17.
I drove on into the light of the new day. I
tanked the car someplace, used the toilets—thank God the French had
long ago got rid of most of those thigh-testing holes in the floor
my father used to complain about—got through two more of those
ludicrous and inefficient toll collection stations invented by the
French and other southern European countries, and reached the docks
at Calais soon after 7 o'clock.
I had to wait an hour for the next ferry.
P&O again.
You know which country you are travelling to
when you check in. They give you a paper 'hanger' to hook onto your
rear-view mirror to denote which lane you are supposed to wait in.
It also contains extraordinary safety instructions:
Any passenger who will require assistance
in the event of an emergency is asked to advise the reception desk
of this fact on boarding the ship!
This of course means
everybody—except for those who might prefer, for example, to drown.
Nobody obeys this, and if they did, there would be chaos. Also, one
notes that those who might require assistance, but
not
in
the event of an emergency, are excluded from this generous
offer.
Ah hah! Not clear? Towards the end of this
document comes the following:
Anyone with need of assistance in
an emergency should notify the reception desk if this need is not
already advised!
Great; this repeated message is presumably for
people who, without these wording modifications, were unable to
understand the first message. But, sad to say, it
is—again—
only
if there is an emergency.
And how about this:
Do not overfill your
petrol tank.
Well, first of all, you already either have or you
haven't. Secondly, it doesn't tell you what to do if you have. And
thirdly, how do Brits manage to overfill their petrol tanks in the
first place?
And this:
Do not start engine until
instructed.
Everybody ignores this. Thank God. There would be
chaos if they didn't.
And this:
Do not move until
instructed.
The above comments apply here also.
And my favorite:
We are happy to supply
ingredient lists for any food on board. However, we are unable to
guarantee that any food will contain only those ingredients
listed.
So why the lists if you can't trust them? Go
figure.
And finally, a warning notice, the purpose
of which somebody, somewhere, somehow understands:
This hanger
remains the property of P&O ferries and must be surrendered to
a member of staff upon request.
Can you imagine having to keep
all these pieces of paper at home until you die because they belong
to somebody else? But don't worry, they have failed to correctly
cite a legal entity name and so you can throw them away, as
everybody does anyway, without fear of being arrested for stealing
somebody else's property. Again, go figure.
I went to the big bar for a coffee. At this
time in the morning the ship was only half full but there were
plenty of those kinds of Brits again. And this time there were
plenty of obese ones, a sprinkling of monster-show hairstyles, and
a few union jack T-shirts. I also saw a T-shirt which I don't think
you could possibly find in any country you would care to call
civilized. Anyone manufacturing or selling them would be fined and,
if they persisted, put into jail. But in the U.K. it is socialism
and the socialist educational levels which rule. Although—let me be
fair—this text did not contain a single obscene word. It read
'Thousands
of my potential children died on your
daughter's face last night."
You will find these T-shirts and
worse ones openly on sale in U.K. stores. They sell well and they
make good reading, do not doubt it, for 10 year-old Brit children,
their Brit grandmothers and all foreigners. The T-shirt text in
this case presumably did not apply to the 12 year old girl who a
few weeks ago became Britain's—excuse me, Great Britain's—youngest
mother, nor to the 13 year old father. And probably not to the 27
year old grandmother either. No, I exaggerate nothing.
You can't get away from these people. Some
of them were obviously from the buses I'd seen boarding the ship.
The cheap holiday agencies frequently use buses to transport their
clients and their buses travel back often enough overnight, it
saves hotel costs.
I caught bits and pieces of the guttural
utterings. 'My fookin daw-er, ah fookin tells 'er, listen, ah sez
to 'er…' the man at the next table was saying, the past tense,
among other things, clearly beyond his capabilities. 'I were' and
'we was', and the 'wivs' and the 'wots', and the 'gnawwotahmeens'
(do
not
pronounce the 't' by the way) and of course the
'fookins' and the 'bluddy coonts' and all the rest of it,
everything was floating through the air like confetti at a wild
hogs' wedding reception, oink, oink.
You even get people on British television
these days who can't speak properly. I don't even understand the
weather reports on BBC World sometimes, dialect words all jumbled
together and exiting in mumbled form through tightly compressed
lips, as if permanently living in great fear of swallowing any
marauding flies. And there were some under-educated Scots on board,
they could have been talking Kurdish for all I knew, but I'm not
going to get into that one. Just read one of those Irvine Welsh
books if you don't know what I mean. In fact, I recommend them
anyway, they're brilliant.
But no problem. We all have the right to be
the way we want to be, or what we have been molded into, and as I
have mentioned before, I respect their right to exist as they wish,
just as much as I respect my own. But you
do
have to be
careful, because this is not necessarily the case the other way
round. So I went and found a corner at the other end of the ship
and snoozed away until the docking noises woke me up.
It was well past ten o'clock, nine o'clock
here of course, as I drove out of the docks and into Dover town
center. I wanted to buy the weekend IHT and stretch my legs a bit.
The signs sellotaped onto the interiors of some of the shop windows
are also indicative of the country in which we now find ourselves.
One supermarket I walked past had three signs, all of which
prompted my neurons to raise a query or two:
WE WOULD REQUEST CUSTOMERS
NOT TO EAT OR DRINK
WHILST IN THE STORE. THANK YOU.
does that allow the small bar next to the bakery section to sell
any of its proffered tea, coffee and pastries?
POLITE NOTICE:
DURING THE WARMER WEATHER, PLEASE ENSURE
THAT YOU WEAR A
SHIRT OR T-SHIRT
WHEN
ENTERING THE PREMISES. THANK YOU.
the weather is not ‘warmer’ (and not warmer than what)? Or, indeed,
at any time after you have finished ‘entering’? And are ladies
included here (blouses, for example, are
not
allowed, you must ensure you wear a shirt or a T-shirt)?
WE WOULD APPRECIATE IT IF CUSTOMERS
WEARING A HOODED TOP
PLEASE LOWER THE HOOD WHILST IN THE STORE. THANK
YOU.
‘warmer’ weather, are the hooded top wearers (most of whom are
presumably sweating badly) still required to comply with the Shirt
or T-Shirt rule?
Certain countries need such signs. No doubt
about it.
I drove out through the town center and up
onto the cliff road. The differences always hit you in the face,
the clothes, the drab terraced houses, the unkempt patches of
'front gardens’, the litter all over the place, and the weather.
And it had just started to rain.
There are hundreds of road sign varieties in
the U.K. involving different colors, different designs, different
wordage, different lettering styles, different-sized text and
different-sized signs for reasons I have never felt the urge to
enquire about. I passed one of these artistic creations about
halfway to Folkestone on the cliff road. It read:
ROADWORKS
NIGHT CLOSURES
1 to 31 June
EXPECT DELAYS
Of course, I thought to myself, with bad
luck it might take a little longer, perhaps until the 32nd? And
good to know that road closures cause delays. I will bear that in
mind
.
The next sign was a much smaller one:
FOOTPATH CROSSINGS
FOR 1/2 MILE
Extraordinary. We are on a
4-lane
dual carriageway (which means two lanes each way with a central
divider). So we apparently have hikers and their dogs and, why not,
their children who are allowed to cross this road! And this small
sign (if you don’t miss it) tells you about it. And the millions of
foreigners who drive off the ferries and into England on this road
all have an excellent grasp of the English vocabulary together with
millisecond translation skills and can understand what this small
sign means (if, that is, they don’t miss it). Ask any native and he
will tell you: this sign is extremely important; it is there to
help prevent you killing any fellow human beings.
There were more signs worthy of comment; I
must write the book one day. I continued plunging onward into the
depths of this fascinating country. The rain made no difference to
the driving, not at 110 kilometers per hour, and with or without
footpath crossings. No traffic problems, it was Sunday and it was
raining. I stopped for a coffee and a cigarette and read a piece of
the IHT, and I reached the hotel in London a few minutes before 1
p.m. Yes, it was Sunday and the pasty red-haired guy was behind the
desk again. But if he was impolite, I was too tired to notice. I
took myself up to my room, my luggage arrived two minutes later,
and I fell asleep two minutes after that.
I woke up at 10 p.m., ordered a sandwich and
a half bottle of Côtes du Rhône from room service, read some more
of the IHT, and fell asleep again.
I woke up early. No rain but cloudy. I had
breakfast in the hotel, waved my hand at Little Miss Ugly on my way
out, made her day, lit a cigarette and set off across the park.
Today was not one of those ordinary days.
Today was Day Two from where my calendar now begins. I checked my
mobile. No calls. No text messages. If all went well, she had
arrived home yesterday. If not, she would be there by around noon
today. She would be talking with her fiancé this afternoon, this
evening at the latest. Not a fun conversation, but they never are.
And by tomorrow she would have arranged her trip to London and
would be in contact.
