Part III

While the Czechs, with their plastic files containing bank statements, letters of employment back home, invitations from UK family, and evidence of ability to support themselves, were undergoing the usual insulting interview process at Calais, we grandstanded a little about our Britishness on the wet Atlantic sun shining on fresh grass. Humidity filled my longs, and then seagulls too, soaring in the thermals of my sadness, for I was close to home and thought of my family. Paul was a marine, based at Dover castle after combat tours of Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Macedonia and of course Ulster, and he wished that his battalion, instead of underpaid security guards of poor old Euro tunnel, fined for every refugee who sticks spider like to a freight train's undercarriage, they should have first para guarding the entrance. (Not to mention flics who patrolled the perimeter fence.) Paul had been to see his girlfriend: stayed twenty four hours, two night trips on a bus sandwiching the visit. Very army: I had once met Canadian soldiers in Bosnia who drove 800 kays to Budapest and back in a night. And then there was me, who spent five days travelling to the Ukraine, and five days back, and spent two days that. Perhaps I was a soldier manque.
Deceptively feline, rough edges worn off by years of Belfast patrols, he was still quite uncharismatic, as blackish as the computer polygon fighters of the latest three-dee shooter, and about my age, yet had a girlfriend of 21. He could do it. On the seesaw of the Euro star coach shuttle's platform, halfway underneath the channel, I felt unbalanced, torn apart by responsibilities to my family, myself and my career, and to the powerful tug of an unslaked sex drive. Perhaps I ought to go back to my unrequited battlefields.
"Civvy street's the problem. There's no one to look after ye," he said, looking me over. "You like Prague."
"Love it. The beer's cheap, food's excellent. Tell the lads, better than Tenerife."
"Many British military people like the east bloc."
I thought of Mirek's friend, "something to do with seeing the other side. A cold war fascination." West is the land of men. East is the land of women. That was my
unappreciated contribution to political science of my twenties.
"Got anywhere to doss down tonight then?"
"I am staying with my Dad. It is his seventieth birthday,"
"Can't stand London meself. It's everyone for himself. "
! thought: no, that's why army people liked socialism. It looked after you.
Maybe that was what was missing from all our lives, a little collectivism,
and we went to the Czech Republic to get it: the warm bath of group love,
not meta-amphetamines, was the drug that, if they could reproduce it in
pili form, would be a successful Czech export. He got off at the Tesco's
in Folkestone and I realised, as he hitched up his green army backpack,
how short he was: a miner's son, lost in the new post Scargill’s England,
perhaps? He was going to phone for an army Landrover to pick him up, and
for some reason I was reminded of the way my exwife always had people
to pick her up, whether she was returning to London or visiting Poland.
I planned, as usual, to walk the last bit. What was travel if you couldn't spring a surprise on your loved ones: this was the crackling of the bacon. I had been coming back to Dover, on coaches, or thumbing it, because these were the best ways, too many times to count, of coming back to England. It was a pivot of all these trips abroad, the corpus callosum of my split Identity, my divided needs. It wasn't only the pivot of my travel experiences. The most significant passage in my opinion of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is the last lines when he describes coming home to England of red phone boxes, ragged posters fluttering in the breeze of silver jubilee announcements, the heavy coins and gentle crowds with bad teeth, the undisturbed flower of the railway cuttings of England sleeping its own deep, deep sleep from which only the roar of bombs, he wrote prophetically, would jerk it awake. It put his Spain of hard jagged limestone peaks, powerful garlic sausage, sausage. Sate trains. constant diarrhoea and hot clear spring skies in contrast. My England too was a contrast, albeit a mutating one. Returning from Spain my England was always a study in charcoal: the black faces, the black tarmac, the dark cashmere coats and skirt suits of serious people, - that was coming in by air, and at night, in November. If I came back in August which was common, the silence and the coolness and the greenesss, whether coming into London by car or by the tube. I would always remember the ticking sounds of the air brakes as the tube doors remained open in the suburban, foliage ciad stations of the Piccadilly line. No one would be speaking, and a good many people would be rubbing their faces with tiredness. London, a serious city.
Coming in from the Czech Republic, in contrast, which was always via Dover was always a disappointment. I always thought London a city
hollowed out of quaility of life and of emotion. This feeling stretches back the years. There was that time when ! hitchhiked back from Prague to Brussels (i cheated and took the tram the rest of the way), in the pre Euro star days,! slept at the ferry terminal in Ostende, And then I took the local train from Dover to London, that stopped in places like Crawley and Croydon. On the train was a man in the army, telling jokes 2nd army anecdotes to some young au pair. I joined in, saying that I was a journalist, which i was? then, and he told me to fuck off: AT Victoria as ! sped towards the tube station entrance he intercepted me and unnecessarily apologised for the necessity of confidentiality. It brought me down to the serious city with a bump, and helped me store away memories of that hot late spring - pictures that lodged in iny subconscious until they motivated me one day to return, at the fag end of my youth. There was Anna with the dirty white socks dancing on the roadside on the way to the German order, as cars carrying garden gnomes and other whatnots catering to German tastes boomed towards the border, I hid in a bush, and a sports car pulled up, and we both got in. He claimed to have to make a turning due north and dropped me off soon after depositing her on a graffiti ridden doorway in Pisek, She got out, and both our minds worked in tandem. So don't blame him5 the driver, a bald kraut. Or the end of term girls in Carlsbad, sitting on wooden pub benches, under a canopy of trees, weeping and laughing with faces buried in their hands while I watched them and thought:! want to creep into their shells, to lead them, And so I was to do eventually, with another generation, But! won't be there for their end of term. This pained me: another fuck up.
The thought of this lost chance pursued me all the way to London, and perhaps jaundiced my views. Yes, there were still George Orwell's kind and polite crowds, easy to push off the pavement, the red post boxes and heavy coins. These were good things, tempting me Into another waltz, with another culture. But Londoners also struck me as shabby, the women as having bad complexions for which not even skirt suits and Gucci bags could compensate. I walked back through Belgravia, and jibbed at the flaking facades of even the embassy buildings, and the uncosiness of the pubs compared to those in Benesov.(Not to mention the higher prices) And then: The Edgware Road? with its boarded up shops covered in ripped posters the late opening groceries sentinelled by pot bellied^ pop eyed Arabs, the grim underpasses where troglodytes, cubit and fragmented in the vast mirrors of Westminster's cleanest public toilets for the Year 2001 laboured for the minimum wage. . Even the advertising, which ! had always thought was a bright spot of the English scene compared to the simplicities of European advertising, now seemed banal and puerile. An advert for a car said “ Bull" and then, underneath a mountain to which a
Road led far away. “Red Rag.” compared this to the subtle humour of my teen queen. The hall of mirrors, when she was ironically looking down at the table, never meeting my gaze, smiling, her elongated upper lip which overhung her lower lip so eminently kissable, quiet except when she suppressed a subtle hiccup. And she was smiling, because she was thinking he thinks ! like him because ! am sitting here and smiling at him and so he thinks I am smiling at him because he thinks I think he thinks I like him, and so he thinks I don't - except I do. Or do I? You have to laugh.
The papers also seemed puerile, trivial, shrill: the British journalistic corps, living In a lunatic asylum of triviality. The media had been my surrogate home but these media arenas, these comfort for the lonely - my London was a beer-stained newspaper spread like a fan next to my bedside - searching the lowest common denominator had only the virtue of their untrammelled authority of their newsstand monopoly. The Emperor's nakedness was exposed by foreign travel The main Czech newspaper’s skull-like reflection of British newspapers' ephemerality was called Blesk and the onomatopeia applied to British newspapers too, even the Times, Well, Tempus Fugit, Fuck the Times.
But f have said all this before, I have only one story, one narrative, which just improves over time. Maybe. Going out and coming back. And then, sweaty and In ink stained shirt, what's new, I surprised Elizabeth and I was swept into another arabesque.