Tourist

You’re not a tourist. It’s one of the things that makes you different. You travel with work. It gives you insights into places.

You’ve been to Africa many times before.

So you have a day working hard, sweating, and then you decide it’s time for some fun. You know someone who used to live here. She has told you what the local drink is, and how to order it. Then you met, today, a guy who knows the town well. Earlier, you walked past a door that leads into a shop, and he pointed to it, saying, go through the shop, and that’s the best locals’ bar.

You won’t find any tourists in there.

So you’re tired, cut adrift as you often feel on these foreign trips, and a little confused by things happening at home. You should return to your hotel. But you don’t like your hotel. It’s basic, and grubby, and power and water are intermittent. You have be sanguine about this, because you know Africa, but you don’t like the feeling of lying there early, in the dark, or if the light works, pretending to read.

Your hotel does not have a bar.

You feel, when it comes down to it, that there should be more drinks in this evening. So you head to this place that was pointed out to you earlier. It is dark, and you do not feel confident. But you’ve had just enough to drink already to decide this might be a good idea. The edges have been rubbed off. The first time you miss the entrance. You walk past, but realise before too long your mistake. You backtrack, feign confidence, head in.

You greet the men you were talking to this morning, even though you are not sure they are the same men.

You stride through and... it’s great. An open courtyard, a home-made looking bar, to your left, the sea. You sit in a plastic chair at an empty plastic table. It is very dark, and you can only see silhouettes, cigarette flares. This reminds you that you can smoke in bars here, so you light up, dragging on the rough, local cigarettes you bought from some boys on the street earlier that day, feeling a participant in this city rather than a tourist when you did so. You struggle to make yourself understood to the woman who is serving, but on the third pronunciation you succeed. She brings you a glass, and a transparent plastic sachet full of clear liquid, which she cuts open and pours from.

You drink it neat and you like the sting.

This is it, you think. This is... authentic. Drinking local drinks from plastic sachets, and knowing the right thing to ask for. No white tourist would come in here. They would feel intimidated. They would not feel safe. They would stick to the main bars, the well-lit ones, with lights, and menus, and working toilets, and lots of other white people. They would deny themselves this experience. You light a second cigarette. When the serving woman comes and asks if you want one more, you say yes.

It’s just... you’re drinking the neat drink and you’re on the phone to your wife, as it happens, who you have not spoken to on this trip, when the girl comes up to you, puts her hand on your shoulder and asks if you want company. You gesture her away, not rudely, but look, I’m on the phone. You think about making light of it with your wife, but decide not to. She is liable to get the wrong end of the stick.

When you finish the call, the girl comes back, and you tell her you’re fine, and she goes away.

Then you’re smoking and texting someone who isn’t your wife, when a man comes up and says hi. You respond neutrally, whereupon he whispers in your ear about some really great shit from Malawi he has. Again, you politely decline, trying not to cause offence. But really, you’re getting irked. You just want to sit here, in the dark, being quiet, getting mildly drunk, smoking cigarettes and making contact with people in the UK in case they forget where you are.

Really, can’t these people just leave me alone?

And then you’re doing nothing, not drinking, not smoking, not communicating, not even thinking really, having said yes again when asked again if you want one more, just sitting there in the dark looking at the sea, when a man comes up to you and insists he is the driver of the taxi you ordered. When you tell him that you ordered no taxi, because you need none, because your hotel, however basic, is five minutes away, there, in that direction, and you point, he changes tack. Will you need one? Perhaps tomorrow? In the future? Do you plan any excursions? When do you leave? How will you get to the airport? And again, you’re ever so polite in saying no, because you’re never going to be one of these tourist types, the ones who snap at the locals.

So then you decide you’ve had enough and your hotel, even in the dark, might after all be the sensible place to be.

You finish your drink, light one more cigarette and when asked again if you want one more, this time you say no. Instead you call for the bill. When it comes you happily overpay it, refusing to quibble, knowing you’re being ripped off, but feeling that it forms part of the duty of someone in your position to be ripped off.

As you pay, the girl from earlier reappears, and asks if you can buy her a coke.

You say no, and get up to leave as quickly as you can without trying to make it too obvious. You head back to your hotel, walking slowly, more unsteadily than you’d like, trying to mask your drunkenness, although you fail to find the exit correctly the first time.

You know you’re fair game. You know, despite the failure you view yourself as, that you enjoy incredible privilege and success in the eyes of those other people in the bar. You know that while you want to feel part of some great humanity, they just want to swap places. And you know there is nothing you are ever going to do that could change that.

It’s just, can’t we pretend for one night? What’s wrong with just wanting to have a good night out somewhere else?

Green Park

On Sunday night and Monday morning, snow fell. Perhaps only once a decade is the city blanketed. Movement stopped, but I travel on the only tube line still running. A handful of us reluctantly straggled into work. We compensated ourselves by lunching in a deserted pub, then throwing snowballs and making a snowman into the otherwise virginal gardens of our building. Snow had revealed the magic of trees, and reminded us that we are something more than our jobs and journeys.

By Wednesday rain came and the temperature had raised. Our proud snowman was washed down to a meaningless stump. And on Thursday, when I made my daily walk through Green Park, I saw this image repeated dozens and dozens of times. The park was an eerie battlefield of stumps. Everywhere I looked there were these snowbases, rapidly fading memories of a brief moment of frivolity and fun when we all downed tools to play at being kids again.

I stopped, and looked, and sort of mourned. Around me, heads down, umbrella wielders hurried, late for work.

Australia

They would go for exactly one month, having husbanded their leave with rare efficiency. The flights were long-booked, internet cheap. For the first three days they knew where they were staying, and after that, they’d go where adventure took them. They had a book, and a good map, bought second hand at the local car booter. It was the map that had started it, in fact. They’d bought the map, and the map had fed the dream. They looked at the shape of the place, the size of it, and knew they had to go there.

They would travel light, be nimble. They would allow themselves five pairs of underwear each, and use laundry, or discard and replace by buying from cheap shops. (They relished the friend of a friend story of an old hippy who’d gone to the states with only one set of clothes. Each city he reached, he went to the discount store, bought new ones, binned the old ones. This, they felt, was something to aspire to.)

They were ready for this. They’d been together four years. They were both twenty-eight years old.

They had done their advanced reading, of uneven treasures truffled from second hand bookshops: Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Patrick White. Not all of these did they like. They listened to the Go-Betweens. What they looked forward to was the thought of being lost, of dusty days of driving without seeing a soul before fetching up in some hick village to drink tasteless chilled beer and amuse the locals with their accents. To be in a place at the same time parochial and continent-vast: this was what they wanted. They would occasionally seek out internet cafes, update their social network spaces, email friends with only slightly exaggerated tales from places with unlikely names. Perhaps they’d finally blog.

They wanted this to change them, to give them definition. They imagined themselves coming back sharper, surer of themselves, tanned and lean. Their outlines would be clearer; they’d leave a stronger shadow. Looking back, they’d see this as the start of being adults, they thought.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. Things rarely do. A week before, they had a nuclear level row which saw bags being packed for a different reason. He’d always had a problem with faithfulness at more than the theoretical level, and had wanted a memory to take with him on the trip. She found out, and her anger combined with his lack of contrition to take them somewhere irretrievable.

They didn’t get much back on the tickets. She boxed the books and took them down the local charity shop. She kept the map. They moved on, as people do. The years turned.

At thirty-two she got a job that took her travelling. India, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey: she liked it. She kept a list of the countries she’d visited and saw it rise towards fifty. One day, finally, Australia. She took the map with her, although she didn’t need it. Her itinerary kept her to the main cities. Work had her busy, but in the evenings she’d walk around, try to get the measure of places. Sydney she found swish, but vacuous. In Melbourne she liked the coffee and the presence of bookshops. Brisbane was a redneck city, a county town really. She drank a little too much wine, having developed a taste for fizzy shiraz, and on her second to last night in Melbourne had an unsatisfactory one-night stand with someone originally from Auckland she got talking to in a bar. They exchanged phone numbers afterwards, but only imaginary ones.

On her last day in Sydney, doing the tourist thing of looking at the opera house, she thought of him, for the first time in a couple of years. They’d have had their picture taken here, accosting a passing stranger, him pulling an ironic pose for the camera. She didn’t miss him, more her young self, or the possibilities there’d seemed to be for the two of them. They should have had that month in Australia. If the break-up hadn’t happened before, it would only have happened after. But they should have done the trip first.

So work done she headed home, feeing she still hadn’t seen Australia, and sensing she never would. The idea of it, that was the thing to hold on to.

In a Philip K Dick world

- If this was a Philip K Dick novel, what would happen next?

Although it wasn’t late, they were both lying in bed. They’d just finished sex and were hoping now to drift into sleep. It was a warm summer’s night and they had the windows open.

They could hear loud and fast footsteps echoing down the street.

- That man would knock on our door, and we’d answer, and he’d know us, but we wouldn’t know him.

- Or he’d knock on the door, and we’d answer, and he’d be confused, because his sister has been living in this house for 17 years and he saw her here only yesterday.

The footsteps went past, grew quieter as they rounded the corner, towards the station.

- Or he wouldn’t need to knock, because his key would work, and he’d want to know what we were doing in his house.

- And then he’d call the police and he’d be right.

- And as soon as he said it we’d know he was right and we’d wonder what we were doing here.

He sat up, drank some water from a glass and then lay back down, this time facing away from her.

- Or we’d answer the door, and outside would be a completely different place. We wouldn’t be on this street, or in this town, or maybe even on this planet.

- And when we turned back from the door the house would be different too.

- And there’d be different people living here and they’d want to know what we were doing here, and it would be like we’d knocked on the door of their house and were coming to see them. They’d answer the door and not let us in.

- Or it would be a hundred years in the future and we’d be remembered as the victims of a grisly murder committed a hundred years before and still talked about to this day.

He turned again to look at her. Not that they could see much of each other in the dark. He could see the curve of her shape and the gleam of her eyes.

- Isn’t that a bit too much Tales of the Unexpected?

- Yeah, you’re right. Save that one up, eh? That’s another game.

- So?

- So he comes to the door, and I get dressed, and I go and answer it. And he recognises me. He’s my husband. He’s been away. He’s been in jail. He was dangerous to the authorities. And now they’ve let him out. He’s come home for me. And he wants to know why I don’t recognise him. Because of course he thinks I must. And so he assumes the authorities have got to me. That I’m on their side. Or maybe they’ve threatened our children.

- You have children?

They didn’t.

- Yes, a boy and a girl, one of each. So he thinks maybe they’ve threatened the children. And it breaks his heart.

Silence. They lay there for a while. She sounded genuinely upset.

- Or he comes to the door, and you get dressed, and go and answer it. And you recognise him. You recognise him straight away. He’s your husband. He’s come back from jail. And instantly you’re deprogrammed. You have false memories, of a false life with me, but when you see him instantly something clicks, and you know he’s your husband. And so you let him in.

As he said this, the footsteps approached again. They got louder, then halted, and then someone knocked twice, clearly, on their front door.

Are you going to answer, he asked.

Sorry, who are you?, she asked.

Three unconnected thoughts from an old notebook

I lost my MP3 player. Without it I walked self-consciously. For the first time in years, I could hear the sound of my feet.

I played with my wedding ring. I moved it, and discovered a layer of flaking, pale skin underneath.

The floral tributes are still there, where a young life ended not so long ago, where they were forced to cancel the Olympic celebrations. I walk past them daily to and from the tube station, perturbed that I feel so little.