December 2011
A well-built black guy dressed like Dr Alban, circa 1993 at the World Music Awards in Monte Carlo, puts a cigarette out by the entrance before stepping inside just in time to watch his dessert arrive. I’ve never seen him here before. But just from his garish early 90s clothes, I can tell he’s not British. His low cut top reveals a cleavage with a gradient every bit as pronounced as the subsiding floor in my front room. A navy blue baseball cap is pulled low over his eyes, and a huge white belt, the centrepiece of his blindingly colourful outfit, is likely to be, at this moment in time, the most expensive belt on South Lambeth Road. Despite being clad in what is essentially a summer outfit, the Doc pretends not to be cold as I walk around him and step into the café, but I notice the goose pimples on arms that contain veins as thick as the strings on a bass guitar.
As always, I’m relieved to find the toilet table free. It’s one of the nicest feelings I’ve ever known. A moment that gives me comfort in a way few other things do, certainly this year. It’s the moment where I know that for the next two hours at least, I’m going to be okay. Removing my coat, I immediately feel the cold from the marble tiles to my right. The café, faithful to the identikit Mediterranean café, has never been the warmest place in the winter, refusing to use building materials more suited to a northern European climate.
I wash my hands in the café, as I always do upon arriving, having usually handled bins as I put my rubbish out or taken out cash from the local ATM on my way here. As I wash my hands, Dr Alban squeezes past me to step into the loo. There isn’t much space back here, and there’s no way of him getting into the cubicle, unless he waits for me to finish washing my hands, without him pushing past me and our bottoms rubbing. Most regulars would be aware of this and would wait for me to finish. Unaware that our arses are about to touch, he doesn’t want to wait. Moments later, his backside, no doubt, going by the rest of his body, honed over many hours in the gym, brushes past my own spectacular bottom. I’ve never had to work hard to attain my muscular rear, which was once described as a “black woman’s bottom” by an ex girlfriend, and which during my formative years, embarrassed me no end. As our rears meet, the Doc looks at me like I’ve done something wrong. I ignore him and punch in the hand drier with my right shoulder, hoping that at the very least, the Doc will next time wait for the person to finish washing their hands before pushing through. We didn’t need this moment. I’m happy to be the one that suffered it if it means he never does this to anyone else in here again.
Usually I savour the arrival of my latte. I stir. And then I stir again. If finding the toilet table available provides me with the greatest relief, the latte arrival is the highlight of my day. I’m in no rush for this to be over. But today, at the end of a week in which my lack of sleep, as worrying as it already is, has had to contend with a third week of building work from the flat above me, I take a few gulps and feel the caffeine slowly take hold of me.
Dr Alban emerges from the loo, and I’m pleased to say washes his hands. At last, another man washes his hands here. I am no longer alone. The Doc returns to his table, his gait appearing slightly uncomfortable. I watch him rush through his dessert and take a few swigs from his bottle of Sagres. Something is going on.
The café’s most beautiful woman, who I’ve never seen here before until earlier this year, has arrived with her boyfriend. They have sat to my left. I knew she was Latin American soon as I saw her. Obviously she reminds me of my own erstwhile Latin America. Dark skin, big head, big eyes, a mouth that opens to reveal a surprisingly great number of teeth. She looks at me as she often has here, as I work on my laptop. I like to think it’s because despite my struggles, I remain attractive to women. But it’s more than likely to be because of the strange array of old clothes I’m having to wear to get me through this relentlessly grim period.
I accept that for some people, my clothes will make me a curiosity. I am one of many attractions in this south London based recession zoo. Those strong enough to ride out the recession can, by taking an 88 or a number 2 bus, come down here and view myself and others who are suffering, and either laugh at us, or marvel at how we continue to function whilst pitifully kitted out. They can point us out to their children and show them how other people live. The plaque on my cage reads, “Read the Independent from 1989 to 1994. Telegraph ’94 – ’99. And took the Guardian from ‘99 to 2009. Shoplifted 2000 – 2002 during which period he lost both parents in peculiar circumstances. Sacked whilst in a pair of white chinos 2002. TV scripts commissioned 2000 – 2008.”
At the table in front of me, two nut jobs, regulars, discuss, as they always do, 1970s sitcoms. Their encyclopaedic knowledge of 70s comedy always impresses me. The stranger of the two, an unshaven northerner sporting a beige beany cap that looks like it could do with a wash, says, “I’ve not had a shit in two days,” without dropping his voice. His friend takes that comment in his stride and continues talking about what direction “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em” might have taken had bigger success not come Michael Crawford’s way.
Dr Alban settles his bill, then with intent in his eyes, and taking bigger strides than he was a few moments ago, he returns to the loo. From the hurried and panic-like way I hear him sliding the latch across, I guess he’s in some difficulty. Past experience here at this table tells me that the café could be in trouble. And being sat at the toilet table leaves me more vulnerable than anyone else here.
For a few minutes, as the stench slowly begins to envelop us, we all pretend nothing is wrong. I try to type my way through it. Latin America 2 and her partner continue to hold hands over the table, but their eyes are now struggling to meet.
It’s been a while since the cafe toilet table got hit like this. I’ll survive. I do the thing I always do. I tell myself tonight, at some point, I’ll finally be back in bed under 30+ worth of togs, and this’ll be something that just happened. That the people who witnessed my battle to breathe today won’t be here every day. That maybe, if they’re not like me, they will manage to forget what happened here today. The couple are now breathing through their mouths. Latin America 2 pulls a pained expression that I once saw on Micky Boyd when he once attempted to finish a meal here as the toilet was similarly wrecked by another punter.
Finally, just as we were all giving up hope that it might ever come to an end, we hear the flush. We can all hear the man doing up his big, showy belt. He’s annihilated the cafe. His hesitant exit following his previous entry suggested he wasn’t done. This must have been his original intention during his first visit but he must’ve known the perils involved. Instead, he chose to finish his meal but was so obviously in such discomfort in those final moments at the table that he had to reconsider his original decision.
Dr Alban emerges, his baseball cap pulled down even lower over his eyes, perhaps some acknowledgement of his shame or maybe it’s his way of pretending he hasn’t done what he’s just done. But he knows what he’s done. He can see us all pretending this isn’t happening. He pulls his shoulders back and strides out, but it’s unconvincing. He knows it’s all over for him here. How can it not be? He has to leave, there’s nothing else he can do. It may be that he can never come back. Which would only be right. As he exits, he takes one last sheepish look back at those who are now suffering because of him. I wonder if our haunted looks will, in the months and years ahead, give him horrific flashbacks.
I am going to need all my toilet table experience to get me through this. Usually I try to ride this out. To get up, especially with the laptop and all my paperwork on the table, is too big a statement. It would be like announcing to the world that I’ve been affected by what’s just happened.
I’m trying not to eavesdrop on the couple’s conversation. It would kill me to hear the woman acknowledge in Spanish the current toilet situation. I don’t want to hear toilet-related words tumble out of such a beautiful woman’s mouth. I don’t want to have an idea of how comfortable her and her man might be with each other when it comes to such matters. I put on my iPod so as not to hear any such words come from her.
Couples, new couples especially, shouldn’t be allowed to sit here. The café must do all it can to ensure that early mutual attraction can be protected until couples are comfortable with one another. Personally, I’d be pleased to see a ban on women under thirty-five sitting over on this side of the café. The toilet side. Any women over thirty-five, well, it wouldn’t really matter to me. They’re on the veterans tour. That’s not the age range I operate in. I don’t care what terrible scatological terms they use or what smells interrupt their dinners.
If the café were a forward thinking outfit, they’d implement a policy whereby just singletons, losers and the broken sit here by the loos. I tick all those boxes right now. I’m a shoe-in. There should be a one-day training course for the waiters that would teach them to how to spot such scenarios developing and how to handle them. They would be given the tools to diplomatically lead new couples away from the more intimate tables and blind spots of the toilet side, and steer them back towards the window seats. But no such training is in place. The waiters just leave the regulars to fend for themselves and consequently, we end up with unseemly situations like we have now. And this is ugly. This is brutal. This could utterly destroy a new couple.
The couple ask to move. What’s happened is too much. I don’t blame them. They must be an established couple to have moved the way they did – with at least six months behind them, most sexual positions now performed with one another – comfortable enough to have run through their reason for moving. I wonder which one of them raised the subject of moving. Would they have pretended to be moving for another reason? There would be no other reason for swapping tables. There can’t be.
I see LA2 looking back at me, appalled and perplexed that I haven’t sought to move. Where she once used to look at me, either through attraction or pity, I know that she won’t be looking at me any more. I understand that.
I wonder if they’ll be wondering why I never asked to move. Might they be thinking, “How can he write through that? Imagine how he must live. ” LA2’s man might be pleased that his woman’s had an opportunity to see what might be perceived as an unsavoury side to me. He may have noticed her looking at me every now and then during previous visits. Now, my decision to stay put will cost me future, furtive glances and there’s one less man for him to worry about.
Perhaps this is the moment their relationship moved onto the next level. That awful stage where you accept some of the romance will die, and has to perish, if you are both to accept that you’re human and need to go to the toilet. And that the rest of the world also goes to the toilet. I rarely make it to that stage. I take romance over reality any day. If there is a Great Scientist in the universe presiding over all of this, then I feel they could’ve maybe held off on creating us until they’d come up with something better than the bowel. To have rushed the creation through in such an incomplete way reminds me of the many incomplete spreadsheets I’ve put together in many of the jobs that inevitably and ultimately presented me with the P45.
My limited range of faces always comes in handy during difficult sagas such as this. Right now, my face suggests this hasn’t happened. My mind is shutting down. It’s the same approach I took when the Dentyl scare broke in April 2009 and the product was quietly and rather impressively removed from all shops without customers being told why. The scare had broken just days after I’d rather ambitiously bought 10 bottles that were on special offer. Determined that such unusually lavish expenditure wouldn’t be wasted, I continued to use Dentyl throughout the scare, which crept into the summer, all the while telling myself that I wasn’t endangering my health.
My focus has been shot to pieces by belt man’s super quick bowel evacuation. I pause to think where belt man might be now. Will he be thinking about what he’s done and where he’s left us mentally, or whether he’s ruthless enough not to care? Is there anything about the café that he’ll miss? Did he weigh this up before doing what he did? If he’s meeting a woman, travelling to her place perhaps for an afternoon of intimacy, surely he’s going to require a shower? Wouldn’t she find it curious that he’d require a shower at hers? Surely if the purpose of his visit was specifically that of intercourse, he would’ve washed up at home?
Now the two crazy guys in front of me are contemplating moving. The nutter in the hat asks his pal,”Don’t people have a shit before they come out? I don’t understand that. How do you do that in such a small establishment, and come out and face the people whose meals and sandwiches and refreshments you’ve ruined?” He’s right. How do you leave your house in that state?
The Doc’s disappeared having rattled the café and fast tracked any new relationship in the café. He’s pickpocketed the romance and vanished, most likely forever. He’s made us question everything. New relationships tested. Meals and clothes ruined. The mood, darkened. We’re all here, barely able to look at each other, pretending this isn’t happening.
I can’t have the two crazy guys moving. Everyone here knows that pair aren’t the full ticket. Their mental health is a fragile one claimed long before the recession, and if they have the sense to move, what will everyone else think of me? I’ll end up cutting an isolated figure here.
Another couple arrive and approach the table not long vacated by Latin America 2 and her partner. The man’s nostrils are the first to flare. There’s some discussion that I can’t hear between he and his partner. They look around and see there are no other tables free, and in the end, decide to sit down next to each other, their backs turned to the loos. That’s not going to help. I mean, I get the idea behind such a move. Like me, they’re trying to pretend this isn’t real. But I’m just having lattes. The impact of the recession upon my life means, even if I wanted to, I’m not attempting to eat through this.
The first thing this couple of have to endure is the rather unattractive sight of the younger of the two short-arse waiters belatedly making for the loo with a can of air freshener. It might be too little too late. He’s arguably the most unpopular of the waiters owing to often slacking off when his big sister, and I do mean big, a café regular, is in. Perhaps he’s trying to endear himself to the other waiters who may feel he doesn’t pull his weight, but in doing so, has he given any thought as to what his dramatic appearance with the can of air freshener may do to any new relationships currently playing out in the café?
You just don’t walk past a new couple having a meal with an air freshener. Their relationship may not be strong enough to survive that. It’s one thing trying to talk and eat your way through an odour as terrible as the one that has enveloped the café right now. But most new relationships will be hard pushed to ignore the moment the air freshener arrives, and the no messing about blast-like sound of it being put into action.
Once you hear that spraying, people know what’s going on. The couple can both talk as much and hurriedly as they like, as indeed they are right now, but every word they utter is completely undermined by every new blast of air freshener. They have a fair idea of what sight might have greeted the waiter, and that moments later, that same guy could be serving them. This whole late-in-the-day spraying feels like the waiters needed to be seen to be doing something for the sake of the customers’ morale.
Having decided to go down the air freshener route, I wonder how much time they spent round the back searching for this can of air freshener and why they didn’t just head to the shop next door and pay over the odds for whatever they had in here.
The situation really required one of the waiters to have the courage to step forward and say, “What’s happened has happened. Leave it. Let’s everyone just try and ride it out rather than draw more attention to it.”
Meantime, Latin America 2 keeps looking over at me, as if she’s appalled that I’ve chosen to stay put rather than join the mass exodus to the other side of the café. My super sensitive third nose ’05-07, wider nostrils model wouldn’t have been able to handle this. It would’ve led to me ripping this jumper from my body right here in front of everyone. I can smell everything on my jumper. It’s embedded in the fabric. If I’d gone to Cubs as a child and knew how to start a fire, I’d burn this when I get home.
I continue my attempt to look completely unaffected by this most taxing of situations, and consider myself fortunate to possess a very limited range of facial expressions. The expression I’ve maintained throughout this debacle is strikingly similar to the face I always wore back in the days when I used to get sacked.
The waiter’s still spraying. He is a courageous man. Any minute now, I expect to see a couple of his colleagues dragging him out half dead, the waiter still holding onto the can as one of the waiters shouts, “somebody get an ambulance”, in Portuguese. As they wait for the ambulance to show up, the call will go out to see if anyone in the café has an asthma inhaler and I will be tested. Am I still the same guy who kept quiet about having an inhaler as a man had an asthma attack right in front of me in The Falcon pub in Clapham Junction in the spring of ’89? I can’t be sure I’m not.
We are now, all fourteen of us who sat through this horror, survivors, forever linked by this most dreadful and embarrassing ordeal. Some of the cafe survivors are texting loved ones, letting them know they’re okay.
It crosses my mind that Belt Man might have been put up to this. For a living, he empties his bowels in restaurants, testing the strength of new relationships. Might it be that one of the guys sitting here with their women, drained by pretending neither he nor his new woman go to the toilet and believing such a fairytale existence unsustainable, had actually enlisted Belt Man’s services to commit this relationship-threatening atrocity?
Belt Man’s brutal WC visits force new relationships to acknowledge what’s just occurred, and moves them onto the next stage. If this is indeed the case, then I would see the merit in that, finding this particular aspect of coupling excruciatingly difficult. It is something that in the past, and in the future I’m sure, will hold me back from stepping into another relationship.
Suddenly, as a result of Belt Man’s cameo, people whose intimacy with each other has only extended to seeing if they’re capable of giving one another orgasms, have to deal with the flipside of that level of familiarity with one another. Words like “toilet” and “smell” and “air freshener” will suddenly become a part of their relationship. Once those words come between you, everything has changed. You can never go back to how it was. The mystery has gone. For good.
Should there be some mileage in my theory, it’s a role that appears to pay well. Belt Man’s belt alone looked like it cost more than all four tops combined that I’m wearing.
The waiter’s heroic intervention with the air freshener an hour ago appears to have endeared him to colleagues. He knew he had to show them something. This was perhaps the moment he had been waiting for. He knew that by going in there and confronting this, no woman present at the time would ever consider a relationship with him. The women who witnessed this would never forget the ugly visual of him marching towards the loos, his hand wrapped tightly around the can of air freshener.
A relationship cannot rise from such beginnings. I doubt whether in the history of man there has ever been a relationship with such origins. As their breasts were gently fondled, the women would remember that those hands had once gripped a can of air freshener. In saving the cafe, the waiter ensured no woman here would ever pleasure him. It’s a term often over used, but he is a hero.