Friends at the centre of the universe

It was the hay fever. The pollen count was exponential and my eyes itched and I couldn’t breathe. I had to speak with an open dry palate, every - breath - effort. As your brain snapped in to gear it would stop intermittently with sneezing fits turning it in to sludge. 

I arrived at the bar and burst in to tears. A gin and tonic ordered straight away and they listened, carefully like teachers and molly coddled me like a newborn puppy. I cried the world was too much! My job, the work, the state of it. I couldn’t breathe! I blew my nose and had a nose bleed and drank my gin and felt better. The pair of them. Dressed in dungarees, a mustard yellow baggy sweater, crop top, bright socks, hair messed up, scrunched atop their pretty heads like bird’s nests. I loved them. And they told me tales of theatre.

Imprisoned indoors because of the grass I was sad and spoke to Susan. She listened and offered to wash my towels because of my conjunctivitis. I bought hair perming solution. Susan positioned a seat in front of the bathroom mirror, twizzling my hair, making me feel better. Her delicate fingertips massaged my head and pushed me adrift on to a swimming pool, where I lay dozing on an inflatable alligator. Not a single strand left loose, she’s a pro. I clumsily rinsed my hair out twice and woke up with curls. 

Brixton Market on the hunt for a shopfront with ‘a blue hue’. It rained the night before so the air has clarity. I feel almost human again. Sunglasses acting as protective shields, vaseline smeared across nostrils to stop particles. She lets me tell my sorry tale. Encourages, coaxes, gives me fuel.

I have a sty in my eye but it doesn’t matter, I believe. Bounding my way across London to a pub at The Centre of the Universe, where all my Friends shall meet. Four friends who’s paths rarely cross between London, New York and Berlin but it happens. Get a round-in, pork scratchings and pints, gin and tonics for me (because wine and beer contain histamines). Spilling over the pavement then filling our booth. It looks like a cabin from a timeless fleet, with portholes of stained-glass windows peering out on to the street. How much time has elapsed. None at all. Ten years. We end with pizza at Pollo’s and a bottle of red to wash it down.

Now I lie on my bed. The final night. Peripeteia complete. Annina lies by my side with her asthma inhaler, I with a bloodied tissue pressed against my nose. She tells me to tilt my head back and I can’t because I’m lying on my back. ‘Do you know the story? Of the man who is standing in the middle of the square. Looking upwards. In to the sky so people start to wonder, what is he doing? One stranger stands next to him and looks up too. Then another joins the pair and begins to stare upwards. Soon whole crowds are joining the men, all wondering what can he see? Then the first man stops and looks down. The second man asks him with awe-inspired breath, ‘What did you see? What could you see?’ And he replies, ‘Nothing. I had a nosebleed.’

I smile and believe that my friends have saved me.

Liverpool

There are many many pretty girls here, is what I thought peering over the pier at what’s now a disused dockyard. The boys aren’t bad either, I see mullets. Over there filling up the whole middle-distance is that brick. If I was a trader of all things human and I got Liverpool as my port of export, then my top three exports would be: The Beatles, The Brick, The Accent. Can’t have enough of that alluring accent, though it doesn’t like me much and it sure doesn’t hide it, I like it very much. Liverpudlian. Feels like sticky toffee pudding when you try to mimic it. Leaves a tang at the back of your throat like those sour red sugarcoated laces did, the kind I used to buy from the tuck shop when I was little, those that once made my tongue bleed when I ate a hundred of the laces in one go, to prove a point to myself.

The taxi driver who sat silent and staring whilst we gave off affected chatter in disaffected tones in the back perked up: ‘The laa-jest br’ick building in the whol’er Yeur-up that.’ Our three little heads swivel round to see the enormity of this brick building, there’s a lake that could house the Loch Ness monster in between the two halves of this vast brick structure, stretching back more than double it is wide, and it is very very wide. I ask, ‘What was it for?’ and the taxi man replies, ‘Tobacco’. The old and abandoned tobacco factory, the largest brick building in Europe, I’ve never seen it before but it’s already iconic. It demands significance. 

There are more hairdressing schools in the city than there are supermarkets. It’s an important facet: hair (and obviously it is, why not). There are also two cathedrals, and the Anglican one is the largest of its kind in the entire world. I feel like in my tiny London-shaped-mashed-brain I’d overlooked some of the grander things this England had to hold, like this place. The sun glared at us from high above as bands played to a backdrop of sea and gulls. A cruise liner the size of a council estate appeared one sunny afternoon on the horizon, and I ate the best hot dog of my life, mainly because it was soaked in sauerkraut and I in ale. 

The one time I had to order a cab over the phone I remembered the words of the little brother. ‘You ask for a taxi in your accent and you won’t get one. “Fully booked, sorry love.” Is what they’ll say.’ And the one time I ordered a cab over the phone I got the not uncommon and plain knee-jerk reply, ‘Sorry love, fully booked for the day.’ And my! a taxi firm booked up a for a whole day. Must be a busy port still, Liverpool.