Excerpt from London San Francisco, (2014) a novel by Elizabeth McKague
"I didn't invent countries"
The sky was silver, his geraniums dusted with dew, and the car alarm that had barked incessantly through the hollow of dawn was once again scowling above the shuffling roads at 8:30 that morning. He went into his tiny bathroom and looked in the mirror. He desperately needed a haircut and shrieked when he grabbed the back of his hair and could nearly make a ponytail with that secondary school mullet he had going on. He made coffee and eggs, then showered but decided not to shave. A trip to the salon would be enough for one day. If you had to place Paul Wise on a scale between the woodcutter and the metro-sexual, he’d fall just below the central point on the side of the woodcutter.
“Green.” He called it.
There were several stylists he’d gone to in the past and they always, always fucked up. A few days ago on a whim, he’d taken Harrow Road home from a pub in Chelsea instead of grazing through a maze of back streets to avoid it as he usually did. That night he subconsciously registered seeing a new salon that had just opened up. It had been closed at that hour but for some reason he had processed the notion that perhaps it was unpretentious, almost needy and possibly a bit serene. When he got there that afternoon, the impression proved misleading. Regardless, he waited in the fake cowhide chair for his name to be called out by a pregnant, anorexic receptionist with iridescent green eye shadow. She led him to a second room in the back of the establishment that he was not aware existed, where a pretty Palestinian girl was spritzing a man’s hair in one chair, while an older man with a silver pony tail himself, was blow drying what cotton pink fibers were left upon the head of an 80 year old woman. If he got the guy, he’d request the girl. That’s how it was, no ifs ands or buts. Spritzing finished, the Palestinian girl smiled at him and waved him to her chair. It was a rather magnetic experience as he sat down, stared into the mirror and saw her standing there behind him, mouthing “oohs,” and “ahs,” repetitive as a car alarm, with her sharp, slender fingers rousing through his hair.
Twice, he told her twice, exactly what he wanted. Yet like every single time before, three and a half raucous house-music tracks and twelve pound sterlings later, including the tip, he was back out on Harrow road with a head that belonged to the kind of man he thought the entire planet should ignore. He put his hands in his pockets and stepped out of the way of two small children with post-childhood faces who were aggressively trying to push each other into the slow moving traffic. An old lady, to avoid being knocked over, slowly orbited their world. She was dragging a tartan shopping trolley behind her with a discarded, blue, off license carrier bag trapped underneath one wheel, creating a sound like sandpaper against the gray pavement. Across the road at a bus stop slapped flush to the doors of a KFC, the dark, dejected faces of unemployed men ate burgers from a chip shop further along the way. Rejected lettuce leaves lay alongside their spit polished trainers. Paul tried to remember the old joke but couldn't quite. Just the punch line; ninety percent of London.
He walked on until he reached a second hand furniture shop, a place that sold mostly outdated office furniture and cheap single mattresses. Seeking a moment of solace he went inside. After rummaging through the one plastic tray of books they had to offer, he found a novel by Herta Muller. He decided to buy it. He was fond of the author, but the real reason he spent his last pound, fifty pence on the book was because the picture of her on the inside jacket made him think he could possibly look almost like her in thirty years. Maybe it was something to do with the hair. The hair he had up until half an hour ago. He stepped out of the shop reading the back cover and when he looked up he saw the most bazaar sight he’d ever seen in London. A young man with naturally bleached blond hair, wearing beach shorts and sandals was walking down the street carrying a surfboard.
“Where does he think he's going dressed like that?” He heard someone say.
Nostalgically amused, Paul turned onto Ladbroke Grove, deciding to traverse a newfound maze back to Salem Road. The surfboard spectacle reminded him of an afternoon he spent in Paris three years ago. It was an uncomfortably hot and humid day. He took the bus from his not so shoddy pension room in the Latin Quarter to Père Lâchais cemetery. He had no interest at all in visiting the famous graves of artists, composers or writers, and least of all, the haunt of Jim Morrison. Yet by chance he happened upon it and had to admire the group of teenyboppers in their tank tops and shorts, smoking joints and drinking cheap wine out of the bottle, mourning the death of their hero. He’d gone there to feel cool amongst the cold, sculpted stones, to stroll beneath the shade of hazelnut and ash trees, and to escape the heavy aesthetic demands of the most beautiful city he’d thus far visited in the world.
After some hours he passed through the gate and waited at the bus stop on the Avenue Gambetta. Many minutes passed. Few people were out because of the dead heat. Finally, he saw a large, gray mass moving far down the street but soon realized that it was going too slow to be a bus. He put on his eyeglasses and watched as the body came closer. It was an elephant. He thought he was hallucinating or that perhaps he’d come out of his walk amongst the dead and entered some kind of surreal dream. Paul lit a cigarette and stood up straight and tall, bewildered as hell, as the beast thundered past. It was wearing a headdress made of bells and a woman in a pink and red sari sat poised, dripping with sweat, atop its back. Two boys followed along its side, poking the animal with aluminum poles. A banner was stretched between the boys, advertising the name of a new Indian restaurant.
Elaina was also in Paris that summer and in Père Lâchais as well, on that exact same day and during the same hours. Of course she’d gone there specifically to visit the graves: Proust, Wilde, Apollinaire, Eluard, Balzac and especially Abelard and Heloise. She’d learned one motto as a writer, “You don’t read the work; you inherit the work.”
So she felt akin to these guys and it had become a ritual to pay her respects. Yet as usual, even though she’d visited the grounds many times before, she got lost and ended up asking one of the stoned teenyboppers how to get out. It was Paul Wise’s first and only trip to the place that day and he found his way back onto the street quite with ease. The historical fact is that if Elaina had left Nerval’s tomb and headed for Musset instead of Molière, she would have reached the same bus stop at exactly the same time as Paul, and stood beside him, consumed with awe, as the elephant plodded down the avenue.
Comments