Last Friday night, I walked into a bookstore. I was just browsing, really, but I’m doing a short course at the moment so I decided to look for books on theatre. For a while I couldn’t find any, then I spied one at the back of the store, a big fat tome of a book called THEATRE.
Up close it was surrounded by art books, and indeed it was THEARTBOOK (The Art Book), clearly not a book about theatre at all.
I turned around.
Ah! (Insert smiley face.) ‘DRAMA’… over there, in a different section.
BURMA.
A cook book.
I read a little extract from a book called, I think, Brain Rules. If I remember correctly, it said that humans are blind, just for a fraction of an instant, four times a second.
The girl in the bookstore looked, to me, about twenty. She had brightly dyed hair cut into a sharp fringe and wore big fat-rimmed glasses that played on the line between Indie and nerd. She welcomed everyone into the store with the same I’m really happy if you don’t need my help line: “Are you just happy browsing?” Unfortunately, she was managing the store, which didn’t shut until 9pm, alone. This meant she hadn’t had any opportunity to go and make herself dinner. But she was enthusiastic about books and her replacement dinner.
“Aren’t wasabi peas awesome!?” she said to Lily.
“No! I really don’t like them,” Lily responded, with equal enthusiasm.
The bookstore had an eclectic mix of music playing. Jimi Hendrix sang “Purple haze, all in my brain… Excuse me, while I kiss this guy…”
When we left the store, I suggested we head home.
Lily turned right (not the way home).
“Did I say ‘out’...? I meant to say ‘home’.”
We ended up at the pub down the road, which was nice. Lily normally drinks shiraz, but this time she opted for a gin and tonic. I nodded, repeated the order back to her, then walked to the bar and ordered her a shiraz.
I wanted a ginger beer for myself. The barman said yes and then started pouring something into a glass from one of those premix guns that have different buttons corresponding to different drinks. Then, because he was obviously new, he asked the staff member next to him whether they had ginger beer. I have no idea what was in the glass. She said that yes, they had ginger beer in bottles, but only alcoholic ginger beer.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s give that a try.”
“But we don’t have anything that can be added to a premix.”
“That’s okay.”
“So you don’t want it?”
“No. I do. That’s fine.”
“But not in a glass?”
“No. The one in the bottle is fine.”
“But we don’t have any non-alcoholic drinks in bottles.”
I thought about having an orange juice, but changing course now would be too complicated.
“The alcoholic ginger beer in a bottle will be fine. And the shiraz.”
The barman looked at the glass of premix he had poured, then wandered around for a second looking for somewhere to put it.
“That’ll be $17.50.”
Okay. For me that’s a lot of money for two drinks at a pub. Nice pub, but… I let it go. I gave him the money and he went off to try to work out how to use the cash register. The woman next to me at the bar smiled. I joked, “That was more complicated than I expected it to be.” She laughed.
And then she stood there.
She’d just bought a beer and had been about to walk away, I’m sure. But instead she put her beer down, half-turned towards me, shifted her hips and smiled, inviting me to continue.
I hate it when sentences that aren’t pick-up lines actually are pick-up lines, and I don’t realise it until too late.
I got my change, walked back to the table and gave Lily her shiraz.
“Okay. Shiraz it is!” she said. I looked perplexed. “I wanted a gin and tonic.”
And I had forgotten the menus.
In the background, Bon Jovi was singing. “It doesn’t make a difference if we’re naked or not…”
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| What's in this thing? |
I got the menus, eventually, and we ordered a Baileys cheesecake to share. I was excited. I like Baileys a lot. It was one of the drinks that we used to mix at home and it wasn’t especially unusual for us to have a carafe (or a reused milk bottle) of it on hand in the fridge. It’s basically a cross between a whiskey and a chocolate milkshake, so it’s hard to get wrong.
The cheesecake came and tasted like coffee. I hate the taste of coffee. My tastebuds are still confused about what it means to be an adult. I like dark chocolate, olives and avocados, but not coffee, artichokes, red wine or shellfish. I couldn’t smell coffee, see coffee, feel coffee… but that bitter malty burnt-woodchips coffee-flavour was definitely present. I sputtered, wanting to wipe my tongue with a spoon dipped in actual Baileys.
Madonna sang “Poppadom peach… I’m in trouble deep.”
A group of top food critics were given a jar of bright green jam and asked to identify the flavour. With their eyes open, they couldn’t place it. Familiar, but green isn’t a jam flavour they were familiar with.
With their eyes closed: strawberry.
Where had the suggestion of coffee come from? A memory? A smell? A colour? If I hadn’t thought about coffee then perhaps I wouldn’t taste it. I kept eating the cake, hoping that it was in my imagination, but by the time I had finished I was pretty certain: it was in the cake.
Our sense of smell is the most potent of our senses in terms of memory, because it feeds directly to the areas of the brain responsible for emotions and memory. However, my basic sense of smell is limited to “seems fine to me”, “this might be off but I’m not sure”, “fart” and “rancid”.
10,000 years ago, when humans were first domesticated by wolves, one of the first senses we started to give away was our sense of smell. This made sense: the wolves gained a teammate with great planning skills, and we gained a partner with a great sense of smell and the ability to kill things by biting them in the throat. Wolves became dogs, and I became unable to tell for sure whether or not my Baileys cheesecake had any Baileys in it.
In evolutionary terms, our sense of smell is disappearing fast.
“Here we are now, in containers…”
No wonder Kurt Cobain killed himself. He must have felt so misunderstood. And trapped. In containers. (I think of film containers more than shipping containers, which I think makes it worse.)
Time to leave. I think I was full. But I’m unclear whether that was because I was actually full or because the cake was finished. I may even have been full before I started.
We decided to go.
A couple of philosophers I’ve read recently have stated that the fundamental question we all face is: How are we to live?
“Should I stay or should I go now…?” is probably simpler, and requires less planning.
We should definitely go. The drinks here are too expensive… “unless you’d actually like to get that gin and tonic you missed out on before?”
“I can see clearly now Lorraine has gone…”
We decided to stay. We hadn’t checked out the upstairs bar before, so we did that. There were two door frames which had been kept as part of the de-renovation. They looked fantastic. They made symbolic entry points to a big space, in which there was no floor - just a view of the people eating below.
The DJ was playing in the corner, trying to get a vibe going. “See that girl, watch that scene, kicking the dancing queen.”
It was still early.
While I was wondering about the question that has been plaguing me: What am I doing here? And equally perplexing: What are you doing here? Lily said something.
“I love you.”
The music was really loud. Maybe I didn’t hear that right. I looked at her. She was frowning and bending forward.
She had something on her left shoe.
Annie Lennox came on. Ah. I love her voice. She “must be talking to a ninja.”
“My left shoe,” Lily repeated. “I’ll have to buy another one when I get to India.”
“Just a left one?”
“Yeah, why not?”
(We have that kind of witty repartee some times.)
“I love you, too.”
“What was that?”
“This song. I love U2.”
“Some day. Bloody some day…”
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