I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal

by Charlie Hill

  New Year’s Eve, after the pub, I am escorted round the back of an independent bakery —Lukers, in Moseley — by a woman uninterested in pastries. I am being forced up against a pile of pallets when the security lights come on and she bails, a circumstance that leads me to question my hitherto rock-solid antipathy to the nascent Surveillance State.

  First love. One day, shortly after the longest Christmas on record, there was a heavy fall of snow in the south west. “I don’t want to go to work today,” I said, and she said, “You don’t have to. Tell them you went to Devon for the weekend and can’t get back.” So I rang a Civil Servant in the office where I’d just been promoted and told him I was snowbound in Tavistock.

  We spent the morning warm under thin blankets, feeding each other fresh strawberries dipped in cream, mouth-to-mouth. Later, there was a cosmic blessing. The clouds above the city opened and dropped flowers of snow onto streets of cars and terraced houses and we went for a walk down the middle of Willows Road, linking arms like the Freewheelin’ Dylan and Suze.

  Publication! At the first time of asking! The Observer Magazine pays a third of my monthly take-home for a rant about Civil Servants being unable to think for themselves. I do some sums and calculate that if I sell three of these freelance pieces a month, I’ll never have to work again, so I pack my Civil Service job in, buy an electric typewriter and get to it.

  It was my twentieth summer and I was living with a woman in Handsworth Wood and having doubts about our compatibility, including but not confined to her liking for Kaffe Fassett knitwear. I played cricket for the second team at Moseley Ashfield — Moeen Ali’s club! — and went on tour to the New Forest. The first night, I appropriated a straw boater from behind the bar of a pub in Brockenhurst and met a girl who took me camping in a clearing that was a wild pony rat run. We played pool together and drank English beers, but she read too much Terry Pratchett and there was nothing going on.

  I broke the bad news to my lover a week later. A week after that my new friend visited to play pool and drink English beers, a misjudgement, it seems. My ex was furious and no one in the city believed a word I said.

  An ex-girlfriend drove a lime-green mini. She had given it a name though I can’t remember what it was. I left the pub with another woman and walked her home to a tower block in Highgate, full of the bursting stanzas of youth.

  The lime-green mini overtook us and my ex got out, berating. We walked on. The lime-green mini overtook us and my ex got out, berating. We walked on. The lime-green mini overtook us and my ex got out, berating. We took a shortcut through a park.

  A lover leaves me to travel round the world, on a trip that was booked before we met, and I am once again in-between allsorts.

  I live in inner-city Balsall Heath with outlaws, dole-ites and artists and get a job with a packaging firm. The packaging firm is in Tyseley, a fraying patchwork of factory estates and boarded-up pubs. I smoke amongst the cardboard boxes in the warehouse, there is a woman on the bus who looks like Clara Bow and the flapjacks from the shop are good but still, I am restless. After managing an office consisting of me all day, I come home to a house full of New Age travellers chopping speed to jungle — an eight dog front room! — and a tea of Special Brew and noodles, and although my relationship with them is cautious, there are pulls in many directions.

  Then some friends come down from Glasgow for Primal Scream. One of them supports Celtic and asks me if I’d like the travellers out of there. Another has set up a music magazine — M8, after the motorway — so I do some reviews and jack-in the bubblewrap.

  My lover comes back from faraway, wearing silk and faraway brown. We are sitting next to each other on the sofa in the living room of our attic flat in Moseley. We have just made love, or are about to. We have always just made love or are about to. We are listening to Dolly Parton. We are smoking some nice resin and feeling good, like superheroes or film stars or chipmunks, although the reason we are feeling good is only partly to do with the resin.

  Dolly is singing the original version of I Will Always Love You. I look at my lover, fix her eyes unhurriedly. She is in this moment and not. I almost say something but don’t. She looks back at me. “I know,” she says. “I know.”

  I am with a woman. We lived together, she went away, we lived together, we can’t anymore, so how does this work now? I move into a house opposite the Fighting Cocks, with blokes, start writing for a Brum-based London listings magazine run by a fella called Saeed, or Imran when the debtors ring. I find the home number of rugby player Jason Leonard, ring him for an interview, get no reply, speak to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin in Stourbridge, Boy George by fax. It is fun subbing the copy of people who can’t write. In the office I have an altercation — nearly fisticuffs! — with the soon-to-be bestselling author Mike Gayle.

  I introduce myself to Paul, Delbert and Delroy on the top deck of the 50; they have travelled from Peckham to the Handsworth Carnival and have been told Moseley is the place to buy weed.

  I give them a tour of contacts and here’s the thing: as we walk the streets I see every single face I know and, unlike sometimes, each of them sees me too. People cross the road to bump fists, car horns sound, I mean I can’t miss, it’s like I’m a made guy in a south Birmingham Goodfellas, although it nearly costs me a mate (someone didn’t like me arriving unannounced with strangers…)

  Later, in my flat opposite the Fighting Cocks, Paul, Delbert and Delroy are rolling a few out of gratitude, when a fourteen-carat hippy chick, who is shortly to join a tribe of Druids in Cornwall, wanders through my open front door and wafts, finely, mightily. The lads from Peckham sit there shaking their heads — what is this place? — and invite me down for a game of pool; I don’t have the money but the afternoon of strutting has been compensation enough.

  I am introduced to moules mariniere on the Wake Green Road, by a friend from Manchester. He’s an artist who had a gallery in London until city boys began buying his oils — depicting city boys as dancing pigs — by the yard; afterwards we shoot blocks of wood with an air rifle, taking care not to disturb the other people in the house.

  The pubs of my early twenties have their seasons. Outside the Trafalgar in Moseley, there is a queue of dealers all the way to the part-time cop shop on Woodbridge Road; inside I play pool and drink with Leroy, Rocky, Rasta Pete, Michelle from the pool team, Guy from Moseley Ashfield Cricket Club, Alex the teacher and t-shirt artist, that bloke over there, Janet, Jackie and Eirwen from Aston Uni, Kathryn, Rocky, Skinny, Shorty, my brother, Steve Peters, Angry Andy, her by the bar, Woz, Trace and Neil, the New Age Travellers, and Tangle the dog.

  Then someone from a different group of travellers hits a fella with an axe and Gorebridge Ian — Jock Rob’s brother, all ken and likesay — opens his coat to show me a reassuring breadknife. At which point I begin using the Prince and Fighting Cocks again.

  I was flown to New Orleans by my best friend who wanted to introduce me to his girlfriend. She lived in the French Quarter and had decided to split up with him, a fact of which he was unaware. It was the first time I’d been on an aeroplane. Our party was from Glasgow. One presented a show with Janet Street-Porter on BBC 2, another ran a music magazine. We hired a red Chrysler LeBaron convertible in Orlando and drove through Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. In Lake City, Florida, the Chief of Police offered us prostitutes in an International House of Pancakes and ran us out of town when we said no; in N’Awlins we stayed in a shotgun shack on Second Street, scored weed from the Chicken Man’s shop in a non-tourist part of town and drank liquid acid with a New Zealander who looked like Jesus and photographed the insides of volcanoes for MTV. In Baton Rouge, speeding, we had a close encounter with some State Troopers before crashing 808 State’s backstage party, which wasn’t, really.

  I was a patsy, a sap, a pawn, a heel.

  My friend changed his plans and decided to go down into the jungles of South America. “Safe home,” he said when I left the Big Easy, turning away from me, not that I wan
ted to see the look on his face.

  In the summer of 1994 my girlfriend went away. She’d left me to go ‘travelling’ once before; this time — unemployed, resentful, guilty — I didn’t try to hide my disgruntlement. “I’m going to Thailandmalaysiaindonesia,” she’d tell anyone in earshot, breathlessly excited. “That well known amorphous land mass,” I’d mutter, “of a thousand different cultures and languages.” I asked often what the difference was between ‘travelling’ and ‘going on a cheap holiday’ and she didn’t answer. When she left I sent bitter letters and then decided to prove myself, so I went on the road; after sleeping under a tarpaulin on a tour of the fogous of Cornwall, I hooked-up with a bunch of energetic DIY-ers taking a caff round the free festivals of Wales.

  In the autumn my fellow festival-goers and I set up a vegetarian restaurant in an art gallery in Hockley — later Michelin-starred Lasans! — which was run sneeringly by the Revolutionary Communist Party. The enterprise was a smoosh of fine dining and anarcho-libertarian politics: during the week we cooked high-end dal and chilli beans with coffee and cocoa to an accompaniment of Vaughan Williams, while every other weekend we had a side room at Que Club all-nighters, distributing anti-Criminal Justice Bill flyers and serving bowls of Coco Pops to people off their cake. True, the Mason’s favourite, the Birmingham Post, awarded us three stars out of five (despite an over-lemoned fennel à la Grecque), but it was a contentious business plan. One Sunday, three generations turned up for another nut roast to be met with billows of hash smoke and the chill-out stylings of the Club Seal Cabaret —William Shatner sings the Beatles! — in full saucer-eyed swing. The police were called.

  I was now, I supposed, a libertarian, not that I thought about that too much, as I resented and was mistrustful of the simplicity of the creed; likewise, I was not convinced by the Barbours of the Rev Coms, I mean whichever way you looked at it, it seemed a little easy or implausible, but then what was the alternative? Sometimes we worked together. The day after we hosted a showing of The Maltese Double Cross, a film about the Lockerbie bombing that had debuted in the House of Commons, the gallery was raided by MI5, with our tills unmolested and the Rev Coms’ floppy discs wiped clean of names. Another time, C18 daubed the front door.

  In winter, with a party of vegans booked in, one of our number cooked herself a nice chicken dinner. As the unmistakeable smell of garlic-roasted murder wafted across the restaurant, I decided I’d done enough and wrote a nicer letter.

  Just before Christmas I borrow the plane fare to India and travel halfway round the world for love. The plan is to meet up in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges. I take thirty quid spending money and decide to do it my way, free of guidebooks. “DON’T GIVE TO BEGGARS!” suggests The Rough Guide to India, which I’d skimmed at the library, “IT ONLY ENCOURAGES THEM!” which struck me as paternalism — and maybe it is — so I refuse to read anything else about the place.

  I fly with Aeroflot, via Moscow and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where we are taken from the plane to a small room and given numbered tickets by a man sat at a desk; armed guards watch over us as we stand around. Twenty minutes later we are ushered back onto the plane, having surrendered our unchecked tickets to the desk wallah, an exercise that must keep some people in a job.

  Then Delhi. Delhi is a crush of camels and samosa sellers and rickshaws and fruit sellers and buses and magazine sellers and cows and trucks and orderly ranks of beggars without arms or legs and billboards advertising soft drinks with “LESS THAN 3% JUICE!”; at the concourse of the railway station, I am pulled under the waves of the cacophony before being spotted by a fat tout, who hustles me to a waiting auto-rickshaw and then charges me a hundred times the going rate for a train ticket to Varanasi and twice that for a ‘hotel’ that turns out to be a room in a shack up a dark and terrifying alley. I drink myself to sleep on Duty Free gin and, waking-up down to my last few rupees, I realise I haven’t eaten since the flight and ask about food. I wander, dazed, to Connaught Place, a circular square at the heart of Imperial Delhi, where I am approached by a fella who points at my dilapidated baseball boots and offers to stitch them, on the face of it a good idea. As I sit on a patch of grass, shoeless, longingly gazing at restaurants across the square, another entrepreneur comes at me from behind and pokes my ears with something sharp — “Your ears very dirty! I clean!” — while a third administers a shoulder-prodding he refers to as a massage. “But I haven’t got enough money,” I protest, to no avail: “England is a rich country, yes?” Fifteen minutes later I leave the square hungrier than when I arrived and in debt you could scarcely credit.

  My train ticket is for a third-class carriage which is full of peasants. Some consider me a voyeur — “This Third Class. You shouldn’t be here. You should be in First Class” — others take me for what I am: someone who is beginning to question his judgement in matters of foreign travel, his rejection of the dreadlocked. At a stop just outside Allahabad, the carriage fills with people handing out portions of rice on banana leaves, to which I hungrily help myself. That’s very nice of them, I think; ten minutes later, the carriage fills with people asking for payment. I offer all I have on me — 20p in pounds sterling — but my assurances about its real value are rebuffed and negotiations are fraught, at which point some of the peasants have a whip round for my food. Eighty miles and six hours later, I arrive at Moghul Sera, twenty miles from Varanasi, and discover my train goes no further. It is two in the morning and I am neither warm nor, I suspect, able to pick myself out of a line-up. I have to get to Varanasi somehow, so I try to sell my camera to the transport police for the remaining train fare. A policeman called Ashok takes pity on me and gives me an armed escort to Varanasi, rifle-butting a paying customer off his bunk on the next train through, so I can get some sleep, fat chance. In Varanasi he pays for a rickshaw and I make him a present of half a tube of Colgate by way of thanks. “Here,” I say, “you clean teeth. Like this.” Ashok looks puzzled.

  I knock on the door of my girlfriend/ex-girlfriend’s guest house in Varanasi at five in the morning and we are together again. We sit on flat roofs and look at the cows and the billboards advertising toothpaste. From the Ganges we hear incantations, while in the narrow street below men play chess. There is a festival on and the sky is full of bright kites, darting like sprats, stitching the sky with messages of devotion. She says it would be a nice idea if we get married. I demur. I’ve flown halfway round the world for love and there is a limit to how far I am prepared to go.

  After a week I get amoebic dysentery, which takes care of Christmas. In Pushkar, monkeys climb onto the balcony of a restaurant and steal our thalis. In Pokhara, Nepal, on New Year’s Eve, the night black as all eternity, we hear a lone piper up in the mountains, but by now it is too late, the spell has been broken years ago.

  Back in Delhi, with a week to kill before our flight, my ex-girlfriend/girlfriend suggests we go to see the Taj Mahal, eighty kilometres away in Agra. “I don’t want to go to the Taj Mahal,” I say. “Everyone goes to the Taj Mahal — why would I want to go to the Taj Mahal?”

  After four years, or three if you subtracted the to-ing and fro-ing, which I suppose we should, although it all seemed part of the same thing to me, my girlfriend and I decided to make more time for each other, have ‘date nights’, go out for meals. Make an effort, like we used to, although we never used to. To kick things off I brought in fish and chips. “I’m being ironic,” I said, “postmodern,” though I wasn’t sure I was. A positive: it was the last time we had an argument about my sense of humour.

  We had been in and out of love — even monolithic at times — and were now somewhere else. My restaurant had just shut down — too much libertarianism, not enough punters — and Kronenbourg Lager had an offer on. In exchange for five ring pulls you could get a cigarette lighter, for twenty a t-shirt. I didn’t like Kronenbourg — it was pissy — but I couldn’t afford beer and clothes, so I invested in a six-pack. “Where are you going again?” I asked. “Just out with some p
eople from work,” she said, and I was asleep on the sofa when she didn’t come home to Springfield Road.

  In the Fighting Cocks I am smelling of Boots’ Vanilla Body Spray and I turn to a woman I’ve just met and say, “Can I come back to yours?” She is like me, in that respect at least, and takes me to Stourbridge. She has three kids and drinks Coca-Cola in bed and although she isn’t overly fond of her body, it is womanly; we have a lot of fun and remain close friends.

  I am sleeping on the floor of a house that is being rented by crusty mates, one of whom is just about to be kicked off a PhD in Neural Networking. One night I meet a filmmaker who is looking for funding and thinks I have beautiful fingers and I take her back.

  My housemates don’t have much but they have more than we do and despite their anarchistic tendencies are grateful, I suppose, for any opportunity to punch down: drunk in the early morning they bang on the flimsy door of the back room and bay and guffaw while me and the filmmaker cling to each other, feeling somewhat wretched.

  Years later, I think it might be a nice idea or at least interesting to reminisce about those times, so I look her up, send her an email and hear nothing back.

  Some friends went to Prague and I tagged along for respite. When we’d drunk all our beer on the coach, a woman rested her head on my shoulder as I read a holiday Barbara Vine. In Prague I waited to cross the Charles Bridge in search of absinthe and she ran to me through the crowd. This was ironic because, for a while afterwards, I thought she might have been one who got away, which was ironic because she is a biker now and lives with a biker and rides out with bikers, and the one time in my life I’ve been on a bike I rode pillion and jumped off when my mate slowed down at a junction.