The 2084 Precept

by Anthony D. Thompson

  It was very dark inside, there were candles on the tables, and it was quite full. But there were a couple of tables free at the back. The bar served finger food. We ordered some chicken wings and some bread and cheese and a large pichet of red. We didn't say anything until the food arrived, we just held hands across the table and looked at each other. Like a couple of teenagers. The music was soft, low volume, romantic ballads. An oldie, Forever Young, was playing. He knew about atmosphere, the owner of this place, whoever he was.

  Céline had picked a short blue skirt and a white woolly sweater out of her rucksack, slightly rumpled, but she looked like only a French woman can look. It doesn't matter what their clothes have cost, €5,000 or €10, they look…well, feminine. And my Céline was feminine, magically so, the ponytail was back, the chipped tooth was there, she was occasionally pushing up her glasses and I was…happy. Incredibly, incredibly, happy. I almost wanted to cry because of it, who says cynics can't have feelings.

  I think London is going to have to wait for a few days, or maybe for a few years. I am going to Rouen.

  I started off with a smile. "So what will you be doing with your week off in Rouen, Céline, apart from preparing some school work?"

  She looked straight at me. She wasn't smiling. She looked sad. She paused only briefly and then she dropped her nuclear bomb. Thermo-nuclear.

  "I will be seeing my fiancé," she said.

  A nuclear bomb causes your jaw to drop, your eyes to protrude, your vocal cords to produce barely audible guttural resonances, and your heart to fall. My heart did fall, it sank right down through my body and plummeted down to my feet and tried to get out through my shoes. I am not joking. If a heart can jump, it can fall. And my neurons? My neurons had become inoperative, disarray does not describe it.

  It took me a while to think of something to say.

  And all I could come up with was, "Your fiancé?"

  An old-fashioned word, there aren't too many fiancés around these days, and the same thing for fiancées. There are more bastard children than there are fiancés these days, bastards have become a perfectly acceptable element of modern society in recent times. No doubt the pope has fits and has significantly increased his praying time, and his predecessors turn over in their graves and smash their harp strings or whatever. To no avail, of course.

  "Yes," she said, "I have a fiancé."

  "But why…why did you…you didn't have to sleep with me, I would have understood. You shouldn't have slept with me, Céline."

  "Yes I should. I am in love with you."

  "But…"

  "But nothing, Peter. I am going to Rouen, I am going to see my fiancé, I am going to tell him that I like him a lot but that I am not in love with him, I am in love with someone else, and then I am coming to London to be with you until I have to go back to work again."

  So there had never been a nuclear bomb. My heart removed itself from my shoes. My senses returned, I could hear the wine bar music again, another oldie was playing, Unchained Melody, the world was in order, everything was back to being magical, my neurons realized there was no longer any danger of a computer crash.

  She smiled, she pushed her glasses up, she leaned over the table towards me and she took hold of my hand and held it tightly.

  "We are going back to the hotel now, Peter. Being in love with you increases my need for pornography. Of the nice kind, you understand."

  I smiled back at her. But I had a problem. I am not the kind of guy to be the cause of a breakup. A marriage or an intended marriage, it's the same thing. Not me, I am not made that way. I have a guilty conscience, a huge bloody guilty conscience. And although I would have signed on a bible with my own blood that Céline and I had a good chance of staying together, I knew, back in the dark recesses, that this might not be so. Impossible to know after just a few hours. What might seem permanent in the beginning can turn out to be not permanent, as we well know. People can change, people can turn out not to be who you thought they were. Especially when you hardly know each other. Bibles and signatures in blood notwithstanding.

  Nevertheless, I would have signed, I wanted to keep her. But not like this. My throat was dry, I drank some wine, I needed to spend some time explaining my thoughts. "Céline," I said, "I don't think I should go back to the hotel with you. I don't think you can know if you are in love with me. You may think so. And I might perhaps be in love with you too, totally, incredibly in love with you. But I don’t know. I can’t know. We haven't known each other for a single day yet. We just suppose and hope it might turn out to be the way we feel. The way we think we feel. We should wait. You have a fiancé and until this morning you thought you were in love with him. I think you should go back and find out what your feelings about him are. I don't think we should think anything else, anything at all, until you have done that. It hurts me to be saying this, you have to know that, but I think I am going to get in my car, right now, and I am going to drive up to Calais and over to London, and you are going to go to Rouen tomorrow morning, and I am going to wait to hear from you. I think it's for the best."

  She thought about this. She looked very sad and disconsolate. She bit her lip, she sipped her wine, she thought some more. And then suddenly her look became a happy one, a contented one, a decision taken.

  "I'll be in London in two or three days' time," she said. "You are right. This is what I should do first. Perhaps I made it sound easy, but it won't be. I like him a lot and it will be very painful for me to tell him we're finished. But I've met you, Peter, and I know I'm not in love with him. Love is something very different, it takes hold of you, it takes hold of your entire body and it takes hold of your entire mind and it takes hold of all of your feelings, and nothing else is important, absolutely nothing, nothing else matters. And I have never felt that way with him. I am in love with you Peter. Intensely. I know it can last. And if it doesn't, well, I will have no regrets. I will at least have been with you for a while, I will have known you for a while, I will have had you in my life for a while, and that is something I want, something I need, something I have to have. I will miss you every minute and every day, until I see you again. I will miss you terribly."

  Her eyes were glistening. Some tears had started to trickle down her cheeks, but she was smiling again and she was happy again and she squeezed my hand and she stroked it.

  "I need something to remember you by," she continued with that impish smile of hers, "in case you change your mind in London and you don't want to see me again. Perhaps you could write a poem for me? Please?"

  "I don't write poems anymore, Céline, and in any case I couldn't write one spontaneously. It would be pure drivel, nice drivel maybe, but red wine drivel. Here, here is my card, it has my mobile number and my email address. Good for arranging when and where to meet in London—that is, if I don't change my mind of course."

  She laughed, she was happy, she took the card, she inspected it, she took a huge gulp of wine, she emptied the pichet into her glass and drank some more.

  I emptied my glass as well. I paid the bill and we headed back towards the hotel, she was clinging to my arm, she was a bit tipsy.

  "I love you Peter. I want a poem," she said. "A poem from Peter. Please."

  "I don't think you need a poem. I think what you need is another liter of wine."

  "A poem."

  Cheeks still glistening from the tears. What a girl. And she deserved a poem, no doubt about it. She deserved anything as far as I was concerned, just for being who she was and how she was.

  "The only poem you could get from me would be one of the strange ones. The two published ones are still more or less in my head. But not tonight, Céline, not now, they are weird poems. They are about as unromantic as you can get and I am not going to do it."

  We reached my car and stopped.

  "O.K. Peter, I will try to understand. But on two conditions."

  "Two conditions?"

  "Yes. First you have to promise to send me a poem when you reach
London. I need to have a piece of you until I see you again. Or in case you change your mind."

  "And secondly?"

  "And secondly, we need to get inside your nice car and you kiss me goodbye."

  "Both conditions agreed," I said.

  And we got into the car, and I wrote down her email address on my insurance certificate, who cares about an insurance certificate. And we kissed goodbye, and it wasn't just kissing, and it went on for a long time and then I watched her walk into her hotel and then I drove away.

  * * * * *

  I drove for a few streets without worrying about the direction, and then I stopped. There was virtually no traffic, the city was quiet, the neon lights were making yellow shadows out of the night's ground mist, hundreds of thousands of people were asleep around me. A dog was barking somewhere far away and the noise of a lone motorbike dwindled slowly into the distance. I lit a cigarette and then a second one and, yes, a third one and I sat there for about half an hour, thinking about today, about Céline, and about where life's ocean waves could take you sometimes if they felt like it, suddenly and without warning. And I was thinking about her curled up in her bed right now. And I felt good. That was the very best way to describe my feelings then. I felt good.

  And then I put the car into gear, found a sign to the autoroute and headed north on the E17.

  I drove on into the light of the new day. I tanked the car someplace, used the toilets—thank God the French had long ago got rid of most of those thigh-testing holes in the floor my father used to complain about—got through two more of those ludicrous and inefficient toll collection stations invented by the French and other southern European countries, and reached the docks at Calais soon after 7 o'clock.

  I had to wait an hour for the next ferry. P&O again.

  You know which country you are travelling to when you check in. They give you a paper 'hanger' to hook onto your rear-view mirror to denote which lane you are supposed to wait in. It also contains extraordinary safety instructions:

  Any passenger who will require assistance in the event of an emergency is asked to advise the reception desk of this fact on boarding the ship! This of course means everybody—except for those who might prefer, for example, to drown. Nobody obeys this, and if they did, there would be chaos. Also, one notes that those who might require assistance, but not in the event of an emergency, are excluded from this generous offer.

  Ah hah! Not clear? Towards the end of this document comes the following: Anyone with need of assistance in an emergency should notify the reception desk if this need is not already advised! Great; this repeated message is presumably for people who, without these wording modifications, were unable to understand the first message. But, sad to say, it is—again—only if there is an emergency.

  And how about this: Do not overfill your petrol tank. Well, first of all, you already either have or you haven't. Secondly, it doesn't tell you what to do if you have. And thirdly, how do Brits manage to overfill their petrol tanks in the first place?

  And this: Do not start engine until instructed. Everybody ignores this. Thank God. There would be chaos if they didn't.

  And this: Do not move until instructed. The above comments apply here also.

  And my favorite: We are happy to supply ingredient lists for any food on board. However, we are unable to guarantee that any food will contain only those ingredients listed. So why the lists if you can't trust them? Go figure.

  And finally, a warning notice, the purpose of which somebody, somewhere, somehow understands: This hanger remains the property of P&O ferries and must be surrendered to a member of staff upon request. Can you imagine having to keep all these pieces of paper at home until you die because they belong to somebody else? But don't worry, they have failed to correctly cite a legal entity name and so you can throw them away, as everybody does anyway, without fear of being arrested for stealing somebody else's property. Again, go figure.

  I went to the big bar for a coffee. At this time in the morning the ship was only half full but there were plenty of those kinds of Brits again. And this time there were plenty of obese ones, a sprinkling of monster-show hairstyles, and a few union jack T-shirts. I also saw a T-shirt which I don't think you could possibly find in any country you would care to call civilized. Anyone manufacturing or selling them would be fined and, if they persisted, put into jail. But in the U.K. it is socialism and the socialist educational levels which rule. Although—let me be fair—this text did not contain a single obscene word. It read 'Thousands of my potential children died on your daughter's face last night." You will find these T-shirts and worse ones openly on sale in U.K. stores. They sell well and they make good reading, do not doubt it, for 10 year-old Brit children, their Brit grandmothers and all foreigners. The T-shirt text in this case presumably did not apply to the 12 year old girl who a few weeks ago became Britain's—excuse me, Great Britain's—youngest mother, nor to the 13 year old father. And probably not to the 27 year old grandmother either. No, I exaggerate nothing.

  You can't get away from these people. Some of them were obviously from the buses I'd seen boarding the ship. The cheap holiday agencies frequently use buses to transport their clients and their buses travel back often enough overnight, it saves hotel costs.

  I caught bits and pieces of the guttural utterings. 'My fookin daw-er, ah fookin tells 'er, listen, ah sez to 'er…' the man at the next table was saying, the past tense, among other things, clearly beyond his capabilities. 'I were' and 'we was', and the 'wivs' and the 'wots', and the 'gnawwotahmeens' (do not pronounce the 't' by the way) and of course the 'fookins' and the 'bluddy coonts' and all the rest of it, everything was floating through the air like confetti at a wild hogs' wedding reception, oink, oink.

  You even get people on British television these days who can't speak properly. I don't even understand the weather reports on BBC World sometimes, dialect words all jumbled together and exiting in mumbled form through tightly compressed lips, as if permanently living in great fear of swallowing any marauding flies. And there were some under-educated Scots on board, they could have been talking Kurdish for all I knew, but I'm not going to get into that one. Just read one of those Irvine Welsh books if you don't know what I mean. In fact, I recommend them anyway, they're brilliant.

  But no problem. We all have the right to be the way we want to be, or what we have been molded into, and as I have mentioned before, I respect their right to exist as they wish, just as much as I respect my own. But you do have to be careful, because this is not necessarily the case the other way round. So I went and found a corner at the other end of the ship and snoozed away until the docking noises woke me up.

  It was well past ten o'clock, nine o'clock here of course, as I drove out of the docks and into Dover town center. I wanted to buy the weekend IHT and stretch my legs a bit. The signs sellotaped onto the interiors of some of the shop windows are also indicative of the country in which we now find ourselves. One supermarket I walked past had three signs, all of which prompted my neurons to raise a query or two:

  WE WOULD REQUEST CUSTOMERS

  NOT TO EAT OR DRINK

  WHILST IN THE STORE. THANK YOU.

  And how does that allow the small bar next to the bakery section to sell any of its proffered tea, coffee and pastries?

  POLITE NOTICE:

  DURING THE WARMER WEATHER, PLEASE ENSURE

  THAT YOU WEAR A SHIRT OR T-SHIRT WHEN

  ENTERING THE PREMISES. THANK YOU.

  And is it O.K. to wander in half-naked whenever the weather is not ‘warmer’ (and not warmer than what)? Or, indeed, at any time after you have finished ‘entering’? And are ladies included here (blouses, for example, are not allowed, you must ensure you wear a shirt or a T-shirt)?

  WE WOULD APPRECIATE IT IF CUSTOMERS

  WEARING A HOODED TOP

  PLEASE LOWER THE HOOD WHILST IN THE STORE. THANK YOU.

  ‘oodies in ower cooontry, we duz.> And oh, the grammar…oh dear, the grammar. And in the ‘warmer’ weather, are the hooded top wearers (most of whom are presumably sweating badly) still required to comply with the Shirt or T-Shirt rule?

  Certain countries need such signs. No doubt about it.

  I drove out through the town center and up onto the cliff road. The differences always hit you in the face, the clothes, the drab terraced houses, the unkempt patches of 'front gardens’, the litter all over the place, and the weather. And it had just started to rain.

  There are hundreds of road sign varieties in the U.K. involving different colors, different designs, different wordage, different lettering styles, different-sized text and different-sized signs for reasons I have never felt the urge to enquire about. I passed one of these artistic creations about halfway to Folkestone on the cliff road. It read:

  ROADWORKS

  NIGHT CLOSURES

  1 to 31 June

  EXPECT DELAYS

  Of course, I thought to myself, with bad luck it might take a little longer, perhaps until the 32nd? And good to know that road closures cause delays. I will bear that in mind.

  The next sign was a much smaller one:

  FOOTPATH CROSSINGS

  FOR 1/2 MILE

  Extraordinary. We are on a 4-lane dual carriageway (which means two lanes each way with a central divider). So we apparently have hikers and their dogs and, why not, their children who are allowed to cross this road! And this small sign (if you don’t miss it) tells you about it. And the millions of foreigners who drive off the ferries and into England on this road all have an excellent grasp of the English vocabulary together with millisecond translation skills and can understand what this small sign means (if, that is, they don’t miss it). Ask any native and he will tell you: this sign is extremely important; it is there to help prevent you killing any fellow human beings.

  There were more signs worthy of comment; I must write the book one day. I continued plunging onward into the depths of this fascinating country. The rain made no difference to the driving, not at 110 kilometers per hour, and with or without footpath crossings. No traffic problems, it was Sunday and it was raining. I stopped for a coffee and a cigarette and read a piece of the IHT, and I reached the hotel in London a few minutes before 1 p.m. Yes, it was Sunday and the pasty red-haired guy was behind the desk again. But if he was impolite, I was too tired to notice. I took myself up to my room, my luggage arrived two minutes later, and I fell asleep two minutes after that.