It takes a lot to make a 40€ flight to London not worth it, which is why RyanAir makes it company policy. After all, if it's worth it to me, must not be worth it to them. A departure at 11:30pm instead of 10pm, one check-in counter for a whole plane full of people, flight staff who speaks "English" and nothing else, and seat backs which don't recline. Add this to a splitting stomach ache and you have the makings of my Friday evening. I've since discovered that if I eat a pound of peanuts at a time I get a stomach ache, which would technically make them the perfect snack food. Quantized morsels of fatty salty goodness, they have a built-in consumption limiter. Problem is, only works half of the time.
My plan: spend the weekend in London with Harry, the brother of a good friend. He was there for the presidents' day weekend, and a friend of his was planning on meeting us there. He didn't give me many details except that the friend was female.
Hopping off the bus from Stanstead airport put me in Victoria station at 3am, at which time the central nightlife was crowded around a pot of boiling oil filled with various pieces of bread and pastries. It never occurred to me that refried bread would be the first food I would come across in London, but maybe that's just because I was trying to forget Liverpool. 45 minutes and an expensive cab ride later, I approached the front desk of the hotel where Harry and I agreed to share a room. The clerk insisted that I would get lost trying to find the room, so he accompanied. I didn't imagine what would be so hard until I actually went inside. The place looked like it came straight from an M.C. Escher sketchbook. The cleaning staff must routinely find the bodies of elderly guests who got lost on the way to the ice machine and never made it out.
It's 4am, so I rap his door hard to wake him up. We hear a girl yelp followed by bumping and furniture noises. Not missing a beat, I turned to the clerk and said, "I wonder how much he paid for her." It's fun seeing Indian people turn red and look at the floor. I was dog tired, and I barely waited to be introduced to this Alice girl before returning to the front desk and shelling out 90£ for my own room. Before you say that better have been a nice hotel, it wasn't, and I don't want to hear anymore about it.
Saturday started off nice and sunny, an auspicious start which in retrospect was more like the reprieve, but in good spirits we explored Notting Hill and the food it has to offer. Indian food is good, the Kebabs are all good, and fish and chips are tasty. Beans and eggs on toast is also good. Now that we were more relaxed, I got to meet Alice a bit. She was pretty in a Kate Moss sort of way; nice features which would have been nicer if it didn't look like someone put her skin in a tourniquet. She had that waif-ish cocaine look which at sunny 11am worked because it diverted attention from my own relentless gluttony.
By the afternoon I began to cool to her presence, owing to the fact that she was incessantly smoking pungent hand-rolled cigarettes and she seemed unable to either make decisions or offer anything substantial to the conversation. She was even vague about what exactly she was doing in London, stating simply that she hadn't had a job for almost a year, and a well-connected friend of her mother offered her something in London so that evening she would check herself into a nice hotel on his dime. She also wore stilettos which entitled her to complain every block and make real exploration on foot impossible. By the time we'd gotten to Big Ben I wished she were just a bag of horse shit. Like her, it would just sit around and smell bad, but at least it would have handles for easier dragging.
Against our burgeoning moment of inertia we plodded on, managing to see some famous sights of London in the waning sunlight, which was quickly being replaced by a uniform layer of grayness. What little she did add to our conversation all started with, "So this one time me and me girls get together, and because I was right fucked up about something, we get so drunk, and then my friend right, she says let's have some fun..." Not only did she inherit the Kate Moss looks, she got the drug problems too. Swell.
By the evening I'm just about through with this girl, and Harry sympathetic as he was to my situation just ended up at odds with himself, trying to balance the undeniable fact that she is a complete strung out airhead with the sex he is anxious to have later that evening. At this point, feeling sorry for myself that I'd spent 40€ just to come and babysit an addict, I took control of the situation and sat us down while I ate several pieces of piping hot fried fish. Harry tucked in as well, but Alice just looked on glumly. Like an obese person who orders half the menu at a fast food joint then washes it down with a diet coke, I'm of the opinion that as long as you can roll and smoke a cigarette with one hand while talking on a cell phone, if you think something I'm eating is unhealthy you can SHUT THE FUCK UP.
After dinner the time had finally come for us to part ways; Alice was going to check in to a nice place in the Covent Gardens, right in the heart of London. On the 30 minute subway ride over all she could talk about was how great it was going to be to rack up a huge tab at her mini bar and not have to pay a cent. I, feeling the second wind of a marathoner rounding onto Boylston, even did my best to laugh along. We dropped her off without incident, and as soon as she was out of earshot I asked Harry where the hell he met her. "Oh, at a bar in Prague last year," was his reply. Figures.
Maybe fried fish isn't very filling, or maybe I felt cheated out of my due enjoyment thanks to the third wheel, but whatever it was we were both famished. Finding food in London near 11pm is harder than one might think, nonetheless we found an open Indian restaurant and settled into nice overpadded chairs. The vacuous silence left by her departure was actually a positive warmth that I intended to savor, so there wasn't much talking going on (who knows, maybe Harry was visualizing the sex he wasn't getting that evening) aside from ordering, until my phone buzzed.
It would be melodramatic of me to say "I knew this was going to happen" and yet Harry was a lot more surprised by the text message "Help call me I'm in deep shit-Alice" than I was. We learned from a halfway hysterical Alice that she was somehow at some cheap hotel in east London. Turns out her mom's friend was recruiting her for a job sexual in nature, and he sweet talked her into coming to London but once she got there he was all business. It might seem a bit cruel in retrospect, but the first thing we asked her was if she didn't mind waiting for us to finish our dinner. I suppose at this point we really didn't take her seriously. What made her so infuriating is her demonstrated inability to do absolutely anything. A conversation went something like this:
Me: Where are you?
Her: I don't know, a different place.
Me: How did you get there?
Her: He drove me.
Me: Are you alone?
Her: Yes.
Me: Ok, get out of there and get a cab back to our hotel.
Her: I don't have any money.
Me: Don't worry, we'll pay the cab when he arrives at the hotel.
Her: Ok.
(calls back 5 minutes later)
Her: How do you call a cab?
Sweet jesus. After 40 minutes, we'd hastily finished our dinners and seeing as she was in the exact same spot as she was when she called, we had a decision to make. Conscience stricken and fed up with dealing with her shit, we decided to take care of things properly. We called Alice and told her to stop trying to find a cab (harder than it should have been, given she hadn't been at all successful) because we were on the way. We went outside and flagged a cab. The cab told us that our only option to go that far out was to hire a "minicab" which charged by the hour. Twenty minutes later, we were in a nicely equipped Volvo minicab following the gradient to a seedier and seedier London. 10 minutes from our destination, I call Alice and tell her to gather her things and check out.
Arriving at the shack of a motel, I saw her through the window at the front desk. I overheard her arguing with the desk clerk over why she should have to pay extra for room service, and if she couldn't just put it on the bill of her room which was being paid by her mom's not so benevolent friend.
Me: Look, whatever it is I'll pay the bill, let's just go.
Her: I haven't packed yet, I was talking down here.
Me: Ok well go pack your things, I'll pay this off.
Her: Oh I haven't ordered anything yet, I was just wondering.
!????!!!?
We finally all pile back into the cab, and I insist on sitting up front so that Harry can sit with Alice in the back. Mostly though, I was just exhausted and every foot between myself and Alice was a golden foot. I finally felt a sense of mild gratification that in spite of spending over $200 we got this girl out of a risky situation. "So, what are you doing out here?" I become presently aware of the smiling Indian cab driver who was sitting on the passenger side driving the car. I explain my weekend trip and the excitement surrounding Alice who at that moment was oblivious due to the high school hanky panky going on in the back seat. He was a pleasant looking fellow, and I was appreciating the conversation until he asked, "So, you know after we drop your friends off do you want to get a drink?" I thought I'd misheard until he said, "Where are you staying? You can stay with me if you like."
At that moment I reflected on my weekend. I got into London at 3am Saturday morning just to find myself sexiled and out 90£, I spent the day with a cocaine addict who regaled me the whole day with stories of substance abuse, then ruined my evening with a wild adventure into the shady streets of London's east side escaping pimps, and finally just when I think it's over I get to be privy to adolescent petting in the back seat of a cab, with one of London's finest gay Indian cab drivers propositioning me up front. Fucking brilliant.
At least I didn't have to pay for my room the second night.
Kidding!
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