Chapter 17 – Heading North
Tarquin had been having a rather lonely time of late, since his relationship with Chantelle, an exotic dancer at Club Bonbon, had imploded more rapidly than he had expected. His optimism had faltered when it was apparent that Chantelle had no interest in helping him assemble some new flat-pack furniture from Ikea, and that they had argued about how to pronounce “Ikea” had not boded at all well. She did not even show any interest in his collection of Margaret Atwood novels! So it came as no surprise when Chantelle called time on things, and told him to stay the hell away from the club or there would be trouble big-time. This was bad news, because he had forked out for a year’s membership, and there was still ten months to go. But he knew that Chantelle knew some fearsome people there, so he was not going to take any chances.
On this particular morning, Tarquin had feigned collapse and lain prone for two or three minutes on the southbound platform of the Northern Line at Euston even though he had been heading east to be nearer his once upon a time Chinese concubine Li Mei Meng at her family home in Xiamen, Fujian Province, in the People’s Republic. His sense of direction had never been very good. Realising that no-one was going to come and offer him assistance, and that this method of meeting new people was proving to be spectacularly unsuccessful, he picked himself up and dusted himself down and checked to make sure that his copy of “Sonnets to Awfulness” by Rainy Marina Rilke had not fallen out of his coat pocket, which it had done on several occasions, as though it had been trying to escape to a better and more fulfilling life.
He had not heard from Li Mei Meng for several months; she was not replying to emails or WeChat messages. Tarquin worried that she may have fallen foul of the dastardly Chinese government. According to recent news reports, they had been clamping down on any displays of cheerfulness and the unnecessary use of cosmetics. Tarquin did not know if these reports were true. They sounded a trifle draconian, but these days you just don’t know, do you?
Deciding that the London Underground was not where he wanted to be, and that perhaps the time had come for him to seek pastures new, Tarquin abandoned his frankly idiotic plans to head to the Orient and instead made his way to the railway station that was above the ground and brought a ticket to the North of England. He had read somewhere about this land of milk and honey where the lasses were sturdy in a good way and enormous fun to be with, and where you could buy loads of things for almost no money, and he had often considered checking it out but had never gotten around to it. Now he had time a-plenty on his hands, and there was a vacancy in the paramour department, and so he thought, Why the hell not? So what if it meant learning a new language so he could talk to the Northern people and thereby conquer a heart or two? Accordingly, before very much longer, Tarquin was trying to work out how to buy a train ticket from a self-service machine that looked at him as if it couldn’t care less.
Conrad Titmuss
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