Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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2.8.05 Stay With Me - Speak To Me - Hold My Hand

The most beautiful phrase in the English language is "Fade Out", and I'll fight anyone who says different. You can trot out "I love you", that old bit of flim-flam, any time of day or night, to anything. But if you type "Fade Out", it means you've reached the end of 90 to 120 pages of blood and toil and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a commitment not to be taken lightly.

Sunday afternoon I was 20 pages shy of Fade Out, on that gorgeous Cresta Run glissando to the end, but I was also 48 hours shy of food. My stomach refused to suffer in silence any longer, and I was forced, grumbling and resentful, to leave my cave and trek up the hill to the Cafe of Crossed Destinies, purveyors of scrambled eggs and strange coincidences.

My first encounter with this place was at 7.30am on a Sunday when I was jazzed on too many cigarettes, a fine and late Saturday night, and a story rattling round my head so hard that I couldn't get properly to sleep; no, the night train didn't go through to dreamland, only as far as that odd fugue country on its borders, inhabited by imaginary characters hungry for conversation. No, I couldn't lie in bed any longer. I went out in search of caffeine. It was barely light and everywhere was closed. Everywhere, except the Cafe of Crossed Destinies.

I got an inkling of the cafe's strangeness when I bumped into a big ginger bloke on my way in, and nearly lost my whisper-thin grasp on sanity right then and there. There are certain things you really don't want to see at half seven on a Sunday morning when you're electric with insomnia, and Chris Evans is top of the list.

Weeks pass. Second visit to the Cafe: Derek Jacobi wanders in. I had seen him only the night before in Don Carlos, a performance so terrifying that I still shrank back as he walked by. Third visit: guy sits down next to me who I haven't seen since Hong Kong, and who is one of the few people from my university (a small one, and far away) I ever want to see again. Since then I've breakfasted with rogues and blowhards, fantasists and bums, and a goodly number of the local bourgeoisie.

The Cafe isn't a place for the faint-hearted. Anything can happen there, especially at the communal tables out on the pavement. But this day, I was a focused demon of preoccupation: serendipities be damned; give me eggs. My head was stuffed with thoughts about the screenplay. Was it too old-skool noir for modern audiences? Was the bit where X happens too subtle? Do the scenes in Vegas drag? Will people accept the incredibly dysfunctional (but to me, realistic) relationship between the two leads? Is my agent going to hate it, because all the violence is quiet and personal, rather than operatic action-explodo?

Not even the sound of my local's Sunday afternoon ragtime pianist playing "Lullaby of Birdland" could slow me down, and a day when I don't pause in the sunshine to give "Lullaby of Birdland" its due is a dire day indeed. I stomp on. Eggs, then home. Eggs, then home. Dum tiddly-tum. But it was sunny, and Sunday, and all the Cafe's pavement tables were full. Arse.

I swoop in on the only empty chair, at a small table already occupied by an old lady of matchstick proportions and cotton-wool coiffure. "Might I sit here?" She doesn't react. I move more into her field of view and repeat my question. She smiles, blinks apologetically, and cups her ear. It's almost painful. I at last get my question across, and she daintily motions a fragile, nearly translucent hand to the empty chair. Take it. She smiles again and I sit down.

She had sherbert. It's the cheapest thing on the menu. And she had it some while ago; the residue of the melted pink liquid was already starting to darken in the bottom of the glass. She had no reading material, just a small purse, and a nearly-empty Tesco bag.

I caught her eye and we smiled again. When the waitress delivered my eggs (oh eggs, how little there is that a cheese and mushroom omelette can't solve), she took away the old lady's sherbert glass and asked if there was anything else she wanted. It took three tries.

There was a palpable curtain of silence around her. She sat; the world rushed and eddied around her, always about three feet away, just out of reach. A preoccupied horse of an American girl wolfs down eggs on the other side of a cafe table, and it might as well be on the other side of the world. I recognised this silence; I had wrapped myself in it in Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, when I didn't speak the language and didn't know a soul. I felt all the meaner, then, for not trying to alleviate hers with a few friendly words, an offer to share my newspaper. Perhaps she was content in the sunshine by herself, underwater. Perhaps a chat would have been too tiring. Perhaps I feared I saw my future in her; perhaps she saw her past in me.

I finished my eggs and left, cursing myself for selfishness, for not listening to the stories sitting right next to me. She remained, blinking in the sunshine and looking out at England's Lane with motions both quick and hesitant, like a new-whelped bird who knew that soon enough, she would be beyond this confused and lonely place, and would fly.

I have not seen her since.

( 5:09 PM )

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