Nowhere People by Paulo Scott Page A

him; and it almost didn’t matter that he has made good use of this afternoon, the afternoon off from the Italian restaurant where he works preparing desserts, and has done his laundry for the week, and done his exercises in Gladstone Park and the stretching that was prescribed for him by the physiotherapist and, back home, after half an hour soaking in the tub, that he has put on a cool long-sleeved Dudalina shirt, from the time when he used to go around Porto Alegre in a suit, and a pair of jeans he’s just bought in Brixton; and it almost didn’t matter that he has taken the Tube into town, got out at Charing Cross station right by Trafalgar Square, walked to St Martin’s Lane, gone into Café Pelican, run right into Tom Waits at one of the smart tables in one of the most expensive establishments in Covent Garden, almost nothing mattered: the memory of Maína and his feeling of having messed up with her travel with him wherever he goes. There is no place to hide, there are no more fears about what the strips of LSD, the waxy pellets of hashish, the tubes of poppers being passed from hand to hand on Thursday nights at Heaven, the London nightclub, can do to his brain, the golden brain that needs to be quicker and more agile than that of any of his acquaintances, his competitors. There’s no more Porto Alegre, news from the unforgiveable provincialism of Porto Alegre, and there’s no longer the task of getting everything done by yesterday, nor the crappy proletarian revolution in Brazil. All it takes is a public transport pass, a one-month pass on the metrô , as the Brazilians call it, with the little wallet where they glue your three-by-four photo in the top right-hand corner to allow you to move around the central parts of town, and a few coins to buy a Twix and a Coke (Maína’s taste for Coke got him addicted) and that was that. He allowed everything he had once learned to be transformed into a great ignorance. And there, that’s where the urgency was. He sleeps, wakes, takes the Tube, works, fifteen-minute break, works, takes the Tube back, eats the sandwiches he’s usually made at the end of the shift, drinks a few shots of the spirits purloined from the bars where the others in the house – almost all of them bartenders – work, chats to whoever is awake (making conversation is the social responsibility of anyone who sleeps in the living room), does the washing up when it’s his turn to do the washing up, takes a shower in the adapted cubicle in the kitchen that takes fifty-pence coins and is much cheaper than the shower in the room with the bathtub which, besides being more expensive, is also for the collective use of everyone living on all four floors of the house, reads the newspapers that he picks up for free at the Tube stations, waits till he is absolutely sure that everyone has retired for the night, moves the coffee-table off the rug in the middle of the room, lays out the mattress, sleeps. Fabio, his Brazilian friend who works at Café Pelican, says that Tom Waits was only there to do an interview with a journalist from Time Out magazine. Tom Waits, tall and tanned, waving his arms about like an athlete, doesn’t look to him anything like the image that appears on the cover of his records that sell in their thousands in Brazil.
    Although he is recovering well, his leg still hurts, a lot.
    ‘Ah, mon cher monsieur ! Per’aps monsieur will ’ave anozzer leetle glass of our verrry expensif wine?’ Fabio kids around with him, catching Paulo at just the moment when he is watching Tom Waits and the journalist out the corner of his eye. ‘What’s up, Fabinho? Weren’t you heading out?’ asks Paulo. ‘So the thing is, man, Etienne, that anorexic fag, asked me to stay till it’s time to cash up,’ and, taking the nearly empty glass from Paulo’s hand, Fabio wipes the cloth over the granite surface of the bar. ‘You’re going to have to stay? Well then, take it easy.’ Paulo shifts position