Epilogue to The Interloper's Tale

At this point, after smashing a dent in the table and screaming about Germans, Jews, and Americans at the top of his voice, The Interloper’s friends finally came over from their table and, in very soft and calming voices, said, “Roger? It’s about time that you put down the jar and get back to the Uni, don’t you think?”

“Fuck off!” shouted The Interloper.

One of his friends, a man who looked like he stepped out of a Led Zeppelin picture, sighed and took out a black canvas bag. “I hate when you make us do this, Roger. I really do.”

“What—?”

The Led Zeppelin man then forced the bag over The Interloper’s head. The Interloper struggled for a moment, and then we heard soft snoring coming from inside.

“He thinks its night-time,” said another one of The Interloper’s friends.

They took him from underneath his arms and dragged him out of the pub, tipping the barman generously.

When they left, I took the seat previously occupied by The Interloper, and said, “Now what in green Hell was that?”

The Traveler, starry-eyed and beyond confused, said, “I have no idea. Frankly, I don’t think I want to know what goes on in that man’s mind. Knowing might just kill me.”

There is a special sort of silence one experiences after a tragedy. It is heavy, remorseless, and, usually, full of regret. In the wake of whatever it was The Interloper was saying, our party felt that silence full-force. In fact, we found ourselves unable to speak for the rest of the time we were in the pub. I imagine that the brute force of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism acted as a sort of kryptonite to everything we held dear and forced us to reboot, as it were. After about an hour of sitting still and drinking in silence, we filed out. The Traveler and The Student went back up to campus to browse through course material for a module they shared; The Writer mumbled something about going for a walk for a few hours; The Stalker left at some point without the rest of us noticing; and The Drunkard and I went to buy a very greasy, unhealthy food known as doner meat and chips.

The Interloper's Tale

“you can do that and—wait, why did I start talking weirdly?”

“Shut up,” said The Interloper, “I’m about to tell a story. Ooo, look at that, my voice has gotten all bendy and I only had three pints!”

There was once a river known as the River Thames. It was located in a magical land called London, which was once the seat of a glourious Empire that existed to keep the darkies in place.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted The Traveler.

“You take His Name in vain,” said The Interloper, “and I’ll kill you.”

Well, our story takes place a long time after the darkies got uppity and tossed the rightful rulers—my people, the British—out of their dark, spider-infested parts of the world. Now, in London, there was a man named Uncle Timothy FitzWilliam Patrick. We will call him Timothy for brevity’s sake. Timothy looked around him at the state of the world and didn’t like it one bit. Why, just last week, a curry shop opened up where there was once a good, God-fearing British pub called The Empire. Every day, Timothy would wake from his flat—owned by the money-grubbing Jews, he well knew—and despair.

One day, he was strolling down the Embankment—he didn’t have a job since the Indians snatched it away from him—and thinking about what retribution he and his friends in the God-fearing BNP could enact against the darkies. This was his daily routine. He would wake at eight o’clock, have some good, British Earl Grey tea, put in the good, British whole milk, put in some good, British cane sugar, and enjoy his breakfast of good, British fried eggs.  Then, he would read the only paper worth reading, The Daily Mail, and go for a walk down The Embankment, glaring at the people who, by divine mandate, should have been British subjects instead of that cheapened word: citizens.

Today, he passed a certain place in The Embankment walk where there was a ladder leading into the Thames. He assumed that it was there for some sort of maintenance project or some sort, but, as he would soon find out, he was dreadfully—and yet awesomely, supremely, and fantastically wrong.

“What in the Hell does that mean?” asked The Writer.

The Interloper leapt up from his chair and swung a fist at The Writer. He dodged. “Next time I’ll knock your fuckin kike nose in!”

As he walked by, he noticed a part of the river bubbling. “Well this is right odd, then,” he thought to himself. “Good British river like the Thames shouldn’t be bubbling like that.”

And then, bursting out of the water like some fish or something that bursts out of water, a submarine burst out of the water! It was the grandest thing Timothy had ever seen. Painted up like the Union Jack, flying the Union Jack at the top of whatever it is that pops up out of a submarine and from whence people come up and go, “Hello” at you. Out of the top bit, a man wearing a Royal Navy uniform popped out and went, “Hello!” at Timothy.

Timothy, doing the only thing he knew would be right proper, clicked his heels and said, “Hello!” right back at the man.

“Right!” said the man, whose name, it came out through conversation, was Captain Reginald St. Reginald Smythe. “We’re down a man, First Officer Turpington being shot out of the torpedo bay for saying that the Indians might not be so bad. How would you, citizen, like to come aboard and serve your country?”

Timothy didn’t need to think at all. “Sir, to refuse service would be nothing more than to spit in the face of the Queen, and I am no traitor, sir!”

“Jolly good!” said Captain Reginald St. Reginald Smythe. “Come aboard spit-spot and we’ll set you up with all the bits and bobs you need to be a proper submariner!”

And so Timothy climbed up the top bit of the submarine, climbed down the ladder after the Captain and beheld the most glourious sight he had ever seen. The interior of the submarine was completely painted up with murals of glourious British victories throughout the history of the Empire. From the Battle of Bunker Hill—where the British slaughtered the Yanks with not even a casualty—to the Siege of Delhi—where the British busted down the walls of that city just by thinking “God Save the Queen” at it—to the time where, graciously, the British gave up its Colonies to the undeserving darkies, even though it hurt the British.

“God save the Queen!” shouted The Interloper for no apparent reason. He then took a shot of Beefeater dry gin before continuing.

“Attention!” shouted the Captain, removing his hat and revealing his clean, chiseled, handsome British countenance. “We have a new mate aboard!”

“Righty-o!” shouted the rest of the crew, all chiseled handsome British faces, and not a lick of a homosexual among them.

“Pluffles!” shouted the Captain.

A shorter man, six-five—for all of the crew were between six-five and six-ten, all being proper examples of military men—strode up with confidence, saluted and said, “Yes, sir!”

“Pluffles,” said the Captain, “this here is First Officer Timothy FitzWilliam Patrick. He will be in charge of hunting down the darkie submarines in the Thames, and will be your immediate superior officer.”

Pluffles saluted the Captain, clicked his heels, turned, and saluted Timothy. “God save the Queen!”

“God save the Queen!” roared Timothy. This was, easily, the proudest moment of his life. It beat out the birth of his son by a long shot.

Within an hour, First Officer Timothy was in full military parade regalia—for the officers of the HMS Awesome did not dress in anything other than the best and most impressive uniforms.

“The HMS Awesome?” asked The Drunkard.

“Shut your bloody pie-hole, you Colonial bastard!” The Interloper shouted in such a shrill, loud voice that the pub was silenced for a good three minutes.

The first sign of action came in half an hour when, while cruising the Thames near Big Ben, Sonarman Copperpot noticed an American submarine blaring hideous rock music through the water. First Officer Timothy, duly enraged by the Colonials’ audacity, shouted a string of obscenities not fit for common usage, and said to Pluffles, “Pluffles, I order you to blow those Yankee-doodle-dandies out of the water!”

Just then, the HMS Awesome received a radio transmission from the American ship, USS Queerboat. It ran as follows, “Please, Mr. Strong British Man, don’t kill us, for we are all American fairies and cannot defend ourselves.”

“NO MERCY, MR. PLUFFLES!” First Officer Timothy shouted.

“Aye aye, sir!”

The Americans were then killed to the very last one. The crew of the Awesome celebrated by drinking standard-issue Navy Rum.

Not half an hour later, the Awesome was on the other side of the Thames and spotted a Nazi U-Boat that was thought to be sunk in 1944, but, due to them being sneaky Kraut bastards, had been loitering in the Thames the entire time, taking up space that belonged to the British. “Well, well, well,” said First Officer Timothy.

The Germans then hailed the Awesome. “Vell hello, English svine,” their captain said.

“You bastards,” responded Captain Smythe.

“Vee are here to take avay your precious London, you Jewish svine!”

“They dare call us Jews?!” shouted Timothy. “KILL THE FILTHY JERRY ROTTERS!”

Then they blew the U-Boat out of the water, sending it flying back to Godless Germany. They celebrated by drinking standard-issue Navy Rum.

The Prologue to The Drunkard's Tale

“I don’t see why not,” I said. And, in truth, it seemed like a great idea. Over the past week, I’d been thinking about our contest, the two tales we’d already heard, and which was stronger. Though the question of who would be going next hadn’t entered my mind more than a couple times, it was really an important question.

The Writer, whose twitches had subsided to a much more manageable level, took a sip from his ale and said, “Who’s it going to be? I can always go next, perhaps I can weave a yarn about—”

“No,” the four of us said in unison.

The Writer shrugged his shoulders and glanced furtively around the pub.

“How about you?” asked The Traveler to The Drunkard.

“Me?”

“Yeah. You’re in journalism, so I’d expect that you’ve got some interesting things to say. Doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s completely fictional, to be honest.”

“Now hold on,” said The Writer. “Doesn’t have to be completely fictional? I thought that we were telling stories that only happen in the imagination! That were only brought to us on the wings of the Muses! To expect—”

“Goddamnit,” said The Student, leaning over to me, “is this guy a fiction writer or a poet?”

“—that we would interject our own, base, unworthy lives into this contest is laughable! I should say—”

The Drunkard smacked The Writer upside the head with his open palm. “Shut up. You’re telling me that bullshit you said on the plane didn’t happen to you?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying, and I would appreciate it if you would cease attacking me—”

“When I attack you, you will be laid up for a good week and a half. Son,” the Drunkard continued, “what you told us was so laden with pretentious and angst-ridden bullshit that to say it was fictional is a lie on par with saying Saddam Hussein was a direct threat to the United States.”

The Writer mumbled into his drink and took a swig.

“Fuck it,” said The Drunkard, “I’ll give you a story. It might not be the best I have to offer—on account of you all just now asking me to tell you one—but it’ll be better than this shmuck’s by a long run. When I was working on a paper in my senior year at Cumberland Rift University, I was sent away to follow the Republican candidate on his election circuit. Now, they gave me an allowance of a thousand dollars to spend on—”

“Ey lads, what’s going over here?” asked a man who was rapidly swaggering towards us from the other side of the pub. He was tall, about six-five. He had short-cropped brown hair, tanned skin, the build of a body-builder, and wore dark jeans and a black t-shirt that had the words “Fuck Heidi” ironed-on in pink. “You telling stories, yeah?”

“I, uh,” I said.

“Well, yeah,” said The Traveler.

“Wicked. You know,” he said, pushing The Student out of his chair and taking his place (I got up, gave The Student my place, and leaned against the wall), “I’m a pretty good storyteller myself.” He cleared his throat. “Comes from watchin the telly most of the day, don’t it?”

“I see,” said The Traveler. “Well—”

“Tell ya what,” the man continued, “why don’t I tell you Yanks a story, show you what’s done.”

The Traveler and The Writer exchanged a quick glance that said, “This man can easily snap us in twain, we should probably ease him out of this.”

“Well, I don’t think that—”

Our First Week

The first week passed largely without any sort of incident. It was what was called ‘Freshers Week,’ which meant all of the University’s staff were extremely, obscenely, and disgustingly cheerful to new students—postgraduates included. An example: One night, The Drunkard and I were returning from one of the bars on campus, having consumed, roughly, half a barrel of Guinness between us, when a middle-aged portly man we vaguely recognized from the International Office (the agency set up to help out international students) leapt out from the bushes with six cartons of orange juice and a gallon of water in a bag. “You’ll need this to not get a hangover!” he screamed.

The Drunkard stumbled backwards with a shout and I, much more prone to fright than he, screamed my head off, which made me dizzy, which then made me vomit on the man. Unflappable Brit he was, the man simply said, “Oh, well that’s a bit of a bother, isn’t it?” He then took out a handkerchief and wiped off the sick. “Oh well, no worries. It’s happened a few times tonight.”

The Drunkard swaggered up to the man, poked him in the chest (once again, the man, like most of the English, was taller than the two of us, so The Drunkard had to give himself a little bit of a jump to reach him), and said, “What for doing this are you? Scaring the shit out!”

“Ah,” remarked the man, “right. Well, do take the liquids, it will help you in the morning—better yet if you drink them as soon as you get to your flats! Don’t want to miss the day tomorrow, it’s suppos—”

The Drunkard let loose a scream of rage and punched the man square in the jaw, took the bags, and ran. I’m not proud to say that I did the same (ran, that is), but I did—judgment, as you know, is clouded easily by drink. At any rate, the man didn’t recognize us; I guess we had some shadows on our faces that night.

For that first week, we five didn’t see much of each other, what with running around and taking care of administrative duties. The exception to this was The Drunkard and myself. Apparently, on the second day, the French nihilists set an American flag on fire and hung it outside the kitchen window. I was in the city centre at the time, and managed to miss this display of anti-Americanism, but The Drunkard, cynic though he was, had a part of his personality that truly loved America. Upon seeing the flag aflame and hanging out the window (The Drunkard claimed that the nihilists were cackling like some sort of witch’s coven, but I’m not certain as to the veracity of this statement), my friend rushed inside and, according to him, “put one of the emos in a state worse than Marie Antoinette.”

 So, after that, he didn’t see much of the French nihilists, and we went around the bars on campus. He would try to chat up girls, fail most of the time, succeed some times, and slowly slip into an alcohol-produced haze, only to pass out around four in the morning and repeat the process the next day. The rest of our group had a much less eventful week. The Traveler slept with representatives of each nation in Western Europe and was in the best mood out of all of us. The Writer… well, I’m honestly not too sure about The Writer other than to remark that there were a few times I saw him with a black eye. The Student realized that his flat was the equivalent of a pigsty on the second day and disappeared into the recesses of the library for six hours a day, pouring over volumes of literary criticism to avoid having to see the beginnings of evolution in various pots, pans, and bowls in his kitchen. Once I saw The Stalker being escorted across campus by two members of the security force (Campus Watch), and upon asking him why he was detained, he told me it was because they didn’t appreciate art. I did not pursue the matter further.

Towards the end of the week, we all met up at a pub in the city centre called The Sub-Pope’s Flock (with a hanging picture of a midget in a pope outfit tending to sheep) across from the Cathedral Gate. It was an overcast day—as they tended to be in Canterbury—and the city was, as usual, filled with tourists and European children on trips to the city from the Continent. The Drunkard and I sat outside in strangely comfortable wooden chairs, our ales in front of us, tossing balled-up pieces of paper at the children, waiting for the rest of our party to arrive.

“Hey,” The Drunkard said, “five quid to the first one to peg that pigeon on top of the memorial.”

In the center of the square in front of the Cathedral Gate, there was a large memorial dedicated to the Kent divisions who fought in World War Two. Like many English memorials, it had a column tipped with what was once a shining bronze something or other. And, it being a statue in the middle of a city, it was a haven for pigeons. The top of the spire was about twenty feet above us, and it would be quite a difficult task to hit the pigeon with a paper ball, but I was certain that with God on my side, I could not help but win.

After our first salvo, the pigeon caught on to what we were doing and flew off into the grey sky. Then, it began raining in a light mist, the sort of precipitation one sees in a mist tent in an American theme park. “It would appear,” I said, “that God is on the side of the pigeons.”

The Drunkard grunted, chucked a ball at a German teenager in a half hearted manner, and started humming “Deutschland Über Alles.” We were saved from any reenactment of Call of Duty by the approach of The Traveler. “Hey, maties,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Meh,” I answered.

“Pas mal,” answered The Drunkard.

“Hey,” I said to The Drunkard, “the French are rubbing off on you.”

“Watch your trap, yid.”

“Right,” said The Traveler, “how about we go inside before this actually turns into rain? The Writer’s on his way down from campus—sounded like he drank a pot of coffee earlier this afternoon, so we should see him running around like Sonic in a couple minutes—The Student called and said that he’s on the coach into town, and The Stalker is, in all probability, waiting for us inside, sitting at a table in a dark corner.”

The Drunkard and I took up our pint glasses, disposed of the rest of the pieces of paper, and followed The Traveler inside the pub. The inside of the pub was dim; the building was erected in the sixteenth century and, from what I could tell, the long line of owners and landlords had not bothered to install electrical lights. The interior, therefore, was lit completely by candles and oil lamps, lending the pub the appearance that one had stepped into the past. Hanging from the ceiling and the rafters were bundles of hops (according to The Student, hops had the effect of making people drowsy simply by inhaling their aromas; this explains why going to The Sub-Pope’s Flock to do work invariably led to a nap or drunkenness), and the walls were decorated with old posters of railway and beer advertisements. There were about twenty tables in the place, with two to four chairs at each. Parallel to the right wall (when coming from the entrance) there was the bar with five cask ale pulls and ten taps for other beers and ciders. As we walked in, we spotted The Stalker sitting at a table in the back corner of the pub, his hood pulled up over his head. “Traveler,” The Drunkard said, “you’re a smart guy, you know that?”

The Traveler bowed.

As The Drunkard and I already had our drinks, we made our way to the back and sat in a couple of chairs next to The Stalker. It was around six o’clock, and the pub was fairly busy—about half of the tables were full of men and women—and students, who deserve their own qualifier when out in the Real World—and there was a warm hum of conversation.

“Howdy, kid,” said The Drunkard.

“Hello, Drunkard,” said The Stalker, sipping from a cider. “How was the chicken you ate last night? It smelled good. Did I detect a hint of lemon?”

The Drunkard cleared his throat. The Stalker would occasionally do this to each of us; ask us how dinners and dates went, that is. Had The Stalker not been an inherently eerie individual, we would have joked that he was ninja in all of its glory, but, as it were, whenever he made such a comment, hairs stood on end and nightmare fuel was created. “Pretty good,” said The Drunkard.

“You might want to put the oven on one hundred degrees next time. It might make the chicken a bit juicier than at one-twenty.” The Stalker took another slow, loud sip from his cider.

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

The Traveler joined us then with a loud, contented sigh as he plopped down in the chair and laid his Guinness on the table. “So, what’s new?”

“We were just discussing The Drunkard’s meal last night,” said The Stalker.

“That so?”

The Drunkard shrugged at The Traveler.

The Writer then walked into the pub, let out a boisterous laugh when he saw us, took out his mobile phone, checked the time, put it back in the front pocket of his corduroy jacket, laughed again and rushed over. “My friends, mes amis, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” he sat down, tapped his fingers on the table, and laughed again. Clearly, this was a man who had no regard as to the dangers of over-caffeination. “How’s things?”

“Not as good as you clearly are,” said The Drunkard.

“Ah, well, what can I say? There are some things in life one simply needs twelve cups of coffee to embrace.” He leaned forward. “For instance, I saw God on the Eliot Footpath!”

“No kidding?” asked The Traveler.

“No!” The Writer smacked the table with a fist. “I would not joke about the metaphysical! It’s not something you fuck with, my friend!”

“You’re absolutely right,” said The Drunkard in the most sober and calm voice I’d ever heard him use. “Hey, here’s an idea: How about you go get a beer. My treat,” he laid down three one pound coins. “The Doom Bar is really, really good,” he tapped his glass as an example.

The Writer studied him for a moment. “You and the barman aren’t in cahoots, are you?”

“Nope. In fact, he couldn’t stand me when I ordered from him earlier.”

The Writer let out a triumphant laugh, took the coins, and dashed to the bar.

“That was really nice of you,” said The Traveler.

The Drunkard shrugged. “That kid’s going to make his own heart explode with that much coffee.”

“Wait a sec, I thought you and he had this whole disliking-each-other thing going on.”

“Well yeah, but everyone needs a nemesis, just as they need someone to be around. Without that nemesis, man, they get too content with life.”

The Stalker chuckled. “The Writer reminds me of a friend I had in undergrad.”

I can assure you that we were all shocked that The Stalker had a friend in the last five years, but we let him go on.

“The kid went absolutely mental after drinking a pot of coffee and reading some Nietzsche. Philosophy and caffeine should never be mixed, my friends. Never,” he punctuated this admittedly wise statement with another loud sip of the cider.

The Student then walked in the pub wearing a black blazer, black button-down, jeans, and dress shoes, ordered a drink alongside The Writer, and the two sat down. The Student was sweating profusely and a vein throbbed in his forehead.

“You all right?” asked The Traveler.

The Student held up a finger, took a sip from his Kronenbourg, and sighed. “I asked this girl out a little bit ago, right?”

“Well hell, it’s about time,” said The Drunkard.

“Now, hold on. Turns out that the tall guy she was walking with—who I assumed was her brother on account of they looked damn similar—was her boyfriend. I have never ran so fast in dress shoes in my whole life. Luckily, I managed to get on a bus while the guy stood outside, shaking his fist and screaming at me in Italian.” He shook his head, drank from his beer, and said, “The horror. The horror.”

“Barman!” shouted The Drunkard. “Whiskey for my friend with the near-death experience!”

To his credit—and I doubt many barmen would do the same in England—the barman poured a single of Jack and brought it to the table. The Drunkard, of course, tipped generously.

The Student knocked it back in one go and coughed. “Ah, Jack, how I missed you.”

             “Right,” said The Traveler, “we’re all here. Shall we continue our contest?"

Our Arrival in Canterbury

I was awoken by a horrible screeching sound, the likes of which I had only ever heard in my worst nightmares. I jolted up, felt my face contorted into a look of sheer terror. The screech turned into a high-pitched whistle, which finally turned into a person’s voice announcing “Canterbury bus station. All for Canterbury.”

I stood, rubbed my eyes, and saw the bus driver dash out the front door, followed by half of the people on the bus. In fact, out of the ten of us getting off at the station, half of us were English, and the other half were made up of my party. The Brits dashed off, the side compartment flung open and, just over the top of the hatch, I saw baggage being tossed out of the underside of the bus with reckless abandon. I turned to the Traveler and said, “They don’t mess around with this stuff, do they?”

He shook his head, “No, I think we’d better leave before—”

The hatch slammed shut and the bus driver dashed back on the bus. He would have been an otherwise harmless-looking man with his comb-over and pudgy exterior, if it were not for the burning red eyes with which he looked at us. “What the hell are you still doing on the coach? You leaving for Canterbury, or not?”

“Yeah, but—” said the Writer.

“Then get the bloody hell off the goddamn coach before I shit-kick each and every one of you Yanks!”

When a man with hatred-fueled red eyes tells you to do something, then you do it without regard to social conventions. We fled the bus, and in the process, I believe The Stalker may have knocked an elderly woman unconscious with his laptop bag. The action may or may not have been accidental. As soon as the last of us—The Student, if I remember correctly—stepped off the bus, it flew into reverse and backed over a brown piece of luggage the size of a foot locker. “Oh for the love of God,” remarked the Writer.

“What?” asked The Traveler.

The Writer ran over to the now-basically-cut-in-half bag, unzipped it, and uttered a string of obscenities that are not fit for print. “My first editions!”

The Drunkard, now sober thanks to the restful sleep on the coach, walked over and went, “Hmmm,” in a sagely fashion.

“For Whom The Bell Tolls!” shouted The Writer. “It’s ruined!”

The Drunkard bent down and picked up a cloth-bound book, bent in half by the weight of a National Express coach. “Yup. It’s done for.” He tossed it in a nearby rubbish bin. “Now what would possess you to bring—” he paused for a moment, counted under his breath, “twenty rare first editions across the Atlantic Ocean in checked luggage?”

The Writer looked up at The Driver, tears in his eyes. “They’re my lucky charms.”

“Ah yes,” The Drunkard nodded. “Normal people have rabbits’ feet, or shamrock lighters. You have volumes worth five grand a pop.” He patted The Writer’s head. “You’re a special kind of stupid, you know that?”

After The Drunkard got his jab in, we helped The Writer clean up the corpses of his books and hailed a taxi.

The taxi ride was uneventful. We took in the scenery, ooed and aahed at the bits where buildings looked especially old and English-y. For the most part, I just watched the cab’s meter. I noticed that the method in which a taxi meter behaves does not change between countries. They operate by laws which are inexplicable to the layman, their functions likely defined by some fel science birthed by Satanists at the advent of the automobile. At least, that’s the way I understand them. The Traveler could probably tell you the actual method by which they work—and, indeed, I think he once explained it to me—but honestly, I would much rather have some sort of absurd explanation that makes mundane things more interesting.

The cab stopped in the dormitory’s parking lot (which, as we were on British turf, I shall henceforth refer to as a college and car park, respectively) and we filed out, paid the driver, and looked around us. The college was made up of nine flat blocks arranged around a central building. At one end, there was a lecture hall attached to a few seminar rooms that were used for class meetings. There were two blocks in a building, and two of the buildings faced each other with a sort of courtyard stuck in the middle. The courtyard was sprinkled with trees confined in square bush and mulch displays, and, as I noticed then and confirmed later, the courtyard mainly functioned as a smoking lounge for the frankly inordinate amount of Greeks and Turkish smokers. (It seemed to me that half of the Master degree students were Greeks, but I am prone to hyperbole.)

We entered the Pavilion, went through the motions of checking-in—made all the worse for not having a firm grasp of language due to being jetlagged—collected our keys and dispersed to our various flats. Aside from my own account, all of the following is collected from what my companions told me about their living conditions. We shall commence with The Traveler’s conditions, for they were the most normal.

He lived in the fifth block of flats, on the first floor, in the room marked A—which happened to be across from the entrance to the flat. Because of this, he was awoken promptly at 8:20 each morning by one of his flatmates, who treated being a student as if it were a nine to five job. He, like the rest of us, lived in flats of six people. His five flatmates were made up of two British men, a German woman, and two women from Hong Kong. They were in various courses—ranging from international relations to biology—were courteous, kept the common areas clean, and, for the most part, weren’t too loud. (According to The Traveler, the Brits drank a bottle of whiskey before each Chelsea match and became belligerently drunk; other than that, they were genial individuals.)

The Student lived in the fourth block of flats with five Chinese people—two male, three female—from Beijing. In the course of the full year we lived in Canterbury, The Student never developed the ability to understand their accents. As such, with such thick accents, bordering on farce, The Student, when he was in his flat, hid himself in his room and spent most of the time desperately trying to get into contact with his friends and get out of the flat. Whenever he talked about the living conditions in his flat, The Student would shudder and describe such an unsanitary Hell that would make any self-respecting obsessive-compulsive kill themselves. The Student’s academic success through the year was probably due to the fact that he never had contact with his flatmates, and whenever another man would have been relaxing in his home, The Student would be pouring through texts and manuscripts in the library and the Cathedral Archives.

The Writer lived with three Greek women and two German men in the seventh block of flats. He didn’t speak about them often, but there were more than a few times when I would be going for an evening walk, look up into their kitchen window, and see him pressed against the panes of glass, cringing in fear of a shouting Greek woman. I’m not sure what he did to precipitate such altercations, mainly because what words I could hear were in Greek. The Germans, as I understood them, didn’t have a high opinion of him. They were very tall individuals with blonde hair and stark blue eyes. One—Stephan—habitually wore suit jackets as blazers and looked as if he were a professor; he was in Comparative Literature and the other, Will, who wore thick glasses and perpetually looked like he was in need of a deep cleansing bath was researching for his PhD in biometric security.  Once, I asked them why, and Stephan responded with the following.

“When he first asked us where we were from, we responded that we were from the Eastern part of the country. He didn’t speak for a couple moments, cleared his throat, and asked us how we felt about the color red. We laughed, thinking this was an American joke, but as it turned out, he was not joking. Now, we try to avoid him as much as possible.”

Will said something in German, and Stephan nodded, “Ja.” He turned to me, and continued, “Then he made an incredibly awkward joke about recompense for the Holocaust. We walked away that instant.”

“Well, understandable,” I responded.

The Stalker never spoke of his flatmates and, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure that they knew his room was occupied.

The Drunkard, God bless him, lived in the first block of flats in a situation that, for him, could only be described as an existential Hell. He lived with five French nihilists who habitually wore black sweaters, berets, and tight jeans, smoked long cigarettes twenty-two hours a day (The Drunkard once actually counted this and determined that they slept only three hours a day), and ate only plain baguettes. They filled the kitchen with smoke—after dismantling the smoke detector, of course—and talked about the miseries of life all day.

“You want to know what I live with?” asked The Drunkard, one evening when we were out in the courtyard. “Last night, I go in to make a pizza. One of the frogs comes up to me, blows smoke in my face, and says in an accent so thick I cannot duplicate it, ‘You fucking American, you think you own the world. You can take her, she is shit.’ Then he walks off into the hallway. Confused, I blink a couple times, put the pizza in the oven, and turn around. Well three of the fuckers are standing there in the kitchen just staring at me, smoking those goddamn cigarettes. We sit there, staring at each other, for a full minute, like we’re in some Sergio Leone movie, then they file back out of the kitchen, talking about me in French.”

“You speak French?”

“Enough to recognize the words ‘American’ and ‘shithead.’”

For my own part, my living situation was such that I could not, in good conscience, have any complaints. There were sometimes some messes in the kitchen, but when is there not a mess in the kitchen? I was in the second block of flats. I lived with an Indian man named Jay, a Greek man named Zaf (I never learned his full name), and three women from Hong Kong. Jay was in an IT support course, Zaf was in a biometric security course with a couple other Greeks, and the three Hong Kong women (with whom, admittedly, I never really had a protracted conversation beyond trying to find out their names and being told they were Katie, Catherine, and Janice) were in actuary science, human resources, and sociology. Like The Traveler’s, my flatmates were all genial and realized that we were all in the same boat—generally speaking—when it came to being in a foreign country away from friends and family. We shared meals, went out together, and basically tried to make life as easy as it could be.

We Arrive in England

The last time I was in England, I had made my way in through Gatwick airport—a large enough beast in its own right. This time, however, I found myself in Heathrow. In fact, none of us had been through Heathrow airport, save the Traveler. So, when we exited the plane, made our way through the confusingly long departure gate, onto a train leading to Customs, and then finally into the Customs area, only to see a queue made up of what seemed to be four hundred people, we each had our own negative reactions.

The Student: “What is this, Kafka?”

The Drunkard: “Glad I got some whisky on the plane.” He then took a one-ounce bottle out from his pocket and took a swig.

The Stalker: [Incoherent muttering]

The Writer: “I can tell you another story, if you want.” The Drunkard answered this question for us all, “When I have a bout of insomnia, then I’ll come to you.”

Myself: “Vey iz mir.”

The Traveler simply took out a paperback copy of a book called Last Chance to See and started reading.

It would be an understatement to say that I was disappointed by the ensuing half an hour. It would be even more of an understatement to say that I was displeased by the fact that it took an additional twenty minutes, on top of the half hour that found us only halfway through the queue, to get to the front of the line. Everyone in the queue was just as unhappy with their circumstances, and registered their impatience in at least fifteen different languages. I wish that there were some interesting event—a man in the queue going insane from boredom and bumrushing the Customs agents, for example—that I could tell you about, but aside from one man who was coughing and sweating a superb amount, there was nothing of interest.

We passed through Customs fairly quickly—it is amazing how little hassle one gets when one has a visa—and found ourselves past the bizarre no-man’s land of an international airport, safely inside the British borders. That is, most of us were safely inside. I looked around and noticed that one of our party were missing. I turned to the Traveler and said, “Where is The Stalker?”

That ever-watchful individual replied: “He was detained by a very strong-looking man in camouflage.”

Certainly this was a bad thing. If the Drunkard, who had consumed eight ounces of Jack Daniel’s whilst in the queue wasn’t detained solely on account of his reeking of alcohol, then surely The Stalker must have done something atrocious that showed up on his record. “Um.”

The Drunkard blinked. “Hey, Quiet Kid’s gone.”

“Just as well,” said The Writer, “he is a thoroughly frightening individual.”

The Drunkard responded with what could have been mistaken as an impression of Beaker from The Muppets. “Listen, putz,” he said, walking up to The Writer. Now, we were all roughly the same height—five-nine to five-eleven—and so seeing a man roughly the same height as another man, walking up to the second man and attempting to tower over the second man in a drunken haze is a sight worth seeing. But, as it turns out, The Drunkard had learned some tactics of intimidation from wherever it was that he had been, and managed to cow The Writer. “One of our guys,” continued The Drunkard, “falls behind in battle, we don’t fuckin say ‘oh leave him behind.’ You get me? We’re a platoon.” He jabbed The Writer in the chest. “We’re a fuckin squad. The Three Musketeers.”

“Five Musketeers,” I put in.

“Right,” he said, “Five Musketeers. All for one and one for all. You get me, son?”

“I’m the same age as you,” The Writer said.

The Drunkard slapped The Writer, the sound reverberating across the Customs Hall and briefly calling attention to us. “Pull yourself together!” shouted The Drunkard.

Now a man in a police uniform approached us. “Help you, gentlemen?”

The Traveler put on his most winning smile. “Everything’s fine here, officer. Just having a little reenactment of Abbot and Costello.”

The officer, who at that moment seemed like he was half a foot taller than the rest of us, studied us with the look of cold British justice in his eyes. He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I always loved ‘Who’s On First.’ Can never understand bloody baseball, but it’s a brilliant bit.” He straightened up and tipped his hat to The Traveler. “Right, carry on.”

After the officer walked off, The Traveler turned to The Drunkard and said, “Friend, I know that you have strong emotions when it comes to putting The Writer in his place, and God knows that sometimes he can be downright infuriating and I’d like to bash his head in—”

“Hey—” said The Writer.

The Traveler smacked him over his head with his book. “Sh. But you have to keep it down sometimes. However,” he said, clearing his throat, “I agree. All for one, and one for all.” As we had arranged ourselves in a rough circle, he put his hand in the middle.

I followed suit, as did The Drunkard, and The Student.

The Writer hesitated a moment, said, “Fucking hated that book,” and put his hand in the center.

At that moment, The Stalker walked up to us, blew some hair away from his eyes, and said, “What?”

“We’ve just made a pact,” said The Student. “All for one, and one for all.”

The Stalker studied us for a moment. Dear Lord, I thought, his eyes are actually black. Then he reached into his right eye, pulled out a contact, revealing brown eyes for just a moment, rubbed his eye, and put the contact back in. Ah, I thought again, there we go. “Whatever,” he said with a shrug, walking towards the baggage claim.

I would later find out that, over the course of a hundred years, the time it took to travel from London to Canterbury remained the same. Initially, I was shocked—this slowly moved to confusion, then to anger, then to acceptance. All I knew upon leaving Heathrow (aside from the initial awe at the sheer size of the airport) was that it would take five hours to get to Canterbury from London. As I was planning on avoiding jet-lag as much as possible, I set about trying to find a decent cup of coffee to keep me awake. As it turned out, finding coffee was actually quite easy. The trick of the matter was that getting a good cup of coffee was incredibly difficult.

We had an hour and a half layover in London Victoria coach station. When we arrived, I asked my companions if they would like a cup of coffee. The Drunkard responded with “only if it’s Irish,” laughed, and took a drink from an ounce bottle of vodka pulled from his coat, so he was out. The Writer said something about not drinking coffee without having his notepad around, and refused. The Traveler grinned and shook his head, “oh, you naïve fool.” So I assumed he was against it. Only The Student said he would go, so we left our bags with our friends and wandered out of the coach station.

The coach station is never a place of excitement or interest, much less at ten o’clock in the morning on a Sunday. The only people out on the streets had a very dejected look about them, as if the gray sky had made its way into their very souls and become a part of their being. (A British friend of mine would later tell me that Londoners are actually friendly people; they just really, really hate their jobs.) For a second, the thought that I should run around posing as a psychiatrist and passing out prescriptions for Prozac flitted through my mind with wings made of concern for my fellow man. The moment passed, though, as a pain shot through my head. I had gone without coffee for far too long.

We walked down the street, not really making note of the historical buildings all around us—quite disturbingly really, considering I had spent most of my life wanting to see even a square foot of this metropolis. We passed two teenagers wearing track suits, holding gold cans marked Carlsberg Special, arguing about who owed who a fiver. I made momentary eye contact with one of them—the taller of the two—and he looked back at me, said, “Oi mate, you startin’ or sumfin? Wanna ‘ave a go?”

I was not fully aware of my surroundings. Usually, when I run across another person acting hostilely towards me, I feel abject terror, curl into a ball on the street, and wait for the danger to pass. However, right now, I blinked at the man. Some part of me, some subconscious instinct which knew that a good Brooklyn accent is a universal sign of don’t-fuck-with-me-as-I-have-killed-a-man, and said, puffing out my chest, and cracking my knuckles. “What the fuck you sayin, kid? You wanna fuck with this? You don’t wanna fuck with this, I’ll bust your fuckin head in right on this Godamm street so fast that your fuckin girlfriend here will piss her pants. Ever seen what happens in a lynching? Son I will wreck your shit harder than an L.A. cop on Rodney Fuckin King.” Then I surprised myself by pushing the tall man—he had a good six inches on me—into the street.

His friend, the shorter one, turned and ran faster than anyone I have seen outside of a track meet. The taller of the two, who had burst into tears by this point, ran inside of a pub. I saw him cower in the window, cracked my neck, and continued down the street.

The Student, who had spent the whole of the encounter watching me with amazement, stood still for a moment, finally recovered himself, and then ran to catch up, “Holy Hell,” he said, “what was that?”

The events of the situation played themselves back in my mind’s eye and, a bit shocked myself, I said, “I have no idea.”

We walked on for a few moments, discussing whether or not such a feat could be replicated witht the same results, when we managed to find a chain coffee store. It was similar to Starbucks, but the color scheme was different and, for me, this was enough to mean quality. We walked in, ordered two Americanos to go, paid, walked out, sipped the drinks, and spat them out in unison. Slapstick comedians the world over would have been overcome with jealousy due to the flawless execution in our coffee spit take.

The Student, who was a much more pampered coffee drinker than I, turned a shade of green I had only seen in comic books. “Good God,” he said, “what is this?”

I sniffed the coffee. It smelled normal, even quite good. “I don’t know, but I think that we are going to have to set up a trade route with the States in order to get some decent coffee.” I tossed the cup into a rubbish bin and walked back to the coach station. The Student followed suit—eventually.

I sat down next to The Traveler, who asked, “So how was the coffee?”

“We managed to perform a perfectly synchronized spit-take. Abbot and Costello are rolling in their graves in envy, I believe.”

The Traveler nodded. “Yeah, they don’t know how to make a good cup of coffee over here. Something to do with the Empire, I think.” He shrugged. “I think there’s actually a good shop in Canterbury, though. I’ll show you it some time.”

The bus pulled up shortly, we boarded, and I promptly fell asleep

The Epilogue to The Writer's Tale

I have to admit, after The Writer said that Chopin could eat an asshole for the second time, there was a safety valve of sorts that shut off in my mind. The Writer kept talking, babbling on about despair, angst, and how The Arcade Fire was terrible. Myself, I was so bored I started stealing glances at our companions.

The Traveler fought off sleep. His head drooped, jerked back up, he cleared his throat, did it all again.

The Stalker, to his sparse credit, kept on listening to The Writer babble on. His face turned redder by the minute, and, I think, if you had noticed his hands, you would have seen them clinching and unclinching at roughly the rate at which his heart beat.

The Student, that respectable academic, gave up even the pretense of paying attention, sat back down in his seat and began reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling.

The Drunkard attempted to refrain from bursting into laughter every few seconds. While he succeeded—for the most part—a rare chuckle escaped his mouth from time to time.

And, his audience’s attention wavering more than a wheat field in a high wind, The Writer continued on.

I could not tell you how long he went on, but it was a while. He was so interested in his story, in the nuances of how to tell it (I had never seen anyone pause for about twenty seconds to really drive home what would be blank space on a piece of paper), that he completely forgot about his audience. In essence, he was talking to himself. He was telling a story to hear his own voice. You might say that he was telling the story as an exercise in storytelling theory rather than with the intent of telling a decent story.

He went on, and I realized what The Drunkard had realized. This was a man for whom Art was more important than Creativity. While I did not particularly agree with the way The Drunkard registered his dislike of The Writer (for I have long been a believer in the wonders of civility), I now understood exactly why it was that he felt how he did. I started daydreaming. The center of my ruminations was how I could come upon the funds to commission the construction of an X-Wing—for you see, it had been a dream of mine since childhood.

At some point, The Writer stopped talking. He finally looked around him and made note that everyone except for me had dropped off to sleep. Now, being busy trying to formulate a fool-proof scheme to buy an X-Wing (I’m afraid it can’t be done), I didn’t notice when they all fell asleep, but thought about how lucky they were, for they probably wouldn’t be jetlagged.

“Well,” said The Writer, “I guess they don’t know what they’re missing.” I assume that he was praising his own story. “But never mind my review,” ah, I was right, “what did you think?”

I’d never been able to come up with blatant lies on demand. Most of my family are able to, and they, generally, are much more accepted among society than I am. “Ah,” I remarked. “It was…” I searched. Luckily, The Writer appeared to assume that I was made speechless, and, judging from the grin spreading around his face, that was a better lie than I would have been able to tell.

“So glad you appreciate it. So few people really get what I’m trying to say, you know? Take the Neanderthals on the literary magazine where I went to undergrad. The fools. The morons. The imbeciles.”

“The shmendricks?” I offered.

The Writer wrinkled his nose. “I never like using Yiddish when I speak. Don’t agree at all with Israel, and that’s what they speak there.”

This was quite possibly the dumbest thing I had heard the man say, but I had the impression that The Writer would defend anything he said to the death. So, that in mind, I let it slide.

“Anyway,” he continued, “so glad you enjoyed the story. I need to come up with a title, though.”

“How about ‘Sheol?’”

He stroked his goatee. “Yes. Yes, I think that will work. It brings to mind the absence of any good that we usually stumble upon in a given day. Relationships are Sheol.”

I had suggested it because listening to the story was the aural equivalent of rolling around in a trash heap—and ‘Sheol’ originally referred to a trash dump outside of Jerusalem during the Kingdom days.