Vitoria and Helena say they’d like to come with me to the matinee screening of Casablanca at the British Film Institute on Valentine’s Day. “No, sorry,” I say. “I need to go alone.” I’m currently in a long-distance relationship: the only three-word phrase from contemporary dating vernacular grimmer than “ethically non-monogamous.” Moyshie and I have been apart for six months now, bar a brief, ecstatic holiday in France, a rendezvous, as they say there, and I want to really wallow at the movies.
*
Red velvet curtains slowly roll open to reveal a flashback scene in black and white. Moyshie and I were having shabbat-ish dinner together on a perfectly average Friday night in Melbourne. I bought steak and wine on my way home from work, turned my phone off, and lay reading on the modular sofa, Design Files odalisque-style, waiting for him to Lime home from the office. He came in and washed his face. Then he walked over to the couch, gave me a kiss, and poured us both a drink. He got two wax-flecked brass candle-holders from the cupboard, placed them on the kitchen table, wedged two candles into chunks of alfoil, lit them, and said the evening prayer. I stood by him and half-closed my eyes—I never really knew what I was officially meant to do at this point, but I liked hearing him quickly mumble through the Hebrew. I returned to the couch. Moyshie started cooking. He put on the movie version of Sandra Bernhard's one-woman musical show, Without You I'm Nothing (1990), to play in the background.
“Tell me why you love Sandra Bernhard again,” I said, patting the tabby cat, Olive, nestled in my lap.
“The thing you have to understand about Sandra Bernhard is this,” Moyshie said, rubbing oil and salt on the steak, then laying the meat onto the hot frying pan. “She walks a very difficult tightrope between being a clown and being sexy. We’re talking about raw chutzpah here. The pure appeal of someone who is exuding libidinal energy in every way. And she has one of the best noses in the business.”
He refilled my glass and offered me a cigarette. I took it and we moved to the balcony.
“In terms of her ideas and her use of language—she has this very ‘40s, ‘50s sensibility. It's like she's in a noir film. Her expression is always cloaked in irony. She speaks in one-liners and jaded aphorisms, like a drag queen, or someone who has been working for years as a stalwart soul musician.”
Sandra warbled on-screen in the background. She's a gawky rake with a bouffant and huge lips that seem to take on a life of their own when she sings. We went back inside. Moyshie chopped up parsley and red onions and threw them into a bowl with white beans, olive oil, and vinegar.
“And she has the confidence to act crazy on stage, but never in a way which is so cutting as to be irredeemable,” he said.
He expertly prodded the sizzling steaks with his fingers, took them off the stove, and wrapped them in alfoil on a plate.
“The final thing I'll say on the matter is that she's one of the very few people post-1950s who can pull off red lipstick. That's massive.”
He neatly folded two napkins and laid them on the table with two sets of cutlery, three types of mustard, and a small bowl of pickles. Then he unwrapped the steaks from the alfoil, sliced them into thin, bloody strips, and placed them onto plates with some salad. “Dinner's ready!”
*
45-degree angle shot of Big Ben. Shot of a row of miniature Union Jack flags in the window of a shop. Timelapse shot showing a diverse urban crowd entering and exiting a tube station. It has been established that we are in London. Now, a long shot of a young woman wearing AirPods walking across Waterloo Bridge. The Bend It Like Beckham club scene anthem, “I Turn To You” by Melanie C, plays. The woman walking seems to be lost in thought. We recognise her—it’s our reporter from The Paris End.
Life in Melbourne was good, but London was calling. I moved over for the year with specific goals: acquire a respectable graduate degree, improve my career prospects, and absorb the culture of a global metropolis, innit. It was a manageable scheme. Exciting. But sometimes in the early days, I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake. I got the vertiginous sensation that I had arrived in the city just at the moment it was really, finally, dying, hard Brexiting into little more than a Monopoly Board of sandwich franchises for the pallid underclass and private members’ clubs for the finance guys and their consorts.
London had a grey, relentless suck, a way of extorting £20 from me every time I opened my bedroom door. My functional yet vibeless student accommodation was full of British teenagers with posh accents asking me the correct method to heat up their frozen fish pies, then not washing their claggy dishes.
I missed our apartment. I imagined Moyshie going to bed alone; I went to bed alone. It's crazy how much time you have with your thoughts when you move to a place where you have barely any friends. I gassed myself up to go outside. Every commute entailed withstanding a barrage of advertising designed to manipulate weak, lonely people—I was in the high-risk category—to join attractive customer loyalty programs, replacements for things like “family” and “friends” and “lovers.” (I got a Pret membership: five free hot drinks a day for £15 the first month, then £30 after that?! Incredible deal.)
A few weeks in, I started panicking. Then I forced myself to relax. I messaged the four fun people I vaguely knew to hang out again, and, after that, I watched Bridget Jones's Diary. She had plenty of troubles, but she picked herself up off the floor of that fire station in Lewisham and got on with the job. I also read Guy Rundle’s diary, sorry, Crikey column, about his Soho era: “Soho has been dying a long time, dying since it was born, a spec-built property development carved out of the King’s hunting fields.” London is always dying, and always being remade anew. I got a grip. Maybe it wasn't the decline of the West. Maybe I was just adjusting to living in a new city without my boyfriend.
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