Read Online Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland - Free Book Online
Authors: Douglas Coupland
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for myself. Once you’re past thirty, you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you turn bitter.
I’m jumping the gun. Back to that horrible little hostel with its thin-sheeted shabbiness and its aura of the ghosts of ten thousand homesick girls. Back to Italy and its striking plumbers and suddenly having to find a functioning toilet somewhere, anywhere. The hostel’s toilet might as well have been a bucket. I scrambled off my mattress and walked out into the Roman night. My homesick stomach was in free fall beneath the sodium street lights that bathed the industrial nothingness with a burnt yellow tinge. There was a droning from the autostrada bordering the hostel’s neighbourhood. This wasn’t the Europe I’d been led to expect. In hindsight I can see that we’d landed in the Europe of the future.
Though I was swamped with homesickness, part of me was also enjoying a sense of inner freedom that I now know evaporates after about the age of twenty-five. It was a small joy finding an all-night gas station called Elf, maybe a few hundred yards around the corner from the hostel complex. The guys inside saw me coming from a long way away, and I could tell they were used to having girls from the hostel visit in desperation.
Okay, here’s the reason we never told Mr. Burden about the gas station bathroom: its employees were the handsomest men any of us had ever seen, sculpted from gold, and with voices like songs. And there they were, in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, going to waste. They ought to have been perched on jagged lava cliffs having their hearts ripped out as sacrifices to the gods. On top of their physical blessings, these guys were charming and attentive—in both a humanitarian way and a frisky way, even charming to me —and … well … I’d never been flirted with before, nor has anybody flirted with me since.
They spoke their schoolboy English, with heavy Italian accents I’d always thought were a cliché: Hello-a young-a lady. Good eve-a-ning. All I could do was blush, and as I knew only Latin (B+) it was flummoxing to have to ask for a key, but obviously they knew what I needed, and handed it to me like a crystal champagne flute. I may have been desperate for that key, but I still dawdled; it was heaven. And best of all, the bathroom was spotless and even had a small bouquet of irises—plastic, but it’s the thought that counts. When I returned to the hostel, Colleen was just waking up. I told her about the station, and she returned a half-hour later, aglow, saying how much she loved Europe. By the end of the night, all the other girls loved Europe too. We couldn’t wait for daily sightseeing to be over so we could run to the Elf station. We were awful. Nature is awful.
* * *
I said nothing, and used a dishtowel and tap water to clean my hands and knees. I’d have thought Jeremy would be crushed to not know who his father was, but he accepted it calmly. “Was it rape?”
“No.”
“Incest?”
“No.”
“You simply don’t know?”
“It’s more complicated than that, Jeremy. And seeing as we’re both starving, let’s eat first, okay?”
He pulled items from the fridge I’d barely remembered were in there. Chives. Some old cheese. A bottle of pickled something or other.
“You can cook,” I said.
“Vocational school. My ticket out of hell. It doesn’t matter what happens in the world, we’ll always need chefs. Even during Armageddon, the troops will still need their mashed potatoes.” He winked, and suddenly he was joking about themes that had so recently terrified him. After the highway incident I didn’t have the energy for religious debate.
He cracked open eggs, and then whisked them with confidence, adding pinches of things along the way. Bowls and utensils came and went, and for the first time I could see the reason TV cooking shows might be watchable.
“You know, I was with Family Number Six once,
I’m jumping the gun. Back to that horrible little hostel with its thin-sheeted shabbiness and its aura of the ghosts of ten thousand homesick girls. Back to Italy and its striking plumbers and suddenly having to find a functioning toilet somewhere, anywhere. The hostel’s toilet might as well have been a bucket. I scrambled off my mattress and walked out into the Roman night. My homesick stomach was in free fall beneath the sodium street lights that bathed the industrial nothingness with a burnt yellow tinge. There was a droning from the autostrada bordering the hostel’s neighbourhood. This wasn’t the Europe I’d been led to expect. In hindsight I can see that we’d landed in the Europe of the future.
Though I was swamped with homesickness, part of me was also enjoying a sense of inner freedom that I now know evaporates after about the age of twenty-five. It was a small joy finding an all-night gas station called Elf, maybe a few hundred yards around the corner from the hostel complex. The guys inside saw me coming from a long way away, and I could tell they were used to having girls from the hostel visit in desperation.
Okay, here’s the reason we never told Mr. Burden about the gas station bathroom: its employees were the handsomest men any of us had ever seen, sculpted from gold, and with voices like songs. And there they were, in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, going to waste. They ought to have been perched on jagged lava cliffs having their hearts ripped out as sacrifices to the gods. On top of their physical blessings, these guys were charming and attentive—in both a humanitarian way and a frisky way, even charming to me —and … well … I’d never been flirted with before, nor has anybody flirted with me since.
They spoke their schoolboy English, with heavy Italian accents I’d always thought were a cliché: Hello-a young-a lady. Good eve-a-ning. All I could do was blush, and as I knew only Latin (B+) it was flummoxing to have to ask for a key, but obviously they knew what I needed, and handed it to me like a crystal champagne flute. I may have been desperate for that key, but I still dawdled; it was heaven. And best of all, the bathroom was spotless and even had a small bouquet of irises—plastic, but it’s the thought that counts. When I returned to the hostel, Colleen was just waking up. I told her about the station, and she returned a half-hour later, aglow, saying how much she loved Europe. By the end of the night, all the other girls loved Europe too. We couldn’t wait for daily sightseeing to be over so we could run to the Elf station. We were awful. Nature is awful.
* * *
I said nothing, and used a dishtowel and tap water to clean my hands and knees. I’d have thought Jeremy would be crushed to not know who his father was, but he accepted it calmly. “Was it rape?”
“No.”
“Incest?”
“No.”
“You simply don’t know?”
“It’s more complicated than that, Jeremy. And seeing as we’re both starving, let’s eat first, okay?”
He pulled items from the fridge I’d barely remembered were in there. Chives. Some old cheese. A bottle of pickled something or other.
“You can cook,” I said.
“Vocational school. My ticket out of hell. It doesn’t matter what happens in the world, we’ll always need chefs. Even during Armageddon, the troops will still need their mashed potatoes.” He winked, and suddenly he was joking about themes that had so recently terrified him. After the highway incident I didn’t have the energy for religious debate.
He cracked open eggs, and then whisked them with confidence, adding pinches of things along the way. Bowls and utensils came and went, and for the first time I could see the reason TV cooking shows might be watchable.
“You know, I was with Family Number Six once,
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