One Handheld PA Minus Ritalin Goes Beeping Bananas and What’s Geography Got to Do with Sweet FA?

Just made Nigella’s Chocolate Olive Oil Cake. Luscious is a word that was, without doubt, invented to describe this cake. Also, unctious. And further to the chocolate theme, I learned today, via my sneaky-cute Tunnel Bear VPN and the BBC’s ‘Further Back in Time for Dinner’ (I do love Giles Coren) that Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ was inspired by the writer’s boyhood taste-testing for the Cadbury’s chocolate factory near his school in the 1930s. Which, I guess, is what geography has to do with Sweet FA. It may also be noted that I mark up my trusty Googlemaps with a liberal spackling of stars, denoting the locations of yummy cafés and bubble tea places before travelling anywhere. So loath though I am to admit it, sweet and geography are in fact intimately related after all.

Surfacing into the bluster and confusion of Leicester Square, her phone goes manic; her stressed out blonde twit of a handheld PA clearly forgot to take her Ritalin. Probably her mother, leaving a vendetta-blood-trail of messages. Which she will deal with in a better frame of mind, such as when she’s well and truly smashed and seeing double.
Which would, of course, entail booze. She turned her back on Leicester Square’s mish mash of overpriced cinemas, greased cardboard pizza-by-the-slice holes-in-the-wall and barftastic out-of-town-teens, and marched herself through the cluttered cobblestoned alleys edging on Chinatown. There was a new pop-up place round the proverbial corner. No name, that she remembered. Dimly lit by bare bulbs, stripped brick walls in shadow, it was provided of counter and booths, they did mean sliders and a drinks menu offering fresh twists on all the classics.
Three variations on a martini theme later, she digs the ditzy, hormonal PA phone from her bag. Presses down on the opposite ear as she lifts it, to muffle the noise of other people’s raucous night on the town, thinking briefly of Negronis in Milan, of suave Italians under the chandeliers of Bar Basso.

None of the first three messages are from her mother. But by now the queue is stacking up, like traffic on the M25 around a three car pile-up.
She likes the music in here, sultry, but with a decent spine of base. She lifts her empty glass suggestively at the bartender dancing and spinning on the other side of the granite strip, easier than the whole menu farce… Pick your own inebriation delivery system. Customise your own calorie delivery system. But sometimes, such as when there’s a three-four-five car pile up backing up your phone and sending the ditzy thing to the edge of a schizto-paranoid freakout, you frankly don’t have the time, energy or attention span to worry about what to mix with your vodka and do you want the new potatoes or mixed game chips with that?
Of course, it was always possible that her metaphoric denigration of her schitzoid freak phone was in fact displaced, that it was actually her own brain with the problems she was so busy sticking to her phone.
Another martini type thing landed in front of her, the empty swept away, and she still had yet to find out what this six-seven-eight car pile-up on her phone was all about. Procrastination being, in fact, her middle name.

Lena Procrastination Bellington, do you take this man to be your…
Your what? Was there even a name for what Danielli wanted her to be?
Hang it, even her bloody schitzoid phone pile-up had to be better than this.
‘Ello? Lena? Zis is Madellena. I ‘ave talked with Nicholi, and I think we should be talking before you talk wiz ‘im. So, ah, ring me back when you can… yes, ah, ciao ciao.’
And beeeeeep.
‘Hey, Lena. Why aren’t you picking up?’ Danielli. The freaky Italian porn-prom on a stick expected her to be at his beck and call, while he could just sashay off for a Stuart-shagathon whenever he felt like it? ‘Anyway, think there might be a bit of a situation with Nicholi… So, uh, ring me back, yeah? Preferably before you talk to him… God, you haven’t talked to him already, have you?’ ambient traffic noise, the swish of passing cars maybe, hard to distinguish beneath the thrum of base pushing up against the bare bricks of the bar. ‘Anyway, get back to me when you can. See ya.’
She removes the phone from her sweaty ear for a second, stares at it, like the bloody piece of plastic could explain.
Beeeep.
‘What the hell are you doing, marrying that gay ponce? Are you trying to play the girl-fucks -best-friend thing? You want your life to be a chick flick, is that it?’ Nicholi. Lena squeezed her eyes shut. When really, it was her ears that needing shutting. Maybe her brain, too. Nailed shut, with crime scene tape draped around it for good measure. ‘Because chick flicks are cheap. Cheap and fake. Thought you were better than that. But you’re just a cheap fake. A fraud, just like him.’
Beeeeep.
‘Alright Miss High and Mighty. Since you’re too good talk to your own bloody mother to my fucking face, we’ll do this over the fucking phone. Cath told me all about –‘
She unsticks the phone from her ear. Hits delete message, delete message, delete message. Not bothering to listen to the rest of the traffic accident of her life. The casualties, the DOAs, the mangled write-offs scraped from tarmac to wrecking yard to be stripped down for salvageable parts.

She takes a hefty swig of her drink, swishes it around her mouth, the sour sharpness of the alcohol across her tongue, fire at the back of her throat. She wants to bathe her brain in it. Like you do a baby, carefully, in the kitchen sink. But she doesn’t really have a kitchen sink anymore. Her lease is up at the end of the week. She handed in her notice weeks ago. She has a plane ticket booked for Milan in the morning. Movers will come a cart her stuff away to a storage facility somewhere in the arse-end of nowhere, overseen by her landlady, who recommended the company. Some family connection.
Who knew they could actually be useful? Family connections. What a joke. A pathetic joke, like something from a cheap Woolworth’s Christmas cracker, that comes with a stupid tissue paper hat in magenta or lemon-yellow.
On the bar next to her glass, her phone starts up its frantic buzz again.
Danielli’s number lights up the screen. A bunch of pixels, conspiring to form the shapes of numbers. She’s always hated numbers.
She kills the call, but not two seconds later, it starts up again.
‘What?’ she snaps.
‘Where are you?’
Why is that always the first thing he says to her? What has location, geography, got to do with sweet fuck-all? Good question. If location was such a pesky, trivial detail, why was she here, and not at home. Correction, not in her almost ex-flat. Why was she moving to Milan? If she was moving to Milan. Clearly, she saw location as some kinda cosmic answer too. Maybe the answer to that other question, the one Danielli wasn’t asking: how are you?
‘Lena?’
‘Yeah. I’m here.’