Groundhog day
Jeremy Clarke
The coach journey from the airport to the city centre took three quarters of an hour. Slumped in my comfortable seat near the back, I looked glumly out of the window at the rain-sodden north-eastern Italian countryside. Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’ blared reedily out of a small loudspeaker overhead.
When I’d asked my boy where he wanted me to take him for his half-term holiday, and he’d said Trieste, I’d protested. We went there last time, I said. And it was a known fact that people only passed through Trieste on the way to somewhere else. To go there on holiday was folly. To go back deliberately was madness.
Did he not remember going with me into the tourist information office in Italian Unity Square and how the woman nearly fell off her chair when we told her we intended staying for three days? (There’s a James Bond novel, apparently, in which M makes an uncharacteristically abject apology to 007 for sending him there for just a day.) And what did we actually do in Trieste the last time? Nothing except wander up and down the seafront starving almost to death because there was none of the traditional fast-food outlets.
The main attraction, apparently, was the seafront, which was lined with architectural monstrosities — banks, hotels, marineinsurance companies — dating from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The tourist information pamphlet had said it was: ‘A showpiece for the architectural and urbanistic factors that define the style of the city as it has developed over time, and represents the fulcrum of the creativity of a present-day development plan which sets out to reinterpret the urban fabric with a view to the city’s future prospects.’ A sentence which sort of said it all, really.
We became so hungry wandering up and down, we started to lose our marbles. Then, on a footbridge over a wide canal, we came across what I thought was one of those people who try to earn a living by keeping still for long periods. He was painted from head to toe in gold paint and pretending to be James Joyce, who assiduously checked out the brothels here between 1904 and 1912, in mid-stride. An arm-in-arm couple were looking dubiously at it. ‘Fools,’ I said to my boy. ‘They think it’s a statue. He’ll make a sudden movement in a moment and frighten them out of their wits.’ We stood some distance away, waiting for the performer to reveal himself to the couple. We waited and wait ed. The couple drifted away. It was the best living sculpture I’d seen for a long time, I told my boy authoritatively. I went forward to reward him with a euro and found, on closer inspection, that it was indeed a statue.
Desperate, we’d returned to the tourist information office to ask about the nearest McDonald’s restaurant. The directions she gave us involved a ride on a funicular tram and a bus journey. When we finally found the place and crawled up to the counter, they said they didn’t sell Chicken McNuggets. In the end, we’d returned to the hotel and laid on our twin beds waiting for death.
‘Can’t we go to Cork?’ I’d said to my boy. ‘Or Bergerac?’ But my boy likes to stick to the things he knows and I couldn’t budge him. So Trieste it was, then.
Brown, dripping northern Italian countryside flashed past the coach window. A neon sign above a roadside car lot said ‘Planet of Cars’. I wondered whether the sign was in English because the proprietor saw the language of Shakespeare as being suitably glamorous or suitably vulgar. Someone tapped me on the head. Refusing to be associated with his old man, my boy was sitting behind me. He passed me a plastic bag with some cash in it. It was from his Mum. She wanted Mayfair, he said. Failing that, anything would do except Marlboro or Camel. But we were able to get Mayfair the last time we went, apparently, and she was hoping for those. It only dawned on me then that my boy had been influenced in his choice of holiday destination primarily by the availability or otherwise of the brand of cheap cigarette smoked by his mother. It was because you could buy amazingly inexpensive Mayfair there that I was now sitting on a coach that was hurtling down the coast towards Trieste.
The coach pulled in at the bus station off Piazza della Liberta. We lugged our suitcases along the showpiece for architectural and urbanistic factors representing a fulcrum of creativity — aka the seafront and checked in at the same desk in the same cavernous edifice we’d stayed at the time before. The receptionist recognised us. ‘But you’ve come back!’ he said, lowering his spectacles in astonishment. I made a facial gesture expressing helplessness and despair. Shaking his head, he addressed himself to his computer screen.
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