Nowhere People

Although he is recovering well, his leg still hurts, a lot.

‘Ah, mon cher monsieur! Per’aps monsieur will ’ave anozzer leetle glass of our verrry expensif wine?’ Fabio kids around with him, catching Paulo at just the moment when he is watching Tom Waits and the journalist out the corner of his eye. ‘What’s up, Fabinho? Weren’t you heading out?’ asks Paulo. ‘So the thing is, man, Etienne, that anorexic fag, asked me to stay till it’s time to cash up,’ and, taking the nearly empty glass from Paulo’s hand, Fabio wipes the cloth over the granite surface of the bar. ‘You’re going to have to stay? Well then, take it easy.’ Paulo shifts position on his stool, which is tall and doesn’t have footrests. ‘Yeah. Another hour and a half. Bastard manager. Well, I suppose it’s just tough shit, this is my job. I’ll give you some more wine,’ Fabio mutters. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll make the most of the fact that I’m at a loose end and you’re doing this overtime, I’ll go by the anti-apartheid vigil outside the South African embassy. Apparently there are these two big-shot militants who’re going to talk about the negotiations to end Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment.’ He gets down from the stool with no footrests. ‘Son-of-a-bitch South African government, this whole segregation thing, I just don’t get it,’ says Fabio without ever losing his elegant, Italian movie-star pose (an absolute prerequisite for getting a job at the Pelican). ‘You get segregation everywhere, Fabinho, theirs is just more brazen than the others,’ he muses, ‘or rather, it’s the first one I’d like to see brought to an end. So look, keep your very expensive wine for some other day. Today our business is with some Mexican beer courtesy of Drake, right?’ Picking Fabio up at work was to have been part of the arrangement for going together to the exclusive party for friends of the staff at Bar Sol, the restaurant everyone wants to work at because, besides being a fun place to serve, it’s far and away the bar where the customers, most of them American tourists, leave the best tips. Fabio was invited to work there by Drake, who has a Brazilian mother and an English father and has worked at the restaurant ever since it first opened and always manages to get himself back in work there when he decides to come over from Brazil and spend a few months in the city. ‘We’ll talk at Bar Sol, Paulo … And watch out for any trouble, those gatherings outside the South African embassy sometimes end up in confrontations with the police.’ Paulo puts on his jacket. ‘So I just ask for Drake, right?’ and he gives one last glance at Thomas Alan Waits, one of the few idols in his life right now. ‘Yeah, he’ll be expecting you.’ Paulo turns, heads off towards the door. On the street, he turns left down St Martin’s Lane, which will take him straight to the South African embassy.