Fruit Flies Like a Banana

Three walks.

With Valerie down the country paths. Rus in urbe. Not the end of Newcastle but the beginning of Northumberland.

Four walks.

With Valerie by night. To Valerie’s, alone, on Ladies’ Day. The crowd at the Three Mile Inn, like a wedding, but who has that big a family, that many friends? The women getting off the bus in gowns and dresses, a clown car commercial for fake tan, depilatory cream, streak-free deodorant.

From Valerie’s at 4am. The strange sight of a city that works.

And out with Valerie, walking to town, looking for monsters.

We’d left Rob on the sofa, sleeping off the booze. We had battery packs for our phones, we had cables. Valerie had access to a website claiming to have access to the servers for the game. She said rarer creatures could be found in the University grounds. I said okay then, let’s walk there. I know a route we can use. I wasn’t psyched about rare creatures: I was psyched for any of them, a week later to this game than Valerie and the others, the same amour-propre that made me decide that as a 38-year-old woman I should start eating sorbet and drinking V and slimline instead of beer and Ben & Jerry’s telling me I shouldn’t waste my time looking for computer-generated manga-style fauna. More fool me.

I took Valerie on my usual route here from town, but in reverse. Up Matthew Bank, down Friday Fields Lane, past the Church of the Holy Name, through Jesmond, where the Tories glared and I stood briefly at a cashpoint between two young things treating their life like a scripted reality, which indeed it was, scripted for them by parental wealth:

‘I can’t believe you spent four hundred pounds on a coat!’

‘I know! The daft thing is, I’ll barely wear it!’

We did not warm to Jesmond’s people, but Valerie loved the architecture: the big, cathedral like parish church at the end of Osborne Road, the flowery design on the lodge by the Gosforth Rackets Club, the Jesmond Lawn Tennis club gate with its plaque commemorating Muriel Robb, even an electricity substation whose blocky construction and salmon-pink paintwork she found enchanting. Valerie stopped to photograph many of these things and although I feared, particularly by the substation, that we might be challenged as potential subversives, no hand gripped either of our shoulders and we proceeded on our way.

That we were regarded as subversives, at large in this new England, we knew from the reactions of those we passed: the motorist who shouted QUEERS at us as he drove past us on Matthew Bank, Doppler-shifting away towards the pub outside of which I’d clashed with Rob’s promoter; the truck-driver stopped in traffic by the Mansion House who made increasingly incoherent noises at us as we deprived him of the attention he desired; the stares.

Outside of an American-style barbecue joint I got into a virtual altercation with a sort of bird that refused to be caught. I spent almost a whole minute swiping my hand up the screen and muttering, until in the end it disappeared in a puff of smoke. Frustrated, we continued on, through the concrete subway that passes under the motorway to the Robinson, where Emma and I had mused about being included in female aggression. We caught a new digital beast by the Hancock, where I showed Valerie the rhino statue with its wonderfully Dadaist warning sign, PLEASE / DO NOT CLIMB ON THE / RHINOCEROS

Rob had informed me, during the brief space of time he was lucid, about a bad experience he’d had with a mutual acquaintance of ours, a cis woman, the night before. I was inclined to believe him, the woman in question being one of the few people I’d ever been threatened by online who’d genuinely scared me.

‘Man, I’ve been through some fucked-up shit,’ I sighed, as Valerie and I passed the Armstrong Monument and the concealed entrance to the Victoria Tunnel.  

‘Tell me about it. I am never walking through there again.’

‘Same.’ I wiped my hand across my forehead. ‘Are you hot? I feel like I could do with a chance to sit down and grab something.’

Valerie nodded.

‘Actually, do you know what I feel like? A milkshake.’  I continued.

‘Hmmmm.’ Valerie pondered. ‘There’s a Mark Toney’s up on the right.’

‘Huh.’

‘What?’

I looked at her, gothed up against the weather in her hat, her black top and waistcoat, the pleated skirt she’d bought from Oxfam just a day or so before. ‘I don’t know…’

‘What?’

‘There’s just something about the way you say Mark Toney’s. It’s hard to explain. Hearing it in an American accent…’ I saw her smile. ‘…it’s like me saying Walgreen’s or Duane Reade, or something, you know? Slightly off.’

‘Well, yanno, that’s the way it is for me with most of the stuff around here. Even your Wal-Marts are called something different.’

‘Yeah, I dunno…maybe it’s that Mark Toney’s is specifically a North East thing? So it’s like me saying something specific to Kansas City.’

‘Or like you saying sore bay and my mom saying sherbert.’

‘Yeah, exactly.’

‘Two nations divided.’

‘Oscar Wilde, yeah.’

‘You want a fucking milkshake?’

‘I drink your milkshake.’

‘You drink your milkshake, I’m getting a Pepsi. And maybe a waffle. And a sandwich.’

‘Holy shit you’re ravenous.’

‘Well yanno I couldn’t really eat with all the noises your friend makes in his sleep.’

‘Yeah, he’s, ah, he doesn’t sleep lightly in any sense of the…’

‘He’s shitfaced is what he is. Jesus, Ruby! The guy was passed out on your couch!’

‘I know but…’

‘What?’

I shook my head. ‘He wasn’t always like this, y’know? It’s…kind of sad. I worry, especially with Fringe coming up.’

Valerie got to the counter first, and gave her order. I waited in line. ‘Do you think bubblegum’s a good milkshake flavour to ask for?’

Later, seated, I leaned in to Valerie and whispered: ‘It’s also kind of like the way you say cunt.’

‘What is?’ she said aloud.

I looked around and whispered again. ‘The way you say Mark Toney’s. It has different connotations, like it does when you say the word cunt. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Or like when I say the word wench?’ Her eyes sparkled with mischief.

‘Well,’ I demurred, ‘that’s more specific to me I guess…’

She smiled. ‘You’re a little excited now, aren’t you?’

I looked down at the table as my milkshake arrived, smiled at the waitress then turned back to Valerie and mouthed the words fuck you. She laughed.

‘So anyway,’ she said. ‘Article.’

‘Article?’

‘I got an idea for one. I’ve been thinking about something you said, and I want to write an article about it.’

‘And you want me to help?’

‘I’d like you to look at it, yeah.’

I put my milkshake to one side and rooted through my backpack, finding and pulling out the spare power pack for my phone.

‘Yeah, sure, I’ll give it a once-over. What’s it about?’

‘Well, I only really have the title so far…’ She slid her phone across the table to me. ‘What do you think?’

I looked down at the screen of Valerie’s phone, took another sip of my blue milkshake, and passed the phone back.

‘That is brilliant. Have you ran into any yet?’

‘No, but apparently the St Mary’s Lighthouse area’s known for it. And there are monsters there you can’t find anywhere else. Sooner or later, it’s going to happen.’

I chuckled. ‘Man, I wish I could be there when it does.’

Valerie laughed. ‘I know, right? When Pokemon meets dogging. Like, how the fuck is that gonna oh hey –’

She looked at me in silence for a moment while the waitress put her sandwich down before her.

‘How the fuck is that going to go down?’ she whispered.