Book 2, Chapter 65

Pounding the pavement on the morning of Monday 18th of June, 2001, I worked out that as Captain Cook set sail from Plymouth on the 26th or 27th of August, 1768, according to who I believed, there were only ten weeks to go before I left England but nearly three years before Litara’s project reaches its conclusion with me back in England for June 8th, 2004. That seemed pretty good job security when some entire careers hadn’t lasted as long. Earlier in the year there had been a television series, Popstars, about a businessman finding singers to mould into a group, like the Spice Girls, which he would then market. Suspecting that the musical careers of the winners would be at best ephemeral the format struck me as a cynical and brutal way to play on the dreams of people my age. I was doing better I thought than the failed singing wannabes if not better so far than the winners of Popstars who were now called Hear'say and making hit records. My tennis-playing namesake was having a wonderful year with promise of many more to come but comparison to her no longer made me feel inadequate. Indeed while a year ago I felt that I was falling behind her and those of my friends with jobs or lines of study chosen, now I view things differently. Money and fame now seem to be the sum total of what a job could give me or anyone else yet I’d already learnt, since leaving college, that both are a pain in the neck without a specific target for the excess.

Pain! I’d been enjoying my morning run. The sun was shining and my mind wandering when this idiot opened his car door straight into me. The irony that the idiot was the man whose rod I’d broken and because of our inattention my tooth was chipped was not lost on me, particularly as by synchronicity he was a dentist outside his surgery.

“Life is ridiculous,” Robert stated, that being the idiot’s name - I was inspecting my repaired tooth for invisible flaws while he rambled on as dentists do. “I’m sorry for shouting at you in the marina office on Saturday but I do get het up and I was annoyed at myself as much as you.”

“Think nothing of it. It was as much my fault,” I replied for, despite being an Afro-Carib Indian-Hispanic-Polynesian-Welshwoman who had put several offenders into hospital, I had grown up next to the English watching their television so had a default reaction of being ready to take the blame for everything.

And so our conversation meandered on as I somehow agreed to meet him that evening in my regular café where my friends gather on Churchill Way. ‘Because my tooth repair is not yet completely hard he’s even cost me the pleasure of my my breakfast,’ I thought to myself a little later as I showered and changed into work clothes back at home.

I told Da of my morning’s adventures but after checking how my tooth looked he just laughed and gave me a work schedule for the day that while full was uneventful giving me plenty of time to fruitlessly ponder why I'd agreed to meet Robert. I could have saved myself the effort because when Serena and I finally did get to the café it was to find Robert and Andy deep in conversation about sculpture with Andy's drawings all over the table so we joined Penny, Kelly and the boys to catch up on news.

Jenny was up in London and her modelling career was taking off so the conversation went round to who she would meet and who she would date when she was rich and famous. At the moment the publicity parties are all built about Big Brother contestants and groups like Hear'say, was Kelly’s view of the London scene as observed from Cardiff. None of us thought Jenny would give them a second look so maybe she would have to go to the USA for Johnny Depp whose film Blow was on at the local cinema.

“You think that Jenny will make it big but don’t underestimate Andy? He was playing on the table with a model he made when that man came in,” Penny said, pointing at Robert, “and the next thing the man is talking about financing and jointly building a huge mobile with Andy.”

Looking across at Andy and Robert, still both intently working on a drawing, I felt for a moment as though the gods might have arranged the chipping of my tooth for no good reason other than to bring those two together. No, the world doesn’t work like that. Does it? I did finally talk with Robert and he accepted my offer to replace his rod for a similar second-hand one while making it clear that it wasn’t very urgent now that he’d found Andy. That did confuse me until he explained that he went into dentistry both to help people and also because he had a talent for sculpting. Helping people unfortunately, he now knew, meant hurting them all day every day while creating crowns and dentures was a limited sort of sculpture which was any case becoming increasingly mechanised. His job in short was driving him mad and while he couldn’t afford to give it up totally, working with Andy might just save his sanity.

As I waved goodnight to Serena later I remembered that like Jenny, Penny, Andy and Evan her plans of a year ago had also veered - before her plan was year in her father’s estate agency followed by university but now in theory she worked for me and seemed more interested in the theatre and flying to exotic places to meet me sailing Dumblebit than in going to university. All of my friends once had seemingly sensible plans and expectations that went out of the window in less than a year while I, who a year ago didn’t have the faintest idea of my personal future, was the one person whose life was beginning to look as though it was running to a plan. Viewed objectively I was like a character in a novel working my way through the plot but from my viewpoint I was simply dealing with problems as they occured while making the most of unexpected opportunities.

Up in bed I looked at my non-work schedule for the week ahead:- kick-boxing, dancing, exercise with Beth's group, karaoke night, Saturday afternoon dancing and Sunday free. There was my morning run to consider and my share of the cooking and housework but there was something missing…

As I drifted off to sleep it finally came to me. I needed to make a phone call in the morning to book a dive for my qualification as an open water diver. I knew just the spot having seen advertised in Milford Haven the temptingly named Blue Lagoon. I also wondered if I could interest Serena in an internship, for which read unpaid, as my appointments secretary.