Just to Join Me.
I was just interested to see whether people would. And if nothing else, the small ad was a late, personal tribute to my great-uncle Gallus, to show him that at least I believed in what he’d tried to do. It was just a gesture, in many ways.
And then I forgot about it.
But a few days later, somewhere in Camden, northwest London, a man named Christian Jones was studying that small ad over breakfast. He read it, and read it, and didn’t understand it. He was intrigued. He acted on a whim. He replied.
And with his reply was his passport photo. The one thing I’d asked for, so that I’d know he wasn’t just someone who says ‘yes’ to things. To know that he’s someone who does things. That small amount of hassle, effort and expense – the same amount that would have put off so many other people who’d seen that ad and read those words – told me I’d found someone like me. Like Gallus. A do-er. A joinee. My first.
Had I told Hanne what I’d done, and who’d written back, I dare say that this would be the final chapter of the book, and you would have asked for your money back. I would have stopped there and then, red-faced and suitably chastened. I would have shoved the picture of Christian Jones in a drawer somewhere and put it all down to a moment of lightheaded madness. I would have given up, just as Gallus had done.
But I didn’t tell her. And I wasn’t going to. Not now. Not yet. Not when I was starting to have fun.
And now, I think, you’re up to speed.
So . . . as I was saying . . . we were on our way to the Madras Valley, in northwest London . . .
CHAPTER 3
10. Hanne took great indignation, and her face did gather blackness.
11. So Daniel fell on his face and offered tithes of grain.
12. And there was a calm.
HANNE AND I stepped on to the tube.
‘Are you sure I’m going to like this place?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I read about it somewhere. The chef has twenty years experience as a chef,’ I said, remembering what the leaflet had said. I made a face like she should be impressed, but apparently she found the notion of a chef having experience of being a chef rather less impressive than I did.
‘And where is it?’
‘NW1,’ I said theatrically. I was excited.
‘Oh, God. It’ll take a while to get there, then. Is it worth it? Why don’t we get a Chinese? We could get a bottle of wine and rent a video, too.’
‘Nah, it won’t take too long to get there. We’ll be home by eleven. Sooner, if we eat fast and skip the starter and dessert and don’t have any coffee or mints or too much wine.’
‘I can’t wait,’ she said, rather more flatly than I think she meant to, but I shared her basic excitement. This was a restaurant recommended to me by my first ever joinee, after all. A joinee who had not only gone out of his way to send me his photo, but had even thought to enclose a menu from his favourite restaurant as well – just in case I was ever in the area and feeling peckish. Wow. This was a wonderful world, alright, and it was all thanks to people like Joinee Jones. Hey – see how nice that sounded? Joinee Jones. Lovely.
‘What are you smiling about now?’ said Hanne.
‘I’m just . . . y’know. Enjoying the ride.’
‘Yes,’ said Hanne. ‘I know how much you love these filthy, deafening tube trains you have in this country. Hey, look! I think there’s some urine in that Coke bottle over there. Another for your collection!’
I looked Hanne in the eye.
‘Answer me honestly,’ I said. ‘Are you being sarcastic?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘No curry for you, then.’
‘Curry?’
Ah. It was at this point that I suddenly remembered that Hanne doesn’t like curry – it disagrees with her.
‘Yes, curry,’ I said. ‘You like curry don’t you?’
‘No! It disagrees with me!’
Sorry, it was actually at this point. But in my defence, I’d like to point out that it’s precisely because Hanne doesn’t like curry that I forgot that Hanne doesn’t like curry. Because she doesn’t like it, we never eat it together, so, naturally, the conversation about her not liking what we’re not eating very rarely crops up. So what I’m essentially saying is, this was all her fault.
‘This is all your fault, Danny.’
Women lack logic, don’t they?
‘I’m sure they do other things,’ I said. ‘Every curryhouse does chicken and chips. You like chicken and chips, don’t you? Come on, let’s go to the Madras Valley. There’ll be candles and everything. Look, we’re already at King’s Cross, we’re only a few stops away. I’m paying.’
Hanne looked annoyed but agreed.
‘You’ve got to learn to remember facts like that, Dan,’ she muttered. ‘How come you can remember facts about helicopters and lions, but you can’t remember I don’t like curry?’
It’s because helicopters and lions are interesting.
Ten minutes later we were walking past the pushers and tramps of Camden Town tube station.
‘We should have booked a table,’ said Hanne, as we wandered down Chalk Farm Road. ‘I hate turning up somewhere and not getting a seat. It’s embarrassing.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Trust me. It’s a Saturday. Who goes out on Saturdays? That’s so 90s . . .’
Hanne smiled, and we held hands as we crossed the road and made our way up Castlehaven Road.
‘Quite a quiet road to have a restaurant on,’ she said, and she was right, but that just made it all the nicer as far as I was concerned. This was clearly going to be a classy joint . . . a lovely restaurant on a lovely street; a wide, tree-lined street in the heart of Camden.
I began to lose confidence, however, when I actually spotted the Madras Valley.
I ran through Joinee Jones’s letter once more in my head. He’d definitely said the Madras Valley was his local restaurant, hadn’t he? Yes. He’d said restaurant. Definitely. Well, it must be a restaurant, then. I just hoped that by the time we got a bit closer it would look more like one, that was all.
It didn’t.
‘Is that it?’ said Hanne, her grip on my hand loosening. ‘Is that where you’re taking me?’
‘Er . . . I’m not sure . . .’
‘It says the Madras Valley. That’s what you said earlier. I can’t believe this is the place. Why did you take me here?’
‘Maybe there are two of them on this street,’ I said, my eyes feverishly scanning the street for some place, any place with even just a whiff of romantic candlelit dining on show . . .
‘This isn’t a restaurant, Danny.’
I could have lied, but really, all the evidence she needed was now right in front of her. I tried anyway.
‘Yes it is.’
She stared at me.
‘No. It. Is. Not.’
She was right. It was a small room with strip lighting and a few randomly placed plants. A scrawny boy in a baseball cap sat in a red plastic chair, tapping his knee. There was a yellowing photo of a curry on one of the walls. A curry that was clearly made and photographed in the 70s. If there was one thing that wouldn’t make things better right now, it was buying Hanne a thirty-year-old curry.
‘This is a takeaway,’ said Hanne. ‘Very bloody romantic. A bloody takeaway.’
‘Well . . . yes . . . but I said we were getting a takeaway, didn’t I?’
‘No, Danny, you didn’t. You said we were going to a restaurant. You said there’d be candles.’
‘We’ve got candles at home.’
‘Yes, and we’ve got a phone at home. We could have called this place and told them to deliver.’
‘But we wouldn’t have done that, would we?’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because you don’t like curry.’
I was pleased with myself. I was learning to remember facts like that. I’d probably lost a great fact about a helicopter to make way for it, but hey – relationships are
all about sacrifice.
‘But Jesus, Danny! Why take me to a takeaway on the other side of London? You travel to restaurants – not takeaways! And you know I don’t like Indian food! You did this purely because you knew I wouldn’t let you order it in for us!’
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘Oh. Well, whose fault is it?’
Hmm. This was tricky. It’s not as if I could really tell her, now, is it? I didn’t think that explaining that a complete stranger who’d responded to a whimsical small ad I’d placed in a local newspaper had recommended the Madras Valley to me would really absolve me of all blame. It might even make me seem sillier to her – we’ve already established that women lack logic.
‘Well, I’m getting the Chicken Dansak,’ I said, confidently, remembering Chris’s recommendation. ‘Let’s get you that chicken and chips, yeah?’
Except, of course, that they didn’t sell chicken and chips.
Or egg and chips.
Or anything and chips.
Or chips.
To her credit, Hanne munched her way through the small box of boiled rice I bought her without doing me any actual physical harm whatsoever, and I got away with a mere stony silence as we sat on the tube train home, twenty minutes later.
‘Why don’t we grab a quick drink, or something?’ I tried.
‘Yes,’ said Hanne. ‘Why don’t we? We could go right the way across London to find some fancy bar you’ve heard about and then find out it’s a vending machine in a leisure centre.’
At Euston, she wordlessly got her things together and prepared to get off the train. Apparently she wouldn’t be staying at mine that night. I went for a kiss but missed, and she stepped off the train, turning round just long enough to throw me a withering glance and say ‘And you made me wear the wrong trousers,’ before the doors closed, the withering glance made way for the back of her head, and she walked off. Oops.
I reached into my shirt pocket and brought out the picture of Christian Jones. I instantly forgave him when I saw that smile. It wasn’t really his fault. And he’d been right about the Dansak. If only Hanne liked curry . . . I’m sure she’d have appreciated the advice. I stared at Joinee Jones’s big, grinning face and grinned back.
This man was special. He was surely a sign. And the excellent curry I’d had at his recommendation was a sign, as well. The fact that Hanne was now a bit angry with me . . . well, that was probably a sign, too, but I was willing to let that one go for now.
Because all the evidence pointed to the fact that I could make this work. For Gallus, and for me. I could, theoretically, get more people like Jonesy to sign up. More people who’d want nothing more than to recommend restaurants, or send me cheerful passport photos . . . more people, in short, to Join Me. I didn’t know what I’d do with them once they had, but that didn’t matter, because I was sure that whatever it was I was doing was A Good Thing. It felt right. Despite the fact that I was now going home alone.
I looked forward to the future, and my next ninety-nine Joinee Joneses.
I put the photo away, leant back in my seat, realised I’d missed my stop, swore a little too loudly, and then waited forty minutes to get a train that would take me safely home.
The evening may not have gone quite to plan, but I was certain that things were about to change.
And they were.
* * *
We were in the Horse & Groom on Great Portland Street. Ian put his pint down on the table and raised an eyebrow.
‘So what you’re essentially saying is, you’re starting a cult.’
‘No, not at all. Let’s not start calling it a cult. If anything it’s a . . .’
I struggled to find the right word. Cult was definitely not it. Cult had negative connotations. Cult implied suicide pacts, and space travel, and odd chanting. No, this wasn’t a cult. What had I called it before?
‘It’s a collective.’
I let the word hang in the air. Yes. A collective. That’s what this was. I looked around the pub, proudly, like I’d just answered the hardest question in a pub quiz, but no one had heard me.
‘A collective of two people,’ said Ian. ‘You, and this Jones bloke. And this is all because your great-uncle decided it’d be a laugh sixty years ago? What does Hanne think?’
Ian’s a radio presenter, and has an annoying knack of getting straight to the point.
‘There’s no need for Hanne to be involved,’ I said. ‘So don’t tell her please. Not yet. You know what she’s like about things like this.’
‘Particularly when you promise to take her to a fancy restaurant and it turns out to be some dodgy Indian takeaway. This could get out of hand, Danny. You don’t want to annoy her too much. Remember what happened last time?’
And he had a point. Maybe I should explain exactly why telling Hanne what I was up to wouldn’t be the wisest thing in the world to do. Hanne has, in the three years we’ve been going out, put up with rather a lot from me. One time, because I was bored, I’d decided that I wanted to see if I could go a whole week without once introducing myself to people I met. That failed on the first day, when Hanne had taken me to a party and everyone thought I was extremely rude. I had to pretend to be a mute at one point.
Another time, it fell to me to plan our holiday. She’d wanted to go somewhere ‘different but familiar’. I felt this was a challenge. I started to think about where we could go that would be different but familiar. We were at my parents’ house in Bath at the time, and I realised that whichever town Bath was twinned with would be quite different but at the same time fundamentally familiar. And then I discovered that Bath was twinned with lots of different towns. And those towns, in turn, were twinned with lots of different towns themselves. So in one busy afternoon, I planned a route around the world. I proudly showed it to Hanne.
‘This is what we’ll do,’ I said. ‘All these towns should really be very similar to Bath, but they’ll be quite different, too. From Bath, we go to its twin town, Braunschweig, in Germany. Then we get on a train and go to one of its twins, Nimes, in France. After that, we head for Preston, in north England, which will be nice. Now, that’s also twinned with Almelo in Holland, and once we’ve seen that, we’ll jump on a plane and fly to Danishle, in Turkey. Then it’s Frankfurt, before heading to its second twin, Milan, before finishing the holiday off with a night in Birmingham.’
Hanne just looked at me. ‘But I want to go to Barbados.’
Despite my extensive notes, maps, and pleading, we went to Barbados. A few months later, I’d told Hanne I was still quite keen on playing this game of twin town dominoes. She told me in no uncertain terms what she’d do to me if I did. And yes, Milan is twinned with Birmingham.
Then there was the bet I’d had with my old flatmate, Dave, a year or two previously. It was a macho, booze-fuelled challenge involving tracking down and photographing dozens of men with the same name as him, which had dominated six months of our lives, sent us around the world, and very nearly cost me my relationship with Hanne. To be honest, there’s a longer story there, which could almost be a book in itself. But things had got so bad at one point that Hanne had actually left me, and gone back to Norway. That scared me. I promised her that things would change from that moment on, and to be honest, they had. I’d stopped indulging myself in what she called ‘stupid boy-projects’.
But I could feel myself starting to be pulled into that world again . . .
‘I’m telling you, Dan, it’s not worth it. Hanne will kill you. You know what she always says—’
‘“If you’re going to be spontaneous, at least plan it properly,” yes. But I’m not going to take this so seriously, Ian. It’s just a little something to keep me occupied. And remember, it’s for Gallus, not me. Anyway, no one else is going to join me, are they? I’m sure I’ll get two more at most, just like Gallus, and then I’ll give up. I mean, I actually want a hundred, but how’s that going to happen?’
‘Well, all you’d have to do is walk down Oxf
ord Street one afternoon, I’m sure you’d get loads of people to say they’d join you.’
Ah, I’d thought of that. Ian was right. Sure, I’d be able to just wander down a crowded shopping street, and sure, all the nutters would say they’d join me. But they wouldn’t count. It’s all very well saying . . . but I want do-ing. Joinee Jones had passed the first test of Join Me. He’d sent me his passport photo. He’d shown he was serious. That’s all I needed; I wouldn’t ask for ten per cent of people’s earnings, or for their first-born child, or that they all wear the same turquoise shellsuit as me. I wouldn’t ask them to believe that the world is run by twelve-foot lizards, or that one day a vast celestial force will arrive to take us away on a comet, or that Elvis is dead.
I would just ask them to trust me enough to send me a photo. Just as Jonesy had done; the only man with the nerve to have joined me. God, he was brilliant.
‘But what I don’t understand,’ said Ian, ‘is why this bloke has agreed to join you in the first place. Given that he’s no idea what it is, why would he do it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t care. All I care is that he’s joined. Maybe he’s done it because he’s got a sense of adventure. Maybe he’s missing something in his life and he thinks this is it. Maybe he just likes joining things. I don’t know. It’s interesting.’
‘He probably thought it was a lonely hearts ad. Maybe he’s going to try and kiss you when you meet.’
‘I’m sure he won’t do that.’
‘You mean you are going to meet him? Really?’
I thought about it. I suppose I’d just thought it was natural that we should meet at some point. If only to discuss where we were going to find a couple of twins to marry.
‘I think I’d like to meet him, yes. I want to meet my joinee. Wouldn’t you?’
‘You’re like that bloke you were telling me about that time.’
I cast my mind back. Surely if I’d told Ian about a bloke once in the past I’d remember it?
‘Could you be more specific at all?’