Life's a Banquet by Robin Bennett

Author:Robin Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Book Guild
Published: 2019-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Royal Holloway, Part 2

And you don’t even need to go to lectures to learn stuff at university

It’s March 2018 and I’m standing outside New York Central Library searching for something familiar, but nothing looks remotely how I remember it, which is perplexing as this looks like a solid, dependable type of building, one that you should be able to rely on to not change much. I’ve been over in Brooklyn for a week at a conference about translation (I know) and I have given myself a day or two off either side to wander over the Brooklyn Bridge, visit old haunts in Manhattan and drive about the Hamptons in a rubbish car I hired at the hotel.

I couldn’t do the latter when I was here all those years ago – not just because at eighteen I still had no idea how to drive a car but also, when I came to New York thirty years earlier, I was stone broke. As in no money at all, in danger of starving in a ditch were it not for the fact I at least had a roof over my head, courtesy of two girls I knew from Oxford who were out on a sort of fluky secretarial secondment that came with a luxury apartment on 34th Street, between 9th and 10th.

Dominance of the London–New York route was, at the time, hotly contested and flights were therefore incredibly cheap. I had jumped on a plane with £20 in my pocket. Most of that went on a fry-up as soon as I left the airport, but I reasoned that being a long way away in America meant that Barclays Bank in Henley would not be able to let them know I had no money left. I would therefore be able to extract money with impunity from these new-ish machines in the wall.

On the list of stupid assumptions I have made in my life, this is high.

Quite perceptively, my school friends who had come out with me told me I was a moron and that I was on my own. The girls were slightly more understanding and pampered me in a sort of long-suffering way by cooking me a nice supper and telling me that they would at least make sure I wouldn’t starve.

However, this was the end of the ’80s in New York and the place was awash with yuppies spending money and falling in and out of limos, bars and waterbeds.

In short, I was buggered if I was going to be left out. Asking Lucy26 if I could make an international call, I got up early and dialled the number I had for Barclays in Hart St, Henley. Amazingly I got through to a manager at the branch (those were the days).

I explained my situation in very broad terms – i.e. I am in New York, I have no money, bad things may happen to me as a result… we’ve all seen Midnight Cowboy – leaving out the bit about flying there

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