– or should – ever be a part of my life again was something I wasn’t ready to consider yet.
While I had been sleeping, Lizzie had been busy. Keen to make me feel more a part of her city she had invited her friend Eric to join us for dinner.
‘You’ll love him,’ she promised me, dashing around her tiny kitchen as she prepared food. ‘If anyone can cheer you up, Eric can.’
Eric Walker was a six-foot bundle of pure energy, from the cheeky grin playing on his face to his ever-moving hands which he used to accentuate every word. Even sitting at Lizzie’s dining table he didn’t keep still, animatedly jumping from anecdote to anecdote. Originally from Dagenham in Essex, Eric had come to San Francisco for a year and ended up with a lucrative job entertaining visitors at Pier 39 with his unique blend of British humour, circus skills and crazy unicycle riding – which he was still doing fifteen years later. It was wonderful to meet him and especially lovely to talk to another British person, even if his accent had adopted a noticeable West Coast twang.
‘If I’d stayed in the UK I’d be an accountant by now,’ he told me, after reducing me to tears of laughter by juggling various ornaments from Lizzie’s living room. ‘That’s what my dad wanted me to be. Instead I’m in San Francisco, where juggling swords while balancing on a unicycle is perfectly acceptable. I make a good wage from the daily shows and teach circus skills to private students – most of which are accountants, lawyers and bankers. Can you imagine me doing that for a living in Dagenham?’
Watching Lizzie’s friend performing his impromptu routine I found it hard to imagine Eric wading through tax returns in an office.
‘So Lizzie tells me you’ve had a tough day?’ he asked, when Lizzie was in the kitchen dishing up dessert.
‘Not really. I’ve just felt a bit out of place. Everything’s different here: crossing the road, ordering a cup of coffee, even buying things in shops.’
Eric laughed. ‘Don’t worry, we all go through it. Listen, have you been to Fisherman’s Wharf yet?’
‘No, I only arrived yesterday. But it’s on my list of places to visit.’
‘Excellent!’ He grabbed a handful of cutlery and began to juggle it, making me laugh again. ‘Why don’t you two come and see my show tomorrow? You’ll love Pier 39. It reminds me of summer holidays in Southend and Bournemouth when I was a kid.’ He added a pepper grinder to the collection of tumbling knives and forks – chuckling when a cloud of pepper dust covered his lap. ‘Trust me, it’s impossible to feel out of place there. Lizzie, what do you reckon?’
Lizzie returned to the table with enormous bowls of ice cream sprinkled with tiny Oreo cookies. ‘I think it’s a great idea, but this is Nell’s trip.’
By now I was laughing so hard I had to struggle to catch my breath, feeling so much better already. Eric’s suggestion sounded like the perfect choice.
‘Yes – let’s do it!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cable cars and seaside jazz
Next morning we made our way down to Fisherman’s Wharf. Eric had recommended a great place for lunch and suggested it was worth spending time wandering along the Bayside streets to soak in the atmosphere before we visited his afternoon show.
‘I really like Eric,’ I said to Lizzie as we walked past the numbered piers stretching out into the San Francisco Bay. ‘How did you come to meet him?’
‘He was teaching circus skills in one of the schools I teach piano at. My friend Tyler introduced us – he’s the principal of Sacred Heart Elementary where my after-school kids’ club meets. I think his exact words to me were, “we have another crazy Brit here you should meet”. Of course, he expected me to know Eric simply by virtue of the fact we both hailed from the same country. You’ll notice Americans think that a lot. As it turned out, we got on instantly and he became a really good friend. Actually, it was because of Eric’s work with the children that I was inspired to start the club, so I have a lot to thank him for.’
Restaurants and food stalls selling fresh crab, clam chowder, hot dogs and seafood lined the seafront, the scent of cooking food surrounding us as we walked past gift shops (stacked with jokey t-shirts, souvenirs and cheap sunglasses), brightly painted coffee stalls, bicycle hire companies and electrical goods stores. I breathed it all in, feeling decidedly more positive than I had yesterday, the innate sense of fun making me grin like a big kid.
On every street corner, we passed buskers playing. Their music styles were as varied as the food stalls they were often performing beside: reggae by the clam chowder stands, classic rock by the coffee and pretzel stand, jazz by the Italian pizzeria unwisely named ‘Pompeii’s Grotto’, funk by the twenty-four-hour breakfast diner and even classical opera next to an Asian-Japanese restaurant. It was my first introduction to the two major things that seemed to underpin everything in San Francisco: music and food.
‘The restaurant Eric recommended is over there,’ Lizzie said, putting a dollar in the bucket of a reggae-playing dreadlocked busker who appeared to be working his way through the Bob Marley Songbook on a battered synthesiser. She pointed towards a cluster of wooden tables beside a fish restaurant.
We ordered steaming clam chowder served in bowls made of hollowed-out bread loaves and settled down for a great lunch.
‘I read one of Aidan’s emails yesterday,’ I confessed, blowing on a hot, sweet spoonful of buttery chowder.
‘You did?’ She made no attempt to disguise her reaction. ‘And what did he have to say for himself?’
‘That he’s sorry. And he loves me. He said the experience of making me redundant made him realise how much he wants me in his life.’
‘He actually said that?’ Lizzie shook her head. ‘Oh well, how nice for him. How do you feel?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, when he called me into his office I thought he was going to ask us to get back together, so in one way knowing that’s how he feels confirms what I’d been thinking for a while. But that was my life before and losing my job has called everything into question. And I’m still angry with him. He said he tried to save my job, but that’s easy to say after the event, isn’t it? When I thought about it this morning I came to the conclusion that I’m just not ready to go down that road again yet. Not until I work out which direction I want to go in.’ I stirred another handful of crunchy oyster crackers into my chowder. ‘Does that make sense at all?’
‘Yes, absolutely. This trip should be about you, not about Aidan’s guilt.’ She held up her hand. ‘Not that I’m saying he doesn’t love you. I’m sure he does. But you need to focus on yourself, not him. It’s like when I first moved here. I got involved with a bloke a couple of years ago who was enthusiastic one minute then cold as ice the next. I’d been battling to keep the relationship going for six months when Eric pointed out that the guy was demanding so much time from me that I never had any for myself. I argued with him about it for a couple of weeks, but he had totally summed up where I was. I pulled back and the guy disappeared.’
It was so good to find that Lizzie understood what I was feeling and also to share in more details about her life. I was intrigued by the fact that Eric had been the one to dissuade her from her previous relationship. Seeing how close they had been last night made me wonder if their
