Chapter I: The Man in the Café i The Man in the Café October 2015
In your defense, it was really busy on the day we met.

You probably felt that you had no choice but to sit at the empty spot beside me. Nobody ever chooses the tables that face the windows, the ones with the stools too high off the ground, where if you place your belongings beneath you, it’s a whole maneuver just to reach down and grab them. It’s usually only if they have no other choice. Of course, I’m generalizing preferences, and I’m excluding myself from the generalization. I love window tables in cafés. This particular spot had been mine for weeks before the fateful day we met. I would sit right where the bustling street in Holborn worked as a foreground, hammering away at my laptop in either focused ferocity or erratic desperation, with a piping-hot mocha to the left of me, every weekday for a few hours, in the same chair, in the same café, like clockwork. I’d often have a chair left between me and the next stranger, so I would have preferred it if you had scanned the room for a little longer so you could find a free spot elsewhere, or anywhere to give me space for myself. But this one day, nobody was giving up space. The café was getting busier and busier, with activity climbing towards its lunchtime summit just as you came in. I wouldn’t have given you a second glance if you had walked past, but you stopped after you entered, hesitated, and then walked to the seat right next to me. I moved my tote bag out of the way, and you smiled instinctively, harmlessly. I kept my eyes glued to my laptop screen as you set up your things, but I was very much aware that you were there, floating, hovering, bobbing around in my periphery.

Art is a stressful game, Hugo. I know you know that now. But it was consuming me that day. I was trawling through the script for the play I was working on, so, so close to the end, yet so far away. I had the passion for it, but not the discipline. I had the dream, but not always the drive. I was excited, but I was also stressed. And to thwart the stress, I would take a smoke break every hour, to the hour. I’d start rolling up Golden Virginia tobacco into a Rizla paper, stick in a menthol filter, and then step outside, directly ahead of the window, where I could keep an eye on my things. I found myself turning to you after I licked the cigarette closed. I politely asked you to watch my belongings while I stepped out to degenerate my lungs, and you politely obliged. You were a faceless stranger. Sometimes I cherish that first hour we sat together, with no knowledge of one another. It was peace, for us to blend into the café, become a part of everything else, all consumed by our own lives and worries. It was peace before your life became mine, before mine became yours.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pried, but I couldn’t help but notice that you’re working on something interesting,” you said to me around five minutes after my return. I turned to look at you properly for the first time. I was slightly intimidated, wondering what on earth compelled this man to have an ounce of interest in me. I was self-conscious, knowing I smelled like a fresh ashtray, so I internally tensed at the sound of your introductory apology. I thought you were going to bring up my disgraceful habit. British people have a way of using an apology to convey opposing things; it represents 50 percent regret, and 50 percent inconvenience. I relaxed once I realized you were just being deferential. “Is that… a script for a play, or a show, or something?” you asked. Unlike me, you did not smell like a fresh ashtray. I remember thinking, I bet his cologne is the most expensive recommended retail price Hugo Boss, or a limited-edition Abercrombie & Fitch fragrance or some shit like that. Of course, I didn’t know the retail prices of men’s cologne, and you’d later come to tell me that those brands were on the modest end of the price scale: “Creed Aventus is my go-to, typically.” But it wasn’t really money I could smell. It was just whatever I couldn’t afford.

“Umm, it’s just a personal project. A play.” I tried not to say too much. You nodded, still looking over at my laptop. I thought, Should I have locked my screen when I went outside? Closed the laptop? But I didn’t think you’d care. Strangers aren’t usually that interested in other strangers.

“A play? That’s amazing. Sorry, I just saw a page from the corner of my eye. I didn’t touch anything, I promise. But the script, it sounds interesting. What’s the play called?”

“It’s called The Worthy,” I said. “It’s this kind of… near-future dystopia.”

“Oh wow. A dystopia. What’s it about? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“It’s about a lot of things, really. Mainly national identity, citizenship, capitalism, that sort of thing. I’m still working on it, so the specifics aren’t all quite there yet.”

“That’s very impressive. When did you start it?” I quickly glanced over at your screen, where I could see an application form for something. The page had expired due to a lack of activity, so you would have had to refresh it. I guess getting swept into the sweet embrace of procrastination was at least one thing we had in common.

“I’ve been working on it since the late summer. I started it around August, and I’m nearly done. Hopefully by next month, or December. I think I’ll spend the Christmas holiday tweaking it.”

“That’s great. I’m quite into theater myself.” You took a sip of your coffee. “I love the West End. I love drama in general. Films, TV. Do you work for anybody? Should I expect to see this anywhere?”

“Uhhh, no.” I shook my head. “It’s just a personal project. I’ll try and get it out there myself, but we’ll see. It’s a long road to stardom.” I chuckled uneasily. I had completely lost my creative train of thought at this point; it was going to be a ball ache to try to get back into the script. “I graduated from Kingston University in drama and creative writing, which was not exactly in my parents’ life plans for me.”

“Really? Wow.” You frowned in surprise, and then your expression softened as you stared through the window, out at the busy road ahead. “Chasing your dreams is always worth a shot every now and then, isn’t it?”

“Sure. Well, what do you do, then?” I rallied a question back, somewhat intrigued by your response.

“Oh, uhhh, I’m a master’s student. LSE. Law. Fun stuff.”

“You don’t sound too convinced.”

“Like I said, I have a great love for theater. But law runs in the family, so the road has been somewhat paved for me,” you said, shrugging lightly. You didn’t need to expand on that point. As I looked you up and down, it all made sense. What struck me, however, was that your assurance towards obtaining a career in what I thought must be an extremely competitive profession didn’t necessarily read as enthusiasm or pride. I was quick to wonder whether most people with privilege felt resigned to it, or whether you were something of an outlier.

“I guess sometimes we know what our destinies have in store for us.” I smiled, closed my laptop, and jumped off the stool to collect my bag. I had to leave; I was getting too stressed out, thinking about where my life was going, terrified at not knowing. But you were set for life. I knew that from the moment I saw you.

“What’s your name, by the way?” you asked, once you realized I was making a run for it. “I’d love to see the finished product at some point. I’m sure it’ll be out there in the world one day.”

“My name’s Eddie. You can add me on Facebook if you want,” I found myself saying, taking my phone out of my pocket. “What’s your name? I can add you now.”

“My name’s Hugo,” you said. “Hugo Lawrence Smith. Lawrence with an A-W, not an A-U. But I’m just Hu to most.”

“Nice. I’ll see you around, Hu.” I had no intention of seeing you around.

You nodded and smiled courteously as I turned away. I laughed internally at the revelation of your name. You weren’t wearing Hugo, you were Hugo. You were a living, breathing embodiment of splendor. It was etched into your linen shirt, your crisp trousers, your charcoal-gray overcoat, your hazel eyes, your diplomatic smile, your attention-commanding posture. Even though you were a coward at heart, your outward form was a hiding place from that truth.

See, Relebogile Naledi Mpho Moruakgomo is quite a mouthful of a name if you’ve never heard it before, I’ll admit. My mother couldn’t decide which name she liked best, so she took all three she was considering, scooped them up into her hands in Gaborone’s Princess Marina maternity ward, and stuck them onto my birth certificate without a second thought. My father had no say whatsoever; they had this idiosyncratic deal that if I came out a boy, he could pick my name. My mother was elated that I was a girl. I had my father’s surname, anyway—that should be enough, she’d huffed. When we moved to England, Naledi ended up winning the space where Relebogile stood, just to make things easier for everyone else, and that was the name I’d hold from there on. But even a name that was easier for everyone else wasn’t going to be easy for everyone. I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I had always hated my name, because there was a time—a blissful moment—where I would assertively correct my peers on its pronunciation. No, it’s not Nail-dee, it’s not NAR-leh-dee, it’s not Nah-leh-DIE, it doesn’t rhyme with Malachi, it rhymes with Eddie, it’s Naledi. You’d think the English language would be more accommodating to the arrangement of the letters, you’d think it would be easier, but it has its trials and tribulations on the British tongue. And don’t even get me started on the rest of my names.

It didn’t help that as I sauntered into my teenage years, social standing and appearance became everything, and I had a name that was practically oral acrobatics, a name that had me growing tired of racking up three times the number of introductions to strangers than the average local, a name that received a predictable scroll of questions about the meaning. A suggestion that “Eddie” might be easier. It didn’t help that in my weariness, by the time I started university, I gave in to that request.

So that was naturally how I introduced myself to you. I was Eddie. No, it wasn’t short for anything, yes, my parents knew what they were doing giving me a boy’s name, it just added to the flair, the zaniness of my character, it built me up for the judgmental world around me, they thought it would get me further in life, that’s why they did it. I told you a year after we’d first met that it wasn’t actually Eddie, it was short for Naledi. You looked at me funny and asked me why I went on that faux spiel about my name’s origin, and I told you it’s the same reason that when someone asks me where I’m really from, I’ll have a different genesis, because they don’t really care, it doesn’t really matter. My name is Relebogile Naledi Mpho Moruakgomo, but my name is Eddie. You thought Naledi sounded cooler, more unique, but I could only translate that as it sounded more Other, and I was tired of that kind of attention.

I’ll never truly know now if you genuinely understood where I was coming from, considering the sequence of events that have occurred thus far, but I think that was the beauty of it. You never truly understood, and you never really cared, and your name was easy on the ears, your face was easy on the eyes, your smile was easy on the heartstrings, and that was why I chose you.