(///ramp.pets.budget – Victoria Station, London, UK)
I can honestly say I hadn’t thought about that moment for around five years. But it’s funny how being confronted by an angry limping Spaniard who is trying to sue you can focus the mind.
I was a little scared at first. After all, he had followed me to the pub from my office and come straight up to me, finger pointing and shouting in Spanish. But one of my business associates spoke the language and calmed him down, ascertained he wasn’t actually an imminent danger to the four of us, and then acted as interpreter as we sat down to understand what had brought Francisco to seek restitution from me for apparently causing permanent damage to his leg.
Francisco had been in prison for causing injury by dangerous driving but was close to release and had resolved to live a better life. But then he was set upon by a fellow inmate for no reason. The broken leg he sustained as a result was complex and though he was now healed, he had been left with a permanent limp.
I politely interjected that I wasn’t responsible for an injury suffered by him in a Spanish prison, but he swiftly silenced me and proceeded.
He explained his injury had been caused by a man called Carlos, who was in prison for assault. When Francisco was being released, he sought an audience with Carlos to understand the motive for the attack. Carlos admitted his regret and said he was angry at himself for being in prison and hadn’t been thinking. It was the same loss of control in fact which had led to him being in prison in the first place for attacking his former employee Pedro, who had caused his company to go bankrupt. He then started weeping uncontrollably.
I still couldn’t see how I could be blamed for the state of Franciso’s leg but now knew better than to interrupt so allowed him to carry on with the next phase of his story, which involved him tracking down Pedro to see if he knew why he had been attacked. Pedro shed a small tear and said it was perfectly understandable. He had massively over ordered supplies and they had been unable to return what they had bought, blowing the company’s budget and forcing them into liquidation. But he pointed out that he had been distracted. He had found out that morning that Lucia had broken up with her boyfriend, and consumed by the sense that he might be able to act on his unrequited love for her he had lost focus on the matter in hand and added too many zeros to the order form.
I tried to interject to say that all such business problems can usually be resolved with payment plans and sensible negotiation but Francisco was not to be interrupted. He said he had found Lucia, who admitted she had known nothing of this backstory to her former workplace’s demise but confirmed that she had split up with Diego around that time, when the simmering tension of whether she could have pets in their apartment finally broke to the surface after he had said he would never tolerate living with an animal of any sort, and she had left him.
I momentarily put my head in my hands at now having to remember yet another name but thought better of it as Francisco described how he had located Diego, who was reluctant to retread old ground but confirmed Lucia’s story. He said the reason for what proved to be their ultimate row was that he was a waiter and had been treated badly that evening by a normally friendly customer at the restaurant, a British ex-pat called Colin, and his anger over that confrontation had spilled over into his mood when he got home.
I was barely following by this point but nodded along as Francisco eventually found Colin after a few weeks of fruitless searching. It was fair to say that Colin had no recollection at first of ever being rude to Diego, but when pressed, the evening came to mind. He said he was in a bad mood because his brother Eddie, on holiday from England, had beaten him at golf that day, which never normally happened, and had been goading him ever since over the unlikely result. Colin didn’t regard himself as a bad loser, but for some reason this defeat affected him and he had taken it out on the unsuspecting waiter.
Francisco was on a mission. He worked to get the money to get himself to London, and then Croydon where Eddie lived, to ask him if he remembered that game of golf. Eddie laughed. Of course he did! He beat Colin so rarely he could never forget. And did Francisco want to know why he had played so well. It was because he had found himself at Victoria Station on the way to the airport, and had been trying to take his golf clubs down from the upstairs food court when he discovered there was no down escalator working, only the up escalator and stairs. He was about to heave them back to a lift when a random man and his son offered to help him carry them down. And that unexpected gesture of help had put him in such a sunny mood that it had carried him through the next few days, all the way to the first tee and had led to him playing the golf of his life.
Funny thing was, he had never known who the man was until he saw him on TV, only the other week. Turned out he was the CEO of a big finance firm in central London.
So now Francisco knew who had started this whole chain that had led to his broken leg, and where the blame lay. So I had to pay up.
I was bemused for a moment and had to think fast. He had come this far. He was hurt. It seemed rude to just send him on his way. But clearly I wasn’t going to be writing him a cheque.
“You know,” I said. “The fault doesn’t really lie with me.”
Francisco stared at me.
“As I recall, the escalator was being repaired at the time, which is why there was only one in operation, and they didn’t offer a ramp or some other easy alternative nearby. It strikes me that the real culprits here are those running Victoria Station, who took that escalator out of action.”
Francisco stroked his chin. “You are right,” he declared in faltering English, standing up and pushing the chair back with his legs, wincing with pain slightly as he did it. “I will go there.”
I stood up and offered my hand. “Let me call you an Uber,” I smiled. “It’s the least I can do.”
_________________________________
what3stories 