Girlie Grey, part two

…con­tin­ued from Girlie Grey, part one.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Thanks but I don’t really like tea.’

It is Fitzroy, 2003 and the sales assist­ant at Tea Inter­sec­tion shrugs.

‘Have you con­sidered the pos­sib­il­ity that you might be in the wrong place?’ she suggests.

‘All the time,’ I say. It was sup­posed to be flip­pant, but she checks the panic button.

The Evil Sul­phura has brought me here. I mar­ried a career supervil­lain who appar­ently really didn’t know about my caf­feine prob­lem when she announced on our engage­ment that she was also a cof­fee con­nois­seur. Some­times even a crim­inal mas­ter­mind gets lucky. Now she is across the street at Mac­chi­ato­tal­it­ari­an­ism fond­ling plun­gers, and this is the only other shop in this part of Brun­swick Street that doesn’t sell pornography.

’There is one I like,’ I venture.

‘Yes?’

I never drank tea before the 1998 Event. After two years of caf­feine abstin­ence I dis­covered green tea, which has almost no caf­feine, and after a hand­ful of mildly exhil­ar­at­ing exper­i­ences in the safety of my own kit­chen star­ted to exper­i­ment with black tea, which I quickly determ­ined was awful. In fact, exper­i­ment­a­tion proved that I loathed black tea universally.

With one exception.

‘It’s a bit embar­rass­ing,’ I say, ‘but I can’t have cof­fee, and the only tea I like is Lady Grey.’

She bites her lip. I’m not the macho type, but it’s hard to avoid the feel­ing I’m being set up.

‘Lady Grey?’

‘Yes sir,’ says the maitre d’. ‘It’s a blend of black tea vari­et­ies fla­voured with orange and lemon.’

Picasso is a fine res­taur­ant, one of the finest in Las Vegas, and an excel­lent place to be a grooms­man, but sud­denly the entire wed­ding party is watch­ing me expect­antly and I don’t know why. I def­in­itely didn’t order tea, but I was just loudly rant­ing about it. How loudly?

‘Lady Grey,’ I breathe.

‘Yes,’ says the maitre d’, his face a pic­ture of con­dol­ence. ‘Sadly, sir, we have no Lady Grey tea.’

Sulph appears at my side. ‘What’s up?’

‘She says they don’t have Lady Grey tea.’

‘No, wait,’ says the Tea Inter­sec­tion sales assist­ant. ‘We have that kind of tea, we just don’t call it that.’

I catch my breath. It’s always grated on me that, of all the Rus­sian Cara­vans and Irish Break­fasts and even Earl Greys, the one I became addicted to is called Lady Grey. Why, I pro­claimed loudly at every occa­sion before and since, couldn’t Lady Grey be called Mon­ster Truck Killer Death Foot­ball Tea? It’s just tea after all, there’s noth­ing espe­cially lady­like about it and any­way it’s not grey, it’s bloody orange!

Now here was someone telling me they called it some­thing else. I fol­lowed her in a three-cup adren­alin rush to a shelf pop­u­lated by sil­ver tins with prim pink labels.

In Las Vegas, the groom and best man appear behind the maitre d’, who leans over me.

‘Here we are, sir,’ says the assist­ant. My mouth falls open.

A tiny mis­chiev­ous smile flick­ers across his face.

‘We like this name much bet­ter.’ Sulph has to stuff a packet of cof­fee into her mouth. I read the label twice. A grim calm settles over me.

‘But we do have some …’

The world, I decide, will hear about this.

‘… Girlie Grey!’

The maitre d’ erupts into hys­ter­ics, fol­lowed closely by the rest of the party and ran­dom other diners. He shakes hands with the groom, who had evid­ently heard me com­plain once too often.

‘Dude!’ he says.

‘Dude!’ says the best man.

I care­fully straighten my cravat and tip my chin up towards the art.

‘… oh dude …’ muses the groom. Tiny tears are form­ing in the corners of his eyes.

The world, I decide, will hear about this. I turn to the maitre d’.

‘I’d like a very large cof­fee, please.’

This true story was writ­ten with the assist­ance of four cups of Lady Grey, a quarter-caff espresso and an Orange Pekoe speedball.