The next morning I got Jeremy signed up for the first beginning boxing class of the day, and bought the necessary paraphernalia from their stock. I even bought him a gym bag with the place’s logo on it to carry his new headgear, gloves, and so on. He’d long since given up protesting whenever Emmy or I spent money on him, and actually seemed to enjoy all the clothes and things we had bought him.
We used the hour before class started to work on his stamina- nothing too strenuous, but enough to get him warmed up. I told him this was going to be the routine two days a week- An easy (but not too easy) pace on the treadmill until it was time for his boxing class. Another hour after class on either the treadmill or the exercise bike to cool down, and he’d be able to build up his fitness in no time.
“Look,” I told Blake, the boxing instructor, “Jeremy’s recovering from some fairly serious injuries, so this is about him getting some technique and fitness for now. Until we’re completely sure he’s fully healed I don’t want him actually sparring, alright?”
“We don’t spar in the beginner’s class anyway,” Blake assured me. “What kind of injuries?”
“He was stabbed eight times,” I said.
“And he’s here to tell the tale?” Blake asked.
“He very nearly wasn’t,” I replied. “So, yeah, it’s important to me that he builds up his strength and fitness and of course, heals completely before he starts taking any body blows.”
“I guess that means that our ‘Eight weeks to the ring’ program is out, then,” Blake said, rubbing the back of his neck in thought.
“Until the doctor signs off on it, no full contact,” I agreed.
While Jeremy followed the workout I’d set up for him, I did my own thing. I concentrated mainly on my strikes for the first hour and a half, then on general strength and mobility for the rest of the time.
“How do you feel?” I asked Jeremy on our walk back to the apartment tower.
“Tired,” he admitted. “But it’s a good kind of tired.”
“Eat something, then take a nap when we get home. Emmy and I aren’t going out for the rest of the day, so you can concentrate on your recovery. This is what I want you to do, Jeremy. Train, but also rest and recover as much as you can. Be lazy when we don’t need you. Lie around the house, watch cooking shows, whatever. Your strength, fitness and general healing all happen when you rest.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Jeremy replied as we waited for a light. “I really do, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me, but it seems like I’m taking advantage of things.”
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I mentioned cooking shows- why don’t you learn to cook while you have all this down time? We have an incredible kitchen here and so far we’ve barely used it. Or take up baking- learn to make tasty bread and yummy muffins. I’m just throwing out ideas here. Heck, you could learn origami, or take up writing poetry. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re doing something that keeps your mind busy while your body does what it needs to to get stronger.”
“You’d be O.K. with me spending time in the kitchen?” Tiny asked as we resumed walking.
“Of course!” I replied. “Well, only if you make tasty stuff, that is,” I added, which got the big man to give me a smile.
“Tasty stuff it is, then,” he agreed.
“Hey, babe, have any plans for this afternoon?” I asked Emmy over lunch- which Jeremy had fixed. Sure, it was only sandwiches, but they were tasty sandwiches.
“No plans,” she said. “Do you mind if I spend some time in my new little studio?”
“Of course not,” I told her. “If you’re going to do that, I’m going to run out and buy myself a car for my driving lessons. Something nice and disposable.”
Emmy laughed at that. “Not your new Lotus you have never even driven?”
“No, but I do need to have that brought over here. I talked to the building’s concierge and he said that they have a long-term car storage program, since so many of the apartments in this tower are pieds-à-terre. It’d be much more convenient than the dealership’s storage facility,” I told her.
“You say disposable- what exactly do you mean by that?” Emmy asked.
“Well, I figure there’s a non-zero chance I might screw up and wreck it, right? So I want a car like a Nissan Micra or Ford Fiesta or something like that so I can’t do a whole lot of damage. My second thought is that we could keep it as a loaner car for any guests we might have stay here. If, say, Lee and Jen want to spend some time in London they could stay here if we’re not in town, and they could use the little Fiat 500 or whatever. Odds are they won’t be great at driving on the wrong side of the road, so they might crash, right? Again, a small car is less likely to cause problems than, say, a Range Rover would be.”
“How many parking spots are we allocated?” Emmy asked.
“Four. I asked. The penthouses get four, the larger three bedroom apartments get two, and the two bedroom units get one space. So in the long-term, we’ll probably need to buy a bigger car for when we all go out- I’ll probably talk to your dad about an X5 or something, but that’ll wait until after I feel confident with the traffic here.”
“That makes sense,” Emmy agreed. “Whatever you get, if we are to use it as car for guests, it should have four doors. You mentioned a Fiat 500, but that is probably too small. Perhaps something slightly larger than that?”
I did a bit of Google mapping and discovered a cluster of car dealerships out in the suburbs to the south of London proper. This seemed to be atypical, which I found strange since it was the norm in the US. I was used to districts with many, many dealerships within close proximity, allowing for cross-brand shopping. Here in the London area they seemed to be scattered about, mostly in the suburbs. I guess it reflected a different attitude on the subject- another thing to discuss with Emmy’s dad when we had some down time.
The taxi driver and I had a nice chat on the long trip out to where I’d found Nissan, Ford and Toyotas dealerships all within walking distance of each other. We got to talking about the relative merits of the class of cars I was considering, and his take, as a professional driver in the London metro area, was that any of them would do, but it would boil down simple preference.
“I’m a Ford man, me,” he said. “I been restoring a classic Mustang. Left-hand drive, imported from the States. The engine work’s all done and she runs like a scalded cat, but the interior still needs a fair bit of work. So I’m a bit partial. My wife’s car is a Mondeo, and it has been trouble-free. It’s not a pretty thing, but it gets her to where she needs to go.”
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“I’ve never owned an American car,” I admitted.
“What with you being American and all,” the driver laughed.
“I know, right? I’ve had one Japanese car, and the rest have all been German or English,” I told him. “No American cars at all.”
“English?” he asked, looking at me in the rear view mirror in curiosity.
“I’ve got an Aston Vantage back home, and I bought myself a Lotus Evora here in London.”
“And you’re shopping for a Fiesta?” he asked, amazed.
“I need a car I don’t care about, to loan out or run quick errands in. Do you know how much of a pain it is to go grocery shopping in a Lotus?” I asked.
Laughing, the driver admitted that it would be a terrific pain in the arse. “Now that you put it that way,” he said. “A Lotus in’t practical thing on the road, now is it?”
I let the driver take me to the Ford dealership first, and asked him to stick around to take me to the next stop if nothing caught my eye.
“I like the looks of the Focus,” he said as we pulled up. “For practicality you can’t beat the estate.”
The whole car buying experience was different than I was used to in the US (or at the Lotus dealer, for that matter). In fact, the sales people seemed uninterested in selling me a car, even as I walked the lot and looked at the available Fiestas and Focuses. Finally a guy in his mid thirties came out to talk to me as I peered in the window of a Focus wagon (an ‘estate’ in the UK).
When I asked if I could take it out for a test drive, he said we’d need to go inside to fill out the necessary paperwork first.
Walking in the front door of the showroom I did a double-take. There next to the Mustang GT (or whatever it was) sat a gorgeous blue Focus hatchback on custom wheels. They’d fixed it up as some sort of spec car, with a signboard explaining all the aftermarket mods they’d had done.
“What is that?” I asked, naturally gravitating to the hatchback.
“Oh, that?” he asked, again seeming to be bored by the whole process. “We had a race shop up-spec an RS. Everybody looks at it, but the problem is that it’s too dear. You could get that Mustang for less money, and it’s got more power and a better interior.”
Looking at the long list of work done and the amount it added to the price, I could see his point. It really didn’t make any sense.
“Can I take that out for a test drive?” I asked.
“No, sorry, not that one. We have an ST you could drive, though.”
I handed my driver’s license and insurance cards to the lady at a desk so she could make copies for the test drive, but she balked at the California license and American insurance.
It became this huge hassle of whether they could actually allow me to drive a car without a valid UK license, so finally I said, “You know what? This is too much of a pain. As much as I hate to give you guys my money, let’s just ring up that RS and I’ll drive it away. After all, if it’s my car, you don’t have to worry about whether or not my license or insurance will cover me.”
“We will do, for the financing, the woman said.
“No financing. I’ll have the money transferred right now,” I replied. “In the meanwhile, could you take it to the back and have it prepped to go? I’d like to get this done as quickly as possible.”
This really threw them for a loop, but eventually I convinced them that I wasn’t kidding and really did have the money to plunk down like that.
While I was waiting for the car to get sorted out I strolled out to the curb to talk to the waiting cabbie.
“Well, I’m buying a Focus,” I told him.
“You won’t regret it,” he said. “Nice, reliable cars, if a bit boring.”
“I doubt this one’ll be boring,” I told him. “But I want you to do me one more favor. I want to follow you back to South Bank- I’ll pay you for all this waiting time and for the ride back, but I want to follow you back so I don’t make any wrong turns or anything. Sound good?”
“What color is your new car?” he asked. “I’ll keep an eye on you to make sure you’re doing alright.”
“It’s a sort of medium electric blue.”
“Not boring, bright blue… You’ve done and gotten an RS, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Not boring,” I confirmed.
“I should say not!” he replied. “I’m surprised they still have any on offer. I would have thought they’d have cleared out their allocation long ago,” the driver said.
“I guess they wanted something special for their showroom, so they had a tuner shop do a bunch of work to it. The downside is that it bumped the price up into the stupid money category,” I said with a shrug. “All those mods priced it out of the market.”
“But not for you,” said the cabbie.
“No, not for me,” I agreed. “For me, this is about the cheapest car I’ve ever bought myself.”
The sales guy came out at that point to bring me inside to deal with some final paperwork, so I told the cabbie I’d be out in a little bit to follow him back to London. For a reply he just touched the brim of his cap and nodded his head.
Paperwork done and keys in hand, I finally got to sit in my new little hot hatch. Adjusting the seat to fit me as best as possible put me fairly close to the head liner and positioned the rear view mirror in an awkward spot, but I figured I could play around with those settings a bit more when I got the car home.
When I pulled up behind the classic boxy London cab, the driver got out to take a look at my new ride.
“It is a lovely blue, alright,” he said, walking around and inspecting the Ford.
“Your meter’s running, right?” I asked. “You’re still on the clock until we get back to South Bank. Jump in and let’s take this little beauty out for a spin.”
“You’re having me on, right?” he asked, astonished.
“No, I’m serious. Let’s find a road where we can stretch its legs a little.”
“There won’t be anything like that around here,” he said dubiously.
“You know, I never caught your name,” I said. “I’m Leah.”
“Johnny J,” the driver said, reaching to shake my hand.
“Johnny J,” I said. “You enjoy fast cars, right? You’re a professional driver- I’ve heard about what it takes to earn a taxi license in London. What would you say to spending a day- let’s say, six hours, all told- driving around London in this car, and maybe my Lotus, too. You’d give me a quick course in the traffic patterns and rules of the road and make sure I’m not likely to endanger any innocent victims. I’d pay you, of course. Oh, and you’d get to drive a bit, too,” I said, adding an additional temptation.
“When d’you think this would happen?”
“Not tomorrow- I have an appointment that’ll take up all afternoon. When’s your next day off?” I asked, seeing that he was open to the idea.
“I don’t work Saturdays,” Johnny said.
“It’s supposed to rain this Saturday, so your weekly rugby game would be pretty miserable,” I prodded, earning me a laugh.
“Aye, so it would,” he agreed.
Following Johnny J’s cab back to South Bank was a real non-event. Staying on the wrong side of the road wasn’t as much of a challenge as I’d feared, but I still wanted someone to hold my hand a bit while I got used to it.
Stopping at the front of the tower, I paid him for all the driving and the waiting, and he agreed to meet me there at nine on Saturday.
I stopped at the security office in the parking garage and did all the necessary paperwork to get the car assigned to one of our open spots, which brought a momentary pang when it reminded me of doing the same thing for Angela’s new car at the Century City condo tower we’d lived in. Parking the car alongside the covered Lotus, I made a mental note to get a similar cover for the Ford. Sure, the tower had a detailer who came weekly and getting on his schedule would be good, but keeping the dust off in the first place wasn’t a bad idea.
“Did you buy a car?” Emmy asked when I found her in her little studio.
“I bought a Ford Focus,” I said. “A nice little economy car. Perfect for what we were talking about. I got to talking to the cabbie on the way to the dealership, and he’s going to give me traffic lessons on Saturday.”
“Does that mean you will not need that other instructor?” Emmy asked, gently strumming her acoustic guitar.
“No, I still want to do that,” I replied. “This will just be a basic introduction to London traffic, with someone who navigates it on a daily basis to guide me, that’s all. Think of it as the 101 Intro class, in a way.”
“After all this, even once you become proficient in the local rules of the road, we will still mostly take cabs or chauffeured cars,” Emmy said. “Simply for the convenience.”
“I know, I know,” I admitted. “Especially if we go anywhere together. But really, that only applies to when we’re here in town. If we ever, say, want to drive down to Brighton or wherever we’ll want our own car.”
“How do you spell ‘rationalizing’?” Emmy teased.
“And of course, there are a lot of tracks here in the UK…” I said with a shrug.
“Of course there are,” Emmy agreed with a laugh. “Perfect for little economy cars like the one you just bought.”
Tiny made dinner that night. Apparently he’d taken my urge to start using the kitchen seriously. The meal wasn’t complicated- roast chicken and sautéed vegetables- but it tasted good enough and it was a solid first effort from the big man.
“Thank you for dinner tonight, Jeremy,” Emmy said when the meal was done. “It was a special treat to have a home-cooked meal.”
“Leah suggested I could start to cook for you guys,” Jeremy said. “It would give me something to do when we’re home.”
“That is perfect,” Emmy said. “We should buy you some cookbooks.”