‘Breathe,’ she says, indistinctly. ‘It’ll pass.’
* * * *
We are standing around a dark wooden table listening to somebody talk about Jim Morrison. In the corner, on the piano, a large silver ice bucket is cooling three fresh bottles of gin. I vaguely recognise the speaker – whose feverish, animated hand gestures are getting wilder by the second – as Dan, a self-confessed singer-songwriter from
I have never liked him.
In fact, his ongoing soliloquy – a sycophantic heaving up of the dead singer’s acidic legacy to something paralleling the work of Gandhi – is exactly the sort of inflated small-town nonsense I could do without. But it has always been this way and things won’t change. This, for better or (what is infinitely more likely) worse, is the nature of a homecoming.
The evening is heavy, warm, and pushing down on the bar. Above the Carpathian tree, and the white Duvel sunshade, and the collected egos of the assembled drinkers, a church spire points an accusatory single finger skyward and teeters, celestially, as if threatening to puncture the clouds. The transformation, some years ago, from church building to public house had been fiercely watched over by the council, the National Trust and the city’s abundant Catholic population. At no point, each organisation had warned (in its own particular way, for its own selfish reasons) must the original architecture be replaced or damaged. And it never has been. So one or two of the more fundamental religious factions complained and campaigned about how this former place of worship, this symbolic steeple of faith, had been despoiled by its crude conversion to atheistic alcoholism - it didn’t matter. The city had acquired a new bar and the drinkers outnumbered the protesters.
I take a step forward so that the spire disappears behind the square overhang of the doorway. Across the table a tall pink-haired girl is preparing to succeed Dan. Quietly, she takes up the mantle of self-righteousness, her eyes bright with caution as she chooses the right point at which to intervene. It is an important decision. She cannot move too quickly for if she does she might peak too soon. The tension is too much to withstand and I decide to go to the bar.
Inside, I am a different person. I am Peter Cook. I am Albert Finney. I exist solely within the confines of my mind. The boy behind the bar, whose hair is cut into two mutually exclusive styles (and whose face, twelve years previously, had been acned and innocent) throws an arm across the barricade and takes my hand in his.
‘Yes, Alex. How’s it going?’ His voice is brash, pure, unrestrained. It is an accent I had not recognised until I moved away, now simultaneously hostile and welcoming. We all talk this way. It was never a choice.
‘Rob,’ I reply, and I am myself again. I cannot pretend around these people. I belong to them, and they to me.
‘Jo stuck her card behind the bar for three bottles of gin,’ he explains.
‘Too much too soon,’ I reply. ‘Give us a bottle of that Japanese beer instead?’
Immediately he serves me up and I realise a moment too late that he has given me more change than is necessary. I selflessly decide not to argue.
By the time I join the toilet queue I am fuzzy enough not to remember all of the conversation at the bar. I was there and now I am here. In front of me, a bearded stranger, clinging to an optimistic bottle of red wine, is engaging a fellow queue-maker in conversation. The proof of his consumption is painted on his lips, which are stained a provocative crimson. It strikes me that even the pretty boys and girls, armed as they are with Sauvignon and sophistication, still find themselves here, waiting patiently with the rest of us to empty their bladders of expense.
I am back outside soon enough to find James, a drummer, arguing the case against the pretentiousness of The Doors. The tall pink-haired girl has joined a splinter group on the outskirts of the table. I wonder if she enjoyed her time at the pulpit, or if she even made her address at all.
‘Alex. The Doors. What are you saying?’
‘Bollocks.’
James, outraged and laughing, shouts something at me as I walk on and the conversation moves on. There are no real questions here. We are not learning from each other. Instead, each one of us speaks in a series of statements, flirtatiously hoping that some silvery beauty just within earshot will rush to our agreement or defence. It is exciting and it is meaningless. I consider that other class of twenty-five year olds, gathered now around some imagined kitchen table with bread and houmous, wine and cigarettes, to debate – with great knowledge and authority – the death of a tyrant, or the coalition, or Richard Dawkins. And what of those forgotten kids from school and university who chose to settle early? Many of them are still here, just a few miles away, dispersed unevenly across the city, some with cars and some with kids. And here we are, I think. In the middle of everything – reckless, joyless, free. We are not happy and we’re not sad.
Suddenly my beer is gone and the spire is back. I turn to the tabernacle on the piano and remove one of the gin bottles. My hand trembles as I pour out the spirit and I realise, for the first time, that I haven’t eaten anything since this morning. It does that to you, this city. It suckers your appetite and sends you off into the night with a stomach full of promise. Anything can happen in the confines of this bar but it’s more likely not to. Soon I won’t recognise myself anymore.
‘Glass of that gin would be great,’ Annie says. Her eyes are bright and she is smoking a cigarette.
‘Is that a joke?’ I ask, impatiently, insincerely.
‘Just fucking do it,’ she replies, with equal venom. I like Annie and will end up liking her more as the night progresses, but it is too early for us now (she recognises this too) and when I hand her the drink she re-joins the majority, leaving me alone at the piano.
The city is loosening around me and I know the booze is working. Again I look up at the spire to find the light at its peak now fading. It was an inspired choice to open this place up; to rip it from its theist roots and install a bar. Nothing has been lost. We have all come to church – it just looks different. At the entrance, dressed entirely in black, two voluminous clergymen keep watch over the dearly beloved. In the dusty half-light of the evening it is not hard to imagine dog collars instead of lanyards. We look different too, the faithful, draped as we are in our Friday best. This morning seems distant and Sunday is a world away – an afterlife each of us is desperately trying to avoid.
It is dark by the time I am sitting down. I have said goodbye to myself. There are five of us at the table and much to my own surprise I have a cigarette between my teeth. I am sure I don’t look natural with it. The DJ is playing something vaguely recognisable. In the doorway, three or four charming girls are dancing – not because they like the song, or even know it, but because three or four boys I went to college with are standing opposite. I am still watching when the first words of conversation spill out of the prettiest girl’s mouth and into the second prettiest boy’s ear. I am horrified and I am jealous.
‘S’good innit?’ Jane, who has surfaced beside me, says. I watch the pretty girl tenderly grasp the boy’s wrist then look away.
‘Hmm?’
‘I said it’s good. To have everyone here at the same time.’
I only see this girl twice a year, but still I engage:
‘It’s just the same as last year,’ I say. ‘Except we’re older.’
She looks good when she laughs. I wonder if she has a boyfriend.
‘Fag?’ She offers, and I accept.
An hour later, I am at the piano again. The gin has been replenished by some kind soul whose name I silently promise never to discover. My glass is nearly full but still I top it up. Paul, who in a giddy moment of festive idiocy decided to venture to the tobacconist’s up the road, returns now with forty Silk Cut, for which I dutifully and disappointedly part with six pounds. I produce the first of my own twenty deck and take in a double lungful so as to get my money’s worth. It strikes me that I will have to find a cashpoint when I leave. Unless -
‘I thought I’d find you here,’ Annie says, sidling up beside me for a second time. ‘Pour us a gin then.’ I oblige with much less faux-arrogance than before. ‘Your sister here?’
‘Somewhere,’ I tell her, although I really haven’t a clue. ‘Probably at the bar.’
Silence.
‘
It had never really been a relationship. Three months, and an erratic adventure at best. We had fallen into a spare bedroom on the last day of August, several years ago, crashed repeatedly into one another’s hips all through September, argued in October and been mutually unfaithful by Bonfire Night. But now, in the crippling summer hometown twilight, I am able to attribute a higher meaning to those intoxicated collisions. I fix and I plan and I convince myself – consciously and with little difficultly - that it had all been innocent, exciting, worthy…
‘I remember you used to write when we were... together,’ she continues. (And could that be a hint of nervous uncertainty frothing forth over those final three syllables?) ‘And the other day, when I saw your magazine...’ More gin. Appropriately, I draw deep on the cigarette’s bold orange filter and expel smoke so that it drowns my immediate vision in an exquisite haze of smoke. In the doorway, all but one of my formerly youthful college co-conspirators are drinking and laughing with the dancing girls.
‘I try,’ I mutter finally, finding it incredibly easy to root out a fitting tone of brooding modesty. Images of a thinly veiled romantic past creep and stir in my inelegant gut.
‘Is it about me?’ She asks, comfortably. ‘The girl in the story, I mean. Is she me?’
‘A bit of her,’ I confess, knowing full well that my imaginary lover, my fictional sweetheart, is in fact a creature of complete invention.
‘I knew it was,’ says Annie. In seconds she is dangerously close, leaning into me, reaching over my left shoulder and into the ice bucket, so that the slow show of her breast lights on my arm. And then our glasses are full again and it is clear she has no intention of stepping back on to her previous mark. We are actors, the both of us, and we are good.
‘Steve writes you know?’
‘Who’s Steve?’ I ask.
‘My ex. He works for the BBC now.’ A heavily pregnant pause. ‘Well, CBeebies.’
Her breath is a sweet mixture of syrupy booze and adolescent smoke. I let her shadowy fingers flirt with mine. It is a familiar, ergonomic entanglement – her delicate human frame cowering intelligently beneath the elevated bulk of my own – and in the few predictable seconds before we kiss I glance back at the doorway, seeking just once more those stylish boys and dancing girls, only to find an empty space where previously they had been perched.
* * * *
Unusually – and despite never having visited the place before - I know precisely where I am when I awaken, nauseous and half-undressed, some two or three hours later. We are on the settee. The room is dark. I start anxiously at the sight of a large figure standing squarely in the doorway, before identifying the stranger as a long, sober summer dress hanging dreamily on a coat hook.
‘Go back to sleep,’ Annie, the sprawling mess of perfumed flesh beside me, says. I touch her ankle lightly and my stomach tightens. The smell of cheap wine, gutter wine. I think I remember spilling more than a polite amount over her dusty wooden floor panels. Unconsciously, I am massaging her calf, spiralling upwards, struggling to piece together a chronological order of –
‘No,’ she says, weakly, confiscating her legs, and I remember how I had failed.
‘Was I sick?’ I ask her.
‘No.’ (Sleepy, distant, uninterested.) Then she is almost unconscious again.
‘I think I might be,’ I confess, matter-of-factly.
‘Just... don’t,’ she says. Ineptly, I arrange three cushions so that I am able to lie, hunched over, in an almost upright position. In doing so, my precocious fingers touch upon the glacial exterior of a jaded wine bottle. Coaxing myself back into the pillows (a manoeuvre which is soundtracked by the formidable reintroduction of Annie’s comatose breath) I swig, savagely and foolishly, from the bottle and replace it noisily on the coffee table. I want to be somewhere else. I don’t want to close my eyes.
‘Breathe,’ she says, indistinctly. ‘It’ll pass.’ But she can’t be certain that this – any of this - will ever pass, ever change, ever improve. Neither of us can. Carefully, and with all the pious precision of a cardinal, I gulp down the last of the wine (a pinkish rosé, like the heavily diluted blood of my own personal Christ) and settle beside my incongruous lover, not once daring to look outside at that swelling city where - imperfectly framed by the dark crucifix panels of an open window – an expiring night would soon be replaced by daylight.
