Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  Once I had my pint in hand, whether from John or Colin, I read my Standard. It’s a tabloid-size paper, heavy on feature stories and columns but lacking the photos of bare-breasted girls that appear on page three of the Daily Sun. It functions as an antidepressant, lightening the burdensome weight of the hard and frequently bad news that more serious papers heap on your shoulders every morning. In the evening, you’re ready for comic strips, handicapping advice, and the inside scoop on Prince Charles and Lady Di. (She was pregnant then, and the betting shops were offering odds-on in favor of a boy. They were also accepting bets on whether or not Christmas would be white.) After I finished the Standard, I ordered another round and sometimes got involved in a game of darts, doing my best to imitate the style of the pro champ of Great Britain, Jocky Wilson. Jocky was a very rotund Scot who admitted to reporters that his recent successes were due to a newfound ability to monitor the amount of beer he drank the night before a tournament. Simply put, Jocky played better when he wasn’t hung over. I became fairly adept at darts and learned to throw a set of “arrows” without impaling any bystanders, but what I really liked to do while I nursed my second pint was to talk to people.

  It is true that the British are reserved and perhaps seriously repressed, but at The Fountain these characteristics were not so noticeable. I credit the beer. Whiskey tends to sweep the drinker into sudden, unpredictable moods, often of a provocative nature, but good ale or stout loosens the vocables and sets free our hidden desire for intimacy. A glass or two of Burton will make even the shiest person want to lean over and tap the stranger on the next stool. I tapped—or was tapped—many times at the pub, and it seems only fair to provide a brief catalog of some of the people I met, as testimony to Burton’s liberating power:

  A pen salesman

  A poet who published in little magazines

  A charwoman

  Several construction workers

  A Rastafarian who was lost

  A hod carrier who had an American friend called “Chicago Bob”

  A clerk from a shipping firm

  A solicitor

  Mr. Lloyd’s son, whose name, in my cups, I heard as “Floyd Lloyd”

  A girl who sold naughty underwear at a smart boutique in Belgravia

  A retired prizefighter who almost punched me because I didn’t know anything about Marvin Hagler, the American Middleweight Champ.

  Most of these people were just passing through Islington, but there were a few regulars with whom I frequently spoke. One of them was a kid named Colin, who was twenty-six, moon-faced, intelligent, with short, brown, bristly hair that verged toward punk. Once, I heard him refer to himself as Colin Two, to distinguish himself from Colin the barman, and that’s how I always thought of him. Colin Two had warm soup for blood. Even in the dead of winter, when the snow lay thick on the ground, he ran around in summery clothes—sometimes just a T-shirt and a sleeveless wool sweater above his trousers. Maybe he could tolerate the cold because he had such a short trip home. He lived with his mother in a council-owned flat above A. R. Dennis. The arrangement was fine, since Colin Two saved money and had somebody to darn his socks and remind him to eat, but he told me that his mother could be tough on him—she was down on his boozing. “She’ll only give me enough rope to hang myself,” he said. “Then I’m out on my arse.”

  Recently, Colin Two had been working at a pub on nearby Essex Road as a part-time barman and “dogsbody”’ who did odd chores, like mopping up the cellar floor. He’d been made redundant, though—the morbid British way of saying that a position’s been terminated. He was considering a new job with a cleaning service. It wouldn’t bother him to swab out loos, he said, so long as there was no hassle about it. In a sense, Colin Two was a victim of the Tory economy. Working-class kids like him had no old-boy network to turn to in times of trouble. The only thing Colin really had to look forward to was the onset of spring, when he planned to travel north to Manchester for a visit with his brother. They were going to float down the Thames on a barge, just lying around in the sunshine and knocking back the beer.

  Any good local mixes the young with the old. Doug was eighty when I met him. He was waiting for dreamy Colin to bring him his stout, and we struck up a conversation. He invited me to join him at a table he was sharing with his sister, who was eighty-three. She was a shrunken little woman who immediately directed my attention to the black liquid in her glass and introduced me to Mr. Guinness—a pseudo-face in the foam. Mr. Guinness had a hole for a nose, two holes for eyes.

  “That’s a sign of fresh beer,” she said smugly. “Isn’t it, Doug?”

  “That’s a sign of fresh beer,” Doug agreed, tugging at the brim of his slouch cap. He gave his sister a bunch of coins, and she wandered off to feed them into the slot machine—it paid out a two-pound jackpot. While she was gone, Doug told me that he had another sister, older still, who liked to go disco-dancing. I didn’t doubt it, since Doug was solid evidence of the soundness of his family’s stock. He had a steel-trap mind and never missed a trick. He loved jokes more than anything. Whenever he laughed, he’d throw his body back against his chair and expose his pink toothless baby’s gums and the old pink tip of his tongue.

  “I was in the Meat Game,” he told me on another night, gripping my forearm for emphasis. The Meat Game—did I understand? Butcher’s business! (Gums, pink tongue.) He’d had his own shop, back in the days when beef was beef. In his spare time, he played the squeeze-box. He even performed at dances at The Fountain, back in the days when . . .

  “I always loved music,” Doug said.

  “Doug always loved music,” said his sister.

  “I always loved music,” Doug said. He took out his wallet and showed me a brown-edged photo of him with an accordion draped around his neck, and then one of him in a soldier’s uniform, posed next to his father. The most important one he gave me in secret, passing it under the table. It showed a group of young soldiers, veterans of the Great War, standing on crutches in the middle of a dirt road. They were all missing an arm, or a leg, or both legs. “That’s what it was like,” Doug whispered, as if the image captured every bit of horror he’d known in his eighty years. But that was the only darkness I ever saw in him, the only wound. He was happy for decent health and a glass or two of stout. “No use in complaining,” Doug would say.

  Then there was Giustino. He was the most outlandishly generous customer in the pub. Every time I ran into him, he insisted on buying me a beer. If I tried to buy one for him, he’d slap my hand. “No, no, Johnny,” he’d say, pursing his lips. I was always Johnny to Giustino. His English was faulty. He hadn’t been in the country long. His home village in southern Italy had been destroyed in an earthquake—“Terremoto,” Giustino would say, gesturing with his arms to show how the rubble fell, the houses, the people—and afterward he’d started wandering across the continent, working as a chef. He worked now at an excellent restaurant in the financial district. “Good money,” he’d say, producing a fat roll of bills to convince me. The cash went for drinks, for luxury items, for food—that was Giustino’s passion. Every Sunday morning, he shopped at Chapel Market for the big lunch he always cooked for his wife, and he liked to display what he’d bought. “First, bistecca,” he’d say, putting a slab of beefsteak on the bar. “Second, some potato. Then, radicchio for salad. Lovely.” He’d pause to kiss his fingertips. “Lovely. Next, some red wine. Some musharoom. Some broccoli. LOVELY!” Though Giustino had many acquaintances at The Fountain, he confessed to me once, in a despondent mood, that he was lonely. These English, they were very nice, they treated him decently, but, well—they were English, not Italian. “I need simpatico,” Giustino said.

  The best friends I made at The Fountain were Simon and Juliana. I met Simon first, on a drizzly Sunday night, when he came into the pub and demanded that I give him the magazine I was reading. I glanced over at the next stool and saw a lean, fidgety young man in jeans and a faded cowboy shirt who resembled the French actor Jean-Pierre
Léaud. I was so taken aback by Simon’s forwardness that I didn’t answer right away. “I just want a bloody look,” he said, frustrated by my hesitation. I handed him the magazine and watched as he riffled through the pages, searching for something. When he didn’t find it, he rolled up the magazine—rolled it up, I say—and handed it back. Later, I would learn that it was his habit to crush, crumple, or otherwise mangle pretty much every object he touched, the better to file it in a pocket of his pants.

  He asked me if I was aware that I’d purchased a blatantly centrist rag. A film he’d done some editing on—a documentary about the People’s March for Jobs—wasn’t even listed in the cinema section.

  I said that I was not aware that I’d purchased a blatantly centrist rag—that I had in fact found the magazine’s listings to be comprehensive and accurate. I used it whenever I wanted to go to the movies.

  Well, said Simon, running a hand through his long, black hair, wasn’t I the lucky American tourist? He wished that he could go to the cinema now and then, inasmuch as film (not bloody literature) was what he cared about. But he was strapped with this insufferable job at a TV station in Southampton, slicing up videotape for the evening news. Did I have any idea what sort of town Southampton was? It was a bloody nowhere Navy town, better than an hour’s train ride from London. Nobody lived there except drunken sailors and indigent shipbuilders. Was there any chance that I could grasp what it was like to have to spend Monday to Friday in that wasteland? Had I ever boarded in a rooming house full of snoring old sots? The bloody Tories had caused the problem—Maggie Thatcher and her lot. There was hardly any work anywhere in the country. The system was falling apart. And if I thought it was tough on white people, I ought to go out to Brixton and talk to the blacks who lived there—Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Nigerians, Ghanaians, the poor bloody flotsam of the Empire. Nobody was helping them. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that they’d started putting their feet through the shop windows.

  Simon paused here for breath. “We’d better have another,” he said, calling to John. The Burton came. Simon had light-and-bitter—Burton to which a bottle of light ale had been added. He took a sip, then went into a frenzy. “Oh, no!” he cried. “The laundry.” He dashed coatless into the street and returned shortly, shivering. “Forgot the bloody clothes,” he said.

  Sunday night was laundry night—another in the series of outrageous burdens that Simon had to bear. He was living with a woman, Juliana—they were squatting in an attic room of a row house on the square—and every Sunday, he took his clothes and Juliana’s clothes to a laundromat at Amwell Street and then stopped at The Fountain for a pint. About midway through the pint, he’d go back to the laundromat and switch the clothes from washer to dryer. He’d forgotten about the dryer part while we were talking, and it had suddenly occurred to him that some swine had probably removed the clothes from the washer (the laundromat was always overcrowded) and thrown them on the floor—not that he, Simon, would mind, but Juliana preferred clean underthings to ones that had been stomped upon. This penchant for cleanliness did not mean that she was willing to do the laundry, of course. Juliana had a pathological aversion to laundromats and wouldn’t go near them—something to do with her Irish upbringing, Simon thought, some irrational fear of ending up as a scullery maid. Did I have any idea what it was like to be madly in love with a woman who hated laundromats so much that she expected you to do the bloody wash on your weekend break, when you should have been going to the cinema?

  Somewhere in here I ordered two more pints. The beer must have affected me, because pretty soon I was speaking in as loose-tongued a way as Simon, offering a sampler of opinions on love, sex, films, bloody literature, and anything else that floated up to the surface of my mind. Simon drank and listened. I was impressed by his humility, and by the appreciation he showed for my views—at least the Burton I’d drunk made it seem like appreciation—and I suggested another round. I think we had another round after this, but I wouldn’t swear to it. After a while, the pints lose their discreteness. At ten-thirty, John marched by and took our glasses prisoner, but we agreed that it was imperative to continue our conversation on the following Sunday.

  A week went by, and I went back to The Fountain. Simon was already there when I arrived, seated at a banquette with the laundrophobic Juliana. She was about the same age as Simon, in her mid-twenties, wrapped in a tweed greatcoat she’d found in a pub. Her attitude to me was cool, even severe. Who was this American fool? After an hour or so, the beer did its work, and she softened a bit and dropped her guard. She turned out to be witty and tough-minded, locked into a “sorting-out” phase of life. She’d just resigned from an administrative job at the BBC in a dispute over feminist issues, and she was a little confused about what had happened to her and not quite certain what came next. She spent her days in the row house, reading novels both great and trashy, listening to soap operas on the radio, and contemplating—in a half-serious way—her future. She was a brilliant conversationalist, with a hard eye for ironies. It was clear that she was as attached to Simon as he was to her. It made them fun to be around.

  I brought my wife on the next weekend, done up in her many layers of protective clothing, and it turned out that we all got along quite well. After that, we began drinking together every Sunday night, convening at a banquette and resting our elbows on a table that became progressively wetter from slicks of spilled beer. The difference in our ages seemed not to matter; in the democratic atmosphere of The Fountain, all but the most essential differences were ignored. When Simon learned that we’d been protest marchers in our youth, he forgave us for actually paying rent on our flat. We listened to his complaints about the political system, about the world in general, and found that—more often than not—we agreed.

  Gradually our friendship pushed its way out of the pub. We invited Simon and Juliana to our place and introduced them to Texas chili. Juliana said that she was amazed to see Simon eat real food—at home, he survived on crisps, like the dog from The Old Red Lion. One night, after the pub closed, they invited us to the squat. We went up to their room by climbing a desperate staircase, past bicycles, boxes of books, and other squatters. There were wires dangling down, exposed bits of insulation. We drank some cans of beer that Simon had stored under the bed, and he sketched some unflattering pictures of us—he’d wanted to be an artist once. The squat was the kind of place that’s good to live in when you’re young and in love, oblivious to the conditions that will ultimately form the borders of your life. We felt privileged to be there—to be with friends in an improbable country, safe, reasonably warm, in an old stone row house whose windows looked out on a churchyard and those last stubborn roses.

  The roses died in mid-December, after a wicked snowstorm. Worst winter in thirty-one years! The Indian woman fell to a constancy of shivering, and Mr. Lloyd put on another sweater. At The Fountain, Christmas decorations went up—strands of gold and silver tinsel across the brass rail of the bar, glittering in the back-bar mirror. The spirit of the season affected the behavior of regulars. There were more toasts more often. The lunch hour stretched into two. John got his hair cut. Ted, the butcher, chased Maureen around with a seltzer bottle, in a conciliatory bout of good cheer.

  We went away for the holidays. My brother and his girl flew over for a visit, and we decided to show them the famous English countryside. It was slush, mostly, all the way to Stratford-on-Avon. The Cortina I’d rented kept skidding on icy slicks. Driving the car was like taking a test for brain function. I had to do everything left-handed. Because we share a language with the British, we tend to think we have more in common with them than, say, the Rumanians, but it isn’t true. At least the Rumanians know which side of the road to drive on. As we headed southwest, toward the English Channel, the slush was replaced by mud. Near Taunton, in Somerset, there was less mud and more pastureland. Green hills hung with haze. A little lemony sunshine.

  Our destination was Chardstock, a tiny village of ancient f
arms and single-lane roads. Our cottage, plucked from the advertising pages of the Times, dated from the fifteenth century. It had a thatched roof, white plaster walls, black shutters, and a little yard. It was trim and pretty. Inside, the plank floors slanted in several different directions, depending on the slope of the land. There were two parlors, both furnished with antiques that were charming but perilous to sit on. The upstairs bedrooms, under the eaves, had rickety beds with quilts and blankets. The woman who owned the place had told us that the heating system—a couple of Dim-plex radiators and a vintage space heater—would be inadequate at freezing temperatures, but that she would have a load of wood hauled in. The wood was green. It was wet. We built a fire anyway, using some coal we’d found as kindling, and the cottage filled with smoke. When we opened the windows, frigid air rushed in. Make the best of things, we thought. Be hearty! Thrive in the face of adversity, the way the British do. So we set up the larder, drawing a kind of warmth from its promise. The fresh turkey we’d bought from Ted was already barded with bacon, trussed and ready for the oven. From Harrods we had our Christmas splurge—a haunch of venison that we stuck in an old pot and doused with red wine and bay leaves. The plum pudding went on a sideboard in the fuming parlor, next to bottles of brandy and port.

  That done, we walked to the local at the end of the road. We’d noticed it on our way in, the only business in town—The George, it was called. It looked like our cottage, though larger, with the same thatched roof and whitewashed walls. The barroom was small and undivided. It had about three tables, and a bar with a few stools. In an inglenook fireplace, dry logs were blazing. Nobody was in the pub except for a woman who was polishing glasses. “You’ve come for the carol service,” she said, putting her rag down and giving us sheets on which the words to several Christmas carols were printed. We asked for pints and sat on stools to sip them. A man with a ruddy country complexion came in, blowing on his hands. “Come for the carol service, have you?” he asked. He said that it was a custom in the village for families to gather outside The George on the twenty-third of December to await the arrival of Father Christmas, who would ride in on his horse and distribute candy and other trifles to the children. “It’s just old farmer so-and-so from over the hill,” the man said with a wink. “He’s had a few nips at home, and we’re hoping he don’t fall off the pony.”