by Robert Ward
“You can do better than that,” she said.
“No I can’t,” he said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I can’t. I’m not as clever as you. I don’t have the words. My parents aren’t as liberal as yours. They expect things of me. You know, like passing exams and then university? That would make them happy, and I want to make them happy. Is there something wrong with that? But you just don’t seem to care about anything. You just do what you want to do. That’s why I love you and envy you and want to be with you and be like you, but I can’t, I just can’t.”
“Oh, Rich,” she said, as she leaned back on the bench and looked straight out over the lake. “Why don’t you tell me what you feel all the time? You’re just as clever as me. We’re cleverer than all of them. We know we’re different from the rest of them, don’t we? And your parents are ace. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?”
He smiled and leaned towards her.
“My parents run the post-office and I’ll be the first member of the family ever to go to university, if I ever get there,” he said.
“I know your people are in trade,” she said, laughing. “But you can’t be held responsible for that.”
“Oh, Liz,” he said.
“What?”
“Just, oh, Liz.”
“But don’t make your parents an excuse. They’re lovely. Every time I’ve been to your house they’ve been lovely. And don’t think mine are anything to be envied. Anyway, you shouldn’t think about them, your parents I mean. What matters is you and nothing else. And my God, you sound like something out of the eighties saying that you’ll be the first of your family to go to university.”
“It’s taken us peasants that long to catch up,” he said.
“Nonsense,” she said. “And listen to yourself. You sound just like me. There might be some hope that you are one of us and not a pimply callow youth at all. Let’s go out into the rain.”
“So you’ve finally decided, have you?”
“Yes, come on,” she said, taking off his blazer and leaving it on the bench.
They ran out from the protection of the summerhouse into the rain. Elizabeth’s hair, dark already, was made almost black by the rain and it hung in rat’s tails over her shoulders, dripping down her yellow dress. Richard’s short blonde hair was thick and cut in such a way that the rainwater seemed to bounce off it.
Beyond the wooden walkway they ran across the short sodden grass to the waterside. She spun around with her arms outstretched and her head flung back letting the rain fall onto her face and into her mouth.
“Oh, Rich,” she shouted. “Can’t you hear the music?”
“Yes, I can,” he said.
“Look, over on the island. There’s a band of minstrels playing for us. They wear doublet and hose and play ancient flutes.”
“I can see them because you can,” he said.
“See them for yourself.”
“I do.”
“Take my hand.”
They danced far apart, a kind of minuet, only their fingers touching, and then they happened to look at each other at the same time and their eyes drew them together. They held each other and kissed. Her dress and his shirt were so wet that as they felt each other it seemed that they were naked.
“Always hear the music, Rich,” she said, into his ear.
“As long as I have you,” he said, hugging her close.
“Remember this moment, Rich. The one when we were most alive.”
“I’ll always remember, Liz,” he said. “I’ll always remember you.”
In that moment they realised that they were both saturated and cold and that there was nothing more to say.
“Come on then,” she said. “Let’s go back now. Do you want to stay at my house? You can if you want to, you know?”
“No. I think I’d better go home. They’ll be wondering where I am, already.”
“Okay then, it’s up to you. We’ll stop at the shop on the way home and I’ll buy some cigarettes.”
“Liz.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, say it.”
A sudden gust of wind, stronger than most and driving the rain before it, blew across them, and his words were taken away on it.
“I love you, Liz. Whatever you do. Wherever you go. I will always love you.”
She didn’t hear what he said, and perhaps he never said it but only thought it, but she knew that he had felt it.
In the morning, at school, at assembly, they looked at each other and smiled, but didn’t speak.
CHAPTER THREE
The stripper at the Rat and Cockroach was tall and slim and the colour of cinnamon. The hot blood of the young men boiled, as she thrust her breasts and buttocks at them and smiled and pouted at them with her pretty but unlovely face. She was a little too heavy about the jaw.
Older men, raincoated and unshaven, wearing flat caps, felt stirrings of nostalgia or regret, of frustration, knowing that they were unlikely to actually feel such young flesh ever again. The beat of the music throbbed.
Fred Cheese, the landlord, aided by Flo and Chantel the barmaids, dispensed foaming pints of thin sour beer in dirty glasses. Fred, with a lovingly cultivated beer-belly and a red geographical face as sour as his beer, snarled and grunted at his despised customers, his illegal behind the bar fag-ash miraculously falling between the pint glasses and glasses of gin and tonic, the latter ordered by rough looking women with voices like sandpaper.
In a dark smelly corner behind a below eye level wooden partition sat Richard, swirling whisky around in a dirty glass before heartily slugging it down.
The stripper, slinking past naked after her gyrations nodded to him and he smiled back having hardly looked at her. He had seen her perform now so often that he was familiar with her every inch and familiarity does breed something.
The pub, known universally as the Rat, the Cockroach being much neglected, was a backstreet Victorian monstrosity, seeming somehow to be diseased independently of its bizarre if quaint name. The pub-sign swinging above the door depicted a black plague-rat, sharp of tooth and red of eye, and beside it a giant non-mammalian, insidiously hideous creature bristling with legs and antennae. The doors were windowless and a filthy green where the paintwork had not disappeared altogether, with a metal plate screwed onto them informing all that Frederick Cheese was licensed to sell, etc. The windows at either side were frosted to half way up, and above were so filthy that the tobacco coloured curtains were totally unnecessary. Inside it was even more depressing.
Richard ordered another large whisky leaning up against the warm vibrating hot food display of salmonella sausage rolls and botulism minced beef pies which he was yet to see anybody buy, and was served by Chantel, a saucy little strumpet with an accommodating nature, though the bare beer stained breasts and the west-country accent were missing. The glass again was rimed with film.
The stripper appeared again, this time semi-clad in a black silk shift with a half-pint glass in her hand, moving amongst the patrons seeking alms. She concentrated most on those she had seen slavering at her performance, avoiding the women and those, like Richard, who as a regular could not be expected to pay more than once and he had already given her a pound. Her hair was blue-black he noticed, tightly permed and long. Surprisingly, that hadn’t registered with him before. But then, without looking at her, he couldn’t have described her face.
Back at his table he took a sip of whisky and then took out his letter pad from a cardboard folder and began to write.
Liz,
Well I’ve finally done it. I left a month ago. Mum and Dad are pig-sick though they haven’t said so. God knows why I chose to do the postgrad anyway.
It was my play being accepted for the radio that did it. I’ve worked out that if I can manage one a month then I won’t quite starve to death. I’ve also got a job at a travel agents (what a coward)!
One play a month? It took me a year to write the f
irst one! I’ll record it of course and send you a copy because I know nobody listens to the radio.
Anyway, I’ve got myself this incredibly squalid flat but at least I’m not sharing. It’s near a pub, which is good, but the pub is vile, which is bad. Otherwise I’m rather excited by if terrified of the outside world. What have I done?
Rich.
“Mind your stuff then, Ritchie, there’s a good boy,” Chantel said as she wiped approximately an eighth of the table top with a filthy cloth.
Considering he had only been frequenting the pub for the few weeks since he had moved into his flat it was remarkable how quickly he had become a familiar fixture and was very much what the staff thought of as a regular. This, to some degree, given his surroundings, disturbed him.
“What you writing?” Chantel asked, standing close to him.
“Just to a friend.”
“A letter you mean?”
“Yes.”
She wiped her chin with the back of the hand which held the cloth.
“Is it your girlfriend?”
He looked into his glass and swirled it around.
“It’s a girl who’s a friend, but it’s not my girlfriend.”
“Ah, I see. But you love her though, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment’s thought realising he shouldn’t be ashamed to say it. “How did you know?”
“It’s in your eyes. I can tell these things.”
He looked at her and saw that she had a pretty face. She was a bottle blonde with dark roots and he couldn’t tell what colour her eyes were in the dim light cast by the shaded wall-lamps but he guessed them to be blue. She had a hard mouth but a warm smile and he decided he liked her. She liked him. He could tell that.
“You all alone tonight then? It’s Friday, you should be…”
“I should be what?”
“Well… not alone.”
He wondered what it being Friday had to do with it.
“I’m not alone,” he said. “I’m in the pub.”
“Course you are,” she said.
He watched as she walked saucily away, her black skirt tight around her nicely shaped hips. Saucily? He wondered, but it seemed to suit her, and he imagined her hot breath being spicy even though that was the wrong sort of sauciness altogether.
Flo served him the next time he went to the bar. She was about fifty he guessed, skinny, hatchet-faced and coarse. Her face was pasty, with a sheen of grey down, and she had eyes which seemed to be black. Her hand was dry as she gave him his change.
He sat back down on the red plastic covered upholstery and looked around him as he drank. The advancing night, not that it was discernible from the inside, somehow made the pub seem like a dark red cave. The ceiling was high but seemed low and was a pale coffee brown and plain. The walls were papered in red and what once might have been yellow, the woodwork was dark and the floor, bare boards. It was a single large room part of which, over in one corner forming an alcove, was carpeted in navy blue and light green. Old people seemed to sit in this area he noticed. He sat on the other side of the bar in one of the semi-open cubicles which lined that side of the pub. He could see most of what went on from there without himself being noticed seeing.
By about ten o’clock it was very full, the other seats near his being occupied by some students from the art college. The area was blessed or cursed with much cheap accommodation and attracted artists and students accordingly, so there was a sizeable population of the intellectual poor, and the Rat and Cockroach, largely because of its name was a popular watering hole, though Fred did not stock absinthe.
The girl sitting opposite him had an ugly face. It had the normal features of eyes and lips and cheeks and eyebrows, a forehead a nose and a chin, and they were all where they were supposed to be, but somehow, their arrangement was not pleasing, as though by a fraction, positioning or shape of one feature or another was wrong and so the whole was wrong. Such is the difference between beauty and ugliness he thought. Between happiness and misery.
She caught him looking at her. It was a part of a second before he averted his gaze and she smiled at him as though knowing what he was thinking. In his memory, as he stared into his glass, he pictured something attractive about her, perhaps a rearrangement of her features in his mind but perhaps something already there in reality.
“Are you struck by my beauty?” she asked, sounding drunk. “You were staring at me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, cowardly. “It’s a bad habit of mine. There is so little of interest in me that I look for it in others.”
“You lie with ease and you have a glib command of the language,” she said. “Buy me a snakebite. A pint, and a double vodka chaser, straight, no ice.”
This was not a request but a command, and he obeyed.
“I’m Sally,” she said when he returned with the drinks. “I’m at the art college. You know, one of those people with vision but without the academic ability to get into a university, even a polyversity.”
“You don’t believe that or you wouldn’t have said it.”
“Never, ever contradict me. Not if you value your life. Remember that when you fall asleep I could slit your throat with ease. What’s your name anyway?”
“Richard.”
She drank down a quarter of her pint of snakebite and then swallowed her vodka in one. She grimaced and sighed.
“I drink to forget,” she said, noticing him smiling at her.
“Forget what?”
“I don’t know. I’ve forgotten.”
They both started to laugh. She introduced him to her friends but he forgot their names almost immediately. One boy was very large and wore a green cardigan with no buttons on it and had dark curly hair as though it was permed, but wasn’t. A pretty little blonde girl sat next to Sally and sipped her red drink while looking around timidly and interestedly with big saucer eyes. Another boy was fat and laughed a lot and seemed like a nice chap, someone to be used. There was another girl, dressed all in black with black hair and black eye make-up but she was sitting at the far end of the table and Richard didn’t notice her much.
Sally seemed to split off from the rest of her group and become the exclusive company of Richard. Certainly, they drank exclusively of the others. By eleven o’clock they were both more or less roaring drunk.
“Are you always this shy with strangers?” he asked, trying to find his lips with his glass.
“Yes, always,” she said, trying to focus on him. “I was one of those horrid little girls who was always showing her knickers to everybody and I’d sing and dance at family parties and sit on dirty old uncles knees and let them touch me up.”
“It sounds like you were a delightful child.”
“Are you a tits or a bum man?”
He reeled at her abruptness.
“I rather like them both,” he said.
“Yes, yes. I know but which do you go for first?”
“It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Well, I prefer a lovely bum to horrible tits, but then I prefer lovely tits to a horrible bum.”
“Both of mine are lovely,” she said, her head swaying slightly.
“What? Both your tits?”
“No, I mean, yes of course both my tits. I haven’t got one lovely tit and one horrible tit. I mean both my tits and my bum are lovely.”
“Well that’s good to hear.”
“More drink. I hope you’re rich. Where are we sleeping tonight, anyway? Where’s your place? I mean, you could come back to mine but I share a room, not that that matters, but if you’re shy?”
Richard, drunk though he was and having realised long ago that she had picked him up was still a little taken aback by the actual statement of it and he hesitated.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t I beautiful enough for you?”
“How do you know I want to sleep with you? I might find sex disgusting,” he said.
“Who said anything ab
out sex?”
“I live very close,” he said. “Well within staggering distance. It’s a bit of a hole but it’s home and you’re quite welcome to share my poverty and degradation for the night, and you are quite beautiful enough for me.”
“Aah, isn’t he a sweetie, but you say, quite, too often.”
By midnight the Rat and Cockroach was full to bursting with students and prostitutes and old drunks singing and staggering and the noise was deafening and the smell of sweat and perfume and alcohol and tobacco and dope overwhelming, the smoking ban being completely ignored. One important thing about the pub Richard had discovered since he had moved in nearby was that it never seemed to close.
“We’re going for a meal,” the girl in black shouted at Sally in order to be heard. “Are you coming?”
“No, you go ahead. I’m going with Richard,” Sally said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I think he’s going to drag me off and have his way with me.”
Her friends kissed her and nodded at Richard as they left.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go with them?” he asked. “They may make for more lively company.”
“I love them dearly,” she said. “But the four of them are all rather in love with each other you see. I’m a bit of an appendage. That’s why I’m a slag and pick up strangers in pubs. That reminds me, you haven’t passed the test yet.”
“What test?”
“You just wait here while I buy more drink and when I come back you’ll have to answer some questions.”
She returned from the bar and squeezed in next to him and they talked in the extraordinary privacy of crowded places.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty two.”
“Do you work?”
“I’m a clerk in a travel agents,” he said. “But I also write plays,” he quickly added.
“Any performed?”
“Yes, one. On the radio.”
“Hmm,” she said ominously. “You’re never likely to be rich, are you?”
“No, never likely.”
“No. Is it likely that you will die of consumption?”
“Very likely.”
“Are you deformed in any way?”