He tries to talk to her about her father, about her family, but every time she deflects his question. ‘I don’t want to talk about me,’ she says again, with that twitch of a smile and the fleetingly aggressive look. At a table behind them two girls who sound like Trish and Kath are talking in whispers. Chewing a tiny ribbon of skin from her thumb, Step looks over his shoulder, then towards the three boys by the cigarette machine, who are going on and on about some Czech au pair they all fancy.
‘Hello?’ he says, waving at her.
‘Sorry,’ she smiles, and for a while they talk about the hotel, about the people who work there and the people who stay there, and she listens to him as if she believes there is something he could say that would impress her but he hasn’t hit upon it yet. Then she notices Harry at the corner table, sweating in his tight tweed jacket, holding a half-full pint glass in each hand, and there’s a six-pack of beer in the pink plastic bag between his feet, along with some loose potatoes and a newspaper. Opposite him, Clive fiddles with the zip of his jacket, the one he’s worn every night for God knows how many months, while he goes through the motions of reading a copy of the Times Higher Education Supplement, which he’s fished from a bin somewhere, by the look of it. He picks up the paper, holds it close to his face, further away, close again, screwing up his eyes in irritation at the page’s refusal to get itself into focus. He presses the paper onto the table-top and pins it down with his pint of lager. Step looks at Clive’s face, as his eyes wobble and his brow buckles in a ludicrous imitation of a thinker in deep concentration. She looks at his dandruff-speckled parting, at the black streaks round the cuffs and collar, at the three empty peanut packets by his arm.
‘That’s Clive,’ he tells her. ‘Our writer in residence. He’s been writing his book for twenty years now. When it’s published it’ll shock us all. He’s discovered the secret force behind the governments of the world. The conspiracy theory to beat all conspiracy theories. JFK was whacked on the orders of the Queen Mother or something. If we’re lucky he’ll show us a page.’
‘You’ve seen it?’
‘Oh yeah. We’ve all seen a page. Seen it, that’s all. Lines and lines of typing, single-spaced. He won’t let you read it. He’ll just show you a page. But not if you keep staring at him. He’ll think you’re an agent of Them.’ They talk about his website, about the other websites he’s made for his friends, about his friends, but her eyes keep flicking between the three boys and the girls behind him, then back to Harry. ‘Stop it,’ he tells her, giving her elbow a nudge.
‘Sorry,’ she says, but she cannot take her eyes off Harry, who, oblivious of Clive’s spluttering at what he’s reading, is now looking around as if in search of a friend among the crowd at the bar.
‘Waiting for someone, Harry?’ he asks.
‘Nay lad,’ says Harry, throwing them an approximate glance, like a throw of a slack lasso. He aims a benign and queasy smile in the direction of Step, but now his attention has been caught by the glasses of beer. Evidently having no notion how he came to be in possession of them both, he regards the left-hand pint, then the right-hand.
Observing Harry’s consternation, Step gnaws at a fingernail. ‘Is he often like this?’
‘Only once a night.’
‘God.’
‘Bit of a double act, Harry and Clive. Always sit at that table, hardly ever talk to each other. As you can see, he has a drink problem: not enough hands,’ he says, as Harry takes a mouthful from the left-hand glass, then a mouthful from the right-hand. ‘Got to admire the technique,’ he comments, and Step repays him with a laugh, though her eyes show only distress at the tragic state of Harry.
‘Was there ever a Mrs Harry?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Thought not,’ she says, as Harry’s survey of the bar returns their way.
‘He’s OK, though,’ David assures her. ‘OK, Harry?’ he calls, raising his glass.
‘Aye lad,’ Harry replies, wagging his head profoundly, with a smile that disappears like a slip of melting wax. He takes a gulp from each glass and scowls at Clive, who is dozing over the Times Higher Education Supplement, his face squashed in his hands. Shaking his head, Harry looks over at Step, who pretends to be reading a message on her phone. ‘You treat her well,’ he yells, reinforcing the order with a jiggle of the right-hand glass. ‘You hear me, young feller. I know what’s what. You treat her well now. You hear me?’
‘I hear you, Harry.’
‘I know a thing or two. You look after that lady,’ he tells him, and the girls at the table behind, definitely Trish and Kath, cheer him on.
‘Shall do, Harry.’
‘You do that. You do that,’ Harry reiterates. His eyes swivel and his mouth does a peculiar squirming, as if his teeth were clogged with toffee. He closes his eyes, still clutching a glass in each hand.
At last she tells him something about her family. Her mother has remarried. Her stepfather is a dentist. She has a half-brother, Gareth. Gareth’s OK. Her stepfather isn’t OK. ‘Look,’ she interrupts herself, pointing at Harry, whose left-hand pint has tilted so far that beer is spilling onto his trousers. His eyes spring open; mystified, he considers the wetness on his thigh. Having solved the problem, he has a swig from one glass, then from the other, and then his eyelids droop and his head lolls, as does a glass, spilling beer onto the table and onto his leg, and baffled Harry again examines his trousers before deciding in favour of sleep, while a tongue of beer advances across the table towards the left elbow of Clive, whose mouth is gaping as if in horror at the encroaching flow, but he’s solidly asleep.
‘Back in a mo,’ he tells her, and he goes over to Clive. ‘Wakey wakey,’ he says, giving his shoulder a shove. ‘Your attention, please, Clive. The CIA would like a word. Come on, Clive. The Martians have landed.’ Simultaneously Clive and Harry rouse themselves and regard him, as if from a very great distance. ‘You’re going to get soaked,’ he tells them and blankly they both regard the slick of beer. Blankly they look at him, while he mops up the mess with a cloth, then they close their eyes once more.
‘I went to see Mr Morton the other day,’ she tells him the second he sits down again, so abruptly that at first he has no idea who she’s talking about.
‘The blind guy?’
‘The blind guy,’ she confirms, with a hint of displeasure. ‘He’s amazing,’ she tells him.
‘I’m sure.’
‘You know what he does for a living?’ she asks, hunching forward over the table as if to disclose a secret.
‘No idea.’
‘He’s a translator. German and Italian. It’s incredible how much is in his head. The way he talks, it’s like nobody I’ve ever met. He’s translating this book, about some German MP whose father was a forester, under the Nazis? He was telling me about it, and he just went off on this fantastic monologue, about being a student in Germany, and the German obsession with forests, and the Romans thinking that the German forest was as old as the world, and the myth of Wotan hanging himself from a tree and being reborn, like a Christ of the forests, and then he’s on to the brothers Grimm and some novel I can’t remember the name of,’ she enthuses, like a convert to some cult, and she stops, suddenly self-conscious. ‘He has all these computers,’ she continues more calmly. ‘They’re programmed to respond to his voice and read aloud what he writes.’
‘Speech recognition software, yeah,’ he joins in, a little bemused by this outburst of enthusiasm, though what it does to her eyes, ridding them of their veil of worry, is very appealing.
‘If you saw him at home, you wouldn’t know at first that he’s blind, the way he moves around. It’s like the rooms are perfectly fitted to him. They’re an extension of him. And he seems to be easy with it, with being blind. That’s what I just can’t get my head round. He hasn’t always been blind, but now he can’t see anything at all. I just can’t imagine how he’s come to terms with it. I’d cry all day if it were me.’
‘But you’re no
t him.’
She frowns doubtingly at him. ‘No, I’m not. So?’
‘So of course you can’t imagine it. He’s in his own world, and if you were in that world you’d come to terms with it. You’d cope. It’s like saying you don’t know how cats cope with eating cat food. You’re not a cat.’
‘That’s a daft thing to say. He’s a person who can’t see. I’m a person who can see. We’re the same, except he’s got the huge handicap of being totally blind. Cat food doesn’t come into it,’ she asserts, apparently delighted to be arguing.
‘OK. Put it another way. It’s like bats navigating in the dark –’
‘God. Cats one minute, bats the next. We’re talking about a man, not –’
‘Wait, wait,’ he butts in, putting a hand on her wrist. ‘Bats see in the dark, with their ears, OK? You can’t imagine what that’s like, to see with a sonar in your brain. But you don’t go around feeling miserable because your ears aren’t as good as bats’ ears, same as bats don’t miss what they can’t see with their eyes. We see the world in different ways.’
‘Jeez,’ she exclaims, reeling back. ‘Great comparison. Mr Morton used to be able to see. If he’d been born blind you might have a point. But I told you he used to be able to see. That’s my point. One of my points.’
‘OK. Not an exact like for like.’
‘To put it mildly.’
‘OK, OK. But my point is that we all experience the world differently and we experience only a part of it. We’re all missing a lot of what’s around us. We can’t smell what dogs smell, we’re useless in the dark. Who knows what tastes we’ve lost since we were babies,’ he suggests, getting carried away, but she laughs approvingly, and when she laughs the blush of suntan under her eyes darkens, becoming even prettier. ‘If your tongue and brain were wired differently, everything you ate and drank could have a unique taste. No two mouthfuls would be exactly the same. If your eyes were wired differently you’d see a hundred different kinds of blue. Colours we can’t imagine. Colours we couldn’t even put a name to,’ he goes on, as her smile changes, as if she were awarding him better marks for this performance. ‘Colour isn’t really an aspect of what’s out there, is it? It’s not a thing. It only exists in our heads, doesn’t it? Our brains just happen to select a range of frequencies, but the colour isn’t really there, not like the shape of something is there. See what I mean? Our colours aren’t a cat’s colours.’
‘Is this an obsession of yours?’
‘Is what an obsession?’
‘Cats. How did we get back to the cats?’
‘All I’m saying is our brains aren’t identical bits of hardware. The world’s different for all of us. Mr Morton can’t see what we see.’
‘Mr Morton can’t see anything.’
‘OK, Mr Morton can’t see anything. But I’m sure he experiences things we know nothing about.’
‘Hope, you mean. You hope he experiences things we know nothing about, because the alternative is too awful to contemplate.’
‘No. I’m sure he does,’ he insists, feeling as though he’s having to comfort her after some disaster that’s happened to a member of her family. ‘It’s not all loss is what I’m saying. He has to listen in a way we don’t. That must change things.’
‘I suppose so,’ she says, and she looks around the room, not nervously this time, not as if to see who’s watching her, but as if she’s imagining what it would be like to hear this room as a blind person might hear it. Returning to him, she raises her glass and chinks it against his pint. ‘But you wouldn’t want to swap places with him, would you?’ she challenges.
‘No,’ he concedes. ‘I wouldn’t.’
Her eyes levelled on his, she tastes the wine. ‘I could do with my brain rewired for this stuff.’ She winces, and he has an urge to kiss her, and he would kiss her, if Trish and Kath weren’t behind him. ‘Look,’ she says, pointing at Clive, whose elbow has been reached by a fresh spill of beer from one of Harry’s glasses.
Half awakened, Clive blearily examines the dampened elbow of his jacket, then the puddle from which he’s lifted it, and slowly traces the trickle of beer back to its source. He looks at Harry as if noticing him for the first time, and mutters something at him before shifting his chair a few inches to the side. Rapidly, randomly, he scans the pages of the Times Higher Education Supplement and grasps his glass, which he empties in a single gulp. Harry, meanwhile, is dozing contentedly, but the left-hand glass, almost empty now, is almost horizontal, while his right hand is losing its grip on the other one. It slithers slowly down, very slowly, then suddenly slips from his grasp and drops plumb into the middle of the plastic bag and somehow doesn’t break, but a miniature geyser of beer shoots upwards, dousing Harry’s knees. His startled eyes look directly at Step, and in a voice that is not at all slurred he says to her, ‘I’m very sorry, my dear. Terribly sorry.’ Delicately, as if extracting a musical instrument from its case, he removes the glass from the bag, takes a sip from it and places it on the table, while tipping onto the table the last of the beer in the left-hand glass. Clive, having observed the accident with absolute indifference, folds each of the three peanut packets neatly into thirds, tucks them in turn into his empty glass, then carries the glass to the bar, walking with great care and holding it stiffly at arm’s length, as if it were full to the brim. Leaving the paper behind on the table, he departs with the air of someone who has found this evening’s company insufficiently stimulating, and in the doorway steps aside to allow some new arrivals to pass. And now Harry, conscious once more and finding himself the custodian of two empty glasses, ponders his beerless state for a minute but seems to find the conundrum too taxing. His head lolls, pressing his chins into a collar of flesh.
Immediately the old man is asleep again, but still Step watches him. Tears are appearing in her eyes.
‘You can’t worry about everyone,’ he tells her, and touches the edge of her sleeve.
‘It’s not everyone,’ she says, looking at his hand on her arm.
Gently he touches her elbow under the prominence of the bone, supporting her arm on his fingers; with his thumb he can feel the bump of a plaster beneath the material. Her gaze sidles away, to rake across the room, across the walls and floor before turning on him. It’s like looking right into the beam of a torch. Unwaveringly she stares into his eyes, knowing what he wants to say, perhaps daring him to say it. ‘Is that better now?’ he asks, with a small squeeze of his thumb.
‘Yes.’
‘How did you do it?’
‘An accident,’ she says, withdrawing. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Didn’t look like nothing.’
‘It’s nothing. I was helping in the garden, at my dad’s house,’ she explains, not telling the truth. ‘Cutting the roses. I got scratched by thorns.’
‘Thorns.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Hell of a scratch.’
‘Yes.’
‘Looks more like a cut than a scratch.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘I don’t think thorns did that, Step.’
‘That’s what happened.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Evading his eyes, she reaches for her glass.
‘Come on. Tell me,’ he asks her.
‘I’ve told you,’ she says, with another torchlight look, and there’s no doubt about what she means.
‘OK,’ he apologises quickly, touching her other arm, at which she flinches.
Harry jerks upright in his seat, as if stabbed with a pin. Befuddled, he takes his bearings like a man waking from a full night’s sleep and finding himself in an unfamiliar place, then he recognises them. ‘Nice to see, David,’ he slurs. ‘Nice to see.’
‘See what, Harry?’
‘Nice to see,’ he winks, wrinkling his nose at the cuteness of them. ‘You be nice to her. You hear me?’
‘Shall do, Harry.’
‘You do that.’
‘Right you are, Harry.�
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Slamming one of the glasses on the table, like an auctioneer’s gavel, Harry rises from his seat on legs that quiver with the effort. Stabilised, he turns his attention to Step, almost toppling as he inclines his head towards her. ‘See that he does, my dear,’ he instructs her. ‘You hear?’ He puckers his lips, satisfied by his wisdom and eloquence, and approaches the bar with a tacking manoeuvre, zigzagging towards a gap in the wall of bodies.
‘Safe for a while,’ he smiles, and puts a kiss on her hand.
‘Woo,’ he hears from behind him, then Trish and Kath are whispering.
Step glances over his shoulder and her face tightens with annoyance. ‘I should ring my dad,’ she says.
‘It can wait, can’t it?’
‘No,’ she says, getting up. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Call from here.’
‘No,’ she repeats with another glance behind him, and without waiting for a reply she heads for the door with that sexy slouch of a walk that shows she doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her, but with those little sideways looks that show she does.
Wide-eyed and innocent, Trish and Kath wiggle their fingers at him daintily.
‘Will you two just back off?’ he tells them.
‘Oooh,’ Kath recoils, her hands to her mouth.
‘Kiss on the hand. Very romantic. What book you get that from, Davie?’ asks Trish, blowing a smoke ring.
‘Who’s the girlie?’
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