So, her face faded more and more, getting murkier. It was like everything else these days – turning to mud and fog. I got glimpses of it sometimes, in parts; her smile, her bright eyes, her smooth, dark skin. And sometimes, if I was lucky, I’d remember something. And sometimes, if I was unlucky, I’d remember something.
There was this one time I liked to try and remember. She’d made us a picnic. It was a warm day, clear, bright, blue.
We’d gone to a small park somewhere. We sat on the grass and ate the lunch and drank the wine and did all the things couples did when they were together and alone and away from life. So, we lay together and stared up at forever, me on my back, Brenda sideways, her head on my chest, her hand on my stomach.
But when I tried to remember that day, Brenda’s face blurred and clouded over, and it became something I could only see out of the edge of my eye when I looked away from it.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure if that had been real or just a dream.
I opened my eyes. The light was dull, the TV was off and Browne was there, in his seat, the glass of Scotch tight in his hand. I looked around for the tea. I couldn’t see any.
‘You were dreaming,’ he said. ‘Of faraway things.’
Faraway things. Yeah.
He reached for the TV remote control and flicked the box on. I wondered how long he’d been sitting there, waiting for me to come round. I suppose he must’ve thought I wouldn’t ever open my eyes again. Still, that hadn’t stopped him drinking.
‘You were saying her name,’ he said.
‘Her name?’ I said, knowing I’d been speaking Brenda’s name, screaming it, probably. ‘Whose name?’
‘You know whose. Your woman’s. Brenda’s.’
‘Uh-huh.’
He took a gulp of his drink and pretended to be fascinated by some programme about earthquakes.
‘Do you go back there, Joe?’
This was something he did now and then, this interrogation, like he was some kind of brain doctor, like he was going to sit there, drunk and disappointed by his own failures and work everything out for me: where I was going wrong, what I should do, that sort of thing.
‘Go back?’
‘When you have your flashbacks. Like today.’
‘Today?’
He went to take another gulp of Scotch and found that the glass was empty. He frowned, then lifted the bottle and tipped it up. A dribble came out. He frowned some more and glared at me, as if it was my fault he’d finished his booze.
He said, ‘Hm.’
He stood slowly and staggered out of the room. When he came back, he had a fresh bottle of booze. He made a big thing of cracking the seal in front of me.
He said, ‘Hm,’ again and fell back into his seat.
He filled his glass, put the bottle onto the floor, leaned back and lifted the glass. And stopped it short of his mouth, peering at me over the rim.
I could feel a lecture coming on. I didn’t have the strength to do anything about it.
Before the lecture, though, he decided to drink his Scotch. He said, ‘Ahh,’ and put the glass on the floor by his foot.
‘You know,’ he said now, ‘when you first came here a few weeks back, I thought you were a goner. You had that .32 round in your shoulder and there wasn’t enough blood in you to fill a thimble.’
‘I remember,’ I said.
Well, mostly I remembered.
‘Why did you come here? To me?’
‘Nowhere else to go.’
‘You could’ve gone to a hospital.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Yes. You mean there was nobody else you could trust to fix you, to help you.’
I hadn’t thought of it like that, but he was right. There was nobody else.
‘Yeah.’
‘You can’t carry on like this.’
‘You told me that.’
He had told me, hadn’t he? It sounded familiar, anyway. Now his face was red and shining.
‘Christ, you make me bloody mad, man. You’re killing yourself. And for what? Revenge, rage, fury, the only bloody things that seem to keep you alive. It’s ironic, you’re killing yourself to stay alive.’
‘You’re drunk,’ I said.
His eyes flashed for a moment.
‘Bastard,’ he said.
Then, as quickly as it had come, his anger went and he sank into himself.
‘Drunk,’ he said to his Scotch. ‘I should bloody well hope so.’
He looked up at me and his eyes were swimming and I realized he’d had a gallon more booze than I’d thought. I was killing myself with fury, sure, and he was killing himself in sympathy.
‘So I’m drunk,’ he said to me. ‘So what? And besides, what’s it to you, anyway? And besides that, your observation is less than keen considering I try to be as drunk as possible for as long as possible as often as possible. It’s quite an art, you know. Quite an art. I would suggest you try it but I think it would kill more of your brain cells than you can afford to lose. And besides … uh …’
He creased his forehead and scratched his ear. Then he lifted his shoulder and dropped it and reached over for his glass. He’d used that stuff on me before, about the art of boozing, all that. But he’d forgotten. It’d been a long time before.
Everything was back, nothing forward, except ruin and death. My life was there in the past, hanging on a nail in Brenda’s flat, right where I’d left it. I should go look for it someday. Maybe that’s what I was doing. Maybe that’s all I’d ever done.
FOUR
We were in a pub, me and Brenda. The weather was warm, that thick warmth you get in the evening of a hot day when the air is soaked through with sweat and fumes and nobody can breathe too much, though they’re all gasping.
This was the day after we’d been up the West End and looked in all those fancy shop windows. This was the day after I’d bought her the box of soaps and creams and stuff. It was a week before she died, before Paget sliced her face off. She knew she was in trouble. She knew she was using me. She was cut up inside. When Paget killed her, he was just finishing the job she’d already started. She never said anything to me about it all. I suppose I never asked the right questions.
We’d been in her flat before the pub, and she’d started drinking early, chain smoking. The cigarette smoke made my eyes sore, made my head hurt, but I didn’t tell her that. She had something on her mind and I just let her get on with it. I knew later that she was scared. I knew later that her fear was the only reason she was with me; because she’d thought I could protect her. Well, there might’ve been other reasons, but that was why she’d come on to me the first time.
‘Let’s go to a pub,’ she said through the smoke. ‘I know one.’
At the time I thought she just wanted to get away from the small space of her flat. I suppose that ‘I know one’ should’ve tipped me off.
She was wearing a cotton dress. It was the one I’d bought for her. It had flowers on it. It stuck to her flat stomach, the middle of her back. She’d worn it before, too – that day we spent walking down Bond Street and Regent Street, looking at all the pricey gear the toffs bought, diamond rings, two-grand handbags, that kind of thing. That was the day she was happy, for a while. That was the day before the day before the next, when she had to make the film.
We got a cab from her place just off the Caledonian Road. She told the cabbie to take us to the Fox and Globe, on the Seven Sisters Road, up by Finsbury Park. As the cab rolled along, I watched the world scrape past, remembering places I’d known years before, decades before. I remembered how it was when I was young, wandering these streets with a blank mind, a blank life, a blank future. I never would’ve thought then that I’d be with someone like Brenda who had no blankness at all.
I knew the pub too. It seemed like a long way to go for a drink, but I guessed Brenda wanted to make sure she avoided people.
The Fox and Globe was a place I used to go sometimes when I fought nearby. But that had
been a long time before and I figured it would’ve changed. It hadn’t. It looked just as I remembered, not dirtier, not different. It was as if the place had been kept waiting for me to return. I think it still had the same beer stains on the carpet, the same dried-in blood on the wall, the same shrivelled barman behind the same battered bar behind the same weary punters. It was all circles. The further I went from the past, the nearer I came to it.
It was one of those sixties brick things, not popular with anyone except the locals, and even then not really popular, just a boozer nearby, the kind of place people went when they didn’t have anything else to do, anywhere else to go. There was a jukebox and someone had put music on, soft, slow stuff. There was a pool table in the corner and a few kids sat around it and drank and hit the balls now and then, if they could be bothered. Mostly, though, they sat and gazed at the table and chatted about something or other: girls, probably, or what they were going to do when they finally had the guts to leave this place.
Me and Brenda took a seat in the corner and the old geezer slumped at the table next to us looked up and looked down and looked up again. It was Browne, only it took me a few seconds to realize it. He looked like he’d stepped in from a storm, hair straggled, shirt half-untucked, bleary eyed. He’d hadn’t changed either – not back then.
‘Joe,’ he said, focusing his eyes. ‘Is that you? Course it’s you. How many other people could look like that and still be alive?’
Brenda smiled. Browne stood, automatically lifted his empty glass and stepped carefully over to us. He sat and put a cold hand on my arm.
‘Good to see you, son. How are you getting along? How’s the head these days?’ He looked at Brenda then. ‘And is this your young lady?’
‘You met her,’ I said.
‘Did I?’
‘At the fights. A couple weeks ago.’
‘Fights,’ he said. ‘Ah, yes.’
He twisted some of the hair on his head around his finger and looked into the empty glass for his memories.
‘Barbara,’ he said.
‘Brenda,’ Brenda said, still smiling and holding her hand out.
‘Charming,’ Browne said, lifting her hand and putting it down again. ‘I do remember,’ he said, as if we were arguing with him. ‘You were upset, as I recall.’
‘Well …’ Brenda said, glancing over at me.
‘Don’t mind him,’ Browne said. ‘He doesn’t care, do you, Joe? You didn’t like the violence, my dear. Was that it?’
‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice. ‘The violence.’
Mostly what bothered her, I think, was the idea that I’d got in that ring and taken the violence.
‘All that fighting, Joe,’ she’d said that night, after we’d walked out of the fight and into the warm, fume-filled night.
‘I’m glad we came here,’ she’d said. ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘For showing me something of your past.’
‘Not much of a past,’ I’d said.
‘As good as any.’
We’d carried on walking in silence for a while, then she’d said, ‘Tell me more about your childhood.’
‘I’d tell you if I could remember it.’
‘I don’t think you were ever young. I think you were born old.’
She’d given me one of her smiles to let me know she was teasing. I hadn’t minded. She was probably right.
Born old. Yeah, that was it – assembled on some factory floor, made up of broken parts of other machines. Broken machines.
After that, we hadn’t talked much. She’d tottered along on her heels, still holding my arm tight. We’d passed a tramp trying to sleep in a doorway, wrapped up in layers of clothing, despite the heat, and lying inside an orange nylon sleeping bag.
Traffic had passed us, but it was quieter, slower, as if the heat was getting to the buses and taxis and lorries, making them all sluggish. Everything was grinding to a halt.
I heard Browne say something and looked up and saw that I was in The Fox and Globe.
‘Don’t blame you,’ he was saying to Brenda. ‘Not nice, the violence. Civilized people can’t take it. Not supposed to. Not for the likes of us. For the likes of him, brainless, dead from the neck up.’
Brenda’s eyes flicked from Browne to me, then back.
‘Well …’ she said again.
‘You’re too civilized for that kind of thing,’ Browne was saying. ‘Too tender for the tenderizer.’
I had no idea what that meant.
‘You’re drunk,’ I told him.
‘Bloody glad to hear it. I’ve been working on it long enough. It’s quite an art, you know. Scotch is my medium, like oils to a painter. You have to drink to a certain level of inebriation – just enough to keep the effect of the alcohol from dis-uh dis-pating – and then maintain it for as long as possible. Fine balance. I’ve been in this state now for …’ He lifted his arm and gazed at his watch. He gave up with that and dropped his arm. ‘Well, for a while.’
As Browne was letting his mouth loose, Brenda was nodding like she agreed with him. But I’d seen what booze did to her. She thought the drink would numb her, sock her into unconsciousness. Instead it turned her thoughts into acid, twisted her memories until they split and bled again.
She glanced at me, half smiled. Browne raised his glass to the light – what light there was in that place – and stared at the dribble of copper-coloured stuff in the bottom.
‘Of course,’ Browne was saying to his glass. ‘The trick is to know by how much and over what period the alcoholic effects of … uh … alcohol will dissipate. One has to remember also that alcohol is a disinhibitor, an unleasher of the darkness in people, the anger, the spite. It is the freer of deranged thoughts kept in check in sober moments. And one has to remember too that one is inclined to go too far and become pissed out of one’s brain.’
Brenda laughed. Browne looked at her, smiled, put a hand on top of hers.
‘Take no notice of me, Barbara,’ he said.
Brenda nudged me and made eyes. I said, ‘Huh?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. Then she looked at Browne and said, ‘Can we get you another?’
She nudged me again and I had to go the bar and fetch him some more of his fucking medium. While I was up there, I saw the two of them leaning close to each other, gabbing about something or other. Every now and then Browne would touch her hand and she’d laugh. Browne seemed good for her. I stayed at the bar a bit longer.
When I got back, Browne said, ‘Hold onto this one, Joe.’
I said, ‘Yeah.’
‘You old softie,’ he said, smiling.
I didn’t mind him taking the piss out of me if it made Brenda laugh. But when I looked at her the spark had gone from her eyes, the smile had gone from her mouth and something inside me tightened up, got colder.
Browne noticed it and made a show of taking the glass from me and holding it up to the light.
‘I’m the van Gogh of drink,’ he said.
He glanced at Brenda, his eyes roguish. But she wasn’t buying it any more, and he could see that and he became serious and put the glass down and said, ‘Oh well.’
She was lost in her thoughts, tracing a line on the table with her finger, the long fingernail wiping the spilled alcohol into spikes and swirls. Me and Browne watched her do it, watched her watching the light hit the shining liquid. I realized I was still standing. I sat. Brenda didn’t look at me. I had a pull of my pint and put the glass down and wiped my sleeve over my mouth. Browne sniffed. Still she didn’t look up.
Finally, her hand stopped and she just gazed down, her eyes empty. Everything became still, everything stopped, as if her hand had been the only thing keeping it all moving. I waited. Browne waited. We looked at her finger and waited for it to move again.
I think we both felt it, Browne and me. The world had stopped moving – our world, anyway, whatever that was; some part of some part of some pain that we called our own.
I listened to the hum of chatter around me, the clack of the pool balls, the quiet music. Why the fuck was I here? Why had I let her bring me to this place? I knew what it would be like. I could’ve taken her to the West End to see a film. I could’ve taken her to some posh restaurant. I could’ve taken her to the country for a weekend, by the sea, maybe. Instead I’d let her bring me here, to my lousy past.
Brenda pulled her finger in and made a fist of her hand and looked at Browne and said, ‘Why?’
‘Why, my dear? Why what?’
‘Why is it better to drink? Why do you drink?’
He took time to answer that. He peered at his glass.
‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘I feel reasonably happy most of the time, and then I remember. Then I drink.’
‘Remember what?’
‘Myself.’
‘You drink to forget yourself?’
‘Not really. I drink to forget what I’ve remembered, and to remember what I’ve forgotten. Understand?’
I said, ‘No.’
I don’t think either of them heard me. They’d both forgotten I was there. I didn’t count. I wasn’t in on this thing, whatever this thing was.
‘Yes,’ Brenda said. ‘I understand.’
Browne turned his head slowly to look at her, and the expression on his face changed. His eyes got softer, his brow lost its creases.
‘Ah,’ he said. Nothing else, just ‘Ah.’
And I knew that he understood, and that she knew he understood.
And I knew too that it was something I couldn’t understand. And that hurt, deep, deep down.
I wanted to say something, to join in their conversation. I couldn’t. I was out of it. Cold.
By now they were chatting about different stuff. I forget what. Brenda had a few drinks and lightened up. Browne was the same as always, dishing out his usual drunken bollocks.
To Fight For Page 2