Always the Sun

by Neil Cross

  ‘Dad …’

  ‘All right. I don’t know. Gladiator or something.’

  ‘I’ve already seen it like a gazillion times. I haven’t even seen Scream Three yet.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sam. ‘But I’m telling you now—there’s no sleeping with the lights on.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said Jamie, for Stuart’s benefit. ‘Dream on.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘What? Right now?’

  ‘What’s wrong with now?’

  ‘Duh. It hasn’t even started yet.’

  Sam looked at his watch.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. I’ll see you a bit later then. About teatime.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Sam terminated the call and pocketed the mobile.

  Mel had been keeping half an eye on him. She broke off from whatever Alison was saying and said, ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Sam. He gave her an encouraging, martyred expression and urged her to continue with her conversation.

  He lit a cigarette and tried to join in, but it was a halfhearted attempt. Gossip was of greatly reduced appeal when it involved strangers. Nevertheless, it was a fruity story. It featured a woman called Jenny he would be interested to meet.

  Taking grim pleasure from his own selflessness, he went to get in another round. At the bar, he cast several glances at Dave Hooper, who was engaged in the same conversation with the same four men. Hooper was interrupted every few seconds by someone saying hello on their way to the lavatory.

  He seemed unaware of Sam’s presence. Sam found this greatly irritating.

  It was clear that Hooper was drinking too much. At one point he offered up a great yell, such that the entire pub paused for a second and looked his way. Hooper was clambering on his mate’s shoulder, holding up a twenty-pound note like an Olympic torch, trying to get the barmaid’s attention. He got it.

  Sam’s contempt darkened. Taking great care, he balanced the drinks on a circular tray which he carried back to the table. Everyone was too involved in their conversation to thank him properly. Only Anna took the proffered glass, raised an eyebrow and briefly touched his upper arm.

  The Guinness, five pints of it by now, pressed against his bladder. He’d delayed going to the lavatory because he’d have to pass Dave Hooper to get there, bidding him a courteous acknowledgement. If Sam broke that protocol, sanctions might be applied. These would be followed by a renewed peace agreement that would require greater reparation, and more profound public humiliation.

  Even worse was the possibility that Dave Hooper might wish to visit the lavatory at the same time as him.

  He imagined Hooper doing a quick, copper’s squat at the urinal, untucking his cock from its lair. Should Dave Hooper occupy the urinal next to him, Sam knew that he wouldn’t be able to piss. It had happened before. If it were the wrong kind of pub lavatory—two urinals, and only one cubicle—he might find himself in real trouble. If the cubicle was occupied, he could find himself trapped at the urinal, desperate to piss and quite unable. An unending queue of men would see only Sam’s back and his bald spot, as he waited with gritted teeth at the urinal, mentally rehearsing the 13 × table, waiting for the train that never comes.

  Whenever it was possible this might happen (which was whenever he visited a new pub) Sam would not go to the lavatory until he was drunk, or until discomfort had matured into pain. Whichever was first.

  He stood. The weight against his bladder sent a cramp across the wall of his stomach, down to his anus. He excused himself, then walked fearfully in the direction of the door marked Gentlemen.

  There was a laugh.

  The young man talking to Hooper glanced briefly at Sam, and said something into Hooper’s ear. Hooper laughed and looked sideways. He cuffed the younger man round the back of the head. Sam was close enough to see, but not hear, him mouth the word behave.

  He pretended not to notice. But as Sam approached, the lull in Hooper’s conversation deepened. Soon it had become a derisive silence. Hooper stayed propped at the bar, looking at Sam with blank disinterest. His companions paused, then parted, allowing Sam to pass.

  Sam fought to keep his expression impersonal. His penis twitched. He feared to piss himself.

  He nodded hello to Dave Hooper and passed by. The small group of men closed in his wake.

  With an open hand, Sam pushed open the lavatory door.

  He heard Hooper laugh behind him.

  In the lavatory, there were four urinals and three cubicles, only one of which was unusably stuffed with shit-smeared wads of paper. He passed it, gagging, then hurried into the farthest cubicle and locked the door behind him. He scrambled to unzip his fly. He waited for a few moments, in some discomfort. Then he pissed for longer than seemed possible. When he was done—and there were several false starts—he pulled a few sheets of paper from the roll, just to make the right noises, and pulled the flush. He stepped into the tiled lavatory, adjusting his belt.

  One of Dave Hooper’s companions stood at a urinal. It was the young man who’d spoken into Hooper’s ear when Sam approached, causing him to laugh. He was good-looking, in a sporty way, in his late teens or early twenties. He was looking at the ceiling, whistling as he passed a hot parabola of pale beer-urine against the aluminium splashback.

  Sam passed by him, and stopped to wash his hands. (He knew that flush handles, touched by numberless faecally-smeared hands, were the dirtiest part of any public lavatory. Second came the taps, which were touched by many (not all) of those same shitty hands. And further, he knew it was unnecessary to wash one’s hands after urinating: the skin of the penis was no dirtier than the neck or the cheek or the ankle, and the hand was not contaminated by touching it. Yet he could never bring himself to leave a cubicle without flushing it, and washing his hands afterwards.)

  As he washed, the young man sighed and zipped himself up. He joined Sam at the wash basins, but only to check his hair in the mirror.

  He caught Sam’s reflected eye.

  He said, ‘All right?’

  Sam nodded, rinsing the soap from his hands under a trickle of cold water.

  ‘All right?’ he said.

  He turned and began to dry his hands on a damp loop of thin, blue towel that hung from a battered dispenser.

  The young man said,

  ‘Are you Jamie’s dad, then?’

  Sam straightened.

  He faced the wall for a few seconds, the filthy, wet towel limp in his hands.

  Then he turned and faced the young man.

  He said, ‘Are you Liam?’

  The young man nodded in a manner that suggested of course he was Liam. Everyone knew that.

  Sam spoke through his teeth.

  He said, ‘Leave my boy alone, you little bastard.’

  Liam made a show of patting flat the crown of his gelled hair.

  He said, ‘I haven’t touched your fucking son.’

  The casual obscenity, with his child as its object, slapped Sam with the cold force of blasphemy and he trembled when he spoke.

  ‘You coward,’ he said. ‘Look at the size of you.’

  Liam’s smile was beautiful.

  He laughed.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

  Before Sam could answer, the lavatory door swung open. In the mirror, Sam watched Dave Hooper enter and stop behind them.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Liam Hooper laughed again.

  ‘Mr Greene’s having a word with me.’

  Sam faced Dave Hooper.

  Dave Hooper said, ‘If you want to have a word with someone, have a fucking word with me.’

  He punched Sam in the face.

  Sam’s head struck the towel dispenser. He and the dispens
er’s metal cover fell to the floor. It whirled and rattled on the wet tiles like a spun coin.

  Sam lay in the wet, looking at the scuffed nubuck suede of Dave Hooper’s Caterpillar boots. Hooper drew back a foot. Then he paused, put it flat on the floor.

  He said, ‘Twat.’

  He held the door open for Liam to leave, and followed his son back into the pub.

  Sam got to his feet, using the washstand to steady himself. His jaw felt broken. He examined it with tender fingertips. Then he looked at himself in the mirror.

  Abruptly, he turned to face the far wall. He saw that the only window was heavily barred. The bars were thick with old coats of white gloss paint and they hardly budged when he reached up to tug on them.

  He didn’t believe he could walk out of this lavatory and go past Dave and Liam Hooper. Not with his arse and back still sopping wet, and blood on his face. But the longer he delayed his exit, the worse he knew it would be.

  With resigned anger, he slammed his way through the swinging door. Dave Hooper and what Sam now supposed was his family were waiting for him. They made a silent half-moon of Ben Shermans. Sam tried to keep his head up, but it was not possible. Scorn radiated from them like heat and he passed them with his gaze lowered. The boy, Liam, moved into his path, specifically to shoulder-nudge him.

  Sam didn’t pause. The Hoopers watched him make his way across the pub, back to the table. It seemed infinitely familiar. He sat down. Alison and Anna were gone. Mel was alone.

  She looked at him.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  He tried to speak.

  ‘Christ,’ said Mel. ‘Did he hit you? Did Dave hit you?’

  Before he could restrain her, Mel stood. The Hoopers were still watching.

  Mel caught Dave Hooper’s eye.

  Across the now quiet pub, Dave called, ‘All right, Mel?’

  Mel gripped the edge of the table. She bellowed, ‘You fucking animal, Dave Hooper. You fucking coward.’

  The assembled Hoopers raised their glasses and cheered. Dave Hooper cheered the loudest. Then he muttered something to Liam, who laughed.

  Everybody else looked at their tables, out the windows, into their glasses, at the coal of a cigarette.

  Mel took Sam’s elbow.

  ‘We’re not scared of you,’ she said. ‘You’re just fucking animals. All of you.’

  The Hoopers beat out a tribal rhythm on the surface of the bar as Mel ushered Sam from the Cat and Fiddle. When the heavy doors swung closed, the jeering seemed to stop. But behind the door, Sam knew it continued.

  They stood on a bright, painty smear of sunshine that fell on the concrete. Mel fumbled with a cigarette. She inhaled five or six angry, pecking puffs.

  She said, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sam. His brow was furrowed. He was thinking about something else.

  He said, ‘Mel. You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Fuck them,’ she said. ‘I’m not scared of them. What happened?’

  He told her. He described being punched and she pursed her lips. She looked old and pale and furious. She stamped off down the street, slightly unsteady on her heels. He followed, shambling, ashamed, like a scolded Old English sheepdog. Already he needed to piss again.

  On the corner by the Dolphin Centre, Mel’s mobile rang. It was Janet. She’d been in the toilets chatting to Anna and had missed everything. Already she’d heard several versions of what had happened. In the worst of them, Sam had been glassed and had run from the pub, one eye dangling free of its socket.

  Curtly, Mel let Janet know what had happened. Then she told her to stop worrying and stay in the pub. She’d see her later.

  Sam stopped off at Mel’s house, to clean himself up. Mel applied a sticking plaster to his cut, bruised cheekbone. Sam drank several mugs of coffee. He didn’t want to sleep. He dreaded the waking moment, when today’s events would charge at him and shame would rush through him like sunlight.

  When he left, Mel was still withdrawn. She seemed to be furious with him, as much as Dave Hooper.

  ‘Mel,’ he said. ‘There was nothing I could do. It happened so fast. And there were so many of them.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and turned on the TV.

  He stood there, fussing with the blood on his shirt. Then he said goodbye and walked home.

  He arrived to discover that Stuart hadn’t left yet. So he called hello from the hallway and went straight upstairs to bed.

  The house, new wood on an old frame, remained indifferent to his presence.

  10

  The next morning, he stood at the bathroom mirror, applying a borrowed cover-up stick to the ripening bruise on his cheekbone. It left a pale, disfiguring smudge.

  He patted his pale, solid, hairy belly.

  Whenever he thought about the Cat and Fiddle, he endured a debilitating thrill of shame. It distracted him from his work. He was inattentive to patients and brusque to colleagues.

  Eventually, Barbara summoned him to her office. He sat like a schoolboy on a beige Ikea chair while she took her place behind the desk. She glanced at some notes spread before her. Then she looked up and told Sam that she was concerned about him. She knew he was a talented, dedicated nurse—after all, Isabel Beaumont wouldn’t have recommended him so highly if that were not the case.

  She told him she knew he had a lot on his plate. But during this, his trial period, he had never seemed quite happy and it was beginning to affect his work—which she knew (she reminded him) could be excellent even in situations that were far more demanding than they enjoyed at Agartha Barrow. As his line manager (and, she hoped, his friend), she had a responsibility to him. But she also had a responsibility to his colleagues—and their collective responsibility lay with the patients in their care. She could under no circumstances allow the quality of that care to be compromised by the problems of an individual member of staff.

  She asked if there was anything he’d like to say. He told her no, and held her gaze for a difficult second. She dismissed him.

  All he wanted was to sleep.

  Variously during the distracted day, he’d thought about taking Jamie on a long holiday, moving him to a private school, finding a job on the continent, or perhaps America. He thought how Jamie would enjoy America. As fantasy segued into fantasy, he felt more deflated and trapped.

  He finished his shift without speaking to anybody, and without anybody speaking to him, and he caught the bus home. Stepping into the hallway, he barely had the strength to remove his coat. He hung it on the banister like a soldier returned from the trenches and dropped his bag in the very place he reprimanded Jamie for leaving his.

  Jamie was on the sofa, watching TV in the dark. Blue, flickering cathode flickered and lashed at his face. Sam said hello and dumped himself in the armchair. Jamie didn’t respond. Sam said hello again.

  Then he caught himself and sat forward. Jamie’s face was smeared and wet. In the cold blue light he looked brutalized.

  Sam said, ‘Jamie? Mate? What’s wrong?’

  Angrily, Jamie wiped his nose on his hairless wrist. He tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat and all that emerged was a hound-like whimper.

  Sam knelt before him and held out his arms. But Jamie pressed himself further back into the sofa and Sam let his arms fall to his side. He stayed there, wondering what to do.

  Jamie said, ‘How could you?’

  ‘How could I what?’

  Jamie stood. He looked down on his kneeling father. His upper lip was smeared with snot and his eyes looked swollen and tender.

  His voice broke.

  ‘You let him hit you.’

  For a few moments, they were frozen like that, cold blue in the cathode rays.

  Then, wearily, Sam got to his feet.

  ‘Jamie,’ he said, ‘you don�
�t understand.’

  He reached out to put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder.

  Jamie shied from his touch.

  ‘You fucking wimp,’ he said.

  He went upstairs.

  That night, Sam dreamt the cabin crew of a 747 en route to California were urgently insisting that he was the aircraft’s missing pilot. Despite the fact that he wore sandals, a Hawaiian shirt and, inexplicably, no trousers, he was required in the cabin. Then the soft, spongy chair from which he could not rise to go and fly the plane became a bed, and he lay awake.

  He felt welded to the mattress. He forced himself to rise only because he needed to speak to Jamie. He moved in weary, befuddled circles, searching out his discarded clothes. Downstairs, he made a pot of coffee and sat at the breakfast bar, where he found a pack of eleven cigarettes. Only two were left when Jamie walked into the kitchen, showered and dressed for school. He registered his father’s presence, then went to the fridge and poured himself a long glass of orange juice.

  Sam stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘Jamie,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let me explain.’

  Jamie held the glass to his chest.

  ‘Explain what?’

  This the delighted, pink, warm, happy child whose nappy he had changed so many hundreds of times.

  ‘Explain what happened.’

  Jamie wiped his eyes.

  ‘I told you not to do anything,’ he said. ‘I told you.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘Look—’

  ‘Dad, you’ve made it worse. All right? You stuck your nose in, and you made it worse.’

  ‘I didn’t stick my nose in,’ Sam said. ‘I’m your dad.’

  ‘And now everyone’s laughing at you,’ said Jamie. ‘All right? Everyone at school knows you’re a wimp. Lying on the floor and crying.’

  Sam jerked as if prodded.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  Jamie shook his head.

  ‘You fucking wimp,’ he said.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Sam.

  ‘And you’re a liar,’ said Jamie, more quietly yet. He stood there, dependent and repelled.

  Sam could find no words. He looked at the crushed cigarettes in the ashtray.