Jonathan edged through the crush with two pints carefully held, handed one to me and squashed up at my side, turning his feet out sideways not to obstruct the narrow passage through to the hatch; but his eyes were already turning towards Jacko, shifting guiltily back to me and turning again.
I grinned. “For Christ’s sake, you don’t have to talk to the one you came in with. It’s not an obligation.”
“Sorry?”
“Go see Jacko, will you? He’s what you came for.”
“Well, but... You’ll be on your own...”
“Never alone with a good pint,” and Conciliation is a fine bloody pint. “Besides, I’m used to it. Go on, I’ll see you later.”
That was all the encouragement he needed. I watched him slide between tables and knees, greet Jacko just with a touch on the shoulder and then settle to the floor at his feet; and I felt the usual pang, it should have been me. It should have been me and Laura... But Laura was I knew not where and doing I knew not what, I could only hope not with Jamie; and I was here, on my own and used to that, boasting about it. No time for pangs. Get your head straight, Macallan.
Straight wasn’t really an available option, though, that evening. Not thinking about Laura meant thinking about Marty, thinking about Tommy, thinking about someone out there with the power and the will to kill. That had its own magnetic flux that could warp any head out of true, let alone a Macallan head. Here was something we really weren’t used to. My father wouldn’t be a factor, he only ever did what he was told and very much preferred not to have to think at all; but I wondered how the uncles were handling it. How they were keeping the family calm, while Uncle Allan presumably played Holmes, while Uncle James played the Godfather. That’s how I’d cast it, anyway; but maybe I’d ask Jamie on Friday, if I went. If I could bear to go...
But there was Laura again, turning thoughts sharply away from straight; and the only other choice tonight was not to think at all, or not at all clearly.
Conciliation deserves more respect than chug-a-lug, untasted down the throat; but that’s all that happened to the first pint. First flesh it touched was my tonsils.
Then I headed for the hatch, with just a glance down the tables to confirm that Jonathan wasn’t ready for another yet, nowhere near. Got a couple anyway, while I was there, and a double Jameson’s for added bite. Fingered the change in my pocket, thinking that at this rate it might not last the evening; and shrugged, and went to reclaim my piece of wall, lining the drinks up along the mantelpiece beside.
o0o
Drinking alone, you drink faster. It’s a universal law.
Whether you get drunk faster, that’s more open to debate. I think company gets you drunk, as much as alcohol. Certainly that night I was going for it hard but not getting anywhere much, so far as I could tell.
Then Carol swam up beside me, and all right, maybe I wasn’t so sober after all. Talking was the acid test, and I hadn’t been doing any of that hitherto. My teeth felt strange in my jaw as I smiled, and they were a little hard to work when I said hullo.
“Hi.” Maybe she was getting somewhere herself, the way she tucked her arm through mine, more contact than I was used to. “Are you all right?”
“Sure, fine. Why not?”
“Stuck here on your own. I was worried about you.”
“No, really. I came with Jonathan, but...”
A twitch of my head, all I needed to point out where Jonathan sat, still on the floor, hugging Jacko’s knee now while Jacko’s long fingers played with his hair, those brief periods between tunes.
Carol nodded. “I saw you come in. It’s not fair, him abandoning you like this.”
“I told him to,” I said. “I don’t feel abandoned.” Only isolated by blood and temperament and habit, all three.
“Well, come and join us. What are you drinking?” as Mike the landlord bellowed loudly, “Last orders now, please!” from the hatch, while someone in the other bar jangled a hand-bell hard.
“No, it’s okay...”
“No, it’s not okay, Ben. What are you drinking?”
“Um, Conciliation, then...”
“Right. Since when has buying a man a drink been such hard work? Wait here,” and she was gone, pushing into the pack, short and aggressively blonde and always a pleasure.
In fact I didn’t wait where she told me, I followed her towards the hatch, and took the drinks she passed back to me one by one; then, obedient again, I let her tug me through to Squeezebox Bench and stood quiescent while she bullied the others into crushing up a little tighter, to make room for me on the end.
“That’s better,” nodding with more than a hint of triumph to her voice. “Now you won’t be standing over us like a, like a hawk over a flock of rabbits.”
“Do rabbits flock?”
“God knows. Ask Nicky, he’d know. He knows everything.”
“Where is he tonight?”
Crushing the spirit out of some poor baby-sitter, if his mother were any guide; but, “With his father,” she said. “We swap him around, on a mutual-convenience basis. He handles it pretty well, we think. He’s not noticeably psychotic, at any rate. Probably helps that we still get on, Richard and I...”
“I’m sure.” Family breakdowns were a mystery to me; they didn’t happen to Macallans. Except of course for the big breakdown, the big failure, the one they still talked about: the boy who turned his back on the whole business, who would have changed the very blood in his veins if it had been medically achievable.
But then I was a mystery to me too, as I was a mystery to everyone, inside the family or out.
A mystery to Carol too, seemingly; she was looking at me askance, obviously working up to one of the big questions.
“Go on, then,” I said, barely even on a sigh. “Ask us. If you don’t ask, I’ll never tell you.”
“Does that mean that if I do, you will?”
I shrugged. “No promises. But I usually do.” That was one of the important things in being free, supposedly: the chance to be honest, to tell the truth without fear or favour. Particularly, in this case, without fear.
“Well, then. You’ve done this brilliant thing, right, you’ve walked out on something that revolted you, which couldn’t have been easy; you’ve done the hard part, so why are you mucking it all up now? Why aren’t you happy, Ben?”
For a second I just stared at her, knocked right out of kilter. Then, “I’m happy enough,” I muttered, into my glass.
“No, you’re not. Don’t bullshit me. I’ve watched you, and I’ve talked to Jacko.”
Jacko was in trouble, then. I glared at his unseeing head, promising retribution; then shrugged, said, “So what’s happy?”
“Happy is measuring your life against the options,” she said decidedly, “and not wanting to change it. It’s getting the best of a series of bargains, bad or otherwise. And you’ve worked for that, so what’s spoiling it?”
“Christ.” Not sober enough to resist, I ran her criteria through my mind; and shook my head hard at the results, couldn’t tell her that. “Aren’t you supposed to be playing a tune, or something?”
They were playing a tune all around us; but her turn to shake her head now, as she said, “Right now, I’m supposed to be getting your head sorted out. Self-appointed duty, and I never let myself down if I can help it. Come on, give.”
Someone’s killing off my family. And never mind that I despise everything they stand for, they’re still my family and I can’t break free after all. And not being free, I couldn’t tell her that either; Macallan business was private business, always. So in the end, when her hard stare still offered no compromise, I copped out and told her the other thing, that should have been just as private.
“The girl I love is going out with my cousin,” whom I love, whose values I despise, “is that enough for you?”
She only snorted. “Love how? How long for?”
“More than two years now,” and barely one-eleventh of my life; but all of i
t that counted, sometimes.
“Uh-huh. And what, you split up, is that it?”
“No.” Never got that far, Laura and I.
“Ben, man, for God’s sake,” as she caught on, or started to. “Have you ever slept with this girl?”
“No.”
“Ever been out with her?”
“No.” Well, yes, often; but even those times we were alone it was never a date in the way that Carol meant, only ever as friends on the piss or a cultural jag or whatever; and I wasn’t up to dishonesty tonight.
“For crying out loud, and you call that love? Ben, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three, right, and you sound like a fucking sixteen-year-old...”
I shook my head mutely. I’d been a lot more sussed than this, when I was sixteen. It was having to start again that was the killer, and not knowing what was babies and what was bathwater.
I liked the feel of that in my head, so I said it aloud; and she said, “Explain.” So I tried to tell her how it felt, to reject not only everyone you’d grown up with but also everything they’d ever taught you was true: to lose all your value systems at a stroke, and end up floundering. And she said that just sounded like classic teenage rebellion, and I said no, I thought it was more than that; but even if she was right, I said, a lot of teenagers got well fucked up in the course of their rebelling, didn’t they? And that certainly had happened to me, and to some extent I was floundering still. But I’d found or built myself a couple of rocks to cling to, and Laura was one of those, I said...
o0o
And somewhere in the midst of all this confessional, Mike the landlord came round for our glasses. “See your drinks off now, please, it’s half eleven...”
Which was already later than the law allowed, but even Mike didn’t have any great urgency in his voice, and nobody noticeably moved. Looking around, I saw that a lot of people had pints hardly touched in front of them, and didn’t seem concerned about it. Largely, they just went on playing.
I shrugged, took a sip rather than a gulp, and went on talking.
o0o
A bit later, needing the loo, I left off talking and went through to the other bar.
On the way through, I noticed that the door out was closed and barred and bolted.
When I came back, a girl I didn’t know was standing on a table, giggling and swaying and conducting a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ to herself. Carol had her squeezebox in motion again, which limited my room to sit down; when she saw me hovering, she laid off the chords long enough to reach in her pocket and find a fiver.
“Get us a couple of pints, will you?”
“What? No, hang on, it’s my turn...” And I already had little enough money left, and maybe I’d better just leave now, if I could find anyone to let me out.
“Don’t be stupid. Take it.”
Jacko really had been talking to her, clearly; and punishment would most surely follow. My financial problems were my own affair, certainly not that of a casually-known accordionist.
Back at the hatch they were serving again, and Jonathan was there, waiting in the queue. He grinned at me, a little ruefully. “Sorry, didn’t know it was going to turn into a lock-in.”
“Don’t worry, I’m fine.” I had someone to talk to, however much I might resent some of what she knew or wanted to know; and getting plastered, getting totally out of my box might prove the answer to several questions, including the little matter of getting to sleep tonight. There’s a limit to how much cocoa I can drink.
o0o
The birthday girl was called Jo, and she wanted a song from everyone. Didn’t get one from me, sing I don’t. But Carol sang, an old yiddishe number, to break the relentless Irishness; and someone else sang country, and a couple sang a ridiculously silly duet, and this wasn’t a lock-in any more, it was a party.
So no surprise that when Jo invited people to move back to her flat, “more comfy and I’ve got some grass,” she included everyone in that invitation; and no surprise that along with almost everyone, I said yes. Said yes, please. Getting stoned would add one more layer of detachment, another degree of separation. And the more the merrier, it seemed to me just then.
o0o
Carol came too and I did the gentlemanly thing, I carried her accordion for her, though she laughed at me for doing it. And on the march up I manoeuvred us next to Jacko and Jonathan, and did a little promissory work with my elbow in Jacko’s ribs, murmuring about the trouble he would find himself in, all my old pride unexpectedly rising, you don’t gossip about me, right? He just grinned, shook his head mockingly, don’t talk stupid, everyone gossips about you, and said Carol was just what I needed.
Wrong. What I needed was all that I couldn’t have, and I didn’t come anywhere near Carol’s definition of happy.
o0o
But even Carol’s value-system recognised that happiness is relative: it’s only ever a matter of what you measure it against, how you define your standards.
Chemical interference can do a lot, to make the scales weigh things differently. Happiness is an attitude of mind; thought is an electrical activity taking place in a chemical stew; ergo and therefore, stir a few more chemicals into the pot, and you can come up like a beamish lunatic and mean it.
Alcohol’s a chemical; so’s tetrahydrocannabinol.
o0o
Alcohol I had already, sloshing around in my bladder and my brain, and some still circulating in my bloodstream, waiting its turn. By any reasonable definition, I’d had enough; but that is not to say that there was no room for more. Moderation, I guess, is another sign of contentment, and so — by definition — inappropriate. I lived from feast to famine, famine to feast; and tonight, the table was loaded.
Literally, the table was loaded. Not me, but a dozen of us had brought carry-outs from the Duke; those were stacked up on the living-room table as we trooped in, next to the tray of cans that Jo had in already, and the couple of wine-boxes and the bowls of crisps and Shanghai nuts and olives.
At the back of the table, teasingly lurking, was a bottle of cheap whisky with a ribbon round its neck and a label attached.
I didn’t read the label, didn’t need to. Probably it was in code, probably it said Happy Birthday, Jo or something similar, something equally appropriate for a bottle of altered states; but actually it was an instruction. Whatever it said, it said Drink Me.
And no one else was doing that. I waited, I watched for five minutes, and they were all drinking beer or lager or wine. So I found myself a glass and filled it, settled my butt on a windowsill and sipped quietly.
One of the bedrooms in Jo’s flat opened directly off the living-room. Half the musicians camped themselves in there, spreading out across bed and carpet and leaving the door open, unpacking instruments and tuning up and laying down a base of sound, firm footing that the party could spring from.
Or, in my case, a mattress of music I could topple back into, any time my mind slipped free of the talking.
Carol had let up on me, at least for the moment; I could hear her squeezebox underlying everything, through in the other room. I was talked out, in any case. All I wanted to do was listen, and drink, and not be alone. Not be at home and in bed and thinking about Tommy, or alternatively thinking about Laura.
The whisky was rough, coldly burning like nightfire in my throat and threatening later dismay to my stomach; but it was right for now, and now was all that mattered. Sufficient unto the day, unto the hour was the evil thereof: Father Hamish had taught me that, at confirmation class.
Matter of fact, Father Hamish had also taught me to drink. Also at confirmation class. At least that’s the way I used to tell it when Marty was around to challenge me, to take offence, to growl “No he didn’t, you little bugger,” and remind me with hard knuckles of the lessons I’d had from him. It was a ritual, it was a game we played together; and if it ended up every time with me bruised and yelping through my giggles, so what?
But in all honesty, Hamish had got in first. This is the blood of Christ, he’d said, offering a sip of Communion wine to my thirteen-year-old and curious tongue, and this is the fermented juice of the grape, sloshing a tumbler full of Liebfraumilch and pushing it across the desk. You’ll despise that stuff later, when you’ve learned discrimination, he’d said, and sure enough he’d had a different bottle for himself, and wouldn’t give me so much as a taste of it; but it’ll suit your palate well enough for now. And all you need to know for now is how to discriminate between the one and the other, the sacrament and the indulgence.
Under his tutelage and my cousins’, I’d learned discrimination in wine and other things; but again, babies and bathwater were too confused in my mind to be distinguished now. I still drank Liebfraumilch, when it was offered. Drank it like a statement, indeed, like mute defiance hurled in the sweet teeth of my childhood truths.
But now I was drinking rotgut whisky, in defiance of memory and incipient dream; and circling the room — like the smoke and the conversation circled, in better order than my mind was circling — here came the last temptation, the ultimate persuader. What I was here for, in all honesty. Company was good tonight, and music was good, and drink was maybe better than either; but tetrahydrocannabinol, some nights that could just win out over anything. THC and alcohol mixed, no contest.
Three or four people were rolling joints with varying degrees of concentration and urgency, and the first couple were already on their way. Travelling in contrary directions around the room, and luck had landed me right where their meandering paths were doomed to cross. I’d barely taken hold of the first, barely started to suck in the heavy, soursweet smoke, before the second reached me; smoke leaked between my lips as I nodded a grinning thanks and kept right on inhaling.
Three hits off a joint is about right, I reckon, each time it comes around. Any less and you’re a dilettante, you’re not taking it seriously; any more and we’re into bogart territory, greed winning out over manners. And it’s enough, for me at least. Three tokes at a time will get me going nicely.
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