by Paul Harris
I removed my sunglasses and shivered a little. Ornate chandeliers hung from the ceiling but were dull in comparison to the bright sunlight that glittered like nuggets of gold through the small square dimpled window panes as they rattled unsteadily in their ancient lead frames. The wood panelled walls were littered with original oil paintings and a blackboard offered Bloody Mary Oysters for the paltry sum of ten English pounds. Huge wooden barrels lurked in corners and were adorned with flower pots bursting with colour. The walls were wooden, the barrels were wooden; so too were the floors and the cruet sets; and even the menus were cloaked in wooden covers. The staff, however, were not quite so wooden and we were served immediately by a young lady with the widest smile in the world.
“You cold?” asked Brie. “I told you to wear a jumper.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I snapped.
“You can’t say, it doesn’t really matter.”
I had the next line on the tip of my tongue but managed to hold it in and wondered to myself why some days seemed to come with their very own soundtracks.
As my eyes became accustomed to the light, or lack thereof, I could see that it was busy with people eating Sunday roast dinners in the dark. “You hungry?” asked Brie.
“It’s too hot for roast beef and all that today. What we doing in here? It’s an impressive gaff but not really my type of place, you know?”
“We don’t have to stay long?”
“What a waste. It’ll probably piss down next weekend.”
“For Christ’s sake, stop bloody moaning, Rodney! You do this every time we go anywhere!”
I felt quite wounded by being publicly admonished. “Not every time,” I mumbled, although she probably did have a point.
Brie’s mum was sitting in a corner, pretending to read a magazine, but peering over her big round thick-rimmed glasses at us like an owl holding a pair of binoculars. She looked me up and down, vindictively, and shook her head. I shivered again, and we went over and joined her, weaving between the wrought iron columns that kept the centuries old rafters from falling in on our heads. She stood up as we approached and she and Brie hugged insincerely. “How are you, Darling?” she smiled between clenched teeth.
“Yeah, are you?”
They both seemed satisfied with this exchange but it left me a little stumped. I bent forward a little to give Brie’s mum a peck on the cheek but, before I reached her, she sat down and picked up her magazine again, appearing to roll it into some kind of makeshift weapon. “Hello,” I said, cheerily.
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Oh, mum, please,” protested Brie on my behalf.
“Well!” drawled her mother, and Brie appeared to be perfectly satisfied with her explanation. I wondered what “well” actually meant, but I didn’t have the courage to pursue the matter further. Instead, I sat meekly listening to Neil Sedaka dribbling equally as meekly from the small loudspeaker above our heads.
Brie and her mother chatted about things that seemed vaguely familiar but were beyond my capacity of comprehension. It was an appallingly miserable hour and a half of my life; my feigned contentment broken only when Brie whispered to me, “What you thinking, Babe?”
“Oh Carol! Tune!”
She looked confused, dismissed me with a shrug, and allowed Neil and I to slip back into our own little world.
I sat and watched as Brie, in turns, pleaded with her mother and then cowered from her response. The old lady sat there, magazine clutched tightly at her side as if warding off potential attackers, tight-lipped when she wasn’t talking; but mostly she was talking. She had a habit of twisting her bright red plastic bangle around her wrist. She twisted it as if it were a key in a clockwork mouse or a thumb screw in a torture chamber. The red bangle made me nervous; it was more than decoration; it couldn’t possibly be for decoration; it was cheap and tacky; it was some kind of device. It was the handle on a rack and she turned and turned it, tearing my joints asunder.
Finally, the conference was adjourned when the older, and far less amicable of the two ladies, unrolled her copy of Woman’s Own and began to read it. Brie was familiar with the signs and took this as our cue to leave, which we did, without taking any offence at all. She hurried me through the bar as if she was concerned about being re-summoned, pausing only as I closed the door behind us. “Hey?” she said, grabbing my hand again.
“What?”
“Don’t feel bad about her. She can’t help the way that she is.”
I smiled. I was happy to be outside and away, another chore disposed of. “I could never have any ill-feeling towards anyone who describes me as a womanising drunk. Better men than I strive for the duration of their whole lives for a reputation like that, and here’s me not even having to put the groundwork in for it.”
She sighed. “I wish I’d never told you. You weren’t supposed to be proud of it.”
“It really doesn’t matter to me.” I led her along the Ridgway, chuckling happily to myself, all the way back to the bus stop in the Village.
England’s Glory
The two youths bounded from the pond, with water pouring from their unkempt hair and ragged clothes, their white trainers squelching as they went. They rung their shirts out without removing them from their backs and remounted their bicycles, speeding off across the Common, leaving behind muddy tyre-tread marks across the blankets that bathers had spread on the ground. They kicked over picnic hampers as they passed by. A small boy, still in nappies, panicked at their approach and tumbled into a clump of nettles, producing screams that evoked his pain and confusion in all whom heard them. A black curly haired mongrel chased after them for the best part of half a mile, yapping at their spinning pedals. They collided with a newspaper delivery boy and knocked him from his bike.
They halted at the edge of the Common and the slightly taller of the two boys began to rummage through a Tesco carrier bag that was tied to the crossbar of his bicycle. From it, he took a crushed and sorry looking packet of Lambert & Butler. He fumbled for a while as his bony fingers attempted to extricate a bent cigarette from the misshapen box, threading it through gaps in the cardboard lid. He put the cigarette in his mouth and handed the packet to his brother who was one inch shorter and whose hair was one shade fairer. There was only one cigarette left in the box so rather than undergoing the painstaking operation of working it through the packet, he began to carefully tear the cardboard into shreds and thereby released the cigarette by that ingenious method instead.
The older boy took a box of matches from the bag, opened the box, and looked for a matchstick that still had a pink head on it. Finding one, he held it aloft as if in triumph. The younger boy put his cigarette in his mouth as he tossed the remains of the packet into the undergrowth. He sucked on it prematurely as he waited for his brother to light it for him. “Is that the last match?”
“Dunno. Think there’s more. Dunno.” He struck the match along the side of the England’s Glory box and, cupping his hands around the tiny flame offered it across to the other boy. Their eyes met. “What?”
“Gone out!”
They both cursed and the older boy shook the matchbox as if for luck. He then furtively peered inside it. Looking up, he smiled, and then produced another intact matchstick. He struck it against the box but there was no flame produced. Part of the pink head crumbled under the friction. He tried to light the other side of the match but it too failed him.
The younger boy opened his mouth to utter a grievance so foul it would have made a navvy blush. Instead, he found that his cigarette had been clutched between his lips for so long as he waited for a light that it had adhered to his upper lip and denied him speech of any kind. Finally, a well-rounded expletive dislodged it and it cart wheeled back along the dirt track. “Are there any more?” he asked as he frantically crawled on his hands and knees to retrieve his bent and soggy cigarette from amongst the thistles, thorns and dog excrement.
“Last one,” responded the older boy. He lit it successfu
lly and passed the flame to both cigarettes in turn.
The younger of the two brothers removed his from his mouth and ineffectively attempted to wipe a dark smear from the filter. He recovered his grip on the handlebars of his bike and they both rode off over the dual carriageway into the path of startled motorists as they bid to escape the dark claustrophobia of South London for the pretentious gentility of North Surrey.
The boys sped on across the road and across the Heath, laughing manically and barging into one another. They raced on through the centre of a cricket match, tearing up the whole twenty two yards with their chunky rubber tyres. The bowler shouted at them in terms that left no doubt as to his position concerning the two boys’ two-wheeled antics. One of the batsmen lazily flung his bat after them. The outfield rounded on them but they dodged and evaded and made it into the cover of the trees. The Tesco bag hovered for a moment in the light breeze before slowly drifting downwards and wrapping itself around the bales.
At the traffic lights at the top of the hill, they stopped once more as they waited for them to change. They continued to laugh like creatures who had taken leave of their senses and left them far behind on a path that only they, and they alone, had journeyed, side by side just as brothers ought to. Tears of joy rolled down their cheeks. They hugged and slapped each other’s backs and were oblivious to the green light calling them on towards the Green Man on the opposite side of the road.
“Show me them.” He spat on the ground and rubbed his face excitedly. “Show me them again.”
One of them took a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and tossed them into the bright summer sky. The other caught them in his open hand. They glistened wickedly in the high afternoon sun.
Chapter Eight
The Bay of Pigs
The Volunteer was hosting a theme night; a fancy dress spectacular; the theme was the nineteen sixties. Brie was wearing a flower-emblazoned mini dress of the style that Mary Quant had popularised. Up until then, I hadn’t realised what supremely good legs she possessed. I was dressed in jeans, trainers, and a polo shirt, just the same as I was every Saturday night. She really threw herself into the spirit of it. I didn’t. We were surrounded by people in tie dyed kaftans and dresses, big Elton John glasses, and brightly coloured flared trousers. There were flowers everywhere; perched on the bar, hanging from the ceiling, in peoples hair; and “Flowers in the Rain” was being played too loudly by the DJ.
I grunted, contemptuously, to myself, but Brie discerned my contempt and decided once more to make an issue out of it.
“What’s up with you?”
“The sixties were about more than flower power, mini-skirts, and the Beatles, you know.”
“Oh, here we go,” she sighed.
“What about the moon landings, the Kennedy assassination, the Cuban missile crisis, the slaughter in Vietnam?”
“Blah, blah, blah,” she retorted, appearing not to share my opinion of events.
I continued showering light on the proceedings, nonetheless. “Why don’t we all dress up as Vietnamese peasants, hiding in paddy fields, as another saturation napalm attack is resumed? That’s the sixties for you.”
“You really are a bundle of laughs tonight, Rod.” She walked off and, as I couldn’t really see what she was getting at, I followed her.
“I’m just saying, that’s all.”
“Well, next week we’ll do something that you want to do. What about the pictures?”
I shrugged. “I don’t really like the cinema.”
She looked at me and seemed quite exasperated. “We could go and see the new Batman film?”
“Nah, I don’t like the cinema.”
“You’re always going on about films, though. You keep doing really crap impressions of scenes from films that nobody’s ever heard of.”
I could have taken umbrage at that remark but I chose to ignore it. “But not the cinema though.”
I thought she was going to grab me around the throat and start trying to throttle the life out of me but instead she asked, with just a semi-tone of sarcasm, “Why not the cinema, Rod?”
“You can’t concentrate properly. People are always rustling packets of crisps and munching on popcorn or slurping pop through straws. They laugh at parts that aren’t supposed to be funny. They fidget in their seats. They whisper and cough and sneeze.”
She held a hand up and halted my flow. “It’s not the cinema you don’t like, Rod, it’s just people.”
I found that I had to give her comment some serious consideration before I could plausibly dismiss it. “D’you think?”
She gave me a knowing look and I tried to appear sheepish in the hope that she would soften a little and feed me with affection despite my randomly generated rants.
“So, what do you want to do next weekend?” She gave me a kind of a hug that stopped just short of outright affection but was far better than the cold shoulder that I’d been expecting. “What would make you happy?”
I gestured with my hands to indicate our surroundings. “This is cool,” I complemented and in so doing appeared to completely contradict myself.
“You’ve just been slagging it off!”
“No! I just said that there was more to the sixties than flower power. That’s all! Listen! The Kinks! You gotta love that. Ask him if he’s got any Small Faces.”
“I’ll ask him on one condition.”
“What?”
“That you’ll stop bloody moaning!”
“I never moan.”
She ignored me and continued to lay down further conditions. “And you won’t mention Vietnam or Apollo Eleven or any other number Apollo or Saturn Five or the Bay of Pigs or any more of that stuff tonight.”
“What stuff?”
“Sad stuff.” And she disappeared, leaving me holding two empty pint glasses and with a guilty grin on my face. I followed her withdrawal as I squinted through flashing disco lights, which were surely more suggestive of the seventies, but she disappeared in the crowd. That’s the problem with going out with short women: they can disappear at the drop of a hat. I kept an eye on the door in case she was intending to make her escape permanent. I imagined what a sad and pitiful picture I would paint if I were still standing there holding those two empty glasses in half an hour’s time; still waiting for her to come back; people sniggering behind their hands; the barmaid gazing at the empty glasses with a tear in her eye; and Brie stomping down the road to the bus stop with her I-pod plugged into her ears so that she wouldn’t be able to hear me calling after her.
As if by divine intervention a small gap began to develop amongst the throng of impatient customers at the bar. I placed the empty glasses down and began to wonder what Brie had found so sad about the Apollo missions. There were teething troubles, that’s true enough… and then my thoughts were interrupted by an overbearing barmaid wearing what I think was supposed to be a kaftan. I identified it, quite correctly in my opinion, as an old dog blanket. The tightly matted covering of dog hairs was the only clue I needed.
“Do you want those filling up, love?”
“What?” She leant towards me and repeated her offer. I leant towards her so that I could hear her better over the music and general hullabaloo, and surreptitiously took a large and deliberate sniff of her kaftan. It smelled of wet dog which confirmed my contention that this was no genuine kaftan.
“Are you waiting for a drink?”
I hadn’t been. I’d been waiting for Brie to return. I just put the glasses on the bar because I was fed up with holding them. There were people on either side of me who had been waiting far longer.
“Yes, please, two Amstels.”
I bit my lip and looked up to see if Brie was making her way back to me yet. Three or four faces were gazing back at me malevolently. They belonged to people who were leaning on the bar with empty glasses at their elbows and notes of the realm clutched between their fingers. They all seemed quite exasperated and I wondered why they bothered coming to a place as busy
as this.
I shrugged at all of them and at no one in particular. A girl to my left with a plastic flower hanging limply from her hair tutted acrimoniously. “I’ve been waiting ages, you know!”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” I asked her.
She appeared not to detect the rhetorical nature of my question. “Well, you could stop jumping the queue to start with!” she bellowed quite emotionally.
“I wasn’t even in the queue,” I reasoned unsuccessfully.
“Yes, I know! That’s what I mean!”
Then a man’s voice behind me: “Wanker!” There was a murmur of concurrence from the assembled crowd and more swearing; so much swearing.
Somebody nudged me sharply in the back; right on my spine; and my anger began to rise. It started in my stomach, seeped into my bloodstream, dried my throat out, and entered my brain which began to throb in time with the disco lights. I stepped back into my attacker knowing that this would unbalance them slightly, and then I turned ready to strike.
“You got the drinks yet?” Brie asked, giving me another dig, this time square in the solar plexus. “And watch who you’re barging about.”
“Thank God you’re back.” I handed her a drink.
“How sweet! Did you miss me then?”
“No! I mean yes! Where did you go?”
She winked at me. “Never you mind.”
“Let’s go over there.” I picked up my glass and drew her away from the bar to a safe distance. “I’ve been having a right game.”
“What? Getting served? It’s always like that in here on a Saturday night. You should know that.”
“No, not getting served. Well, yes, getting served.”
She looked confused. “What?”
“I wasn’t trying to get served because I didn’t know where you’d gone. I just put the empty glasses down on the bar.”