by Paul Harris
“Why can’t you speak to him personally?” Tom leapt to his feet and began to pace up and down. “This is serious! You don’t understand how serious this is! Phone him now!”
“I can’t. Doctor Erasmus is missing.”
“Missing!” shrieked Tom.
“He went to a seminar in Graz and has not been heard of since. But this is of no matter to us,” assured Mr Cawthorne, waving his hand nonchalantly in the air. “You must not excite yourself, Mr Peddle. Erasmus dispatched the document to us by courier prior to his disappearance. This we have no doubt about.”
As Mr Cawthorne took another sip from his almost empty glass, Tom strode over to the window and looked searchingly out into the street. He had no idea what it was he was searching for. The park was empty. The street below seemed to echo with the cries of lost children. An “out of order” sign hung from a parking meter. A traffic warden was writing him a ticket. A grim grey haze descended as a cloud passed overhead and momentarily blocked the sunlight.
That’s What Dogs Do
“You missed the England match!”
I shrugged.
“But, we arranged a meet. What’s up with you these days?”
I shrugged again. I hadn’t wanted to watch the football. I had wanted to visit Moke.
“Where were you?”
“I went to see an old friend instead.”
“What’s her name? This ‘old friend’?”
“How do you know it was a her?”
Amos pulled a peculiar face that, or so I gathered, I was supposed to interpret as ‘ain’t it bloody obvious?’ “Who is she?”
“An old flame. I haven’t seen her for years. She just dropped me a text and I went down to see her.”
“Just like that?”
“I ain’t doing anything else, am I? Apart from watching the football with you. So, why not? That’s what I thought anyway. But now, now that I have seen her, it’s as if she’s never been away. I can’t get her out of my head.”
Amos thrust a handful of peanuts into his mouth and proceeded to talk through them. “So, I take it you’ll be seeing her again?”
Yet again, I shrugged.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He imitated my shrug.
“I dunno, do I? Frankly, I can’t imagine a future without her. It’s as if it was always meant to be her, but they just wanted to make it difficult for me; make me jump through hoops; send me off in the wrong direction.”
“They?”
“Whoever. It’s like the journey’s nearly over. I only need one more word with her and I won’t feel lost any more. Never again.”
“Call her then.”
“I’d better not. I’ll wait for her to call me.”
“Why? Didn’t she call you last time?”
“I don’t want to come over too eager.”
“Just call her!”
“Besides, I may have misread the signs.”
“Jesus Christ! Just call her!”
Amos was shouting at me and I didn’t like it. I looked him in the eye and said calmly, “And what exactly do I say?”
“How, after all these years, can you still be so shit at talking to women? Why aren’t you still a virgin? Just ask her if she’d like to go for a meal or something. Easy, innit?”
“Uh, no!”
“What?”
“Public eating’s just disgusting.”
“What are you talking about, Rod, it’s perfectly normal.”
“Unless you live in a gaff that doesn’t have the facilities for food preparation, it’s just totally unnecessary.”
Amos sighed and put his head in his hands, muttering something that I couldn’t quite hear. When he raised his head again, he placed a hand on my shoulder, and spoke very softly to me. “Look, Rod, I wouldn’t get jumping the gun about this journey being over, you know; not just yet. And all this stuff about not being lost anymore, well…” He paused, took another mouthful of peanuts, and walked away without finishing his sentence.
I watched him go, meandering and mingling. He was chatting to people, laughing and nodding, and that’s the way to get on in pubs. Whatever everyone else is saying, just say the same thing. It sounds boring but that’s how you make friends. Except, in the case of Lola and Buffalo; they are the exception that prove the rule; a saying that I have never really understood. In their case, whatever one of them says, the other immediately, and without recourse to consideration, disagrees with. Amos was now standing between them and didn’t know which of them to agree with. If he agreed with Lola, Buffalo instantly assaulted him and turned him around to his way of thinking.
“Yeah, I see what you’re saying, Buffalo.” This would be the cue for Lola to launch an attack. Amos was beginning to look weary.
A bank of television screens flickered above his head, exposing us all to advertisements for Spanish lager, hair restorer, and payday loans at 1,509% APR. Nobody was watching the screens apart from me. Everybody was regaling each other with anecdotes about their day’s work on the sites and in the factories, in their offices, and on the roads.
Above the television screens, a phrase, in quotation marks, was painted onto the wall which read “One More One”. Nobody, not even the staff or the management, had any idea what it meant. It had been there since the refurbishment and nobody knew who’d commissioned it.
“Must be an Irish thing,” Lola had suggested. “A saying or something.”
“Must be a load of bollocks, if you ask me,” was Buffalo’s rounded response.
A woman sat alone at the end of the bar, nursing a glass of house red. She looked alone and forsaken. Was it possible that this was the one woman that nobody wanted? But she wasn’t unattractive. She yearned to meet Mr Right. She had met him once, long ago, but took another spin of the roulette wheel because her friends told her that she could do better. She lost, and now she sat alone blaming the world for a string of failed relationships. She stroked the screen of her smart phone, up and down, left to right, with her long, red-painted, fingernails. She once had passion and a light that shone in her eyes but it burnt out so very long ago, even before the three day week and the miners’ strike put everybody’s lights out. Now, she just sat and waited, and although she can’t remember what it is she’s waiting for, she knows one thing: that it will never come. She took a delicate sip of wine and screwed up her face as if she was drinking Jeyes fluid. The next time I looked, she had gone; on a silent journey. She would turn up on the local radio news the following morning.
Amos came back just as the pub was filling up for the football match. The main event was preceded by a commercial for Gillette razors and was promptly followed by Gary Lineker sporting a brand new goatee beard anchoring the evening’s broadcast from Paris. Behind Gary there was a window out onto the Paris skyline. The Eiffel tower was shimmering in the background, emblazoned with blue and white lights like a huge Christmas tree. Amos had managed to round-up the troops and had Lola and Buffalo with him, a reluctant-looking Sol, Trainer-Bore Bill, and someone called Duncan whom I hadn’t met before.
“Duncan Durkin,” announced Duncan, holding his hand out to me.
I shook it as Amos whispered into my ear, “Owns a lot of property, he does.”
I shrugged. It was becoming a habit. “Seems a bit of a bell-end to me,” I thought but, for once, didn’t say.
Luckily for all of us, Trainer-Bore Bill didn’t hang around for long. After showing off his new pair of limited edition Air Jordans, he moved onto another crowd and began to explain to them how rare they were. They looked appalling; as if they’d been designed by a four year old with a new set of Crayolas.
“You into your football then, Rodney?” asked Duncan Durkin, who seemed to be corralling me into a corner.
I shrugged. Again! “Sometimes. I’m not a big fan or anything.”
“I know what you mean,” he winked knowingly. “You just go for the ruck.”
I’d been right; he was a bell-end. I smiled weakly and tr
ied to extricate myself from his company. Amos was standing behind him talking to Lola, Buffalo, and Sol. He, momentarily, broke off from an argument with Lola to cast me a glance that was clearly meant as an apology. “I don’t even know who’s playing tonight,” I said to Durkin.
“France and Albania,” he enthusiastically informed me.
“Oh,” I responded, as disinterestedly as I possibly could.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” I was glad that he knew what I meant because I didn’t have a clue what I meant or, indeed, what he meant. “I don’t know who I’m supporting either. I don’t know who I hate the most out of the pair of them. I can’t stand the French, obviously, because they’re just like Scousers, and as for the Albanians, well, I ain’t really got to explain that, have I?”
My head was spinning and I was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic. I was wondering what to say next, if anything at all. I avoided eye contact so that he wouldn’t take it as a sign of encouragement to keep talking. But, I just couldn’t help being facetious. “Isn’t it best just to hate everybody equally?” I asked him.
“No, no, no, no!” he protested. “For instance, take the Germans; they’re one of our ancestral enemies. It’s in our blood. You ain’t normal if you don’t hate the Germans. But the Italians, well, the Italians are more like the Geordies. They don’t really matter. We still gotta hate them because they’re greasy but they don’t really matter like the Germans do, and the Mancs do, and the French, and come to think of it, the Scottish.” His explanation was so thorough that he actually seemed to believe it himself. He wasn’t joking or performing a parody, but was in complete earnest. Curiously, when he referred to “we” and “us” and “our”, he very much appeared to be including me in his analysis, as if I was one of him.
“I gotta piss!” I blurted and pushed past him. I pushed past everyone and went and hung my head over the hand basin, raising it occasionally to stare into the cracked mirror to ask myself, “What am I doing here? What the hell am I doing here?”
When I came back from the toilet, Durkin had ensnared Sol in his web of bigotry. “I hate all the build-up,” he was saying, “and all the bollocks they talk, especially that Garth Crooks geezer, even if he is ex-Tottenham. Ah, but when the whistle blows; when battle commences…” and then he started yelling at the top of his voice, “Get into them! Get fucking into them!”
Everybody looked around at Durkin. Sol looked pleadingly at everybody else and tried to distance himself. The match hadn’t even started yet. Durkin didn’t even know who he was going to support; who he hated least of the two teams; and here he was with his fists in the air, screaming like William Wallace.
“Your mate’s a moron,” I said to Amos, and didn’t whisper.
“He ain’t my mate,” responded Amos.
Lola wasn’t paying any attention at all to Durkin, and Buffalo’s only gripe seemed to be that Durkin was commanding more attention than he was. Accordingly, he raised his own profile by finding his own axe to grind.
“See these geezers coming in here after work?”
“Who? What about them?” asked Lola, sensing a point of contention before the point had even been made.
“These lot.” Buffalo pointed to a group of tradesmen standing by the door. “They come in here, all swaggering, claiming that they’re grafters but their Dewalt rigger boots look like they’ve just come out of the box at Homebase.
“I haven’t heard them claim anything,” I said.
Lola shook his head. “Nor me.”
Buffalo went on. “They look like they’ve come out on a fancy dress do as the Village People or something. They’re too clean. I’ll tell you something: if their trowels and their spanners, and their jackhammers moved as quickly as their jaws, we’d all be on a three day week now. London would be finished and we could all move on to rebuilding another town, like Beirut or Sarajevo or Damascus.
“Damascus?” questioned Lola. “Isn’t that where the baby Jesus was from?”
“No, that’s Bethlehem, you fool. Didn’t you learn anything at Sunday school?”
“I never went to Sunday school.”
Buffalo expressed his indignation by rolling his tongue against his upper lip. “It shows.”
“Well, why can’t we rebuild Bethlehem instead?”
“Because Bethlehem’s in Israel, near Jerusalem.”
“So?”
“It’s all the towns just outside Israel that want rebuilding. The ones in range of the missiles.”
But no matter how hard Buffalo banged his drum, Duncan Durkin picked up the chorus and ran with it. The chance sighting, through one of the large pub windows, of Bo Billox striking one of his dogs with his lead gave him the opportunity he’d been seeking. “Bloody hell! Look at that geezer! You know, I’ve never had to hit a dog before but, Chelsea fans, well, now that’s a different matter; an entirely different kettle of fish altogether. And, as for traffic wardens, need I go on?”
“No!” I protested. “Shut the fuck up.”
He did shut up, for the time being, but began to eye me with a great deal of malevolence. Sol took the opportunity of my drawing Durkin’s attention to escape his corner. He looked almost grateful as he settled at the bar beside me and ordered us both a drink.
During the build up to the match, that no one seemed particularly interested in anyway, the BBC were showing pictures of disturbances from the previous evening, where England football fans had clashed with Russian fans and the French police outside a bar in Toulouse.
“Get into ’em!” screamed Durkin.
There was footage of plastic seats flying through the air; a whole wave of white plastic furniture; a barrage of bottles and glasses, from left to right across the screen. Durkin was getting excited. I could hear him breathing heavily as he imagined himself in the thick of the battle. Then the tear gas came, and they ran. Durkin cursed the police. The violence was halted. Afterwards, there would be recriminations regarding heavy-handed foreign policing. The last thing we saw from Toulouse were pictures of a local woman scurrying into a shop doorway with her shopping basket, as an empty bottle smashed against the pavement at her feet.
A roar of laughter went up behind me. “Frog bitch! What’s she doing there, anyway?”
“Her shopping, you knob!”
Sol put a hand on my arm. “Leave it, Rod.”
And then a helpful interjection from Lola: “Think of your old ticker, son.”
I squinted at Lola and wondered what had made him say what he had. Did he know people at the medical centre or had he simply stumbled blindly into my private party? He didn’t seem embarrassed by his comment, even when I questioned him about it, which led me to believe that the latter was the case. “What’s that supposed to mean, Lola?” I pursued him across a new conversation that he had embarked on with Buffalo.
“What?”
“That crack about my heart?”
“Well, you ain’t getting no younger, Rod.”
“None of us are, Lola.”
“That’s right, Rodney,” and he returned to his discussion with Buffalo.
For some peculiar, not to say bizarre, reason, best known only to Sol, he still had his hand on my arm. He looked concerned. “Why so touchy about the heart thing, Rod?”
“Get your hand off my arm, you weirdo!”
He snapped it away as if he hadn’t realised that he’d been manhandling me, but the concerned expression remained. “Why are you still running, Rod? You’re always running.”
“It’s like being on a treadmill, Sol; when you stop running, you get spat out onto your arse.”
He didn’t seem to understand what I meant by that and, to be quite honest, neither did I. I hadn’t really understood his question though. I didn’t think that I ever ran from anything. But my response had an appropriate air of mystery about it and I was quite satisfied with that.
Lineker was introducing the teams and Durkin was making disparaging remarks as each name was announced. Th
en he began to question Mr Lineker’s legitimacy before moving on to assert that Alan Shearer and Gary Neville were as equally incompetent. As the match officials were announced, we were treated to Durkin’s expected vitriol.
“Who is this clown, anyway,” Sol whispered.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before. Isn’t he a mate of Amos’s?”
“I don’t think so. He was talking to Trainer-bore Bill and just latched onto us.”
“Well, can’t somebody unlatch him?”
“What can you do?”
“What if we get lumbered with him on a permanent basis?”
“We’ll have to start drinking in the Vol. Simple as that.”
“And what’s to stop him following us down there?”
“Why are you always so negative, Rod?”
“Realistic, Sol. You mean realistic.”
The match kicked off to great enthusiasm in the studio but very little excitement around the bar. As soon as it was under way, everybody turned away from the screens and continued their conversations. It seemed that Duncan Durkin was still occupied by the events that he was closely following through the window. “Because that’s what dogs do,” he was saying. “They sniff each other.”
I discretely glanced around at him to see who he was talking to and saw that he wasn’t speaking to anybody in particular. In fact, an empty space had formed around him; like a huge halo. “But, your Chelsea fans? I ask you. What the fuck are they sniffing each other for?”
Listening to his random outbursts was painful. It was embarrassing and made me question why I was there at all. Was it to see my friends? Was it because I had no friends? Was it because I was still lost? Would I always be lost? I decided that I must phone Moke.
Sol was a Chelsea fan and I couldn’t remember him ever sniffing anyone. He nudged me. “I hope he isn’t in here tomorrow.”
“You can only hope.” I knew that if he was, then I wouldn’t be; not for very long. “We all have our hopes and aspirations, Sol.”