Judgement Call

by Nick Oldham

  His lager tasted good. It sent a chill all the way across his chest. He took a long draught, then another, and then it was gone. And then he was back at the bar, ordering another.

  ‘Well?’ the landlady demanded, placing down his new pint on the bar top. She was called Steph.

  Not understanding, Henry said dimly, ‘Well what?’

  She sighed as if he was beyond help. ‘Did you like what you saw?’ She raised her finely plucked eyebrows.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, now understanding: did he like seeing her naked? Taking hold of his pint he returned to his seat, his mood for some reason darkening even more and a sensation of recklessness coming over him. He sat down and looked back towards the bar. Steph was still watching him, her arms folded and her head tilted approvingly, a smile quivering on her lipsticked lips.

  Henry knew she was no stranger to the beds of police officers but had so far managed to evade his. A tightening of his stomach muscles made him wonder if that omission would be rectified tonight. He sipped his beer thoughtfully, knowing that this pint – the second – would be his tipping point. Two was always the magic number, beer-wise. Any more and he knew that whatever resolve he had would completely evaporate and he would probably leap into the abyss.

  With just two down him he could drive safely, make clear judgements and control his reactions to everything. One more and he lost his senses. For a big young man, he did not hold his liquor well.

  He sipped his pint. Carefully. It didn’t help that he was drinking on an empty stomach and the alcohol entered his bloodstream quickly so that after the third pint, his evening began to unravel.

  It was pretty much a blur from that point on.

  The pub filled up gradually. Amongst the customers were people he knew from work as well as some locals. The third pint morphed into a fourth at which point he knew he had to get some food down him. This was provided by the landlady who gave him a chicken curry, half rice/half chips, on the house. He wolfed it down and suddenly felt completely sober again, thinking that the alcohol had been soaked up by the naan bread.

  It hadn’t.

  He checked the time and was surprised to see it had already reached nine-thirty.

  There was something on his mind, something important, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was, even though he was sure his brain was now clear.

  He looked at his empty dish which was suddenly whisked away from him by the landlady and his empty pint glass replenished by the fifth pint of the night and a whisky chaser, neither of which he had ordered. He lifted the golden spirit and sank it in one, then took hold of his beer which he stared at quizzically. He tried to work out what number it was, but he’d lost count and didn’t care, really. He took a long pull of it and realized how well it mixed with the whisky. A perfect combination – lager, curry and Scotch.

  The evening chugged on in a series of images and unremembered conversations.

  Jo Wade appeared around about ten o’clock and sat beside him. He seemed to think he had a deep and meaningful conversation with her but later could not remember one word of it, other than it seemed to be dour and full of recrimination. He did recall pushing a wisp of her hair back from her face and next thing he was kissing her … really snogging, tongues in mouths and some serious, but hidden, groping.

  Again, he wasn’t certain how long this went on for.

  He recalled seeing her at the bar, talking to the landlady, both of them staring across at him, obviously discussing him. Jo returned with another pint and chaser.

  A few more people from work drifted in. He had a laugh with them, a couple of them patted his shoulder but he couldn’t work out why. His mind started a slow spin.

  The next thing he remembered was pounding music, cigarette smoke, disco lights and the fact that he was dancing with Jo, although dancing was not the best description of Henry’s uncoordinated dance-floor moves. It took a while for him to work out where he was, although he did not know how he got there. He was in the nightclub, the Royale, in the basement of the Royal Hotel in the centre of Waterfoot, the tiny town situated between Rawtenstall and Bacup. It was another regular haunt of cops on the prowl, somewhere Henry had spent too much time in the last few years.

  Jo was dancing up close to him. Her moves, in stark contrast to his, were slinky, sexy and in time to the music.

  Henry tried a few of his Mick Jagger moves to a Bee Gees song and incorporated one or two John Travolta touches and was pleased to see Jo laughing at him. They lurched off the tiny, crowded dance floor and found a murky alcove where the kissing and groping restarted. This did not last too long as Jo dragged Henry out of the club, surfacing into the cool night air and falling into a taxi. A couple of minutes later it pulled up at the bottom of Henry’s street. Jo paid the driver and the two of them stumbled arm in arm up the cobbled street to Henry’s house, crashing through the door and scrambling up the stairs to his bedroom. They fell across his bed in a heap, a tangle of limbs and desperately started to rip each other’s clothes off, Henry suddenly aware he was still in half uniform under his civvie jacket: blue shirt, trousers and black shoes. He had a sudden vision of a drunken dancing cop in the night club and what a complete tool he must have looked.

  Within moments Jo was straddling him, bouncing up and down, whilst Henry, still as ungraceful as he had been at dancing, tried his very best to keep time for a while until he realized that he was not enjoying himself.

  With amazing clarity he stopped mid-thrust and looked up at this lovely young woman who was screwing him, someone he’d only known in passing really, hadn’t even had a proper conversation with because the drunken ones didn’t count.

  For a beat, Jo wasn’t aware that Henry had stopped moving, so engrossed in the activity was she, with her head thrown back, biting her lips.

  Then she did – and stopped in mid-air before sliding down the length of Henry’s penis, picking up the wrong message, believing that his expression was one of affection, not horror.

  ‘Hi, babe,’ she whispered, kissed him on the mouth, around his face and neck and chest, taking a nipple between her perfectly white teeth and biting hard whilst moving very slowly now.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

  She glanced up from his chest, dragging the nipple up in her teeth as though she was going to rip it from his chest. Then she let it go with a wet ‘plop’ and said, ‘You no like?’

  ‘No.’ He eased himself out of her and pushed her gently to one side.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Not right,’ he said thickly. ‘Got to go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Go … just go,’ he said and fell off the bed into the pile of discarded clothes. He picked himself up stupidly and staggered out of the bedroom into the bathroom where he sank to his knees in front of the toilet and threw up copiously as his world looped unsteadily around him. He lifted his head and stared at the door handle, watching it rise mysteriously, then fall back into place as he attempted to focus.

  He was sick once more, emptying his stomach of all its contents, then he pushed himself up using the toilet bowl as leverage, only to lose his grip. One hand slithered down and splashed into the mix of vomit and water in the bowl.

  He kept his hand in there and flushed the toilet, rinsing his fingers in the gushing water before rising and staggering to the sink. He turned on the hot tap and waited for the water to heat up, then washed his hands and splashed his face, swaying slightly off balance all the time, occasionally having to grab the edge of the basin to keep upright.

  Taking a deep breath he propelled himself away from the sink, out through the bathroom door, across the hall and back into his bedroom.

  Jo was out of it. She was curled up in a tight, naked ball, breathing heavily as she slept under a thin sheet.

  Henry stood unsteadily and regarded her, the room rotating slowly. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and held his head in his hands for a while before crawling across the floor to a chair over the back
of which he’d left a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. He knew he couldn’t stand up to get dressed. It was beyond his present capabilities, so he pulled on the clothes whilst sitting on the floor. This was not the easiest of tasks but, eventually fully dressed, he clambered to his feet, using the corner of the bed as purchase, not realizing his T-shirt was not only on back to front, but also inside-out.

  The next few minutes were spent trying to put his feet into a pair of trainers.

  He hit the door jamb on the way out and slammed against the wall opposite. At the top of the stairs he gripped the handrail tightly and looked at the steep, narrow steps, realizing that he could not safely walk down them. He lowered himself carefully onto his bottom, going for the safe option, one step at a time.

  Whilst still working this out, the door to his housemate’s bedroom creaked open and Henry blinked. For the second night in a row, the landlady stepped out naked. She spotted Henry, who stared fuzzily at her. She came to the banister and leaned over, allowing her breasts to sway a couple of feet away from his face. Their graceful movement hypnotized him for a moment.

  His right hand dithered, wanting to reach out and touch them.

  ‘Henry Christie,’ she cooed. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Uh … dunno … gotta do summat,’ he slurred.

  This time she deliberately made her breasts hover above him by leaning a little further forward. His jaw sagged. She giggled.

  ‘What about us?’ she asked.

  Henry, who could hardly keep his head from lolling like a nodding dog on the back shelf of a car, muttered something incomprehensible, pushed himself off the top step and shot down the stairs like he was riding a toboggan. He hit the hallway with a heavy thump and crumbled before sitting up, groaning.

  ‘Hell fire, you idiot!’ the landlady shrieked.

  ‘I’m all right.’ He took a few breaths, then forced himself up to his feet and headed to the front door, exiting with a crash.

  Outside, the night was cool. Henry stood in the middle of the street and said, ‘Right,’ and set off down the uneven cobbles to the main road. He had left his car in the pub car park. He knew he had to get to it, needed to drive it and, very urgently, see Kate.

  In his extremely inebriated state, this all seemed eminently logical to him.

  EIGHT

  At three in the morning the roads of Rossendale were virtually bereft of other vehicles, including prowling or parked-up cop cars. This was a fortunate statistic for Henry as he raced through the valley at the wheel of his beat-up ten-year old Morris Marina coupé with the exhaust blowing, concentrating hard – as only a drunk driver could – and getting it completely wrong almost every foot of the way.

  He truly believed he was driving just under the speed limit for whichever stretch of the highway he was travelling along. Twenty-eight in a thirty zone, thirty-nine in a forty. In truth he exceeded the limit all the way, but his dreamy drunken state slowed everything down for him. Once or twice he did try to read the speedo but found it hard to focus, though he was certain the needle hovered around the correct speed.

  He was also certain he drove correctly and accurately, positioning his car perfectly in the straights and in the corners, but he did wonder what the bang was at one point when he – unwittingly – drifted wide on a bend and skimmed the kerb. He ricocheted off and the steering wheel was ripped out of his grasp, but the incident registered only vaguely.

  That he completed his fairly short journey without demolishing roadside furniture or powering headfirst into a lamppost and killing himself was little short of a miracle.

  But such is often the case with drunk drivers.

  Unless they got stopped, either by a police patrol or something harder than their car, they usually managed to complete their journey in one piece and either experienced guilt-ridden reflection or the opposite and wondered what all the fuss was about.

  However, Henry made it unscathed, didn’t kill anyone or damage anything, pulling up outside Kate’s house in a leafy avenue in Helmshore, a village on the eastern edge of Haslingden. He thought he had parked magnificently, not realizing he had put three wheels on the grass verge.

  Moments later he was pounding desperately on the front door with tears streaming down his face, sobbing uncontrollably as he hammered away.

  Sequentially, the house lights came on.

  Kate lived with her parents, Bert and Elsie, in a big detached house and her mother and father slept in the front, bay-windowed bedroom. That was the first light that came on, followed by a twitch of the curtains and a white face at the window. Kate’s mum looked down fearfully, knowing that an early hours knock rarely brought good news. She moved out of the way and allowed her husband to look down at the pathetic figure below, who he recognized instantly.

  ‘What the hell’s he doing?’ he said.

  Bert Marsden had met Henry on a few occasions and had no particular affection for him. Intuitively he fixed him as a fickle young man with questionable social skills, no charm whatsoever, and clearly nowhere near good enough for his one and only daughter. She deserved someone better. A banker or an accountant, he had suggested reasonably to Kate, rather than a rough-edged, overconfident and rude cop with probably no chance of any career advancement and only after one thing: his daughter’s body.

  ‘He’ll never make a detective as long as he’s got a hole where the sun don’t shine,’ he guffawed when Kate had revealed Henry’s aspirations to him. ‘And I know people,’ he said, sticking a finger in his own chest. ‘Not remotely impressed,’ he added, lips curled with condescension.

  Henry staggered back from the door and looked up at the figures in the window.

  Bert opened one and leaned out. ‘What do you want? Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Kate, Kate, I wanna see Kate,’ Henry babbled. Unfortunately looking upwards and tilting his head back caused him to lose his balance.

  He teetered backwards even further, uncoordinated, and the back of his knees hit the lip of a large terracotta flower pot and he tipped over spectacularly, ending up splayed out on the lawn like a huge beached starfish.

  ‘He’s pissed,’ Bert said. ‘Would you believe it, he’s bloody pissed.’

  Kate’s room was at the back of the house. Her light, followed by the landing light, came on. She had been roused by the knocking and general commotion and, pulling her dressing gown around tightly, she came into her parents’ bedroom, still drowsy with sleep.

  ‘What’s going on, Dad?’

  Mr Marsden spun aggressively. ‘What’s going on? There’s a bloody drunken imbecile at the front door, that’s what.’

  ‘Dear, it’s Henry,’ Kate’s mother interceded. Unlike her husband, she had a bit of a soft spot for him.

  ‘Henry? Let me see.’

  Kate pushed past her mother and nudged her father out of the way in order to lean out of the window to see Henry still flat on his back on the lawn. The overturned plant pot explained the scenario.

  ‘Henry?’

  He raised his head and pathetically said, ‘Yes.’

  With a mutter and shake of her head, Kate moved back into the bedroom and rushed past her parents.

  ‘I told you he was no good,’ her father called smugly, as if all his dreams had come true and Henry was acting in the way he knew was the real Henry.

  ‘Dad,’ Kate shot back despairingly, ‘he might’ve hurt himself.’

  ‘We can but hope,’ he muttered.

  The three nightwear-clad members of the family trooped downstairs to the front door. Kate let herself out to tend to Henry, who was attempting to sit up, but somehow his hands kept slipping from under him on the damp grass, and he thudded back to earth.

  Kate swooped down next to him.

  ‘Henry, are you all right?’

  ‘Kate, is that you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Henry.’ She leaned over and wafted away the reek of alcohol on his breath and also glanced at his car, parked at an acute angle on the grass verge. ‘H
ave you driven here?’

  ‘I … I don’t know … have I?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she moaned. ‘Come on, let’s get you up, come on …’ She took an arm and pulled him upright, then limb by limb up onto his feet, catching him as he lost balance again and almost went over. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I dunno … I just thought,’ he said. ‘Something … I thought …’

  Kate realized that nothing coherent was going to leave Henry’s mouth. She took a firm grip of his bicep and steered him up to the house where her father waited at the door scowling, as though she was bringing in a dead rat, and her mother watched wide-eyed.

  Henry greeted them in an avuncular way, warmly and with the misplaced courtesy of a drunk.

  ‘You’re not bringing that in here, are you?’ Kate’s father demanded.

  She stopped Henry, but whilst his feet came to a standstill, the top half of his body swayed dangerously. ‘Yes I am,’ she said firmly and the older man backed off. ‘He’s my boyfriend.’ Her right hand delved into Henry’s jeans pocket and found his car keys which she handed with aplomb to her father. ‘He’s had a spot of bother parking. Can you just straighten up his car for him? It’s a bit skew-whiff.’

  ‘I’m in my pyjamas.’

  ‘And?’

  Henry wavered precariously. Kate caught him and propelled him past her parents. He grinned lopsidedly at them and said, ‘Hi, Mum and Dad, mister and missus … thingy …’

  Kate kept him going, down the hallway and up the stairs. Getting him up them was a gruelling event in itself and, almost exhausted by heaving and manoeuvring him, Kate eventually managed to drag him into the main bathroom.

  He stood stupidly in front of her, his head lolling, his mouth snarling a terrifying grin as though he had no control of his facial features and had been injected with a muscle relaxant. In some ways, he had.

  ‘Kaaaaate,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s get you in the shower,’ she said, business-like.

  ‘Right – good idea.’

  He suddenly leaned forwards and planted a messy wet kiss on her cheek. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk.’