by Danny King
‘You don’t know Alan, do you? Alan. Alan Law, Robbie’s brother,’ I pleaded, holding out my hands to stop the big man’s advance.
This momentarily checked him in his tracks and he took a moment to look me up and down as the question melted over his face.
‘Yeah, I know Alan. And Robbie as it happens. Who are you, then?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘I’m Terry, I work with Robbie down in Wimbledon,’ I told him, hoping this would count for something and that he wouldn’t simply tell me to say ‘hallo’ to Robbie next time I saw him as he slung me head first into the bins.
‘You on the hod with Robbie, then?’ he asked.
‘No, the trowel. He runs our bricks,’ I explained, noticing that I was actually being given a chance to explain something rather than just being threatened with the door, and I glimpsed a chink of light.
‘Yeah, I know Alan really well,’ he happily admitted. ‘Top bloke, he is. I used to do a bit with him down Docklands when it was all going up.’
I didn’t have a clue what Alan and this enormous bloke used to do a bit of ‘down Docklands when it was all going up’, it could’ve been tarmacking, chippying, drug smuggling or beating up taxi drivers for all I knew, but I nodded and looked as chuffed about it as I could before hitting him with the first favour of our new-found friendship.
‘Look, Keith, mate, I don’t know what’s going on here, I seriously don’t. What’s this all about?’
Keith didn’t know so he turned to his mate Kev for answers. Kev told him that I’d threatened to beat up the bloke behind and Keith took a look over his shoulder and cocked his head sympathetically.
‘Who said that? I never said any such thing,’ I lied as fast as I could. ‘I just asked the bloke if he could see his way clear to getting a move on because he was taking all night pissing about with his little mates while I was stood behind him waiting to get served. OK, I admit it, I swore and told him to get “a fucking move on”, but I certainly didn’t threaten him,’ I insisted. ‘What am I, a hooligan or something?’
‘That’s rubbish, he said he was going to break all of my records and teeth if I didn’t get out of his way,’ matey with the record bag and bruised ego finally piped up.
I tried to look as wronged as I humanly could and my acting got an unwelcome boost of authenticity when his mate bullshitted that he’d heard me say as much, which was as big a lie as my own as he hadn’t been anywhere near either of us when I’d offered to do a Norris McWhirter on the little fucker’s record bag.
I clocked the changing expressions on Keith and Kev’s faces as the bag ladies launched into their own little tirade and I got the distinct impression that the cavalry were starting to side with Big Chief Whispers with Menace after a while. Bag matey and his little yapping poodle might’ve had the facts in their corner but they’d underestimated the importance of presentation and the more they banged on about me and what I’d said, the more it sounded like they were telling the doormen their job. Not a fantastically smart thing to do, so I figured now was the time to trip them both us with my peace pipe.
‘Look, I’m sorry if you thought I was out of order for asking you to hurry up, but you have to admit you were mucking around ordering teas and coffees on your credit card, then jabbering on to your mates while the barman was waiting for you to type in your PIN number,’ I pointed out, for the benefit of our bouncers, then stuck my hand in bag matey’s direction and offered, ‘No hard feelings?’
Naturally, bag matey snorted with derision and folded his arms in defiance to show me that he didn’t do deals with thugs. That was when Kev apologised to Charley and me and even told me I was ‘all right’.
‘What? But he threatened to beat me up,’ bag matey protested with outrage.
‘Just get over there and let’s have no more of this, OK. The man’s just trying to have a drink with his girlfriend,’ Kev told him. Charley shifted in her seat to show me what she thought about that particular can of worms and Keith gave me the thumbs-up and asked me if I ever got down the White Horse.
‘Occasionally,’ I once again lied for seasoning.
‘But he should be thrown out of here,’ bag matey continued, then added for some reason that he knew the DJ.
‘Then do us a favour and go and lend him some of your records, he seems to have been playing the same one for the last half an hour,’ I suggested, making both Keith and Kev nod in agreement.
‘Fucking dreadful, inne?’ Kev confirmed.
Bag matey couldn’t let it go, though, and insisted on seeing the manager. Keith told him he’d be seeing the double yellows out front if they had any more trouble out of him, before wishing me all the best and shooing the pair of them away with a few well-chosen words, sixteen of which were ironically:
‘I’ll smash all your fucking records in if you don’t pack it in, now behave yourself.’
I retook my seat opposite my dumbfounded date and promised her that I didn’t know what the hell had just happened there. And you know what, I really didn’t.
OK, so I’d bared my knuckles a bit with old bag matey but it was only an expression. You know, a sort of ‘hurry up or I’ll smash your face in’ born of frustration. If he’d taken it seriously there was nothing to stop him barking back instead of running off and crying his eyes out to the bouncers. I mean, he was the one with all the mates in here, not me.
And besides, over and above everything else, couldn’t he see how out of order he was for doing what he’d done? I mean, he was the one that had quickly cut in front of me. He was the one that had ordered half a dozen complicated cocktails and a cup of espresso and monopolised the barman so that no one else could get a drink for over fifteen minutes. Not me. He was the one that had been laughing and joking around once he safely had a drink in his hand without sparing a thought to concluding his business so that other people could get served. Was bag matey such a complete me-first merchant that he couldn’t see how inconsiderate this was and understand how much it might wind up the blokes spitting feathers behind him? It didn’t help that this place thought they only needed one barman, but that was beside the point. His actions had been keeping me from my beer for a full quarter of an hour while my date sat waiting in the corner. You’d have thought if he had any sort of shame he would’ve actually felt embarrassed and apologised for his behaviour, wouldn’t you?
I would’ve, had the record bag been on the other shoulder.
‘Oh shit, sorry, mate. Here you go,’ I would’ve said.
At which I would’ve got a somewhat frosty:
‘No problem, ta,’ for my troubles and that would’ve been that.
After all, pubs are places for grown-ups, ain’t they, not spoilt little brats who couldn’t see that there was anything wrong with hogging all the swings for the whole of playtime just because they got to ’em first.
I decided not to go sharing any of these thoughts with Charley as I figured this would just put a dent in my cool handling of the situation, but it did twist one thing into sharp focus that I hadn’t really given much thought to up until this moment.
And that was, we weren’t in Catford no more.
6 Money can’t buy you love
I didn’t go home with Charley at the end of our date. Not because of my near-punch-up, but because it was a work night and I had to be back in south London to press my snooze button the next morning. Not that there was any sort of invitation, you understand. We’d just had a couple more drinks, tried to pick up the conversation where we’d left it and chucked in the towel at around half past ten.
I thought I’d blown it. Or rather, I thought matey had blown it for me because the shadow of my barney hung in the air like a bad smell for the rest of the evening. In fact, I’d already written off the whole date as just one more thing to get annoyed about come Judgement Day when Charley texted me as I was on my way home.
‘I had a great night. I can’t believe those fucking prats. Are you free on Saturday?’
Actually,
that’s not strictly true. What her text had really said was this:
hd gr8 nite :-) cant blv wot hpnd wth thos gIs :-@ u3 sat :-D :-(?
At first I thought something had gone wrong with my phone again and it wasn’t until the next morning when Jason turned my phone on its side that I realised that the :-)s were actually little faces and not just really shit punctuation.
‘Sandra sends me them all the time. I thought she was texting me while wearing her oven gloves the first time round but no, they’re little faces. See, happy and frowny? For yes and no.’
‘I see.’
Truly bizarre. And I don’t mean Charley’s text shorthand. I mean the fact that she wanted to see me again. It’s funny how two people can come away from the same date with completely different ideas about how the evening has gone, isn’t it? It had happened to me a few times in the past but this was the first time I was the one who hadn’t thought the evening had been a blistering success.
What was it that Charley had liked about the evening? We’d chatted and joked and a couple of times I’d even managed to make her laugh, but it had been a long way from great. I don’t mean from my own point of view. No, I’d loved the evening because Charley had been there. So as far as I was concerned the evening had been great. I just couldn’t figure out why Charley had thought it had been great too.
‘Will you stop annoying me and talk about something else, for crying out loud?’ Jason pleaded from the other end of the scaffolding. ‘Christ, it’s like someone reading out Marjorie’s problem page all morning long.’
‘You know what your problem is, Tel?’ Big John said, addressing me with the tip of his trowel. ‘You’ve stuck this bird up on a pedestal from day one without even getting to know her. Perhaps she did have a great night. Perhaps she’s all as chuffed and as giggly and girlie as you this morning. I don’t see how she could be, but you never know.’
‘Yeah, she’s probably on the other side of London, slapping down some bricks and having exactly the same conversation,’ Jason pointed out, as he cut and buttered a brick.
‘You don’t know what sort of blokes she’d been out with in the past,’ Big John then said. ‘She might’ve been out with all sorts: boozers, wife-beaters, two-timers, cokeheads. They’re a right load of bad boys those rich Flash Harry City types, you know?’
‘That’s true,’ Jason confirmed, which instantly underpinned Big John’s statement as a fact. Two brickies’ opinions carried that sort of weight, you know.
‘She could’ve had the lot, you know. Compared to them, you could be Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot all rolled into one,’ Big John said, twirling his trowel around in his hand. ‘You’re a nice bloke, you are. What’s up with you? Why wouldn’t she like you? Sort yourself out.’
‘Nah, I go wit’ Jays,’ Nobby perked up from the other end of the flank. ‘She’s probably just after a bit o’ rough. Ah put money on it that she was aching to see you smack tha’ fella in the gob las’ night. I bet she would’a wet her knickers and sucked you off all the way ta hospital if ya had.’
‘Yeah. Or there is always that,’ Big John admitted, rolling muck on his muck board to get a nice big trowelful before spreading it along the wall.
My love life focus group continued with such advice up until tea break when the conversation landed on football island and got shipwrecked there for the rest of the week.
I’m not much of a football fan, to be honest. I’ll watch the odd England match and get as excited about it as the next guy come World Cup time. I’ll even occasionally ask Robbie how Crystal Palace are doing, them being my nearest local league team, but by and large the government could outlaw the game and I don’t think it would make a jot of difference to my life. Not like Robbie. It would be an utter disaster for him. And not only because he wouldn’t have anywhere to go at the weekends – and anything to talk and think about at all other times – but because he’d suddenly find himself up against an enormous pool of unskilled and unemployed labour and I bet Wayne Rooney could shift a few bricks if he put his back into it.
‘He’d have to for two hundred grand a week,’ said Robbie, prompting one of those ‘if I had a million pounds’ conversations which ended in a shouting match when Stuart insisted on risking his in stocks and shares rather than sticking it in the bank and living off the interest like the rest of us planned to do.
‘Jesus, isn’t it five o’clock yet?’ grumbled Jason.
I didn’t do much on Friday night. I had a couple of pints in the Lamb but went home early so that I’d be fresh as a daisy for Charley the next day.
I texted her when I got in but no reply came back, which meant she was either playing it cool, was too drunk to notice or had taken her own life because I’d not texted her for the whole of the evening.
Or she was too busy getting banged in the bog by those two blokes I went on holiday with twelve years ago, of course, which was equally possible.
When her reply did finally arrive, Saturday morning, it was heavily encoded.
wnt2 cum ^ 2 cnbry + mt 4 drx 2nite :-)
‘What the fuck…?’ I muttered, trying to decipher it, before giving up and simply phoning her.
‘What do you think? Are you up for it?’ Charley asked, after the initial ‘oh hi, how are you?’s.
‘OK, let’s do it, I’ve got the microfilm. Let’s telex HQ and get out of here.’
It turned out what Charley’s text had actually said was this:
‘Do you want to come north to Canonbury (^ being north London, you see) and meet for drinks? Such a thing would make me smile.’
I played it cool and told her I might wander by if I had nothing better to do, then put down the phone and rushed into the shower, shaved, trimmed my nails and flossed, and spent the next seven hours throwing shirts about the bedroom and shaking the clock.
Nine hours later I pulled up at a nice little pub in a Canonbury back street, got myself a pint and pulled a newspaper out of my back pocket. If nothing else, I’d at least learned from our earlier date.
Charley arrived a respectable fourteen pages later and shed her grin for a couple of seconds to plant a breathless and excited kiss on my lips before shaking herself out of her coat.
‘I’m not late, am I? I couldn’t find my keys anywhere,’ she explained, pulling the arms inside out and dumping the whole lot over the back of her chair.
‘Not a bit of it. White wine?’ I offered.
‘Actually, can I have a beer? The same as whatever you’re having.’
‘Half?’ I double-checked. Charley laughed like that had been a joke so I pretended it had and got her a pint.
‘How have you been? Tell me about your week,’ she said, when I sat back down.
My week had been much like the previous five hundred. Jason had called around in the van, picked me up, driven us both over to some half-built housing estate and together with a load of other blokes, we’d finished a little bit more of it. The only things that ever changed about my job were the blokes around me and the weather above me. It had rained at the start of the week, dried up towards the end and we’d finished half a dozen gables, a couple of footings and four murder lifts, which are what us brickies call the brickwork around the upper storey of a house for reasons no one’s ever been able to explain to me. All in all, it had been a spectacularly ordinary week, though I did put something of a gloss on it and scared her to her toes with a story about how Robbie had overloaded the boards again and how the scaffolding had plunged right beneath my feet, though in truth it had only plunged by about two inches. And it had happened to Big John, not me.
Still, Charley looked suitably blown away at my action-packed week full of danger and dare-doing and made me promise to be careful in future. I half thought about telling her that danger went with the territory, darling, then realised that if I did, everyone in the pub would be quite within their rights to throw their drinks over me, so I simply assured her that, the odd overloaded scaffolding board aside, most sites were pretty saf
e places these days.
‘And how about you? How’s the campaign going?’ I asked in return.
Some progress had been made. Naldesco had agreed to sit down and listen to what the agency had to say about the benefits of a regional strategy, so Charley was pulling stats and data from similar past campaigns to smack ’em over the head with and make a bit of a fist of it.
It’s bonkers when you think about it really, isn’t it? All this fuss, money and talking over something you’re going to empty over your chips – and just once in all likelihood. You’d think it would be simple, wouldn’t you? Stick an ad on the box along the lines of: ‘Buy Rocket Man Sauce. It’s fantastic’, run it six or seven million times until we’re all ready to kick the telly in every time it comes on, then repackage the product and repeat the process a year later when Naldesco finally gets the message that we don’t want any. That’s what everyone else seemed to do. Just because it was Rocket Man Sauce, it don’t mean it was rocket man science, did it?
‘Remind me what you do for a living again?’ Charley asked in her defence.
I gave her that one but still, it was stupid. You’d think intelligent, well-educated people would have better things to be doing than wasting their time on this load of old rubbish, wouldn’t you? No wonder we hadn’t found a cure for cancer yet.
I thought better of sharing this last observation with Charley and we got on to the subject of our families. Both sets of parents were still alive and while Charley was an only child, I had the full set, an older brother and a younger sister.
‘How do you get on with them?’ Charley asked.
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘I go round there for tea once in a while, borrow a couple of tools off my old man every now and again and call in on my sister when I need a few shirt buttons sewing on, that sort of thing,’ I explained.
Charley wiped a mock tear from her eye and asked me if I ever saw them when H&S Hire and Sketchleys weren’t closed. She didn’t quite phrase it like that, but that was the general gist.