Sweet Sorrow(115)

I was in a rut, and knew that it was a rut, and took some pleasure in the shelter it provided. In the war movies and science-fiction films I loved, there was a stock character, the plucky corporal, wounded in the stomach or spine. I’ll only slow you down, he says, go on without me, and surrounded by explosives, and with a grenade clutched to his chest, he sits and waits for the enemy and the most destructive time to pull the pin. I always admired that character, his masochistic nobility. I’m not sure who I thought of as the enemy but I was happy, in my own way, to sit and wait while others made their escape, despite not having slowed them down at all.

Mum and Jonathan moved away to Exeter to be nearer his parents, both finding management jobs. ‘Boutique hotels, God help me,’ said Mum. I missed her, and I think Dad missed her too, but leaving no longer felt like a dereliction of duty, and she’d never really liked our town. Billie excelled in her GCSEs, then her A-levels, and went off to study Chemistry at Aberdeen ‘because it’s so far from Exeter’.

And I did miss Billie. She’d left home at the point where we might have become friends, and I never told her about the worst of times with Dad. In turn, I’m sure she had her own struggles in that stranger’s home, but though she remained my sister, we no longer felt like family. Our paths diverged too soon, and every choice she made took her further away. Perhaps some time in the future those paths will come back together.

I became very good at pool. And darts, and the slot machine. The Angler’s became my local, the staff who once refused to serve me became my friends and I graduated to a regular stool at the end of the bar. I had a few flings with girls I’d met there, consummated in cars or, in celebration of the spring, in the nearby churchyard. A love affair that begins up against a tomb is unlikely to flourish, and soon phone calls went unanswered. Once a drink was emptied over my head, just like in films, and I wondered, my God, is this who you’re becoming – someone who has drinks emptied over their head? What would Fran say?

On Christmas Eve in 2002 I had taken up my spot at the bar, privately resenting the part-timers who packed the pub at this time of year. Like worshippers who turn up once a year at midnight Mass. I wondered, where was their commitment? The woman on my right had wedged her elbows onto the bar and now was slowly pushing them outwards, shouting to the barmaid, ‘Excuse me? Miss?’

A loop of Christmas pop hits was playing loudly but still I recognised her voice and, for reasons that I couldn’t have explained, tilted my face away. A man had joined her now.

‘I need my drink!’

‘Fuck’s sake, just wait a moment, will you?’

‘Do you think I should ask for a vodka martini?’

‘In The Angler’s? Straight glass or tankard?’

If I swivelled to my left I might slide off my stool, take my pint and sit elsewhere …

Too late.

‘Oh. My. God.’

‘Hello, Helen.’

‘Charlie! Charlie Lewis, come here!’

‘Hi Alex!’ I mumbled into his shoulder as they wrenched me from the stool.

We moved to a table. Despite the solemn vows on Brighton beach, we’d drifted apart in their college years. Now they’d both changed just as they were meant to, Helen with a smart military haircut and a small black stud in her nose, Alex looking skinny, poised and quite beautiful, a louche millionaire in a slim black jacket.

‘Thierry Mugler, if you must know.’

‘Second-hand.’

‘Your donkey jacket is second-hand. This is vintage.’

If I’d not known them, I’d have felt intimidated. Knowing them, I felt intimidated, but still cautiously pleased to see them. Predictably, they were both in London now, a Sociology degree for Helen, last year of drama school for Alex, sharing a big house in Brixton with playwrights and artists and musicians, just back for family duties at Christmas (‘Boxing Day, seven a.m., we are out of here’). When it was my turn, I told them about my work, trying to make a dark joke out of it, the comedy sounding a little darker than I’d intended. They laughed but looked concerned. Perhaps I’d had too much to drink. Certainly I’d finished my glass some time before they finished theirs. I escaped to the bar and realised, as I waited, that it was not nostalgia that had brought them here, but irony. The Angler’s was a joke to them and I wondered if I was too, and so I lingered at the bar through ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ and ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’, in no hurry to be served, occasionally glancing over to the table to see their heads close together. I bought myself a beer and a chaser and when I finally got back Alex got up ‘to make a call’, and Helen and I sat in silence.

‘You all right?’ I said.

‘Yeah, just admiring the view.’ She nodded towards the bar and the row of three male backsides, the cleft of the buttocks visible over the backs of their jeans, heads down, no conversation.

‘Don’t wind up like that, will you?’

And now I could say it. ‘Snob!’

‘Hey, I’m not a snob! No one in the world is less of a snob than me—’

‘Because you sound like a snob, Hel.’

‘Coming back here, with your clever college ways—’

‘Yeah, exactly that.’

‘Except I’m not a snob! I don’t give a fuck what you do – live where you want, do what you want. I mean, I get it, it’s your wilderness years and that’s fine.’