Sweet Sorrow(68)

The Angler’s was an altogether classier proposition, a new-build Tudor farmhouse at the edge of town, whitewashed and freshly thatched; a destination pub with a large car park. The ceilings were authentically low, the artificial timbers exposed and, on Sunday, families would cram into inglenooks and cubbyholes to gorge on the famous all-you-can-eat carvery, a festival of bottomless meat with two different kinds of gravy, dark and light. In happier times, Mum and Dad would take us and we’d sit and dehydrate on crisps and pink stringy ham, Britvic 55 and great mounds of fat chips. Now its great selling point for the younger drinker was the beer garden, a paddock of scuffed lawn that sloped down to an artificial lake – a large pond really – around which foul-tempered anglers – the eponymous anglers, I suppose – hunched late into the evening, drinking pints and glaring at any youth who dared come near and ‘scare the fish’. That spring, on weekday evenings when we should have been revising, I would sometimes come here with Harper, shivering against the evening chill, topping up our innocent Cokes with the bottle of rum concealed in his jacket pocket. At no point did we think any of this was wrong or foolish. Laws were guidelines and the age-eighteen rule was only there to keep the fourteen-year-olds out. An informal understanding had been reached: as long as we stuck to the holding pen at the back, we were fine.

And that’s where we found ourselves on that Friday, every single member, young and old, of the Full Fathom Five Theatre Co-operative ranged around two wooden picnic tables that we hauled together across the dusty lawn. In the spirit of responsibility, Ivor refused to buy anything stronger than a half of shandy for the younger members, and so we were obliged to drink them twice as quickly and, with nothing to eat but two baskets of undercooked chips, the volume of conversation soon began to creep up. It was that time of our lives, and an era too, when all conversation aspired to stand-up comedy, and so I told Helen, Fran and Alex the story of my Shakespearean improv session – with love, my experience hath been both hit and miss – and felt gratified at their laughter. The more we drank, the easier the laughter came until, at a certain point of drunkenness, a switch was flicked and the conversation turned confessional.

So – Keith, it seemed, was in the throes of a miserable separation, his own fault, after a fling with a fellow cast member from last year’s Fiddler on the Roof, a girl playing his daughter, would you believe (‘Tradition!’ shouted Alex), but he still loved his wife, still wanted her to take him back, and Lucy was telling Miles about the pressure she felt to achieve top marks and Miles was saying, yes, I know what that’s like, because if he wasn’t the best at something, he had to have a bloody good reason why not, and Colin Smart, who we’d always dismissed as a dull and feeble swot, had revealed his brother was in a young offenders’ unit for dealing drugs and before I could even take this in, Polly, some way through a bottle of white wine, was saying how lonely she and Bernard felt without their kids and grand-kids, in New Zealand now, how much they loved being around us young people, how youth kept them young. In a quiet, intent voice to my right, Alina was telling Fran about her faithless ballet-dancer boyfriend back in Vienna while Alex, on my left, worried about telling his Ghanaian parents that he was gay. ‘They’re liberal,’ he said, ‘but they’re not that liberal.’

For the most part, I sat and listened, tuning in and out as if sitting in front of a bank of TVs. There was something contagious about all this confiding and I wondered, should I join in, offer something up? That I no longer saw my sister, was drifting away from my best friends? That I hated my mother but wanted her back? That I worried my father was suicidal, that I was a thief of cash and garage glassware, had flunked my exams and lay awake at night, fearful of a future I could not imagine?

It was too much. There were few parts of my inner life that wouldn’t cause the listener to toy with their beermat, and the only unsullied secret that I felt compelled to share was my great, bursting passion for the girl who sat alongside me now, our hips touching, her bare arm brushing against mine, hand on her cheek – oh, that I were a glove upon that hand and something-something-something – leaning forward, listening to drunk Polly as she held her other hand and told her how beautiful she was as Juliet, how talented. Fran batted the praise away but it was true. By my side was the smartest, brightest, most brilliant girl I’d ever meet, the antidote to all the other shabby dross in my life. I’d never wanted anything more than to be with Fran Fisher, whatever ‘be with’ meant, but which of these people could I tell? Certainly not Fran Fisher.

Miles returned with a tray of drinks. ‘Chips!’ said Helen. ‘You forgot the chips!’

‘And cigarettes!’ shouted Alex.

‘No!’ said Ivor. ‘Absolutely no cigarettes!’

‘Oh, I would so love a cigarette,’ said Alina.

‘Alina, we have a duty of care!’

‘A little something to eat might be nice,’ slurred Polly, ‘to soak up some of this white wine. Here, I have the money …’

‘No, I’ll go,’ I said, extricating my legs from beneath the picnic table, stumbling and placing my hand on Fran’s shoulder, noting how just for a moment she reached up and held it by the fingertips. My God, I wanted to shout it out!

And no wonder. As I walked to the bar, the baked ground was now a swamp beneath my feet. The sodium lights had been turned on and I noted how the moths and midges drifted like burning embers in the warm electric air. That’s how drunk I was – drunk enough to make observations. Inside, the still air smelt of vinegar and hot oil. I ducked under the timber eaves, straightened up and prepared my voice in anticipation of speaking to the landlady. ‘I would like chips, please. Two, no, four, no, six portions. And eight packets of nuts. Four salted, four dry-roasted.’ I sounded like a drunk elocution teacher. ‘And four packets of salt and vinegar crisps.’ It would be expensive, but I had cash and scratch cards in my wallet and the shandy had made me devil-may-care.