by Minnie Darke
About the only thing Evie could have said for certain on the subject of her relationship with Dave Wright was that it began at the Thorn and Thistle.
By Scottish standards this was just a common-or-garden pub, but to an Australian like Evie it was beautiful. It had upholstered furnishings, dusty rugs, an old timber bar and a traditional ‘snug’ – a tiny room within a room – which had stained-glass windows and booth seats of pleated deep red leather.
Evie’s favourite nights there were the once-a-month Fridays when the small stage in the corner of the bar room was home to Poetry in the Pub. If she wasn’t rostered on, she’d turn up anyway, order a shandy and a bowl of salt-and-vinegar crisps, then stow herself away on a stool in a shadowy corner to listen. That’s where she’d been sitting, and that’s what she’d been doing, when she first saw Dave. He’d been standing on the stage with a sheaf of dog-eared pages in one hand, trying with the other to adjust the microphone stand. Downwards, much to the loud amusement of the other poets at the front of the room.
It was true that Dave was not tall. He was small and fine-boned, with unkempt hair and an intensity – of gaze, of speech – that made it difficult to resist bantering with him. At some point in the journey of them getting to know each other, Dave, in the Scottish accent that Evie found so irresistible, had christened her ‘M’lady Greensleeves’. One day, with his splotch-making fountain pen, he’d dashed off a poem for her, torn it out of his notebook and presented it with a flourish, as if he were Sir Walter Raleigh laying a cape across a puddle for the Queen of England.
The poem was a bazaar of vocabulary, full of random capital letters and suggestive, half-abandoned thoughts, and although Evie knew that it meant nothing that he’d written her a poem – he’d written similar poems for all the girls behind the bar at the Thorn and Thistle – she kept it anyway.
Then one night he’d come to her at the bar, straight from the stage. He’d had to make his way past some hand-shakers and a few back-slappers, but then he was leaning forward on the bar. In his grey eyes, Evie could see . . . what? An invitation? Mockery? A dare? With Dave, it was always hard to tell.
‘Good gig tonight, Dave,’ Evie had said, without fawning. ‘What’ll you have?’
On Poetry in the Pub nights, the performers got a drink on the house. But only ever the one.
‘Wine comes in at the mouth,’ he said, ‘and love comes in at the eye; that’s all we shall know for truth, before we grow old and die. So says William Butler Yeats, in any case.’
‘But he was wrong, of course,’ Evie said, wiping the bar in front of Dave and studiously avoiding his ambiguous gaze.
‘Was he indeed?’
‘Love comes in at the eye?’ She straightened up and looked at him now, crossing her arms across her chest. ‘Surely a poet would prefer the ear.’
‘I don’t know. I could imagine someone smitten with you at a glance, M’lady Greensleeves.’
Evie was far from new at the business of working in a bar. ‘Well, this isn’t getting you a drink, is it? Did you say it was wine that you wanted?’
‘No, whisky,’ he announced. ‘Your best, if you please.’
Evie unstopped a particularly expensive drop, poured a generous nip, and watched as Dave swirled the amber liquid until it made a whirlpool.
‘So, I heard on the grapevine,’ Dave said, ‘that you’re in need of a place to live.’
Evie raised her eyebrows. This was true. The tent in the campground had been all very well during the festival, but she’d soon become tired of carrying around all the possessions that she wanted to be protected by more than her tent’s front zipper. The flat she was now sharing with a crew of near-strangers was about to be re-occupied by its owner, and – being new to Edinburgh – Evie hadn’t exactly developed an extensive network of friends with spare beds or couches.
‘Happens I have a room to let,’ Dave had told her.
Evie had known that it was stupid to be attracted to a man who smelled of late nights, Scotch whisky and a sensitive ego, and she had known that it would be even stupider to move in with such a man, particularly if the precise nature of the arrangement was not entirely transparent. But when Dave took centre stage, and even if Evie didn’t fully grasp every word that he spilled, crooned, whispered, shouted into the microphone, there was something special about the way the words went together, and Evie couldn’t help wanting to be closer to him.
Dave’s place, a soot-stained townhouse in the general vicinity of Leith, a short bus ride from the Old Town, belonged to an elderly woman who no longer had any need of it.
‘Her chosen form of arts patronage, bless her lilac rinse, is to allow the place to become run-down under the benign neglect of a young poet,’ Dave had explained, and Evie had suspected her face may have betrayed something of her bemusement at Dave’s use of the word ‘young’. Dave was what you would get if something cruel had restarted Peter Pan’s internal clock and accelerated him to an age somewhere in the vicinity of forty.
What Dave hadn’t needed to explain to Evie was that the rent he received from a flatmate would become a handy, if unofficial, part of his income – which otherwise consisted of dole payments and increasingly rare arts grants, cheques for the reviews that he infrequently penned, and the occasional sum for a poem that found a home in a broadsheet newspaper or literary journal.
The room he showed to Evie, which seemed to have been last decorated in the 1970s, had floral wallpaper, mismatched floral curtains, and carpet marked with evidence of parties past. The room was on the street side of the house, with a view of clusters of identical houses pressed tight together and punctuated here and there by cheap and cheerful restaurants, a nail boutique and a shop selling cut-price mobile phones. The street was so narrow that when double-decker buses passed Evie’s window, she felt like she could almost step out onto the tops of them.
On her first night at her new address, Dave had stood beside her at the kitchen sink, drying the dishes from their first at-home dinner together. When the job was done, he had taken Evie’s hand and pressed the back of it to his lips, but the way he looked at her was no longer teasing. He seemed fragile, and although Evie had known that it was a stupid idea to sleep with her new flatmate, she’d known all along that she was going to do it anyway.
In the four months she’d lived with Dave, they had established an odd sort of arrangement. Sometimes it involved sex, usually in Evie’s room, after which Dave would leave her to sleep and return to his own bed. As well as having separate bedrooms, Evie and Dave had separate schedules and separate friends. When they were both at home in the evenings, one would cook for the other, but they shopped for groceries haphazardly and alone. They almost never quibbled and absolutely never fought, but there were periods of days on end in which he withdrew entirely, sleeping alone and shutting himself away in the den with a bottle, pen and paper. Evie had come to accept that Dave, rather like a cat, would engage with her on his own terms, and no others.
Dave and Evie did not, as a rule, discuss poetry other than Dave’s. Occasionally, Evie considered confiding in Dave about her writing, perhaps even asking him to read her work, but deep down she already knew that the outcome of this was unlikely to be good. Once he’d told her that two poets in a relationship had about as much going for them as two drowning swimmers clutching at each other’s throats. She’d replayed the comment over and over in her mind, trying to analyse its tone and work out whether or not it was evidence that he thought they were in a relationship.
There were times when Evie thought that Dave did think of her as his girlfriend. When they ventured out together to a play or a book launch, Dave would hold Evie’s hand as they walked the streets, and whenever he stopped in at the Thorn and Thistle for a drink, he would lean over the bar and kiss her. But then there were times when she was fairly sure he didn’t think of her that way. When he introduced her to someone he knew, he’d only ever say, ‘This is Greensleeves.’ It had been a while now since he’d bother
ed with the prefix ‘M’lady’.
Evie let herself into the house but didn’t take off her coat. She found Dave in the den, sitting in semi-darkness, his feet up on the coffee table, a can of Guinness in hand, and a scarf wound multiple times around his neck. Since the fright of the most recent bill, they’d been keeping the heating turned down as low as they could manage.
‘What does everyone like, Greensleeves?’ he asked, glancing up to where she stood in the doorway.
Oh, my day was great, thanks for asking. A Guinness? Thanks, that would be lovely.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I need to write something popular,’ Dave said. The coffee table was copiously littered with newspapers and magazines, flyers, pamphlets and mail, both opened and unopened.
‘What for?’
‘For this,’ he said, hauling himself upright to grab a familiar flyer. It was for Ten Lines, and identical to the one she’d picked up from the counter at the poetry library several weeks earlier.
With a slight twinge of guilt, Evie thought of her ‘Dandelion Clocks’ lying in the belly of that bright red postbox, and wondered what Dave would think if he knew that she had already submitted a poem for the same anthology.
There wasn’t any real cause for guilt, of course. She had the right to send a poem wherever she chose; she didn’t need to ask Dave’s permission. And yet . . . she felt awkward about the way she’d always kept her own poetry to herself. If you shared a house with someone, and a bed sometimes, too, shouldn’t you at least want to tell them about your hopes and dreams?
‘Ten Lines,’ Dave scoffed. ‘I wouldn’t bother with something so bloody gimmicky, except the money’s good. Who knows how you’re supposed to make a living as a poet without going in for this kind of crap?’
Evie thought, but didn’t say, that the world actually didn’t care about ‘supposed to’ for poets, or anyone else for that matter.
‘So, what’s in the zeitgeist, Greensleeves?’ Dave asked, flicking the flyer in the direction of the coffee table. ‘What is everyone thinking and talking about right now?’
‘Climate change?’ Evie suggested.
‘Who wants to read about that shit? Everybody just wants to ignore that shit. It’s the only way we can go on. Thinking about climate change is like thinking about your own death. It’s just one great big bummer. What else?’
Nice attitude. ‘Scottish independence?’
‘Yawn,’ Dave said.
‘Well, what about love?’ Evie offered. ‘Everyone likes love.’
‘Greensleeves, I’m after an interesting suggestion,’ Dave said, and Evie knew that when he was in a mood like this one, there was no sense trying to shift it.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ll work it out.’
Upstairs was no warmer than downstairs. In her bedroom Evie shivered, wishing that she was already undressed and dressed again and could skip the part where she was hopping about trying to put her tights on, her bare legs puckering to gooseflesh from the chill.
Between the parted curtains, she could see the flashing from the bright lights that encircled the window of the phone shop across the road, and she could hear a festive note in the voices of people calling to each other across the street. The old year was coming to an end, and a new one was beginning. Out there in the city, resolutions were being made; new leaves were about to be turned.
The turn of a year was a strange and fragile time, Evie always thought; it seemed to require you to look honestly at yourself, to take stock, to ask yourself if you were where you ought to be, or at least travelling the right road. Several times lately she’d dreamed of a fog-filled house that felt like it might be her own, where she lived with a partner whose face she couldn’t quite see, and some mist-edged shapes that might have been children, but whenever she tried to bring them into focus, to touch them, to claim them as her own, they were swept away from her – partner, children, home, all – as if they were nothing more than clouds on a windy day.
When she woke, she would come hurtling back to reality and find herself alone in her ugly, street-side bedroom, where the posies of flowers on the wallpaper looked in the half-light like the faces of goblins. In the not-quite-warm-enough bed, she would remember that she was twenty-eight and far from home, and that the years were sliding by all too quickly and easily.
She hadn’t meant to travel forever. When she’d left Australia, she’d imagined she was going for a year, maybe two, and while there was a part of her that now wanted to stop drifting and put down roots, there was another part of her that didn’t quite know how it was done. What she did know, though, in those soul-bare moments in the half-light, was that if she didn’t change something soon, she might easily drift right past all the parts of the life that she’d supposed she’d one day have.
Right now, it was summer back in Australia. In Melbourne, where she’d lived before leaving the country, the sun was sometimes hot enough to warp the tram-tracks in the middle of the streets and turn patches of asphalt to liquid, while in Perth, where some of Evie’s scattered family lived, the sky could be a perfect shade of cobalt for sun-soaked weeks on end. Evie had grown up in Tasmania, which was where her closest half-sister, Stella, still lived. There, a summer’s day could just as easily be mild and tranquil, or cranky with ice-laden squalls. Or both.
Six years she’d been away, and all she really had to show for it was a stack of notebooks filled with unpublished poems. She crouched at her bedside and opened the cabinet where she kept these notebooks out of harm’s way. Some were tall, some short, some expensive, some cheap. The last couple of times Evie had packed up and moved on, her notebooks comprised the greater part of her luggage; it wouldn’t be long, now, until her own thoughts would become too heavy for her to carry on her back.
The notebook she withdrew at random was a pretty one she had bought for herself as a treat at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, its cover richly embroidered with doves and roses. The moment she opened it, she could almost smell the era of her life from which it had come: the pungent mud of the Thames at low tide, the cold ash that filled the bar room of the Noble Swan on winter mornings, the yeasty pong of dishcloths used to mop up spilled ale, the unmistakeable whiff of the dogs – spaniels, terriers, hounds – who dozed under the tables at their owners’ feet.
Still wearing her coat, she sat down on the bed again with the notebook and flicked through its pages. There were messages she barely remembered leaving for herself, and poems she had rewritten so many times that they’d taken on the texture of overworked dough. But here was something she remembered: a description of a plane falling from the sky, the sea below crying out with a great big blue mouth as the silver craft plunged down into its gullet. The Air Pleiades crash. Was that two years ago already?
Most of the poem was terrible – Evie could see that now – but one or two of the lines were quite good. She took a pencil from the top of her cabinet and underlined the parts she thought might be worth salvaging. So absorbed was she in her thoughts that, at first, she didn’t notice that Dave had come into her room.
‘You working tonight?’ he asked, sitting beside her on the bed, and bumping her shoulder with his in a just-good-mates fashion. ‘Or are you free to see in the New Year with me?’
Bashfully, Evie put a hand over the open pages of her notebook. ‘I’m due at the pub at nine.’
Idiot. If she hadn’t put her hand over the page, he’d never have looked.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, amused.
Evie could feel her cheeks burning as Dave pushed her hand away, uncovering the words on the page.
‘Looks serious,’ Dave said, a laugh in his voice. ‘Oh! Poetry, no less. Really?’
‘Dave, don’t—’ Evie began.
‘What’s this here? A billowing keen of grief? Whoa! Careful you don’t go overboard.’
It was an accurate hit. He’d picked out exactly the phrase that she had loved the most, and even though the most sensible parts of herse
lf counselled her to pay no heed to whatever Dave said next, the most fragile parts of herself waited, like an unshelled snail, for the boot.
When at last he spoke, his voice was so patronising that Evie was surprised he managed to stop short of reaching out to ruffle her hair. ‘Never mind, Greensleeves. Writing poetry’s not for everyone.’
IT WAS AFTER dinner, but still light, when Arie drove back to the city from Belinda’s house with six jars of apricot jam and a New Year’s Eve radio special for company. Although Prince’s ‘1999’ got his fingers tapping against the steering wheel, it wasn’t enough to get him in the mood for the party Richard and Lenka were hosting at their place.
The previous day, Arie had messaged Richard to say that he was going to give the occasion a miss, but Richard had fired back a text that read: Unacceptable. See you 9 pm, latest. You’ll have fun once you get here.
If it had been anyone else’s party, Arie would have stuck to his decision and stayed home with the expensive bottle of Scotch whisky that his middle sister, Lotte, had bought him for Christmas, much to the disapproval of his mother and two other sisters. But while all of Arie’s friends had rallied around in the months after Diana’s death, it was Richard and Lenka who had really gone the distance. They continued to insist that he eat with them once a week, and about the only Wednesday they’d missed so far was the one when Lenka had been in hospital after having Marek.
Predictably, Lenka had turned out to be one of those insanely capable women who took to motherhood as if she’d been changing nappies and settling crying babies her whole life, and the no-nonsense approach she took to her baby was similar to the forthright way she dealt with Arie’s grief. The times Arie lost his shit and ended up sobbing at the dinner table, she had simply sat beside him, rubbed his back with the flat of her hand, and said, ‘It’s just awful, Arie. That’s all there is to it. It’s just awful.’
Unlike his oldest sister, Sara, and his younger sister, Heidi, who were prone to dishing up pep talks and handing over the business cards of grief therapists, massage therapists, Bowen therapists and aura therapists, Lenka didn’t pretend there was any easy fix.
