by Robert Ward
Enough for now. Write soon. And stop driving your lovers to suicide!
Rich.
Sally was in the bath letting the water go cold, as she lacked the will to rise. She had been right, the bathroom was a midden. The bath-enamel had completely worn away in several places and the toilet bowl was indescribably filthy with ancient ingrained dirt which was impossible to get out. Broken and mildewed ceramic tiles partially covered the walls, and the ceiling was green-black with damp. A bare light bulb on a twisted flex hung sadly from it.
“What a dump,” she said, just aloud.
It was Friday and they would be going to the Rat and Cockroach later no doubt. Getting drunk was a favourite pastime of hers but she couldn’t help but feel an enveloping sense of ennui as she lay in the tepid water as the last bubbles of bubble bath disappeared.
“Waaaagh!” she suddenly shouted. “This is not what it’s supposed to be like! Someone take me away. Bear me away on noble wings!”
“What the hell’s the matter?” Richard shouted in to her.
“How can you keep me imprisoned in this terrible place?”
“It’s not a terrible place. I think it’s got character.”
“Nutter!”
“And get out of that bath. You’ve been in there for hours. You’ll be like a prune.”
“Kiss my arse.”
“I’d love to. It isn’t all wrinkled is it?”
“I’m going to have it tattooed with a rat and a cockroach.”
“Mmn, lovely.”
“Do we have to go there again, tonight?” she asked sulkily.
“What? Miss Friday night at the Rat? Unthinkable. Anyway, you like it.”
“Yes, but not all the time. Can’t we go somewhere different, just this once?” she asked, finally getting out of the bath.
“Like where?”
“I don’t know, think of somewhere.”
“Are you out yet?” he asked through the door.
“Yes, I’m out,” she said.
“Can I dry you?”
“No, you can’t. Last time you walloped me with the wet towel. Sadist.”
“But I thought you liked it, and the red welts looked so pretty.”
“You’re sick, you know that? Now think of somewhere interesting to go.”
They sat in their usual place in the Rat and Cockroach and Sally sighed as she raised her pint of snakebite to her lips. Richard looked around. It was fairly empty yet.
“God, you’re boring,” she said. “I thought writers were supposed to be interesting. I mean, this is hardly Paris-cafe society, is it? I suppose it’ll be a curry again later, if I’m lucky.”
“You like curry.”
“Yes, I know. But not all the time. And anyway. That’s the point. When are you going to write something and make us zillions of pounds? One poxy radio play. When do you write? I’ve never seen you.”
“I told you I wouldn’t be rich,” he said.
“Yes, but there are limits. I wouldn’t mind a bit of romantic poverty but all I’ve got is the poverty without the romance. Don’t you know anyone interesting you can introduce me to? A mad painter who’s likely to slash his ear off? A heartbroken poet in a garret? On second thoughts, forget the garret. How about an insane composer who’s crazed on drugs and is a de-frocked priest?”
He smiled and winked at Chantel behind the bar as she unscrewed an optic out of an empty bottle.
“I don’t know where you get these notions from,” he said, turning again to Sally. “Life isn’t like it is in books and films. That’s the point. There is no romance in poverty. It’s only romantic when it happens to other people and usually in the past. The present reality of it is a bugger.”
“You mean that in a hundred years time, if by some miracle our lives were recorded in history, people would think of us as bohemian romantics who lived interesting lives?”
“Exactly.”
“Wow. What a bummer. So this is it? Is it?”
“Yep.”
“Wow.”
Sally thought for a moment and then took a drink.
“Waaagh!” she then shouted, and Fred, the landlord, and the staff, looked at her for a few seconds and then continued with their work.
Later in the evening Sally was feeling a little better about her lot and was downing snakebite with abandon. Although she liked to think she was a liberated drug-taker, her first love was alcohol, and quite honestly she knew that what attracted her to drugs was the naughtiness of it. She could quite easily do without them but she liked the image. Drink however was a dear friend. Not that it worried her. The pub was full by now and she liked the heat and the smell and the sound of the bodies.
They were sitting where they had first met, as they usually did, and their table was cluttered with empty and full glasses. Fred and Flo and Chantel, being far too busy to bother with such matters as clearing away the debris. Richard noticed there was a new barman working tonight. A young man wearing a black and white striped shirt like an American football referee, and looking harassed. Music throbbed from the jukebox and people queued impatiently for service. The stripper had gone by now.
“I wonder why alcohol makes awful things seem better?” she said.
“Why, or how?”
“Why,” she answered, darting a look at him.
“Perhaps we’d all go insane if it didn’t.”
“But some people don’t drink.”
“Perhaps what they see is not so awful?”
“Perhaps.”
She looked about her, at the awfulness, and smiled.
“People are disgusting though, aren’t they? Their functions, I mean. All life is, really. Nature is disgusting.”
“I went through that phase when I was about twelve,” he said, and then disinfected his mouth with whisky.
“Well, aren’t you the sophisticate then?”
“Yes, I am rather.”
“You’re an arrogant bastard, aren’t you?”
“I have to be. It’s all just a front though. I’ve had the stuffing knocked out of me really.”
“Emotionally, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it. No, on second thoughts don’t. I’ve enough problems of my own, a starving art student living in a hovel with an emotional cripple. What a nightmare. Anyway, let’s cheer up. Maybe something will happen?”
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
The throbbing music from the jukebox ceased and the out of tune piano began to tinkle. An old man with white swept back hair was playing and an old woman wearing a purple coat was singing “Only a violet I plucked from my mothers’ grave,” followed by a rendition of “Oh dear Daddy, why am I blind when other children can see?”
“Dear God,” Sally said. “I think I’m lost in a time-warp. How can these people remember the words anyway? Can you imagine us doing that in fifty years time to one of the current pop songs? Bizarre. When were these people young?”
“I think it was when footballers had their hair parted in the middle and wore shorts to below their knees and people in films said things like, Ginger’s bought it over the channel, and, ’ere, ’ere wot’s all this perishing lark?”
“Your mind must be a nightmare.”
“It is.”
“But those songs are older than that, aren’t they?” she said.
“Yes. They sound Victorian. Culture lasted longer then. Today it’s about fifteen seconds.”
“Fogey. You do seem old, you know? Not in looks, but the way you are. Like you won’t be any different in the future. Like you’ve stopped growing.”
“Is that good or bad? I suppose it’s bad.”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s bad too though.”
The interlude of live performance was over and the jukebox was back in action and the pub seemed more crowded than ever. A group of prostitutes now occupied the rest of their cubicle and were refreshing themselves with a round of pernod and blackcurrant.
One of the prostitutes was pressed-up close to Richard and he noticed that she had nice legs. They were slender and clad in black stockings. Sally noticed him looking and smiled. The prostitute had noticed also and managed to hitch up her already short skirt even higher.
“They reckon that all we’re after is sex,” Sally whispered into his ear. “All human activity is based upon it. Writing a poem or playing netball. It’s all sexual.”
“Bollocks,” he said.
“Exactly,” she said.
Marcus was the name of the new barman Richard discovered when he bought more drinks. He was a student and Chantel kept looking at him and feeling him as they squeezed past each other in the narrow space behind the bar. It was on her recommendation that Fred had taken him on, as Fred was a notorious hater of, fucking students, as he put it. Chantel told Richard such things as though he was a lifelong confidant, and he liked it. In fact he just liked Chantel.
The prostitutes, refreshed, had gone when he returned, no doubt to provide comfort for the lonely, and their places were taken by hard-drinking Irishmen from a nearby construction site which seemed to be in action twenty four hours a day. What they were constructing however, no one was quite sure. They had been standing at the bar but Fred had told them to fuck off and let the other customers get served out of shrewd business acumen rather than concern for his guests.
The Irishmen talked about pubs in Ireland and how a decent pint of Guinness was not to be had in pagan England and about red haired Irish girls who would let a man give them a seeing to for half a Murphy’s and a bag of chips. They had magnificent bellies with skimpy T-shirts stretched over them and wore much distressed jeans showing acres of burnt red bum-cleavage.
“Mmm, I fancy a bit of rough tonight,” Sally said to Richard. “You should drink more beer, your stomach is much too flat.”
“Give it time,” he said.
“We may not have it.”
“My, we are doom laden tonight, aren’t we.”
“Am I, Richard? I’m sorry. I’m a miserable cow sometimes, I know.”
“Drink is making you mellow. I like you when you’re a miserable cow.”
“It’s because I’m ugly, I suppose. Like they say cripples are vindictive when in positions of power.”
Richard looked at her and saw that she was becoming maudlin and he wanted to help her.
“I don’t know where you’ve got this ridiculous notion from that you’re ugly,” he said. “I think you’re lovely.”
“You’re just being kind,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten how you were looking at me the first time we met.”
“What is it you’ve got about that? I was just looking at you, that’s all.”
“You were thinking about someone else, and thinking how ugly I was.”
He was quiet for a moment, thinking about what she had said.
“Nonsense,” he then said, without looking at her. “I love you, Sal.”
“What? Say that again.”
“I love you.”
“Wow. What a fucking liar. But it was nice of you to say it.”
He smiled and shook his head.
“Okay, I give up,” he said.
“Good. I think I’ll have a quadruple vodka. Scottish water is it? It comes out of the taps in Glasgow you know?”
Sally returned with their drinks having manoeuvred her way back from the bar through the crowd with pelvic thrusts as her hands were full.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said as she sat down again beside him. “It’s all about spheroids of flesh.”
“What is?”
“What men like about women. Tits and bums. Spheroids of flesh. They reckon that we used to screw back to front and so men were attracted by a nice round bum. When we started to make the beast with two backs women grew breasts to attract men in the same way. Spheroids of flesh.”
“I can see the point,” he said. “That sounds quite likely. That is what we look for. But there is more. There must be a reason why we are the only creatures to do it face to face. It must be because the human face is so beautiful, and all the senses are there. The eyes to see, the ears to hear, the nose to smell, the mouth to taste and feel.”
“The human face is so beautiful,” she said, as though to no one.
The Irishmen left, seemingly in search of a decent pint of Guinness, and surely not drunkenly to return to constructing, and were replaced by a very tall and striking looking man of about fifty with a bald top of his head and long white hair at the back and the sides. He wore black, everywhere, including a three-quarter length barathea coat and a long thin lace tie over a black linen shirt. The girl with him was about thirty and very blonde, with a beautiful nose and eyes. She wore red. A long plain dress. She was what one would call, petite.
The girl in red immediately spilled her gin and tonic in a tall glass over the table and onto Richard’s legs.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so clumsy tonight. Have you ever had a day when inanimate objects defeat you? What is the saying? Homo Sapiens, nil, world of inanimate objects, one, I think. Let me buy you a drink as penance. I’d offer to have your trousers cleaned commercially but I don’t think the laundrette will be open now and I doubt if you’d appreciate the obvious inconvenience anyway. I know it feels cold and wet and uncomfortable now, but your body heat will dry them in no time, and a white spirit surely won’t leave a stain. Now, what will you have?”
“Really, nothing. It doesn’t matter. Really,” said Richard, amused by what she had said.
“You must have a drink,” the man in black said. “I have to return to replace the spillage and we would feel much better if you would accept something from us. My name is David by the way, and this is Charmian. Now, what is it to be?”
“Scotch then, please,” Richard said. “But please, don’t think that you have to.”
“Of course not,” David said. “And what about your friend?”
“I’ll have a straight vodka, please,” Sally said, as amused as Richard was.
“Coming up,” David said and left to fight his way back to the bar.
“Don’t you just love the Rat?” Charmian said. It’s so wonderfully seedy, isn’t it, and yet one meets the most interesting people here. I love it like I love hot buttered toast, and I mean butter with toast rather than toast with butter. We live a little way away but we often come here for the feel of it. You know, the dirty, grainy feel of it, and the red and white raw people who come here. Is that why you come here? We do. It’s like an old folk song written in about eighteen hundred, you know, the way they sang in a plaintive poetic nasal way about men gone for soldiers and maids left with child? Oh, here’s David. That was quick. But he’s tall and striking and people notice him, and I suppose he was served quickly because of that.”
Richard and Sally looked at each other and smiled.
“I got two of each,” David said as he sat down again next to Charmian. “Fred told me to fuck off when I asked for a tray, but Flo gave me one. Saves a journey to the bar though, don’t you think, getting two of everything?”
“Good idea,” Sally said, not mentioning that it was something that they had done often before and that it was hardly an original thought.
At that moment, an old man who looked like a derelict because of his filthy appearance and because he was desperately clutching a plastic carrier bag, staggered backwards for some considerable distance and was only prevented from knocking over their table by the swift action of Sally who pushed him away at the last moment.
“Isn’t it awful to think that he was once a tiny baby in his mother’s arms with all the hopes and expectations that we all have and that now he is a staggerer in the Rat and Cockroach?” Charmian said. “Sometimes I just want to cry.”
“Don’t upset yourself, darling,” David said. “Perhaps in some way he is happier than us all? Perhaps his role in life is to make us see him, and perhaps he sees more than we do?”
David had cradled Charmian’s
head in his arms and she looked up at him and smiled. They then parted and sat upright and both turned to face Richard and Sally.
“Your health,” David proposed, and they all drank.
Biographical details were exchanged and David proved to be an award-winning animator. Charmian taught small children at a private school and was amusing in the telling of how they all had child psychologists and if they weren’t geniuses their parents wanted to know why.
Richard and Sally told of their humbler achievements, though David and Charmian seemed impressed with Richard’s play and professed a desire to hear it, though probably only out of politeness. Richard in turn said that he thought he might have seen some of David’s work on an obscure TV channel, though in fact he was virtually certain that he hadn’t.
David and Charmian’s house was tall and white and stood alone in gardens of eucalyptus and rhododendrons. Tall trees surrounded it and it seemed from the outside like a house that would never be bright and sunny even in midsummer. They had invited Richard and Sally back after many drinks in the Rat. For them all, it seemed like a good idea at the time in the comradely glow of intoxication, and when they arrived they were still in the same mood.
The drawing room was white, brilliantly white, and tasteful to the point of perfection. The furniture was leather and in modern design, made for comfort. The human body seemed to fit it. Otherwise it was of good dark wood and there were electronically motored dark green swish curtains before french windows leading to a rear garden.
The curtains were not drawn and the spotlights in two corners of the room illuminated a white paved patio and a small stone cherub fountain. It all looked rather pretty.
Mireille, the au pair, a lovely looking girl with black hair, assured Charmian that Charisma, her seven year old daughter was asleep and well, and then she brought in on a trolley some drinks and a very creative lemon and lime cake. She then retired to bed.
They drank sparkling Italian wine with their cake, which was delicious, and apparently made by Mireille, who was a treasure in every way, and they even liked her boyfriend who was Australian and called Brett or Brent or some such and lived in a hostel with other Australians. It was too late to bring down Charisma to play with, but photos were shown and admired.
