Girl 99

by Andy Jones

  ‘Excuse me?’ I say, covering the list with my elbow.

  ‘Another Guinness?’ says Susan, picking up my empty glass.

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ll bring it over,’ says Susan, smiling.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’ll give me something to do,’ she says, taking in the quiet bar with a nod of her head.

  Susan is everyday pretty – off-blonde hair gathered into a tight ponytail, small nose, even teeth. Nothing to stand her out in a crowd, but there’s no crowd here. She’s certainly a damn sight more than Deck Chambers deserves.

  I pick up the pen, print Keeley Alexander next to the number 50, then cross her out with a wiggly line. I’m about to turn the page when I see it . . .

  Number 1 – Trudi Roberts

  . . . and my mind makes the connection.

  I remember how things changed after Trudi. How I acquired a degree of popularity at school, leaving behind the timid teacher’s son who dreaded lunchtimes in case someone threw rocks at his head. I arrived at university with three notches on my bedpost and my ego located firmly between my legs. And it’s not my fault. Blame Deck fucking Chambers, but don’t blame me.

  I screw up the list and take the borrowed pen back to the bar, where Steve is holding court with a couple of regulars.

  ‘Thought I’d save you a trip,’ I say to Susan as she tops off my Guinness.

  I ask if Deck is planning to pop in tonight, and Susan says he’s driving a lorryload of kitchen fittings to London. Probably passed him on the way up, I joke. Steve asks what I’ve been up to in ‘the big shitty’, and I tell everyone about the Little Horrors shoot. They listen with a flattering reverence. ‘You’re practically famous,’ says Steve, and insists on buying me a drink. Eleven thirty comes and goes and Steve locks us in, me and him and his two buddies who laugh at his quips and concur with his shifting opinions. Susan’s kids are staying overnight at their granny’s, so she agrees to join us for a drink. I’m buying, I say.

  Susan’s top rides up her waist as she reaches for the vodka optic. The black trim of her bra shows around the neckline of her vest; she has freckles on her white cleavage.

  Someone asks if I have a girlfriend, and I say no.

  Steve starts to pour a new round of drinks but Susan has to go; drink goes straight to her head, she says, and she has to pick up the kiddies first thing in the morning. She calls a cab but both the local firms’ cars are out on jobs. ‘I’ll walk you home,’ I tell her, ‘it’s hardly even out of my way.’ Everyone agrees that I’m a proper gentleman.

  ‘It’s not as warm as I thought,’ says Susan shortly after we set off walking.

  ‘I’d give you my jacket,’ I say, ‘but I don’t have one.’

  Susan laughs.

  ‘Here’ – I hold out my arm, crooked at the elbow – ‘we’ll keep each other warm.’

  Susan hooks up next to me. ‘Are you limping?’

  ‘Stubbed my toe,’ I say.

  We walk and limp on for a minute before Susan breaks the silence. ‘So what brings you home?’

  ‘Just fancied getting away from London.’

  ‘I’ve never been,’ she says.

  ‘To London?’

  Susan’s ponytail lashes right, left, right as she shakes her head.

  ‘Deck never taken you?’

  ‘Too expensive,’ says Susan.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ I say, and where her arm is threaded through mine I squeeze her incrementally tighter.

  The moon is bright enough to see a fox saunter across the road fifty yards ahead of us. I steer Susan through a twisting, hedge-lined cut-through, and it’s not for the one minute we’ll shave off the walk time.

  ‘Scary,’ says Susan, leaning in closer against me.

  ‘And you all alone in that house,’ I say.

  ‘Stop it,’ she says, elbowing me playfully.

  I stop walking and Susan, anchored to my side, jolts to a halt beside me. ‘What’s up?’ she says in a frightened whisper.

  I turn her to face me. ‘I wondered if you needed any company tonight.’

  It’s darker here than on the street but our faces are close enough that I can smell the vodka on Susan’s breath, and I can see the trepidation in her eyes. Susan doesn’t ask me what I mean by ‘company’. She doesn’t say she’s married. She doesn’t say anything. I hold her by both biceps, and we stand like that in silence for a count of seconds.

  I kiss her, tentatively; politely almost.

  Susan looks up at me. ‘I shouldn’t,’ she says.

  I kiss her again and her lips are stiff and dry . . .

  Not like Verity’s lips.

  . . . our teeth clash and we both apologise.

  ‘I don’t know if we should,’ Susan says, but her hands are still on my waist, mine still holding her arms.

  ‘It’s just a kiss,’ I say.

  That’s what I told Sadie after I kissed Holly. Just a kiss. And look where it led. Here, kissing a married mother-of-two in a back alley.

  ‘I remember you from school,’ says Susan. ‘You were tall.’

  ‘Still am.’

  She laughs nervously. ‘You seemed nice.’

  Declan Chambers deserves this, but not Susan.

  And what about Verity? What about me?

  ‘Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving,’ I say. ‘Come on, I’m supposed to be walking you home.’

  ‘You won’t tell your sister, will you?’

  ‘Just a kiss goodnight,’ I say. ‘Nothing to tell.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Susan. ‘Just goodnight.’

  We walk the rest of the way with our hands in our pockets, and I watch Susan to her door from the end of the road.

  It’s almost an hour into Sunday when I get back to Dad’s place. He’s asleep in his chair, a bottle of whisky and an empty glass beside him. The glassware clinks when I pick it up, and Dad wakes with a start.

  ‘Thomas,’ he says, rubbing his eyes. ‘Time is it?’

  ‘Nearly one.’

  ‘Pinch punch first of the month,’ Dad says – one of my mother’s tics, and we both smile at the reference. He nods at the bottle in my hand. ‘You want a drink, son?’

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ I say. ‘Do you want tea?’

  ‘Aye, go on.’

  Dad follows me into the kitchen. ‘You’re out late,’ he says. ‘Thought you were staying in.’

  ‘Went to the Bull.’

  I take two mugs from the cupboard beside the sink and drop teabags into them. ‘Déjà vu,’ Verity said last night as we walked into the flat. I touch my head and there’s a lump on my temple where I banged it on my kitchen cupboard twenty-four hours ago.

  Dad hands me a carton of milk from the fridge. ‘Steve have a lock-in, did he?’ His voice is groggy with sleep and drink.

  Over the few days I’ve spent in this house this year, Dad must have consumed an entire bottle of whisky. Maybe more. Plus wine, plus beer.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Son?’

  ‘I’m worried that you might drink too much.’

  Dad rubs a big paw back and forth across his face, and his stubble rasps against his palm. ‘I could drink less, son, aye. But you don’t need to worry. That’s my job,’ he says, laughing.

  ‘I do, though – worry.’

  Dad smiles. ‘I don’t drink for a long time, son, and then . . . sometimes, I do. Had a few yourself, hey?’

  ‘It’s not about me, is it?’

  ‘You can get pissed and I can’t, is that right?’ Dad’s voice is calm.

  The kettle boils and I pour water into the mugs.

  ‘Other than tonight,’ Dad says, ‘I haven’t had a drink since . . . not since last time you were down.’

  ‘Mum’s anniversary?’ I say.

  ‘And before that . . . I don’t know when.’ He nods to the whisky bottle on the countertop, blows air out the corner of his mouth and shrugs. ‘But, aye, sometimes . . .’

/>   ‘So what’s the occasion tonight?’

  ‘Saw the photographs out,’ Dad says. ‘Reminiscing, I suppose.’

  I spoon out the teabags, add milk to both mugs, sugar to Dad’s.

  ‘You and that goat, son. You were terrified, hey?’

  ‘Pretty scared, yeah.’

  We carry our tea through to the living room. Dad sits on the sofa instead of his armchair. I sit down next to him.

  ‘You’re limping, son.’

  ‘Stubbed my toe.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Let your da see his boy’s foot, Tom.’

  I kick off my trainer and put my foot in Dad’s lap. He rolls down my sock and winces when he sees the swollen toe. ‘Looks broken,’ he says. ‘You should have an X-ray.’

  ‘They’d only tell me to rest it.’

  ‘You’ve cut it too,’ he says, gently touching the wound on the ball of my foot. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  Dad waggles his mug. ‘Probably anaesthetised?’

  I laugh. ‘Probably.’

  ‘You’ve been in the wars, son,’ he says, stroking my foot.

  ‘You could say that.’

  Dad goes to stand. ‘I’ll get the TCP.’

  ‘It’ll keep,’ I say. ‘Drink your tea.’

  We’re quiet for a while, sipping our tea, and I feel somehow calmed by this contact. Like stepping off a fairground waltzer onto solid ground. I’m tired, and sore, and stupid, and I’m getting an early hangover, but I feel . . . I don’t know, lighter. The box of photographs is sitting beside Dad’s armchair; maybe tomorrow I’ll take a few back to London.

  ‘Penny for them,’ says Dad.

  He rubs my toes absentmindedly, and even now, nine years after Mum’s death, he still wears his wedding ring. I put my other foot into his lap.

  ‘Do you think Mum was, you know, “The One”?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ says Dad. ‘I don’t know if there was someone else in God’s whole wide world I could have been equally as happy with. Loved. Probably there is.’ He shrugs, apologetically almost. ‘But no one more than your mother.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It just isn’t in me, Tom. To love anyone more than I loved her.’

  ‘How can you be positive that there wasn’t someone who . . . I don’t know . . . someone else?’

  ‘I was engaged to be married before I met your mother, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, when you were in college.’

  ‘Theresa Howells, aye. And she wasn’t my first girlfriend either, you know.’ He says this in a way that implies ‘girlfriend’ is a euphemism. ‘I’d slept with other girls, son,’ he says, just in case I didn’t get it.

  I nod my head in a way intended to demonstrate that I find this neither surprising nor shocking. I doubt it’s very convincing, but it feels like the appropriate thing to do.

  Dad continues: ‘And then I met Theresa Howells. And she was confident and clever and funny, she made all the girls before her seem like . . . well, like girls. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well, when I met your mother, it was like that times a hundred.’

  ‘But how do you know you wouldn’t love someone else a hundred times more than you loved Mum?’

  ‘Because it simply isn’t in me, son. The way I couldn’t jump out of that window and fly. It’s . . . it’s like laughing, I think. You can only laugh so hard, you know. Or cry. You have your limits. And your mum was mine, son.’

  There are tears in Dad’s eyes when he says this, but he’s smiling too. And I believe him completely.

  ‘Sadie left me because I cheated on her,’ I say.

  Dad doesn’t say anything, just rubs my feet.

  ‘Well, I told her, and then she returned the favour, and then she left me.’

  ‘Had her pound of flesh, did she?’

  ‘You could say that,’ I say, trying not to dwell on Dad’s unfortunate turn of phrase. ‘No more than I deserved.’

  ‘Do you miss her, son?’

  I shake my head, and Dad smiles. ‘Someone else?’

  ‘There might have been. But I think I’ve . . . I think I’ve fucked that up, too.’

  Dad stares at me for a moment. He looks tired.

  ‘You’re not going to smack me for swearing are you?’ I say.

  Dad slaps my leg playfully.

  ‘Maybe you should pray for me.’

  ‘Always do, son.’

  ‘You know I don’t believe in’ – I point upwards – ‘all of that?’

  Dad nods, smiles. ‘Doesn’t matter, son. Just be good. Be honest.’

  ‘I was honest with Sadie, and look where that got me.’

  ‘Got you out of the wrong relationship, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it did.’

  ‘So, Daffy . . .’ He smiles. ‘What’s the plan?’

  I hold up my mug. ‘Another?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Dad. ‘That’d be nice.’

  JULY

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  ‘Muggins?’ says Doug, collecting together the dominoes, turning them face down and mixing the set. He’s referring to a variation of gameplay, rather than to himself or, for that matter, me.

  ‘Whatever tickles your fancy,’ I tell him, placing two fresh pints on the table.

  ‘Less loose ends,’ he says. ‘All threes or fives?’

  ‘Let’s do threes?’

  We draw our tiles and Doug kicks off with the double three. ‘Six,’ he says, scribbling the score in his small notebook.

  Eileen texted again while I was on the train down to Dad’s, and again while I made the return trip. The woman has a one-track mind and she’s issued a deadline. And the deadline is today.

  ‘How’s Eileen?’ I ask, opting for direct.

  ‘She seems fine.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Nine points,’ says Doug, noting down my score.

  ‘I mean how are you and Eileen?’ I try, opting for even more direct.

  Doug inspects his tiles, makes a gruff sound that could mean anything or nothing at all.

  ‘Sorry about the other night,’ I say. ‘All the . . . you know, drama.’

  ‘Aye, you said. It’s fine. You’re young.’

  ‘And stupid?’

  Douglas sips his bitter, wipes foam from his top lip. ‘We were all weetchils once,’ he says.

  And I tell him everything. I don’t leave out a detail. He is the only person I have talked to about the whole sorry mess. El knows about the numbers, Ben knows about Kaz and Holly, Bianca knows about Verity, Dad knows about Sadie. But this is the first time I’ve laid the whole thing out, bare, if you like. Doug listens and nods and sips his drink. He calls me a fool, a dope, an eejit, a doitit divil and a daft beggar – but he does so sympathetically. And anyway, he’s absolutely right. When I get to the bit about Yvette and Verity and sleeping in the porch and breaking my toe and standing on glass, Doug calls me a halfwit but he says it in a paternal, compassionate way. I tell about him going to my dad’s, about Susan from the Old Bull.

  ‘Ye’ve been busy,’ Doug says.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. Another way would be I’ve been . . .’ I try to think of a suitable description, but I thinks Doug’s exhausted all the available options. ‘I’ve made a lot of mistakes,’ I tell him.

  ‘Did ye learn anything?’

  ‘Other than the fact I’m an eejit?’

  Doug pats me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be too hard on yeself. That’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I tell him. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘What went wrong in Lyme Regis?’

  ‘Who said anything went wrong?’

  ‘No one. It’s just that, up until then everything seemed tickety-boo.’

  ‘Tickety-boo? Do folk still say that?’

  ‘Just t
rying to get down to your level.’

  Doug smiles, shows me the back of his hand. ‘I’ll knock ye doon a level.’

  ‘Lyme Regis,’ I say. ‘You’re avoiding the question.’

  I hate putting Doug on the spot like this, but I can’t think of another way to move on.

  ‘Doug, we’re friends, right?’

  ‘Aye, I like to think so.’

  ‘What would you have said, if I’d told you all that bullshit about the bet? About one hundred women?’

  Doug plays a domino but doesn’t score. ‘I’d’ve told ye t’screw your head on right,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘And you’d have saved me a shitload of trouble, Doug. You’d have liked Verity.’

  ‘Aye, she sounds like a guid yin.’

  ‘She is. And if I’d told you what I was doing four months ago, maybe you could have got to meet her.’

  ‘Would ye have listened?’

  I shrug. ‘Who knows. Maybe. Twelve points. So?’

  ‘So what, lad?’

  ‘So what happened in Lyme Regis?’

  ‘Precisely’ – Doug plays his own tile, another no score – ‘nothing.’ He looks at me, letting his gaze give his words context.

  ‘Because? Is Eileen not . . . interested?’

  ‘Oh, she’s interested, lad. Very interested.’

  And this is it, Thomas: now or never time.

  I reach into my back pocket, produce the box of Viagra and place them among the dominoes. ‘Do you know what these are?’

  Doug looks at the tablets like they might be lethal. He looks at me but his expression is as blank as the back of the domino in his hand.

  ‘Viagra,’ I say.

  ‘What are you doing with those?’

  ‘A friend gave them to me,’ I say.

  ‘What? Do ye have . . . issues?’

  ‘Not exactly. Not like that. But they’re . . . recreationally,’ I say, ‘they’re kind of in.’

  ‘In?’

  ‘Popular. With clubbers and whatnot.’

  Doug lays down his domino and picks up the pack of pills, turning it over in his hands as if examining an item of intricate marquetry. ‘I’m no much of a clubber,’ he says.