by Rhys Thomas
“Got it. Easy-peasy.”
Tango scoffed.
“Do you want to get out?” said Blotchy, looking in the mirror.
“Ignore him,” said Sam.
Blotchy composed himself. He was a loud breather generally, but he was almost snoring now.
“There is no spoon,” he said quietly, slid the car into gear, revved the engine, released the hand brake and shot forward.
Sam braced with one arm pressed into the roof, the other on the dash, and he said very quickly, “Okay, slow down immediately.”
Blotchy panicked and yanked the wheel around the turn in the road, mounting the curb. He was going to hit the lamppost. Sam reached across and pulled the wheel back into the road and they whizzed across to the wrong side, up the other curb and onto the muddy grass bank, where they finally came to a stop.
Blotchy hit the wheel and turned to Tango in the back.
“It’s your fucking fault!” he yelled. “I can hear you sniggering.”
Tango, whose eyes were wide, said, “Fair play, that was awful driving.”
“Better than you can do,” said Blotchy.
“Guys,” said Sam. “Let’s just get this sorted.”
He and Blotchy got out of the car to swap seats, and as they passed each other at the back of the car Blotchy said, “Sorry about that.”
The grass underfoot was squelchy, and as Sam climbed back into the car he almost slipped. The air was tense now and nobody said a thing as Sam tried to get off the grass verge, with no effect. They were stuck.
“Time to get out and push,” he said, looking across to Blotchy. “Go on, then,” he said, “out you get. You too, Alan.”
Blotchy was staring at him through his small round-rimmed glasses.
“What?”
“I can’t get out and push,” he said.
“Say again?”
Blotchy awkwardly lifted his left foot out of the footwell, revealing his new shiny white Air Jordans.
“I can’t get these muddy,” he said.
“Are you taking the piss?”
He shook his head. “Not going to happen,” he said. “My mum will kill me if I get them dirty. They’re brand-new.”
“You’re twenty-fucking-six!”
Blotchy just shook his stupid, fat head with his ponytail swinging from side to side. Rather than finding this ridiculous refusal to help amusing, as he might have, Sam was very angry. Blotchy shrugged and looked out the windscreen.
Sam stared at him incredulously. “Fine.”
Blotchy climbed back into the driver’s seat and opened the window while Tango and Sam went to the rear of the car.
“Now, you’re sure you know what you’re doing?” Sam called.
Out of the window appeared Blotchy’s stubby hand, forming the okay sign with his thumb and forefinger.
“Just put the brake on as soon as you get onto the road.”
But Blotchy revved ahead of time, and immediately Sam and Tango were sprayed by a powerful wave of mud spewing up from the wheels.
“Argh!” said Tango, leaping clear.
Sam leaned into the car, just wanting to get it over, his face completely covered in seconds, and the car slowly moved up the verge and back out into the road. But instead of slowing down, Sam watched in horror as Blotchy hit the accelerator instead of the brake and sped out along the road, swerving back and fore, until he reached the roundabout and went up onto the center of it, through a low bush and straight into the metal advertising sign in the middle.
Sam stood there for a second, covered in mud, as Tango rejoined him.
“Probably best if you hadn’t let him do that,” he said.
13
HE WONDERED IF you could call a pub a chocolate-box pub. It was in one of the cooler suburbs of the city, on the corner of a crossroads, and had brass light fixings above the arched windows, spilling circles of cream light on the red Victorian brickwork. In the dark night it was like a pair of open arms. Her friends from work were there, but that was no problem. He could drink because his car was still in the garage and Sarah had said she’d give him a lift home. Riding the bus in the city at night made him feel cool and street-smart. Statistically, the chance of getting stabbed was actually pretty low, and hard data always helped Sam when his more irrational side started to stir. His heart was beating very fast as he pushed the door too hard and it slammed into the wall, but the inside of the pub was loud with chatter and good cheer and nobody seemed to notice.
If you included the first time he saw her in the bakery, which he did, this was the fifth meeting with Sarah.
The pub was furnished in a cool, modernized Victorian shabbiness with beat-up wooden chairs and tables and old leather wingback chairs in the corners. Green-shaded banker’s lamps illuminated dark wooden booths. It was a bit like Dickens but in Urban Outfitters. It was excessively hot, though, and he immediately started sweating. Sidling through the crowds, he found a place at the bar, where he was quickly served by a young Australian with curly hair.
“A pint of lager with a dash, and half a pint of tap water, please,” he said, quickly.
He immediately downed the water in an attempt to stop sweating and took a slug of the lager in an attempt to calm his nerves. Then he went to the bathroom, where he took off his sweater and inspected himself in the mirror. He felt a bit better.
In the center of the pub was a spiral staircase that led to the first floor. At the base of the staircase he stopped for a moment and closed his eyes to compose himself.
There was more shabby leather furniture upstairs, low-slung sofas and mismatched armchairs. He found Sarah and her friends in a far corner, grouped around a low coffee table with a few tea lights in ceramic pots. She had her back to him, so he tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hi,” he said.
“Oh, hey,” said Sarah, turning to him. She was wearing a floral shirt and a neckerchief and looked amazing, like someone from Paris. He tried to gauge how happy she was to see him, but his mind was doing somersaults.
“This is Sam,” she said to the other people sitting around the table. She pointed to each of them and told Sam their names, and he nodded and smiled to them, feeling not at all cool in his brand-new T-shirt he’d just bought from Tesco and smart straight-cut jeans, saying hi to Charlotte and Felicity and Emily. The guys were Gareth, Charlie and then, sitting next to Sarah, a dark, handsome person.
“...and Francis.”
Francis was exceptionally handsome, in fact. His hair was black and wavy and looked impossibly cool. The collar of his shirt was all wrinkled and the sleeves were rolled up past his elbows. Great forearms; lithe, lean, with an easy, muscular grace.
“Hey,” he said to Sam, smiling.
The introductions over, Sam stood there for a moment with them all looking at him. He needed to do something. And it had to be cool. He made a shiver gesture and said, “Brrrr! It’s cold out!”
Charlotte nodded and smiled.
“It is,” she said.
Sam stood there for a second and then realized he had nothing more to add, so sat in the low tub chair next to Sarah. There was a slight pause, and when the others realized that Sam was done they went back to talking.
“You okay?” said Sarah, quietly to him.
“Uh-huh.” He nodded.
He took a sip of his drink. She had a glass bottle of Coke with a curly straw coming out its neck.
“It’s nice to see you,” he said.
“And it’s nice to see you too.”
A hand tapped her arm and Francis’s face peered over her shoulder. He was sitting in a higher chair than Sam, so was looking down on him.
“So how do you know Sarah?” he said.
“Oh well, I don’t, really.”
Something flickered on her face.
“I mean.
We met in the pub.”
Francis nodded and stared at Sam for a second too long. “So what do you do for a living?”
“I work for a Japanese electronics wholesaler.”
“Cool.”
“I’m in admin.”
“Right. Good for you, man,” said Francis, which made Sam feel about an inch tall.
“Francis works in the library with me.”
Francis was drinking a tumbler of whiskey.
“Yeah. Part-time,” he said. “I’m doing a PhD in English Literature.”
“Oh, great,” said Sam. “Sarah likes literature. Books.”
“Well, books and literature are not necessarily the same thing,” said Francis, with a chuckle.
“Definitely,” Sam said.
“Francis is what you might call a literary snob,” said Sarah.
“You will only read a certain number of words in a lifetime,” said Francis. “You might as well have them in the right order.”
“Francis is writing a novel about Easter Island,” Sarah continued.
“It’s going to cover a thousand years but will be minimalist as well,” he said. “Three hundred pages max.”
“Sounds good,” said Sam.
“Easter Island is where they have those giant stone heads.”
“Yeah, we all know that,” Sarah said.
Francis looked at her and smiled, like it was just the two of them. “They call them moai,” he said. “Easter Island is thousands of miles away from the nearest continent. That’s a long way. What were those people doing out there building those stone heads?”
Sam turned away and looked around the table. The others were huddled around the sheet for the picture round.
“For me,” he heard Francis say, “Easter Island is a delicate miniature of all human civilization. We come, we build wonderful things, we destroy, we go again.”
The annoying thing was that he didn’t sound stupid. It sounded interesting. It was frustrating how he could say obnoxious things but still come across as cool just because he was good-looking.
“I’d love to read it,” said Sam, aware that he was butting in.
Francis’s eyes flicked to him uninterestedly. “It’s a long way off, and I never show anyone my work before it’s ready.”
Just then a sound came from the speakers, the voice of the quizmaster telling everyone to settle down. Sam drank more of his beer. The first question was “Which president was involved with the Watergate scandal?”
Francis leaned forward enthusiastically to give Charlotte the answer, which she was already writing. Sam was disappointed by this. He was always disappointed when he found out people were really competitive. But at least Sarah would see the same thing in Francis—even though, as Francis leaned across her, she didn’t pull away.
All of a sudden he felt like a spare wheel. He picked up the picture round and took a sip of his drink.
Francis started explaining to Sarah what books she should read over the course of the next year.
“Have you ever heard of Don DeLillo?”
“Yes,” she said.
“He wrote this amazing book called Underworld. TIME magazine listed it as number two in the greatest books written in the second half of the twentieth century. It starts off with this incredible scene at a classic baseball match that takes place at the same time as the Russians are conducting their first nuclear bomb test. The winning home run is struck at the exact same moment the bomb goes off. It’s an amazing juxtaposition. He does it amazingly.”
“Yeah. I’ve read it.”
“Did you get how the book follows what happened to that baseball from the moment it was caught in the crowd right up to the end of the twentieth century? It’s genius. Of course, nobody knew that 9/11 was just around the corner.”
Francis’s intense talking was like a hair dryer to Sam. He looked at his beer and wondered if he should just get hammered. But just as it had the other night, something stopped him and it was clearer now, a recognition of how important this time was.
The next question was “What was the name of the geological time period during which the dinosaurs existed?”
Perfect!
But Francis was leaning forward again.
“Jurassic,” he whispered to Charlotte.
“No, wait,” said Sam, deciding to also lean forward. “It’s the Mesozoic.”
Francis looked at him and smiled. “I don’t think so,” he whispered. He tapped Sam on the knee and used his other hand to point at the answer sheet.
“Put it down. Jurassic.”
Charlotte looked around the table for help, but nobody said anything.
“Trust me,” said Francis. “If I’m wrong, I’ll buy a communal bag of peanuts.”
They all laughed.
“Oh, Mr. Generous,” said Gareth, over in the corner.
Sam was sure he was right. The Mesozoic was the dinosaur period, made up of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. He didn’t know what to do, and before he knew it the next question was being asked and Francis was nodding insistently at Charlotte until she eventually scribbled the answer down.
Though closer to them than Sam, Sarah was still a bit of an outsider. He found the way she leaned forward to speak, as if guilty for interrupting, endearing; the side of her face so smooth, a tiny glistening of anxious sweat at her temple, the shape of her seashell ear.
These people were far more articulate than him and his friends, and it felt to Sam as if a second level to the world had suddenly revealed itself, a level where different people existed, and he felt a little disappointed that this wasn’t his life when, perhaps, in another offshoot of the multiverse it might have been.
At halftime there was a thirty-minute break and Sam listened quietly to them talking about their weekend plans. There was a vintage market taking place and afterward they were going to a new place that sold cronuts.
“What’s a cronut?” said Sam.
“It’s like a mix between a donut and a croissant. You should come,” said Charlotte, smiling.
“Oh, thanks. I’m already doing something with my friends on Saturday,” he lied, making a mental note that he would definitely go and eat a cronut on his own soon.
“Okay, switch papers, everyone, in a few minutes we’re going to have some answers,” the quizmaster announced.
“I’m just going to nip to the loo,” said Sam.
“Okay, cool,” said Sarah.
He was keenly aware of Francis listening. Sam smiled a little too long and went to the top of the staircase. By the time he turned back to the table Francis had already engaged Sarah again.
He locked himself in the toilet. Fucking Francis. Was this really worth it? He could just bolt, get a taxi and disappear. The others were all upstairs, they’d have no idea, and he could go home, cook a pizza in his new oven and watch Inception. But then he thought of Francis, and Francis talking to Sarah, leaning close so she could smell his sophisticated aftershave, Francis with his superb looks and encyclopedic knowledge and, no doubt, his worldly experience. He stared at himself in the mirror and felt very strongly that he was at a crossroads. If he went home now, then...
He found himself at the bar ordering another drink, and a Coke for Sarah. He looked at the shelf of spirits on the wall behind the barman, all the beautiful bottles lined up. Something had happened in that bathroom, like the crossing of a threshold, a moment of rare bravery where he’d made a decision to do something for himself, and he felt good.
He collected his drinks and went back upstairs, just as the quizmaster said that the time of the dinosaurs was known as the Mesozoic.
* * *
“So who’s that Francis guy?”
“What do you mean?”
The thin road was silvered at the edges with frost in the headlights.
“No. He went to uni in Edinburgh, so we were talking about that.”
“I thought you didn’t go to uni.”
“No, but I lived there. I told you that?”
“Did you?” She’d lived in Lincoln but definitely hadn’t said anything about Edinburgh, because he remembered everything she said to him.
“That’s where I worked. In Edinburgh, before Lincoln.”
“You’re not Scottish, though, are you?”
“No. My old boyfriend was.”
“Oh, okay.”
“It’s a long story.”
A strange feeling fluttered through him that was something like envy, a set of beating wings against his organs.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know you lived in Edinburgh.”
The road here was dark without streetlights and the cones of headlights were mesmerizing.
“I know hardly anything about y—” He lost his breath for a second. “You.”
“You’re so drunk!”
Leaning his head against the cold window, he said, “I’m not that drunk.” And it was true. He was a little tipsy, but the reason he’d lost his speech was because his heart was beating too fast.
“Francis is a bit of a mansplainer, though, don’t you think?” he said.
“Francis?”
“Did you hear him telling you about that writer, with the baseball match?”
“He’s okay,” she said. “But he does like to offer advice. He’s a bit of an advice raper.”
“Oh wow.”
Sarah laughed. “That was funny. You’re really funny.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such a dork.”
Oh. He didn’t know what to say to that.
“In a good way.”
He was hoping she’d agree with him about Francis, and the fact she didn’t was frustrating. Why couldn’t she see he was annoying? The car came into Sam’s village and the orange balls of light from the lampposts brought normality rushing back.
