by Nick Laird
‘I’m going to head off, I think,’–she glanced at him–‘Get the overland to Highbury and then catch the tube.’
‘Ellen, no. I’m sorry about this. Too much drink. Stay. Just for a bit anyway.’
Danny knew he was too drunk. He was going to say too much and be too much. He bent down and snapped off one of the few daisies still standing. A thin trail of sap dangled from it, white like saliva. He wiped the stem on his sleeve and handed it to her.
‘Here. Peace. Have another glass of wine. We’ll go inside.’
She looked reluctantly at the flower but took it anyway, and twirled it slowly between thumb and forefinger.
‘You don’t have many of these left.’
‘No.’ Danny gazed stupidly at her.
‘Your garden’s nice though.’ She looked down it, appraisingly.
You can have it, Danny thought, and the flat, whatever you fancy.
‘And your kitchen’s a nice yellow. Same as the middle of this.’ She waggled the flower, almost under his nose.
‘I think it’s cowslip, the kitchen,’ Danny said. ‘Or possibly mustard.’
Ellen laughed and started walking to the back door. Danny watched from behind for a second, the dip of her waist and the curve of her ass in her jeans, and then followed, obedient. He felt like skipping. Ellen didn’t stop to talk to Rowena and this, Danny noted, was a good sign. It suggested that Rowena had been primed not to interfere if Danny and Ellen went off somewhere. Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed: she was still talking. Albert was standing beside her and looking like he could, just about, imagine some other place he would less like to be, although he’d need a week or so to think of it. He lifted his eyebrows as Danny walked by to ask him if he was okay. Danny nodded. His eye was throbbing. Somewhere during the proceedings he’d been thumped in the head.
Ian was demonstrating to Geordie some sort of open handed punch to the neck that knocked people out for hours…if your arm’s sufficiently twisted…finish’em for good. Geordie was nodding and trying to look calm but his breath was still coming in gulps. Danny thought he heard Ian say You should have used them and wondered if he meant the hedge clippers. As he walked through the enlarged group at the bottom of the garden (most of the party seemed to be out here now), he found himself tempted to limp. Someone patted his back but when he turned to speak to them it was a girl he didn’t know, holding two bottles of Becks, who just wanted him to move out of her way.
Everyone was drunk inside too. And it was clear the party hadn’t gone alfresco, it had just got bigger. Phone calls had been made. Friends of friends had been advised and turned up. Parties are another thing subject to natural selection: a good party thrives and multiplies, a bad one dies out. Ben had now moved on to Philadelphia funk and was playing a stomp with the wonderfully dysfunctional chorus You can have my husband but please don’t mess with my man.
Ellen stopped in the hall and turned to face Danny just as Clyde appeared from the toilet behind her. He made a leery grin at Danny and then wobbled his enormous head in Ellen’s general direction. It was like trying to point with a football. Danny ignored him by squinting slightly and making a confused face. Ellen had moved so close to him that her breasts brushed against his top. They were standing directly under the white paper lampshade and she was staring very intently at his face. Danny suddenly thought We’re about to kiss. The phrase Go on my son arrived from nowhere and settled in his brain. Or maybe Clyde had just said it. Please let Clyde not just have said it. He looked up, but Clyde and his head had both gone. Ellen was still staring at him. She touched his cheek, tilting his head slightly. This is it Danny thought. Her lips were plump, budded, open.
‘I knew it looked funny.’
She tilted his head again, the other way this time so his left cheek was directly under the light. ‘You’re going to get a black eye. It’s already swollen.’
‘Oh…Yeah, it is sore actually. I think Geordie kneed me in the face.’
‘You’d better get something frozen on it.’
‘I don’t think there’s any ice left.’
‘D’you have any peas in your freezer?’
She strode purposefully off back into the kitchen, pleased to have an objective. Danny touched his left cheekbone exploratively. It felt raw and new and not a part of him. He thought of a terrorist he’d read about in the Sundays recently: this guy had turned state’s evidence in Belfast and re-emerged after reconstructive surgery, months later, in the foreign living room of a Plymouth semi-detached. He’d described touching his face like this, amazed and terrified to be alive. Danny remembered the photo of him sitting looking out through the double-glazed windows onto a strange new estate. They’d blacked his eyes out in the picture so it looked, appropriately enough, like he was wearing the blindfold of a condemned man. Danny was still absently tracing his cheekbone when Ellen arrived back with a saggy unopened bag of frozen petit pois. She held a tea towel in her left hand that Danny’s mum had given him when he went off to university. The tea towel had a picture of a tractor on it, pulling a trailer full of pigs across a green hillside. Their quizzical snouts poked out between the trailer’s side-bars and the tagline at the bottom read The Sperrins: where there’s time for good things to happen. Though not to those pigs, Danny invariably thought when he saw it. The strange fact of Ellen being suddenly in his things, in his domestic life, made Danny stop for a second: all these objects that ramified for him now being touched by her. He had always considered the moment the person starts using your stuff a certain pivotal stage in the relationship process and now, though he wasn’t even seeing Ellen, here she was, casually wringing his tea towels, at ease in his dust and his hallway. And he hadn’t wanted her to set his things down somewhere safe and move off swiftly. This was a good sign. Even by the way she quickly folded the tea towel and peas into a bundle, she somehow demonstrated a competence so effortless that it seemed a style. She moved well, contained and easy. Danny wanted to kiss her, to slide his hand into the absolute fit of her cheek and ear and cup her face like a flame up to his, as if he was lighting his own face from hers, and to kiss her, to taste her, to touch her.
She handed the makeshift compress to him. There was something of the perfect nurse about her, Danny realized. That was part of what it was. Her unfussy capability was soothing: around her he felt that sedative tingle he got in the back of a black cab or when he was having his hair cut. You have nothing to do but keep still and watch. It was like entering sleep’s antechamber. He realized he was staring again.
‘I might sit in the bedroom then and hold this on my face for a few minutes,’ he said, trying to win back some authority. ‘We could just sit in there for a while, get out of this madhouse.’ Madhouse? Madhouse? Stop talking now, he thought.
‘All right then. Is there more wine in the fridge?’
‘I think so. There’s some red in the cupboard beside it if not.’
She was off again, being capable. Ian shouldered past him into the toilet, not pausing or glancing his way. He heard the rasp of the lock slide across. Ellen returned brandishing an opened bottle of red Rioja and two squat brandy glasses he didn’t recognize. Holding both glasses in one hand she shook them out–she must have rinsed them–and a drop of water spun off to splatter on the hallway wall. She didn’t notice. Danny walked across to his bedroom door and knocked. A girl’s voice said, ‘Yes?’ He turned to Ellen, gave a little shrug.
‘Can I come in?’ Danny said, feeling ludicrous.
‘Yes.’
He opened the door and Claire, Albert’s ex, was perched on the edge of his bed beside the chubby pigtailed blonde. Claire had a gaunt beautiful face but the correspondingly gaunt figure of an eight-year-old boy. Her long brown hair was draped across her features and, as she brought her head up from her knees, Danny saw that she’d removed his framed photograph of George Best from the wall, balanced it on her lap and was employing it to snort coke off. George would be pleased, Danny thought. As Claire flicked her hai
r back she flashed them a winning and angular grin.
‘Daniel, sweetheart, how are you? I hope you don’t mind us in here.’
Pigtails was already greedily lifting the photograph off Claire’s knees and on to her own.
‘Claire, long time. Albert said you were here. How’ve you been? This is Ellen by the way, at M & T as well.’
‘I love your top. I’m always looking for a fitted white shirt,’ Claire said, looking Ellen up and down and then glancing back at Danny and widening her eyes. Ellen smiled at her, but awkwardly.
‘I suppose you two want us to leave now?’
‘No, no, whenever you’re ready. I was…I got a black eye, I think, and I was going to hold this…’ He lifted up the small bundle of tea towel and peas. Claire looked at it like he had presented her with roadkill, which, in its lumpish wetness, it was beginning to resemble.
‘You poor darling, Melissa told me all about the fight. Was it awful?’
Presumably Melissa was Pigtails because although her head was now in her lap, a ten pound note sticking out of her nose, she carefully raised her left hand in greeting. The manner in which Melissa then snuffled her head sideways reminded Dan of the pigs on the tea towel.
‘Oh your poor eye. Is it very sore? But think how manly you’ll look, having fought over a girl, and what a girl…’ Claire said stupidly, coked up to her eyeballs. She stared at Ellen voraciously again. Ellen stepped in slightly behind Danny.
‘It wasn’t over…anyone, Claire. We were just drunk. The whole thing got out of hand. Anyway…if you’ve finished.’ He took a step towards the wooden chair in the corner of his room. He’d rescued it from the pavement outside his old flat in Turnpike Lane.
‘Danny, how rude of me. Have a line. And you,’–Danny realized she’d already forgotten Ellen’s name–‘Both of you. Here.’
She delved into her elegant Indian silk camisole, and on into her redundant bra, and pulled out a small white wrap. She waved it at them. ‘Here, here we are.’
Danny was thinking a little line wouldn’t go astray, but when he turned to Ellen she was already shaking her head.
‘No thanks, not for me,’ she said.
‘Yeah, no thanks Claire,’ Danny repeated.
‘Okay, well we can see we’re superfluous here, can’t we?’ She looked at Pigtails and then fluttered her fingers around in front of her, playing an invisible piano. Perhaps to signify walking, Danny thought, or maybe she’s waving goodbye to the room.
‘We can indeed.’ Pigtails set the photo frame on top of the chest of drawers, licked her finger and expertly wiped it over the glass, picking up any stray specks of cocaine.
‘All right, we’re out. Let’s leave the lovebirds to it.’ Claire grinned and blinked dramatically again, then pouted, kissed Danny on both cheeks and swirled out of the room.
‘Was that the coke or was that her?’ Ellen said, when the door was closed.
‘A little bit of both. She’s nice though. Recruitment consultant.’
Ellen nodded in such a serious and sympathetic way that Danny laughed.
The bathroom confirmed the existence of a party. The white floor tiles showed a muddy turbulence of footprints. A single clump of grass and soil had been trampled into the middle of the beige bathmat so that it resembled a scale model of an oasis in a desert. There was no toilet roll on the holder but several pieces were stuck to the tiles, and two full rolls, both sodden for some reason, sat on their ends in the bath. A cigarette butt turned slowly in the toilet bowl and a full glass of red wine stood abandoned by the sink, as though its drinker had caught a glimpse of themselves in the mirror and decided they’d really had enough. A clean silver ashtray was pristine on the windowsill. Ian took his fags out of his Rangers top and lit one. He was getting angry. He’d already sneaked into the boxroom where Geordie’s clothes and bag were and rummaged through them. Nothing there but an assortment of stains and a bar of hash. Where had that little gypsy put the money? Ian knocked the toilet seat cover down with the toe of his trainer and sat on it. He’d either have to wait around tonight, which could take for ever, and the gangly lawyer would still be here, or he could come back tomorrow. Danny was off to Belfast in the morning with that black girl. Geordie’d be on his own. Maybe he could invite himself round for lunch and stay ’til he got the cash off him. Only way. Ian flicked his ash on the floor and stood up. He rolled his shoulders in front of the mirror, set his fag in his mouth, and ran his left hand over his number one crop.
In Danny’s bedroom, Ellen had chosen to sit on the chair in the corner while Danny was attempting to recline in a semi-recumbent posture on the bed, in a manner which seemed both natural and inviting. It was not going well. Ellen was looking around herself and sipping at her wine. Danny was alternating between furiously knocking his Rioja back and dabbing at his face with the soggy parcel of melting peas. Ellen got up from the chair and set her glass on the chest of drawers, beside the photo of George Best. She moved to his bookcase and scanned the shelves. When she reached up to pull a book out–the Times Atlas, in fact–her white shirt hitched up and showed the small of her back and the top of her knickers above her dark blue jeans. Her back was taut, hollowed, and a deep brown, the warmest colour conceivable. The glimpse of her knickers showed they were gold. Gold!
‘Your knickers are gold.’ It was too late. Ellen turned round, her arms folded, the atlas a breastplate behind them.
‘My mum gave them to me for Christmas. I didn’t buy them. Anyway I like them.’
‘I like them too. I was just surprised. You don’t see enough gold clothes these days.’
‘And why are you looking at them anyway? You’re supposed to be covering your eye with that ice. I was going to ask you to show me where you’re from–in this.’ She tapped the atlas twice with her right thumb. Her arms were still folded across it.
‘Okay then. C’mere.’
She took one step towards the bed and then looked at him seriously suddenly.
‘You know I don’t do this with just anyone.’
‘Do what? We haven’t done anything.’
‘Sit on their bed and look after them. I just feel sorry for you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Although I don’t even know you.’
‘Of course you know me. You’ve advised me on the purchase of domestic applicances.’
‘Yeah, true. I know you a bit I s’pose,’ she cocked her head to one side, pouted and looked at the ceiling. The pose looked practised. Danny smiled and said nothing. She sat down on the other end of his duvet and opened the atlas between them. Countries and colours. He looked at her lips, and then up to her eyes. He wanted to look at her breasts but knew that he shouldn’t, or shouldn’t get caught. He set the peas and tea towel on the bedside table. His sleeve and forearm were cold and wet from the melted ice. He lifted the book onto his lap. One page had a map of the island of Ireland. He found it and turned the atlas round to face her. He pointed at his home town.
‘Right in the centre. Just to the left of Lough Neagh, the biggest lake in the British Isles. A wee place called Ballyglass.’
Ellen was looking at the map. This isn’t exactly flowing, he thought, and went on, ‘It’s beside where the High Kings of Ulster, the O’Neills, were crowned at Tullyhogue Fort. My house is near there. But there’s nothing left now really–just a ring of trees where kids go to get drunk and have sex.’ Ellen looked up.
‘I thought you’d be near the sea.’
‘Well, it’s only an hour or so away. Everything in Northern Ireland is only an hour or so away…We’re going here tomorrow.’ He tapped Lisamore, a town just outside Belfast.
‘This is where Ulster Water is. Have you been to Ulster before?’
‘I’ve never been to Ireland.’ Ellen said. She shut the book and rested it on her knees, then made a show of checking her watch, a sensible little wind-up thing with a black leather strap. Am I boring you? Danny thought, irritated that she hadn’t asked him about Ballyglass
.
‘I’d better find Rowena. She’ll be wondering about me.’
‘Okay,’ Danny said quickly, feeling flattened.
‘But let’s have a look at this eye first.’ She leant over him and turned his bedside light on. He could smell the wax she used to straighten her hair. It smelt edible, like coconut.
She pushed the head of the mini-Anglepoise back so it shone on Danny’s face. There was already a carmine-coloured spot just below his left eye and the cheek was jaundiced-looking and swollen. Some small dark thing seemed to be trying to break out of his face. She touched his left cheek gently.
‘God, your face is cold. But you’re going to have a black eye tomorrow. Should keep those peas on it.’ Her fingers were still on his face. Danny was trying to work out whether it was a purely maternal instinct that kept them there when she swung forward and kissed him swiftly on the other cheek. Then she was up and across the room.
‘Right, I’m off to find Rowena and then we’re going home.’ The door opened and closed and Danny sat on his bed alone. He grinned and touched the swelling on his left cheek, then moved his fingers across to the faint wetness on his right.
LATE NIGHT
There are those who know when to go and there are those who don’t. Some people, like Albert, never stay longer than you want them to, possessing a sixth sense for the host’s wellbeing, for mixing and amusing, for not becoming too drunk. Most importantly, they order their own taxis at a suitable time. Others hang about, drifting from emptying room to emptying room until you’ve struggled into your pyjamas, picked up your teddy bear, and manhandled them out the front door. Clyde could unpeople Egypt, Danny thought, as he watched his cousin the lummox sitting on the sofa, engrossed in picking his nose. The living room was empty. Everyone had left. Even Ben had packed up his decks and gone home. The furniture was mostly back in its place. Clyde was now contentedly watching television, an athletics tournament in Copenhagen. He had made himself a cup of tea and was eating some crisps he’d found at the back of a cupboard. He’d also, Danny’d noticed, set a Chinese Chicken Pot Noodle on the kitchen counter and Danny was now listening out for whether the kettle was being re-boiled. It might have been four in the afternoon but it wasn’t. It was, as Danny had just exclaimed to Clyde in a deliberately surprised tone, four in the morning. The flat was a hell’s angels’ squat. Danny turned all the lights on in the living room and slowly orbited the planet of Clyde’s head, gathering empty bottles and cans from the floor and dropping them into the bin bag he was trailing behind him.
