Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  ‘I can’t say I pay it much heed.’

  ‘“Tomorrow belongs to us.” Do the people who did that not know what that sounds like, or do they just not care? I mean, you don’t have to have been brought up on Cabaret for the little Nazi alarm bells to ring. And those tourists, do they think it’s funny, posing with that?’

  Maybe, probably not, anyone’s guess.

  She pushed the salad drawer shut, with difficulty. ‘There’s no more room in your fridge,’ she said and left the bag on the floor before it, still three leeks shy of empty. She sat at the table and took out her phone. ‘I tried to get a photo of those people’ – squinting – ‘nah, it’s come out all blurry.’ Tossing her phone – the entire subject – on the table, ‘My Uber driver was saying he knows you.’

  ‘Uber?’

  ‘It’s like a taxi.’

  ‘I know what it is, but what are you doing using it?’

  ‘Well, it’s way cheaper than a taxi if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Not as cheap as the bus that goes past the end of the street.’

  ‘My feet were sore. I’d a big bag of leeks, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘We have a fruit and veg shop round the corner.’

  ‘I didn’t go into town for leeks. I went in and I saw them. They had them reduced. That whole bag for two pounds. Jesus Christ, Dad, do I have to justify everything. I went in to get out. It was you that was telling me to.’

  He didn’t let himself say anything more, though she left him the time to, daring him. Gave up finally.

  ‘He says you come into the cafe he goes to.’

  The Uber driver, he guessed she meant.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  She picked up the phone again, checked the app. ‘Paul.’

  ‘I can’t think of any… Wait, about your age?’

  She didn’t take the calculation well. ‘I’d have said a bit older.’

  ‘Glasses?’

  ‘Well, he was wearing shades, but I guess they could have been prescription. Brown hair, side parting, thinnish face.’

  ‘Sounds like him, but I don’t know what he’d be doing driving a taxi.’

  ‘Uber.’

  ‘Right. I thought he was with Diageo.’

  ‘Not today he wasn’t. What’s this he said the place was called the two of you go to?’

  ‘Sam’s.’

  ‘That’s it. He says you’re never usually out of the place…’

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that.’

  She tilted her head, narrowed one eye. ‘You’re not embarrassed of me, are you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I just thought… I mean, you didn’t seem…’ He stopped. Sometimes it was just better to. Start again: ‘Tell you what, seeing as you still have your jacket on…’

  She thought a moment. ‘Maybe.’ A moment more. ‘All right, yeah, that would be nice.’

  He held the front door open for her.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to call a taxi?’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to let it go. I just knew it.’

  Paul, in fact, was just about to get into his car, parked in the lay-by in front of the cafe, takeaway coffee balanced on the roof while he searched for his keys. Glasses now rather than shades.

  ‘There he’s there,’ said Beth.

  ‘So, it was you,’ Herbie said.

  Paul patted himself down for verification now rather than keys. ‘It still is, I hope.’

  ‘I was telling Beth you were with Diageo.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You would have to ask Diageo that.’ He opened the car door, sat in the driver’s seat. ‘This is just to tide me over. You have to keep busy, don’t you?’

  ‘Here.’ Beth lifted the coffee cup off the roof. ‘Don’t be forgetting this.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Paul said. He was swapping over to the sunglasses again. He looked like he was getting ready to go skiing. ‘And for the rating. Enjoy your leeks.’

  Sam himself was behind the cafe door, putting up an A4 poster on the inside facing out. ‘Thursday Night is Music Night’. Grand piano, crotchets and quavers spiralling away from it into the top left corner, an open wine bottle in the bottom right next to the letters BYO. The design boat had not been pushed out very far.

  ‘I thought we’d give it a whirl,’ he said when Herbie and Beth were finally able to step inside, ‘see how it went.’ He had found a wee lad, living up a lane somewhere in the Craigantlet Hills, who played jazz piano. ‘You’ve got to see him, complete time warp: wing-tipped shoes and Oxford bags. Was quoting Gershwin to me: “songs for girls in love to hum on fire escapes on hot summer nights”.’

  ‘You don’t see too many fire escapes out in the Craigantlet Hills,’ Herbie said.

  ‘Can’t knock it for an ambition, all the same,’ said Beth and Sam looked at her properly for the first time.

  ‘Sorry,’ Herbie said, ‘my daughter, Beth.’

  ‘Daughter?’

  ‘Don’t tell me he never mentioned me?’

  ‘Oh, he did, but you look nothing like him… A bullet dodged.’

  ‘I was about to ask you if we had to book for the BYO night,’ said Herbie, ‘but I’ve suddenly gone off the idea.’

  ‘Stick me down anyway,’ Beth said. ‘Plus guest.’

  Derek came out and they did the introductions all over again, and another version of the bullet being dodged.

  ‘You two really need to work on your script,’ Herbie told them.

  ‘I like your Scrabble letters,’ said Beth.

  ‘Thank you,’ Derek said, though more to Sam, who shrugged.

  ‘You know, though, someone has moved the D and C…?’

  Derek was out from behind the counter. ‘I keep thinking whoever’s doing that will grow out of it.’

  ‘I keep telling him not to hold his breath,’ Sam said.

  ‘So,’ Beth asked the moment they were out the door, coffee drunk, world watched as it went by, ‘are Sam and Derek…?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And nobody…?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘There’s hope.’

  They walked the few yards to the pedestrian crossing. ‘You won’t take this the wrong way?’

  ‘That pretty much guarantees I will.’

  She squeezed his arm. ‘It’s strange seeing you with other people. I’m not used to it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You always seemed to me a bit… I don’t mean stand-offish, but you didn’t really bother much, isn’t that what they say?’ She nodded, satisfied with the formulation. ‘Neither of yous did. I know Mum had her gang from school, but how often did they all get back – once a year? And the rest of the time… I just can’t think.’

  Herbie opened his mouth to protest. Closed it again. He didn’t know that she was altogether wrong. He simply could no longer get enough of a purchase on that period of his life to say for sure. There had been evenings in neighbours’ houses – and neighbours in Oriel (seriously, what had they been thinking?) – a group of eight, all of an age, or at least a stage, small kids, big mortgages – but they had never developed a pattern, never mind a routine. Two of the couples had moved away – on, was his impression – Beth might still have been in nursery school – and the remaining couple, at the far end of the street, became once-yearly visitors, one of the nights between Christmas and New Year, and then, as the penny finally dropped that the four who had gone had been the glue, not even that.

  They must have heard about him and Tanya or at the very least seen the ‘For Sale’ sign go up – it was out there long enough before it turned to ‘Sold’ – but they didn’t come near him once, although he supposed, looked at from their end, it was him didn’t come near them.

  Just didn’t bother.

  There was an epitaph.

  *

  Monday night was leek and bean hash, Tuesday night leek and lemon fettuccine, Wednesday night Monday night’s leftovers s
erved on a bed of Tuesday night’s. Thursday night they made leek soup and stuck it in the freezer before heading out for some much-needed leek respite.

  They stopped in on the way at the off-licence, where Herbie took longer than he normally would, or his budget normally merited, over the choice of wine, being flusher than anticipated by £50 thanks to the descendant of Terence Quin, currently resident in Hong Kong, who earlier that afternoon discovered to her delight that her distant ancestor had been entered in the annals for turning up drunk at church to receive his alms on a Sunday in May 1792. God knows what sort of a tip the woman would have given him if the bold Terence had succeeded in his attempt to undo his breeches.

  The piano was upright rather than grand. Sam and Derek had still had to lose two tables to get it in, although they had filled all the rest, could easily, they said, have filled them twice over. The staff from the Post Office were there, all seated together, all appearing to have Brought Their Own and one for a friend. People on the edge, of opportunity or hardship, they seemed undecided which, but ready to drink to the one or in defiance of the other. Beth and Herbie had Emmet and Yolanda to one side of them. Beth asked, without waiting for a further steer, if they were from around here. Emmet told her he and his brother ran the wheelie-bin cleaning service that did pretty much the whole of the area. Yolanda told her she ran Emmet and his brother. ‘They would be clueless otherwise, the pair of them.’

  Derek appeared. ‘Can I open that for you?’ he said and Herbie handed him the wine. The corkscrew was embossed with the name of a restaurant in the Cornish town of Looe. Or more probably no longer in the Cornish town of Looe.

  Herbie filled Beth’s glass and his own (‘This is for you, Terence Quin,’ he said inside his head) and seeing Emmet’s was empty offered to pour him one too.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  Yolanda covered her glass with her hand. ‘Driving, but thank you.’

  She drank nothing stronger than fizzy water, but still seemed to become more garrulous with every glass she put away. Halfway through her third, while the musical entertainment was still courtesy of iTunes, she had an arm draped round Emmet’s neck, saying, go on, go on, tell them, when you were at school, what did you play…?

  ‘I played the oboe.’

  ‘And what did your da call it?’

  ‘The oboy,’ said Emmet, sheepishly.

  Yolanda positively hooted. ‘Every single time he took it out: Oboy!’

  ‘For three years,’ Emmet said.

  ‘Until he just stopped taking it out altogether… Didn’t you?’ Stroking Emmet’s ear with her thumb, ‘I’ll bet you could still get a toot or two out of it… I mean, if someone was to come and stick one in your hand.’

  She turned in her chair to mock-frown at Beth, who hadn’t said a word. ‘You’ve a dirty mind, you.’

  ‘Yolanda,’ Emmet said, ‘that’s Herbie’s daughter.’

  Herbie’s daughter put the back of her hand to her forehead. ‘My innocence snatched from me!’

  The only other oboyist in his year, Emmet told them, toured America with the Ulster Youth Orchestra then went on to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, got through however many auditions for second chair oboe with the Hallé Orchestra there – his parents, ‘ordinary working people, like you and me,’ said Emmet, were speechless with pride…

  ‘The mother not so much,’ said Yolanda. ‘She never shut up about it.’

  But then her son got in with a crowd who were running raves – ‘Those were like outdoor dances the youth used to have,’ Yolanda, translating from the Eighties, said for Beth’s benefit, ‘way before your time, and mine’ – ‘And that,’ said Emmet, ‘was the last anyone heard of chairs at the Hallé or anything else to do with his oboe.’

  ‘Until,’ said Yolanda under her breath.

  ‘Who’s telling this story?’ Emmet asked her, and she held up her hands, So arrest me! ‘Until,’ he said, ‘about five years later this record came out with this little bit of a sample…’ He whistled it.

  ‘No!’ said Beth. ‘That was him? The Volvo ad?’

  ‘Volvo ad, Olympic opening ceremony…’

  ‘Recorded in his student digs,’ Yolanda said to Beth, and to Emmet, ‘you always leave that bit out.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s right. In his digs, when he was nineteen. Mucking about with a friend’s DAT machine. And he probably made more money out of that…’

  ‘Or DAT…’ (Yolanda, quietly, almost apologetically.)

  ‘… than he would have if he had been sitting in the second chair at the Hallé from that day to this.’

  ‘You know what the old folks say,’ said Yolanda.

  ‘Only from Pulp Fiction, but yes.’

  ‘“C’est la vie.”’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Sam and Derek had gone for an economy-class in-flight menu choice, chicken or pasta, take-it-or-leave-it chocolate brownie for dessert. There was a raffle ticket paper-clipped to every menu card, free entry. The prizes – listed on the specials board – were in the same cheerfully plain vein as the menu. A bottle of white wine, a bottle of red, two soda and two wheaten from the home bakery, five pounds off your next purchase from the fish and chip saloon, and why not, there were still another six nights in the week in which to eat when Sam’s had shut its doors for the day. Two columns the prizes ran to. It would be an unlucky table that won nothing at all.

  The wee lad from the Craigantlet Hills came on as the main course was being served. He was called – had, unlikely as it seemed, always been called – Kurtis Bain. He looked, despite the wingtips and the Oxford bags, about fourteen. He sounded, when he sat down at the piano, let his fingers stray up and down the keys a couple of times, and started – eyes closed, lids trembling – to sing, about seventy-five. ‘’S wonderful, ’s marvellous, you should care for me, ’s awful nice, ’s paradise, ’s what I love to see…’

  He had the whole thing down pat, but heartfelt.

  There was a girl sitting alone at a table to the right of the piano, bow-fronted blouse, hair in perfectly executed finger waves, who appeared, from the way she kept trying to angle it, to be recording the entire set on her phone, which in her hands looked like the anachronism. It was a while even so before Herbie twigged (the third verse of ‘Aren’t You Kinda Glad We Did?’ to be precise, with its wouldn’ts, couldn’ts and shouldn’ts) that Kurtis Bain was addressing all his songs to her.

  He stood up from the piano after the eighth, bowed with his hands clasped back to back between his thighs, and went and sat by her side while Derek and Sam took centre stage.

  ‘If you can contain your excitement, ladies and gentlemen,’ Sam said, ‘eyes down for this evening’s raffle!’

  Derek shook the bag, Sam drew the tickets.

  Yolanda won the bottle of red wine first number out. ‘That’s my Saturday night sorted then!’ Two full columns later, Beth won the final prize, a ticket to the home of the local intermediate football team. ‘This would be a good time to go,’ Emmet said.

  ‘Is the football season not over?’ Beth asked.

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  Plates were cleared, the take-it-or-leave-it brownies were served, bottles over and beyond what the doctor had ordered were opened. Kurtis Bain had just come back on and was warming to ‘Waiting for the Sun to Come Out’ when Paul came in. Staggered. He looked a mess. A graze ran the length of his nose. Blood had dripped on to his shirtfront. Beth stood up.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Yolanda opened out her wheelchair and Paul sank down into it. Or it was the other way round: Paul was sinking and Yolanda’s quick thinking arrested his fall. It all happened so fast it was possible nobody else in the cafe had even noticed. His hands were shaking as he took his glasses off. One of the lenses fell out on to his lap.

  ‘Some fella…’ he struggled for the words, ‘…down behind the picture house…’

  He’s been beaten up, Herbie thought.

  ‘… ran i
nto the side of me.’

  ‘You were in a car crash?’ Yolanda said. ‘For God’s sake somebody phone him an ambulance.’

  Beth already had two nines up on her screen before Paul stopped her. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘You do not,’ said Beth.

  ‘How’s the car?’ Emmet the Practical.

  ‘I had to climb out over the passenger’s seat.’ Paul screwed his eyes tight shut at the thought of how close he had been to greater harm. ‘The driver’s door is completely banjaxed.’

  Yolanda moved a glass of water towards him. ‘You need to let the police know at the very least.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Something in his tone, the quick glance towards the door… ‘Who was it hit you?’ Herbie asked.

  ‘He didn’t give me his name, only his rank.’ Paul managed at the third attempt to get the lens back in its frame. ‘Apparently he’s a brigadier.’

  ‘A soldier?’ Beth asked, and they all looked at her: where have you been? (England, of course, the best part of ten years.) ‘Oh. Right. That sort of brigadier.’

  ‘He told me he could provide half a dozen witnesses who would say it was my fault. He could provide someone with a freshly broken leg, or arm, or collarbone, or fucking spine if need be, who would say they were in the passenger seat beside him.’

  ‘Just learn to sing and never mope,’ Kurtis Bain sang, ‘there is a thing that’s known as hope.’

  Paul seemed to notice him for the first time. He looked for a moment utterly bewildered. Who was that? What was that?

  ‘Come on, up you get,’ Yolanda said, and took his place in the chair. ‘I’ll give you a lift home – you can get your car in the morning.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘It might as well just sit there, for all the use it is to me now.’

  Kurtis Bain’s fingers pranced. ‘Dreary are the flowers, weary are the hours, waiting for the sun to come out.’

  *

  Yolanda was gone half an hour. Emmet jumped up to get the door for her.

  ‘That poor fella,’ she said.