Harry closed the studio door, headed straight for the kitchen area, took a bottle of grappa out of the cupboard and filled a tumbler. He had stayed sober all through the wake because he had driven, but he had soon regretted not taking a cab.
Stroking his IPod, one of the very few luxuries he was not prepared to give up, he switched it to shuffle songs quickly. The last thing he wanted to listen to was Bruce telling him about his Hungry Heart! Turning the volume down, Harry took his tumbler to the sofa and, kicking his shoes off, laid down.
He hadn’t known today’s corpse very well. Even at school they had only been distant friends and there had been no contact in later life, but he had succumbed to FaceBook pressure from ‘friends’ he barely knew, or cared about. He made a mental note to delete his account the next day.
Harry had attended the occasional school reunion over the years but as far as he was concerned, the past was the past. The only possible use for a reunion was the chance of meeting an ex and getting laid, but, as he swallowed more grappa he reflected sadly, even that wasn’t an option any more.
Today’s bunch had been a dull group, all crushed by life and disappointment - all the bright fires he knew at school burned out by grim reality. At best they were just recognisable as the people they used to be; at worst they were total strangers.
That was with the exception of one guy, Lee. Lee Williams. Harry and Lee had been the best of friends - virtually brothers even - at school, but, as so often happens when school ends, they went their separate ways and they had not met or spoken in over thirty years. But today, during their meeting out of the blue, Lee had been the same person, it was as if they had seen each other only yesterday.
It had only been the briefest of meetings, ten minutes before Lee had to go, but the connection was there for sure and they had exchanged numbers and emails with the promise to meet again soon. Harry smiled at the thought. He loved the fact that someone else had retained their love of life, their true nature.
As he worked his way down the bottle of Grappa, Harry’s thoughts turned to the girls from his school days. There had been many girlfriends but there was one particular girl that always came first in his thoughts; one that had hurt him so deeply, yet one - if he was brutally honest with himself, that he had been trying to replace all his life.
Harry flipped open his laptop and logged into Facebook. He really would delete his account, tomorrow, but now he clicked on the search for friends box. He knew she was married and he only remembered her maiden name, hell, she could be dead too! The chances of finding her were incredibly slim but he tapped in Silverton nonetheless. There were no matches. But what if her parents were still alive? It was an even slimmer chance - both Harry’s parents were long dead, but if her parents were alive at least their names would not have changed.
Harry punched the details into a search engine which brought up three Silvertons with the correct initial, R. Draining his glass, Harry rang the first number. It was an answering machine so he hung up. The second took him for a cold caller and immediately told him to fuck off. Third time lucky? A little shaken, Harry rang the number.
‘I’m looking for Ron Silverton, can you help me?’
‘This is Ron, how can I help you?’ The voice was instantly recognisable - the stern voice of a girlfriends father and it still sent a shiver of fear down Harry’s spine as if he was still sixteen.
‘Errrmm....I.... I don’t know if you will remember me, I was a friend of your daughter in school days, my name is Lee Williams.’
Harry knew how Ron used to feel about him so he was not about to risk having the phone slammed down. There was a long, long pause before Ron replied.
‘Yes, I remember you well lad, what can I do for you?’
Harry explained that he had been living out of the country, and as he had recently returned he wished to catch up with a few old friends if possible. He could hardly say he was trying to track down an old girlfriend to see if she was still as vibrant as the girl he remembered, but even so he felt convinced that Ron was hearing exactly that. Ron listened then told Harry that she was running a pub about thirty miles away. He sounded so proud of her, but she had always been the light of his life.
‘Can I leave you my number and perhaps you can pass it on next time you see her?’
Harry could hear the hesitancy in his own voice and felt convinced that Ron must have seen through his lie, know exactly who he was and what he wanted, and that any moment would tell him to leave her alone and fuck off or else - just as he had done thirty five years ago. But Ron listened once more as Harry read out his number, then thanked him for calling.
‘Don’t you worry lad, next time she’s down I will make sure Susan gets this.’
Having set the phone down, Harry poured himself another glass of Grappa - a full glass. His hand was shaking and he had butterflies in his stomach-none of it made any sense. All he had done was make a phone call, speak to a stranger and leave a message for someone who would, in all probability, never call, so why did he feel like a teenager on his first date?
In the background he could faintly hear Pulp singing Disco 2000, describing the very world that he had grown up in, that they had grown up in, including the woodchip wallpaper. For a moment, Harry allowed himself to think fondly of how important music had been to them, how they had crowded around the radio for Luxembourg or the charts on a Sunday night. But that was all a lifetime ago.
Draining the glass, he mentally kicked himself for making the call - it was a stupid thing to have done. She was a bitch; always had been, always would be. She would never call, she never called after that day, and what use would it be if she did? Harry looked down at his crotch and laughed before reaching for the bottle again. He cursed, it was empty. Staggering to his feet, he lurched off in search of more booze. He did not have to go far.
*
Harry’s separation and subsequent divorce had coincided with a monumental collapse of business. Several major clients had folded in the face of internet competition, others had cut their advertising budgets dramatically and many more had simply stopped using his services, generally because he was drunk and feeling sorry for himself most of the time.
He had never felt bitter about the divorce, or about Marie demanding so much cash, and the house-he knew he had been an arse and that he deserved whatever he got-but knowing that did not make the reality any more palatable. His wife, his business, his lovers and his libido had all left him at the same time, and there was only one friend left - the bottle.
He had retained a few loyal clients, he managed to stay sober most days and produce enough work to keep the studio rent paid and the credit cards serviced, but to quote Springsteen, he had debts no honest man could pay - and if he couldn’t pay them at least the booze helped him to forget, for a while.
It was a far cry from his best years when he couldn’t put a foot wrong; when he employed three assistants and the studio was always busy, sometimes pulling in so much work that they were shooting eighteen hours a day. That was when he had bought the local film processing lab. Bringing the processing in-house had made him even more money - money that he managed to spend as quickly as he made it, and quite often much more quickly!
Then the digital revolution had arrived. Harry had been so busy he didn’t see it coming, and when he did he was so confident of the way he worked that he couldn’t imagine the breadth or speed of the changes that would hit him like a tsunami. The processing lab became redundant overnight and, as his clients dropped away, his assistants too became redundant, until there was just him, just Harry in the sprawling concrete box that was his studio, and now his home.
He was fortunate. When the studio had been in full production he had had to cater for clients who expected a certain degree of luxury so there was a lounge area with three huge, leather chesterfield sofas and a plasma screen TV. The TV had long since gone and Harry connected to the outside world via his laptop, but the sofas were still there, a little more worn but no less comfortable. For the first few weeks, until the reality set in that this was his new home, one of the sofas had been his bed. When he had finally accepted that Marie wasn’t going to take him back, Harry had set about building a private room at the back of the studio. It was small and discreet; the sign on the door said STORE. It was padlocked and drew no attention from any of the few clients that actually still came to the studio. They all knew he was divorced but none knew how dire his situation really was; he simply couldn’t risk being honest with them, not even the oldest and most trusted - the few he regarded as friends. The bedroom was tiny and had no windows, but it could have been much worse. The studio had a superb shower set up and an excellent kitchen area, plus it offered the enormous bonus of allowing him to get drunk and not have to worry about driving home.
Harry slumped back on the sofa and stared blindly at the swirling shapes on his laptop’s screen saver. He knew the effort it would take to turn his life around, but he didn’t even have the energy to touch the computer’s return bar and stop the nauseating patterns that were mesmerising him. Slowly Harry’s head fell back onto the cushions, and as his eyes closed he found himself asking who was going to save him if he couldn’t save himself?