ROBERT

I spent my twenty third birthday alone in my flat and, as I sat there nursing a glass of single malt that I’d brought up from the bar, I had nothing else to do other than think about my previous birthday: the night Michelle had told me she was pregnant.

The following day it would be a year since I’d got in my car and driven away from everything and everyone that had ever meant anything to me. Did any of it mean anything to me now?

Of course it did. There were days when I could’ve killed for one of Mum’s steak and kidney pies, or gone for a pint with my dad even though he did go on a bit sometimes. I even missed my kid brother from time to time.

Tom was a good lad at heart, a bit like a puppy sometimes – you know, hanging around for any crumbs that you might throw him – but I liked him. Poor bugger had spent all of his life wanting to be me but I was willing to bet that wasn’t the case anymore. I thought he was probably the golden child now, the one that could do no wrong, the one that didn’t do a runner as soon as he got a lass in the family way.

I know that he had wanted to be me but, the ironic thing was that sometimes I wanted to be more like him. There was a reason that I’d asked him to keep a look out for Michelle, and that was because I knew that he would. I was willing to bet that he was the best uncle a kid ever had.

I drained the best part of half a bottle of whisky that evening and I don’t remember how I got to bed.

The second season that I was at the pub passed in pretty much the same way as the first one except that I knew what to expect, my job was more secure, and I was living alone so I could sleep with whoever I wanted to without worrying about it. Not that I ever really worried about Tanya, but you know what I mean.

Do you know, this is the first time that I’ve ever put what happened into words and I realise how bad it makes me look. I wasn’t a nice person. I’d done Michelle and the kid a favour.

There’s not a lot to tell about my early twenties: I went to work and I had casual sex with a lot of women. I knew it was a dangerous game I was playing because you have to remember that this was back in the days when hysteria about AIDS was at its height. I watched those adverts with the gravestone on them and I knew that I had to be careful, but careful to me meant a condom, not abstention, and luckily for me there were enough girls around that felt the same way.

I spent two years living that way. And then I met Diane.

Diane came into the bar one evening in the third summer after I’d left. What we euphemistically called the function room had been booked for a seventieth birthday party and Diane was the grand-daughter of the birthday girl. I popped into the room a couple of times during the evening to check that everything was all right and I’d noticed Diane almost as soon as I’d gone in the first time. She was the only one dancing on the tiny dancefloor and I smiled at her when she looked my way.

She was standing at the bar the second time that went in, and she said hello when I checked on Danny who was working the bar in that room. She must have heard him call me by name because she used it as I walked away and I turned around.

She smiled at me and from that point I was putty in her hands.

Diane was different to the girls I normally went out with. I found that my sole intention of seeing her wasn’t to get her into bed, and that scared the hell out of me. I enjoyed her company and I liked being with her. We slept together, but not until we had been going out for a couple of months. Not counting Michelle, it was the first time that had happened to me.

Diane moved in with me a couple of months after that and we settled into life together. From time to time I would think that this was how things could have been with Michelle but it wouldn’t have been the same really, would it? If I’d stayed and settled down with Michelle there would have been a baby to consider. There would have been a baby tying me to her. Nothing tied me Diane: even though she shared the flat above the pub with me, there was nothing to keep her there if things didn’t work out.

Things worked out pretty well for a while, but after six or eight months I could sense a sea-change with Diane. When we were out shopping she would slow down as we passed jewellers’ shops and eye the rings in the window. She would say that she was looking at earrings or something but she wasn’t and it seemed like one or other of her friends was getting engaged every other week.

We split up before Christmas.

Angela came to work at The Bull the following year.

She’d turned up for her interview wearing a pair of jeans and a tight red T-shirt so she immediately stood out from the two people I’d seen before her who had both turned up dressed like they were going to a funeral, you know, dark business suits. They were after a job in a back-street pub for God’s sake, not a bank.

I call it a back-street pub but, without making it sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet, it had come on a lot since Gloria and Phil had handed the reins over to me. I’d sorted out the back room, which had been little more than a store room before, and turned it into the function room that I told you about. We’d started to do more food, which was bringing in extra revenue, and I’d renegotiated with the brewery which meant that the margins were better. All right, I am blowing my own trumpet, but why the hell not? I was good at my job.

Anyway, getting back to the point, we were taking on extra staff and Angela stood out from the other two. Her first shift was a Wednesday evening and after we’d locked up we tidied up and I asked her if she’d like a coffee or something. She laughed and suggested that we should probably have done that before we’d loaded the dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

‘I’ve got cups upstairs,’ I told her.

Would you believe me if I told you that we drank coffee and talked? You should, because it’s the truth. She was so easy to talk to and she seemed to want to talk as much as I wanted to listen. She had long blonde hair and a figure that most girls would kill for and so I don’t suppose she was used to blokes just wanting to talk to her.

‘You not from round here, are you,’ she said. It was a comment, not a question, something that she was certain of and I guessed that my accent was a giveaway.

‘No,’ I admitted as I handed her a mug of instant coffee. She didn’t strike me as a coffee snob so I didn’t think she’d mind. She had cosied herself into the corner of the sofa with her feet tucked underneath her. I noticed that she’d kicked her trainers off and made herself at home. She took a sip of her coffee and smiled as if it was the best thing that she had ever tasted.

She asked things like, ‘How long you been here?’ and, ‘Do you like it?’ before she asked the sixteen-million- dollar question of, ‘Why did you come here?’

How to answer that one? I shrugged my shoulders to give myself a bit of thinking time and decided to tell her, ‘There was a traffic jam on the A1.’

She did that thing with her eyebrows where they almost join in the middle, what’s it called, furrowing? I smiled to myself because I thought my answer was clever. Needless to say, she asked what I meant.

‘I wasn’t sure where I was going,’ I said, ‘but I was on the A1 and there was a traffic jam. I sat there for a while and then I realised that the turnoff to here was just up the road so I nipped onto the hard shoulder, turned right at the roundabout, and here I am.’

She sipped her coffee and studied me a while. ‘What made you leave?’ she looked me straight in the eye though I noticed that her head was tilted slightly to one side.

I thought carefully before I answered.

‘There was nothing for me there.’ It wasn’t like I was lying to her but I wasn’t ready to tell her the truth, not the whole truth anyway. She asked me if I had a family and before I’d realised what I was doing I’d said, ‘No.’ Later on, I would think long and hard about why I’d said that and all I could come up with was that it made things easier to explain. No excuse, I know, but I’d said it and I was glad when she then started to tell me a bit about herself.

She was twenty three years old, which of course I already knew, and she had lived in the town all her life. She’d moved back in to live with her mum the previous year after her dad had died suddenly in a late-night car crash. ‘I’ll move out again,’ she told me before she finished the dregs of her coffee, ‘but I just needed to make sure that Mum was OK.’

‘And is she?’ I asked.

On reflection it was a stupid question, which Angela confirmed when she answered, ‘As OK as she’ll ever be.’

She looked off into a space behind my shoulder for a second and I guessed that she was thinking about her dad so I let her do that for as long as she wanted to.

‘They were childhood sweethearts,’ she told me, ‘and neither of them ever had another partner. They were only nineteen when they got married and my eldest brother was born six month later.’

The maths wasn’t lost on me but I didn’t say anything.

By the time she left, just before two in the morning, we’d had two more mugs of coffee and I’d discovered that in addition to her eldest brother there were two more, both older, and a younger sister. I also knew that she preferred cats to dogs, apples to oranges, and that she’d tried vegetarianism for a week before the call of a bacon sandwich defeated her.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you home?’ I asked as she threw her jacket over her head and slid it over her arms.

‘Don’t be daft,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll be home in five minutes.’

I conceded and took her downstairs. I opened the back door and let her out and she laughed saying that she’d be home in four minutes now because she’d cut the corner off.

We stood in the doorway and she looked up into my face. Was I supposed to kiss her? I wanted to, but before I could make a move she made hers and pecked me on the cheek.

‘Goodnight, Rob,’ she said. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘’Night Angela,’ I said.

She took a step or two and then she stopped and looked over her shoulder.

‘Call me Angie,’ she said before she disappeared into the darkness.