Len Gray, as required by law, called last orders in the Cocktail Bar and prepared himself for another couple of hours behind the counter, reaching down last week’s Titbits from a shelf above the till and turning to the crossword. Someone else had already started it. Six down: A country in Central Africa. Four letters. PERU, the someone had written firmly in green biro and then, more faintly, either side of the R (five letters, clue: May I have this …?) D–INK. Len couldn’t decide which he needed most, a new hiding place for his magazine or smarter bar staff.
Clive White, meanwhile, laced his fingers behind his head, the better to persuade himself he was completely at his ease. A minute before, his wandering mind had stumbled into a nightmarish scenario in which Trevor Noades had been transmitting every word spoken since he arrived tonight via a microphone taped to his body (Clive read Titbits too); in which, at the very moment the money changed hands, there was a knock at Fitz’s bedroom door (Fitz, as he went to answer it saying, ‘But we didn’t order room service.’), and in which burly cops were now sitting on the bed, on the chairs, on the dressing table, on Fitz himself, waiting for Clive to lose his patience and come up to the room.
It was pure nonsense, of course. Trevor Noades wouldn’t have had the balls for it. Something could always go wrong, a trailing wire, a noise – what did they call it? Feedback – on the mike. A person could find themselves falling out of a hotel window fairly sharpish …
Whoa, Danny! Whoa!
I know I said I’d take liberties telling this story, but maybe that’s taking one liberty too many. Fitz was no killer, neither was my second cousin. I worry about some of the thoughts I have been putting into Clive’s head, worry that the picture I am drawing is too partial. There had to be more to him than wheeling and dealing and women and ego.
I might have mentioned, for instance, that I visited his parents’ house once – or parent’s house, for there was only his father left by then – with Andy and Edna, my father and mother. I suppose I would have been about eight. Family visits, as I am sure I did say, were not altogether in Andy and Edna’s line, but Clive’s father, my not-strictly-uncle Gabriel, had recently been in the hospital: heart condition. We got a bus, the three of us, to Carlisle Circus and walked from there up the Crumlin Road. Edna went into a bakery below the courthouse and bought a Florence cake. I remember being delighted that the very next street we passed was Florence Place and amusing myself reconstructing a Belfast of Tatie Bread Ways and Gubstopper Entries.
Uncle Gabriel’s house was the last of a terrace of six wedged between a flour mill and a coachbuilder’s yard. Collectively they had the kinked appearance of overcrowded teeth.
An ancient dog – some make of bull terrier – lay curled up in the doorway. Its coat, which must have been white when new, was yellowing and lustreless, its ears and pointed muzzle in places hairless. My father clucked his tongue and the dog opened an eye half brown, half milky-blue.
‘Sure, you’re all right,’ Andy said.
The dog half looked at him.
‘Course you are.’
He scratched a threadbare ear and stepped over the heaving flank, rapping the hall door. I followed close behind him, hardly daring to look down, but while I was still astride the dog I heard the scrabble of claws on the tiles as it tried to raise itself. I felt its nose, rough, at the top of my knee-sock. I couldn’t not look.
Its mouth was like an injury: an unhitched display of gums and livid tongue. I froze.
Uncle Gabriel called us in. My mother thumped me between the shoulder blades; the dog, unable to bear its own weight, lay down again, panting.
‘It thinks you’re our Clive,’ Uncle Gabriel said. ‘Poor oul’ thing forgets they’re neither of them pups any more.’
My mother had warned me that Uncle Gabriel’s heart condition was caused by a problem with his thyroid gland. I think I had imagined a swollen throat. In fact, Uncle Gabriel filled the two-seater sofa, which with the radiogram and a leatherette pouffe made up the entire furniture of the front room. My father perched on the arm of the sofa beside him; my mother sat on the leatherette pouffe. I stood.
‘How is Clive?’ my father asked.
‘Sure, I hardly see him at all.’
Edna tutted, too soon.
‘He’s in here and has the fire set for me before I’m down out of my bed in the mornings. Leaves me the paper and a note not to take the ashes out.’
A brass hearth-set, with handles in the shape of thistles, stood, polished, by the fireplace in which red coals were beginning to eat away at a crust of damp slack. Directly above the brush and pan, on the mantelpiece, was propped an oval picture frame containing a tinted photograph of a boy about the age I was that day, hands lying unnaturally loose on his lap, legs crossed at the ankles. For some reason he wore a slipper on his left foot.
‘I hear him at night, the odd time, coming in and I shout down to him – “Who’s that?” – and he shouts back to me – “It’s only me, Daddy, don’t be getting up.” And that’s about the height of it so far as talking goes, but I don’t know where I’d be without him all the same. Honest I don’t.’
The pouffe parped as Edna shifted from one buttock to the other. Parped again as she shifted back to prove that the sound was the inevitable by-product of Crimplene on leatherette. On the doorstep the dog drew a rasping breath. From where I was standing I had a clear view through the rest of the house, out the scullery window into the yard. A bicycle tyre clung to the sloped asbestos ribbing of the outhouse roof, a twisted length (an ampersand, I would have said if I’d known the word) of green hosepipe beside it. The guttering was weighed down at one side with moss and stones. A tea towel was tangled in two converging washing lines.
I looked from the yard to my uncle, to the tinted boy in the photograph wearing one shoe and one slipper, trying to connect them in some meaningful way.
I don’t remember Uncle Gabriel dying, though he could not have lasted long after that visit. Clive was away on business the day his father’s heart finally gave out. When my own father died, getting on for ninety, the year before last, and I was sorting through the biscuit tin in which he kept his papers, I found a letter, elegantly written in black fountain pen. Thank you for all your help … Thank you for asking about Sally (Sally?), but it wouldn’t be fair to move her … Old and tired … Sad, but humane, like falling asleep. Thank you anyway. If ever there’s anything I can do … Sincerely, ‘Clive’.
That’s exactly how he signed himself. ‘Clive’. That’s the point of this reminiscence – not the father, not the dog, the inverted commas. I want you to remember, before I bring him back in, that my second cousin was a man who signed his name as my father and mother signed theirs, the shy, old-fashioned way, in inverted commas. Whatever that tells you.
At ten or a quarter past ten that January Saturday night, and having left word with Len where Fitz and Noades were to find him, Clive dandered into the Blue Bar and ordered a pint off me. (Brandy was fine for business, but football called for beer.)
‘Nice dinner?’ I asked. He rolled his eyes.
‘God, you can’t scratch yourself in this town but somebody knows it.’
He was shamming, of course, and didn’t care that I knew it. I was to understand that I could not begin to guess the half of what Clive White was at.
‘You were only up the stairs,’ I muttered, like it mattered what I said. Clive had already turned towards the television, not following the match so much as the faces of the people who were following it. A lot of the time he could not decide which he enjoyed more, the football or the barroom fans, shouting at games which had already been decided and whose outcome, even if they had been in the ground, they had not the slightest chance of influencing.
Or maybe I’m losing the run of myself again, for in no time at all Clive was hollering with the best of them: Go on, shoot yourself, shoot yourself … Ah, fuck, shoot yourself. So engrossed was he, in fact, that he did not at first notice Councillor Noades come into the bar and look about him.
A goal was scored. Cheers and groans and loud appeals to the referee. The man with no neck next to Clive – his name, for we knew him well in the Blue Bar, was Gerard, pronounced Jurd – said something in what Clive thought might be Swedish, which was the language drink often seemed to use when it was talking through Jurd. Clive laughed regardless, because let’s face it, most of what strangers said to you in a bar was designed to make you laugh. The man, encouraged (that was always the danger), carried on incomprehensibly. Clive carried on smiling, all the while searching out a spot he could slope off to at the first opportunity. He spotted Noades at last, though, strangely, he was now reluctant to move. He didn’t want Noades, or Fitz, thinking he had been biting his nails waiting on them showing up. He waved a hand in a slow arc above his head: over here, thicko.
Twenty voices shouted Penalty! Clive whipped round to catch the replay – a clear dive – and when he turned back Noades was standing by his shoulder.
‘I don’t know what yous two fellas take me for,’ Noades hissed. His lips were tight and flecked with spit. Clive’s first thought was that five hundred pounds was not enough; his second was that he had not been wrong about the secret microphone.
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re on about,’ he said to the top button of Noades’s waistcoat.
‘Don’t you start wasting my time, too.’ This was a different Trevor Noades talking. ‘And you can tell your friend, wherever he’s got to, that I don’t do business with amateurs.’
All thought of microphones fled Clive’s head.
‘What did you say?’
‘Are you deaf? I said yous are behaving like a pair of amateurs.’
Clive could hear the thump of his own heart and supposed everyone else could hear it too. He felt curiously empty. Gas gurgled through the echoing streets of his intestine.
‘No, no, you said, wherever he’s got to.’
‘Well, I’ve looked and he’s not next door. The last I saw of him he was coming down to have a word with you. I’ve been sitting there in that bloody room of his for the last three-quarters of an hour listening to yon porter fella.’
And it was then that Clive realised, what you could probably have told him from the start, that he had suspected the wrong man.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘fuck.’
Clive made a move towards the door. Noades blocked the way.
‘Where do you think you’re off to?’
‘Time, ladies and gentlemen, please!’ Hugh shouted and Clive White, almost lazily as it looked to me from behind the counter, landed one on Trevor Noades’s cheekbone.
The word spread to all four corners of the bar in an instant: fight. Where a moment before there had barely been room to flex a muscle, a ring opened up. People capped their drinks with their hands. The more enthusiastic stood on seats. I thought I saw a camera flash. Hugh and Jamesie were both out from behind the bar.
Clive had hauled Noades up by the tie and was screaming into his face. ‘Why didn’t you come and get me sooner?’
The councillor’s body sagged at the knees.
‘Get him off me, somebody. Police!’
‘You want the police, do you? You want the police?’ (I have seen a fair few bar fights in my time. So far as dialogue goes this was about par for the course.) ‘I’ll give you the fucking police.’
Clive flung the councillor aside – Noades, though he yelped, appeared to prefer this to being throttled, in fact if anything aided his own propulsion. Jamesie caught him before he hit the deck again.
‘Quick, Hugh,’ Clive said. ‘I need your phone.’
‘Wait a second, wait a second,’ Hugh said, but Clive was already stomping towards me.
‘Give me that phone there.’
‘Danny,’ Hugh said. ‘Call Len.’
Clive summoned a stare from his darkest depths as I lifted the receiver from its cradle.
‘Give me the phone.’
I did not know then, of course, about the thing with his name and the inverted commas. My second cousin at that moment seemed to me composed of unalloyed malevolence.
I closed my eyes and dialled the Cocktail Bar.
‘Fuck!’ Clive head-butted the counter. ‘Are yous all stupid?’
He raced out of the bar towards the back hallway. Len answered the phone – ‘Yes?’ – but before I had a chance to speak I heard Clive’s voice over the earpiece.
‘Len, get that wee lad off the phone and call Hastings Street barracks. That fucker Fitz has robbed us all.’
‘What’s going on?’ Len asked me.
‘You know as much as I do,’ I said, and Len hung up.
With Jamesie’s help, Noades had managed to stand and recover enough breath to reassure himself he was not dying.
‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Clive White.’
‘Away phoning the police,’ I said.
Noades shook his head. There was swelling, faintly opalescent, under his left eye where Clive’s knuckles had connected.
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no?’ Jamesie said. ‘It was you was girning for them.’
‘You’ve got to stop him.’
Noades laid a hand on Jamesie’s chest. This was not the best idea he would ever have, any more than was ordering Jamesie about. Jamesie pinched the hand’s middle finger, like he was taking hold of a rat by its tail.
‘You can do what you want, pal. I’m going back to my work.’
The spectators had begun to disperse. Noades retreated into them, making himself scarce.
A few people still stood on chairs, chatting over the heads to friends they’d missed earlier in the night. Hugh brought his hands together in a sharp clap.
‘All right, everyone, would you start drinking up there?’
He came back in behind the bar.
‘Give them a few minutes extra,’ he whispered to me. ‘Make up for the interruption.’
The phone rang. I was first to it.
Right, uh-huh, right.
‘Hugh,’ I said. ‘That was Len. He wants you to take over next door a minute.’
And Hugh did something I never thought I’d live to see Hugh do. He bit a sliver off his thumbnail and spat it into the sink.
‘Is somebody going to tell me what this is all about?’ he said.
I don’t know who did tell Hugh in the end, but the rest of us were not left long in the dark.
Barney had come over to check with Jamesie and me were we OK.
‘Marian’s away upstairs,’ he said. She had taken it upon herself to tail Trevor Noades. ‘If anyone can find out it’s her.’
Marian returned a few minutes later at her familiar, graceful, asymmetric trot and indicated that not a word of what she had seen would pass her lips until someone supplied her with another Bristol Cream. We watched her drink. (‘Sorry,’ I told her. ‘No rocks this time.’) Waited.
‘Are yous ready for this?’ she asked finally.
Right, the hotel manager, the hotel bar manager, the receptionist, the businessman and the politician are arguing in the hotel lobby. (There had been another businessman, but he had disappeared; he was the reason the hotel manager, the hotel bar manager and so on were in the hotel lobby at half past ten on a Saturday night.) And then in walks the taxi driver …
‘Quit messing about, Marian,’ we said.
‘Who’s messing? I’m telling you, that’s what it was like.’
OK. Fitz had fucked off. Nicola had seen him go. Well, not seen him actually walk out the hotel door: she had been talking away to him at the desk and then she had to lean over to get the phone and when she straightened up again he wasn’t there any more. Neither was the taxi driver who had been standing in the lobby for the past twenty minutes saying, in that hopeful singsong taxi drivers have, Taxi for Moore? Taxi for Moore?
The taxi driver who had just walked in the door again, in fact.
(‘See,’ said Marian. ‘I told you that’s what it was like.’)
The taxi driver had come back to give Nicola a pen. The pen was a gold Papermate. It had Nicola’s name engraved on the shaft and a date which was the date of her eighteenth birthday. The man the driver had picked up earlier had pocketed the pen by mistake. He had sent the driver all the way back from Lisburn to return it.
Lisburn was where the man wanted to be dropped off. He went into the train station and came out with a suitcase, then he got into a private car and drove away. The suitcase had been taken to the station earlier in the day by another taxi driver from the same firm, a friend of the second driver’s, as it happens. He collected it from a room on the second floor of the hotel. The two friends had talked about this when they met each other out the front of the depot earlier this evening as the first driver was going off and the second was coming on. They agreed it was a bit strange. Then the first driver said, ‘Talking of strange …’
He had been stopped at traffic lights this afternoon when a horse and carriage passed in front of him. Not any old rag-and-bone cart. This carriage was painted white and gold, you’d never seen the like of it. There were pink plumes attached to the harness on top of the horse’s head. Strange right enough, said the second driver. And what about all those fires today? His wife had been up the town shopping at lunchtime and had come home carrying a sheet of pale yellow paper. A carbon copy, which gave him and her a good laugh, because it was practically turned to carbon in places. The paper was from the department store in Brand’s Arcade. Menswear. It had on it the inside- and outside-leg measurements of a man with an address in Hannahstown. Seems he was having bother with the trousers of his suit. There was an additional comment in the shop assistant’s hand: ‘Well to the left’. The well was underlined three times. The driver’s wife found the thing lying on the footpath in Hill Street, half a mile from the fire.
But where was he? Oh, yeah.
The taxi driver did not make the connection at first between the man he picked up this evening and the suitcase his friend had taken to Lisburn train station. A fare from the International was all he knew. Name of Moore. He did not know that the man he picked up was not called Moore. He had been told to be outside the hotel at half past nine. He had been told he should be prepared to wait, anything up to half an hour. This was not an unusual request with a hotel or restaurant pick-up. He would be paid for the waiting time. But he had got bored sitting in the car so he had come into the lobby. He liked hotel lobbies. You know: busy, busy. The man who said he was Mr Moore had passed him, going to the lift, shortly before he came down and got into the car, but he was talking to a man – this man here, with the shiner – and perhaps he didn’t hear the driver say, Taxi for Moore?
(‘He had something in his room he wanted,’ Noades blurted, then faltered, ‘to show me,’ and blushed.)
At some point the driver asked the receptionist to ring the downstairs bars in case Mr Moore was waiting there.
The first thing the man did when he came back down in the lift was sidle up to the driver and whisper in his ear.
‘One minute,’ he said. He made a kind of a joke of it. ‘I’m Moore.’
The driver saw no good reason not to believe him. So, he drove him to Lisburn and it was only when he was pulling up in front of the station that he remembered what his friend had told him earlier about the suitcase.
No, he hadn’t thought to take down the number plate of the car the man had driven off in. Listen, he had once had a hamster for a fare. Picked it up from the pet stores in Smithfield and dropped it off at the rear of a fish and chip shop on the Newtownards Road. They were in the hotel business, they didn’t need him to tell them how peculiar people were.
He thought it might have been a Vauxhall. The car. Dark blue. Or dark green. Dark, anyway, and anyway it was dark and he was only going on what he could see in his rear-view mirror. He wouldn’t even have seen that much if the guy Moore hadn’t come running back after he got out of the taxi, waving his arms, and handed him the gold Papermate. The driver thought he had better hang on a minute or two longer to make sure there were no other little emergencies. He had been given an extra ten bob to take the pen straight back to the hotel in case the wee girl was looking for it.
(‘That’s my ten bob,’ Clive White said. The driver gave him a hard sideways stare.)
Nicola had been looking for the pen, though not frantically. She assumed it had rolled off the counter and on to the floor somewhere. The last time she could remember having it was when she was adding the final figures to Fitz’s bill. He had asked her to start preparing the bill earlier in the evening. Something had come up, he said. He might have to leave first thing in the morning. Sooner, maybe.
Thinking about it now, mind you, she remembered that Fitz had been fiddling with the pen while he was standing waiting for his receipt.
He had paid his bill in full, tonight’s dinner included. Cash. He had pulled a big bundle of notes from his coat pocket and counted out the exact amount. The bill, which Marian got a glimpse of, came to seventy-something pounds. Seventy-something, thirteen shillings and four-pence. Nicola didn’t say whether or not Fitz had told her to keep the six-and-eight change.
‘That’s my money,’ said Clive.
Clive had lent Fitz a sum of cash until the banks opened on Monday. The Master pointed out that it was only Saturday night. Fitz had not yet broken the terms of the loan. Besides, Fitz must have known he would have to pay his hotel bill, that was probably what he wanted the money for, wasn’t it? The councillor, no longer blushing, blanched.
‘He’s a con man,’ Clive insisted.
‘He’s a scrupulous one,’ the Master said. ‘He paid his bill.’ (He paid his taxi fare too, the driver said. He even paid for the brandy, said Len.) ‘You still have two days. Who’s to say he won’t pay you?’
Clive was staggering about, grabbing fistfuls of his own hair, ranting.
‘I don’t believe you people. I don’t believe you.’
And then he started shouting for the police again.
‘I swear,’ said Marian, ‘it was like something out of the Marx Brothers.’
We had towelling mats over the taps, but when Liam Strong moseyed up looking a wee half-un, Jamesie served him anyway. What use were rules if you couldn’t bend them a little for a regular?
‘And the best of it is,’ Marian went on, ‘in the middle of all this, there’s these two poor fellas trying to register: came in late on the Liverpool boat. I’m sure they were wondering what sort of a madhouse they had walked into. The Master was smiling away for all he was worth, but you could tell he was ripping it.’
A man leaned over the far end of the counter asking for a pint.
‘We’re closed,’ Jamesie said.
‘But I just saw you serve somebody.’
‘He’d been waiting,’ Jamesie said, not caring that it was a patent lie. ‘Danny Boy, give us a hand with the shutters.’
‘So, are the police coming?’ Barney wanted to know.
Marian shook her head.
‘Your man Noades got Clive White out the front door eventually and talked to him a while and then came back in on his own. “Terrible mix-up,” he says, or something like that: “I’m sure we’ll manage to sort it out.” ’
Jamesie and I snibbed all but the central shutter, which we left a couple of feet short of the counter. Jamesie called for glasses, I took a bucket and a cloth and went out to empty the ashtrays. Stanley was putting on his overcoat sitting down. He had one arm stretched above his head, the other twisted round his back. Ingrid, in trying to help him, had got caught up in the tangle. Her hand appeared briefly out of one of the sleeves. I avoided going near them for as long as possible, torn between, ‘It’s time you were making a move,’ and plain, ‘Get out.’ When at last I arrived at their table, however, I told them they didn’t have to go just yet.
‘You can still get a drink next door if you hang on. Say you’re with me.’
Ingrid drew her head back out of range of Stanley’s and made a discouraging face.
‘Or you don’t have to drink if you don’t want to, just sit and have a Coke or something.’
This was pure selfishness on my part, even a Coke in Stanley’s state might not have been wise; but I didn’t want them to leave together. I didn’t want them to leave without me.
‘Well,’ said Ingrid.
‘I know,’ said Stanley. ‘Let’s go dancing.’
Jamesie shouted: ‘Can I have your glasses now, puh-lease!’
I took the ashtray from Ingrid and Stanley’s table.
‘Let me know what you decide,’ I said, and tipped the ash and butts and torn beer mats into my bucket.
Hugh was back, talking to Barney and Marian.
‘He’s going to get himself arrested,’ he was saying.
‘Who is?’ I asked, catching up.
‘Clive White. He’s running up and down the street like a raving lunatic: “Bloody bastard bugger …!” Pardon my French.’
‘Fitz is probably halfway to Dublin by now,’ said Marian.
‘Why doesn’t Clive just go after him and get his money back?’ Barney asked.
‘That’s the problem,’ said Hugh. ‘He already phoned the number Fitz gave when he checked in. It’s a convent in Stoneybatter.’
‘Rough,’ said Barney.
‘But,’ Jamesie spoke for us all, ‘funny, you have to admit.’
All the while the bar was emptying. The fella and white-stockinged girl I’d seen earlier, feeling each other up, kissed just inside the door. Jamesie whistled and cupped his hands over his mouth.
Marian looked suddenly uncomfortable.
‘I’m away up to the bog,’ she said, though to see Barney’s moony expression, it might have been the finest love poetry she had uttered.
Jamesie beckoned to him.
‘Have you any doofers with you?’
‘Any what?’
‘Shut you up,’ I said to Jamesie.
‘Any what?’ Barney asked again.
‘Never mind him,’ Hugh said. ‘Just you make sure and look after that wee girl.’
Barney blinked, bewildered.
‘I’m only kidding you on,’ Jamesie said.
I started wiping tables. Hugh followed me out with the brush.
‘Is he all right, do you think, your mate Barney?’
I didn’t get at first what he meant. I told him Barney seemed fine.
‘That’s not what I’m asking.’
He paused, leaning on the brush, said goodnight to the two old boys from the Markets, who, as ever, had decided just in time to leave that they were firm friends after all. I waited for Hugh to continue, but all he said was that there were still tables needed cleaning.
‘Come on ladies and gentlemen!’ he shouted as he bent again to sweep. ‘Start moving towards the doors.’
He stopped by Ingrid and Stanley’s table. Ingrid said something and I saw Hugh look back at me and I nodded, whooping not seeming quite appropriate. A lit cigarette had been abandoned in an ashtray I had cleaned earlier and had burned down to a curved grey replica of itself which disintegrated when I nudged the table. The butt remained perched on the edge of the ashtray, like the foot I had been told always remained after spontaneous combustion. I didn’t hear Hugh approach.
‘Only, she took that business last summer very bad,’ he said, pitching his voice low. He meant Marian, he meant the shootings. ‘They used to go to parties a lot, her and some of the other girls and the fellas that worked down here. Now the papers are full of your man Burns and what have you, it brings it all back. And, of course, it was a Saturday night …’
‘Barney’s fine,’ I said again. ‘It’ll be OK.’
That was the sort of thing I did say in those days, incidentally. It would all be OK. A not unreasonable assumption and I wasn’t alone in making it.
Oscar was leaving. He clapped Hugh and me on the back.
‘See you next week,’ Hugh said, and Oscar gave him the thumbs up.
Half a dozen men remained at the tables in front of the television, sitting very still and quiet, as though hoping we would somehow fail to notice them.
‘Yous’re going to have to make a move, lads,’ Hugh told them and when they said there was only another couple minutes of the match left he said all right, but finish off your glasses and let’s get them cleared.
I worked my way round to Ingrid and Stanley.
‘You decided to stay, then?’
‘Just for one,’ said Ingrid.
‘One’s all I was thinking,’ I said.
I went for a slash. The toilets were a state. Paper towels on the floor, in the sinks, even plastered to the wall. Fag ends clogged the urinal’s strainer. The piss, backed-up, phosphoresced: fizzled, practically. I considered doing a bit to help out the cleaners, but I had neither the heart nor the stomach for it. I went into the cubicle, automatically reaching for the flush as I approached the toilet. My cock looked slit-eyed tired and mopey in my hand. I tried to jolly it up with thoughts of fingers not my own, but it wasn’t buying them. One of my spots had got worse, I could feel it throbbing at the hinge of my jaw. My cock was right, nothing was going to happen tonight.
I waited for the cistern to fill, flushed again, and left the cubicle.
Stanley was at the wash-hand basins, splashing water on his face.
It is possible to be too handsome, if you ask me, to pass through and out the other side, to become, well, Stanley. Studying his drenched reflection in the toilets’ mirror I wondered what it was I saw in him. He looked as though he had been ordered up from a catalogue of somebody else’s dreams. (Conjure the face yourself. That was Stanley’s.) He looked as though, when you finally got him home and unwrapped, he could only disappoint. And yet …
‘I think us two need to talk,’ he said.
‘Do we?’
I had to wash my hands, if only for something to do. He stood aside to let me at the taps. My forearm brushed his thigh as I scrubbed. Whether he didn’t notice, or didn’t mind, he didn’t move. I scrubbed some more. He cleared his throat.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.
This was not a bad start. I turned off the water. He was looking at my fingers. Soapy drips fell from them on to the toe of my shoe. He reached behind him and pulled down a wodge of paper towels.
‘Thanks.’
I dried each finger separately and with care, remembering Natalie Vance outside the hotel this morning, the ten separate tugs on her emerald green gloves; banishing her finally.
‘Always look after your hands,’ Stanley said solemnly. ‘Our hands are our livelihood.’
‘Funny, that’s what Hugh says, the older guy works with me.’
‘The other one hates me.’
I wasn’t going to make a liar of myself. I stuffed the used towels into the waste bin.
‘You were going to tell me what I was thinking.’
He was looking at his own hands now.
‘About me,’ he said, distracted.
Again, this was encouraging, if slow.
‘What about you?’
He held his hands in front of his face, turning them to show me front and back.
‘Do you know what I do with these?’
‘Something amazing, I’m guessing.’
‘That’s not what Larry Bowen thinks.’
‘Larry Bowen knows nothing, whoever he is.’
Actually, I had a fair idea that Larry Bowen was the man I had seen Stanley with earlier in the week.
‘Larry Bowen’s with Crackerjack!’
‘Crackerjack!?’ This was getting too much. ‘You don’t say.’
‘It’s no joke, you know.’
Out in the bar Hugh was calling to Jamesie, asking where I was.
‘Crapper,’ Jamesie called back.
‘I think I’m wanted,’ I said and waited. ‘Are you going to tell me, then?’
I was still keen to know what he thought I was thinking.
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
As I reached the door he called my name. I knew there was nothing for me to turn back for. I looked at him over my shoulder.
‘She’s not your girl, is she?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s not.’
The Match of the Day credits were rolling, the same half dozen men sitting now in virtual darkness watching them, reluctant to let go of their Saturday night. Jamesie had taken advantage of my absence to try his luck with Ingrid, since I obviously didn’t seem to know how to handle her. Giving her some load of old guff, no doubt.
He pushed himself back from the wall with the elbow he had been leaning on.
‘There you are. I thought you’d fallen in.’
‘How’s Stanley?’ Ingrid asked.
‘Stanley?’ said Jamesie, looking at me.
‘Don’t start,’ I said to him, and to Ingrid: ‘He’ll survive.’
Jamesie took himself off back behind the bar. Ingrid stood up beside me.
‘It’s men you go for, isn’t it?’ she murmured.
‘Mostly.’
‘I don’t think Stanley knows what he wants.’
‘What do you want?’ I asked her.
She didn’t hesitate for a second.
‘Nothing too complicated.’
Except of course that’s not what we said. We just looked at the toilet door, waiting till Stanley came out. Seeing us side by side, he made a low bow and stumbled forward a few steps, knocking into a chair. Ingrid heaved a sigh.
‘I think we’d better leave after all.’
I couldn’t offer a convincing argument against it.
‘Will you be back in sometime?’ I asked. I was hoping she might bring up going to the pictures again.
‘You never know.’ Then Ingrid slipped her arm around Stanley’s waist. ‘Come on, you, let these people get away home.’
Jamesie and I washed the glasses while Hugh counted out Monday’s float and put the rest of the takings into bags. He carried the tray with the float in it and the bags through to Len and stayed in the Cocktail Bar while Len took the money up to the safe. Still Jamesie and I washed up. Pint glasses with handles, pint glasses without, half-pint glasses ditto, wine glasses, shorts glasses, highball glasses, dimpled glasses and plain. Each bore the prints of the fingers, thumbs and palms that had held them. I felt an almost parental affection, equal parts love and loss.
Barney and Marian said it was time they were making tracks. They were heading round to the Fiesta in Hamilton Street. Marian hadn’t been there for months, though she had used to be friendly with one of the doormen and was sure they could get in free for the last hour. She turned to get her coat, but couldn’t find it. She couldn’t because Barney was holding it for her and there was a moment when she seemed to take this for some sort of wind-up and I thought she was going to stamp on his foot again. But then Barney smiled at her and the moment passed. She climbed down off her seat and allowed him to slip the coat over her arms and shoulders. Her thank you was quiet.
We had locked the street door. Hugh came in the other door as Barney and Marian were going out it, one step ahead of Rita Strong, two steps ahead of Liam, who turned, clicked his heels and gave us a valedictory salute – Comrades! – and then there were just the three of us once more in the Blue Bar.
‘Thank God,’ Hugh said.
He lifted three tumblers from the draining board and half filled each of them with Bell’s.
‘ “Afore ye go”,’ he said. ‘From Len.’
It didn’t even matter that Len had probably specified Bell’s because it was the cheapest brand we sold, the whisky was welcome and to be savoured. We stood for a time drinking, lost in our own thoughts. The television had been switched at some stage to Armpit Theatre, by Jamesie I didn’t doubt. The sound was down, though it hardly mattered. The bedroom scenes were what most people watched it for. Tonight’s play looked promising in the write-ups. Some rich guy seeing some woman he shouldn’t have been; rich guy’s wife plotting revenge; but we had tuned in too late for the sex and all we saw were the recriminations. Some days it seemed we couldn’t even get it vicariously.