Marie and T-Bone and a very blond, very glamorous, and very young woman, also American, finally turn up around quarter to ten, so there’s only forty-five minutes of drinking time left. I ask them what they want to drink, but Marie doesn’t know, and comes up to the bar with me to have a look at what they’ve got.
“I see what you mean about T-Bone’s sex life,” I say as we’re waiting.
She raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Isn’t she something else? And you know what? That’s the ugliest woman he’s ever dated.”
“I’m glad you could come.”
“The pleasure is ours. Who are those guys?”
“Dan and Steve. I’ve known them for years. They’re a bit dull, I’m afraid, but I have to see them sometimes.”
“Duck noires, right?”
“Sorry?”
“I call ’em duck noires. Sort of a mixture of lame duck and bête noire. People you don’t want to see but kinda feel you should.”
Duck noires. Bang on. And I had to fucking beg mine, pay mine, to come out for a drink on my birthday.
I never think these things through, ever. “Happy birthday, Rob,” says Steve when I put his drink down in front of him. Marie attempts to give me a look, of surprise, I would guess, but also of deepest sympathy and bottomless understanding, but I won’t return it.
It’s a pretty bad evening. When I was a kid, my granny used to spend Boxing Day afternoon with a friend’s granny; my mum and dad would drink with Adrian’s mum and dad, and I’d play with Adrian, and the two old codgers would sit in front of the TV exchanging pleasantries. The catch was that they were both deaf, but it didn’t really matter: they were happy enough with their version of a conversation, which had the same gaps and nods and smiles as everyone else’s conversation, but none of the connections. I haven’t thought about that for years, but I remember it tonight.
Steve annoys me throughout: he has this trick of waiting until the conversation is in full flow, and then muttering something in my ear when I’m attempting either to talk or to listen to somebody else. So I can either ignore him and appear rude, or answer him, involve everyone else in what I’m saying, and change their direction entirely. And once he’s got everyone talking about soul, or Star Trek (he goes to conventions and things), or great bitters of the north of England (he goes to conventions and things), subjects nobody else knows anything about, we go through the whole process all over again. Dan yawns a lot, Marie is patient, T-Bone is tetchy, and his date, Suzie, is positively appalled. What is she doing in a grotty pub with these guys? She has no idea. Neither have I. Maybe Suzie and I should disappear off somewhere more intimate, and leave these losers to get on with it. I could take you through the whole evening, but you wouldn’t enjoy it much, so I’ll let you off with a dull but entirely representative sample:
MARIE: … just unbelievable, I mean, real animals. I was singing ‘Love Hurts’ and this guy shouted out, “Not the way I do it, baby,” and then he was sick all the way down his T-shirt, and he didn’t move a muscle. Just stood there shouting at the stage and laughing with his buddies.You were there, weren’t you, T-Bone?
T-BONE: I guess.
MARIE: T-Bone dreams of fans as suave as that, don’t you? The places he plays, you have to … [5]
STEVE:They’ve brought The Baron out on video now, you know. Six episodes. D’you remember the theme music?
ME: No. I don’t.Sorry, Marie, I missed that. You have to do what?
MARIE: I was saying, this place that T-Bone and me …
STEVE: It was brilliant. Der-der-DER! Der-der-der DER!
DAN: I recognize that. Man in a suitcase?
STEVE: No. The Baron. ‘S’ out on video.
MARIE: The Baron? Who was in that?
DAN: Steve Forrest.
MARIE: I think we used to get that. Was that the one where the guy.
STEVE:D’you ever read Voices from the Shadows? Soul magazine? Brilliant. Steve Davis owns it, you know. The snooker player.
[10]
Etc.
Never again will this combination of people be seated around a table; it just couldn’t possibly happen, and it shows. I thought the numbers would provide a feeling of security and comfort, but they haven’t. I don’t really know any of these people, not even the one I’ve slept with, and for the first time since I split up with Laura, I really feel like slumping onto the floor and bawling my eyes out. I’m homesick.
It’s supposed to be women who allow themselves to become isolated by relationships: they end up seeing more of the guy’s friends, and doing more of the guy’s things (poor Anna, trying to remember who Richard Thompson is, and being shown the error of her Simple Minded ways), and when they’re ditched, or when they ditch, they find they’ve floated too far away from friends they last saw properly three or four years before. And before Laura, that was what life was like for me and my partners too, most of them.
But Laura … I don’t know what happened. I liked her crowd, Liz and the others who used to come down to the Groucho. And for some reason—comparative career success, I guess, and the corresponding postponements that brings—her crowd were more single and more flexible than mine. So for the first time ever I played the woman’s role, and threw my lot in with the person I was seeing. It wasn’t that she didn’t like my friends (not friends like Dick and Barry and Steve and Dan, but proper friends, the sort of people I have allowed myself to lose). It was just that she liked hers more, and wanted me to like them, and I did. I liked them more than I liked my own and, before I knew it (I never knew it, really, until it was too late), my relationship was what gave me my sense of location. And if you lose your sense of location, you get homesick. Stands to reason.
So now what? It feels as though I’ve come to the end of the line. I don’t mean that in the American rock’n’roll suicide sense; I mean it in the English Thomas the Tank Engine sense. I’ve run out of puff, and come to a gentle halt in the middle of nowhere.
“These people are your friends?” Marie asks me the next day when she takes me for a post-birthday crispy bacon and avocado sandwich.
“It’s not that bad. There were only two of them.”
She looks at me to see if I’m joking. When she laughs, it’s clear that I am.
“But it was your birthday.”
“Well. You know.”
“Your birthday. And that’s the best you can do?”
“Say it was your birthday today, and you wanted to go out for a drink tonight. Who would you invite? Dick and Barry? T-Bone? Me? We’re not your bestest friends in the whole world, are we?”
“Come on, Rob. I’m not even in my own country. I’m thousands of miles from home.”
My point exactly.
I watch the couples that come into the shop, and the couples I see in pubs, and on buses, and through windows. Some of them, the ones that talk and touch and laugh and inquire a lot, are obviously new, and they don’t count: like most people, I’m OK at being half of a new couple. It’s the more established, quieter couples, the ones who have started to go through life back-to-back or side-to-side, rather than face-to-face, that interest me.
There’s not much you can decipher in their faces, really. There’s not much that sets them apart from single people; try dividing people you walk past into one of life’s four categories—happily coupled, unhappily coupled, single, and desperate—and you’ll find you won’t be able to do it. Or rather, you could do it, but you would have no confidence in your choices. This seems incredible to me. The most important thing in life, and you can’t tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul mate should look, I don’t know, well but anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similarly desperate people. When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (£1.60 for egg mayonnaise and crispy bacon, and none of us have ever had more than four pieces of crispy bacon in a whole round yet) or anything at all. I will beam beatifically at all times, just from sheer relief.