‘Oh, but you’ll tire of that. If you’re a committed sort.’ This barman likes to get up on his high horse.
‘We can stay here as long as we like, can’t we? And we’re free to go back to Earth any time,’ Emi says, fiddling with her paper napkin.
‘Technically, I suppose. Do you want to go back?’
‘No, no,’ she shakes her head, ‘I’ve only been here half a month.’
‘Wait!’ I turn to her. ‘Didn’t you say it was half a year, before?’
‘I never said that.’ She pauses a moment and adds, more sweetly, ‘You must’ve just misheard.’
One wonders. I mean, I’ve been here around a fortnight, and seeing as she was here before me…
‘A beer, perhaps?’
‘Oh, forgot to order. Yes,’ I reply to the barman, ‘in a small glass, please.’
He places a delicate fluted glass on the counter, and then a freshly opened bottle. Emi glares as he performs this routine. She’s always like this when I drink.
‘It’s the middle of the day, so… I’ll have something soft,’ she says, slowly.
Emi didn’t win any lottery – she’s here for therapeutic reasons, a change of scenery. Apparently the air on this planet does you good. She says she’s twenty-five years old. I’m not sure what she was doing before coming here.
‘Go pick some music,’ she says quietly, her mind elsewhere.
Stood beside the jukebox, I touch the screen and begin scrolling down through an endless stream of song names and numbers. There are enough records in this thing to fill an entire radio station’s back catalogue. I get sick of sifting through them all, so I just choose three tracks without much thought, and head back to the bar.
‘What did you go for?’ Emi props her elbows on the bar.
‘Some rhythm and blues.’
‘Nice.’
A shrill, tinny voice sings ‘Lucille’ – could be a woman or a young boy. I spend a moment captivated by their strange enunciation, which wraps around the lyrics as if the words were the singer’s own. I take a sip of beer and put my glass down again. Emi glares fiercely at my hands.
‘My mum, she…’ After a pause, she breaks the silence, ‘She’s an alcoholic. Drinks from the morning and right on through. She doesn’t care, as long as she has her sauce. And it’s not about the taste – she says she never even liked it. But being a little tipsy helps take the edge off her pain, she says.’
The barman listens to her words attentively. Well, I suppose he always takes his job seriously. But once Emi started talking, a slight tension seemed to draw across his face.
‘She’s always trying to quit, but she winds up reaching for the bottle again. One time, she went to throw away all the booze she’d stored up. Took me with her, too, all ceremonial. And when we got home, she was so happy – “Now I’ll never drink again!” – all of that. But just two hours later, she was getting restless. “I should’ve kept a little drop,” she’d say. “Just enough for a little nightcap before bed.” And before long she was out buying her bottles again.’ She lets out a long sigh, her brows furrowed, and wipes her palms with a tissue pulled from her sleeve.
‘And?’ I ask, trying to sound as casual as possible, ‘Did she ever do anything to you?’
The colour drains from her face. That seems to have unsettled her.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’ Didn’t I? Well, then, what did I mean?
‘It’s fine, I don’t care. You mean, did she hit me, right? Like some drunken guy on a rampage? No, nothing like that. But when my dad left for work, she’d grab a bottle and a glass and head right back to bed. When she was in a bad mood, she’d be like that all day long. Towards the evening, she’d start thinking about preparing dinner – but it’s dangerous, isn’t it? Cooking when your head’s all over the place – spilling, scalding, dropping knives everywhere. So she’d make something up about feeling unwell and go back to bed again.’
Emi wipes her forehead with the tissue.
‘Shotgun’ plays through the speakers, breaking the silence between the three of us.
‘I wonder why I blurted all that out,’ she whispers between the phrases in the music.
‘Because of this.’ I gesture to the beer before me.
‘Yeah, that’d be it.’
‘I’ll never drink in front of you again.’
‘Oh no, that’s going too far.’
‘But it reminds you of your mother, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah. It’s weird. A little while after I’d arrived here, she started really playing on my mind.’
A door opens and a young barmaid enters the room. The older barman takes off his apron. He only ever works extremely short shifts. I guess it’s enough to keep the place ticking over.
‘What are you up to tonight?’ I change the subject.
The barman begins clearing his things up.
‘I’m going to Friday’s Angels,’ Emi replies, mentioning the name of a kooky nightclub.
‘Oh, great idea! Maybe I’ll come along.’
It’s my kind of place, old-fashioned interior. There’s a thickly carpeted floor, raised in bumps here and there for people to sit. And they don’t just play the charts – you hear some outrageous tunes in there. The other day they started playing some novelty song called ‘Don’t Feel like Doing Anything at All’, and I couldn’t get over it. And there are no kids on the scene.
‘And hey, in that case,’ Emi adds, ‘you might run into Naoshi. He’s always there.’
I feel myself blush. The sound of his name alone sets my heart racing.
‘He’s cute, isn’t he?’ She laughs. ‘Have you spoken to him, at least?’
‘Not yet.’ I shake my head, bashfully.
‘Reckon it’ll take a while to get something going?’
The barman adjusts his scarf and leaves. I stare at my hands, gripping my beer glass.
‘Well, who knows. Things can shift all of a sudden.’
I found him pretty much straight after I arrived on this planet. He’d come to the spaceport to meet some other girl, as it happened. And, oh, the wariness I felt then, and still now – and yes, that’s right. It was wariness, I’m certain. Not excitement.
I’d seen him before, somewhere.
But how?
There’s no way I’d ever forget someone so beautiful. And, actually, rather than having seen him before, it’s like I’ve been involved with him.
‘When I first laid eyes on him, I felt like he’d been someone close to me,’ I say, absent-mindedly, ‘but I also felt this sense of coldness towards my own self; a distance from the version of “me” that had been close to him. It’s a weird way of putting it, I know.’
‘Hey, how old are you?’ Emi sips her lemonade.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Right. So phrases like “I wanna live again” won’t have crossed your lips yet. She used to say that all the time at one point, my mum. “I wanna live again”.’
‘That was a song, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, you can find a song for anything, you know. There’s even a song that goes, “This isn’t real love, it’s just a song”.’
Emi grows silent and starts picking at the peanuts set out by the barmaid.
‘When did your mum say that?’
‘When she was thirty-six. It was a dreadful age for her. All she wanted was to hit reset and start everything over again from twenty-five.’
‘Twenty-five? Why so specific?’
‘That’s how old she was when she got married.’
We fall silent again.
At some point the barman comes back. Music continues playing from the jukebox. Next up is ‘Love’s End Does You Bad’.
‘I’m sorry. I’m all over the place at the moment,’ Emi says, after a pause, ‘I keep remembering all these things from the past, without meaning to. And these memories – they’re so vivid. This stuff about my mum, I mean, it’s as though I went through her suffering myself.’