Three’s a crowd
Jeremy Clarke
Sharon comes out through the door marked ‘Gents’ wiping her nose on her forearm, her eyes streaming. She spots me through her tears and insinuates herself through the Friday night vertical bingedrinking crowd using a combination of politeness, aggression and outrageous sexual provocation. It’s a peculiar gift of hers, penetrating dense crowds. I’ve just come in and I’m trying to attract the attention of the bar staff. The bar counter is short. We’re like Zulus besieging a mealie bag redoubt at Rorke’s Drift. Normally I’m a recognised face and get preferential treatment, but I haven’t been in for three months and the barmaids are new.
Sharon’s too discomposed by her streaming eyes and running nose to speak. Burning septum, I guess. ‘Sorry, Jerry,’ she says. She’s wearing coloured contact lenses that make her irises look purple. It’s the android pleasure-unit look. Purple irises also present the lads with the perfect introduction opportunity. Even the most witless can look into her eyes and say, ‘Those are never real, darling,’ thereby distinguishing themselves as chaps of discernment and wit.
She’s still snuffling and grimacing and wiping her nose with the back of her hand when a possessive hand tattooed with a flying swallow appears around her surreally slender waist. It belongs to a big skinhead, six foot two or three, hard as Newgate’s knocker. He rests his lips on Sharon’s bare shoulder and runs them along as far as the nape of her neck, as if he’s playing a gentle melody on a flute. A mad glint in his eye, flashed mid-solo, warns me that he has attained that liberated state of mind where neither de jure nor de facto authority carries any weight. I raise my eyebrows interrogatively at Sharon. She shrugs helplessly.
Turning to flutter a 20 at a passing barmaid, I knock over a tall glass — white wine and soda with ice, slice and a straw with an elbow. The wine, soda, ice, slice and straw fly out as if projected from the mouth of a cannon and hit the barmaid in the lower legs, stopping her in her tracks. She looks down and shrieks. Quickly on the spot to adjudicate and administer justice is Mr Punch the landlord. He was the victim of a violent assault over the New Year period, which took the wind out of his sails for a few weeks afterwards, apparently. A pair of customers took exception, apparently, to an adjudication of his that went against them, and they gave him a good kicking. Happily, he’s regained his old cheerfulness and I get my customary greeting from him of ‘You’re barred.’ ‘Worry line?’ I say, pointing to the threeinch-long vertical scar on his forehead.
While he’s there, I order drinks. I turn to ask Sharon what she wants. The skinhead’s gone and she’s bawling in Trev’s ear. Trev’s come in with his new girlfriend, Vanda, who’s standing on the other side of him. Vanda drives down from Essex at weekends in something big and German to see Trev. Sharon is insanely jealous of Vanda because she (Sharon) wants to have Trev’s babies. But Trev, who lived with Sharon for ten years, says he wants to have babies with a woman who ‘bigs him up’, rather than one who ‘slags him off all the time’. A bloke like him who can’t read or write needs all the encouragement he can get in life, he says. It’s a plaintive saying of his.
Trev says something back to Sharon and she hauls back and toe-punts him in the shin, and Trev’s bending down clutching his leg and groaning like a wounded buffalo. Then he’s rolling up his trouser leg to inspect the damage. His bending over like that creates a bit of extra space at the bar. Sharon rests her glass on his broad back, as if it’s a table, and seeing Vanda on the other side gives her the sweetest hello. And Vanda, another peroxide blonde, and no slouch herself when the daggers are out, gives her an even sweeter hello back.
It was Trev’s birthday on Wednesday. Sharon bought him a new shirt, took him out for a pizza and drove him to his midweek skittles match. In case Trev hadn’t mentioned any of this to Vanda, Sharon shouts across Trev’s back to Vanda what a lovely pizza she and Trev had shared on Wednesday before Trev went to skittles. And wasn’t it a pity the new shirt was a bit tight in the armpits, restricting Trev’s bowling action. And Vanda shouts back sweetly how odd because Trev told her on the phone he’d had a quiet night in.
I’m about halfway to the Gents when I hear a glass break and then an unidentifiable crash, which, it turns out, is the sound of a full ice bucket making contact with Trev’s bowed head. I notice the clock on the wall. I’ve been in the pub three minutes.
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