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Jeremy Clarke
Q baron's latest, Mickey, is so happy L./about the way things are going since Sharon accosted him in the pub and asked him how he broke his nose, he keeps on hugging me. He hugs me when he sees me and when I take my leave of him. If I tell a joke he hugs me. Sometimes, in the pub, I get a hug from him out of the blue simply because he's so happy. And if I'm staying round at Sharon's, he'll leave her bed in the morning to get in bed with me and give me a cuddle to wake me up. He can't work out exactly what my connection to Sharon is, but it doesn't stop him clasping me to his bony breast. And all we members of the Sharon's ex-boyfriends club (who, by the way, are talking about moving to larger premises) are agreed that Mickey is the nicest bloke she's had so far this year.
The other evening he and I were walking together up the high street on our way to the King Bill. We were meeting Sharon in the King Bill, then the three of us were going to a country pub for a meal to celebrate his court-awarded compensation coming through. (Last year Mickey's jaw was broken in five places after it had come into contact with the pavement after a scuffle outside a pub.) I was telling him the one about the brothel, the man with only 50 pence and the chicken. My narrative gripped him so much he'd stopped me and given me a cuddle even before I'd got to the punch line.
On the last occasion Mickey and I walked up the high street together, he drew my attention to a small mirror fixed at head height to the wall of a barber's shop called Beau Locks. He'd put that there, he said. He'd noticed that Sharon regularly touched up her lipstick in front of Beau Locks's window before going into the King Bill three doors further up. So he'd fastened a mirror to the wall for her to use, as a token of his love, using industrialstrength adhesive.
Sharon had been so grateful for the mirror, he told me as we walked up the street, that she'd allowed him to kiss her as they made love. But as we reached Beau Locks and looked for the mirror, we saw it was gone. We examined the wall together. The mirror had been ripped down, taking an equivalent area of paint and rendering with it. Mickey became uncharacteristically depressed about it, mainly, he said, because Sharon hadn't mentioned to him that the mirror had gone. To Mickey such tactfulness was further proof — if further proof were needed — of Sharon's essential sweetness.
His first idea was to borrow a JCB from work, demolish the hairdresser's, take away the rubble, grass over the plot and reerect the mirror on a creosoted oak post. I pointed out the likely sanctions that society would impose against him if he did that. Moved by my concern for his welfare he hugged me, then thought again. His more sensible revised plan was to make good the rendering and reintroduce the mirror to the wall. In the King Bill, Sharon greeted us with a fatuous squint. She hadn't mentioned to Mickey anything about the mirror being gone, she said, in case he did anything 'controversial'.
I drove us out to the restaurant because I wanted to show off the 1987 Vauxhall Cavalier I bought from the car auction. Sharon and I had the mussels, Mickey had the deep-fried North Sea cod and French fries. We drank rather a lot of wine. Five bottles between us, I thought; Sharon said four. (Mickey had no idea.) The waiter thought five and showed Sharon the little five-bar gate he'd drawn in his note pad to prove it. Sharon maintained it was four and — sadly all too typical of her, this — asked the waiter whether he was calling her a liar. The waiter took an instant dislike to her and said he was, and that he could think of much else to call her besides. Eyeball to eyeball with the waiter, Sharon ordered Mickey to defend her honour. We looked round for Mickey, who when roused is a sort of human torpedo. But Mickey was nowhere to be seen.
Mickey didn't turn up till the early hours of the following morning, having walked the seven miles back from the pub. I opened the front door; he stepped across the threshold and hugged me. While Sharon was arguing with the waiter, Mickey said, he'd gone to the lavatory, fallen asleep, and been discovered and woken up at closing time. They'd made him pay the bill. 'How many bottles of wine did you pay for?' said Sharon, quick as a flash. 'Five,' said Mickey.
And it was that single word, I'm sorry to say, that signalled the beginning of the end.
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