Ex files
Jeremy Clarke
The only comfortable place to sit in my local pub is at this one particular table that is closeted on three sides by highbacked pine pews. Last Saturday lunchtime, when I popped in for a quick one, this cosy nook was bathed in winter sunshine. Trevor was there with his feet under the table, his right arm wrapped tightly around a girl of about 18 — not bad going, I reckon, for an overweight, balding 46-year-old. He was serious about this one because instead of the lascivious smirk one normally expects from Trev when he’s pulled a child, he was gazing with apparent sincerity into her eyes.
Next to these lovebirds was a calm, handsome bloke they call God Boy, who has become so bored by faithless sex — the only kind of which he is aware — that he’s taken a sabbatical, devoting all his spare time to an internet gaming site. And next to God Boy was Tom, whom I hadn’t seen since I spent the evening with him on a pub crawl in the trawler port of Brixham, during the course of which his jaw was broken.
I got to know Tom, God Boy and Trevor through Sharon. Trevor lived with her for nine years, then I took on the heavy lifting for a while, then God Boy had her for a bit, then Tom took over. The four of us could be said to be a sort of Sharon’s ex-serviceman’s Tom is one of those little blokes that God makes small to limit the damage to the environment. When Tom first started drinking in the pub, the unofficial bouncer, a punchy old hippie with a beer gut, went up to him and started prodding him in the chest about some imagined slight. Tom stood his ground then nutted him. I had a good view of it because I was talking to Tom at the time. The head-butt was so perfectly timed and executed, it was a thing of exquisite beauty, and it propelled the bouncer into early retirement.
After Sharon had exhausted Tom’s possibilities and handed him his P45, he went out with Felicity. For a while this relation ship seemed to be going somewhere. I saw them every week in July and August because they’d call at the house to borrow my tent, then they’d trot down to the nudist beach with it and spend the weekend there. But Felicity became jealous about the way Tom hugged me on the doorstep. They had terrific rows about it down on the nudist beach, apparently. Felicity’s jealousy then burgeoned into an obsession that Tom and I were having an affair behind her back. The rows went from bad to worse until one night she bashed him over the head with the breadboard as Tom lay sleeping in bed.
I knew about the breadboard incident because, when we were setting out for Brixham the night his jaw got broken, I’d asked him why he had a bandage wrapped around his head. But I only heard later on that I was somehow involved.
Tom gave me his customary loving hug and asked me how I was with some urgency, as if his wellbeing depended on a positive answer. I laid my shopping bags on the floor and sat down beside him. Was his jaw still wired up, I asked? He hooked his little fingers into the corners of his mouth and pulled, revealing business-like metal bands stretched across his teeth. A fortnight to go, he said, through clenched teeth. Then he showed me a video on his mobile phone of his latest girlfriend taking off all her clothes.
I was about to ask him why Felicity was so jealous of me, when Sharon, wearing her sex-robot turquoise-coloured contact lenses and a new leather jacket, came in to the bar and sat down at our table. Nobody has seen Sharon for months. She’s been living in Leeds with a Lebanese surveyor who keeps her on a tight leash. Monitors her phone and so forth. She was changed, you could see it immediately. She was thinner for one thing, and more diffident — nervous even. We sat there gaping at her. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello, then?’ she said, head down, rummaging in her bag.
‘And should we know you?’ demanded Trevor.
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