Piling up the money
Jeremy Clarke
Last week I borrowed a fiver from the Big Issue seller. I only asked for two quid, but he lent me a fiver on condition he had it back by Saturday. He's always good for a couple of quid, is our Big Issue bloke. He has a natural flair for selling his magazines and shifts more than any other Big Issue seller in the entire region, or so it says in this week's local paper. He's even won an award, it says, which ought to look good on his CV. So he's not short of a bob or two.
I'm not really skint like other people are skint, I should say right away. I could probably bowl into a bank and they'd offer me a credit card and a ten-grand loan just for starters. Probably. And unlike other people who are broke, it is entirely my own fault. Profligacy has got me in this position. Hut it's been six years since I've had no money and I have to say it's kind of refreshing.
When I was a manual labourer, which has been most of my working life to date, I never had any money to speak of. I certainly never bothered looking in shop windows. Items like cameras, CD players and electric shavers were other people's luxury perquisites, not mine. Then I was admitted to the bourgeoisie and you should see all the useless crap I've bought since.
Buying things has become like an illness. Superfluous kitchen gadgets, musical instruments, equipment for making coloured candles, vitamin-enriched face moisturising cream — I'll never use any of it. Just before Christmas I bought a solarpowered garden fountain and I haven't even got a garden. And when I look at the
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telly and see Malawians eating grass, and not very nutritious-looking grass at that, it makes me think I shouldn't have money, really. It makes a monkey out of me.
What I've missed lately, though, is going into a pub, buying one for me and one for the barman, and being able to booze away, if so inclined, without worrying about the financial implications. I tend to drink less for one thing if I have money. It was because I'd been over a week without a beer that on an impulse I touched our entrepreneurial Big Issue seller.
I took my E5 to the nearest pub, one popular with tourists rather than locals. I got one or two strange looks as I walked in because I've shaved my head again and I was wearing a blue denim inmate's jacket I'd bought for £1.50 from the Dartmoor Prison shop. I ordered a pint of the cheapest.
I don't think I have ever in my entire life enjoyed a pint of bitter so much. I relished every mouthful, which wrought a greater and more sudden alteration in my consciousness than if it had been liquid mescaline. It takes me like that sometimes. People around me were vying with each other to get the barman to accept the £20 notes they were waving at him. 'Here let me get these, Tim.' No honestly, Julian, my shout. No no, don't be silly!'
They say you know you are poor when you know exactly how much money you have in your pocket. Well, I now had £3.08. I didn't check my loose change surreptitiously, sliding it half out of my pocket on my palm and glancing down at it. I laid the coins on the bar and arranged them into neat little denominational piles so that I could keep a close eye on expenditure. I treated my glass of beer with unwonted reverence, too. I set it carefully in front of me, about a foot away, with a beer mat for a pedestal and my little piles of coins forming a kind of altar-rail. Normally overly familiar with pub glasses, I treated this one like a first date, touching it rarely and with a sense of awe.
The second pint was if anything better than the first. Catching my mood, the barman, whose emotional intelligence must have been highly developed, or who perhaps thought I was on the run, set the brimming glass before me with something approaching reverence. After I'd finished that one, this tourist in an Arran sweater said to me, 'You really enjoyed that, didn't you? I did, I said. It had been a long time, I said.
I was down to £1.18. Enough for one more half. I watched intently as the barman poured it, willing him to go at least up to the bulge in the glass. This intelligent man went further. He left the tap on until the beer was an inch from the top. His generosity humbled me.
I was only in the pub for half an hour. But when I knocked our Big Issue's seller's baseball cap off as I passed him on the way home, I was flying.
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