Low life
Holding sway
Jeremy Clarke
Strolling homewards after the gym, famished, dehydrated, trembling, I bumped into Sharon in the street again. I was thinking about her at the time, and for an instant I thought she was a visual hallucination. She was tipsy and hiccuping. One of her arms was deep in a giant-sized bag of Kettle's crisps. (Sharon keeps herself thin with a diet of Tic-Tacs and crisps.) 'Come and have a drink,' she said.
She'd been in the pub for three hours already with her younger brother and some of his rugby mates. (She'd popped out to buy the crisps.) You could tell straight away that Sharon was in one of her dangerous moods.
I hadn't been to the King Bill with her before. Previously, it wasn't allowed. The King Bill is her pub, her personal space. If she was there, I had to keep away. I can see why now. She was swaying around the place like she owned it. She knew everyone and everyone knew her and paid homage to her. She is the queen of the King Bill.
I was amazed. The King Bill has a possibly undeserved reputation among the respectable folk of this town for being a den of vice and occasional violence. Whenever I've been in there, having checked beforehand that Sharon was somewhere else, I've kept my head down. If I'd known I'd been going out with the queen of the King Bill, however, I'd have acted with more confidence in there. Sharon handed me a pint as though dispensing charity to the less fortunate. 'It's so over between you and me,' she said.
The pub was holding an open mike talent night as part of the Jubilee celebrations. It was packed. I stood at the bar with her brother, who was too hammered to speak. Sharon kept disappearing, reappearing to make trouble, then disappearing again. She's like that. The first bit of trouble she caused was when she downed my neigh
bour's pint in one, then went away again before he'd noticed it had gone. When he did notice, he immediately blamed me because I was nearest. He didn't actually blame me to my face. He called the manager over and complained to him. The manager, a genial soul, was willing to make light of it until Sharon reappeared and started to abuse the man for making a false accusation. Her language was so vituperative the young man quailed before the onslaught then admitted he might have been mistaken. He was sorry, he said. It wasn't enough for him to apologise to her, said Sharon. He must apologise to me and to her brother as well. He did so, abjectly. 'Call that an apology,' said Sharon contemptuously to the manager. Then she was off, unsteadily, on her travels again.
A German hippy got up and sang about how fine it would be if everyone lived together in peace and harmony. Sharon returned to the bar and began heckling him. 'There's nothing wrong with having ideals,' said a man wearing open-toed sandals, reasonably enough. 'And your set of ideals are roughly along the same lines as his set of ideals, aren't they?' she sneered. 'Actually, yes,' he admitted, 'they are.'
Sharon went away again then reappeared with a pint glass full of ice cubes. She invited her brother and me to help her bombard the German. Sharon is a sucker for utopian ideals, but that night her utopian ideals did not accord with anyone else's. Her brother was way off target. But Sharon and I peppered the singer and his acoustic guitar with a hail of ice cubes until the singer's friend ran over and grabbed me by the throat. Order was restored, in spite of Sharon's best efforts to inflame the situation, after a spirited intervention by the now less than genial manager.
A paralytic drunk on harmonica went down very well next, and I almost managed a head-stand, I remember. I think it was during 'Stand By Your Man', sung by a female country and western duo, that Sharon handed me the pre-rolled singleskin joint. 'Here,' she said aggressively. 'Smoke that.'
'I didn't think you could smoke in here,' I said.
Holding my eyes with her unfocused ones, she said, 'It's fine. Trust me.' Well, she knew the pub better than I did, I thought, and lit up. Relishing the liberty of it, I smoked the joint as I imagined Noel Coward might have smoked it. I held it ostentatiously between my middle finger and thumb and blew the smoke over my neighbours. After a while I found myself face to face with the manager again and coolly blew smoke over him too. He threw me out. I was barred, he said, as he showed me the door.
I went quietly. But where was Sharon while I was being chucked out? Nowhere. Either she hadn't noticed, or, more likely, she'd got me chucked out on purpose. She's like that.
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