Out of step
Jeremy Clarke The first day of June. A golden evening. I've been shopping and bought myself a pair of flip-flops. Fifty quid for two footprint shapes of recycled rubber, two straps and two designer labels. Driving home, I decide to call in at the pub for one. I ring up my boy and let him know. Just the one, I tell him, almost convinced of it myself actually. Yeah, right, he says.
Sharon's brother's in the beer garden with a work colleague and his girlfriend. I'm introduced. The work colleague is from Birmingham. Says he's trying to make a fresh start. Nice lad. Seems shriven by catastrophe. His girlfriend is 17, visibly pregnant and smoking. She works at the pharmacy. She's wearing a white tabard with an anti-smoking message on the front. She points out the contradiction between it and the roll-up between her fingers and we laugh. Basking in reflected glory, her boyfriend says that it is her consistent lack of seriousness that he admires most about her. I hold up a foot and ask them what they think of my new flip-flops.
They nod judiciously. The trouble is, I've never tried wearing flip-flops before and I can barely walk in them. My feet are narrow and lack that prehensile muscular arch necessary for keeping flip-flops on when moving at speed or turning sharply. On my first voyage to the gents, I lose one, and then both. Also, I've strained a muscle in my back from lifting one end of a pool table during the week to shake out a trapped red ball. So instead of making me look young, active and carefree, they make me look merely shambolic.
We have a few drinks here, then a few more in a pub halfway up the High Street, then a few more somewhere else. By midnight I'm down to one flip-flop. I've run out of cash and the cash machine is being petty about a small thing like no funds. My feet are frozen. I can't remember where I parked the car.
Fortunately, along comes my friend Ben, bending under the weight of two cases of cider, accompanied by one of those chavtype youths one always sees in the shopping district, who seem to spend the whole of their day in public, like the ancient Athenians.
Ben took on the heavy lifting of being Sharon's official boyfriend after she'd finished with me. He comes from a close-knit crab-fishing community renowned from Plymouth to Poole for its forceful women, and he's broken nearly every major bone in his body, but even he'd never experienced anyone like her, he'll tell you. They're going back to the chav's place to drink the cider, explains Ben, and we are welcome to join them. The chav looks down at my poor frozen feet, looks at me, appears to arrive at a decision not to punch me in the face by the slenderest of margins, and off we go. Or rather, off they go, with me hobbling after them.
The very best we can hope for, I assume, is that we're going back to the bail hostel where the most quintessential of the town's chavs are said to sometimes roost for a few hours during the night. But instead he leads us back to a small and tidy first-floor flat in a converted Victorian workhouse, where his girlfriend is presiding with remarkable energy over a small drinks party. As soon as I ease myself down into a space on the small sofa, she leaps into the air, curls herself into a ball, like a kid doing a 'bomb' in the public baths, and lands spine first against my ear. 'You're pulled!' she says.
A few hours later I wake up on the sofa among snoring chavs. It's light. I can feel that my ear and right eyelid are swollen. I get up, let myself out and go and look for my car. It's in a car park off the High Street called the Market Square Car Park. There's a parking ticket on it and a weekly market in full swing going on around it. The market stalls are pitched right up against it. I can't move an inch. I'm ten miles from home and I'm going to have to wait till the late afternoon now, when the market packs up, to leave. I unwrap the parking ticket. A hundred pounds. The stallholders are fuming about the car taking up so much limited space. I can hear them grumbling to one another. One of them, this little suntanned bloke, not much more than five foot tall, comes marching up and says all feisty-like, 'I'm not happy!'
Well, nor am I. I look him up and down.
'No? So which one are you then?' I say.
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