Huts59

Sometimes you do the right thing, by doing the wrong thing. I squeezed in between Charlie Porter and Gillian Ambrose, one bum cheek plonked down on a bit of seat, the other, like the moon man, Neil Armstrong, trying to find a bit of space. Nobody was for moving. And I wasn’t for going. Charlie Porter tried to make small talk, but it petered out, with me sitting between them, drinking my pint of lager, like one of those novelty gift-drinking birds, with the pint glass going up and my big beak poking in and out of the glass, and impassively into their faces and personal business. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t remember what. In some kind of reflex action I just yawned the whole way through their conversation.

Charlie made the first move. He nodded Gillian away from me and up to the squelchy Bermuda triangle floor tiles, between the bar and the pool table, called the dance floor that only a drunk could dance on. I moved an inch and then another and sucked my stomach in and held onto the table as Gillian squeezed by me. I sat down again and spread my arms comfortably out on the back of the seat, sitting, as if I was in a four poster bed and lifting one of Charlie’s fags to smoke, because I was all out.

I watched them through the smoke and through my fingers, smirking to myself. Even Hendrix only looked as if he was dancing to Foxy Lady because his guitar strap kept pulling him down and he didn’t want to let go of any guitar that still had some music in it, and he couldn’t really remember the words, but it didn’t really matter because he was that out of his face. Charlie and Gillian had the decibels of Hendrix bounced off them by the jukebox, but they might as well have put a bandana on their own eyes and everyone else in the pub, as they hobbled together like two white men with club feet.

Neither of them was talking when they got back to their seat. And neither was I.

‘That’s the last orders,’ shouted old Isa.

‘You want anything?’ said Charlie Porter to Gillian, as the stampede started and the pub tilted on its axis, with the weight of people moving towards the bar.

‘I’ll have a vodka and coke,’ said Gillian in her cute little Brummie accent as she squeezed in beside me and patted me nonpossessively on the knee and said something else, but I couldn’t hear her.

Charlie Porter looked at her and looked at me. ‘What you want to drink?’ he finally asked.

I held my almost empty glass up, tilting it like the equivalent of a question mark.

I was going to say something. And Gillian was saying something at the same time. So that we half turned and smiled at each other. I could feel the heat off her leg, pressed in tight against mine, closer and more palpable than when we’d lain beside each other in bed. I could almost touch it and wash it down with the fragrance of her. I wanted to say all of those things and none of those things, when my lips found hers.

I grasped at her like a drowning man, with my eyes shut, as we fell into each other, and there was no one else in the world, just us. My lips were almost sore and I was out of breath. When I opened my eyes Charlie Porter was standing in front of us with a triangle of two big drinks and one small drink, in his hand. But he’d nowhere to put them. He was trying to nudge some drinks along to make space on the table, but it was too cluttered, like an algebra problem, his hands just couldn’t work out. I put some empties on the floor, underneath the table.

‘Thanks,’ said Charlie, grudgingly, taking a drink out of his pint.

‘Cheers,’ I said, taking the other pint and moving the vodka and coke over beside Gillian.

‘That’s your last order,’ rattled out old Isa, killing the jukebox stone dead, with the switch of her finger, and suddenly putting all the lights on, so that we were startled, like bats hitting daylight. ‘Do your talking while your walking,’ ordered Isa, as she began to pick up empties, and like a prophet of doom, looked up to see if anyone was listening to the bad news and threat of escalating punishments in the hereafters.

I edged my hand around behind Gillian, eventually finding the courage to touch her on the shoulder. She leaned into me. The warmth of her made me feel complete and left poor Charlie standing out in the cold. He moved slowly, like an iceberg breaking away, closer to the bar, and further away from the foul mouthed wrath of Isa.

‘Are we going?’ I said.

‘Going where?’ said Gillian, teasing me, her toes tapping against mine, suggesting a different tune.

‘I dunno, we could go back to mine.’ I couldn’t help smiling and giving it away.

‘That’d be good,’ she said, smiling almost as much as me. She pulled at my hair and kissed me briefly, her tongue, speaking of other things. ‘I need to get a fag. And a pee,’ she said laughing.

‘Out,’ said old Isa, standing before out table like a sergeant in the Military Police.

But Gillian was already up and going.

‘There’s still some in that,’ I said to Isa indignantly, as she lifted Gillian’s untouched drink.

‘Tough,’ said Isa, lifting it onto a pyramid of orphan drinks.

‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ I shouted to Gillian’s back.

‘Too right, you will,’ said Isa, in reply.

I was going to say something, but thought better of it. I had to finish my pint sharpish.