uncovering oneself (2)

I spent so much of my life not fitting in I fitted in best with those that didn’t. The Atlantis lounge and bar was a two-storey building that had been built as an end-stop onto the curve of tenement buildings that ran down Kilbowie Road. Its customers were largely drawn from workers in the Singers’ Sewing Machine factory. The factory closed. The tenements were knocked down. The Atlantis depreciated into a big cabin with a leaky roof and linoleum flooring that stunk of dampness, and the spectre of fag smoke, particularly near the men’s toilets.  I hooked up with Sammy Small Talk in the downstairs bar. That was his AA name. We were all anonymous, apart from the people we knew.

‘I’m aff it.’ He was hunched over the bar and stood so still, although another few regulars were moping about near the pool table, he seemed alone. A slant smile crooked his mouth as he nodded towards a half pint of lager perched on the bar with a mouthful out of it, which had lost its fizz. ‘Whit about you?’ He stuck his chest out. ‘You still aff it?’

Cammy, the barman, bald apart from a tickle of hair round his ears, walked round the counter and stood waiting in front of us.

‘Nah, I’m no’ aff it. Got a bit of good news. My girlfriend’s pregnant. Going to be a da.’  Catching Cammy’s eye I ordered a lager. ‘I’d get you one,’ I turned back to face Sammy, ‘but I’m pratted’. 

‘Don’t worry about that son. I’m flush. Got a bit of good news myself. That back money from the DSS, cause of my silicosis.’ He coughed, thumping his chest and patted the side pocket of his flannels, a small man made tall by money. Head up like a rooster, ‘give the boy a double voddie,’ he commanded Cammy, ‘and a double Bells for me’. He licked his lips, pushing the glass of lager along the bar. ‘I can’t stand that pishwater,’ he confided in me, ‘that’s why I drink it’. 

He downed his first in a oner. His eyes sparkling like the lights on the faraway fruit machine. I did my best to keep up with him. Our arms sloped together and heads almost touched as the jukebox changed tunes and anthems. At one point a woman with dyed blonde hair came into the bar, which caused more of a stir than the shouting, pushing and shoving at the pool table over a misplaced shot. Sammy’s voice droned on like a Wellington bomber on reconnaissance, his eyes flickered and shut. I caught him before he fell off the bar stool and propped him up on one of the grey leather seats bandaged with strips of red masking tape facing the bar.

‘You cannae leave him lying there.’ Cammy was holding a dishrag, but it was difficult to see where he’d start cleaning and when he’d finish.

‘I need to go to the toilet. Don’t I?’ My speech was slurred and he turned away. I slipped out of the downstairs bar and went to the bar upstairs. I still had a fiver on me.

          The upstairs bar was full of empty booths, rain pattering off the long windows overlooking the play of traffic signals and traffic. Lights dimmed, and the presence of a barmaid behind the serving hatch with the glow of the gantry behind her, made the place seem even emptier.

          ‘A pint of lager Carol.’

 She was a barely five-feet tall in her heels, and in the few years that I’d known her ballooned to the size of a circus tent. I stuck the fiver on the counter as I watched her pouring it. Like any other barmaids she had her favourites. Despite no other customers in the lounge I wasn’t one of them. She handed me my change, turned her back on me and fiddled with the optic for a desiccated looking bottle of Malibu rum.

Sipping at my pint, I didn’t know whether to stand at the bar or sit in the complimentary gloom.  I wasn’t alone long. Jammie Curly shoulder swaggered through the door, coming from the directions of the upstair toilets. I glanced over at the furthest away booth in the corner to check whether it was a hole in the darkness in which to hide.

‘I heard you’re going to be a da,’ Jammie said, slapping me on the back. ‘Whit you wantin’? Anythin’ you want.’ He signalled to Carol with a nod of his head that she should serve me. He clawed at the inside pocket of his denims and brought out a slew of notes splashing them onto the counter.

‘Half pint of lager,’ I said.

‘Fair enough,’ said Jammie. ‘Half pint for me too.’ He left enough on the bar to pay for the drinks and slipped his money away. Different pocket. Same old trick.

We stood beside each other at the bar, like two people at the same bus stop. Friendship was a foreign country for the Curly’s. I’d went to school with Jammie, but there was a Curly in every school year. Twenty boys, with soft baby curls that hardened and retreated into skull-like faces. They had blood relations and that was it, with plenty of blood between them.

I placed my empty glass carefully on the bar. ‘I’d get you one, but I’ve only got two quid left.’  With a sigh, I framed my face as if I was sorry to be leaving, and turned to go.

He grabbed at my arm. ‘You don’t have to go mate. I’ve got plenty of dough.’ His squinty dark eyes peered at me as if he didn’t recognise me. ‘I can lend you a few quid. You’ll be wanting to celebrate.’

‘Carol,’ he said. ‘Give him another half of lager.’

A man and woman stumbled into the lounge, but seeing us standing at the bar about turned and made their way back downstairs.

‘Much you wantin’?’ Ten and twenty pound notes were back in his hand and he flashed them to me like a winning card trick.

‘Nothing.’ I held my hand up like a traffic cop.   

‘C’mon. Take a tenner.’ He peeled one off and slipped it into the inside pocket of my Wrangler jacket. ‘Give me twenty five quid back in a couple of days and if you don’t pay me by Saturday that doubles to fifty quid. Can’t say any fairer than that.’

Carol put the half pint of lager in front of me. I downed in a oner. He was watching me, waiting. I pulled the tenner out of my jacket and held it out for him to take back. ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it a miss. At those rates I’d be better borrowing fifty quid to pay back the tenner I owed you.’

‘Think you’re a funny cunt and you can get away with it because your stepda is a High Court nob.’ His sunken eyes stared out of his skull. His hand shot out and grabbed my hair and smashed my face against the bar. I felt his boot kicking into my body and face.

It was quiet as snowfall and when I opened my eyes there was a blur of faces standing over me.

‘He was lucky, he didn’t chib him,’ a man with a pixie haircut said.

Somebody propped me up against the counter.  Carol was looking up at me from the other side of the bar-hatch.  I reached into my jacket pocket hoping to find a hanky to clean myself up with and pulled out five tenners.     

‘Better give me a double voddie then,’ I said to Carol. I felt at my lips and mouth to check whether teeth were missing.

‘Can’t serve you in here, because you’re bleeding all over the bar.’ A drop of blood dripped off my chin to prove her point. ‘This is the lounge. If you’re going to get into that state you’ll need to drink in the public bar.’