Z - Den and Joey at The Diner

I have seen the end of the world and it's at the bottom of a
bottle.

"How's that for a first line?" I say.

"I like it," she says. "But where does it go from there?"

"That's what I've got to work out now," I say.

I take a drink from the glass in my right hand and look at her. She's
so beautiful. Not just because of the way she looks, but because she
has faith. And loyalty. She believes in me, that's the awful thing.
It's a terrible burden for me to bear. It's late and it's dark outside
and I'm feeling very drunk all of a sudden. I don't know what the fuck
I'm talking about anymore, but I carry on talking all the same.

"I'd like to be raffish, but I'm too conventional," I say.

"Is that the next line or what you think?" she says.

"I don't know," I say. "Do you think it's a good enough line?"

"I think it's very true of you."

I am five years older than she is. She is five years younger than me.
But we are in love just the same. I order martinis and she strokes the
stems. We are very compatible in that respect. It is martinis this
year, for our last anniversary it was daiquiris, the year before it was
highballs. She has a thing about stroking the glasses. She knows her
wrists look delicate and graceful when she moves them from bottom to
top and back again and I find it hard to take my eyes away from the
motion. We have been together for six years and her wrists still
enthrall me. I sometimes find it hard to believe.

The bar we're in is nearly empty even though it's after eight. It's
Tuesday, our anniversary, and I suppose we have more reason than most
to be in a bar drinking in the week. We've been in here since three and
our conversation has switched to my writing for a while. Sometimes that
happens when we're not talking about anything else.

"Dennis," she says.

"Mmm?"

"When is it going to be finished? Your novel I mean."

"Hard to say."

I feel so helpless sometimes. I have written nearly three hundred pages
and I don't feel like I'm even halfway done. I wish I could predict
when the words will come, but most of the time I don't have a clue. The
other day I was standing at a bus stop and two teenage girls and a boy
started talking about a dead girl, a friend of someone they knew, who
had been found naked and blue down some alley, wrapped up in scraps of
discarded carpet. Now there's a dead girl in my book. There never was
before. How can you put a time limit on something when the unexpected
can always happen?

"You've been writing it for such a long time now," she says, playing
with the lighter in her hand before pulling out a cigarette and
lighting it. "Don't you have any idea?"

"It's not something you can put your finger on as easy as that
sweetheart. These things are hard to gauge."

"I want to read it, that's all."

"And you will," I say, taking a cigarette from her. "I tell you lines
from it and stuff don't I? I let you read everything I do. You're my
fan club."

"I know, but it sometimes feels like you have something that I don't
and I hate that. I wish we could share everything, that's all."

"We do share everything. I told you, when it's finished you'll be the
very first to read it. Didn't I tell you that?"

"Yes."

"Well then it'll be a shared thing, it just takes time that's all. You
know we share everything."

This, in itself, is far from true. We do not share everything. I have
not slept with Joey for nearly seven months. We are currently not
sharing our bodies, although I do love her very much and do not want to
sleep with anyone else. I didn't sleep with her for over a year after
we met, she was only thirteen and I didn't think it was right. But I
loved her from the moment I saw her, and what I saw behind her eyes
when she first looked at me has never gone away. Whenever she looks up
from her glass I can still see it, right now, in this bar.

I know there is no-one else in the world that could give me that look.
I look up for a moment and see a guy standing at the bar with a real
tall, model-type. Straight brown hair down the back of her spine and
the sort of outfit that looks like someone took a few fragments of
shiny material and threw them at her. To anyone else she's a knock-out,
a drool-inducing sex-bomb, yet I know she could never give me that look
and so I don't even give her a second glance. Joey gave me a look that
could floor an elephant. But she was only thirteen and it didn't feel
right.

I say, "The problem is that I get too many ideas all at once. I get
halfway through something and then I start thinking of a million
different stories and then I can't get anything done."

"Maybe you're too creative."

"I wish. I'm sure other people don't have these problems. Like when
I've had no new ideas for the novel, I think I'll write something else,
but I can't decide which idea to work on first."

"You just need to focus. You should write the best idea first."

"How do I know which is the best idea though? I don't know whether to
write the one about the kid who kills his parents for the inheritance
and then ends up locked in a cellar by the pub's crazy landlord, or the
one about the two kids who go travelling and wind up at what they think
is a fruit picking place, but really it's a meat works and the cabins
they keep the workers in have poisoned air conditioning and they kill
them and turn them into sausages."

"Isn't that like the barber of Seville?"

"Sweeney Todd sweetheart."

"Sweeney Todd's sweetheart?" she says, raising an eyebrow.

I laugh. This is one thing she has always been able to make me do with
no effort whatsoever. I worry that I'm becoming too serious, that I
think about things too much. She used to smile all the time and now I
think I don't make her smile enough. She's still this young and breezy
girl but I feel like everything's passed me by already. I feel twice my
age sometimes and it scares me. She's still only a child in many
ways.

She glances over her shoulder to take in the rest of the bar and her
hair flops over her shoulder. The music isn't loud in here so we can
talk well enough without having to scream at each other, but the
Rolling Stones are playing in the background. The bar we are sitting in
is called The Diner and it's set out like an old-style American diner
from films, and we have a booth. I don't know if the owners have ever
been to America and it's authentic or if they just watched a film once
and copied the layout from that.

In the daytime it's a restaurant, but they close most of that down in
the evening and just leave the bar part open. At the weekends the staff
dance on the tables. Tonight they just serve drinks and try not to look
morose. It's only Tuesday and there's a whole week ahead of them. I
wouldn't know what day it was if it wasn't our anniversary.

We decided after the first couple of years that we wouldn't buy
anything for each other, but pool the money together and go out for
drinks instead. We were running out of gift ideas after so many
Valentines and Christmases and birthdays, so our anniversary seemed
like one occasion when presents weren't necessary. Maybe we'll
re-introduce them when we're older

"Where do you get these ideas from?" she says

"I don't know, they just come to me sometimes."

"That's one thing I'll never understand. It's so amazing."

These are the things I wish she wouldn't say. Her faith is frightening
because it is so much stronger than my own and I don't want to let her
down. She thinks that when I finish the book we're going to be rich and
live in a big house and buy things and have kids and be happy and she
won't have to work and support me anymore. That's what she thinks,
because that is what I have told her will happen. I have pretty much
promised that to her.

I don't have the heart to tell her that even when I get around to
finishing the book it could fail to land a publisher or an agent, or,
even if it does, the return may not be that great. But then, I don't
have the heart to tell her a lot of things, especially not now she has
so much optimism for the future.

I can't tell her I'm afraid I might be sterile, or that I don't think
my writing is as good as it needs to be, or the reason I don't get
erections is because I masturbate like a madman so I'm not aroused when
she comes near me because I still see her as a child. Instead I tell
her I'm impotent and she's so understanding it breaks my heart. She
tries so hard, but minutes before she comes back from work or when
she's in the shower and there's a chance she might come out feeling
frisky, I'm jacking off in another room to make myself so black and
blue I won't want to go near her.

I can barely sleep I'm so worried she'll wake up and find me erect. I
have to act as though it's a sore subject. I push her away, I act upset
and she comes back to reassure me again and again and it kills
me.

But we are so much in love that sex isn't important. Of course I hope
it will return at some point, and the time will come when I will see
her and she will be a woman and not that fourteen year old who, the
first ever time, had to go down on her knees so she could get my jeans
off over my legs while I stood there watching. I'm hoping I won't
always see the look on her face when we were in the back of my car and
she dropped teddy bear patterned knickers over the drivers seat.

"Do you want another drink, you're running pretty low," I say.

"Are you going to have another?" she says, exhaling smoke.

"Of course I am, we're celebrating aren't we? I'm not nearly drunk
enough yet."

"I was just thinking, if you didn't drink too much."

"You can never drink too much."

"But you said it didn't help."

"Nothing helps," I say, looking down, turning my cigarette around and
shaping the ash in the ashtray.

"I'm sorry baby, I didn't mean to upset you."

I call over one of the waitresses and order two more martinis. I don't
know why we chose martinis this year, but next time I'm going to pick a
drink that doesn't make your mouth feel like a dried up river front. I
think about how she calls me baby and I call her sweetheart. It seems
as though we have always had these affectionate terms for each other. I
can never help smarting at the irony of it though, how she is the baby,
not me.

Yes she is nineteen now and far from being a child, but I can still see
the innocence beneath it all, a too-large school uniform, the teddy
bear pattern. The waitress brings over our drinks and leaves a piece of
paper with the price in a shot glass with all the others. The receipt
is like an old bus ticket, small and square, the kind I can remember
from when I was about eight, when they were produced from odd-looking
machines hung around the conductor's neck. The bus tickets were yellow
though, and didn't cost nearly as much, but that's what they remind me
of.

All of a sudden I begin to sweat uncontrollably. I can't tell if it's
because I have all these things racing around my head or I'm dizzy
because the martinis are catching up on me or if it's just because
someone has turned up the heating in the bar, all I know is that I'm
terribly aware my brow is now prickling with sweat and it's gathering
to form a slick layer across my forehead.

I don't want to wipe it away because I'm sure it's just me who's
feeling hot, but that makes me feel all the more uncomfortable. Joey
has pushed her empty glass aside and is running her hand up the stem of
the new one. I don't have sweat anywhere else, not under my arms or
down my back, but my head and neck feel soaking. She looks up at me and
her expression turns to one of worry.

"Den, are you okay? You don't look very good."

"I have to go to the toilet, that's all," I say, standing up.

She takes my hand, "Are you okay baby?"

"I'm fine, I just need the toilet that's all," I say.

I edge my way through the gap between the seat and the table and head
to the left hand side of the bar where the toilets are. I glance to my
right to see if anyone is watching me, but everyone seems to be minding
their own business. I get into the men's toilet and feel better when
the cool air hits me and I finally have the chance to wipe my brow with
my hand.

The room is pretty wide and white and there is a big, trough-like basin
inside. I wash my face and take a long look in the mirror. It's funny
how I don't look any older. I stare at myself for a couple of minutes
trying to work out if there's any way to see past my eyes and outward
features to what I'm thinking. I'd hate to imagine my expression could
give my thoughts away. If there is any way other people can perceive
how far I have come, I only hope that she cannot also see it.

I keep the tap running and think Joey has a point about needing focus.
I think maybe I should just write a story about me and her whenever I
next get stuck, although I'd be worried she'd spot who it was about a
mile away. It'd be okay though, if I changed the names and a couple of
things about the way we act, it's not as though we're so idiosyncratic
that our habits could not be mistaken for someone else's.

The title Den and Joey at The Diner sticks in my head and it'll be all
about how we are now, or some of it will be. I know immediately I'll
write a bit about how I have to hide my face from her in the men's
toilets, worried that she'll see the sweat forming on my forehead, and
how, when I wipe it away, the drops run along my fingers right down to
my shirt sleeve. But somewhere deep down I know I don't have the talent
or the courage to carry it off. I turn off the tap, shake the water
from my hands and push open the door back to the bar. It's late and
it's dark outside and I'm very drunk. I don't know what the fuck I'm
talking about anymore.