Finding the Give in Bernard Manning

She deduced he was the comic because he was in want of a smile. He also wanted the corner table dead on ten to. He wanted a pitcher of Theakstons and make it lively. He wanted a pig sandwich heavy on the sauce. She quite understood why the others didn’t want to serve him, a great wall of a man with way too much want but her, she was ok with it.

She’d seen something, anyhow. That first night of season. Something she wanted. Barely discernible but when he’d faltered during his live set on: ‘I’ve won the pools, pack your bags’ it started to twitch in his temple, a silken squiggle, and the precise colour of fret. A bona fide exhibit of vulnerability. It’d look splendid in her fattest jar. She collected them, see. Softnesses, she preferred to call them, all those tiny fragilities that don’t like to be seen. The jam imposter on an unwitting cheek. A blouse with all its buttons muddled. The drop of a camper’s face when the sleeping bag runs away from its roll. She collected them fastidiously the same way others do grudges.

It made her sad to see him eat. He disrobed more and more clothes the fuller he got. Off with his waistcoat. A concertina of a tie slung beside his pint. Then it was the top gasp of his trousers. She was turning away from him the more flesh she saw until he found the hair in his pig. Not the pig’s but a long, flexuous one very much like her own. Complaining made him careless with the HP and then there it was, a beautiful moth shaped blotch on his vest, the wings extending in mottled sepia brown. He was less chippy soiled. She was terribly sorry, sir, and why didn’t he just wear the waistcoat back to his room, sir, and she’d see the other got dry-cleaned, sir.

After, she mopped his spills up and saw he’d fingered LAF on the tabletop in a dusting of sugar. She brushed the snowy crumbs in to an envelope, pocketed his debris. Against her face, his vest smelt strangely of new potatoes and solitude and burlap sacks. The slot machine was playing T’Pau’s China in Your Hand on loop and way out past the breakers, the sea was turning slate