Open for business
Jeremy Clarke
Ican go for fortnight without a drink three weeks at a push. After that I begin to feel disconnected. I try to ignore the feeling, hoping it’s a symptom of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or the onset of a cold, or overdoing it at the gym. But it persists and, after several days, changes into a consuming, impotent rage, at which point the penny drops and I know that it’s time for a drink. And then comes that tremendous, slightly nerve-wracking moment when I present myself again at my favourite bar, reacquaint myself with the lovely young ladies loitering behind it and settle in for an evening of selfmedication.
The rage subsides about three quarters of the way down the first pint of lager. By the time I’ve seen the bottom of the second glass, the buttoned-up old misanthrope of the past few weeks is gone and I’m a human being again and back in the swim. I talk to this one and then that one, then to those people over there. And soon I’m genially greeting anyone who catches my eye, whether I know them or not. My sober view is that the world is a ship of fools. Two pints of lager and I’m back on the poop deck, spray on my cheek, wind in my hair, happy to listen with sympathy, energy and imagination to the succession of unhappy monologues that one is inevitably subjected to in this particular pub, which is full of New Age gurus and druggies.
But I’m a good listener. What makes a good listener? A perception either that you are a servant or that you are a spectator and owe it to the committed to let them do the talking. When I trained to be a psychiatric nurse and mingled with those who were committed under the Mental Health Act, desperate patients on the admission wards would sometimes form an orderly queue to talk to me, once they’d noticed I was a listener. It must be awful to go mad and suddenly no one wants to listen.
Last week’s bout of self-medication was fairly typical — instantaneous mental equilibrium, followed by a succession of people singing their same old songs to me — except that my crisis this month coincided with the full moon. The pub in the nearest market town is a dingy affair, though after weeks at home the string of multicoloured lights on the wall-mounted jukebox struck me as glamorous. I stood at the bar and drank alone until fully restored, and then I was open for business, as it were.
Trev was in. He came over and told me about a visit to a nightclub with a pal two days earlier. Afterwards, outside a nearby kebab shop, there’d been a fight, during which his pal had been blinded in one eye. Trev was pretty certain that he’d been involved in the scrap as well — it would most certainly have been out of character if he’d shirked it — only he was so drunk that he couldn’t remember a thing about it, and neither could his mate. His mate remembers only lying on the pavement with his eye kicked out. What had led up to it, neither he nor Trev nor the police were able to piece together afterwards. The CCTV pictures were indistinct. Trev was absolutely gutted about it, he said. He looked it, too. It was something that had never happened to him before, he said — losing his memory completely like that.
Next, this bloke who sleeps rough, drinks all day, plays harmonica and quotes Robert Service came up and told me about his sleeping bag. He’d paid £69 for it and it was rated as ‘comfortable’ down to minus five degrees Celsius. The first time he’d slept in it, the temperature was well above freezing, yet the bag failed to keep him warm. He took it back to the shop. Smelling beer on his breath, the manager had refused a refund, explaining that alcoholics tend to feel the cold more than everyone else.
Then I was subjected by another alcoholic to another and much longer tale of injustice involving his landlord, a CD player and a free-range chicken. Then the landlord came up and asked me what on earth was I thinking about. If I wanted to smoke, he said, I must smoke outside. And if he saw me smoking in his pub again I’d be barred. And then, as closing time approached, the spirit of Terpsichore came upon me and the time for listening to alcoholic bores was over and the time for dancing sinuously on the spot had arrived. I suppose that a few years down the line, when I’m in the gutter, I’ll look back nostalgically on these early symptoms of physical addiction to alcohol and wish I’d nipped it in the bud.
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