Low life
Missing link
Jeremy Clarke
Itry to avoid alcohol during the day. But they drink wine at all hours in the house next door and persuade me to join them on the slenderest of pretexts. And of course anything's better than writing. As Hippocrates said, ars longa, vita brevis (big arse, short life). So I'm easily persuaded, Last Bastille Day I was in their garden with a glass of Bulgarian red in my hand at three in the afternoon and got a taste for it. And that was that for the rest of the day.
By five I was perched on a stool in the pub, and fell into conversation with a selfconfessed small-time drug dealer. He had false upper-front teeth, which he removed from time to time to give his mouth a rest. His original teeth were kicked out, he said, by his immediate superiors when he was in the army. He'd also been blown up, I forget how, on exercise. He'd been invalided out of the forces and spent the last ten years trying to walk again. In this, his success had been limited, but still gamely accompanied me on a pub-crawl.
The next time I saw him was in the pub a week or so later. We renewed our acquaintance. I asked him what his name was again, and he filled in the gaps in my memory from our night out. It was a surprising tale. Then he said, 'See that bloke over there?' He indicated this hardish-looking bloke sat at a nearby table. His T-shirt said: 'Cover Me in Chocolate and Throw Me to the Lesbians'. 'That's Trevor, my new girl
friend's ex,' he said. 'Do you know Sharon, my girlfriend?' Hearing this, I must have looked pretty much like Macbeth must have looked when told that Birnam Wood was on the move, 'Yes,' I said. 'I know her.' I knew her well. I'd done an illicit sixmonth stint at the coal-face between Trevor and him. I was the missing link if you like. This Trevor had done over six years, however, and was convinced he was there for life. When she left him he'd gone nuts. Threats, violence, para-suicide, the lot. If Trevor ever found out she'd left him for me it was widely assumed among informed circles that he would rip my head off my shoulders and spit in the hole. But so far he hasn't.
I'd heard all about Trevor from Sharon. She'd talked of little else. I probably knew more about him than his mother did. But he'd never been pointed out to me. So in the same instant I found myself in the same room as Sharon's infamous ex, and, harder on the old heart strings than this, sitting opposite the bloke she took up with next after leaving me like a squashed rabbit in the road.
I asked my new friend how long he'd known her and whether Trevor knew about him. Trevor did know. My friend had sought his permission. 'I went up to him one night and said, "Trey, I'm going out with your ex-missis. Okay?"' And Trey, tanned and relaxed after a month in Manila, and off the anti-depressants at last, had magnanimously given him the green light. 'In any case,' said my new friend, `if he got funny about it he knows I'd take a chainsaw to him.' I nodded my approval at such a pragmatic approach.
Then Sharon herself entered the pub. In inimitable style she bowled up to our table, fell on her knees and bold as brass put her face between my legs. It was just like old times. Except this time she was simply stashing her bag under the bench. Then she went into a clinch with my new friend and Trevor shot over and joined us. It was surreal. It was like an AGM of her ex-30 boyfriends, with Sharon in the chair. It reminded me of that song by the Kursaal Flyers that goes: I know that she knows that he knows that I know.
Without knowing who I was, Trevor started telling me about a fight he and his nephew had had during the week with three pub bouncers. He and his nephew had 'creamed' them, apparently. Trevor had knocked one of them out with a single punch. 'Whereabouts did you hit him?' I asked, with genuine interest. 'Right on the button,' said Trey, proudly, prodding the cleft of his chin with his second knuckle. 'No one messes with our family.'
There was a drunk slumped on the other side of me. He was nodding silently to himself in a kind of alcoholic ecstasy. He leant across me and, pointing Sharon out to Trey, said, 'See her? If I ever got a woman like that, I'd throw money at it.' I went to the toilet.
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