When you make some kind of fool of yourself, save it as a story for later. Be the life of the party. How they’ll laugh. May as well. Though watch out, she thought, some people have no sense of humour. They just think you’re a fool.
She turned the page. She was reading a novel, which she’d brought to the nightclub because she knew no-one there – that is, who would be there, eventually. Really, she was reading the same paragraph several times. So far, there were only herself, the barman, and someone clattering behind the swing doors in the kitchen. She was early. Absurdly early. All the tables and chairs were neat and empty, spaced out and ready; the shiny-chipped marble floor clean and hard and waiting for all the feet. She would read a book as if that was normal, in a nightclub when the lights were still up full, before they were turned down. Humans are tool-using animals, after all. Maybe next time she’d bring a newspaper. Anyway, it’s better than staring around and trying to look interested and interesting, as if anyone was looking. Well, there is the guy behind the bar, tinkling and wiping, and rearranging the glassware. He must, surely, think something about the woman creeping up on forty in the nightclub an hour before the music starts, reading a book. But it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Can’t be allowed to matter or you couldn’t make yourself be there.
She’d forgotten there was a world where life didn’t start until late. Until other people’s bedtime. It’s a kind of shift-work, where the players of the night begin to dress, to chatter, to laugh and dance … as the workers of the day check the kids, brush their teeth, wind the clock and curl up between the sheets. The first will witness the street-cleaners; the others, the garbage-collection.
She had her weekends to fill now, with the kids off with their dad and his girlfriend. Toys on the floor, and silence. Not so much missing them as aware of not being amongst it. Of being left outside; of being left behind. In the first few weeks after he’d left he’d made so many offers, to buy this, to fix that. Promised to buy them pyjamas but bought wetsuits. It’s classic, perhaps. Promise after promise to her, makes him feel better about himself having left. But wetsuits are more exotic, not to mention expensive, than pyjamas for young children – certainly, she’s not taking them deep-sea diving – and now they talk about the underwater and how maybe they’ll go out on a boat. Outboard or sloop, she didn’t ask for fear of sounding far too sarcastic. The little girl’s been riding on the girlfriend’s shoulders; she’s so damn fit. When not exploring the deeps they are tramping through the highland meadows, apparently. She sneers to herself: yodelling? But their pyjamas are too small for them. She won’t remind him. She knows she’s nursing this resentment – that he’s let himself off some hook or other merely by making promises. Apparently, promises are enough for him. She has noted it.
So. This bar’s been sitting empty, hinting of the night when she’s passed it on the tram many, many times. Posters in the window. Night times – lights and music – she remembers them from years ago. She’s come to reclaim them. She would dance all night, in her twenties. Never tiring, incandescent, dancing on and on. But night-time starts so late now; the trick is to stay awake long enough. That makes her smile. She’d got dressed so early and sat on the couch, reading the book, and she’d tried to eat dinner late, tried to dawdle through it, but ended up hurrying for the tram (five minutes away from here) with the book to hide behind. The time refused to budge more than a fraction, when she looked, and then she was here. This is what happens when you’ve spent years being punctual. Taking the kids to school. Going to meetings. He used to make comments, eyes sliding, suspecting something was going on. I am not attracted by rotting teeth and comb-overs, she’d said. I’m not bewitched by poverty, it has no glamour. I just work with poor people. We call it empowerment, though that might not mean much to you. I just make promises to help and then I can’t be at home, so I’m guilty. Or I can’t keep the promise to help, and I’m guilty. She didn’t get around to saying that last bit; she’s only just admitted it to herself, sitting here with her book, waiting for the nightclub to transform itself. See what happens when you try to please everyone? See?
And I’m never late. Unless I can’t make it at all. Unless I make too many promises and they run into each other and I just can’t make it at all.
And it’s too early for a drink, she thinks. She wonders if she could have a coffee. Would that look odd? Yes, it would.
So she goes to the bar for a gin and tonic. The drink has the virtue of being neither fluorescent pink nor acidic green, and with no tiny umbrella, though it has a straw.
Here’s the band. Drum-boxes; amps; guitars. There’s a saxophone. Nod and smile, and now they’re setting up. Chatting to each other across the wires and instruments; clattering; putting the drums together. Duct-tape to make the leads safe on the floor. There’s some squealing feedback, and a young man tosses his wispy hair out of his face while he says: ‘One, TWO, TWO…’ into the mike, spitting out the ‘t’. The hair, like floss, has a way of floating its way back to settle over one eye. He’ll probably be bald in ten years.
‘Hi,’ the sax player says.
I don’t think they think I’m weird.
She’s already put the book away in her bag.
The lights have gone down. Some young women have come in from outside. There are big smiles and high-fives with the bass player. She is sitting at a round table near the stage, and they ask if they can sit there. O god, yes please, she doesn’t say. She nods. Sure.
If she leans on her elbows she will look more at ease. The band starts up – middle-of-the-road, danceable stuff and thankfully a little bit retro. Eventually the young women bellow their names and she bellows her own back. Presumably that’s mousse in the two-toned hair; they have deep dark cleavages between smooth, mounded brown breasts and a tide-mark where the tan makeup finishes not quite at the hair-line. Sharon and Janine. Perhaps they’re regulars.
Not everyone knows each other’s name in this room, but many do. Doug and Stevie sit at the table; names are bellowed. Hi. They don’t think she’s weird. Everyone’s just friends. The lights are dim, with little spots on the stage. Everyone dances. Peanuts and a glass of wine. She makes it stretch; it’s been a very long time since dinner. And it costs much more than she was expecting. The sax player buys her another during the break. Sam.
The last tram home, clattering along the dark, empty street. Sometimes there’s a light left on at someone’s front door; the spaced pools of light from street lamps. A cat. Two cats. Her shoes clacking up to the house, the new blister almost unbearable, and the key in the lock.
Ten to three, Mondays to Thursdays, are mostly spent staring into a corner. She’s wasting everyone’s time, she knows it. Glances across the desktop but can’t move a muscle while the silence pulls at the hours. Everything she does is why he left. He said so, though she knows that isn’t right. To be fair, it all started a long time ago. But here she is, with everything she does worthless, it feels worthless, must be worthless since he’s nominated what she does and what she is – she’s always out and she’s always messy – as the cause; and she can no longer move a muscle. Three o’clock comes and she locks away the silent office in the silent community centre and goes home. Tomorrow the ladies come for legs-eleven and two-little-ducks and she’ll make the calls, until they leave and the silence blankets the office again.
I wonder if they know I’m wasting money, limp at the desk while kids wheel their bikes outside the window.
There’s a committee meeting next week. Can’t even gather the energy to resign.
Three o’clock comes and she locks away the office in the community centre and goes to fetch the kids from school. Squints into the sun. Four hundred kids all spill into the yard and call: ‘Mum!’ and hundreds of mothers look all around. She still remembers to find that funny.
And then of course, there’s having to confront pity there in the schoolyard. She just tells them she’s a member of a very large club. That, they have to admit, is true.
She supposes, though, that not all of these club members had been treated quite so managerially as she in the lead-up to the split. Had many of them been given a talking-to until three in the morning about their faults? All of his in-house training to the fore, he’d spoken calmly and suggested all would be well if she changed who she was, from now on, lost all those bad domestic habits. Pulled everything together. He had his argument well-marshalled. She’d looked at him and recognised how employees must feel after their first warning. Strapped into the metaphorical sled and edged over to the slope, with no going back. What if she could not change into another person overnight? What if, in a couple of weeks’ time, she forgot she was no longer herself and there was a dress un-hung or a sink full of unwashed dishes? I’m working now, she said, I’m earning. We could get someone in once a month. You’re not taking this seriously, he said, and she felt the sled teeter and begin its descent. Then he settled back against the cushions and complained that they never talked. About? About the relationship, he said.
She’s early but not that early. The band’s set up and the lights are down. ‘TWO TWO’, spits Warren into the mike, and flicks his hair from his eyes. It settles back over an eye. He smiles hello and she smiles back. Now they know her name.
Saxophone Sam and Warren; Stan on drums. Felipe, brown arms, a tattoo, waistcoat in shiny red, on guitar and vocals. Hello, hello, hi and hi.
Sharon and Janine, and Doug and Stevie. Hi, hi, hi.
Potato wedges and sour cream. A wine, which she will stretch out because it doesn’t take much to make her fall face-first into the soup. Or in this case, into the sour cream. Sharon is drinking something blue. It’s come with a plastic construction leaning out of the glass.
What the dimmed lights do is smudge everyone together. This creates something impressionistic. Over-coloured; under-detailed. Everybody draws together: more of an age; more of a type. In a small way there’s a lot of movement, while the crowd grows, greets, waits for the start. Two of the band members laugh, and (one, two, three, four!) there’s the first chord.
A pair of shadows, hunched over with heads jutting and hands jammed into trousers – the one on the street-side with his fag stuck to his lip, glowing red – pass the bar on the way to the high-rise flats further up the road. Or maybe they’re heading to one of the rooming-houses, to rooms that smell dank and have single mattresses with an old pizza-box and an elderly condom under the bed. Clothes that have grown mouldy in the corner. The one on the near-side glances in as the music starts, the bones of his face in peaks, troughs for cheeks, grooves like scars between nose and mouth, eyes unlit and expressing … nothing.
There’s a certain amount of humiliation to the cliché of infidelity. Even if, or especially if, the other starts to funnel his long-forgotten hippie past and insist on honesty. A million years ago, he’d adjusted his cheesecloth sleeves and said they’d have an open relationship if it came up. It would be very honest, he’d said, and everyone would know who and how and what and when.
After all, she’d been less than ardent for some time, he didn’t say now. Withdrawn, with him an insistent and ultimately disappointed presence waiting there next to her in the dark. She’d known what was implied. She knew now, she supposed, that his away-playing was her fault. All those late nights of his had not included report-writing after all, as she’d thought, no lonely tapping of keys with the desk-light burning out its sad statement of overworked civil service. As she had imagined. Everything was very cold out on that peak with the sled where she felt placed as he made his very honest admission, which included the who, the how and the what and the when. But she tried to accept the other relationship, while she confessed she couldn’t quite cope with his being out a whole night at the girlfriend’s. Great, he said as if she hadn’t spoken, because they’d arranged to spend the night together the next week. A Tuesday, it was.
The longest Tuesday night that had ever been, ending with the scuff of his steps along the street and at the door just before dawn. She hadn’t become a domestic goddess overnight, and here was Tuesday’s endlessness blighting her peace. She’d sat up in her bed, burning holes into the dark with her imagination, while he in another gasped and arched and thrust.
The sled came to the end of its long slide and sent her sprawling. Bang.
That was a time-bomb you left there for us, she told him. That was a time-bomb you set in place all those years ago with your pop-psychology and your let’s-be-open. It was a time-bomb and now it’s gone off. A time-bomb on a sled, perhaps. Bang.
Came the day of his bunking out, she retreated to her friend’s, five minutes’ walk away. Returned only when it was safe, so as not to be a witness to his boxing up of books and papers, folding of clothes, and his helpful, fit girlfriend heaving them into her car boot. He left her to her messiness and her meetings, baby sitters, guilt. Her vanished sexuality. Her incapacity. Her failure. What a list.
It was interesting, she observed even before he had formally left the house, that whereas in the case of some other people depression encourages over-eating, in her own it just meant barely eating at all. Once, she’d come to the end of two days and realised she’d finished one apple in all that time. She gave an almost formal farewell to her breasts, shrunk to two white mice asleep in the otherwise empty cups of her bra. Her jeans rested loosely on hip-bones. T-shirts hung in folds. She slipped through the air like an apology. She didn’t even feel especially hungry, she realised, and thought that maybe not eating very much for an extended period gives rise to some sort of chemical reaction in the body. Interesting. She caught sight of herself in shop windows from time to time, barely there.
Anyway, this had to stop. The next meal she made for the children was sausages, mash and peas. So she ate some too.
Her friend said she was a saint and should be angrier. Stop being a saint, her friend said. She laughed at that, said she didn’t blame him for leaving; anyone should be able to leave a relationship if it isn’t working, and it hadn’t been. Her friend rolled her eyes and told her to stop that, being a saint. She should ask for more, her friend said; half of everything. It’s only fair. You have to look after yourself.
So when he turned up one morning – herself in the dressing-gown, head foggy, blinking without her glasses – and started talking about selling the car, she said she should have half of the proceeds, and his voice grew snide. She was greedy and grasping, he said. All the shapes of the room leaned in together, blurred with (she realised later) all the insecurity and loss of these last months, and there was a struggle, where his own glasses were knocked from his face. A lens fell out, and she couldn’t see where it was while he shouted that she didn’t care enough to try. But I can’t see, she said.
This was not what she had in mind, though there you are – she had been angry and shown it. She paid for his new glasses, and as a result received very little from the sale of the car, which was second-hand and not worth very much. She apologised. Not so saint-like, after all.
After he’d left that day, glasses crooked and the lens taped into place, she stood, eyes closed, in the shower and let hot needles beat into the bones past the depleted flesh.
She thinks this guy’s called Rob, sitting against the wall at her table. He’s some friend of Warren’s, plays guitar himself, came to watch the band. Clipped hair, got a job driving some truck or van. She can’t quite hear him, so she has to shout. Does she have a sister? No, she says. Hey, that’s so strange, he says, because he saw someone who looked just like her, only much older, the other day a couple of kilometres away from here. What day, she asks, and he says Wednesday morning, up near the bank. She laughs and says, hey that was me.
Real life is so ageing. She does think that’s funny. She fingers an earring.
She looks around the night-club. People spend so much time on their hair, she thinks. I’ve never really known how. She’s tried sometimes to pin hers up but it’s too fine; it blows out in filaments; it slides down in tendrils and tails.
At the bar, there is the most bouffant Elvis you would ever see. A student she thinks, and he’s heard of her. She’s written into the local paper about politics and injustice a few times. It’s always full of indignation and solutions. He shouts that she’s his hero. Bless you my son, she shouts back. She clinks her glass to his.
This boy salutes her and dances with his friends, then, who have all spent time with mousse for more effective ducktails. She dances too, until the end of the song and her wine, and turns back to her table.
A good night and she’s full of smiles. She’s someone’s hero. She buys another wine, though she nurses it because, well, face-first into the soup and all that. She’s still too thin and the wine has nowhere to go but her head.
She bought a power drill, a screwdriver and some screws, and put up a curtain between the kitchen and the sitting room. She’d never held a drill before.
The house leaked, frequently, at that point where the kitchen had been propped against the sitting room. The middle class who came buying up twee homes all those decades ago planted in their backyards gum trees that grew and grew, buckling pavements and tiling, scattering their leaves and flyaway fragments onto roofs and into gutters. She would lie awake during thunderstorms, tense with the pounding of water washing shredding detritus into her gutters. Other times, it was inevitable that she’d be up on the roof midway between the television aerial and next-door’s swaying trees, with the flash and crash of the storm all around, scooping thick black messes to the ground below, while her son ran from the inside of the house shouting that water was coming into the kitchen, and her daughter stared up from behind him, blurred by rain. All in all, she decided, it was easier to take her clothes off first, before clambering in the rain on the roof. If it was cold, she’d just wear the big yellow raincoat. Pointless to wear glasses, too; so the world itself was a diffused deluge and glittered and gobbled and slashed while she felt her way through slime and gumnuts.
Once, the water refused to run away, despite the slop she’d thrown to the ground. It gathered and burbled around the opening into the downpipe. It washed in a cataract over the edge of the gutter itself. She climbed back down the ladder to the base of the pipe. There was no room to angle a stick into it, so she pulled with her hand, further and further up into the mud and prickles, sticks and shapes that had no name but fell apart at her touch ….
She’d save it as a story for later.
Doug’s been here almost every week. Nice young guy. Seems pleased to see her; keeps her supplied with potato wedges and sour cream. He dances with her, and with Sharon and Janine. He’s bought them each wine. She’s aware he has a sexuality that isn’t demanding, grey eyes that are direct but never personal. She tells the story about the downpipe (and the thunder and the lightning, the big yellow raincoat and near-sighted feeling through the slime …) and he throws his head back to laugh. Sharon gasps and Janine lets out an expletive. She, storyteller, smiles. Here we all are, the subject of a song about strangers or a poster about nightclubs. I don’t know what their opinions are about anything. This is fine; this is fine.
Two wines, she remembers, is so very much her limit. The lights are more than blurred, they are winking, they are stars, and the shouting and the music are jumbling and roaring. She thinks she’s interested in Doug, for a night. For a start. For retraining purposes, she thinks, chuckles in her head as she swallows the rest of her wine. Damn. No, no. No need to buy her another. No, really.
And he has bought her another one. There it is. That Doug is such a gentleman. Well, he’s bought it for her, so she’ll have to drink it. It’s polite.
And it’s inevitable; he offers her a lift home. Her face is numb and she pronounces each word carefully. She manages to guide him to her shambolic fence where the gate hangs a little at an angle, a little spreadeagled. But her gorge is rising – what a telling phrase – and she has only enough time to say goodnight and thankyou. Just enough time to close the car-door without slamming it and apparently in no hurry, before scrabbling at the door with the key and rushing down the corridor, hand over her face to hold it all in.
She’s panting, later, over the bowl and the smell, and the almost-identifiable scraps. Potato wedges. She thinks, Mother was wrong, after all. If you’ve had enough, you shouldn’t have more. Really. Not even to be polite. Her face is clammy and she can’t close her eyes. The bathroom has tilted and is swinging on its axis.
She dances and she dances. Doug came and went; he’s got to help some friends move in the morning. He smiles. There is, apparently, plenty of time. Dalliance will come.
At the end of the night, she’s standing at the stop waiting for the last tram. She looks back. A hunched shadow passes the nightclub on his way to a grey room somewhere. The club is twinkling still, a ship afloat in the dark. There’s a last chord, and the door opens on a shout of laughter.
©JL Crozier