Cherry picking

In Kirsty's front room a man glistered with sweat is trying to mend her landline phone. "I'm going to have to get a cherry-picker," he says, and I stand there mute, trying to make sense of an incomprehensible requirement for a telephone engineer.

I end most of my sentences to him with the word "mate". I mentally kick myself, yet keep doing it. I feel silly around him, the class inferiority of being apparently well-educated yet doing nothing that is of any practical use to anyone. "Could you come and have a look at my phone please--the line seems to be dead." "Sorry, we haven't got anyone available for that, but we could send someone to have a chat with you about communitarian and individualist models of social life in the avantgarde music 'artworld' instead?"

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To Liverpool, with Trina. She forewarns me, repeatedly, giving me several opportunities to excuse myself. And herself, I begin to think. "They're just old work colleagues."

"No, no," I say, as she veers towards the ticket office at Lancaster. "I'll get us through." A ticket collector on the train, a privatised enforcer team on the bridge at Preston station, and the man on the barriers at Lime Street are all indifferent to my waving of an old ticket from St Annes to Preston and its ticket-like receipt. Trina is both silently grateful that we've just saved £34, and slightly pissed off with me. That's a relief. Much better than being interpellated as "edgy".

We go to a retro-modern bar, bare brick walls, a collection of old radio sets--the sort of design cliché repeated up and down the country from Stockwell to Shoreditch. One badly-kept, over-warm real ale at 3.75, implying that the pub wants to turn the three unused handpumps into serving gassed dead drinks.

How fat they all are, I think, and I suspect that they practice the Public Virtue - Private Vice Diet, common in female-dominated administrative cadres. A woman with lovely big tits held in a scoop necked dress is a distraction for a while. They talk over and interrupt each other, disrupting any attempt at following a topic. The evening doesn't matter to them. She who is loudest, wins.

Trina gives me a private downward glance at her watch. Thank you. This is turning into a crap night.

Outside, Liverpool is alcoholically brightened. The sunlight is stroking me, I can feel it. I kiss Trina without stopping walking and start slagging off her colleagues.

We miss, slightly deliberately, the penultimate train home, and settle into the Victorian, muzak-free luxury of The Crown Hotel, sunlight contouring its alabaster ceiling and sending sharp mirrors onto its thousand carats of glass. We get talking to a couple of blokes with whom we share the table, their Ayrshire accents close to the edge of my comprehension.

The journey back is faredodged again: the railway's agents have given up on the last train from Liverpool. Back at mine, I can't be bothered with the pretence, the inevitable lack of an erection, the exhausting overhang of her inevitable snoring, and I embrace her as an apology for saying that I'm going straight downstairs to sleep in the living room.

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Discovered this today, from a commenter on Isabelle's blog. It's very good. I printed sixteen pages of it off (I can't read the eye-straining grey on grey Courier font). It reminded me of The Overnight Editor, in its commenting shadow-self voice, its author's ambivalent attitude to drink, and its vein of sex. All the way from South London, On The Rocks.