The students are out en masse, inoffensively group-absorbed, all long a's and lingerie tops; do we have to faces on some of them as a man conducts them with a waving hand into tequila shots. The Left Hand Miniskirt Hold Manoeuvre as girls go flimsily up the stairs.
To some extent it's been about the drink these last two weeks. There's been a bloggy congeries, from Exile asking a question of Furtheron and then a comment of mine prompting a post of his. There was also Will Self's fascinating essay on nicotine in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago. Nicotine, he said, is like heroin and crack: you're in a permanent state of withdrawal.
Our local paper unwittingly caught my mood too. It reported on a list of the fifty local authorities with the highest level of A&E admissions which were recorded as being connected with alcohol. We came forty-first out of about six hundred.
I am mid-email in the office where I do a bit of reception work each week. The clients have all had their talking-to, and it is just me, Maria José and the white noise of the photocopier.
"Can I say...", she hesitated, "something personal?" "Yes of course," I said, unworried. I find most people boring, and their hesitant preambles rarely lead to anything. "I notice you have not had a drink tonight." I am confused. We have access to a kitchen and I can get myself a drink at any time. "What... you mean..?" And then it dawned on me.
"Because I notice, you have not had a drink today."
"Oh alcohol, you mean?"
"Yes, alcohol. You have not had a drink of alcohol?"
"Er... yes I have," I said. "Oh well perhaps that is for you every day."
"I hope you don't mind," she continued, thwarted in her well-meant positive reinforcement. "No, no, not at all," I said. I couldn't think quickly enough of a follow-up that would make her feel unembarrassed, and she gathered together her kilos of files and bade me an over-smiled good evening.
A few days later, I am with what has become a regular coterie of sots. Nathaniel walks in. "Alright Nat? How are you?"
"Shit. I've been sacked. Well, suspended, but I'm going to be sacked."
He's a barman and has been helping himself to the top shelf. "'Do you want to see the CCTV?'" said [the landlord]. No, it's OK, I know what this is about. Can we get on with it?"
We tried to gee him up, but then he told us it's the fourth time he's been caught doing this. He said that he throws up most mornings. "I'm just afraid of what's going to happen." Behind his closed eyes he was looking upwards to avoid crying in front of us. "It's one of the best jobs I've ever had. I really like working there, and I've fucked it up." He gave up his resistance and went to the toilet.
While he was upstairs I said to the others "If you're like that, why don't you get a bottle of gin or something and keep it in your jacket and swig it when you're out of the CCTV?"
It was my brother's 50th on Saturday. Trina was supposed to be driving us and the girls over to County Durham. She arrived from her house in the morning looking frazzled, saying that the rain was sluicing the roads in her flatlands, and there was a fog of spray on the M6. She didn't feel up to driving over the Pennines.
We were only going over for the day, and it would only have been for a sober pub meal. Only my sister of my family drinks, and I feel uneasy drinking in the company of uncomprehending teetotallers. "They are not our comrades," as Sergei Korovin said; but I regretted missing it, and posted his present with a letter.
We went down the pub instead, then came back here and put some house music on. I curtailed the dancing after an hour or so, suggesting we could have sex instead. Which we did.
I feel like a fucking dog, a fucking, dog. Even after we had outwardly gone to sleep, I was mentally composing a filthy card to Frances -- "I know looby, but the best fucks are the mad ones" -- who lives five minutes away. Permutations of zips and skirts and dresses and kitchen tables and cock and mouth and perineum and the reverse cowgirl and her gorgeous widened W arse from that viewpoint. I turned Trina over and fucked her again. Not right is it?
I took my youngest to the dentist in Morecambe the other day. Slashing rain and what felt like a long walk from the railway station to the surgery, during which part of the patched sole fell off from my left shoe, so that I was blotting my foot with every step.
The first question he asked my sixteen-year-old was "Do you smoke?"