WRITING ON THE WALL
It’s Saturday night at The Five Bells and here we are, five belles, in a dark, sweaty gig room, feeling like we own the place. After all, we’ve been using this boozer since before most of the other customers were born. I think we’re slightly overdressed for the pub but we don’t get out much anymore. We’ve already knocked back two rounds of tequila before we sit down and are bright-eyed and grinning like overexcited idiots. The band, four blokes that one or more of us have screwed over the years, has started. It strikes me that they look the same now as when they were eighteen. Their teenaged Topshop girlfriends adorn the side of the stage and I think about the men we’ve got who, if we’re lucky, will put the bins out in exchange for a blow job. It doesn’t seem fair.
We all squeeze onto a bench at the back, straightening skirts and tucking handbags between our ankles. I try to remain both classy and comfortable but there is nowhere to put my pint, so I just hold it, my hands getting colder and my lager getting warmer. Bare-chested boys are flailing about at the front and there’s a young girl wearing nothing but some skinny jeans and an X of gaffer tape over each nipple. I can’t take my eyes off her little flat stomach. She is sitting on a man’s shoulders and everybody in the room is looking at her while pretending not to. From where I am, the whites of their eyes look like the lights on two hundred cameras as they flash furtive glances in her direction.
‘Oh my fucking God,’ shouts Marie, ‘have you seen that girl’s tits?’ So much for remaining classy. Her fake shock amuses me as I seem to remember her wearing something similar once upon a decade ago.
We soon realise the band are still as bad as they were in the nineties and make our way back through to the bar, feeling less like we own the place and more like we’re in the wrong place, although it doesn’t seem to have changed a bit since I worked here ten years ago. It’s an old building with traditional wood and brass fittings but the woodchip walls have been painted almost smooth in red and plastered with posters of Tarantino and Scorsese films. It was here that I met Chris when he worked as a sound engineer. I thought he looked like Jon Bon Jovi. He was gorgeous and funny. I would watch him while I collected glasses, up in his booth, controlling the room.
‘God, why are you going to that shit-hole?’ he’d said tonight as I got ready to leave.
Tonight’s get-together is for Kelly, whose boyfriend decided a week ago that he was leaving her and the baby. Apparently he’s scared or confused or pressured or something. I told her three years ago that he was a waste of space but now I shut up and do my bit. I pretend to be surprised, share in a toast to the hope that he gets hit by a bus and exclaim that they’re better off without him anyway. ‘I don’t even care if he’s with someone else,’ she says, ‘I just can’t understand why he wouldn’t want to see his baby.’
‘Because he’s a prick,’ says Marie.
‘Maybe he’s just feeling overwhelmed at the moment and a bit of time away-,’ says Sadie.
‘Will make him less of a prick? I don’t think so,’ says Marie.
‘Remember when you went for your scan…’ says Lisa.
‘Exactly,’ says Marie.
‘…and he stormed out when he found out it was a girl,’ says Lisa.
‘I know,’ says Kelly.
‘If that was me I’d have told him to do one right then and there,’ says Marie.
‘I know,’ says Kelly.
‘So just be thankful you found out early on what he’s like,’ say Lisa.
‘And you’ve got us,’ says Sadie.
‘I know, fuck him,’ says Kelly.
We’re good friends and mean well but I can see these wise words are really no consolation to Kelly, a sweet girl who currently has the look of a lost child. I feel bad for her but can’t help wondering why she invested so much in that bloke. Chris may be a lazy bastard but we have a laugh and he loves the kids to death; probably more than he loves me, actually, but I think I prefer it that way. Anyway, it’s not surprising after all these years. His relationship with them is still fresh and they are growing every day, while I am certainly past my best.
I’m trying to think of something useful to inject into the babble of conversation when Brendan Donnelly arrives at our table. Bollocks. That man should have a built in siren that goes off every time he walks into a room so that any unsuspecting female has time to get her words straight. I mutter hello so casually that it seems rude and then escape to the toilets. I pick the cubicle on the right. I don’t know why but it is just the one I always go for. Amazingly, this room is also unchanged. It looks the same as it did in 1997, when me and Brendan had our ten minutes of passion in it. The walls are decorated with pages from newspapers and it has one of those short, pointless doors that look like it belongs in a saloon. I notice some graffiti on the back of the door that looks familiar, like a faded photo of an old face you once knew well but haven’t seen for years. ‘CUNT ON YOUR MUG’, ‘MCMURDER’, then ‘THE NOISE WE THOUGHT WOULD NEVER STOP DIED A DEATH AS THE PUNKS GREW UP’. Sitting down to pee I hear those lyrics in my head. Shit, maybe it was even me who wrote them there. I’m flooded with childish nostalgia. I think about the time I’ve spent in this place, the long afternoons as a student, surviving on a diet of crisps and Carlsberg, waiting for happy hour to begin. I try to remember when the pub stopped being a second home to me and became a graveyard of memories. I go and have a couple of kids and return to find that it’s is full of children who buy their clothes at Staples. I reckon I could trace most of my life through what’s on these walls.
I get up and look behind the lid of the toilet and find it’s still there – B.D + L.R. Even at the time it had seemed juvenile but I was flattered that he wrote it all the same. I thought it was romantic and solid. The letters looked right together.
I hear the door open and someone shouts my name. It’s Marie.
‘Yeah, I’m in here,’ I shout back.
‘Can I come in?’ she says, and before I know it she is crawling under the door, twisting like an over-stuffed snake to get her hips through.
‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘I was desperate.’ I move to let her reach the loo but instead she pulls down her top and bra and leans over the sink.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I say.
‘I don’t know what else to do with it. It’s killing me,’ she says, laughing. By ‘it’ she means the milk that she’s now projecting from her breast, down the plughole.
‘Christ! Let me out,’ I say as I push past her and out the door. It’s funny how Marie forcefully lactating in a pub toilet strikes me as obscene, whereas my quickie with Brendan inspires fond memories of a lost era. I remember gripping the back of the toilet system, wondering if anyone on the other side of the frosted glass window could see what was going on. I don’t think I cared much.
Suddenly I think about Sam, Marie’s little baby. I imagine him at home, writhing on her husband’s lap as he tries to convince him to take the bottle, while she pisses away the glorious brew that is meant only for him.
My infatuation with Brendan Donnelly began when we were still kids. I remember us ambling home from school together. It was raining and dark. I had wanted him so much but had no idea what to do about it. I’d done other things with boys by then but he was innocent. He had stupid floppy hair and glasses and was tall, so that his school blazer didn’t cover his wrists. I was nervous. I wanted to kiss him or fuck him, I wasn’t really sure which. So, tooled up with these lustful urges, I did what any other horny thirteen year-old would do – I pushed him in the rain-soaked bushes and laughed at him. I always assumed we’d get together in the end but as we got older, I got fatter and he got more handsome. Now he’s engaged to a lovely, clever, pretty girl. They’re planning a wedding abroad and lots of beautiful babies. I secretly hope she’s infertile or an alcoholic or suffers from irritable bowel syndrome.
By now a few more old faces have joined our table and the girls are each answering the usual questions about the health of their children. The thing about having kids is that everyone thinks you want to talk about them all the time. We often complain to each other about this but still find we can talk enthusiastically for hours on the subject when asked. I catch the words colic and Iggle-Piggle. Brendan is sitting next to me, looking like he’s about to ask after my children. For some reason it doesn’t feel right talking to him about my life at home, so I get in first and ask how his girlfriend is. ‘She’s-’
Fat-?
‘-fine,’ he says, ‘she’s in Liverpool for work’.
Now I’m irritated. I don’t hate the girl. It’s him that gets to me the most. He’s so bloody charming. The pair of them gets along with everyone and probably are the perfect couple but I don’t see why the princess should get the prince. It’s not the way a fairy tale should end in my opinion. The injustice of it stings me and I’m angry with him for turning me into a bitter old witch.
It’s almost last orders and I’m having a fag outside with him. My toes are numb from the cold and across the courtyard Sadie is throwing up while Marie holds her hair back. It’s not been a bad evening.
‘It’s been great to see you again,’ says Brendan.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘we should do it again when what’s-her-name’s back from wherever-.’
‘You know, there’s not a day that goes by I don’t think about you,’ he says.
At his words I skip a breath. With hazy vision I study his face and it is honest and beautiful. Thoughts and emotions battle for attention in the different areas of my drunken body. I naturally assume he’s drunk too but that doesn’t stop my heart from tearing itself apart in my chest. Is it possible that after all these years he feels the same? There had been times I worried I’d only settled for Chris when it should have been Brendan but never dared think about it for long. We have children who I love and they are part of Chris. How could they have turned out so perfect if the match was wrong?
‘Just wait here,’ I tell him, ‘I’ll be back.’
I concentrate on walking steadily and elegantly to the ladies’ because I can feel him watching my arse as I go. When I am locked inside I sit on the seat and try to separate my thoughts. I stare at our initials, burned into the wall. I had been sitting on his lap, the two of us quiet and content, smoking cigarettes, when he used his one to burn our initials into the paint. I didn’t feel like we’d just had a shag in a public toilet cubicle - I felt romanced, relieved and happy. What had happened afterwards? I didn’t see him for a while. I was heartbroken and hurt that he hadn’t called me but couldn’t tell anyone because it was a secret…because it was sexier that way…because he’d had a girlfriend….
Suddenly I don’t feel very drunk at all. The words on the wall seem to transform in front of me. They are crooked, rushed and a toxic yellow. They are poison.
This is where he keeps me, reduced to two anonymous letters. It’s the same place that Marie comes to hide her other life, where she pours the evidence of her soft, motherly side down the drain. I’d thought Brendan was a serial monogamist; my turn was sure to come round sooner or later. Besides, what we had was older and deeper than anything he could have had with those other girls. I need to get out.
I walk quickly through the emptying pub. Brendan doesn’t see me but I just have time to catch sight of him sitting at the bar with his chin on his folded arms, the lights from the fruit machine dancing over a bald spot on the crown of his head that I could swear wasn’t there half an hour ago. I’m not angry with him now because I realise I’ve seen something he never will. I close the door on the museum of my youth and I can’t help smiling. I decide I’ll visit again one day and Brendan will still be there because that’s where I’m going to keep him, a relic amongst the scribbles and the woodchip. (2292 words)
