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Here comes the big hill leading up to the area where she lives. He doesn’t know exactly which house it is, although he’s been there once, after a night at the Angel. Her parents were away, and they were sat in her front room, which crackled that night with pissed-up euphoria, listening to soul divas on her old gramophone and passing around reefers. Some sort of party - he remembers that much, and she talked to him a bit, but was also flying around chatting and flirting to other, older guys, from a circle further than this town of extremes in South Manchester, big and friendly and slightly intimidating people with garish alternative brand name clothes, phat pants, bodies peppered with piercings. He never minded; he felt happy and exalted just to be sitting there with a drink that the babe Carmen had made him, in her house, with her and these older, friendly people and this good, pissed-up atmosphere as comfortable as a thick, warm blanket.
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Well, it’s really weird, right? You know? They’ve had this real sexual tension for a while. |
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So how’s uni going? |
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Give me your hand. I want to read your palm. |
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He’s finished his pint and he goes and gets another one. The sinister bearded guy behind the bar seems to know he’s underage, but just winks at him complicitly, the same way he quietly oversees the frequent lock ins. Payne likes listening to people; having not much of a life himself, he prefers to learn about other people’s, their intricate connections, their dreams and their fears, their histories and anecdotes, their truths and affectations. This world is infinitely fascinating to him, and also scary; he feels that one day he’ll have to enter these forests of chemistry and connection and maybe those loose jagged branches will tear his skin apart. He’s a good listener, people like this about him, women like this about him. Plenty of drunk and drugged women have poured out their hearts to him over the time he’s known this group he’s with.
There were plenty of times he wasn’t around, plenty of blank spaces for things to happen under the social façade of work-pub-work - intimate sleepovers, group holidays, encounters in club toilets. He’d once seen her in the Blue Angel with this guy called Robinson, Robbo. They were just talking innocuously, and at the end of the conversation she’d stood up, flicked his ear in a flirty way, laughed coquettishly and went off to the bar. And the guy let her go watching her with this expression of total abject longing. How much desire and pain had she inspired in people? He tries to avoid envy because there was no point. You got these bad feelings sometimes. Love is a beautiful dream when requited, a living hell when not. He feels the old style fear again, distorted and submerged by the booze, and just sits down by the pool table. It is almost last orders now and he gets another pint of Carling, by this time fairly pissed. Sits with it in a large group, Kelly, Nicole and Jay among them, sprawled on the bench by the front window. They’re having this rambling, dislocated conversation and he’s enjoying listening to it, and every so often he’ll chip in with something, which everyone takes notice of. One girl turns ‘round and goes, ‘See, you don’t say much, but what you do say is like, really profound.’ She’s there. She’s there among them somewhere. It doesn’t look like the promised lock-in is going to happen, so everybody has one last pint and then leaves, aided by the barstaff turning off the lights and then sitting on a table smoking cigarettes and giving you evils across the room. The cold air feels invigorating as the group spill outside into the road in a hail of goodbyes; people are shouting, laughing, holding on to each other, and she is more euphoric now, as the drink’s got into her and made her feel alive, rubbed off the dreary stain of the day. She’s walking upfront, with her two mates, arms ‘round each other’s shoulders, and he’s walking alone. Some of the boys are singing. And he knows soon when they get to the end of the road they’re gonner be off, back to their detached houses in the old country, and he’s gonner be doing the big trek back to town, alone. The same long trek he made to get here, through the park with the stone memorial to Longwood’s fallen, past the Three Horsemen with its cheesy Eurodisco shite contaminating a quarter-mile radius, running the scally gauntlets on the shopfronts and the garage. One ritual ceremony of hugging, kissing and handshaking and then he’ll be alone with his ideas and desires. This doesn’t really matter because he’s so drunk he’ll just walk on, not really noticing the landmarks, the fights outside the pubs, just in an alcoholic haze. He’ll think of her because the drink knocks down the defences, all those fantasies and dreams seeping in through the gaps. He thinks of ideas for stories, paragraphs form in his head, and the babe entwined with all that, everything sucked into those beautiful ever-changing eyes, the last thing he sees before crashing out into crazy, booze-sodden dreams. His fantasies of her, they’re just about them holding hands, walking through the fields near his house and talking about books and kissing. He didn’t go further than that. Kissing was the cut-off point. He didn’t envisage any mad-arsed sexual scenarios or grand ambitious relationship. That didn’t come naturally and on some level he knows it is dangerous to hope for too much. They get to the end of Brent Street and Kelly is hassling people for dope; he wants to go for a smoke on the park, but it ain’t happening tonight. He gets slapped on the back by some, hugged by others, ignored by many. She’s wandering up the road and she hasn’t spoken to him. She’s supported by her mates, and as he turns to the crest of the hill she suddenly breaks free of them, runs down and grabs his arm and kisses him, almost violently, on the lips. For one, maybe two seconds her nicotine breath mingles with the strange perfume she wears and he’s got the thick, lovely smell of her hair. ‘member to bring those stories out next time, yeah baby?’ she shouts, heading back up the road. I will, he says, with false nonchalance, holding an arm up as he walks over the road, looking at the ragged group of shadowy figures on the pavement. He tastes her in his mouth all the way home. Copyright © Max Dunbar 2002. Title graphic: "Sweat" Copyright © The Summerset Review 2002. |
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