‘OK, Jeremy, you sit there. Next to Sophie.’ We’re sitting down to lunch, eight of us, to celebrate our host’s birthday. The seating plan is male then female in alternate places. The host is a performance poet and about half of the other guests have been introduced to me as poets, but I’ve forgotten which.
I’m rubbish at dinner parties. Mingling the friendly bowl with the feast of reason and the flow of soul I’m crap at. I just don’t seem to have the necessary social ease or articulateness or even basic sanity to play my part and it saddens me. I’m a good listener, though. If I’m seated next to a talker, I’ll listen unflaggingly from sheer gratitude.
I’m seated on the end, so there’s only the one person to contend with — this Sophie. Obliquely, anxiously, I watch how she wields her knife and fork. She doesn’t muck about. Straight in. Decisive. Able. Presently, I’m going to have to hold a conversation with this person if I don’t want to appear rude. I give myself a stern pep talk. Keep it light, I say. Look interested. If she asks you a question tell the truth. Why not?
Presently, this Sophie turns a face that is alive with good will and intelligence towards mine and says, ‘Not eating?’ I shake my head. ‘Hangover?’ she says. Opting for truth, I tell her I’m not sure. I’d bought a gram of MDMA to give to the host as a birthday present, I explain, but was so drunk the night before that I’d blacked out and I don’t know whether I lost the wrap or ate it. All I know for certain, I tell her, is that when I woke up it was missing from my pockets along with my car keys. So I don’t know, strictly speaking, if I have a hangover or if I’m still high on drugs.
‘Do you feel like you’ve eaten a gram of MDMA?’ she says, bringing her keen and sober intelligence to bear. I squint at the tablecloth. Again, I’m not sure. I do and I don’t. But there is more, I say. When I returned to the pub earlier that morning, hoping that my car keys had been handed in, the barmaid from last night was getting the pub ready for the lunchtime session. And she’d told me something rather disconcerting.
Sophie’s fork makes tiny circles of encouragement in the air. ‘Go on,’ she says. It’s hard to face, but again I plump for the truth. I tell her that the barmaid had said that she and her colleagues weren’t impressed by my behaviour the night before. When I’d pressed for details, the barmaid had said that at one stage I was flapping around on the saloon bar floor pretending to have an epileptic fit. My eyes were rolled back into my head and everything, she said. It frightened the life out of everybody. It was silly and unnecessary, she said, and I fully deserved to be thrown out on my ear.
‘So what do you make of that?’ I say, genuinely keen to know what she thinks. A problem shared is a problem halved never seemed truer. And then — fortunately — I come to my senses. ‘But that’s enough about me,’ I say briskly, truly mortified that I am monopolising the conversation. ‘So, are you a poet?’
She isn’t a poet, she says. Am I a poet, perhaps? I am not, I say. But I have met poets in Bristol. And then I tell her about the time I went to a poetry ‘slam’ in a café and the poets slung me out for lighting up a joint in their midst. And then I tell her how I knelt on the doorstep and taunted these poets by blowing smoke at them through the letterbox. And how the skunk was so strong that I then collapsed face down on the doorstep and all the poets who were coming and going had to step over me. And how I then thought I was having a heart attack and I had to tug pitifully at the poets’ trouser legs as they stepped over me and plead for an ambulance. And how an ambulance eventually came and I was loaded into it in a welter of blue flashing light.
Then I pull myself up short. What a sad, bloody bore I am. My, how drunk I was — it’s my one and only conversation. For God’s sake, Jeremy, you idiot, shut up!
‘So, do you work in the Arts, then?’ I say.
Now she seems to have something stuck in her throat. She is leaning forward as far as possible to try to dislodge it. Her nose is almost touching the tablecloth. And then I realise that she is, in fact, helpless, paralysed with laughter, which greatly surprises me, and puts me out a bit, too, because I really wasn’t trying to be funny. ,
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