Another reason why Trev should have gone on the stage instead of becoming a builder, apart from his love of the limelight, is the wonderful expressiveness of his face. Now, merely by giving me a level stare and bulging his eyes at me, he’s conveying that he is about to lose his struggle to keep the lid on his mirth. That he, Trev, should be suppressing an emotion merely out of politeness, and then confiding this, to me, via a subtle facial gesture, like some fastidious bourgeois, is in itself an example of this street-fighting farm boy’s highly developed sense of dramatic irony.
What’s amusing him is the scene being enacted at the next stout pub table, where a chap is trying to have a ‘heart to heart’ with Sharon. That someone should be under the impression that Sharon has a heart, and to then attempt to negotiate with it, is, I agree, amusing. Mystic Mick is a pub regular, however, and ought to know better.
Mick’s a loner, a mystic, but likable because of his crippling anxiety not to create any ‘bad karma’ in the universe. For years he’s stood at the bar tuning in to mysterious, increasingly powerful forces of which perhaps only he is yet aware, noticing from time to time that Sharon is likely to go off with virtually anyone who cares to ask. And Mystic Mick has suddenly come to the conclusion that even harbingers of the New Dawn deserve their place in the sun now and again, and he’s asked her whether she’d like to come back and spend the night with him in his van.
You can’t always judge a book by its cover, was how Sharon had earlier explained to Trev and me her decision to give him a trial. Also, she says, she’s a sucker for the backs of vans. So they go back to Mick’s van and without any of the usual preliminaries she removes her clothes and makes herself comfortable. But Mystic Mick takes one look, freezes, and bursts into tears. He can’t go through with it, he says. The intimacy would unhinge him. He slept with a woman about a year ago. The time before that was in the late 1990s. (It was the same woman.) Please help me, he says. So they have coffee instead, over which he pours out to Sharon his fears, his hopes, his dreams, and his inklings about a new Merlin and the spiritual age to come. And because he’s revealed to her his innermost secrets in the back of his van, and she’s listened sympathetically, there’s no going back. As far as he’s concerned they’re in a committed relationship. And the next evening in the pub there was the surreal sight of Mystic Mick, in a clean and fairly new shirt, and Sharon, who doesn’t do holding hands on principle, holding hands.
Normally, landlord, bar staff and regulars would have laughed or jeered their heads off. But Mick was so changed, and so commanding, and so set on an unalterable course towards a golden horizon, and Sharon was so humble, they merely looked quizzically at one another.
And that’s why Trev’s bulging his eyes at me, instead of his more normal reaction to a new couple, which is to dance a delirious little jig in front of them, prior to an evening ahead of merciless insult and innuendo. Also, at nine o’clock, three men are coming into the pub to attack him, God willing, and he’s quietly sticking vodka and cokes down his throat and inflaming his martial spirit. ‘Only three,’ he says laconically. ‘Three against one. Shows you what cowards they are. Still, you’re here,’ he says, again laconically. (I pledge to throw a pub table should the need arise.) The three men are his girlfriend’s ex-husband plus two others, come all the way from Kent especially. It seems a bit superfluous because his girlfriend left him a month ago, entered into a marriage of convenience, after which she and her husband moved to Egypt.
But before the big fight at nine o’clock, there’s a drama. Mystic Mick stands up, throws a three-quarters-full pint of lager in Sharon’s face and walks out. This doesn’t upset her at all. She just asks for a beer towel. ‘What was all that about?’ says Trev, bulging his eyes at me again. ‘He wanted me to tell him what he had to do to make me happy,’ says Sharon, dabbing the beer out of her eyes. ‘And so what did you say?’ said Trev, screwing his eyes shut as if he couldn’t face what he was about to hear. ‘I said all I wanted was a good seeing-to every now and then,’ said Sharon. ‘And he does that.’ Trev’s cup runneth over and he collapses sideways on to the floor.
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