Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 5 November 2011

issue 05 November 2011

Before I went to the party, I went to the pub for a pint. The pub was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening. Jay was on duty behind the bar. She leaned across the bar to embrace and kiss me. She had a terrible hangover, she said. I told her to have one herself, and she thanked me and put a pound coin in her tips glass, as she does. I like Jay. There was a stage in Jay’s life when circumstances forced her and her two children to live in a tent for six months. Everything Jay has she’s had to scrabble for. Yet hard times involving tents haven’t politicised her. I’ve never heard her make a moral or a political judgment about anything.

After she’d served me, she resumed her perch on a barstool and continued with her texting. I braced my back comfortably against a pillar, stared out of the open door at the drizzle and the shiny street, and savoured every swallow of my pint. When my glass was empty Jay slid down from her stool and poured me another. While she was about it, I said, could she make my face up? ‘Of course, Jerry, mate. Of course,’ she said. (Jay’s Scouse.)

I took face paints and a shaving brush from my carrier bag and she came around to my side of the bar and under instruction painted my face and neck stark white and my eye sockets red. Then I took out of the bag my chef’s jacket, trousers and hat, all liberally splashed with fake blood, and put these on over my jeans and shirt. Job done, I resumed my comfortable position with my back against the pillar and began communing with pint number two. Jay returned to her perch on her side of the bar and continued texting.

Presently, a young woman darted in out of the drizzle. She was in her early twenties, light and energetic. Her headscarf, practical outdoor clothes and absence of cosmetics gave her an attractive, peasant air. ‘Can I help you, love?’ Jay said.

It might sound silly, said the woman, but although she lived quite near, she hadn’t been to any of the pubs in town yet, and she was wondering if this pub was ‘OK’. ‘Yeah, sure, it’s OK,’ said Jay, giving a considered and sisterly answer to a valid question. ‘It’s OK, isn’t it, Jerry?’ Yeah, it’s OK, said the psycho zombie chef, her one and only customer, taking his nose out of his glass. The woman decided to believe us and stay for a drink. She asked Jay for a large glass of red wine. Jay fetched it then went back to her stool and her texting.

This woman seemed quickly to forget any reservations she might have had about coming in. She brought her glass of wine over and stood next to me, eager to chat. She and her husband had walked or driven past the pub countless times, she said, and she had often wondered what it was like inside. It was silly of her to be living so near to town and not know any of the pubs, she said. She really should get out more. I asked her where she lived. She named a village about five miles away that is a byword for rusticity, in-breeding, domestic violence and the illegal use of working terriers. Her accent was southern Irish. ‘I just had to get out this evening. To get away on my own, you know? So I took the car and thought I’d try here. See what’s it’s like.’

I had an intuition. ‘You’ve had a row with your husband,’ I said. She laughed, relieved to be able to speak candidly, or perhaps to justify her actions. ‘Every now and then I need to get away, that’s all.’ ‘You’re bored,’ I said. ‘No, not bored exactly. But there’s only so much you can take of other people. There’s always that power struggle. So I’ve decided to come out and have a good time.’ As she said this, she tilted her glass jovially at me. Her frank, plain, lively face was becoming more attractive by the minute. ‘Paint your face up and come to the party,’ I said.

And do you know, if her husband hadn’t come storming in right at that moment, incandescent with rage, and stood right between us, I think she might have. The initial impression was of an honest man driven to distraction, prepared for any eventuality, but not quite expecting to find his wife deep in conversation with a blood-spattered psycho zombie chef. His initial dilemma appeared to be a question of whom to punch first. I felt sorry for him. His vacillation was fascinating to watch, though. We both looked at him, awaiting his decision. Even Jay looked up from her texting. ‘Don’t, Mike,’ said the woman, quietly. ‘Just don’t, OK?’ 

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