Read by David McGrath
London, October 1979
My boss called out as I passed his office, “oh, oh, oh … Jack …”
I find conversations that begin with “oh, oh, oh …” never end well. He was more nervous and awkward than usual.
“My sister, she um, well she gave me these tickets for the theatre tonight and…”
“Chris, I would love to go to the theatre with you,” I said, even though I would have preferred to stuff a live badger in my pants.
“It’s an Irish play…” he blurted out.
Make that two live badgers.
The play was even worse than expected. A murky stage draped with fishing nets and an upturned currach. Every now and then, a sonorous Mick pranced onto the boards and cursed the Irish skies. The rain never stopped and the cast was bedraggled and drenched. Like Pats leaving a sinking ship.
At the intermission, I drank a Bacardi and Chris ordered a cup of tea. He genuinely did. What is it with the Brits? The Zulus might be attacking but you’d still hear the sound of a whistling kettle rising above the war cries.
“What do you think?” Chris asked.
“It’s fabulous,” I said, because when you go to the theatre, you have to use at least one queer word. He sipped his tea and nodded. He ate exactly half his digestive biscuit, to indicate satisfaction, but not over-indulgence. He dusted the crumbs from his fingertips and touched the corners of his mouth with a tissue.
“Is there anything better than live theatre?” he asked, and I immediately thought of the Sex Pistols. People can say whatever they want about the Kingsmen, Sonics, Mysterians, MC5 and early Underground, but until Anarchy in the UK, it was all just so much amplified twang. The Pistols released four singles and one album. They blew into the scene in 1976 and by late ‘77 they were history. They were gone, and they knew they were gone. Theatre, on the other hand, refuses to accept its own demise. It’s been lying in a grave for 2000 years, but every time you throw down a shovel of dirt, the bastard sits back up and soliloquizes.
“Fabulous,” he said.
“Fabulous,” I repeated, but in my mind I was clobbering it with the shovel.
The end-of-intermission bell rang and I felt like a punch-drunk boxer returning to the ring. We took our seats and watched a lone drummer limping across the stage, rapping out a beat on a bodhran while the sky turned portentous black. Chris pressed his shoulder against mine and, hidden by the darkness, I managed to swallow a Percocet painkiller because I was truly in pain. As our good friend, Jesus Christ used to say: “I have suffered”.
*
When the last currach was sunk, the last father beaten to a pulp, the last pint of porter slobbered over and the last donkey race run, we shambled onto Shaftesbury Avenue with a thousand confused Brits. To them, the island next door was more enigmatic than ever, a place to send your soldiers, but never your tourists.
“I know this great Indian restaurant in Soho.” Chris said, and the night I'd thought was over had only just begun.
*
‘The Taj’ was upscale, full of chrome and mirrors rather than brass and flock wallpaper. The waiters wore sharp suits and white turbans that looked like crash helmets made from giant onions.
“You really must tell me more about your country,” Chris said, and so I invented the Ireland of his imagination, full of picturesque nonsense: thatched cottages, accordion players at crossroads, one-room schoolhouses presided over by unshaven Latin scholars. I was tempted to throw in a leprechaun or two, but somehow managed to resist.
“Enchanting,” he said.
“Enchanting,” I repeated.
Chris stared into my eyes with longing, and it was time for evasive action. I reached into a pocket and pulled out a block of hash.
“Do know what this is?” I asked.
“Yes I do,” he said, looking frantically about the restaurant, “or at least I think I do. When I was in college it was offered, but I never said yes.”
“Now is your chance to say yes.”
I cut the cube in two and slid his portion across the tablecloth, leaving a green-brown smudge on the linen. He quickly covered it with his hand.
“You want to smoke this, here?” he said.
“Who said anything about smoking?”
I popped the block in my mouth, chewed and swallowed.
After some embarrassed hesitation, he picked up his portion and did likewise.
Our meals arrived on brass platters and a man with an onion head spooned rice onto the plates. Chris dipped his fork and put it to his lips.
“Mmm, c’est piquant.” He said.
I was alarmed. Use of the French language is generally a prelude to sodomy. I felt the overwhelming need to do something heterosexual, like scrimshaw a whalebone or run outside and lay tarmac.
“Will I know when the effect starts to happen?” he asked.
“You will know,” I replied, “you will definitely know.”
Dessert was a variety of fritters dipped in a pink mixture of Bazooka bubble gum and melted rubber glove. I stared into the plate and tried to find a small corner of the mess that was edible. When I looked up, Chris was smiling stupidly, and then he laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before so I wasn’t sure if the squeal was the result of English public school or quality Moroccan hash. Either way, people from other tables were looking at us. The waiters huddled in a corner and exchanged Hindi words of concern, and then Chris did it again. This time, it was pirate-from-the-Spanish-Main meets little-old-lady-on-a-rollercoaster. A waiter came to our table and asked if everything was okay. “Perhaps you might like some tea?”
“Are you expecting Zulus?” I asked.
Chris doubled over and from under the edge of the tablecloth, I could hear him choke on the word ‘Zulus’. The waiter waited for Chris to recover, but the effect was only beginning. When Chris sat upright, a change had taken place, something dark and inexplicable was happening in the space where sense was generally made.
“I feel strange.”
“You're meant to feel strange.”
“I feel like I’m going to die.”
“You're meant to feel like you're going to die.”
I tried to restart the laughter, but his eyes misted over and a tear emerged. The waiter, standing awkwardly beside us all this time, looked down at me and said the worst thing he could possibly say, the worst thing imaginable, only five words, well-intentioned and delivered in a gentle tone of voice, but devastating.
"Is your dad all right?"
Chris looked first at me and then at the waiter and then, with rising panic, at the exit.
“He’s fine,” I said. “He just needs some air.”
Chris knocked over his chair in a sudden bolt for the door, and I was so high, between the pills and the pot, I could have wiped my mouth with a ten-pound note and left four napkins as a tip.
Outside, I caught a glimpse of coattail disappearing around a corner. “Chris!” I called out but he didn't answer. When I caught up on him, he was clawing at the shutters of the Leicester Square tube.
“I have to get home.”
“The tube isn’t running.”
“He thought I was your Dad.”
And what was I supposed to say? Along with being twice my age, Chris was critically unfashionable. With his tweeds, his boxcloth braces and his captoe Oxfords, he could have just as easily been mistaken for a granddad. Was he too blind to see the vast gap between us?
I wore black boots with Cuban heels, grey cords and a quilted Sun Yat-sen jacket. Girls turned around to watch me in the street. Did I bloody well have to spell it out for him? Maybe I did. Maybe I needed to shout it in his face as loud as I could. I grabbed him by the lapels and pushed him up against a shop window. It was like trying to position a mannequin with broken legs.
“Don’t you get it, Chris, I like women!”
A look of complete bafflement spread across his face. “So do I,” he said, “so do I, you bloody fool. I just thought we were friends.”
He pushed past me and flagged down a taxi. He jumped inside and was gone.
“Oh!” I said to the emptiness of Charing Cross Road. “Oh!” That was not expected. I turned and started to walk, with no destination in mind. I paused on High Holborn and said “Oh!” once more. A minicab cruised up beside me and stopped. I got in and gave the address of a dealer in Walthamstow. The driver nodded and swung the cab around, fiddling with the radio until he found some music that sounded like a cat caught in a bicycle wheel.
We stopped at a traffic light beside a chip shop in Stoke Newington. Inside, a plump girl sat on a plastic chair with a brown paper bag on her lap. Above her, a sagging helix of flypaper, speckled with tiny death. She wore a white t-shirt and white pants. A roll of fat circled her waist like a ring buoy. She pulled a deep-fried Saveloy from the bag and was about to take a bite when she saw me looking. Ashamed, she tried to dip the meaty log back inside the bag.
This is what happens when fat girls play hide-the-sausage.
I looked away. She looked away. The cab moved on through the night like a wet shadow, skimming on streets I had never seen before. I’m always surprised by the size of this fucking place. Before I came here, London was Big Ben, Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, all squeezed together inside a snow dome, but now it’s a giant redbrick virus, expanding exponentially, eating up the healthy green body of the Home Counties, killing everything it touches.
A man on a grasshopper green Kawasaki pulled up beside us. The bike sounded like a chainsaw stuck in knotty hardwood and when he blipped the throttle, an oily vapour coughed out from three fluted pipes. He tapped his left foot, cut down a gear and swept into the lane ahead of us. His tail bulb, shaken loose by vibration, signalled a message in bursts of three: Three long flashes. I remembered from my days in the Sea Scouts that this was the letter ‘O’. Oscar. Man overboard. I thought about Chris, up to his neck, waving, looking for a ship. Looking for friendship. I thought about the Irish Sea, the North Bull Lighthouse and a sweeping beam that pointed the way to England. Three long flashes. The letter ‘O’. Oscar. Man Overboard. Chris bewildered in the back of his taxi, the swell of London rising and falling between us, him going up and me coming down.
He would never call me into his office again. He would never look at me shyly. There would be no more nights at the theatre, no more tea and digestive biscuits, no more Zulus and Indian dinners. All future contact would be purely professional, but the awkwardness would sit between us like a big rock. Eventually, he would have to let me go, with a cold handshake and a swift cheerio.
The cab driver looked in his rearview mirror and said, “Did you just say something?”
“I said, conversations that begin with ‘oh, oh, oh …’ never end well.”
(c) Barry McKinley, 2014
Barry McKinley's play Elysium Nevada was nominated for Best New Play in the Irish Theatre Awards 2009. He is editing a collection of short stories drawn from his late 1970s London diaries and attends the National Film School in Dublin where he is studying for an MA in screenwriting.
David McGrath performed for Liars' League at Wilderness Festival this year. He has also performed for Spread the Word, Rattle Tales and he has won StorySlam. He'll be reading his story The Elephant in the Tower at Arachne Press's Beastly Tales on the 17th of this month.
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