half midnight,’ the bouncer said, opening the door with a self-important tip of his chin.
I let Ian go in first, followed in his wake. Back in the day, I would have pushed first through these doors like a cowboy into a saloon. Drenched in Limara or Impulse or one of those other cheap body sprays, face smeared in foundation and blusher, hair quiffed up with sticky mousse, elasticated black miniskirt and my trusty Docs: the bee’s knees, the dog’s bollocks, the cream. A walking fire hazard, more like. We all were. And how smoky it would have been then. Our clothes used to reek when we got back to whoever’s house we were staying at that night.
But now, walking in, it smelled only of bodies, the ammoniac whiff of badly dried clothes, trailing vapours of long-ago-applied aftershave. I kept my head down. The carpet had changed – purple and reds nowadays, though I couldn’t have said what it used to be. There’d been fake books on fake shelves, I remembered, back in the day, and a kind of fenced-off raised podium, which was still there, tables and chairs on it just the same. I pushed through warm, sticky limbs, the dull rarararara, the ack-ack-ack of tipsy laughter.
There was a tiny space where the fag machine had been a million years ago, next to the ladies’.
‘Wait there,’ I said. ‘What’s your poison?’
‘My poison?’
I chuckled, feeling older than Aristotle. ‘I mean, what do you want to drink?’
‘Oh, sure. Peroni? Is that OK?’
‘Righto.’
Getting served would be tricky. I was invisible on a good day and this place was full of better-looking people half my age. Maybe I’d stand out on that basis. The bearded lady at the carnival type thing, a Zimmer frame thrown onto a dance floor. I’m exaggerating for laughs, I know, old habits die hard, but still. I queued at the bar. When I reached the front, I took a twenty out of my purse and held it up. Money is visible at least was my thinking. The barman with the goatee served first the bloke with a cantaloupe melon stuffed up each T-shirt sleeve and a neck thicker than a tree, then the woman next to him, arms thinner than toothpicks, but when he raised his eyebrows at the woman who replaced that woman, she nodded at me and said: ‘I think it’s this lady next.’
I thanked her, even though the look on her face said she was wondering why the bloody hell I was here when I’d be more at home in the Wilsons or the Prospect or, well, at home.
‘A pint of snakebite and black, please,’ I said, surprising myself – I hadn’t had it for decades. ‘And a pint of Peroni.’
‘What’s snakebite?’ the barman asked. Bless him, he was no more than twenty.
‘Half cider, half lager in the same glass, dash of blackcurrant.’
On the way back to Ian, one sip of snakebite was a time capsule to long ago, when I’d been fighting lads off with a shitty stick. They would skulk outside the ladies’, fall over themselves to light me up in the days when I held a lit cigarette at arm’s length for effect. As it was, no one was bothering me anymore. The #metoo movement was not a worry; more like #notme, to be honest.
As I handed Ian his pint, our eyes met. And there, as ever, at the howling core of him, was loneliness. Loneliness connects all of us, I thought. We are all so terribly lonely. The full weight of the sadness that had grown into my soul a year ago, that was now part of it, was now having its cover pulled away inch by slow inch. Until last night I’d had Lisa, but now she was gone, taking Mark with her from a place already lost to me: my heart.
‘Cheers,’ I said, and we chinked glasses.
‘This is really kind of you.’
His eyelids drooped. I thought I caught spirits on his breath – whisky or brandy – but I couldn’t be sure.
‘I was supposed to be going out with my daughter.’ I had to shout into his ear, it was so loud in there. ‘But she stood me up.’
He cupped his mouth with one hand and shouted back, ‘Is she at uni?’
I noticed he’d already drunk two thirds of his pint. ‘No. Not as such. She’s taken a year out.’
His head rolled a little. I realised he might have taken something but couldn’t be sure. Picking someone up off the