Ian Rankin - Beggars Banquet

One night a week, I slip out from Alice’s clutches for the euphemistic ‘pint with the lads’. We meet up in the same pub, then visit a new pub where Maxwell will chat up the barmaid, and take carry-out food back to his place where we might watch a video or play cards. Since the videos are all basically the same video, Maxwell attempts variety by trying to freeze-frame the come shot, fast-forward through the humping, or slo-mo the oral sex. I think this irritates the others, not just me. And at the end of it all, Maxwell has the same comment ready for me. A comment whose surface envy disguises a deeper sense of superiority.

‘Of course,’ he’ll say, ‘Kenny’s the lucky one. He spends all day surrounded by teenage lovelies.’

Of course I do. It’s one of the schoolteacher’s few perks.

You’re asking yourself: what does all this have to do with the fact that Alice was eventually put away for murder? And I answer that it’s all to do with a video. Because the barmaid reminded me of a model on the cover of one of Maxwell’s videos. The video was called ‘Asian Brothel Orgy’. No vagueness there. Video titles are seldom open to misinterpretation. You don’t look at them and ask yourself, Hm, wonder what that one’s about? ‘Teenage Dog Orgy’ would mean just that, I’m afraid.

Of course, none of ‘Asian Brothel Orgy’ took place in Asia, and only one model bore any resemblance to someone from that part of the globe. The cover showed a perky blonde and blue-eyed teenager (American, I suppose, like the movie) looking coy and positioned so that, nude, she still showed little of interest to the regular porno customer. She was the tease, the promise of interior revelation.

The back cover of course was a different matter: medical close-ups of penetration and ingestion. The front cover model naturally did not appear in the film. It took me a while to place her. I’m not suggesting that the new lunchtime barmaid did spare-time modelling for porno cassettes, but the two were distinctly similar. I went to the pub most lunchtimes, but seldom paid attention to the staff, being more interested in my beer and the all too occasional presence of Jennie Muir, our French teacher. Actually, it was Jennie’s more frequent absences from the pub which put blinkers on me. I’d sit eating crisps, staring into the bag as it emptied, wondering what she’d make of my Friday night translations for Maxwell and the others. ‘What’s she saying now, Kenny?’ ‘She’s saying “harder harder, faster faster”.’ When I wanted to watch a video in my own home, I’d try to rent something French, despite Alice’s protests that subtitles were too much like hard work. She preferred Steve Martin or Michael Caine over the latest Gallic smash, and had actually unplugged the machine halfway through Delicatessen.

‘It’s anything but delicate,’ she’d fumed.

In my short reverie, prior to two crushing hours with the sixth years or an hour of Shakespeare or poetry, I’d stare into the crisp packet and see it as the interior of a nice flat by the river, a small balcony leading to the living-room where Jennie sat on a white leather sofa, sipping Chablis and chuckling at Delicatessen. I proffered more wine, which she accepted. We chinked glasses. Then I folded the crisp packet, tied a knot in it, and tossed it into the ashtray.

It was Frank Marsh who noticed her.

‘New barmaid’s a smasher,’ he said, placing a pint in front of me.

‘Really?’ Frank taught woodwork. His working knowledge was of planes and drill bits rather than women. He’d been fifty-six years a single man, never having ‘seen the point of getting bogged down’. I was a little envious of him. I glanced over my shoulder anyway. ‘Christ,’ I said, causing Frank to chuckle. She was chatting to a customer, fresh-faced and with a hand resting on one of the beer pumps, slender arms appearing from a baggy white T-shirt. I imagined Jennie Muir having depths of passion and provocation. But there was nothing submerged about the vision in front of me; all was glorious surface.

Inside a few days the lunchtime clientele of our unassuming pub had doubled. Word was getting around. Only later did I equate Donna the barmaid’s years, blonde hair and blue eyes with ‘Asian Brothel Orgy’. Then I happened to mention it to Maxwell. The biggest mistake of my life, just about.

He turned up one lunchtime with a slap on my shoulder. Startled, I tipped some beer on to my trousers.

‘Sorry, Kenny,’ he said. ‘Here, I’ll fetch a cloth.’

When he returned, he already knew her name and her age. ‘You were absolutely right,’ he told me, watching as I wiped stains from my crotch, ‘she’s great. And she does look like the bird off the front of the vid.’

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I knew Maxwell worked three miles away from the school and regarded lunch-hours as an anachronism. He shrugged.

‘Just passing. My name’s Maxwell, by the way.’ He shoved a hand out towards Frank Marsh. ‘Since Kenny’s not going to introduce us.’

Frank blinked towards me. Maxwell was the only one who called me ‘Kenny’. At school I was Ken, and to Alice I was always Kenneth. (She managed to make it sound like a rebuke.) I hated ‘Kenny’, and Maxwell knew it. Once or twice I’d responded in kind with Max or even Maxie, but he just smiled fondly and eventually I came back to Maxwell. He’d managed somehow to avoid abbreviations and nicknames at school, while I was (thanks to my parents) already a Kenny when I arrived there. The nearest I got to niggling him was to attempt what I call the ‘reverse pun’, opening our conversations with the line ‘How’s Maxwell?’ making the ‘How’s’ sound like ‘House’. Get it?

‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ Maxwell asked now. Frank rapidly finished his pint. ‘And tell me, do they do food here?’ Maxwell stood up. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll just go ask Donna.’

By this time, you see, Donna had replaced Jennie Muir in my fantasies. Instead of the riverside apartment, there was a stuffy blanketed room, walls painted black and hung with animal skins. Candles flickered on every surface, and in the middle of the floor was a mattress sans bedstead. Blood-red wine replaced the chilled Chablis, and there was a frenzy of music on the hi-fi. For nearly two weeks I’d been looking forward to lunchtimes and then going over them again during the subsequent afternoons. I’d broken the ice with Donna, had ascertained that she liked rock and a little bit of jazz, didn’t go to watch films but liked ‘clubbing’ at weekends.

‘That’s why I work lunchtimes whenever I can, keeps the nights free.’ Her pale face surrounded crimson lips. She wore two gold studs in either earlobe. I started to drink a whisky with my beer, just so she’d turn around towards the row of optics, giving me the chance to stare. Her shape seemed near perfect, set off by short hugging skirts and thick black tights. Surface. Everything was there. Not like in the videos where the nakedness was so naked that it became clothing in itself.

‘I don’t know how you can teach in the afternoons,’ she said one day. She meant, how could I teach after a couple of pints and a couple of shorts. The answer was: by remote control, literally. I used videos more and more in the classroom, hogging the TV set, showing whatever was vaguely relevant and available. Shakespeare was easy, poetry not. I’d even take a class to the school’s video lab – we have some excellent facilities, due to a go-ahead rector who realises that technology is where future jobs lie. (What he doesn’t realise is that after hours I often use the video lab’s facilities for copying Maxwell’s tapes.) I could fill an hour showing the class how to edit films, why the cameraman is so important, and how an editor can make a movie work where the director has failed.