Nick Laird - Glover’s Mistake

An old western was on the television in the living room. Glover had changed his clothes and now lay on the floor with one arm tucked up into his red T-shirt. The shape of his fist bounced gently off his chest, like a beating cartoon heart.

‘I think this is bust.’

Glover looked up as David wagged the black stapler, pulled the arm out from under his T-shirt and motioned for David to throw it. He caught it neatly, sat up and turned it over in his hands, as if looking for its price. Then he snapped it open and nodded.

‘It’s jammed. I can see it. The magazine can’t push up to the top.’

‘The magazine of staples?’

‘Yep.’

‘That’s very nice.’

‘One of the best.’

Last year David had photocopied the list of collective nouns for animals from his old dictionary at school and stuck it to the fridge. Glover and he had got into the habit of repeating them, and occasionally testing each other. (‘A sloth?’ ‘Bears…A fluther?’ ‘Jellyfish.’) David didn’t know exactly why he’d grown so fond of them. They seemed to hint at all the differing ways to proceed. A labour of moles. A zeal of zebras. A shrewdness of apes. With Glover, from the very start, David felt they fitted; that they lived in the same collective noun. He wanted good things to happen to him. He wanted good things to happen to them both. Glover worked the offending staple out with the point of a biro.

‘Ah, cheers.’

‘Interesting yesterday, with Ruth.’

‘Was the Bell not pretty empty for a Saturday?’ David clacked the stapler lightly a couple of times.

‘I know it sounds stupid, but I never considered a painting as representing, instead of just straight depicting.’

David thought it did sound stupid and it made him feel fond of his friend—it was these little reminders of Glover’s very average mind that made his good looks so much easier to stand.

‘If I’d had a teacher like that I might have done my homework.’ Glover lay back down on the carpet, where two cushions angled his head to the screen. They watched four men on horseback ford a river, then arrive in an empty one-street town. A man dived through the window of the saloon and began shooting at them.

David said, to no response, ‘Sugar glass.’

Glover had slipped his hand back up into his T-shirt and was gently tapping on his chest again. The cartoon heart. He was always in such a good mood after church. David didn’t think it was righteousness particularly, or smugness; more that he’d done his duty and could now relax. Still, it was intensely irritating. David felt excluded from his happiness, his secret. Over another burst of gunfire he said, ‘How was God today?’

‘Fine. Thanks.’

‘What did you learn? What was the sermon?’

Glover sighed and blinked hard at the screen.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Ermm, something like, without a shepherd sheep are not a flock.’

‘Correct. They’re not. They’re autonomous.’

‘They’re sheep.’

‘Autonomous sheep.’

An outlaw was hiding in a barrel with a shotgun, staring out through a knothole in the wood. David prodded again. ‘You don’t have to sneak off, you know.’

‘I don’t sneak off. You’re not up when I leave.’

What’s the opposite of coincidence? What’s the word for nothing happening that might suggest a hidden plan? Glover found significance in the darkest corners of his life. Whatever found him could not have missed him, whatever missed him could not have found him. Once, when David had been turned down for the job of Deputy Head of the English Department, Glover had assured him that everything happened for a reason. David hadn’t protested, but at that moment some deep tectonic movement had occurred. They might share the same flat but they lived in different universes. Folk-tale determinism! David was not surprised by much in the routine progress of his days, but that surprised him. If life turned on any principle it was haphazard interaction and erratic spin. He thought it much too obvious for argument: you make your own luck.

They were silent as the adverts came on. Glover and David considered themselves expert judges of the female form. There was an unspoken question when a woman was sighted which required a binary answer. It seemed as if they were simply being honest, and it made David feel masculine—not macho, not manly—to talk that way. Often, if they were in a bar or on a street, it would be a nudge or a directed glance to alert the other’s attention—although Glover was picky. A beautiful Indian girl in full sari was selling teabags to them now and, without prompting, Glover said no, her shoulders were too wide.

They had met in the Bell two years ago. David was trying to mark essays when the barman put some folk music, extravagantly loudly, on the stereo. Miming how to twist a dial, David said, ‘Sorry, mate, could you turn it down a bit? Too much accordion for me.’

‘My dad used to play the accordion.’

David smiled weakly, showing no teeth, trying for polite dissuasion.

‘He met my mum at a church concert. Without the accordion I wouldn’t be here.’ The barman grinned—a kind of slackening that made his face charming.

‘Does he still play?’

‘On state occasions.’

Wearing a grey T-shirt and dark blue canvas trousers of the sort David associated with plumbers, the barman was athleticlooking with very square shoulders; and these he hunched forward as he rested against the glass-doored fridge, so his T-shirt hung concavely, as if blown on a washing line. The hair on his head was short, black, artfully mussed with wax. David’s mother would have said he had the forehead of a thief, meaning it was very low, but his eyes would have won her over. They were widely spaced and a light, innocent blue. The way his heavy eyebrows sloped towards a neat, feminine nose seemed to grant his face sincerity. David liked him—James Moore Glover—at once. A friendship, too, is a kind of romance.

Glover did all the newspaper crosswords when it wasn’t too busy, and since David always sat at the bar, marking at lunchtimes, or for an hour after work, he was often on hand to help. And talking in the sardonic, ruminative, unhurried way of two men who happen to be in the same place, they discovered that they made each other laugh.

A few months after Glover had started in the Bell, he looked up and scratched unthinkingly at his cheek, where light acne scars were still visible, and David noticed he wasn’t working on a crossword. He was circling flat-shares in Loot. He’d been staying with his boss Tom and Tom’s girlfriend, but the couple were splitting up and selling their flat; he had to move out.

After a pint and a half of German lager David said, ‘Mate, you know, I’ve a spare room. You could stay there if you’re stuck.’

Glover arrived with Tom, his worldly goods in the boot of the bar manager’s BMW. It turned out the bar manager was also Glover’s cousin. David and he disliked each other instantly. Tom remembered him from the pub, he said, as if that was somehow damning and odd, and he walked round the flat with a cursory, dismissive air; he’d seen it all before, or if not exactly this, then something close enough. He said, ‘Going to make tea for us then or what?’ and as David carried the tray through to the living room, he heard him whisper to Glover, ‘You’d best make sure you’ve a lock on your door.’ After he’d left, David had made it plain that this certainly wasn’t that kind of set-up, and Glover appreciated, he thought, his candour. James had six wine boxes of books, several bin bags of clothes and a five-foot bay tree in an earthenware pot. The tree had a slim trunk and a perfect afro of thick, waxy leaves. The pot got cracked on the door jamb and they replanted it into the plastic red bucket David used for the mop. It was still there now, in David’s living room, in its temporary home.