Nick Laird - Utterly Monkey

As they walked, Geordie was forced to half-skip to keep up with Danny, whose eyes, still varnished with surprise, were trained on the pavement. Gum studded the cement like the beginnings of rain. It was too warm for a jacket and he could feel sweat beginning to prickle along his spine. His face was tight with goodwill, his stomach with nerves and he wasn’t certain that what was happening was happening. Geordie Fucking Wilson. He needed a drink.

The King’s Head was a nasty little place but close, with a chubby cream cat that had the run of it to such an unreasonable extent that customers would be standing, possibly shivering, possibly pregnant, whilst it stretched and yawned and dreamt on a seat in front of the fireplace. It had the look of a theatre bar. All busy carpet, threadbare velvet and smeary mirrors, and signed sepia photographs of stars, faded with smoke and sunlight to the same dulled obscurity as their subjects. Its landlord was the obese and charmless Gerard, who sported a lame goatee in a lame attempt to define a lame jaw. Years back, when Danny had been looking for an evening job during law school, he tried all the local pubs for bar work. Gerard had immediately said Sorry mate, hardly enough for meself here really. Danny had persuaded his then-girlfriend to call in and ask. Tamara, a delicate woman whose distinctive nose exacerbated her accent and deportment into something approaching minor nobility, had put her head round the door and Gerard had offered her work immediately. They then couldn’t decide if Gerard was sexist or anti-Irish or just anti-Danny. Still, it was the closest pub and proximity – to lazy men in the city – is worth an acre of stripped floorboards, battered leather sofas, and four elastic student barmaids, which was what the second nearest, Pravda or Molotov or something, offered.

Geordie wandered to the far end to get a table and Danny stood at the bar. Geordie Wilson. How weird is that? He looked very well, really, considering, Danny thought, watching Geordie tap his lighter on the table at the far end of the bar. Chirpy. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time, not since 15 August 1995, the summer Danny came back from his first year of uni, though neither remembered the incident. Danny was driving his father’s grey Volvo estate up the widest main street in Ireland, Ballyglass’s High Street. Ballyglass is really only this street. Other thoroughfares run off it at right angles before petering out into lanes and housing estates and fields. Geordie was crossing the lights by Union Street and Danny was waiting at them, holding the car on the clutch. Geordie saluted him and Danny, reclining, lifted a finger off the wheel and nodded a greeting. Both passed on feeling a little gladdened, a little embarrassed. Old friends know too much.

While Gerard stood and sullenly stared at the two jars of Guinness, waiting for them to settle, Danny watched Geordie fidgeting. He never could sit still. When they were at school, Mr O’Neill the maths teacher had told Geordie that he had no brakes. Danny, remembering that, pictured it literally: Geordie driving through Ballyglass in a car on which the cables have gone. Up Fairhill and Oldtown he could keep pace with the traffic. His car would look like the others, accelerate like the others, and he would sing along tunelessly to the songs on Townland Radio just like the other drivers. But downhill, to James Street, to the Ballymore Road, the car wouldn’t slow. He might try to warn you, flash his lights, beep his horn but he’d still collide and send things flying: other drivers, rickety cyclists, grocery shoppers, idiot dogs. Geordie Wilson, a bad bastard who lacks the ability to stop, and he’s come to see me. Danny delved for his loose change and counted it out while he waited for Gerard to steer his bright blue paunch, like the front of a bumper car, around the open drawer of the till. Gerard performed the manoeuvre quite neatly, pausing in front of the cash register to slam it shut with his side, and then pressed at the optics with two highballs, growling. Danny placed his scuffed Adidas on the brass footrail and shifted his weight onto it, keeping his balance by holding onto the side of bar. What were these rails for? To tie your pet to? He turned again to watch Geordie, sitting at the table, idly aiming and flicking a match, unlit, at the fat white cat which sat a few feet from him, defiantly licking her paws.

Gerard set the two pints down in front of Danny on an already sodden Carlsberg towel, and noiselessly accepted the exact amount (I think that’s right) proffered by Danny. He splashed the coins in the open drawer of the till, and went back to watching some sportive tangle of colour and shouting, wrestling perhaps, on the telly in the corner.

Their table was round, too low, and pocked with circular marks, a Venn diagram of sessions of previous drinking. Their lack of back support forced them to lean forward, conspiratorially. They looked like grandmasters. Geordie moved first.

‘All right fella. Sorry to drop in on you like this. You look a bit shocked.’

‘No don’t be stupid mate. It’s good to see you. What’s been going on?’

‘No no, you go first boss. Last I heard you were doing the law.’

‘Yeah. I’m a fully paid-up lawyer. Qualified almost three years ago. Working in the city. Good money, bad hours. But here, what about you? Let’s hear your news.’

‘Aw, you know me. Bit of this. Bit of that. None of the other. Some of the above.’

Danny had forgotten this, how Geordie spoke. It struck Danny now that maybe it was because he felt awkward. He sounded like a client squirming, mixing bonhomie with avoiding your eye. Danny waited.

‘Well, I’m officially an unemployed labourer.’

‘That what your business card says?’

‘It’s what my dole form says. I wish to labour. But no suitable labour’s available. Suitable’s the key. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve made me go on. I’ve been apprentice, trainee, new-starter, jobseeker.’

‘So you just living off the bru?’

‘Off the bru and on the…’ Geordie lifted his pint and nodded towards it, ‘brew.’ He then laughed too loudly, a little hysterical.

Danny eyed him quizzically. ‘You’re still a funnyman. Funny peculiar.’

‘Sorry mate, I’m a wee bit caned. I had a smoke in that park at the end of the road before I came to see you. What have I been doing? Well…’ Geordie puffed his cheeks and blew breath out for a second. Danny felt the heat of it and moved slightly back. I was doing a bit of cab work with Tommy Vaughan’s Taxis. Driving the old biddies to and from the Bingo. Leaving them over to their friends’ houses for tea and chat or up to the church on a Sunday.’

Danny was reminded of what he’d wanted to ask him when he’d been at the bar.

‘How did you know where I lived anyway?’

‘Just phoned your mum and mentioned I was coming over and she told me. Got your phone number as well but thought I’d just call round, surprise you.’

Damn sure you did. Otherwise I’d have produced a bulletproof excuse. Danny also suddenly realized why his mum had called him at work that morning when he’d been on a conference call: an e-mail from Jill, his secretary, had popped up on his screen asking him to ring her back. He’d forgotten, as usual, but this seemed a disproportionate and cruel punishment.

‘Yeah…You look well. It’s good to see you. How long are you here for? What are you doing here? You know, in London?’

Geordie moved nothing in his face now except his lips.

‘Not sure yet. See how things pan out.’

They drank fast, and let drink do the unpeeling for them. After setting down each new round on the table there was a moment when they waited for the pints to finish settling. It is difficult to get going on a Guinness. There is nothing aesthetic about other refreshments. Lager and cider just slop in their glasses, fizzing at you to get at it, to raise it and down it. Guinness is complete in itself. The first sip is like cutting a wedding cake. After the measured pouring, then the storm in a pint glass, the spindrift apartheid of grains and galaxies settling. And the Guinness was working. Danny began to feel a kind of warmth for this hard-bitten short-arse in front of him. It was good to see him. There was the other thing, of course, that Geordie brought back: guilt. But for the moment that could be disguised with drink, with smoke and mirrors which, indeed, the pub had in abundance. Danny had some knowledge he’d been chewing on for the last hour. It was time to spit it out. He cleared his throat and started, ‘I heard you had some bother a while back.’