Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

Around Christmas-time most firms of solicitors hold an office party or a bash of some kind to mark the occasion. Batstone Buckley Williams is no exception, and just before the break everybody clears up their room and decks it out with the tinsels and shiny fripperies you always see at these sorts of festivities. Work stops early and the fun and drinking begins. Before long crackers, whistles and other items of revelry are in evidence, and as the evening progresses there is loud music and a disco.

I must confess that it is only after I have had a lot to drink that I feel entirely comfortable in the conical, brilliant hat which someone has insistently placed on my head, and that I am able to forget the redness of my face and the perspiration patch along my spine. And it is only then, when I have drunk enough to forget myself, that I am able to take to the dance floor, and even then it is only to participate in the communal dances — the ones where everyone holds the person in front of them by the waist and, having formed a tight, warm human centipede, we shuffled around the room cheering and singing. At moments such as this, in the midst of this joyous chain-gang, I am suddenly aware of how interlocked we all are at Batstone Buckley Williams and how integral and fortunate my position is there, and also how contented I am just to be around in the rowdy, glad night.

As a partner I am allowed to invite a handful of guests (preferably persons with some useful connection in the law). If Donovan and his father had not been abroad I would have considered inviting them, but as it was my thoughts turned to Susan. Poor Susan! Maybe she would appreciate an invitation, it was not often that she enjoyed a carefree night out … And then I abandoned the idea. I remembered our last meeting; I remembered that it might not be a bad thing to be unencumbered by a female partner at an office party (not that I had definite aspirations in that regard, but one never knew …). So in the end I finished up by asking Oliver Owen.

‘James, I must say that it’s very kind of you to think of me.’ Oliver sounded a little perplexed. ‘But I don’t think I’m free that night.’

I said, ‘Well, it would be nice to see you there, that’s all. Don’t worry if you can’t make it,’ I said. ‘I know how it is — family and all that.’

‘Exactly,’ Oliver said.

On the afternoon of the 23rd I packed up my things and watched as the Christmas tree was brought into the room. For some reason — maybe because of the twinkling view it affords of the Strand — my room always hosts the Christmas tree. This leaves me with the wearisome task of having to decorate it with the usual baubles and angels and electric stars. Luckily for me, June does not trust me with this important task and takes it upon herself to weigh down the tree with the trinkets. I am left to spray on the snow and to cover the drooping branches in glistening aluminium tassels.

As evening approached most people went home to change and eat something before the party, but I just popped out for a quick chickenburger and a glass of milk to line my stomach. When I returned to the office one or two people had started the celebrations, so I took up a position behind the drinks table and acted as barman. It is a job I am happy to do because it clarifies everything. Usually at parties my identity is fuzzy around the edges and it is unclear exactly how and where I come into things. When I am behind the bar, though, my role and my responsibilities are clear and there can be no mistake about what I am doing and why I am there: I am there to pour the drinks. This is not a negligible responsibility, and it must be said that I enjoy the status it confers upon me for the evening.

On this particular night things went particularly well. I fell into a nice rhythm of sloshing and mixing and icing and pouring and before long the party around me was in full, sweating swing. People were enjoying themselves and one ripple effect of this was that they were very friendly to me — perhaps even over-friendly. People I hardly knew roared with delight at the sight of me and pounded me on the back as I handed them their liquor. So when, at around eleven o’clock, I heard a voice shout out jovially, James! James, old boy! I barely took notice, I took it to be yet another of the exaggerated greetings I had been receiving that night.

‘Come on James, come on! You’re slacking!’ the voice cried. ‘Two bloody marys, pronto!’

When I saw it was Oliver and a friend I immediately wiped my right hand on my shirt and extended it.

‘Oliver!’ I said joyously. ‘Oliver! I thought you couldn’t make it! Here,’ I said, furnishing the two of them with big, red doubles, ‘knock these back, there’s plenty more.’

As I leaned over to hear what he was saying, Oliver suddenly let go of his glass, splashing my shirt with juice. He looked at me apologetically and grinned.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to top me up.’

I laughed. Oliver is a charming, if mischievous, drunk and it was no bother at all to replenish his glass. I was aglow with the encounter; there is nothing quite like unexpectedly running into an old friend.

‘Let me introduce you,’ Oliver said. ‘James Jones, meet my pupil, Diana Martin — the apple of my eye.’ Oliver said to her, ‘Did you know that James here was once in your shoes? So near we came to taking him on, and yet so far.’

I flushed. I tried to cover my face with my drink.

‘He washed his hands of us,’ Oliver said. ‘And how wise he was. Look at James, my child, indeed look around you, and learn: there is more to life than the Bar.’

We looked. On the floor a line of drunken men and women were pretending to be rowers. They were chanting and shouting and throwing objects — shoes, pens — at the ring of laughing onlookers. Usually such a spectacle — the sight of people so clearly enjoying themselves — would have warmed my heart, but this time I felt ashamed. I felt like disowning them.

‘Why did you turn down a tenancy?’ Diana asked me.

I looked at Oliver. He had placed me in an embarrassing situation.

I said, ‘Well, I didn’t exactly turn it down, not exactly …’

Oliver said to Diana, ‘Well, it’s a rather unfortunate story. You see, a vacancy arose, and James wasn’t around to take it up.’

I was confused. ‘Vacancy? What vacancy?’

Oliver was not listening. He was explaining to his pupil what had happened. ‘Just after James here had finished his pupillage, Lord Tetlow went to the Bench, and so there was an extra space in chambers. We tried to get hold of James to offer him the tenancy, but no one knew where he was. We tried everywhere; I remember manning the phone myself and ringing up every chambers in the Temple to get hold of him.’ Oliver put his arm around my shoulder. ‘No one thought of ringing up this firm, which is not surprising because no one had even heard of it. James?’ Oliver looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’

It rocked me: Oliver’s news knocked me off my physical equilibrium. It actually batted me across the head; my cranial nerves were signalling the same dizzy, tinny pain that I had felt once when, hurrying along my dark corridor at home (the telephone was ringing, there was no time to switch on the lights), I had walked straight into the edge of the half-open door and my skull had given off a great crack.

‘I’m OK,’ I said to Oliver. I said, ‘Look, excuse me, will you,’ and rushed off bent almost double.

The lavatory floor was wet with urine but I slumped down on it all the same. I had to, my legs could not hold me up. My whole body, in fact, felt liquid and powdery, and it suddenly came home to me that that was all I was made of, water and dust. That is not all: I also felt misshapen, mashed up. I felt like a cartoon animal that has fallen with a whistling noise down a mile-deep canyon to crunch face-first on the road at the bottom, only to be immediately mown down by a whizzing truck: flattened and splatted, my torso a pancake with tyre-patterns all over it.