Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

I could only really sustain the stories up to this point. After that, his face came closer, he put his arms around me, there was kissing, there was pressing together, and the narrative failed; it lost its sequence. I could — and did — imagine plenty of what happened after, but not in a clear order. It came in a hallucinated muddle. I would try to disentangle it. I’d return again and again to the gate, the threshold, the movement with which he reached across the distance between us. I’d start again from there. But it was no good. The dream beyond that point was a stuck film repeating itself. Exhausting, after a while. Dispiriting. Because in truth it was nothing at all.

In my second year I was so short of money that I got a job working three evenings a week at a pub in town. It must have been an old pub once, with lots of twisty little rooms winding around the different levels, but it had been knocked through into one huge, cavernous space, low-ceilinged and gloomy. There were still confusing steps up and down in places, and the floor changed from flagstones to boards to carpets; drunks and women in heels sometimes tripped and spilled their beer. Games machines flashing ruby- and emerald-coloured lights stood against the walls. The place didn’t have much atmosphere. It was more fashionable to go to one of the new bars with long pine tables and stainless-steel counters, where food was served; or to one of the old quaint pubs that had kept their little rooms and served real ale. Big parties came to my pub because there was usually room to seat them all. And men came in to watch the football on the TV screens; the kind of men who didn’t want roasted vegetables in pittas or real ale.

I’d worked in nicer pubs. When I lived at home I’d worked in our local, where the old-timers expected you to start pulling their pints the moment they pushed open the door. I didn’t mind the anonymity of this place. I was often on with temporary staff I didn’t know, and that meant I didn’t have to talk too much. If we weren’t busy, I just kept order behind the bar. I made sure that the glasses were clean, the lemons sliced, the drip trays emptied, the bottles in the optics replaced as soon as they ran out, the ice bucket filled.

While I was taking care of all this I forgot that I was a student. I rarely saw anyone from the college in there, students or staff. Then one night when I came back from asking the landlord to change a barrel, I thought for a moment that I saw Patrick. A man with the same long narrow build and thick shoulder-length hair was standing with his back to the bar, a pint of lager in one hand, looking up at the TV screen. Although this was exactly the sort of plausible scenario I was always dreaming up to bring us together, in reality I didn’t want it to be him. I panicked. I didn’t think I could cope with my two roles at once — competent barmaid and besotted student — and I had no idea how to respond when he turned round and recognised me. But the man, when he turned round, wasn’t Patrick, though he did look rather like him. Rather like him but quite different. He had the same crooked nose — more exaggerated, even — and the same close-together eyes that you saw when Patrick took his glasses off. But he didn’t wear glasses. He didn’t have any of Patrick’s concentrated excitement.

He asked for a pint of Stella in an ordinary accent, not like Patrick’s educated one. When I smiled at him and made some comment about the match, he blushed, and I guessed that he was shy, and maybe not very clever. He probably would have liked to keep the conversation going, but he couldn’t think of what to say to me. And I got a certain pleasure out of the situation. It was like a game; I could play at talking to Patrick, without its really mattering, without being afraid of what he thought of what I said. I chatted while I was handing his change over, before I was called away to serve someone else. When he left the pub, fifteen minutes later, he put his glass on the bar and said goodbye to me in such a way that I knew he’d planned it in advance, hoping that I’d be looking in his direction.

I forgot all about him, I didn’t expect him ever to come in again. But a week later he was back, and after that it was a regular thing. He came with his friends, and I really don’t think it was because I was there; they were just a gang who met up regularly and were going through a phase of drinking in this particular pub. But he did remember me, and looked for me when he came in the door, and blushed if I served him. When his friends saw us chatting together they teased him. They made him go to the bar for every round, and then they whistled and laughed to encourage him.

— Go on, ask her, they said, meaning me to hear.

— Fuck off, he said, red-faced, pretending to be busy with the first mouthful of his pint.

Every time I saw him I’d feel the same shock at his likeness to Patrick. People come in physical types; I’ve seen girls I immediately recognised as belonging to the same type as me: small and round with these deep-lidded frog-eyes. There are dark ones and blonde ones, but the type is as unmistakable as if we belonged to the same subspecies. And, even though there were specific points on which they didn’t match, this man and Patrick had the same overall effect. The man in the pub was blurred where Patrick was definite. His skin was coarser. His hair wasn’t as black and straight: it was dark brown, with honey-brown curling bits in it. He was a little shorter than Patrick, but more muscular, as if he did physical work. I asked him, and he said he was a gas engineer, which wasn’t all that physical, but presumably more strenuous than lecturing in literature of the Early Modern period. He had a little beer belly like Patrick’s. His jeans hung on his narrow hips in the same way. Actually — oddly, considering how unlike their lives and personalities were — they even dressed the same. They wore tight V-necked sweaters over jeans, without a shirt. They wore black T-shirts with those little cap sleeves. I suppose they had both found the styles that suited them.

And soon something began that I’m shocked to think of now. Something that I initiated. It would never have occurred to him even to speak to me, beyond ordering his drinks, if I hadn’t started it. I didn’t just flirt with him. I went all out to make things go further. I knew this was a risky and demeaning strategy; it certainly wasn’t something I’d ever done before. But with him I was safe because it didn’t matter. It honestly wouldn’t have mattered to me if he’d stopped coming to the pub and I’d never seen him again. So it could do no harm to play my game.

If I wasn’t busy I’d watch him from my vantage point behind the bar. Sooner or later he’d become aware of this, and look up from where he stood or sat with his mates, and then I’d smile at him, a long heated-up smile, and he would redden and look away again, smiling too. When he came to the bar I rushed to serve him, even if one of the other staff was closer. He bought me drinks, and instead of thanking him and putting the money behind the bar as I usually did, I poured myself a Bacardi and Coke, clinked glasses with him, and asked him about himself. When I gave him his change I made sure our fingers touched. I don’t think that anything like this had happened to him before. He wasn’t a complete innocent. (I found out that he’d been engaged to someone and she had broken up with him a few months before.) But he wasn’t used to being pursued by a stranger.

The shock of his looking so much like Patrick never completely left me. On the one hand, I felt I had the measure of the man he was, pleasant and rather dull. He and his friends talked all evening about cars and football, and teased each other in the explosive foot-shuffling, flaringup way I remembered from the boys at school; from time to time they’d run out of things to say to one another and sit in silence, taking mouthfuls of their beer. On the other hand, his appearance flashed a promise to me, as if Patrick’s qualities must be locked up inside him somewhere, if only I could find the key to release them.