Happy Hours
by Alan McCormick
‘I will step back if you step forward.’
Real people don’t talk like this, but we did. Margaret spoke in her version of therapy speak, betraying countless hours fondling her purple crystal pendant, her weekend Reiki Master course, and her ten year, weekly encounter sessions with the Dark Lord – my name for him – her counsellor, Adrian, who she didn’t have a fling with when we parted the first time.
Anyway, it’s me who steps back; back into a kind of vague abyss. I start drinking again, the lethal liquid comfort that slips numb sentences into my thoughts and fogs my dreams, so I lie awake at night listening to my liver turn and drain, my heart beat into my pillow. My liver is like limestone – that WH Auden poem – each crevice and pool soaking in toxins, then seeping out filtered poison into the system.
If I drink I make myself stupid with deafness, and silence all talk.
‘We should talk,’ she says.
Should, not could, and my ears create a vacuum from the pressure.
In a dark interior of nicotine walls and damp green carpets I bleat a mantra about friendship at the bottom of a glass.
‘Have another, friend?’ asks the barman.
‘I am colossal,’ I say.
‘A whisky with your pint?’
‘I am the colossal Colossus.’
‘That’ll be £5.70 then.’
It makes no difference what I say; it’s what they hear that counts.
‘I would like to buy everyone present a drink for their troubles.’
It comes out as violent pub jargon and I’m forcibly ejected from the premises.
‘Keep your money, you lousy bastard,’ says the woman by the door with no teeth, the prostitute who serves the black drug dealers at the local minicab office.
I go back in and spill her drink, and I’m ejected again, this time with a stiletto in the midriff.
Margaret soothes the bruises.
‘It’s self-abuse,’ she says, analysing the situation with her forensic babble and sleight of hand. ‘What you need is help. If you still won’t see Adrian, then see someone else.’
At Saint Stephen’s, help is offered on the cross like candy on a stick. I drink Sean’s, the priest’s communion wine – a sweet red vermouth, not like wine at all.
‘The blood of our Messiah,’ I tell him.
Sean purrs like a big black cat – with linen trim collar.
‘Have you ever been confirmed, Robert?’ he asks.
A moot point: I think of a long ago cheese and wine party at the university Christian union.
‘I don’t think that counts,’ I tell him, but I forget to tell him what it is that doesn’t count.
‘Stay there a minute,’ he says, leaving me in the vestry.
I upturn the bottle mouth-wards and smile at the thought of priests in string vests, and make with red fangs at a cute Mary figurine.
Sean returns with a pamphlet. On its cover a man sits at a table with an empty bottle and his head in his hands.
‘I prefer the RAC’, I say.
‘Facetious,’ says Sean. ‘But blessed and beloved is the sinner who returns to the kingdom of our Lord.’
I look round to see who he’s talking about, and innocently point at myself.
‘You’re a cunt,’ he whispers in my ear.
‘I like that Sean,’ I tell Margaret when I return home. ‘He says it like it is.’
She shakes her head, and then it rotates five times like a globe with a wig on top.
‘I need to sleep,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll see you in a year.’
Sleep is delicious. Sleep is stupor-endous, and I dribble on the pillow as if I’m teething.
Margaret climbs in next to me, and wants to hold on. The moon glowers. I feel like I’m in a vice, and shoot like a werewolf through the window and out into the night.
The next day at Charing Cross, I beg.
‘£3.50, so I can buy myself a pint and a chaser for happy hour,’ I ask.
I pronounce ‘happy’ with exaggerated resonance, and clap poignantly at the same time. I make £21 in half an hour, and buy a bottle of malt at Threshers by Embankment tube. Soon my throat is full of peat, and fire down the big below.
‘Hello, you must know me, I’m beardless Billy Connolly,’ I tell an American tourist.
He is God Squad from the military school of ‘pull up your pants and start shooting’:
‘Come on, buddy, give it a rest and get your act together,’ he commands.
‘How did you know my name was Buddy?’
He puts a finger up, an evangelical Peace Corps sign, and I am mesmerised, hypnotised in his beady-eyed Texan drawl.
‘Pop was an alcoholic,’ he says. ‘So I know when a guy needs help.’
‘Buddy Guy, I get it!’
He tries to kiss me on the lips.
‘Bugger off,’ I spit back with whisky fire.
He mutters something about ‘Muddy Waters’, folds me in two, and rolls me down the bank and into the river.
Cruising for a bruising, I follow the tide out to the arches under Southwark Bridge. I swell in the swell, then crawl, clamber, and climb out to dry my hair under a pub barbecue light.
‘That’s not for use, unless you’re a paying customer,’ advises an Australian barman, collecting glasses from the terrace.
‘It’s a public hair drier,’ I say, standing up for my hair drying rights.
People move away. I guess I smell of river; must look a sight.
‘Sorry,’ I tell them, removing strands of riverweed from between my teeth.
‘Are you okay, mate?’ asks the barman.
Mate, guy, buddy: all this colony bonhomie; just empty vessels, frigging in the rigging.
‘I’m like a dingo on heat,’ I say, offering the hand of Mother Country friendship.
I disappear for six months after that, but contact Margaret when I can. She speaks and I listen, asthmatic bellows punctuating the silence.
‘Bob, please say something. Tell me you’re okay, tell me anything.’
We arrange to meet in Regent’s Park, at the rose garden; only she never turns up. Later, I find out that listening ear, Adrian, advised her not to come.
‘Listening Ear Adrian is a cunt,’ I tell her on the next phone call, and the line goes dead.
Three bottles of Blue Nun under a blushing, pricking rose bush, my homage to our seventies suburban wedding, and I’m in a reminiscing kind of mood.
Margaret and I were at a Relate session the first time we tried to part. Margaret was in a pale blue dress that showed off her summer garden tan. She fingered her wedding ring whenever I spoke.
‘I don’t know why I behave as I do. I don’t know why Margaret puts up with it.’
Margaret looked down, embarrassed by my banalities perhaps, and twisted the ring around her finger like she meant to cause pain.
‘Sorry, Bob, I want you to leave. I want us to part,’ she suddenly said.
Jane, our counsellor, looks sympathetically at me, but all I could do was laugh.
On the drive home I couldn’t get Elton John’s ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word’ out of my head: it stuck like honey on the roof of my mouth and made me want to retch.
Now the Blue Nun follows and drips acid on my feet.
In the morning when I arrive at Adrian’s, the Dark Lord’s Belsize Park practice, I am not literally legless.
His pearl-white assistant, Suski, lets me in.
‘Have you an appointment, Mister . . .?’ she asks wide – Scandinavian spaces, fjords, elks on walkabout – eyed: her eyes, actually, a brilliant true blue.
‘Mister Bobby,’ I tell her. ‘He’ll know who I am.’
‘Mister Bobby? I don’t think we were expecting you.’
‘I’m here for Happy Hour – “half price, satisfaction guaranteed”’
‘I’ll be back, just hold on,’ she says.
I hear her whispering on the phone in the stationery cupboard. I take time to look at a painting on the wall: a green lagoon in China drawing you in to its moss and plankton, its elusive eastern promise. Adrian has covered his bets with the ambience of his waiting room: Indian incense merges with angel-perfumed candles, whilst tinkling Tibetan chime bells compete with the yawning bass of a didgeridoo. I am about to pick up a pale Egyptian moonstone from the minimalist Japanese herb tea table, when Adrian appears at the doorway. Unmistakeably, he has a ponytail.
‘We don’t have an appointment. Can I help you?’ he asks.
‘I doubt it, but Margaret always wanted me to meet with you.’
‘Well, I can’t meet with you now, but Suski will arrange an appointment if you would be so kind.’
‘If I would be so kind, yes.’
He watches me to see what I’ll say or do next.
‘Margaret wanted me to meet with you,’ I repeat.
‘Suski, will you ring the police, please?’ he requests.
I pick up the moonstone and throw. It orbits the room and smashes against the wall behind him. I go to pick up a bronze Buddha when I feel his arms around my neck.
‘No, that wouldn’t be wise,’ he says.
‘That would be Morecambe,’ I gasp, trying to yank his ponytail.
‘Out, out,’ he orders, wrestling me out of the door and onto the street.
When I look up to the flat above his practice, I see Margaret in a polka-dot summer dress crawling out of an open window and springing like a leopard onto the branches of a nearby tree.
I smile and wait for the hour when the moon is at its fullest so I might join her.