‘We’re better off crossing the road,’ suggested Finn as the ground turned soft underfoot. And this suggestion was swiftly followed up.
Along the way they met another bus stop. At it was a young girl – Sylvie judged her fifteen – dressed in the Gothic style. Sylvie offered her a smile as they passed, and got one in return. And this cheered Sylvie, for in the girl she saw herself at that age – not dressed that way, but always getting onto buses as others were getting off them; out as late as allowed and on every night that she could afford to be.
By now the voices carried on the air were quite loud. So it was no surprise when the group rounded the wall of the last house on the road, and found themselves at the carpark of The Singing Sparrow. It was the kind of pub planned into its neighbourhood, given a prominent spot on a junction, and with lawns and parking spaces spread around it.
Its arch-topped windows were as warming as an open fire. The lights inside cast a pinky-orange glow over the drinkers on the covered terrace, which ran around the whole of the outside of the building. ‘It must have been popular,’ thought Jemima, for even on as chill an evening as that one, there were as many people outside as in.
They weren’t even all smokers, she noticed. She often pitied those poor tobacco-bound souls (she being lucky enough not to have an addictive personality herself). Yet even the smokers on view at The Singing Sparrow seemed to be outside because they enjoyed it. Jemima found this fascinating, when there was warmth and seating available inside.
‘Everyone good?’ asked Jasper. Without stopping to wait for answers, he led the way through the heavy doors. The whoomph of warmth and noise that hit them was as inviting to some as it was inhibiting to others. Finn and Sylvie were the last to enter, now with her arm held firmly through his.
‘What’s everyone having?’
‘No, Jasper. It’s my turn,’ said Jemima. ‘I haven’t bought a round yet.’
‘But you’re only drinking Cokes,’ he answered. His complaints over the nature of their day had not stretched to affecting his chivalry at the bar.
‘Then let me give you something toward them.’
‘No, this is mine.’ Finn surprised them all by moving to the bar and quite decisively gesturing to the woman serving. He requested the same order they’d been placing in town. ‘And one for yourself,’ he added with the brio of someone with a weight lifted off them.
‘I don’t mind if I do,’ the barmaid answered. ‘I’ll have a rum and black, if you please.’
Finn’s cognitive functions were now firing on all cylinders. There had been a recent tendency, he’d noticed, for bar staff in this situation to only allow themselves a soft drink. Or to instead keep the money back and say, ‘I’ll have one when my shift’s over.’ But Finn was glad to see this barmaid engaging the optics there and then, and sipping from the straight glass before leaving it on the back bar.
‘The last of the big spenders,’ laughed another woman, as she carried off her own round.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ asked Sylvie, who felt her job that night was to monitor everything her friend did.
‘It’s okay though,’ answered Finn. ‘It’s okay.’ The group moved to a clear spot by the fruit machines, for every table had at least one person on it. Music played, people laughed, the world was right. Finn felt okay. Suddenly he couldn’t stop talking,
‘I was worried, you see. I was sure I’d see people I once knew, people from school, or wherever. I haven’t had the years here to see these people age, to grow, to get used to them as adults – it felt as if to come back here would be a portal right back to then, to when we were all young. It would have been like being back there.’
Jasper said nothing, though he struggled to remember the last time he’d met or spoken to anyone he’d known in his younger life.
‘I thought the bar staff would be the same ones,’ continued Finn. ‘But they probably have a new lot every six months. I thought I’d see wall-to-wall old faces. But I hardly know a soul, and certainly no one I’d known well. And even if they still lived nearby, would they be in here every minute of every night?’
The bus journey had taken them the best part of an hour, and the evening was well under way. Jasper guessed the drinkers were a mix of the pre- and post-teatime, of early and late work-finishers. They would come and go throughout the session, the numbers peaking sometime around eight and petering out before time was called at half-past-ten – for it was a work night after all. Conversations would rage, darts would be played, and football matches would be watched on the big TV.
Finn sipped his drink, and had the sense again of time foreshortening: it seemed as though their running from the conference suite had been both minutes and days ago.
Chapter 15 – Where Somebody Knows Your Name
At every face he saw that wasn’t known, Finn relaxed a little more.
Finn sometimes wondered whether more-outward-looking people understood themselves as their exterior, and not like him as that swirling pool of thoughts somewhere inside it. This would explain others’ fascination with, and their falling prey to, modes of fashion; as how they looked would be, in an obvious sense, who they were. This would also explain how others felt so comfortable within their environment: for weren’t we all at one level just an object in the landscape, and with no need to feel any less a part of it than a lamppost or a hat-stand?
Considering ourselves as our exterior also explained how, when you achieved a status or became something in life, you were instantly that thing. For as Finn had already been thinking lately, he often felt himself still the same person he had been as a younger man, a teen, a child even. And although his exterior may have grown and become what it was that day, to pretend that the entity that inhabited that body was not the same as had inhabited it at earlier stages of his life seemed somehow a fraud. (Was this connected also to the way he couldn’t help thinking of the future? For surely those stages of development were as unavoidable as those he had already lived through.)
Finn concluded though that others, while obviously having memories of their earlier life, could see the people filling these scenes as somehow other, not themselves now, separated by time. Meanwhile, Finn often felt himself to be all his past and future at once, and this leaving the present hardly getting a look in. He concluded his bout of philosophising, and not for the first time, with the thought that sharing even one-tenth of his mental activity would surely see him committed. And he was only half-joking.
A table had come free beside them, and they had moved to it. Around Finn, Jemima and Jasper had fallen into conversation. Meanwhile Sylvie was looking at her watch and remarking at how late it was – and asking where had the afternoon gone? At the digital jukebox, a man was busily pumping in coins. This would leave them for the next half-an-hour with the hits of Paul Weller, The Jam and The Style Council. A noisy conversation went on to one side of the table, while at the other a man was working at the fruit machine. His urgent pressing of the buttons was bringing whoops and giddy noises from the machine, as if it were being tickled.
‘You alright?’ he asked.
The man’s hands didn’t break from ramming their palms into the row of flat square buttons. Yet his eyes looked away from the machine toward Finn as he spoke, and with a smile that signified something other than casual pub conversation. He added,
‘Haven’t seen you in here for a while.’
‘Paul.’
Finn stood to speak to the man he now couldn’t believe he hadn’t recognised. How amazing, the flood of memories brought by a face that moments earlier triggered nothing,
‘I honestly didn’t recognise you.’
‘What, have I grown a new head?’
Finn stood where he’d been sitting; no need to move for the man was only a foot away. He answered,
‘No, no. I’ve been away.’
‘We didn’t see you at the reunion. You were the only one who didn’t come.’
‘Reunion? When? I didn’t hear
of one.’ Finn wasn’t sure he would have come back anyway, but this much was true.
‘Oh, years ago, a few months after we broke up.’
Finn remembered now: he had known about it, had known of others of their Sixth Form class who went, but did not attend himself, despite still living in town then.
‘Couldn’t you make it?’ asked Paul.
‘I… don’t remember.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Shame you missed it though. What you up to now?’
Finn halted. This wasn’t the first time he’d been ashamed to answer that question. He had no choice; he gave the firm’s name, but not his new job. Instead he gave his old one,
‘Insurance.’
‘You screwed my brother right over,’ replied Paul, but then laughed. ‘He didn’t get back half of what his car was worth. You fellows know how to turn a profit, don’t you?’ Yet Paul was laughing, even half-admiring the firm’s profit-motive.
‘I’m in retail’ said Paul after a pause. Finn realised he had forgotten to ask after Paul’s activities in return.
‘Oh yes. Weren’t you at a clothes store?’ he suddenly remembered.
‘Oh that! Nah, that was summer job when I was a student. No, we sell electricals, wholesale. We supply direct to shops.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Finn encouragingly.
‘Not really, it’s not paying.’ Again there was no sadness in Paul at his situation – he could have been living in the ruins of his house after it had fallen down, considered Finn, and still be chuckling away.
Paul asked, ‘There’s no jobs going at your place? Where’s your office?’
‘I’m not in Sommerhill now, I left town. But we have an office here. I suppose you could contact them.’
‘You don’t have a name of someone? No, I don’t suppose you would, if it’s not your building.’
Finn wasn’t sure he had a name of anyone even at his own office. Recruitment didn’t work like that anymore. You couldn’t get your kids or brothers in with you like you used to. Personnel had to be deliberately aloof, impartial, give a fair crack to everyone. Staff had to be unfavourable even to people they already knew outside of work.
‘Would it suit you though?’ asked Finn, not wanting to get the fellow’s hopes up.
‘What? You’re saying I couldn’t scrub up for an office?’
‘Would you enjoy the work though? When you’re used to being out in the van?’
‘You’d have to get used to it wouldn’t you, if that’s where the money was.’
Finn didn’t like to tell Paul that it had been a while since anyone had considered Insurance a well-paying industry. Perhaps he’d suit the sales teams though, where someone with native charm and the gift of the gab might excel?
But before Finn could get on to being encouraging, Paul had already changed the topic. The idea of a career in Insurance had been forgotten as quickly as it had been conceived. The van may not be paying, Paul went on to explain, but he seemed to suffer no great fear for his career. Something would turn up, something always did. Meanwhile, he’d evidently enough cash in his pockets to pour it down the throat of the fruit machine in midweek drinking sessions. Paul put another pound in – and whether the machine’s noises were happy or sad ones, they seemed to make no difference to the man’s mood.
There were two mind-sets here, Finn decided. What was that Larkin line? – ‘No one actually starves’. Though even he hadn’t given up the library, had he. You either had job-fear or you didn’t; and those without would never know to pity those with.
Chapter 16 – Alright, Jack
Paul turned imperceptibly from conversation with Finn, and said to a third figure,
‘Alright, Jack. Look who’s here.’
Someone had joined them in the glow of the fruit machine’s flashing lights. Another face from the past, though one of a different order in the gallery of Finn’s life and times. Paul seemed to acknowledge this, as he made his excuses and retreated to the bar, leaving the pair to speak.
‘Finn. How are you?’
‘Jack. You drink here?’
‘Not often. Paul called me, said he’d seen you across the bar.’
Finn realised that this must have been before Paul came over to speak to him himself.
‘He knew I’d want to say hello,’ continued Jack. ‘He said he’d keep you here till I turned up.
‘Wow. Good work, Paul.’
‘So, Finn. What brings you back?’
‘Work. We’re at a conference at the Grand.’
‘Very swish. You know how to treat yourselves. And while you were in town you couldn’t resist having a look at the old neighbourhood?’
‘Something like that.’ In fact it was exactly that.
‘You could’ve told us you were coming.’
‘Oh, have I walked into something?’ said Finn, suddenly panicked.
It took Jack a moment to get a grip back on the conversation, ‘Bloody hell, Finn. I don’t mean that you’ve picked an inconvenient moment. I mean that we’d have put on a spread. We’re glad to see you. She’ll be glad to see you. Were you even going to look us up?’
‘Well…’ Finn was floundering.
It was Sylvie, rising from the table, who answered,
‘It was all very last minute, and we can’t stay for long. I’m sure he’d have got in touch if he’d had the chance.’
Neither man immediately responded. Finn was as glad at Sylvie’s intervention as Jack seemed surprised by it; leaving her to ask,
‘So, meeting old friends, Finn?’
Finn introduced, ‘Colleague Sylvie, this is schoolfriend Jack.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ She put her hand to shake.
‘Not as pleased as I am to meet you,’ answered Jack, taking her hand and lifting it to kiss it in mock-romantic pose. He had been caught off-guard, but was making up for it now.
‘Well, I’m sure I don’t know what to say,’ she answered.
‘I hadn’t realised you were the same party,’ asked Jack, looking to the table she’d been sitting at.
‘Yes, we work together.’
‘So, you’re in town for the conference too?’ the man continued. ‘Was Finn supposed to be showing you the bright lights tonight?’
‘That was the plan.’
‘And you somehow ended up here?’
She smiled her coyest smile, in what was a near-automatic flirt-response.
Yet Finn had heard another person referred to, asking Jack,
‘How is she?’
‘Fine, good. If you’ve got half hour, you could pop over.’
‘Is… she still at the house then?’
‘Of course. Not all of us skipped town, you know.’
Finn had no idea how to take this line, instead changing the topic,
‘And you’re looking well,’ he said to Jack, as the latter lingered letting go of Sylvie’s hand.
‘You mean, after everything I’ve been through?’
‘I knew you’d been ill,’ answered Finn.
‘I know you did.’
‘I always meant to come and see you, back then.’
‘I know. But you’d have been busy with work, making your way in the world. It’s okay, Finn.’ Jack paused, before asking, ‘This isn’t what’s been keeping you away all these years since though, is it? Because I understand. It’s all right.’
This sudden lurch toward the personal – and in Sylvie’s case, the incomprehensible – was punctuated by Jack suddenly clapping, and asking,
‘Well, are you pair coming to visit, or what?’
‘We might not have long,’ cautioned Finn. ‘We need to get back this evening.’
‘Don’t worry, we can give you a lift.’
‘And there’s four of us,’ said Sylvie, gesturing to the other pair, who were lost in conversation at the table.
‘They look like they’re getting on well enough without us,’ answered Jack. And looking at them, Sylvie considered he was right.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll pick ‘em up on the way back.’
Sylvie had to speak to them first though, re-engaging the table,
‘Guys, we’re going to see a friend of Finn’s.’
‘Oh, okay,’ was all Jemima said, transfixed by the conversation she’d been having.
‘Are you coming back?’ asked Jasper.
‘Yes, and we can all get a lift into town.’
With nothing more forthcoming, Sylvie withdrew to let the pair continue down whatever road they’d started on.
Chapter 17 – The Corner House
Waiting at the fruit machine, Finn’s old friend gave Sylvie a look with his twinkling eye before concluding,
‘Shall we be off then?’
As Jack bounded for the lounge room door though, Sylvie took Finn’s arm and held him back a moment, whispering,
‘Is he trying it on with me?’
She was hoping for a definite answer. But Finn only replied to say, ‘He can be like that with everyone.’ Sylvie was relieved, for all the romantic disappointment this may have caused another woman. For there was something slightly off about Finn’s friend and his over-familiar manner. She asked Finn,
‘And what was that you were saying, about him looking well?’
But Finn hushed her, seeing the object of their conversation holding the door for them. They rushed along to catch him up. While at the same time, as security from undesired advances, Sylvie hugged her arm around Finn’s even tighter than before.
Back on the street, the evening bit them. While above their heads the sodium lighting fought off the darkness. Finn thought the end result looked like swirls of orange in dark chocolate. Sylvie thought about Jemima and Jasper. They’d have the same initials if they married, she considered; before remembering that Jasper was already hitched. Short of extending their arms toward each other across the table though, their body language couldn’t have been clearer. And Sylvie knew about these things, for she had been there herself.
Who had been her own affairs? Could she remember them all? Sylvie wasn’t sure that she could, off the top of her head. Was that terrible? Or no worse than for any young woman with a surfeit of affection? She felt now though that those times were ending, that she didn’t want them anymore. She hadn’t for a while, if honest. If only any of her dalliances – such a dainty word – could have been made to stick… Or perhaps she’d picked men who she knew couldn’t possibly have stayed?