Atrocious

The phone rang. I was reading up in a cupboard. In the hallway, at the top of the stairs. It was full of books, and I’ve a lamp and desk, but it would be pretentious to call it a study. I let my wife get it. Usually we hear the click as some far-away network connecting. The too proper English. I don’t bother answering, just bang the receiver down.  

I heard the shuffling of feet and my name being called. My wife held the phone out like a baton.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

She snorted and made that face, handing me the phone before scooting into the kitchen.

‘Hallo,’ I said.

‘It’s me,’ he replied.

My brain was muddled, but I knew the voice. ‘Aye, whit is it?’

‘My wife’s left me.’

It wasn’t a surprise. I’d heard he was always leaving his wife, but it was never the other way about.

We’d been best mates, twenty or thirty years ago. I was there the night he met her. We’d staggered out of The Oasis and over to a caravan on a strip of waste ground that sold burgers and chips. He’d hooked up with a girl inside.

When I asked her name, he downed his pint and a quick half. He hadn’t asked or remembered, even though he’d spent most of the last few songs smooching with her on the dance floor and feeling her up like a butcher tendering pink flesh.

‘Atrocious,’ he ad libbed. Cackling into his pint with his own brilliance, even though he was standing with one arm around her ample waist.

Atrocious was fat, with a round face and dark hair pleated into two pigtails. What made it worse was she wore long shorts like Boy Scouts would wear on an Enid Blyton type adventure, which she kept tugging up. Her large feet were in large boots, which she straightened together. She was four or five years older than us. I guess we were too young to recognise the sadness in her eyes.

Her name was Rowena. Or Big Row, for short.  

‘I’m awful sorry tae hear that,’ I said.

He knew I was lying, but carried on talking as if he didn’t. ‘Whit made it worse was she left me for another woman!’

I laughed aloud. ‘That’s a bummer. But whit yeh calling me for?’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve no been in touch.’

‘I never knew yeh hud my number.’ 

He started explaining, but I wasn’t really listening. It turned out she was crazy and a total fucking cow. She took him for everything the fucking bitch.

‘I was hoping, we could go out for a pint,’ he said.

I was doing the arithmetic of the last time I’d seen him and a pint cost thirty pence. We were stupid as each other. His voice took me back to that time and that age.

 ‘Cannae,’ I replied.  

‘Awright,’ he said. ‘I jist thought I’d ask anyways.’

‘No worries.’

His voice cracked and he sobbed into the phone. ‘Did I tell yeh, my mum died?’

‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Naw.’

My mum had been angry and sad at the same time, but his mum was lovely. She made us dinner or breakfast when I stayed over. She’d slip us a few quid to get a pint when we got restless.

‘I’d have went to her funeral,’ I told him.

‘I know yeh would. She always asked after yeh.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He changed the subject. ‘I could huv caught something.’

It took me a moment to follow what he was saying, but I wasn’t going to argue about it. I was thinking about signalling my wife to come and say aloud there was somebody at the door, or some other stupid excuse for hanging up.

‘Yeh don’t know whit it’s like.’ He was going from maudlin to angry and I wondered if he’d been drinking. ‘It’s aw sex and nooky noo.’  

I’d taken the bait. And I was getting angry too. ‘It was always sex and nooky mate. Our dream girls were pretty blonde twins wae big tits, who had sex wae each o’er and everybody else, but ne’r us. That wisnae reality.’

‘Suppose,’ he admitted, coughing into the receiver. ‘But it might huv been fun. Noo yer spoiled for choice. Yeh don’t even huv tae go oot yer house tae get humiliated. Jist upload a picture of yer dick and send it tae wan of they dating sites. Women send yer pictures aw their tits and fannies. Some aw them even send a picture aw their face.’

‘That’s no real.’

‘I’m fucking telling yeh.’

‘I’ve no got wan of they phones.’

‘Yer a fucking dick.’

I did sound prissy and old. In the echo of his laughter, I heard what we had been and what we used to be as it crept up on us.