Huts74

Of course, men don’t preen in front of mirrors. But I moved back a bit, then forward, and flexed my arms so that the fabric in my leather jacket showed the right kind of non-sheen. It wasn’t any use in my room, with a bare light bulb. I’d need to see it outside, with the right kind of light. But it smelled too new, as if the horse, or whatever kind of animal they used, had just given birth to it. I’d needed to get some fresh air anyway, and fags, out of Johnny Graham’s. I’d only about five left; was almost out.

Dad, with a crappy detective story perched open, bleeding onto the arm of his chair, was listening to the radio and watching TV. He turned his head away from me, as if my presence was a reminder that he’d no money to go out. ‘Where’s the playboy going to now?’ he asked mum, even though she was in the kitchen and I was closer to him, than her, at the front door. I didn’t wait for a reply.

I almost stumbled over one of the stones in the shortcut, stubbing my toes. It didn’t hurt. Dad hooted when he first saw them, and christened them Rumplestilskin boots, because of the pointy toes, with the slight backward curl on them. Johnny Graham’s looked as if it was going to close, with one shutter perched up against the window. But I was stupid hurrying. It always looked like that, to encourage customers to rush in, as if it was the closing of the Klondyke, and buy him out. I lit up a fag right away, when I came out, to give myself some thinking time.

There didn’t seem much point in going up the road. Before I’d figured out what I was doing, I automatically wandered across the street and into the Horse and Barge. My feet stuck to the carpet at the door, as if they didn’t want to go any further, but my eyes soon adjusted to the kind of dim light Neanderthal man might have found illuminating. There were more than a few faces that I knew.

‘What’s pissing you off?’ said Barry Ferguson.

‘Nothing,’ I said, immediately on the defensive, trying to imagine what my face looked like, and make it do something else, and felt the heat creeping into my consciousness and splashing its big red fingers up to cover my face, making it worse.

‘Cheers,’ I said, when Barry handed me a pint.

He said something else. But The Mammas and Pappas were hitting it big, with, ‘Monday, Monday, all of the time’ from the Wurlitzer Jukebox, so I mimed, pointing at me ears, to show I didn’t understand, and stepped away from him and the bar. I’d need a few pints before I’d be able to hear. And another few before I’d something to say.

Maureen Hargreaves had stepped outside for something, she’d no jacket or coat on, but her high heels clicked their own staccato on the tacky floor. She somehow became a girl I didn’t know in them, able to hold her bare feet in mid air with a solitary black strap, and walk in them. I breathed in the perfume of her as she passed in front of me. She looked at me, out of the corner of her eye, and looked quickly away, to where Sammy Doak was sitting and staring at her and me. One to the other, like a set of traffic lights. I hadn’t noticed him until them. I couldn’t believe I’d missed him. Missed her. I’d been looking about me like a tourist.

I got Barry and myself a pint, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything he’d talked about, even football. I drifted closer to them. To her. She settled back against her seat, fiddling with the buttons on her blouse, teasing it open at the nape of her neck. The flickering or her eyelashes when she looked up at me, almost made me want to swoon, but there was a warning in her eyes. But the movement of one long silky leg against the other ignited the kind of memories of her that I’d been trying to push away, and disorientated me, so that I when I put my pint up, I missed my mouth. Like me she was restless. Leaning forward and leaning back. Crossing and uncrossing her legs. There was no end the complexity of her. I picked up my pint to join them, schoolboy sure that I could handle Sammy Doak.

‘Don’t,’ she mouthed, when Sammy finally looked the other way, so that I was caught, wrong footed, and had to quickly change my direction and put my pint down on a table with a couple that looked as if they were married because they didn’t speak to each other just looked at their drinks.

She’d a spot of rouge high enough up on her cheekbones, that even it was red with embarrassment, as if it should have known better and she’d plastered round about it with foundation, leaving enough room for a crack where her mouth should have been. She looked openly at me, and nodded at her husband, as if to say what does he think he’d doing putting his glass on our table. Before he could move I’d already lifted it and moved away.

I went to sit with the other guys around the pool table. At least if there was a fight it would be nothing to do with me, because I never won. Whereas before I’d some vague notion of what I was going to do, now I was certain, I was going to have another couple of pints and go straight up the road.

I ducked down when I saw Gillian Ambrose coming into the bar. She was standing at the entrance door, looking about her for someone, anyone, to rescue her. Snoddy Snodgrass cut across her path and said something to her. We were all in the same class. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t like her. I liked her, from her hippy petunia oil to her oversized naked feet sticking out of the bottom of the blankets, but it was just, just, that I was drunk on Maureen. Every time she moved my eyes followed and my body wanted to edge closer. I wanted a bit of Gillian, but a lot of Maureen, as much as she would give. I didn’t care if she was pregnant. We could work something out. I was sure we could.