By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
13) Drinking
The fingers of drink have crawled up his spine. They clutch now open-handed at the back of his brain. His attention has to be concentrated. Events, people and objects come into his focus; and are gone.
His hand encloses the pint glass. The beer is the same clear amber as morning urine. The thought is an old thought.
The hand is a strong hand, has a round solid wrist attached to it. The thumb and the fingers have shape, are not the tubular sausages of shovel pushers. These hands have a craftsman's sinews and musculature.
He uses the arm to raise the cold glass to his warm mouth.
The game machines have bright lights of different vivid colours. Earlier he passed time putting his change through. But he couldn't much understand how he was supposed to win, nor why he did win the few tokens the machine pumped rattling into the tray. Then some know-all berk came over and kept telling him what to do. He still lost all his change.
He looks around the bar. More people in now. Mostly men — standing near the bar, some at the dartboard, some through the archway by the green pool table. A group of four women at a table are oohing and tutting over some story. He is the only man sitting at a table.
He doesn't feel a part of this pub. No-one here has talked to him except the berk earlier and the barman. And the barman said only enough to serve him. Sign of loneliness, anyway, to chat to barmen.
He prefers those pubs where talking just happens. Where someone says something to him and he answers back and before he knows it people are laughing and he's a part of the joke, a part of their night out. No chance of that happening here. All he can see is backs to him. Bastards.
One bloke facing him beyond the backs is staring at him. He isn't seeing him. No expression on his face. Looks like a boxer, feet planted solidly on the ground. Now he glances to a word, the eyes move to others, the quick bright eyes of a man who enjoys a fight. And now the man has noticed the drummer staring at him. With the quick intelligence of a fighter he gives the drummer the once over. Unafraid. And in that appraising twinkle there was a question mark that was a challenge.
The young men with their backs to him have the cylindrical necks of weightlifters. Most have a day's growth unshaven. As fashion here dictates.
A girl is sat alone, excluded from the gaggle of oohing and tutting women. Her man is in one of the groups with his friends. She is young. Must've been born worried though. The anxious wrinkled face is at odds with the rounded proud body. One part of her is lying. He is glad he doesn't have to be bothered by her: the massage parlour tart has served her purpose.
A man immense with silence stands in a niche at the end of the bar. His immobile self-containment starts to irritate the drummer.
Four young girls, shining with make-up, come shimmying in. They recognise someone and, whispering, go rushing into the lavatory.
Through an opening door he sees two fat men in suits sat at the saloon bar. Their faces are the colour of old offal. They are his age. He should be sat in there drinking spirits with them.
The door closes. He looks at the door. At his age his should be the boozer's beetroot-stained jowls. He was never, though, a steady sociable drinker, more a binge merchant. He doesn't want to be those two fat men sat there every night. He doesn't want their money. He doesn't want their easy jobs. He doesn't want to join in their nostalgia. Nostalgia is not a solitary exercise. And he is a solitary man. And nostalgia is for oldsters, for people who want to be old; and he wants to stay young. Folksingers get themselves suckered into regretting times past, when men were men and women wore braces. He wants time not to have passed. Nor does he want to play the game of complaining about these days. It was always as shitty then as it is now. He wants to be young among the young now, fears being kept at a distance from their vitality.
So, wherever he goes, he seeks to ingratiate himself with the young. The young are foolhardy and reckless. When drunk he is foolhardy and reckless. He drinks.
Still he feels time overtaking him, gravity pulling him down, and he knows he can never be young again. He hears himself tell himself that. And slowly he's coming to believe it. Not by the evidence of himself, though — he has always been a stranger to his body and mind — no, the world is changing around him.
They were a small population, his generation, seemed to keep meeting each other at every turn. Now, gone forty, the young are suddenly vast and he meets no-one anymore. All his generation are indoors or dead. Or selling heroin and buying bits of Brazil by the square mile.
Not that it's a sudden influx. Young people have been coming onto the scene for years. Breeding didn't let up after his generation. But those latecomers were background people, were apprentices to his letting rip generation. Or they were young girlfriends not to be taken seriously. His generation was still dominant, still set the pace... It was they who the young were privileged to know.
This new lot though... they are so many. All around him these days is youth with its passions and perversions unformed. He can feel himself being overtaken, overcome by this mass of unknowns who care not a jot whether he exists or not. Just another lined face in the watching crowd. While their every new face reminds him of another, some other place, some other time, ghosts of his past.
When working at his machine he tells himself that he has reached the age when no-one asks him to be in their band anymore. Or their team. Now he's there for just as long as the job lasts. Oh they tell him he's a good worker. But if they're going places he's now considered too old to even tag along. A has-been. As for bands... he's now way back old hat.
Still, though, he cannot accept that age has estranged him from their irreverent vigour. His anger at being estranged further estranges the puzzled young. His now is the voracious rage that grows inside impotence. Like an old volcano he knows that anger well. The young are new to it. So he drinks to extinguish that rage, the sole object of his drinking these days being insensibility, to not feel.
At the bar is a tall nodding man. The nodding is a listening habit. The drummer wants to shout Noddy! at him. Two more pints and he will.
His glass is empty.
commentary.... Every life quickly develops habits. Babies soon have their favourite waking times.
A whole science — behaviourism — is based on the undoing of old habits and the creating of new. The change for most individuals, however, is made voluntarily: their habits changing along with their changing circumstances. The same man — let's take an example to the extremes — can be brave and adventurous in his arrogant youth, then can become circumspect and cowardly in his shrinking dotage, his old mind obsessed with his aches and the lateness of the post.
Some people, though, hang onto habits like outmoded clothes. Some do it consciously, aware that the habit gives them, to their perception, an attractive eccentricity, or at least a social mask to be repetitively remarked upon and hidden behind.
Other people are not aware that they continue to live their lives according to inappropriate habits.
Could cynics and innocents be thus divided into those who are aware of their own habits, and those who are unselfregarding and unaware? But no division can be that simple. In the drummer, for instance, we have a cynic who has a romantic/tragic self image. And he inflicts it on others.
Habits, however, are the root and core of our being, of our intellect even. Paul in those days maintained that stupidity was a habit, a habit of self-denigration, a habit that could be broken. What Paul couldn't accept then, being young, was that life felt safer for some people if they didn't let themselves know.
To some habits denote security, to others a trap. So were some of the people in that pub regulars craving safe habits, while others had gone there looking for a change, albeit that it was but another pub in an habitual round of pubs. And in Bridgwater, of an evening, there was little else to do but drink. (Every night in Bridgwater, after the pubs kick out, staggering men litter the pavements.)
The drummer drew comfort from the very familiarity of his habits, even when those habits were a self-punishing frame of mind — the drummer being of a generation that had been led to enjoy its guilts. He knew too that his were the squandered talents of a man who was always over-concerned with appearances — looking the drummer rather than being the drummer. Aware then that, because he knew himself to be not the genuine article, suspecting that he might look a fool, he had deliberately played the fool, set himself up as a fool, and drank. Then, when drunk, he had become angry at his easy fooling of others, at their unwitting fooling of themselves, and the drummer, not being a man to beat his own breast, had cursed the self-deluded fools around him.
In his uninhibited cups he knew that he had made a life-style out of almost having made it, of having just missed. Certainly his band had a couple of records that had nearly made it into the charts. Certainly he had appeared in the supporting bands on the same stage as the big name bands. And maybe they remembered him. Maybe they remembered all those other nearly people....
His own very private knowledge knew that his one claim to savage creation had been usurped by a synthesiser. What need now did any band have of a fevered man hitting skins when a sober machine was so much more reliable? He knew that had it not been for that box of electronics he would now be happily guzzling and softly tapping out the beat in some second-rate combo, paid in pints.
At work, to fend off the creeps, to score first over the point-scorers, the drummer mocked his band-playing past. Work and the voice of machines, he told himself, that was the real world. Being part of a machine, though, gave him no satisfaction. (Only the professions now can take a pride in their work, in their expertise. There are no tradesmen these days who do not know they can be replaced by a machine, are left with jobs in which they can take no pleasure, only wages.)
When drinking, the music loud, the drummer found his heels unconsciously beating time; then he outright hated the manacling rhythms of work, as he hated too this primeval music of pubs. His mind then launched itself to the greater world of music, and in such a musing mood he approved of the ephemerality of all art, its poignant reflections of life's slippery transience. He, creature of habit, had often decided that if he had his life over he'd have liked to have been a jazz vocalist. Hit those perfect chords, catch that subtle once-only harmony. Here and gone. He wasn't that jazz vocalist. Nor were the bodies around him outwardly aware of their ephemerality. Tomorrow's ghosts.
To break a life's habits some resort to drastic measures. The most blindly desperate might kill themselves. Others simply run away. All those who have an unhappy past want first to escape the place in which it happened. And in an overpopulated country like ours it's easy to disappear. Nobody really cares. Even the professionals just make you someone else's problem, someone else's district, someone else's department. They don't know you personally, so how can they care? They owe you no emotions. They just fill out the forms and cover their backs.
Unless you become their problem, no-one cares who you are in Bridgwater. No-one knows you. So estranged have we all become that nowadays the people of Bridgwater, like communities elsewhere, keep in touch only by radio phone-ins.
Gone now are the settled communities with their network of spies and corroborating lies. Everyone now is in transit. So it's easy to be anonymous these days. No-one knows anyone else. Or, if they are known, then they are more readily recognised by the car they drive and the clothes they wear, rather than their physiognomy and their past. Most people these days know the people on the telly better than their next door neighbours.
You could disappear tomorrow. How many people would even notice you'd gone? Would any of them make a concerted attempt to find you? Where would they start to look? And when you weren't there, or there, where then?
Even in the small towns, even in the villages, no-one knows anyone anymore. There are just too many people for us to be able to care about them all, and they're simply not around long enough for us to find out enough about them to be able to even start to care what becomes of them. Everyone's commuting somewhere else. That's how these nutty mass murderers get away with it for so long. They're usually only caught when someone accidentally stumbles over the body of one of their victims. Nobody missed those victims when they disappeared. Because people are always disappearing, are always moving on....
Bridgwater is a place to run away from and a place to end up in when you've run out of steam. Paul has gone home from new jobs to tell Julie, "Everybody here's from somewhere else."
Bridgwater can absorb drifters, can use their rootlessness, their lack of responsibility, their lack of pride in place, their wage packet mentality. In return it dulls their disconnected minds with mechanised labour, soothes their severed lives with the socially-approved balm of ritual alcohol. Most of Bridgwater's runaways are men. Men who ran rather than become nonentities in their own homes shouting at their own children. Spurned husbands, rejected fathers, all find a shore in Bridgwater after the wreck of their marriages, after the sinking of their egos.
"Nobody comes from Bridgwater anymore," Julie said of one of her jobs, "People only end up here."
It's nothing new. Drifting men have always fetched up in Bridgwater. They came to this nothing place where there are plenty of pubs and a plenitude of fellow drinkers. Distressed Mariners and Disenchanted Gypsies, having escaped their past lives, here they undertake the stilling of time with drink's slow death. And, with the perversity of all émigrés and exiles, once here, they develop a nostalgia for the places from which they fled.
Negated, we are all travelling people now, live lives much alike, and in this small tatty little country we can no longer be fooled by talk of places distant and habits strange. Northern Industrial places, for instance, are an abuse of all our environments. The only reason any people carry on living up North, in stinkpots like Middlesborough and Manchester — with their primitive chip-eating habits, flat cap, real ale, beat your wife crap — is that they haven't the sense to get out. That they may claim to be proud of living on slag heaps and breathing smoke only demonstrates that the despoliation of generations has affected their cranial capacities. To stay there they've got to be stupid. Even some of those who leave have sufficient sense only to seek a close approximation — in Bridgwater — of what they escaped from.
People end up in Bridgwater by birth or by accident. Never intention. Bridgwater's own self-mocking legend has it that every local able-bodied man was recruited to fight, and was subsequently killed in, the Battle of Sedgemoor. This left all the cripples and feeble-minded to interbreed and populate Bridgwater. Paul and Julie were both born in Bridgwater.
True Stories
In August 1985 two brothers, both of Fairfax Road, Bridgwater, were shouting and swearing as they left Charlotte's nightclub in St Mary Street, Bridgwater. When the police intervened Raymond Keith Paul Riddle pushed a policeman in the chest. Upon being arrested 19 year old Raymond Keith Paul Riddle struggled violently. 17 year old Jeffery Gordon Riddle tried to pull him away. Jeffery Gordon Riddle subsequently put up such a struggle that he had to be handcuffed. A group of 30 — 40 onlookers gathered. More police were called to clear the street.
The Department of the Environment, in a letter to Somerset Health Authority, said that the incidence of leukaemia deaths around Hinkley, between 1959 and 1973, being five times what statistically should have been expected, had no link with any incident at the nuclear power station. The letter, in April 1989, said that the higher levels in the early 1960s were due to weapon test fallout.
In June 1989 Paul Baker and Nick O'Grady, both of the Sydenham estate, Bridgwater, were commended by the society for the Protection of Life for having smashed their way into the Fairfax Road home of their neighbour and having rescued Fiona Dunbar and her baby son Joseph. The citation read, 'It is considered that the gallantry and endeavour of Paul Baker and Nick O'Grady secured the lives of Fiona Dunbar and her infant son.'
