By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
14) Drinking
Julie is sat at one of the round tables. Paul is away at the bar behind all those other shouting moving bodies.
The smell and noise of pubs still gives Julie that associative teenage tingle of adult excitements. They also remind her of her husband and of his violence and they frighten her. Her husband isn't in this pub. Only copies of him.
"Go boil your head!" one man shouts laughing at another on his way to the lavatories.
Why, Julie wonders, do Bridgwater males employ the language of aggression even when they don't mean it? Two there are smiling over a darts disagreement, "Like hospital food?"
In the bar beyond is yet more shouting. All the ill-manners and mulish aggression of Bridgwater men, deriding one another upon sight and out of habit. Julie tries to think of a Bridgwater man with an open face, a ready smile. Can't think of one. Only the sucking up smarm of the salesman and the shop assistant.
No single man here wears a face of amiable enquiry. Not that these harsh masks denote strength, rather theirs is the immobility of fear. Julie knows that all these loud men are but children desperate for attention, not wanting to be noticed, however, to the extent that they will be laughed at.
Knowing them does not make Julie feel superior to them. Because it's this idea these little boys have of what constitutes a man that means that sooner or later these little boys, proving themselves men to each other, will go home and punch their womenfolk.
They frighten her.
Paul they amuse. He sits down smiling beside her. His idea to come in here. And how could she have objected to such an ordinary thing to do, go for a meal and a drink after? Now he nudges her attention towards four red-faced girls giggling together on another table.
"Four fat and foolish virgins," he says.
"Fat and foolish maybe," she says.
"It happened to their bodies not their minds."
Now she knows why they came here: it's Paul's turn now to talk, to sound off in the manner of his grandfather without his grandfather going one better.
"It's all a matter of knowing people," he nods at the crowded pub, "and being known. The drink," he swallows from his yellow pint, "is incidental."
A man in earshot tells a Rastus joke. Another man laughs over-loudly. Another voice is telling Irish jokes.
"Here we have a state of mind," Paul says, "that believes the more noise it's making the better the time it is having."
Julie smiles with him. She and Paul have a home, two children, a life and thoughts other than this inside of pubs. This once, she thought, excited her. The loudness and bumping familiarity all making her feel a part of the grown-up world. But this is only pretend grown-up. This is playing. Grown-ups playtime. Attitudes and poses. Grown-ups playing parts to themselves, with themselves as their own audience, all in their chubby rounded ordinariness wanting to be singular angular characters.
"Fuck you Williams," a voice leers.
"Wanker," comes the reply.
"Two more graduates," Paul says in her ear, "of the Bridgwater school of protocol."
Which leads Paul to a favourite topic, Bridgwater men, "In any pub in this town all they boast of is feats of endurance the number of pints they can drink, how many hours they worked one week, how long they can stand under dribbling fireworks.... making virtues of their serfdom, of their being beaten. How much they can take. Not what they can do. No, how much can be done to them...."
He realises that Julie has heard all this before, points her towards a man listening to the arm-waving ramblings of another. The listening man is full of a lofty wisdom.
"Sucking on his secrets like boiled sweets...." and not imparting even a betraying breath of wisdom to another.
Sue from the jam factory uses this pub. Most nights. Julie can't see her here tonight.
In the jam factory Sue and Julie have formed a partnership. Sue tries to create the impression that she and Julie alone in the factory are madcap and unconventional. Sue because of her pub escapades, Julie because of a lifestyle which has her and Paul cycling penniless over the levels. The two women together pity the other plain and spiritless women who work in the factory.
Julie tells Paul about Sue, about why she says she prefers coming here to staying at home with her children,
"Sue reckons they're honest here."
"About as sincere as channel swimmers trying to drown themselves. Listen to 'em. The uninformed full of their own opinions, forcefully delivered. Like tabloid headlines. That's what the opinions and conversations are in here headlines shouted at each other."
"Sue says," Julie says, "that there has to be more to life than drinking and fucking and keeping each other amused. But what? You tell her that."
Julie sees another woman she knows. The woman has long painted fingernails.
"...She's always been in a hurry. Both her babies were premature. No kidding. She even had a bicycle bell on her pram, used to ring it to make people get out of her way. Look, she can't sit still now..." Paul and Julie watch the woman leave her seat to talk to a man, move on to someone else, go into the lavatory....
"People here," Paul says, "tell each other they're the norm. But you look, there's no old people in here. The old people are all locked indoors watching telly. Old people now are human beings who live through one day and on into the next inside two rooms. All of them see themselves as no use anymore. Because they can't work. And because they're not allowed to work they don't have the money to come out to the pub. So they stay indoors and worry about their bowels and the state of the roads. With the result that these few people in here and in the other pubs think they fill the world."
Julie changes the subject. She and Paul compare notes on their separate excursions to the canal. Julie is pleased that Paul doesn't now want to start from the docks.
commentary.... Julie's workfriend, Sue, said that she went to that pub for the company. Like Julie she could not bear to be indoors alone. Alone, that is, without another adult. Children, in this case, didn't count. However, only in their distaste were the two women alike: their tastes differed.
In fact, looking at the inside of this pub and its patrons, Julie had had to reassess her friend. That she should so enjoy coming to this unremarkable pub, that she should bring to work with her excited tales of this pub's unprepossessing patrons.
Julie saw nothing in the pub to please or to excite her. Her initial nervousness was purely associative with her ex-husband. She was not, for instance as is customary with most Bridgwater women on a night out watching out for her man's straying eye.
Neither Julie nor Paul owned any of the conventional jealousies. There was not between them even latent suspicions. Both may have entertained the notion of a bit on the side; but, apart from the logistical complications any act of infidelity could bring into their lives, also leading them to constancy was the thought then of AIDS, was the thought that the gratification of a sexual whim could kill the one they loved. Some do it with a sword, some with a fuck.
Not that Paul or Julie had any need to go outside their partnership for sexual satisfaction. Sexual curiosity possibly. And possibly, if needs must, either one of them could have adapted to the other's infidelity. (Let it be understood here that infidelity in itself is not the prime sunderer of marriage. The first refusal, the first 'Not tonight', 'Not now', 'Not here' is that. The rejected partner thinks, 'if it wasn't me, if it was him/her, she/he would be only too eager...' Even if the infidelity is only wishful thinking popstar adulation say a third party has entered all connubial transactions, and the imaginary cuckolded self is diminished, feels it must assert itself by actual infidelity. Whatever.... the 'If' one is present, and one of the pair is estranged. Julie and Paul, however, are unsuspiciously by themselves.)
As for the habit of profanity in that pub, which might have made those from outside Bridgwater nervous... Some people are overcome by the sociable urge to communicate. Yet they have nothing of any import to say. So they do the human equivalent of moo and baa. In Bridgwater they swear. Or they find themselves recklessly telling the most outrageous stories so that the communality of communication will be sustained, talker and listener, performer and audience.
The polar opposite of this phenomena are those people who are sober and who do have something of matter to relate, but who find themselves incapable of expressing it: they stutter and they stammer in their futile attempts to communicate the inexpressible.... Finally it erupts in a frenzied shout. Usually it is the word 'No!', a denial of all assumptions made of that person, a denial of all systems of belief, of all accepted notions, all interrelated concepts, of all contemporary understandings.... Where else to start, but with the word, 'No!'?
Paul did not want to be superior to the people in that pub, even better than them; he simply didn't want to be like them. Out of unthinking habit, for instance, many of the male customers in that pub passed racist remarks. There are very few noticeably coloured people in Bridgwater: racism has been imported there. But Somerset men, taken as a whole, think it macho to be racist. Somerset men also think it macho to drink lots.
Bridgwater's modern industries continue to intermittently require an unthinking workforce. That workforce is therefore kept in a state of near narcolepsy and its subsequent near poverty. The narcotic can be the obvious type as with the drummer and his binge-addiction to alcohol, or it can be the constant keeping up of appearances as with consumerism, or combinations thereof.
Bridgwater continues to own too the mythos of machismo. "Call yourself a man..." "Make a man of him..." "Act like a man..." "Take it like a man..." This all suits the employers as they can continue to employ cheap male labour to do dirty and dangerous jobs. The mythos even glamourises the bosses own hard-nosed exploitation "What a bastard he was..." And as such that boss will enter, for a forgetful generation, the mythos of Bridgwater machismo with its exultation of casual violence.
On occasion Paul and Julie too have wanted to believe the worst of Bridgwater that Bridgwater was the most chronic polluter, most coarse, most philistine of towns so that they could bask, for a brash brief moment before sense reclaimed them in the glory of those reflected upside down superlatives.
Society only works by us seeking the good opinion of those we have been led to admire. The most admirable men in Bridgwater are all liver-destructing drinkers. Most drinkers also feel sorry for themselves. Self-pity, though, leads inexorably to self-hatred. Egoists all, they feel sorry for their diminished egos. Egoism cannot despise itself, so it must look outwards. Ergo a facile racism, or the drunk looking for a fight.
True Stories
In January 1989 M. A. Jeans (Farms) Limited polluted Stogursey watercourse with farm waste from Stowey Court Farm. M. A. Jeans (Farms) Limited subsequently had to pay £5,000 in fines and costs.
At about 11pm on March 18th 1989 two motor patrol constables saw Stephen Scanlon, of Cranleigh Gardens, Bridgwater, being spoken to by a constable in Broadway. Thirty minutes later Stephen Scanlon shouted and swore at them as they passed him in the High Street. When the two motor patrol constables turned their car around they were again sworn at by Stephen Scanlon. He then pressed the button on the pelican crossing and made the two motor patrol constables stop their car.
"That showed 'em," Stephen Scanlon shouted. Another policeman approached Stephen Scanlon. He warned Stephen Scanlon about his abusive behaviour. As the policeman walked away Stephen Scanlon shouted, "Come back here and I'll have you." The policeman went back and arrested Stephen Scanlon.
In May 1990 13 year old Dean Maker, of Sydenham Road, Bridgwater, was playing on the Beazer Homes Polden Meadow Estate when a 3 foot diameter concrete sewer pipe rolled onto him and killed him.
