7. Like Watching A Wim Wenders Movie
A conversation that might go somewhere
12.14 to be precise, on that Friday
“I’ve never understood the use of the word nursing in relation to a pint,” Rollie says. His thoughts are never idle ones, but each contribute to a wholesale vision of the human condition, or at least that’s how he thinks of them, these thoughts, these proclamations, and throughout this day he will sit at many bars around town and host one-sided discussions on many aspects of this vision with a whole array of people. Rollie is a talker, less of a listener. At this moment, the landlord of The Pipistrelle, Alden Jones, gets the honour of his company. Rollie is sitting at the bar, side-on so he can see the room whilst regaling, but Alden has been in the cellar for a while now, so Rollie’s been left with his own thoughts which come at him at this time of day with a clarity that startles him as much as it does anybody else. Alden was gone to change the barrel, Rollie’s second pint of the hour half-poured on the drip tray, but he’s back now to top it up, and Rollie lights a cigarette, balances it on the edge of the ashtray and repeats his line about the nursing.
“What are you on about?” Alden says, lifting a tea bag out of a mug with a mottled stainless-steel spoon and dropping it wet into the flip top bin.
Rollie clears his throat, takes a drag of his cigarette. “Nursing a pint,” he says as if he’s offended at having to clarify. “Seems to me like the pint nurses you; you get what I’m saying?”
Alden nods and with closed eyes lets the steam from the tea moisturise his face. “Yes, Rollie,” he says.
Alden is a good man. He takes a quiet pride in allowing people like Rollie their space to be themselves. It comes at little cost to him. But, often early in the day when the coffee hasn’t kicked, he needs to close his eyes and let it wash over. Alden is a sturdy figure, broad shouldered, a glistening pate that sometimes he pats and smoothes like Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. The horror the horror. This is as bad as it gets. And as good as it gets. Life is good for Alden Jones. Steady and good. He is liked and admired and is well-read and well-listened and he has a story for every topic, a line for every quip. His name carries weight. Alden from The Pips is a seal of approval in this town. And he’s a way of forty yet.
“If you were to be in a state where you would be described as nursing a pint,” Rollie goes on. “You invariably don’t imbue the attributes that would a good nurse make.”
“Yes, Rollie,” says Alden and he leans his arse against the low shelf of the back bar.
Rollie is a big man, a big old man, wearing two shirts and a sweater and a heavy corduroy jacket with a scarf done up in a Parisian knot right there into his wispy white whiskers. He must have come in on the early bus to not die of heat stroke in that get up. At this time of the day, the pub smells of stale beer, stale cigarette smoke, and industrial disinfectant that makes the protruding hairs of Rollie’s nose tingle and twinge.
“Are you nursing, Rollie?” Alden says wryly.
Rollie turns his big head to Alden. “How fucking dare you, young man,” he says. “I haven’t had a hangover since the X-Ray Specs, Lisbon, 1982. And that was because of the heat. I don’t do so well in the heat. I don’t mind admitting it.” He turns back side-on to the bar. “I’m talking about those two over there.”
Alden follows Rollie’s eye to the only other two in the pub, two young lads, early twenties, sitting in the shadows and light of the lead-lined frosted windows. They’re silhouettes for a while, until you look at them for long enough and they begin to emerge from the dimness as your eyes adjust. Both boys are in silence, at the same time isolated from one another and completely in communion, their beers next to their packets of cigarettes with lighters neatly placed on top. One of them is leaning forward, one leaning back, in the thick amber shadows of the Rembrandt colouring. It looks like a painting, it really does. One is tall, round-shouldered, his hair greasy to his shoulders and tucked behind his ears, his track suit top zipped to the Adam’s apple. The other, bloodshot eyes under a mussed thick mop of hair, stares at the pint he’s hunched over apologetically, his woollen charity shop blazer scrunched at the shoulders, the crown of his hair sticking up like he’s a schoolboy in a picture book.
“That’s Moses and Vardaman,” Alden says.
“I fucking know who they are, mun,” says Rollie. “Good lads. Fucking idiots. But you wouldn’t say they had the stuff of nurses about them, would you? Yet they are both, in common parlance, nursing their pints.”
“I see what you’re getting at,” says Alden, having not for one moment been lost on this. “If anything, the pints are nursing them.”
Rollie looks at Alden from the side of one eye. “Always had a way with words,” he says.
Moses, leaning over his pint, moving in that woollen blazer between hot sweats and cold ones, breathing shallow, becomes aware the two figures at the bar are looking over at them.
“I think Rollie’s talking about us,” he says.
Vardaman slowly turns his head from the mesmerising fuzz of the frosted light to the warm wooden darkness of the pub’s depths. He tinkles the zip on his trackie top with his fingertips, the way Moses always takes the piss and says he looks like Stan Laurel which makes Vardaman frown and say fuck off and then stop doing it.
“You don’t think he knows about last night, do you?” Vardaman says.
“How would he?”
“I don’t know. He has clairvoyant abilities.”
Moses straightens his back, as if he’s getting out of bed. “Not bothering you are we, Rollie?” he calls over.
“Worried about you, boys,” Rollie calls back, his tone far from sympathetic. “You look in need of medical attention. Or maybe your medicine was the problem in the first place, eh?”
“He’s heard,” Vardaman whispers.
Moses taps the corner of his pint glass. “I’m into the drink,” he calls back. “Drugs not my scene.”
“Wise boy,” Rollie says. “What about you, Vardaman?”
It’s rhetorical.
Vardaman has turned his head back to the window. He adopts the thickest of accents common to the guttural speeches of the town. “I smokes the draw, Rollie, you knows that. Nothing else.”
Rollie grimaces disapprovingly. “Fucking hippy drugs,” he says. What comes next is one of Rollie’s many rehearsed lines. “When I was your age, I never took anything that didn’t come out of a laboratory. Trialled and tested.”
Moses looks dolefully across at Vardaman. Vardaman says loudly, “It’s your generation’s lack of ambition meant The Fall made seventy albums.”
“And what the fuck is wrong with that?” Rollie snaps quickly and loudly, as intended.
“Hex Enduction Hour, mate. No need for anything more than that,” Vardaman says; and then, putting on a Manc brogue, “Fuck you, fuck face.”
Moses watches Rollie bristle.
“It’s a quote from a song on the album,” Moses says to him, placatingly.
“I know what it is, twat,” Rollie chucks back. “What have you boys got on your turntable, then? Oasis, I bet. It’s just The Beatles all over again. And the Beatles were shit in the first place.”
Vardaman rolls his eyes, but he’s turned away from Rollie. He has a bit for this. People who think The Beatles were shit are no different to Al-Qaida. Or homeopathists. Delusional. Enemies of culture and science and the progress of Western Civilisation. They should be in Guantanamo. But he doesn’t trot it out this time. It’s too early, the hangover is too severe, and his energy wavers. He lights a cigarette, and it hits the back of his throat like a saw blade. Moses wonders if it might help his own predicament, so he lights one too, but it just drags him into a coughing fit.
Rollie tuts and says to Alden, “The youth of today. No go in them.”
Vardaman feels a surge at hearing this. “What did you say, old man?”
Nobody calls Rollie old man. He’s not all that old – maybe sixty or he could be a hard-lived fifty something – but also, as Vardaman himself has said, there’s a reason he’s the type of old bastard he is, and god only knows what the story is behind that glass eye and the scar across his chin, but his attitudes probably have something to do with loneliness so no need to cut into him too deep when you’re going back and fore like this.
Vardaman stands. Rollie looks angry but also in that podgy grey face of his he looks slightly bemused.
“You have no idea what we’ve been through,” Vardaman begins. Moses, well aware of the sort of show Vardaman is capable of putting on, leans back in his pew and takes a deep breath. “No idea what perfect debauchery we two young lads got up to last night while you were tucked up watching your Morecombe and Wise DVD – the sort of sweet Boschian craziness; you wouldn’t understand it; you’d be terrified of it if you saw it. Don’t talk to me about having go in me. We are gods, my friend. Bacchus reincarnated.”
Vardaman looks dizzy. Stood up too quick. He plonks back down in his seat.
“When I got up, I had a much more ambitious speech in mind,” he whispers to Moses.
Moses pats him on the shoulder. “We got the gist,” he says.
“Why aren’t you boys in work, anyway?” Alden interjects in a calming tone, allowing Rollie to catch his breath and swig his beer and flap a dismissive paw in the direction of the boys.
Vardaman says nothing. He has the day off from the record shop on the hill. He has every Friday off. Moses? Well, Moses is out of work at the moment. Every other Thursday his JSA goes in, twenty quid of which goes straight on the lash. Beer tokens. Moses and Vardaman have known each other since school, since Vardaman was kept back a year when a bout of meningitis meant he missed his exams and they ended up sat next to each other in Geography coming up with daily challenges to write sequential Bowie and Dylan lyrics (Vardaman tested Moses’s Bowie, and Moses tested Vardaman’s Dylan) on their exercise books as Mr Sunblatt belched and grumbled his whiskey breath through slides of different schemata of permeable rocks or some shit or other.
“I’m between jobs, Alden,” Moses says.
“I thought you were at the prison service?” says Alden.
“I was. But the contract ended, so there we are.”
End of.
And so, the glorious eight weeks he spent moving cardboard boxes full of employee files from one floor to another had come to an end.
“Young boy like you; must be something wrong if you’re out of work a day,” Rollie says.
Something wrong, indeed, Moses thinks.
“Why aren’t you in work, Rollie?” Vardaman is on his feet again.
“Retired, you cheeky bastard.”
“Retired from what?” Vardaman says.
“Retired from having to listen to little fuckers like you all day.”
“You’re not old enough to retire,” Vardaman says.
“My knees,” Rollie says.
“Didn’t they call that swinging the lead in your day?” Vardaman says.
“You better watch your mouth, Vardaman, my son,” Rollie says, but they all know he isn’t getting off that stool.
Moses tugs at the elbow of Vardaman’s sleeve and says, “Come on, haven’t we had enough drama?”