I nodded.
—A bit of stupidity through the garden hedge, he said. —They’d have got that.
He sighed, smiled.
—But –, he said.
—But what?
—I’m – I don’t know. Here we are and I’m still trying to explain it. I looked at her and it was like nothing much had happened since the last time I’d seen her.
—And again, I said. —I’m going to ask you. Is that actually true?
He looked down at his plate. He looked up.
—I don’t know.
* * *
—
She was the girl with the cello. But we didn’t know that until later, in a different place. We sat at the bar that first day and felt accepted. One of my children is the age I was then – he’s older – and I look at him when he lets me and I see a child, a kid trying to be an adult. He has a beard and a boyfriend; he lives in London, in Peckham. He’s up and running, as they say. But he looks so young. The beard is a disguise.
We must have looked like that. We were working and twenty-one but we must have looked like two boys chancing their arms, hoping to get served in a real pub, in daylight. Served by a grown-up. That was how I felt, even though we’d already been drunk once that day and had had no problem being served in any pub in Dublin; I hadn’t been refused service since my second-last year in school. But this one was different. This one felt like a club. Its lack – no radio, no television, music, no framed Doors of Dublin poster – seemed like more.
It was quiet.
—I love this, Joe said – he whispered.
—Me too, yeah.
I hadn’t read a newspaper in a pub before but this was where I was going to do it. I hadn’t sat by myself and drunk a slow pint; I’d never had a pint alone. I would now, here. I’d sit and look in front of me. I wouldn’t shift on my stool or look over my shoulder. I’d be a man.
I didn’t say this. I didn’t think this. I felt it. For a while, I noticed no one else. I didn’t see the women and the man pick up their instrument cases and leave. I must have heard them, I suppose, and I probably turned and looked at them as they left. It’s not that I don’t remember; I didn’t care – that was what mattered. I remember how I felt. I’d entered a new state. I’d put on a man’s jacket. I was a man. Because I’d walked into this particular pub. The boys who’d pissed in the bucket across in Mercer’s Hospital were gone.
The place emptied and filled, and emptied again. The man with the magazine – it was Private Eye – stayed. But after the musicians had left, the place quickly filled again, this time with people with shopping bags. Previously, even earlier that day, we’d have sneered. Fuckin’ shopping. Now we smiled. These were adults. Having a drink like us. It was women with shopping bags, and men with women. They were damp – it was raining out there – and happy. There were bursts of quiet laughter. There was no one trying to lasso the room. They all knew the barman. He was the landlord and, that afternoon, he ruled alone; he’d no help behind the bar. He beamed at the customers, greeted them all like they were fresh off the mailboat. And they beamed back. They’d known him for years, and he’d known them. He served them drink but it seemed incidental. They’d come in for a chat and approval, and he gave it. He really knew who they were. He liked them and they loved him.
He was called George. The name was in the air, never out of it. George? It was in the smoke. George. It was never a demand, always a greeting. He never rushed but he was always there. He smiled at us whenever he passed.
—Gentlemen, he said.
He wasn’t being sarcastic, or snide. This was the thing: he respected us. And this is true: no adult male – no man older than me – had ever respected me before. Except, perhaps, my father. But he was my father, and a widower. There were just the two of us in the house and we got on fine without having to try too hard; I loved my father and I hated him. George didn’t know us but he gave us the time he gave everyone else. There were generations of his customers there, in that hour between five and six. Some came in earlier, and some stayed longer. But they were all there in that hour, every Saturday. It became my favourite time of the week. There was no television or radio to give us the football results but I didn’t miss them. We were going to become those people; we already were those people. There was a handsome man who hadn’t shaved for a few days, with a bit of good grey in his hair. He was with a great-looking woman with a Switzer’s bag. I’d be that man in ten years, maybe fifteen. I’d be here at teatime every Saturday. It would never be teatime in this world.
—How long’ve we been here? Joe asked me, that first afternoon.
—Don’t know, I said.
I looked at my watch.
—Two hours? More? Three, maybe.
—How many pints have we had? he asked.
I had to think about it.
—Two, I said.
I looked at my pint. I wasn’t ready for a fresh one.
—One an’ a half.
—Jesus, said Joe. —That’s fuckin’ amazin’.
Ordinarily, we’d have been on our fifth, becoming just us, closing off the world around us. Protecting and building ourselves. We’d been drunk already that day, so we were just topping up what was already there. But it was different. We were here. We didn’t need to cower or snarl, turn our backs on people who wouldn’t have noticed. We didn’t have to make our own noise. It was a dream; it had all the qualities of a good one. It was the drink, I know, the holes and fuzz it could give to the surroundings. Nothing was sudden or unwanted; there was nothing beyond the afternoon. It was the perfect state and I know now, decades later, it was only possible on a Saturday afternoon, in George’s. I don’t think I’m being sentimental, or just sentimental.
I smiled at George.
—Two, please, George, I said.
I don’t recall smiling but I must have. I was twenty-one. In the ten years before that afternoon I’d smiled only when I’d decided to. This, again – here – was different. I watched George fill the glasses and leave them on the towel, beside four other waiting pints. He smiled at the line of six, then turned to fill glasses with gin and vodka. I looked at Joe. He was smiling, so I must have been too. It wasn’t a grin. It wasn’t because I’d been cheeky, because I’d called a middle-aged man I didn’t know George. I hadn’t been cheeky. Cheek was a thing of the past, as were anger and resentment, stupidity, exclusion. That was why Joe was smiling. We were in a new, unexpected life and we were at home in it. Adulthood wasn’t too bad at all.
There was another thing too, another ingredient. We were being shown a new life; we were observing the middle-class world, an ease, a grace we’d never seen before. It could be ours if we wanted it.