Tired of Being Alone

[….]

I recognised the sound: I Fought the Law by The Clash. I had been a teenager when punk hit the music scene like a fist in the face, and I was still there to see how quickly it became an empty parody of itself just over a year later. Now it had become nothing more than golden oldies, just another hairstyle in the ever-lengthening history of Rock 'n' Roll. It seemed as though the outrageous had become commonplace, mundane with outrage itself out of date and worn out. No-one had the energy to be outraged any more, hardly meriting a paragraph unless it was a slow news day.

Guy marched up to where I sat and bowed formally. I stood up and Guy took me into his arms. We waltzed sedately around the half-empty dance floor completely out of step with the frantic beat of the anonymous disco tune the DJ played. As people turned to stare, I noticed Julia and Anne sitting side by side, as we twirled around the dance-floor, laughing as they watched us.

Guy tried to tango. I could not hold him as he bent backwards in my arms. We fell to the floor. I stood and held out my hand to Guy. He pulled me back down onto the floor. Then he rolled and stood up, tottering backwards into a pair of serious dancers. They glared and moved away. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the dance-floor trying to make a roll-up as the strobe light flickered.

‘Al Green: Tired of Being Alone,’ I muttered to myself and looked up as Julia held out her hand and pulled me to my feet. We danced slowly, seriously, close together. I let my cigarette go out as Julia rested her head on my shoulder. Slowly I danced us towards the doorway.

‘I need a drink,’ I said as we danced out into the corridor.

‘Okay.’ Julia let me go. ‘Are you glad you came now?’

‘Yes. I'd forgotten how good a night out could be.’ I frowned as I saw Robert engaged in yet another serious discussion at a table near the door. I turned away towards the bar, hoping he would not notice us.

Robert waved at Julia, gesturing for her to come over to his table. She waved and shook her head. Robert shrugged and resumed his conversation with his union cronies. Someone else I didn't recognise waved at Julia; she waved back once more.

I fought my way to the bar and brought back two pints. Julia was in conversation with someone else I vaguely recognised. Eventually, I remembered her name was Jennifer and I’d seen her at the house a couple of times with Julia. I presumed she was studying Politics too.

I handed a pint to Julia and lit the remains of my roll-up. Julia put her glass down on a nearby table and pulled my tin from my pocket. The two girls chatted together as I leant back against the wall and looked around.

The differences between the first year students and the others were not so obvious any more. The nervous awkwardness was almost gone. Only a few stood, or sat, stiffly on the periphery with nervous hands, seeking sanctuary from others' eyes.

The lights flashed twice and Julia turned to me, raising her eyebrows; I nodded and gave her my empty glass. She and Jennifer headed off to the bar together, chatting all the way.

‘Have you done the essay?’

I turned. Steve, a classmate from my tutorial group, looked up at me blinking nervously behind the thick lenses of his black-framed glasses.

‘More or less, just writing it out neatly. I'll have it done tomorrow sometime,’ I said. ‘Is yours finished?’

Steve nodded and looked around. ‘I don't see you in here very often. You're usually with some girl. The one that meets you sometimes, after the tutorials.’

‘Yes, Alison. She's gone home for the weekend,’ I said.

Julia returned and handed me another pint. Steve blinked across at Julia. I could see beads of sweat on his top lip. He muttered something, gestured vaguely and wandered off.

‘Who's that?’ Julia said, leaning closer to me as she watched him walk away.

‘That's Steve. He's a bit on the nervous side. He sits in the corner in tutorials and never says a word, always terrified of being asked a question.’ I watched him disappear into the crowd at the doorway. ‘The sad thing, though, is that he is the smartest one in our group. We could do with his help sometimes. It took three weeks for him to build up the nerve to say hello to me…. So, by the summer he may even speak in the tutorials.’

‘That's a shame,’ Julia said. ‘I wonder what made him like that?’

‘Being one out of only three in his school to take A levels,’ I said. ‘In some places a little bit of knowledge can be very dangerous. I went to a school similar to Steve's. I've seen what can happen to kids at those places.’

‘What sort of things?’

I pulled the sleeve of my shirt up and showed her the scar: long and jagged, from just below the shoulder to an inch above the elbow, twisting from the outside of my arm at the top to just above the crease of flesh on the inside of my elbow.

‘That was for wanting to keep my Geography homework to myself.’ I pulled down the sleeve.

Julia stared at my sleeve as though the scar was still visible through the material of my shirt. Over the other side of the room, I could see people being herded out by the bar staff.

‘Come on, drink up. I think it's time to go,’ I said.

‘Was your school really like that?’ Julia said, still looking at my arm as she drank.

‘Yes,’ I said. From the age of eleven, I had been interred in a school notorious throughout the local education authority. It was infamous even for the viciousness of the girls' netball team. I remembered once meeting a girl at a party who had played netball against my old school. Much later that night she showed me the scar that ran for six inches up the inside of her thigh. The scar had the shape of an arrow pointing to the place where I was keen to go, nevertheless, I paused to kiss along it in a kind of awe.

The girls at my school had been the granddaughters of the small, pale, hard-faced and broad-backed retired miners who now raced pigeons and grew vegetables on their allotments. Allotments that were already subsiding into the underground tunnels they had dug many years before. Their granddaughters had inherited the small stature and hard faces of the miners, while developing large aggressive breasts that were more terrifying than erotic. Before I moved away, I occasionally saw some of those girls I had lain awake at night trying not to stain the sheets over during my early teenage years. They seemed to be suddenly decades older with sagging faces and breasts, each one with several wild children of her own.

I had escaped Empire Street School with only one small scar on my chin as well as the long one on my arm, and two CSEs: Geography and Mathematics, which suggested only a career in cartography. Instead, I spent a year at the local Technical College, amongst welders and car mechanics, and came out with four O levels. ‘It was nasty, it was violent and I got out as soon as I could.’

Julia looked at me closely and then nodded. She finished her drink, and put the glass down on a table as we walked out of the bar.

I sat on the cloakroom bench, rolling a cigarette, as Julia fished her own coat out from under a deep pile of coats that had been hanging up when we first arrived. Julia put her coat on and I handed the cigarette to her. I began to roll another. I put the cigarette into my mouth and shut the tin.

There was a dull thud and a curse from further up the cloakroom. I opened my tin and began to roll yet another cigarette. I finished rolling it just as Guy came over, rubbing his head. I held out the cigarette to him as he sat down next to me.

‘So how many times is it that you've forgotten about the low doorway?’

‘Seven, no six,’ Guy said and rubbed his head again. ‘Can you hang on a minute? Anne's gone to the toilet. Oh, and we have a couple of bottles of wine back at the house. Interested?’

[….]

[Extract from: Hanging Around Until: A novel]