Everything You Need: Short Stories (26 page)

It suddenly seemed horribly possible that I’d met someone in the pub, gone back to their house with them, and then — for one reason or another — left by a rear exit, making it as far as the park before crashing out.

Not ideal, obviously. Not the outline of a classy evening, a soirée of distinction and restraint. Oh fucking hell. Why did I have to be me? Wasn’t it someone else’s turn yet? Wasn’t there
anyone
else who fancied taking on the job for a while, so I could have a rest?

In the end I decided to just forget about it. I find that’s the best approach to events in your past which you’d prefer not to bring into your present or future. Just pretend they didn’t happen.

In the meantime distract yourself.

To aid this I reached once more for Portnoy’s tome. I dimly remembered having spent a fairly diligent hour or so in the pub the previous evening, trying to make sense of the photocopied pages I’d taken with me — even swapping words back to front, in the hope it was some simple code which Portnoy’s other sages might have missed through lack of familiarity with foreign or obsolete languages.

Nothing had come out of it, and at first glance the text looked no more explicable this morning than it had the day before. After a few minutes of flipping back and forth through the pages, however, I noticed something was tugging at my brain, trying to bring itself to my attention. It wasn’t until I tried saying some of the words out loud that I understood what it was.

The words remained nonsensical, but there was a
rhythm
to them.

I never paid much attention in class during the parts where they explained iambic pentameters and all that jazz (nor during quite a lot of the other bits, to be honest) so I couldn’t put an actual name to the rhythm, but as I turned to other pages at random and read out further chunks, I became convinced I’d finally spotted something. The ratio of long and short words, the way in which the blocks of text were organised and contained by commas and full stops, seemed to have a kind of pattern.

It wasn’t universal - it’s not like the whole thing went
ti-tum-ti-tum ti-tum-titum
— but each section
did
seem to have a kind of aural organising principle, when you said the words aloud. By chance I happened to come across one of the passages I’d photocopied the night before, and as I read through it, I realised something else. It was this rhythm I’d heard in the voice of the man with the torch, who’d let me out of the park I’d found myself in.

It hadn’t been in his words, but in my mind — put there through reading and re-reading this section while pouring beer into my head. Which was kind of weird.

7

P
ortnoy took
a long puff on his cigar and looked at me.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘And?’

‘Well, that’s it,’ I said.

My head was splitting, and it was becoming clear that the hope that this insight would do — and be worth the other six hundred quid — had been overly optimistic. ‘I still can’t make anything of the actual words — and I’ve tried everything I know. But these rhythms can’t be unintentional. It must be what the thing is about.’

‘A book of rhythms.’

‘Yeah.’

Portnoy just looked at me some more.

‘I mean, that must be pretty unusual, right? Very rare?’ I could sense this wasn’t at all what Portnoy had been hoping for, but ploughed on regardless. ‘Maybe it’s a manual of poetic meter, or something.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful news,’ he snorted. ‘Those go for simply
enormous
sums, as I’m sure you can imagine.’

He thought for a while in silence, staring down at the surface of his desk, gently biting his lip.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m not convinced. You’re not there yet. You need to keep on trying.’

‘Christ,’ I said, ‘Look, it’s
something
. And I honestly don’t think there’s anything else there to be found. I spent all yesterday evening in the pub with this bloody thing, trying everything I could—‘

‘You took this book
to the pub
?’ Portnoy said, sharply.

‘No,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘Obviously not. I photocopied some pages, and—‘

‘Which pub?’

‘Um, the Southampton Arms,’ I said. ‘On Junction Road. You won’t know—‘

‘Of course I know it,’ he snapped. ‘I had the misfortune to grow up in that very area.’

‘Oh,’ I said, surprised.

‘Don’t
ever
do that again,’ he said. ‘Do you have any
idea
what would happen to the value of this book, if it got out that it existed?’

‘Trust me, I don’t think there are any antiquarian book dealers working undercover in my local boozer.’

‘Your fellow sops probably don’t imagine that amongst their number is someone who can sight-read medieval Dutch,’ he bellowed, semi-reasonably. ‘And yet there you are, getting merrily shit-faced and falling off stools.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, chastened. ‘I just didn’t think that... well, sorry. Sorry.’

For the second time in three days, Portnoy wasn’t looking sleek. In fact, he was looking the closest I’ve ever seen to angry. And a little scary, too.

‘Where are the photocopies now?’

‘Um,’ I said.

8

E
ven to someone
well-acquainted with the practice of drinking in the afternoon, pubs look different during the day. Natural light is friendly to neither their interiors nor denizens, and since the Nazi health bastards stopped us smoking inside, they smell bad too. Stale alcohol, a waft of disinfectant from the toilets, whatever vile gunk they use to clean out the pumps — all overlaid with the background tang of dust in ancient carpets. Now this olfactory assault is no longer hidden below the welcoming fug of fag smoke, walking into a pub of an late morning can make you wonder why on earth you spent the whole of the previous evening there. Luckily, a quick pint can usually remind you.

I got half of one down me before asking what I'd come to ask.

‘Ron?’ I said, addressing the slab-faced landlord. It would be romantic to imagine he’d once been a boxer, a plucky local hopeful gone spectacularly to seed — and Ron wasn’t adverse to that rumour being spread around — but it’s more likely he merely spent his youth and post-youth engaged in the kind of villainous pursuits that come hand in hand with outbursts of spirited violence. Even in his sixties he remains an extremely handy-looking geezer, and I definitely wouldn’t want to wind up on the wrong end of either of his ham-sized fists.

‘John,’ he replied, in his courtly fashion.

‘Your rubbish. What happens to it?’

Ron cast a droll eye around the bar, but the only other person sitting at it was already too drunk to provide much of an audience.

‘We throw it away,’ Ron said. ‘Is that...
wrong
?’

‘But, I meant, at what time? First thing, or...?’

‘Nah. We like to save it. The bloke comes round to collect, and we say “No, you’re alright mate, we’ll keep it until next week.”’

‘And what time
does
he come round?’

Ron abruptly dropped the show, realising I was going to be dogged about it. ‘It’s still out the back. Why? You lost something?’

‘Few bits of paper I had with me last night. Forgot them when I left.’

‘Not surprised,’ he said. ‘You was fucking bladdered. Muttering to yourself like a twat, you were. Almost thought about not serving you the last four or five pints.’

‘Muttering?’

‘Yeah. Same thing, over and over. Couldn’t make it out. Sounded like a poem, or something.’

That sounded weird, but I didn’t want to risk being diverted from what I was driving at.

I opened my mouth to ask the next question, but had to pause while I underwent a long coughing fit. Ron watched the process with some satisfaction.

‘Sounds nasty,’ he said, when I'd finished.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It feels it.’ The cough was harsh and glassy — a legacy, no doubt, of having spent a portion of a cold night crashed out on damp grass in a park. ‘Look, Ron — thing is, has your rubbish been taken, or not? I need those pages, is what it is.’

He jerked his head toward the side door. ‘Help yourself.’

I swallowed the rest of my pint, indicated I’d like another, and spent twenty minutes in the alley that ran down the side of the pub, sifting through bin bags. Cass used to call bin bags — especially when stacked in a black pile by the side of a building — ‘house poo’. I always liked that, and trust me, the bin bags of pubs deserve the term more than most. I wouldn’t have been rummaging through them at all, had Portnoy’s response to the pages being lost not been as strong as it was. He really was not happy about it
at all
, which made me all the more intrigued as to what the hell the story was behind this book.

I found the photocopies, eventually, in about the eighth bag. I remembered bringing approximately six pages with me, and that’s how many I managed to dredge up. I’m not sure what most of them were covered in, but I hope to Christ it wasn’t on the pub menu — or, at least, that no-one had eaten it. Especially me.

I wiped the pages off as best I could, and in doing so saw that the second sheet contained the passage that had taken me to Portnoy’s that morning. The liquid in the gloop smeared over it had done something strange to the laser print, making it look as though it was standing off the page a little. I still thought I could determine some kind of consistent rhythm in the collections of letters, and it still meant nothing.

In the end I folded the pages in half, and half again, and stuffed them in my pocket. I had a well-earned cigarette and then went back in the pub, where — after washing my hands in the gents — I took my place back at the bar. I didn’t know what to do next. I wanted (
needed
) the rest of the cash Portnoy had promised. I had no idea what else to try, however, and the combination of a hangover and whatever bug I’d picked up wasn’t making my head a place of clarity. Neither was the new beer entering my system, most likely, though it was at least making me feel slightly better. I decided I'd have one more pint then go back to the flat and... dunno. Try looking through the book some more.

‘You’re doing it again.’

I raised my head to see both Ron and the nearly-comatose other bloke at the bar looking at me.

‘Doing what?’

‘The muttering.’

I frowned. ‘Really?’

Ron turned to the bloke. ‘Was he muttering?’

‘You was...
muttering
,’ the man said, laboriously.

I realised that I had been, and was again, that my lips were soundlessly shaping the same phrase over and over. It was as if, suddenly and after all this time, I could vocalise a foreign language after all. It just wasn’t one that I knew.

I got off the stool without ordering another beer, and walked quickly home.

9

P
ortnoy wasn’t
in when I called, and he cleaved to the incredibly annoying habit of not having an answer phone. He’d been extremely insistent that I let him know immediately about the fate of the pages, however, so I remained where I was and waited to call him again.

In the meantime I sat at the table, putting the book in front of me. After a moment I opened it, somewhat more cautiously than on previous occasions.

It was just a book. Of course.

But things get under your skin.

I remembered the first time I’d met Cass, for example. It was in a pub, obviously. She’d been there with a couple of mates, as had I, and somehow over the course of many drinks the two groups wound up mingling. At the end of the evening, two new — and very temporary — couples disappeared off into the night. Cass and I were not one of them, though we did talk for hours and swop phone numbers.

The next morning I woke with her in my head.

I was alone on what serves for my bed, but bang in the centre of a head seared with hangover, was this petite, red-haired girl. Not saying anything. Just there. She remained in vision for the whole of the day — sometimes right in front of me, sometimes glimpsed out of the corner of my internal eye. When I woke up the next morning and found that she was again my first waking thought, I bit the bullet and called her.

I’m not sure we ever quite ‘went out with each other’, as such, though we did spend quite a lot of time together in pubs for a while, and took that one day-trip to France; and on days when I feel scratchy and crap, and put at least some of this down to the vague sensation of missing someone, I suspect it’s her that I miss.

Portnoy’s book, or its contents, had started to feel the same way. Not as if I wanted to snog it, obviously. As if it had climbed into my head. This could just be for self-evident reasons: having pissed away the first half of the money, I needed the other six hundred even more urgently, and he clearly wasn’t going to give it up without due cause — which meant me getting to the bottom of this sodding tome. The cold, flu or whatever I had was getting worse too, making my head muddy and unclear. My cough had by now reached epic proportions. I was trying to unleash it as seldom as possible, on the grounds that it stirred reserves of phlegm so deep it felt like it was endangering the foundations of the house.

I called Portnoy’s office again. He still wasn’t there. Then, maybe because she was in my head from remembering her from being in my head, I called Cass’s mobile.

‘You’re got a bloody nerve,’ she said, before I’d even had time to say hello.

‘Have I?’

‘You don’t remember?’ she said.

1
0

T
wo hours
later I was back in the Southampton, sitting fretfully at a table and waiting for her. In the meantime I'd managed to get hold of Portnoy and reassure him about the missing pages. He sounded less scary afterwards, and listened to me wheeze and cough with something like paternal concern.