Offcomer (2 page)

Inside, the noise was deafening. Loud music, loud voices. As she walked down the long high room Claire unrolled her apron, reaching back to pass the strings round her waist, tying them at the front. Her eyes readjusted as she went; she began to pick out figures, people.

Gareth was turning from the optics with a glass in one hand and a Club bottle in the other. She smiled awkwardly at him. Dermot was sitting at the bar. He glanced round, gave her a grin, lifted a hand. Next to him, straight from work, in his three-piece suit, pushing his glasses back up his nose, was Paul.

She shoved through the double doors, into the kitchen.

Jim, the Scottish chef, shaved head, goatee beard, was standing in his black-and-white checked trousers, jacket
sleeves rolled up to the elbow. His tattoos looked as if they had smudged in the heat. He was in one of his creative furies.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“I’m not due in till seven.”

“These are stone cold now.” He was pouting, one hand flung out towards the platters on the counter. Claire lifted a teacloth, spread it over her forearm, picked up a tray of pizza slices.

“They look fine to me. I’ll get them out now.”

The edge of the metal platter cut into her arm. Whatever way she held them, she would never get the trays to sit comfortably. They were just too big for her. At least this one was cool. When they were hot, they left tender little pink burns on her inner arm. And the taint of this food, bloodwarm and tucked in close and hip-high, would be on her skin when she woke up in the morning, and stay with her all day.

Conroys was split level. As Claire moved around the bar, abbreviated flights of stripped pine steps took her up a few feet, down a few feet. The highest section, at the back, was stone-clad and set out with long wooden tables and benches, like a medieval banqueting hall. It was balustraded along its length with wrought-iron rails, twisted and contorted like candlewax. When the place was full, customers leaned along the whole length of the rail, looking out over the heaving mass of bodies on the level below.

When the middle section was empty, Claire thought, it looked like a ballroom. The scuffed wooden floor stretched for what seemed like acres, lit by wrought-iron chandeliers. You could fit two hundred drinkers in there, no bother. No chairs or tables to get in the way.

The lowest level, at the front, looked out onto the street
through frosted glass. Three steps down from the middle bar. Claire made her way down them sideways, platter cantilevered out from her hip, watching her feet as she descended. The room was low, dark and smoky, with sour-smelling deep leather benches, padded stools and a snug at one end. There were old murky photographs on the walls. Conroys. Generation after generation, muttonchopped, moustached and aproned, hands on hips, squinting in the daylight outside their bar. When one retired, the next one took over with no perceptible difference, except in the quality of the photograph. Glancing up at the fading images as she passed, she remembered asking who the bar was named after. If it was the original Conroy, or a partnership of several Conroys, or all the generations of Conroys that had ever owned it. Where, in fact, the apostrophe should go. Gareth had laughed. He didn’t know. Gareth’s daddy was a McIlhenney. He had made his money in haulage. He had bought the bar years ago from an ageing Conroy junior, and later bought the failed chandler’s next door, and then the clothier’s on the other side, and then the bank on the corner, when it closed down. Then he ripped through and up and back. The front bar was all that was originally Conroys. And there had never, as far as Gareth knew, been an apostrophe at all.

The food had been Gareth’s idea. On Fridays the bar was always heaving early on, from five or so. It was down near the law courts, the offices, the businesses on the quayside, so it filled with people straight from work, still in their suits, still clutching briefcases. By eight, things had tended to flag as, already drunk, the professionals dragged themselves off home for their tea. The younger, later crowd arrived from around half nine. Gareth fed the early drinkers in the pub, so
they wouldn’t get hungry and leave. Pizza slices sopped up the beer, made the customers feel loved, and notched up the profit. If Gareth hadn’t had that idea nine months ago, Claire wouldn’t have had a job. She wasn’t barstaff, she wasn’t really a waitress. It didn’t even have a name, what she did.

It was quieter down there: just the background buzz from the main bar. A couple at a table and an old man at the counter, his papery hand curled around a pint glass. His name, she thought, was Tommy. She held her tray out towards him. He lifted off a pizza slice, laid it down on the scarred bartop like a dead fish, began to pick at it with his fingernails, didn’t say a word.

There was a shout of laughter from the snug. Through the frosted glass panels she could see shadows, movement. A rising wave of talk: English, northern accents, she noticed, and tried to make out what they were saying. The heavy vowel sounds suggested something further south than home, but then she had never been good at placing accents. She turned towards the couple at the table.

The woman was bronze-haired, a cigarette held to her lips, her red top pulled firmly down over a round belly. The man pressed his cigarette down into the notch in the ashtray, his belly bulging against the buttons of his shirt. They sat side by side, a half in front of her, a pint in front of him, looking straight ahead. Claire held out the platter, smiling for them.

“You’re a wee honey.” The woman blew smoke out through pursed lipsticked lips, balanced her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, took a piece. “You’re a lifesaver.”

The man reached out, peeled away a slice, said, “That’s enough, Joyce.” She pulled a face. Claire smiled back at her, turned away.

Tray balanced awkwardly on her left arm, she pulled open the snug door, propped it with her right hip. The tiny space was packed full, shoulder to shoulder.

She remembered afterwards the open pores of a sweaty nose, thick squarish reflecting glasses, neat clean close-clipped fingernails, the reddened curl of an ear. There were smeary fingerprinted glasses cluttering the table, an overflowing ashtray. She remembered later the weight of a hand on her hip, her waist. She never got a clear idea how many of them there were.

They stopped talking. They stared at her.

She felt her face go tight and numb. She felt her eyes go out of focus. She held out the tray. Nothing happened.

“Compliments of the management,” she said.

“Now that’s nice,” someone said. “That’s a nice touch.”

“Irish hospitality, you know.” Another voice. Yorkshire, Claire thought. “They’re famous for it.”

“And a what do you call ’em, an Irish Colleen.”

“They’re famous for that too.”

A hand descended on her waist. She shifted slightly, uneasily.

“What’s your name, then, love?”

She looked round at him. Squarish glasses, wet lips. One hand resting on the table, a cigarette crumbling between mauve fingers, the other hand resting on her. She felt its weight begin to slide down, following the curve of her hip. Behind the glasses, the eyes narrowed.

“C’mon now, don’t be shy.”

Claire, burdened by the platter, wedged between the door and the table, felt helpless, felt her chest cramp up, her face burn. She looked up, looked round the snug. Smiling, most of them. One lifting a pint glass to his lips. Watching her over the rim. The hand slid down still further.

“No—”

She jerked away, her tray crashing down onto the table, sending glasses skidding off the edge. The ashtray, shunted, coughed up a sputter of fagash. She stumbled out of the snug, she heard the door slam shut behind her. A moment’s silence. Then—inevitably, she thought—laughter. Walking unevenly down the bar, she felt the regulars staring, the teatowel hanging over her wrist, her hip burning as if branded. She felt hot. She didn’t know what to do with her hands.

Because it was nothing, she thought, nothing really. Not as if a glimpse of washed-grey BHS bra through the gaps between her buttons had driven them wild with lust. Not as if she was in danger of her life. Just a touch. The slightest of invasions. A couple of words would have sorted it out. An eyebrow, properly raised, could have defused the whole situation. Arsehole. Stupid arsehole. She caught up the teatowel, folded it, unfolded it. Jennifer would never have lost it like that. Jennifer, with a slight twist of her lips, with half a dozen words at most, would have cleared the air completely. Like opening a window. Claire could almost see her there, at the bar, perched on a stool, sleek and glossy and completely at her ease. She would be shaking slightly, perhaps; she would be trying not to laugh.

“Fucked that up, didn’t I?” Claire said inwardly.

“Too right you did.” Jennifer would shake her head in mock despair.

“Well what would you have done if you’re so bloody smart?”

“I wouldn’t be working in this fucking hole in the first place. You’ve got no class, Thomas. That’s your problem.”

Claire was still nodding slightly to herself as she climbed
the steps, turned the corner into the main bar. You work in a pub, she thought, you serve wankers. You deal with it. And while they were laughing at her, they couldn’t be too pissed off. So no big deal, no real harm done. But her hands, as they folded and refolded the cloth, were shaking.

Paul was still at the bar. He leant one elbow on the counter, one hand on his thigh. He was listening to Dermot. Two pints, half-drunk, the glasses ringed round with foam, stood on the bar. Dermot was talking, glancing at Paul, then back at his hands as he shredded a beermat, peeling away little flecks of cardboard and dropping them into an ashtray.

That was it. That was exactly what it did to her. Talking to Paul always left her stammering, fidgeting like that. Paul never fiddled with anything, never played with a beermat or a cigarette. When he smoked, you knew it wasn’t nerves. It was with some people: not with him. With him it was a ritual; deliberate, neatly done. He never tapped off the ash too soon, never sucked too frequently on his cigarette. He was monumentally still. And that just made you fidget.

And he made you talk, Claire thought. He forced you to, just as much as if he twisted your arm up your back and growled threats in your ear. He always seemed sympathetic, but he never gave the impression of registering much of what you said, so you kept on talking to him until you knew you had said too much, but still you blundered on, giving yourself away. Trying to make an impression. You always ended up saying something unforgettably stupid. And you could never tell if he’d even noticed. Nothing, Claire thought, ever bothered Paul.

That Thursday night back in October. Bar Twelve. Two steps behind Alan, Claire had gazed round the bright bustling room looking for she didn’t know who, cheeks glazed from the cold driven rain, hair dripping. Paul was dirty-fair, wore glasses, was an architecture student, Alan had said. So Claire had imagined another Alan, abstracted and dishevelled, blinking out at the world through smeary lenses.

Alan had set off across the room, towards the bar, and she had followed. They had got there first, she decided, before the others. Then she saw the suited slight young man with honey-coloured hair, and next to him a slim dark-clothed woman. He reached out and grabbed Alan’s hand and for a minute there was noisy good-willed confusion.

“Alan, how you doing?”

“Paul.”

So this was Paul. His hand, when she shook it, was dry; not too soft. It made her own feel damp and grubby. And this was Grainne. Slender, smooth-skinned, she took Claire’s arm and began to talk. Kind, quick-fire questions that she never got the chance to answer. Paul bought a round of drinks, and they sat down.

“So, you’re back,” Paul said. He settled himself, glass in hand.

“I’m back,” said Alan.

Throughout the evening, with Alan’s arm clamped around her shoulder, faced with Paul’s cool smile and Grainne’s kind questions, Claire rolled up the till receipts from the bar, pulled her rings round and round on her fingers, twisted her hair into tangles. She tensed every time she felt Alan’s ribcage and diaphragm swell as he prepared to speak. For some reason he was telling them everything, every little thing he knew about her.
Her family, her home, her Jewishness;
Jewishness
, she thought, but didn’t speak. And all the time they were talking, she just wanted to lean across the table towards Paul and tell him,
this is not me
. She thought that he might understand.

Now, she met him most nights on the stairs from the bathroom, or in the kitchen at weekends when he made the morning coffee. His neat body in Grainne’s green towelling dressing-gown, his specs upstairs on her bedside table. His hair sticking up in odd tufts, the warm skin of his throat. Claire slipping anxiously from Grainne’s spare room, parched and headachy from another night’s insomnia, guiltily conscious of the memory of listening last night to what she should have tried to ignore.

Paul ran a finger over his collarbone. He looked up, saw Claire, smiled. “How you doing?”

“Fine.” She wound the teacloth round her hand, unwound it. “Is Grainne coming out later?”

“She’s gone home for the weekend. You’ll have the place to yourself.”

“Oh.”

That meant an empty house all day Saturday, all day Sunday. An empty house tonight when she got in. Not even the dubious comfort of a stranger passed out in the front room. Anyone who needed a bed for the night seemed to end up on Grainne’s sofa. Friends of friends, little brothers, anyone who got stuck without the cab fare home. Claire kept stumbling in on them after work, switching on the light to find the room a stinking haze of smoke and alcohol and sweat and dirty carpet, and an unconscious drooling body lying on the couch. Grainne picked up strays like other people picked up colds.

Paul was still looking at her. She could feel him looking at
her. Was her make-up smudged, could he see up her nose? She held a hand up to her face, touched her upper lip which felt damp. “Dermot, if it’s no bother,” she said, “would you tell Gareth, when he gets back, if you see him, will you tell him there’s some guys in the front bar—” She felt the sentence bloat and twist and fall out of shape, but lumbered on, blushing. “It’s no big deal, I mean, they were just being a bit—you know—”