Surviving Michael (14 page)

‘The curly haired brunette with no tits is still over there,’ Charlie tells him.

‘Come on, big man,’ I say to him. ‘I’m going to go over and stand beside her.’

He takes a few deep breaths with his eyes closed as if about to attempt a bungee jump. I walk over as nonchalantly as possible to the girl. She looks a little rougher close up than from a distance but never mind. Liam is still going through a whole deep breathing exercise. He finally takes one deep breath, then twists around on his heels. He charges so fast that he ploughs straight into a lounge girl, knocks her sideways and sends her tray of drinks smashing to the floor.

She lets rip into him and he just stands there in shock. His shirt is now wet with some of the splash back from the tray. I can see him murmur a few words to her, but she just pushes him hard in the chest and storms off. He looks up, not sure what to do. Nick points over to where I am, directing Liam to carry on.

He takes another breath and starts again. I can see Charlie put his hand onto Nick’s shoulder as they both watch him walk away. They can hardly contain themselves with the excitement. Liam is charging at me like a bull; his eyes locked on the girl sitting near me. His face is contorted as if he’s in pain. I can almost hear the soundtrack to
Jaws
playing in my head.

I look down at the girl and as if sensing the impending danger, like a rabbit smelling a fox, she raises her head up and looks around. Liam is still at full speed as she turns and looks directly at him. He stops dead.

Fuck.

‘Sharon.’ One of her friends calls her and she looks away. Liam continues to stare at her. Nick and Charlie are open mouthed, looking at him. His shoulders fall ever so slightly and he turns back around towards them.

Nick’s expression turns to anger. As Liam is walking back to them, Nick makes a fist and slams it into his other hand, then points back towards the girl. Liam stops again. Charlie points at her as well. Liam turns and looks over at her and then at me. For several seconds I think he’s going to make a run for the exit. I’m sure the thought crosses his mind.

He closes his eyes again, takes another deep breath and marches back towards the girl. Nick makes a fist in the air. Charlie clasps his hands together and almost hides his face behind them, as if he were watching a horror movie. In a way, he is. The girl senses Liam again, but this time she’s too late. He’s already almost on top of her. I lean over quickly to listen, and nearly fall over the table.

I hear him mumble something but it’s incoherent with the music.

‘What did you say?’ she shouts up at him.

I hear him mumble again, and I can just about make out, ‘...do you want to come home with me?’

She looks him up and down for a second. ‘Piss off, fatso,’ she shouts and turns away from him. Now that, I heard. What a bitch.

Liam’s expression doesn’t even register any shock. He simply nods and starts to walk off to another table. Nick and Charlie are looking over at me. I’d hardly call the incident an overwhelming success story, but I have no choice but to give them both a thumbs up. They jump a little in celebration and all previous arguments are obviously forgotten as they hug each other. I take off after Liam.

I can hear his monotone proposal to each girl, but it sounds more like he was asking them if they want salt and vinegar on their chips, than he’s asking them to copulate with him. The music is loud, and I don’t think a lot of the girls can even hear him properly.

The first two girls just look at him in disbelief and then turn away. The third girl isn’t too bad - ‘not tonight honey.’ The fourth is a little harsher – ‘dream on tubby.’ The fifth is brutal. She bursts into laughter and screams at her friends, - ‘did ye hear what he just said to me, the dirty prick?’ She then tells them and they all laugh at him. He walks away slowly, a look of utter dejection on his face. I want to go over to him and tell him to stop, but watching him is somewhat like the involuntary desire of watching the victims of a car crash as you drive by.

Generally, the less attractive girls give him the worst time, quite plausibly because no one has ever said anything like that to them before, and they’re too embarrassed and don’t know what else to say. He goes through about another six or seven girls. I have to hand it to the guy, there aren’t that many men who can take that much sheer rejection and still soldier on. It’s as if he’s doing it as a sort of self-penance for all the times he had wanted to approach a girl over the last twenty years and hadn’t had the guts to do it.

I feel a tap on my shoulder, and turn to see Charlie. ‘What are they saying to him?’ he shouts into my ear.

‘It’s brutal, man,’ I tell him. ‘Brutal.’

‘It’s my turn,’ he says and practically pushes me out of the way.

‘I’M SORRY. What did you say?’

I stopped countin’ after the sixth or seventh girl. That is to say, I lost count after the sixth or seventh. But it’s been about twenty now. Possibly more. I can’t see Danny. He must of got bored. What’s worse is, a lot of the times, like this one, they can’t even hear me, and I have to repeat meself. So that makes it more like fifty times then.

This one is sittin’ on her own, but the table is full of drinks. She has blonde hair. She’s sort of pretty. The pretty ones are a bit nicer, but not always. Her clothes are a bit baggy. Loose.

The other three have fucked off for all I know. I say me piece to her.

‘I didn’t hear what you said,’ she says to me.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I tell her.

‘Well, it kind of does,’ she says and stares up at me.

She might call the bouncers for harassin’ her. ‘I said,’ I say to her, ‘I think you’re very cute. Would you like to come home with me?’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought you said,’ she says. ‘How much did they bet you to say that to me?’

I look down at her. ‘Twenty euro?’ she asks.

I don’t answer.

‘Fifty?’

I just stare at her like a goon.

‘My friends gave you a hundred euro to tell me I’m cute?’

‘No, no it’s not like that,’ I tell her.

‘What’s it like then?’

Not for the first time tonight, I don’t have a clue what to say. I open my mouth as usual but nothin’ comes out.

‘Sorry,’ I mumble to her and walk away. I decide to finish. I’ll look for the others. First I’m going to get a drink. As I walk away from the girl though, I get a bad feelin’ in me belly. There was somethin’ about the way she looked at me. I stop. She wasn’t angry or embarrassed like the others. She just looked, kind of sad. Like she was goin’ to cry.

‘I did it for a dare alright, but it wasn’t for money.’ She looks up at me again. ‘I don’t want you thinkin’ that it’d take a bloke money to have to talk to you or anythin’ like that. I’m mean, you’re gorgeous. I’m sure every bloke in this place would love to... you know... be with yeh, like. I just don’t want you to get the wrong impression or anythin’.’

She keeps looking at me. She has nice green eyes. I nod at her. As I walk away, she grabs me by the sleeve.

‘No wait,’ she says and smiles at me. Not many girls have ever smiled at me before. It’s nice.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I was a bit rude to you. It’s been a rough day, you know.’

She lets go of me shirt. ‘That’s okay,’ I says, ‘I know what you mean. No harm done.’

I’m not sure if she wants me to shake her hand or somethin’, like mates from school who just had a fight. I walk away but she grabs me shirt again.

‘You see,’ she says, but she’s not lookin’ at me now. ‘My boyfriend left me a couple of weeks ago, and well, you know yourself, it kind of throws you off balance a little.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her.

‘You’re sorry. I’m sorry. My mum’s sorry. My friends are sorry. Everybody’s sorry.’

I know I should go but I don’t. ‘If you weren’t in the mood, then why did you come out?’ I ask her.

She looks straight into me eyes again. ‘My friends thought it would help cheer me up.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Over there,’ she says and nods at two girls chattin’ and flirtin’ with two guys.

‘So why don’t you just go home then?’ I ask her.

‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘And you apologise a lot too.’

‘I know. Sorry.’

She laughs. I smile at her laugh, but I still feel a little uncomfortable talkin’ to her. No, that’s not true. I like talkin’ to her. I just don’t like the silences in between.

‘What happened between you and the other fella?’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘since you ask, and to be totally honest, which is not somethin’ I’ve done lately, he said I’d put on a lot of weight since last year. That I’m not the girl I once was.’

‘I’ve put on a few pounds meself in the last year,’ I tell her.

She throws her head back and laughs loudly. A few girls have done that to me this evenin’, but this is different.

‘No honest,’ I say. ‘I was only about seventeen stone this time last year.’

She laughs again.

‘You wouldn’t have recognised me.’

This time we both laugh.

‘Listen, I better go so,’ I tell her. ‘I hope everythin’ works out for you. It usually does.’

‘Thanks, you’re sweet,’ she replies. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Liam.’

‘I’m Julie,’ she says and reaches out her hand to me. I shake it. It’s very soft. I’ve never touched a hand that soft before.

I take a couple of steps away. ‘So, Liam,’ she calls to me.

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you honestly think I’m cute?’

I walk back to her. ‘Yeah, I do. Very cute in fact.’

I stare down at her face. I’m not too shy to look at her now. Her eyes are green and she has a nice nose, but it’s her mouth I like the most. Not too red and not too pale. She smiles at me, and that makes me feel nice so I smile back.

She reaches under the table and pulls out a small stool and puts it in front of me.

‘Want to sit down?’ she asks me.

It’s a very small stool. I sit on it and pray to fuck it doesn’t collapse under me.

I HOPED DANNY would show up tonight, but in my heart I knew he wouldn’t. That didn’t stop me from glancing at the door every few minutes. I kept expecting to look up and see him there smiling sheepishly at me. Or angrily would have been fine too. Sometimes the impossibility of hope is more powerful than the logic of reason. No, not sometimes. Always.

I feel every minute of my shift go by and my tummy expanding as the night goes on. Self-consciously I rest my hand across it, but that only draws more attention to it, which makes me want to hide it more.

How many nights have I worked here? How many drinks have I poured? How many people have I helped to get drunk? I loved it once. Moving to the music. Taking five orders at once. Showing off. The lights across my face; my reflection in the bar mirror. Boys and girls flirting with me. Me flirting back. Loving myself. Ricky smiling his appreciation for my work. We both knowing he’s lucky to have me. I loved it once. And once was only last week.

Now I want to go home. I want everyone here to go home. I can’t even comprehend why they’re here when they could be at home.

I’m slow tonight. Thank God Ricky asked Colin to work. He’s taking the extra weight off me, but it’s costing me his dirty looks. Be a man and say something or cut out the bitch looks you’re giving me. He’ll complain to Ricky behind my back later. Every month or two he drinks too much after work and makes a pass at me. He has a girlfriend and a two year old son. I’ve never told Danny, as I know he’ll do something crazy, and I’ve never told Ricky, because I’d rather just get on with my job. I’m hoping he tries tonight, because I’ll break his fucking arm. It’ll give me something to look forward to at the end of my shift.

I miss my dad. He’s a big softy but by God you don’t wanna do something to upset his little girl. What was it Oscar Wilde said about girls marrying men like their fathers? Or was it Freud? Doesn’t matter. Either way, Danny reminds me a lot of him. Respectful yet proud. Open yet protective.

I was hoping Danny and I could go back to Santa Barbara for the fall. Sort things out with my folks. They’d love Danny. He’s not my usual type, and they never liked any of them much. Maybe drive up the One to Frisco. Stop at Monterey. Drink cold beers till they throw us out of the bar, then make love on the beach. Make him so goddamn happy, he’ll never want to leave.

‘Are you alright?’ Ricky says to me.

I turn my head away from him and wipe my eyes. ‘I’m fine,’ I tell him.

‘Is your stomach upset?’

I suck in my tummy. ‘No. Why?’

‘You’re holding it a lot. Are you sick?’

‘No, it’s just...’ I place my hand across it.

‘Oh, I see,’ he says but he doesn’t see. ‘Why don’t you go sit down in the canteen for a while? Have a cup of tea or something?’

Colin has been leaning over listening to us. ‘Jesus, Ricky,’ he butts in, ‘it’s hard enough even with the three of us.’

‘It’s okay, Colin, we’ll be fine.’

‘Fucking hell. We’ll never manage just the two of us.’

‘You’re right. You and I will struggle a bit, but Ruby and I could manage just fine on our own.’

Colin just stands there not sure what to say. ‘Go back to work Colin,’ he says and then turns back to me. Colin walks away.

‘How many weeks are you?’ Ricky asks, nodding at my stomach.

‘Oh, no, it’s nothing like that...’ I tell him.

He raises his eyebrows at me. ‘I’ve got five older sisters, Ruby, and they’ve thirteen kids between them.’

I lower my head. ‘About eight or nine weeks,’ I tell him.

‘Does Danny know?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How’d he take it?’

I don’t answer him.

‘That bad, huh?’ he asks.

‘It’s complicated.’

‘It always is at first. But these things seem to work themselves out.’

‘I’m not so sure this time, Ricky, but thanks.’

‘Now go sit down for a while,’ he says. ‘I’d better get back before Colin starts crying.’

I laugh. ‘Thanks.’

I slowly make my way through the crowd. I’m bumped and pushed but I protect my baby like a quarterback crossing the end zone. I punch in the code for the ‘Staff Only’ door and follow the corridor down to the canteen.