I tell her,
and reverse the question. That’s an easy one.
‘Phoebe,’ she
says. Lacking anything else to do, or say, I offer my hand. She
holds on to my palm, giving me a strange look. I notice that she
has a tattoo on the back of her hand; I can’t make sense of it from
behind the half-light and drunkenness, but it looks almost as if
it’s been inked-in this morning. ‘Well done,’ she says, after a few
awkward moments.
‘For
what?’
‘For not
singing that stupid television song.’
‘The
Friends
one?’
She shrugs.
‘If you say so.’ I admit that the thought had crossed my mind.
‘You’d be
surprised at the amount of people who can’t resist doing it,’ she
replies. A mental image of Charlie briefly flashes across my mind,
and I can’t help but smile. Then, as if summoned telepathically, a
voice rumbles out of the speakers above our heads, echoing around
the bar.
‘I know we’re
a little bit on the late side…’
I turn to look
at the stage, and see Charlie hoisting a guitar over his shoulders,
a guy on his left doing the same thing, a bassist standing in the
shadows who’s already running through scales, and a geeky-looking
chap sitting down at the set of drums behind the rest of them. A
group of people to the side of the stage boo Charlie’s opening
words. He laughs, and even this quiet chuckle overpowers them
thanks to the heavy amplification.
‘… so we’ll
spare you the introductions.’
The drums, the
bass, the amps, the speakers all blast out at once. The bassist and
the drummer strain to hold the two guitarists together, since
neither one seems to want to play the same song as the other. The
other guitarist’s chin is tucked into his chest and his arm has
gone staccato, moving in discrete little plucks, up and down, in
vivid contrast to the way that Charlie’s wild strokes send the body
of his guitar clattering against his hips, looking like it’s going
to fall off at any second. When he staggers back into the light
he’s yelping something I can’t hear, and probably wouldn’t
understand if I could. All the people at the bar, recognising the
song, have turned around to watch. Just as the instrumental starts
to drag, it all drops back into quiet again, and Charlie waltzes up
towards the mike and sings.
He can’t hold
a tune to save his life - not if you’re using any conventional
definition of ‘singing’, at least. It’s just a demented, incoherent
scrawl of sound, but he delivers it as though he really
means
each word, even if he can’t pronounce them. As though
they’re his own words, and someone else just happened to write them
down first.
As Charlie
stumbles back from the microphone and blunders into the solo, his
attention falls away from the crowd and towards the other
guitarist. A thread of doom and violence twists itself between
their eyes; they’re glaring at one another as though they’re about
to fall off the edge of a cliff, and each has figured he might as
well drag the other one with him. The sound gathers volume and pace
until the rhythm section can barely keep it from collapsing. It’s
music to make you want to lose your clothes and senses - even for
someone who has sex in the dark, such as me. Charlie staggers right
on the edge of the stage, where a sudden blast from the amp could
send him tumbling into the crowd, but he somehow holds it there, on
the edge of chaos, screaming out into the darkness. I find myself
overcome. The worry that came with this halfway-drunkenness flies
off, along with my inhibitions, and I want to dance like Charlie
sings, let the booze loosen my arms and my neck.
‘Alright Ian
Curtis, calm down,’ mutters a girl in a red dress as she passes.
She accompanies it with a glare of disdain - one which is, I
notice, also being worn by a group of hipper-than-thous on the
chairs at the side of the room. Rather than watching the band,
they’re laughing at me. I stop mid-movement, as though I’m playing
a one-man game of musical statues. Then a cymbal crashes, as if to
punctuate the moment, and Charlie spits out his final line. The
guitars fade away, leaving just the bass and drums to gently waft
the song into non-existence, and the encroaching silence throws a
flood of cold sobriety down the back of my neck. I glance
sheepishly at Phoebe. She holds her thumb sideways for a moment,
like an empress at the Coliseum, finally twisting it upwards.
‘We’ll let him
live, for now,’ she smiles. ‘Your dancing, on the other hand, might
warrant a bottling.’
‘What did you
reckon?’ Freddy asks me when it’s over. Charlie’s busy dragging one
of the amps off the stage. The crowd started thinning as soon as he
finished, which I suppose must be a good sign.
‘As rackets
go, it wasn’t too bad. What about you?’
‘Apart from
the fact that he can’t dance, sing or play guitar and he dresses
like shit, I’d say it was pretty good,’ he smiles. ‘By the way, I
hear you need to insert twenty quid to continue the night?’
I open my
wallet. An imaginary moth flies out.
‘Yeah,’ I
reply. ‘You could say that.’
He hands me a
note.
‘Cheers,
sweetie-pie,’ I say.
‘Don’t thank
me; I’m essentially lubing you up, so you’re ready to get fucked by
the long dick of capitalism.’
‘See, that’s
why Martin Luther King was never popular. Didn’t use enough rape
metaphors.’
Freddy
smirks.
‘Oh, have you
met Phoebe, by the way?’ I ask, gesturing in her direction. She
gives him a look like a child inspecting a creature in an aquarium.
The fact that it takes a while for me to figure out why this is
shows just how much of Freddy’s rhetoric I’ve been on the receiving
end of over the last year or so. Marxist dick-jokes seem like a
normal part of conversation to me by this point. Phoebe raises a
curious eyebrow at Freddy, as if to sign-off her inspection, then
tells us she’s going to go and see if her friends are still around.
‘See you later,’ she says to me.
‘You’ve got
such a way with women,’ I tell Freddy, as I watch Phoebe
depart.
‘You never
know where the line is until you put a couple of toes over it,’ he
shrugs. It irritates me that he looks perfectly untroubled by the
glance Phoebe shot him, while the one I received from the girl in
the red dress is still lurching around in my gut.
Charlie
suddenly appears next to us, drenched in sweat, carrying a glass of
wine in either hand.
‘To think I
ever doubted you,’ he grins at me.
‘Is that glass
of wine an apology gift?’ I venture.
‘Fucking dream
on,’ he replies. ‘I see you’ve met Phoebe already.’
I give a
confused expression.
‘Erm, yeah;
why, where’d you know her from?’
‘She’s the
owner of the lipstick I had all over my stomach the other morning,’
he says. Freddy has no frame of reference for this statement, and
his brow furrows as he tries to work out what depravity Charlie’s
been up to this time. I find myself vaguely disappointed that she
was not, in fact, a complete stranger.
‘Seems nice,’
I say.
‘Got off to a
pretty bad start with her, though, didn’t I?’ Charlie asks, not
waiting for an answer. ‘I started singing “
I’ll be there for
you…
” as soon as she told me what her name was. She didn’t look
too impressed.’
‘Of course you
did,’ I laugh.
‘Hopefully
she’ll have forgotten about it after another couple of drinks,’ he
says. ‘Anyone who still looks like that after letting Rosie the
Riveter have a go on her face is worth a couple of weeks on
starvation rations.’
I change the
subject. I’ve no desire to hear about Charlie’s plans for later on
tonight. Especially considering that I’ll probably have to listen
to the live show, since my bedroom is directly above his. ‘I take
it Johnny went to the library in the end, then?’
‘Nah,’ Freddy
replies, ‘he’s around here somewhere. You know what he’s like when
he gets off the leash, though.’
I nod.
Johnny’s inability to handle alcohol is comparable to my own; maybe
even worse, because I at least try to stick within my - admittedly
pretty narrow - limits. Johnny only tends to go out on the last
weekend of the month, though - when he’s got all his extra-credit
work out of the way - so he still hasn’t got a clue where the line
between drunk enough to dance and too drunk to stand lies. Instead
he’ll try to keep pace with Freddy, who’s been plundering his dad’s
whiskey cabinet since he was about twelve, and Charlie, who I’m
fairly sure hasn’t been completely sober at any point in the
fourteen months I’ve known him. And, to be fair, he
does
keep up with them…until about half-eleven.
We catch sight
of him over in the corner of the room, flopping about on the sofa
like an upturned turtle. He keeps tipping an empty bottle up
against his lips, as though he still thinks there’s beer in it.
Freddy and I agree that it’s probably for the best that he
continues to harbour this delusion.
My phone gives
a
Brrriing!
‘Ahoy, ahoy,’
I answer, holding it up to my ear.
‘Hi - erm -
where are you?’ Liz asks from the other end of the line.
‘You fell
asleep, so I ended up going to Charlie’s gig.’
‘So dinner and
the bottle of wine was less of a romantic night in and more just
lining your stomach and pre-drinking?’
I laugh.
‘Well, I’d say it was six of one and half a dozen of the
other.’
‘I hope you
realise this counts as you ditching me for Charlie again?’ She says
it in her best ‘friendly banter’ voice, but the note of irritation
behind her words isn’t hard to detect.
‘In my
defence, it’s hard to have a romantic night in when half the
participants are kayoed on the sofa.’ I quickly try to think of a
jokey rider to add that last sentence. ‘I think that’s technically
just me watching you take a nap. It’s hardly a spectator sport, is
it?’
‘What time are
you gonna be back?’
‘About half an
hour, maybe?’
I notice
Charlie approaching the table, unsteadily carrying a tray that has
every square inch covered in shot glasses and wearing a ‘Happy
birthday, to you…’ sort of grin.
‘Actually,’ I
tell Liz, ‘You’d better make that an hour.’
‘Fine. I guess
I’ll go home then, shall I?’
‘Er, okay.
I’ll see you tomorrow though, right?’
‘Can’t. I’ve
got a load of lecture notes to type up for next week.’
‘Wanna go for
a drink mid-week, then?’
‘I don’t know,
maybe,’ she replies, and hangs up.
As he’s
leaning down to put the tray of shots on the table, Charlie
whispers in my ear:
‘
These
tequilas took a hefty chunk out of the money I got paid for
tonight, so one of you guys getting laid out of it is about the
least you can do to thank me.
’ I take a look over his shoulder,
and see Phoebe speaking to another, more conventionally
attractive-looking girl and gesturing towards us. ‘
And to be
honest,
’ Charlie continues, ‘
I think you’re my only hope.
Johnny looks like he’s having enough trouble keeping breathing, let
alone coming up with small talk, and Fred’s more interested in
recruiting people to the cause than having sex with them.
’
‘That was Liz,
by the way,’ I reply, waggling my phone at him.
‘Just tell her
what I told you,’ Charlie says, letting his voice go back to normal
volume. ‘She’ll understand.’ I roll my eyes. He offers me a shot
glass. I take it and quickly throw its contents over my shoulder,
then wince and splutter as though my body had just tried to bounce
the horrible shit back outside my insides. Charlie is spluttering,
too, though I imagine that his reaction is genuine. The coughing
and the streaming eyes do, at least, signify that he’s been
comparatively sensible for the first part of his evening. It’s only
when he starts chucking it back like it’s water that I need to
start worrying. Speaking of which, when Johnny - my little canary
down the mine - notices that tequila has appeared from somewhere or
other, he starts reaching out his arms and moaning.
‘Giss’
saah…shhh…t??’ he inquires. Charlie and I trade a glance.
‘Yeah, mate,
no problem,’ Charlie says, handing him one of the empty glasses.
Johnny gives a wobbly grin, as if in thanks, and swings the glass
up in the general direction of his mouth. He gives a quick grimace
as the non-existent booze slides down his throat, throws the glass
back on the table with a triumphant glint in his eyes, like he’s
just finished drinking Clint Eastwood under the table, and goes
back to sucking on his empty beer bottle.
‘I think that
somehow got him more drunk,’ Freddy remarks, with disbelief. I
shrug.
‘My bank
account would look a lot healthier if I could get pissed off the
placebo effect,’ Charlie notes. Then he spots Phoebe and a group of
three other girls coming over. ‘Aha! At last I can stop talking to
you unattractive mother fuckers,’ he grins. ‘Anyone for a shot?’
I’m pretty sure his question was aimed at the girls, but that
doesn’t stop Freddy leaning forward and taking another one. As
Phoebe and co. take up their seats, Charlie takes up the
responsibility of introducing us, because one of us is too busy
coughing up tequila fumes to do it himself, and the other is
staring determinedly at his shoes, because he’s just noticed that
one of the girls in the group is wearing a red dress.
I lean forward
and pick up Freddy’s empty glass, but since I can’t think of
anything to do with it once I’m holding it I pass it to Johnny for
him to play with. As he takes it, he garbles:
‘Gerrrannkshhh…Owwishh Olishberrff??’
‘Sorry mate, I
didn’t quite catch that,’ I reply.
‘I believe he
said, “How is Elizabeth?”’ Freddy translates. The girl in the red
dress looks up with a worried expression on her face.