I can’t if I have a third drink, I said. I took one of the glasses from her.
Don’t drink it, she said.
I won’t, I said, and took a mouthful of the stuff and swallowed it down.
You’re so weak, she said, smiling and touching her earring.
You make it sound as if that’s good.
Oh, I love weak men.
So how do I get home?
I’ll give you a lift back.
I was very happy. It was easy to make me happy. Maybe I’d have four drinks and all in Siobhan’s company, and a free ride all the way to Kirkcaldy on the big white ship. There’d be time for one on the moon deck bar on the way over and we could sit there studying the constellations, talking. I was grinning too much too close into Siobhan’s heroic delighted face and turned again to Arnold. We smiled at each other and waved. I raised my glass to him. He raised his. It looked like water.
Great, I said to Siobhan. In the rush of it I almost said I love you, not meaning it like that, but instead said: Why did you say Same one again?
Confusion sluiced darkly into her face.
You said Same one again instead of Same again.
Did I?
Yes.
She looked into the middle distance, frowning, quiet for a while. So what? she said eventually.
I took a deep drink and went under, groping for something good.
We’re like sister and brother, you and me, I said.
She looked at me without saying anything for a few seconds, then put her drink in my free hand. Arnold’ll give you a lift, she said, and walked out the door.
I finished my gin, sat on a bar stool and started in on hers, raising the side without lipstick to my mouth, turning it to the side with lipstick. It tasted pretty much the same. I was watching Arnold. He was scribbling away with a pencil. The bar was full but the only person I knew was Arnold, sober as an ayatollah and his car parked outside.
Once there was a group of merchants who returned to the borders of the empire after months spent crossing the great wilderness. Everyone wanted to know what it had been like. Och, it was all right, the merchants said. Hot deserts of course, cold mountains, wet jungle – still, we made it.
Folk listened to them politely, clapped them on the back and drifted back to their affairs. Some time later another group of merchants arrived. The locals gathered round – what was it like? Incredible, the merchants answered. Absolutely unbelievable. It was so hot that the beaks of the vultures would soften and fuse together and they would die of starvation if they were careless enough to close them. It was so cold that we had to breathe on each other’s eyes every five minutes to stop our eyeballs freezing solid. It was so wet that a cup held out would fill with rain faster than a man could drink it.
A huge crowd gathered round the second group of merchants, stood them drinks for a year, offered them their daughters in marriage and secured them pensions for life.
Arnold was making a good living on the discovery that folk hungered after apocryphal facts like drinkers hunger after salty snacks. He had a name. The editors would ring him up: Death Valley, Arn, they’d say, give me ten by six. And he’d sit around and write: In Death Valley in August, you can toss an ice cube in the air and it will have melted before you can catch it. Nine more like that. Or: Dead composers this week mate, say a dozen. And he’d write: If the Italian composer Vivaldi was alive, he would be the richest man on the planet, earning an estimated £1 million a minute from royalties on the use of The Four Seasons on telephone switchboards. The secret lay in the utter lack of research and confidence that anyone who could be bothered to challenge his published facts would be rejected as a nitpicking wanker. Besides, whenever one of his jobs appeared, it was so quickly plagiarised that it immediately took on the veracity of gospel – more so, in fact, since every second of every day somewhere in the world an average of 6.5 people challenges the authenticity of the New Testament (6.5 – what Arnold calls the precision principle in successful apocrypha) whereas no-one, not even the Vatican, had ever taken the trouble to complain about Arnold’s assertion that, for liturgical reasons, the Pope never flies in aircraft that can land on water.
He never said but I reckon it was something about the six months he did for dangerous driving that got him on the apocrypha thing. He’d been terrified of getting beaten up or abused or whatever in jail and tried to keep in with the authorities on both sides by writing pornographic stories to order. And maybe after a while the sex fantasies began to fray and it began to show that there was a hunger for something else, tiny legends of a world outside, and he began to slip them in: that it wasn’t just the smooth slender bodies twining over the sheet which got the screws and lifers going but the insistence in parenthesis that the ancient Egyptians had abandoned goat-hair duvets for duck-down ones when they discovered the aphrodisiac qualities of the now extinct Nilotic eider.
Almost everyone had been amazed he got sent down, he was so middle class, even the advocate was embarrassed, he hurried away afterwards and didn’t speak to anyone. I wasn’t surprised, though. Arnold was a dangerous driver. He’s a dangerous driver now. Whatever they did to him in prison, it didn’t change his overtaking habits. It was a gamble on a blind summit and he lost, collided with a car full of students from England. He killed two of them. Arnold went into an airbag but his wife in the passenger seat didn’t have one. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Perhaps she’d been as unhappy as that. I don’t know. Anyway she went through the windscreen head-first. Straight away you imagine it happening in slow motion but it doesn’t, of course, you don’t see it like that any more than you see the flight of a shell from a gun. There’s a loud noise and in an instant, like a badly edited film, it jumps, it’s all arranged across the road, perfectly, peacefully, the broken cars, the glass, the bodies and the wheels spinning slowly.
Arnold was 36, same as me. His wife died about the time my divorce came through. Since the trial he’d seen even less of Jenny than I had. She didn’t think he’d killed her deliberately, no-one did. Before the accident Jenny said she liked the way he drove. Afterwards she didn’t hate her father: nothing so passionate. She went off him. She’d just started at art college and got a flat and never went round to see him any more, in jail or out. When they paroled him I expected him to take to drink, I don’t know why. He went teetotal and as soon as he got his licence back he was driving worse than before. That’s to say he was a good driver, very skillful, but always found a way to drive that was out beyond the edges of his skill and relied on luck to fill the space between.
I’d left my watch at home. The clock above the bar said 10.25 and the last boat was at 11. Someone told me that the landlord always set the clock ten minutes fast, so that left a good three quarters of an hour to get to Queensferry. You couldn’t rely on Arnold to use that time well, though. Of course everyone ran the risk that they might die on their way home from the pub. A loose slate might fall on their heads, or they might have a heart attack, get stabbed. What else could happen? There could be an earthquake. A predator could escape from the zoo. A predator could escape from his mates. But the chances were infinitessimal. It wasn’t something you thought about: Better watch on my way home from the pub in case I get killed. Driving with Arnold it was. Even if the chances of death doubled at the third decimal place, you wouldn’t put money on it, there was only one life. To have four gin and tonics and then go out the door thinking and now, perhaps, the afterlife, now, even before morning.
Arnold was coming over. Need a lift? he said.
