- Never stray from the path.
- Never eat windfall apples.
- Never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.
- Angela Carter, from the film version of A Company of Wolves.
Where the fuck do I start?
Thursday. Ah, Thursday. Thursday the 24th, I had already started [...] an unsent letter to him, detailing how I felt. This could not have been started at a more appropriate time. Thursday night despite his unusual hovering at the bar and my avoidance of him, he then sat down smugly with the girl who has supposedly fancied him for ages [...]
He bought them drinks and gave me an absolutely malicious sly-glance. I went a bit wappy at the time and didn’t take it very seriously because I knew what his game was. Then he left with her and Julie just to spite me, very publicly.
Sad bastard. I cried. I was hurt that he was either doing or giving the impression of fucking someone else, but what really hurt me was that he was doing it deliberately to hurt me. Pathetic piece of shit. I left crying and when I got home I got pukey in the middle of the night again, horrified because I promised myself never again I’d end up in that mess.
– Sunday, September 6th 1998
The first time I ever saw him was a Friday evening, at about seven o’clock. It was the ninth of January, the day before my birthday. I’d just finished my shift and was pulling my coat on when he careened through the bar hatch and started signing on to the tills. I saw his back first; he had a ponytail, and I have a serious weakness for men with long hair.
Jeans, denim jacket, funky, laddish white Adidas trainers. His face had a feline quality, a cat-like nose with gentle, arched eyebrows that met together, not in a way that was unattractive, but rather endearing. His cheekbones were exquisitely pronounced, and the dark, ash brown ponytail at the nape of his neck gave his delicate, elfin profile an otherworldly quality. Something about him made me believe he was from my world, the fantasy world I wrap myself in to keep out reality. He was beautiful, in spite of his eyebrows meeting in the middle.
As I came to know him over the months that followed I found he was not all that he seemed. His eyes, which appeared very dark from a distance, were actually the coldest of pale sky blues. His friendliness and the warmth of his personality hid a darker, cynical, shrewder edge. He smoked like a chimney and drank like a drain, and his casual laddishness was a front, concealing vulnerability, mischief, and just how fucked up he was.
I was never going to do anything about him; I never had the confidence or the enthusiasm. I found him attractive, but not so much so that I was about to drop down dead. And I felt so low about myself I didn’t ever think I could have him anyway.
I’d known him for six months when the rumours started; local pubs are wild places for rumours; bar staff are the worst targets, particularly in rough, working class areas where the clientele have no sense of discretion, and a tight-knit sense of community. “Anthony fancies you,” proclaimed big Al, at the top of his voice across the whole length of the pub, and tried to set us up on a date.
“She’s in love,” Teresa, the landlady teased a week later, and Anthony promptly bought me a drink. But the truth was, Anthony and I didn’t actually know each other that well. I’m notoriously shy, and besides which, our shifts didn’t coincide that often.
I’m not one for messing about. “Do you fancy me?” I asked him as we walked home together one Thursday night.
“I’m not ready for a relationship yet,” he explained in a long, round-about, unenlightening kind of way. “I was in a really long relationship with a girl, and I spent all my time with her, and I don’t want to have to think about someone else all the time.” Fine, fair enough I thought. A week later he almost kissed me on the corner of Burton Road as we parted.
I thought I was so lucky, despite his seeming reluctance, he was showing an interest. I was such a silly schoolgirl – all the clichés that told me I was in love. There we were the very next night, kissing outside my front gate, and when I got inside the clock said three in the morning. And the next night, and the next. Then I was scared. I guess I knew what he wanted, and I made it clear I wasn’t that kind of girl. “It’s all or nothing with me. I’m sorry Anthony.”
“What have you got to be sorry for?” The words sank in as I watched him walk down the road. I hated myself for being so true to my feelings. Why couldn’t I just switch off and get on with it, and not get hurt?
But he came back again, and again. Five weeks of kisses, and horseplay, and I really thought I was bringing him round; it didn’t matter that I was discovering what he was like beneath the mask; that his small drinking problem wasn’t so small. That it seemed every time I saw him he was drunk. That on a good day he could put eighty quid into a fruit machine and not give a damn. “It’s the entertainment value,” he would say when I quizzed him.
“Not, uh, compulsive gambling then, is it?” That he was a workaholic as well as an alcoholic; he worked full time at an accountancy firm in the day, and four shifts a week at the pub in the evenings. This stuff worried me sick. But it didn’t seem to matter.
Then I did something completely stupid. “I love you,” I blurted out. He lay on my front step with his head in my lap. We’d been making small talk; he’d told me I was a really sweet person.
“Nooo,” he moaned. “You don’t want to say that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a git.”
Two days later he gave me the speech. “It isn’t going to happen. I like you too much to hurt you. I’m not ready for any sort of commitment. If I commit to you then I’ll just go out and get off with someone else, and then I’ll have to lie to you and feel guilty about it.”
He started avoiding me. The flirty looks and smiles stopped. Even the conversation stopped. He started getting taxis back from work, complaining about the walk. The freeze was sub-zero.
Maybe if I were a stronger person I wouldn’t have been so devastated. Maybe if the prior relationship I’d been in hadn’t been so abusive and starved of love, I would have been able to handle yet another rejection. But I came close to collapse. I started throwing up in the middle of the night, in the mornings, in the afternoons. Sometimes every fifteen minutes. I got the shakes. All I could think of was him. Cold turkey is never good. When the drug is love, it’s soul destroying. And this was liking me too much not to hurt me?
After two weeks of being ignored, I tried to talk to him in the car park of the pub. “I’m trying to be your friend.” I told him tearily.
He threw it back in my face, maliciously, arrogantly. “Then don’t be,” he said as he pushed me aside, marching back into the public bar where I couldn’t reach him. Back, perhaps, to his only true loves; the demon drink, the fruit machines, and the endless flattery from female customers who thought he was wonderful because he had a degree.
So I used the only weapon I had left. I ignored him. I took every opportunity I could to snub him, to avoid him, to leave before him so I didn’t have to get a taxi back with him. Petty isn’t even the word for it. But every little victory made me feel a little better about being dumped on.
Until the Thursday, when he drew out his trump card in the form of Tina. Tina has long dirty blonde hair which she ties up in a scrunchie on the top of her head. She has a severe face and wears glasses, baggy jumpers and frumpy jeans. She’s seventeen and left school before her GCSE’s, and she lives down the bad end of Netherfield. I’d seen her around; I knew her as a rather stupid, immature girl who came in with her friends; a rotund mother of a horde of small children, and a much prettier, sparkier brunette of around her own age.
Anthony had been very drunk the Saturday before, and had been buying them drinks all evening. I knew he was doing it to get at me in some strange, twisted way. I knew because he arranged to have a drink with her on the only night that I was working. I knew because he gave me repeated spiteful glances and evil grins, one of which was so obvious even the landlord and landlady spotted it and commented quietly on it. When he left with her, I watched him out of the window as I swept up, and I cried as I put the dustpan away.
I threw up in the night, and I spent the next day giggling hysterically.
Saturday was the day of Big Al and Jose’s party. Jose is a deputy headmistress, and Al is her second husband. As customers go, they’re pretty unusual for the area. They live just around the corner from the pub in one of the big houses on Conway Road, and they’re the nicest, sweetest people, and the biggest party animals I’ve met since I’ve been working there.
They had invited me to their party about a month before. They have several sons, step-sons, loafers and hangers-on in partial residence at their house, and I knew they were all in a band together, so I took my sister “bass guitarist and rock star” along to meet them all. The party was a bizarre mixture of Jose’s school teacher friends and carefully selected regulars. Also some of the more insane regulars, invited deliberately and subversively by sons, their mates and hangers-on, “just for a laugh.” (“I love it when we invite people from The Fox, because they all just stand around going mental,” says one hanger-on to a step-son).
My sister, Sarah, immediately hit it off with Oliver (mate and hanger-on) and we all sat around upstairs watching them play guitar together, getting pissed and smoking pot.
Prior to arriving at the party we’d been in the pub, and I’d spotted Anthony trying to teach his starry-eyed little scrunchie how to play pool. He was pissed out of his pretty little head, and just after closing time they arrived, uninvited, at Jose’s party. Anthony was probably too intoxicated to be thinking about anything much at this time, but I had it in my head that he was trying to rub my nose in it. When I went downstairs and saw him leching drunkenly all over her, the knife in my belly twisted up into my gut.
I went back upstairs and told Little Alan (step-son), Olly and Sarah what I was going to do. They egged me on. I smoked pot until I was dizzy. I picked up a pint glass. Unfortunately it only had about half of a pint of lager in it, but it was enough. I didn’t want to waste good beer.
It couldn’t have been more perfect. He was outside in the garden with her and her rotund friend Julie, and surrounded by bar staff from the Fox. I marched straight out. I can see it as clear as day. She was stood next to him, and she watched the whole thing. “Do you think you can get to me by bringing her here?” I yelled. I pushed his arm so he was facing me. His eyes were only half open, he was so pissed he hardly knew what he was doing. “Do you think you can get to me? Do you think you can fucking get to me?” I threw the lager all over his shirt. His sad little white Tommy Hilfiger designer polo shirt.
When I turned around I saw Olly, Little Alan and Sarah all in stitches in the conservatory window. I stormed back inside. In the doorway, Big Al was so surprised by what he’d seen, he dropped his bottle of lager and it smashed everywhere. I pushed through the kitchen, hearing nothing but my own and everyone else’s hysterical laughter. In the hall, Jose caught up with me. “I don’t want any trouble,” she said, taking my arms.
“There won’t be any trouble now, that’s it, it’s over,” I told her. Sarah caught up, explaining that I’d thrown lager all over Anthony.
“Oh, well, Anthony, if it was Anthony, he fucking deserved it,” Jose exclaimed. And this woman is a school teacher. I ran and hid upstairs as I heard the commotion getting closer.
Sarah followed Jose to the sink, trying to explain what he’d done to me, as Jose filled a pint glass with water. Jose nodded and listened as the glass filled up. She went outside and found him. “You bastard.” she said, “Ha,” as she chucked it all down his front.
Sarah was screaming for me to come downstairs, and I eventually came to find out what was going on. “I didn’t do it for you,” Jose said. “I did it for me.” People from the Fox were yelling at me furiously. I was laughing at them. One of them came back two minutes later and apologised.
I saw him in the kitchen and I called him a user at the top of my voice. “I don’t want to see her get used the way he tried to use me,” I called. “Except he never got that far.”
The Scrunchie darted over to me. “What did you say?” she asked, horrified.
I was bent double with laughter. “I said I don’t want to see you get used the way he tried to use me, but he never got to sleep with me.” The regretful twinge in my voice was hidden beneath layers of triumph; now a new rumour would be going around the Fox; my reputation as a ruined woman replaced, hopefully, by one concerning Anthony’s inadequacies.
At this point Anthony, masculinity insulted, managed to open his mouth for the first time “Oi, oi,” he managed, “don’t chuck lager all over me,” and sat down, speechless, so drunk, and so blatantly in the wrong he couldn’t even defend himself.
I went back upstairs to little Alan’s bedroom where we’d been playing guitar, followed shortly by the lads, Olly and Sarah, and I gloated. “Now that is closure!” I crowed, and lay down on my back on Alan’s sit-ups bench with my arms in the air. I smoked some more pot and was congratulated on my ability to turn the whole party upside down.
“I’m so proud of you, Emma! I never would have had the guts,” Sarah exclaimed gleefully, clearly even drunker than me.
“I tell you,” Olly gushed. “Women are cool. They’re wild, they’re unpredictable, man, but they’re cool… It shouldn’t've happened, but some things just happen, and they’re cool.”
