The Unbearable Truth

Image by Yesudeep Managlapilly.  This work is licensed under (CC by SA 4.0)

Another damp greylight gloom was dissolved by rain into black and sodium orange dusk. Out of the night Jamesie comes walking, a sixty-six year old swagger in ill-fitting jeans. The truth is Jamesie’s a lad, a chancer, a bit of a rogue, a cocky bugger, a cheeky chappie. He walks down the dismal road, deftly avoiding the discarded needles, pigeon remains and oil-slick puddles. A grin stretches across his nicotine-tanned face as he spots the bright glare of the pub at the corner, his watering-hole, his territory, his home away from home, “The Gazelle”.

He'd called the pub “The Guzzle” once, back in ‘77 and wee Madeline Bannister had laughed so much she said she’d thought she’d wet her knickers. She’d been a looker then, only 19. Three weans but even so, Jamesie wouldn’t have minded really making her knickers wet. Time had not been kind tae wee Madeline, her curly black hair faded to grey in her thirties, her youngest, Tam, had overdosed at the turn of the century. She went to pieces after that, then the cancer took her a year or so later. Jamesie felt sad, he should have shagged her when he had the chance. “The Guzzle” he called it, she’d laughed and so he had called it that ever since. It had been years since anyone had even cracked so much as a patronising smile, not like the old days when people had a sense of humour.

The pub was his haunt, had been for as long as he could remember and outside the door, that little patch of strewn fag ends and discarded plastic wrappers was just as much his domain as his regular seat inside. Jamesie stood outside the door of the “Gazelle” like he did several times every night. Puffing on a cigarette and bobbing back and forth with a cocky swagger, he threw his unbidden banter at a few scampering passers-by trying to avoid the rain. He was like a dog tied outside a shop doorway barking at strangers. Truth was Jamesie was a character, a joker, a mischief maker, a raconteur and a bon-vivante; which he thought meant the same, a wind-up merchant. Yes, he was that sort of bloke. That guy, the one outside almost every pub, every night, in every city up and down the country.

The rain had washed away most of the pedestrians, so the street was quiet. He drew on the cigarette and observed how little had changed. The years-old bloodstain on the corner of the pub was still there, a dark eroding continent in reddish brown. The metal shutters into the basement were still rusting, still warped and loose, still dangerous, had been for years. One day someone was going to walk onto them and drop straight down. A tragedy to be sure but it would give them all something new to talk about.

Everything remained the same as it had been when he was a lad. The only thing that had changed was the design and colours of the cars parked on the kerb.

As he stood there, with no one to talk to or shout at, Jamesie reminisced about all the time he spent standing outside the pub door when he was a kid. His dad would spend a couple of hours inside getting drunk of an evening when he was supposed to be taking Jamesie out somewhere. Jamesie would stay there outside and stay quiet, watching the people pass or enter. They'd rub his head and say “alright Jamesie” and at the end of the night his Dad would give him two pounds -still notes in those days- but only on the promise that Jamesie told his mother they'd been at the pictures, or football or whatever. Those were fond memories for Jamesie, quality times with his father, long dead.

He snapped from his fond memories as a car passed, slowing as it approached the lights, Jamesie took the opportunity to yell at the driver, seeing the vehicle had its windows down. “Affupthetoonurye?”

The young man in the car completely ignored him. Jamesie felt slighted. “Fuckin' poof!” he barked before punctuating it with a laugh which sounded like a deranged crow with laryngeal tumours. The driver turned and scowled at Jamesie, looked at him like he was a piece of shit. Jamesie had hit a nerve. Jamesie smiled and waved.

“Awrigh' son? Nice night eh?” he said sarcastically, before beginning to laugh again. The car drove off but he continued cackling. He was pleased with himself. Mind you, he was always pleased with himself. He took one last drag, swaggered some more, flicked the cigarette end into the river of rain being swallowed by the choked gutter and marched back inside, ready once more to lay down the class patter with his good mates.

In he went. The stool, which he had planted his arse on, was a red faux-leather which had burst at the seams along one side. White cotton, stained yellow bloomed out of it. It was his stool, the one he always used, the one he’d burst. It sat right by the bar next to Davie and Freddie, who, like Jamesie, were there every night. The truth was they'd been friends since they were bairns, since school. They had grown up together, ran amok together, even settled down together. None had escaped from the dire gravity of either the housing scheme or it's grim moon, “The Guzzle” illuminating in the night with 40 watt bulbs. They'd grown old orbiting around both, a small unstable corkscrew orbit, back and forth, back and forth.

Between them they had spent hours and days and weeks and years drinking, talking about the football, whatever politics had cropped up on the nightly news but mostly reminiscing. They had discussed a decade and a bit of youthful freedom for the past half century. It was a coping mechanism to blot out the avalanche of responsibilities they'd been crushed by. Suffocated by mortgages and unwanted, ungrateful kids and shitty, demeaning, backbreaking jobs and miserable, ageing partners who were sick of the sight of them. They, like so many other broken men, had retreated to the pub to turn their dull pasts into glory days, a constructed effort of group narrative in which their trivial antics became legendary through exaggeration and repetition. It was an impenetrable fantasy of fictional fights, of chat-up lines that never were, of lost loves idealised to absurdity, of misremembered nights out on the town elaborated into epics of hedonistic and decadent splendour.

Another cocky laugh came from Jamesie as he ordered more pints and slapped down the usual tenner for his round. The barmaid Janice sweeped it off the lager sodden bar with the face of a woman worried her till is going to be short again, like it was every night. She had long past given up trying to explain it to the boss, just made up the loss herself, it was only short seven-fifty. The price of three pints of the weak piss-water they served. Even so, it mounted up. Business had been dying off at the exact same rate as the punters had.

The pub had once been the heart of the community. They’d been celebrations and music, fiddle bands and singers. There’d been wedding functions and parties, wetting babies heads, engagements, even the odd graduation party. Fights and murders, fucking in the toilets, a place for first dates and last goodbyes. Now it was like a waiting room for the morgue. The only live entertainment was a TV screen affixed to the roof where sports pundits wittered incessantly at a low volume. The only social functions left were the sporadic Wakes. If it wasn’t for Jamesie, Davie and Freddie still coming in every night, the place would have went up in flames as an insurance job long ago, and she’d be working in another pub, with almost exactly the same desperation and paper-thin profit margin. Janice hated her life, it was etched into her defeated features.

“Whit's the face fur?” Jamesie sniped at her, his own ruddy face, screwed up in offence.

“Nothing Jamesie.” she groaned trying to placate one of the few people keeping her in a job. “Jist goat a bit of a heidache, pal.”

Jamesie was displeased. Janice’s attitude had soured the mood and so he muttered and went outside for another smoke as she pulled the pints. Outside he felt like a king. The truth was, out there everyone knew him, acknowledged him. He didn't much give them a chance otherwise. He was that kind of guy, so he’d convinced himself; friendly, sociable, neighbourly, good-hearted, well though of in the community.

“Awright Barry? How's yer maw?” He asked the kid walking by with the dog.

“Aye she's fine.” Barry replied dismissively, distracted by the dog which appeared to be dragging him along with it.

“Aw, that yin's got a mind of it's ain, eh?” He quipped, a bit too late, but he laughed anyway. The crow-like barking rattled off the windows of the bus-stop and echoed down the street, pissing off all the neighbours in the tenements above the pub and across the road from it.

A nod and a wink to old Mrs Curtis. She never noticed, being that she was on the other side of the street. It didn’t deter him “Awright, Mrs Curtis?” he shouted, waving his hand as the old woman shuffled on, giving him a cursory nod and a smile that did not shy away from displaying her annoyance.

A man of the people, a local character. The truth was that's who Jamesie was. Back in he went, feeling better, like he did every night. A fresh pint waiting for him. More banter, more memories, faded jokes, disagreement over the talent of footballers, past and present, but mostly past. Always the past. What could they speak of about the present?

The truth was they sat in that pub for the majority of their lives, slowly rotting while stuck wallowing in their fabricated memories. It would be enough to drive anyone to drink. Yet as much as they tried to ignore it, the ugly thought always lay there uncomfortably below the surface. They were marking time, running out the clock, hammering the last few nails into the coffin. Not just the three of them, but the pub, the streets beyond, the city itself, even the whole culture.

Outside, for once, Jamesie was not alone. Janice was taking a smoke-break, like she did at this time every night, and she was in a mischievous mood. Gossip, scurrilous and implausible, landed in his ears. A young man, wide-boy and not long married, caught sucking cock in the gents toilet. She swore it was true. Jamesie howled with laughter and the sound, abrasive as ever, caused another collective sigh throughout those living in earshot.

“Fucking Jamesie,” it hissed, as it had several times that evening.

He couldn't wait to get back inside and tell the boys but Janice wasn't finished. She complained about her daughter's new man. Jamesie nodded in sympathy. He'd never had any children; his wife of two years ran away in tears, demanding a better life than he could every muster. Still he imagined it was a worry, looking after kids when they were growing up. He finished his cigarette and went back in to spread the dirty gossip.

Closing time rang at half past ten as it did every night and out onto the streets they went, off in their different directions, back home, like they did every night. Jamesie stood outside, having one last fag as he watched Janice's husband turn up to give her a lift home. They drove off, leaving him alone on the road. Alone for once, Jamesie walked down the path, staggering home. He whistled a tune, “alive alive-o”, like he did every night, sending vague chills down the spines of those behind the closed curtains.

He walked through the door of his house and looked at the corpse lying there. He was always surprised by it, even though it was always there, always waiting. The skin had sloughed off long ago, the juices pooled and stained the carpet, blue muscle shrivelled like prunes, and the bones beneath the only thing holding it together. “Aw Christ,” he sighed. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”

The truth was, the real truth was, he was a ghost, a wraith, a spectre, nothing more. He’d collapsed one night nearly a year before, his heart had stopped and so had his thoughts. Jamesie had plummeted to his death on a cheap brown carpet almost worn through. The body had been decomposing on the floor for months.

No neighbours had called on him to see if he was fine, no family had worried about his lack of contact with them, the phone had never rung, not even his friends had came round, why would they bother? He was at the pub every night. He had always lived alone, he had died alone and had remained alone after that. The truth was that no-one had known nor had anyone cared. It didn't matter, he'd be back the next night, and the next. The truth was he had nowhere else to go, not even Hell nor Heaven, if such places even existed.