THE BEDFORD GOLF CLUB PUB - PT II

After this the night was a pleasant, dimly remembered blur. An inner expansiveness had dissolved the edges of my awkwardness. After a few drinks my tongue can sometimes feel too thick to fit my thoughts around. Tonight it was working fine. I'd been making Dianne laugh. She'd brought her stool to sit across the beer slickened bar counter from me. The Doc had gone home. I'd walked him out to his old Rover and we'd made heartfelt promises to meet the following day. Richard was still here, looking grisly. His nose had taken on that peculiar alchoholic hue of something dipped in gentian violet. The beers had made him belligerently dogmatic. Worse, they had brought his belief in his own slyness to the surface. If any on the locals contradicted him his lips curled in a snarl and you could see him thinking, I'm far cleverer than this cunt. They just sighed and said, "Yaa, Richard,' and changed the subject.

The rest of the club was thinning out. A group of smoking, flirting teenagers held court now amongst the sofas. They'd turned the music up and some sort of demonic heavy metal blared out. Spud sat at their feet. At a floral Chesterfield sofa the Doc's assistant sat with a few of her friends. He had introduced me to her earlier. In fact I'd been introduced to virtually everyone in the club. They'd wandered over at different stages of the night and the Doc had told them my story. The Doc's assistant had smiled shyly, and after this, whenever our eyes met, she'd smiled. She smiled now, when I looked over. She was pretty, in a plain, wholesome sort of way. Rosy cheeks, page-boy haircut, low heeled, square toed shoes. I find it difficult to look at myself from the outside, but I suppose I cut a slightly romantic figure here - back from a few years in a glamourous, major city, travelling the country on a sightseeing tour, spending my nights in the back rooms of pubs. This wasn't my reality at all - London had been cold and grim and this trip was in many respects a flight from some aspects of my life - but it was pleasant to bask in this fiction.

And then it was just me and Dianne. I walked with her while she locked the kitchen and side doors. Unseen for most of the night beneath the bar, she wore a grey suede skirt with frontal ties of rawhide. Tan leather espadrilles wrapped around her brown calves, scissoring in front of me. They showed an unexpected shapliness and muscularity.
At the front door she stopped and we faced each other - me slightly inside the door, she slightly outside. Spud went out and began peeing against a bush beside us.

'This is it old boy. I'll be back to open up at eight.' She grinned her twisted, wry grin and looked at me, her head slightly to one side.

It was now or never. 'I'm going to miss you. How will I find my way to the toilet in the dark?'

'Oh, I think you'll find a way.'

'What if Spud needs to go out? What if all those chop bones he's been given tonight suddenly need to exit?'

'I think we'll have to take our chances.'

'Damn. I guess it's goodbye then.'

'I guess so. I have an eleven year old daughter to go home to.'

And that was that. She smiled and let me to go to bed alone, wondering if I'd been too forward. I wasn't even all that interested in sex. It was more the idea of wrapping an arm around her and having her head on my chest, the warmth of her body pressing against my side. Instead I had Spud, curled in the crook of my arm, sighing with the full load in his belly. Oh well. Just before I fell asleep a fart fluttered against my thigh.