Middle Of Nowhere

Going Somewhere?

I stand at the bar, two beers in my hands. I have been there for a few minutes and already the perspiration is beginning to drip down, making the glass slick to the touch. The foam is beginning to disappear from both, a slow trickle of bubbles rising from the base, just tickling the surface. I already know that the second will not be able to compare to the first because of this. I think that maybe I’ll finish it quickly. Perhaps it's a bit too early for that.

The band hasn’t started playing yet but there is already a steady hum of voices from the surrounding crowd. It is the first Thursday back from the holidays and people are comparing notes from their vacation. Comparing tans too, somewhat enviously on the part of those who haven’t left the country. Or their bedrooms as is the case for others. A boy signals to me from the crowd, waves his hand and pushes himself over, glass held high. He slaps me somewhat too enthusiastically on the arse, swears and asks me how my holiday has been. I answer that it was too short but good all the same. His? F-ing hilarious he says, but he’s not had a shag for 4 months and is anxious to get back into the swing of things. Irony intended. I’m already aware of this. Having spent four days sat in front of him, hearing little beyond, “She’s fit, she’s fit, aren’t the new girls fit, she’s fit”, I am quite aware that he wants a shag.

I have known James for two years and his problem is his inability to appear as equally confident toward girls as they do toward him. He swings from perilously shy to pushy flirt with no space in between. Having got to know some of his attempted conquests well, I have only had these suspicions confirmed. If he doesn’t bore them by saying nothing, he does so by saying everything and trying to pull his shirt off too as if to entice them further. He is short, with a boyish look and a toned body he had agonised over since escaping puberty. I could never work out if it was some insecurity about one of these or some other flaw about his boarding school upbringing that had crippled his ability to talk to girls but regardless, he couldn’t. I felt rather sorry for him. Seeing someone else across the bar, he moves on, swearing at me a farewell in the uproar.

It is as I turn my head to watch him go, quite curious whether or not she will get one word from him or fifty, that I happen to catch a sight of Hannah through the mass of people. She is wearing a crumpled white shirt, undone a little at the top, with blue jeans. Her hair is piled high on her head, exposing her neck, with a few tendrils wafting up and down as she lightly nods and sighs along to the story. Her blue eyes seem to shimmer iridescent in the orange glow from the bar light. She smiles at some unheard joke, her teeth just beginning to appear as her lips glide up. In the haze, one can just see the hint of the peachy fuzz that lightly dusts her cheeks.

We first met at a university mixer in our accommodation block as freshers. We had all been much more nervous around strangers then and everyone had drunk to compensate. I was still enjoying the novelty of being able to drink in the early hours of a Monday morning without rebuke. She sat down opposite me and introduced herself. Even then, at that age when most girls felt the need to wear makeup to counter any lingering doubts from school, she had barely touched her face. All save a pair of red lips that only seemed to sharpen with the lack of any other adornment. I felt that she was the prettiest girl. She also seemed to be doing my course which I imagined would only improve things. She was sitting at the table with one hand just seeming to support her face while the other twirled a stray fragment of hair between her fingers, wrapping and encircling it before letting it drop. She had that grace and confidence one finds in nice girls who’ve been to English public schools, almost like someone has refined and sweetened what was already there. Although, having only been to a comprehensive, perhaps this was just my own imagination. The grass is greener. But in her case I think it was true.

We decided that we would live together with three other friends from the block a month and a half later.

I was walking through our kitchen on the way to the bathroom just as she was leaving from a shower. She had a grey robe on with the cord pulled tight around her and her hair piled up in a towel. Her cheeks were freckled with a dusting of dew, flushed from the water. She would look up at me with her face tilted downward and quickly look away. The Madonna and the whore. The smell of her shampoo lingered in the bathroom, closer to gunpowder than floral, like the hour after bonfire night when the cordite and the charge just begin to fade, leaving the scent on the breeze. Just quite intangible that, seeming to catch it, it slips out of your hands.

I was stood behind her while she was washing up, making small talk, bantering about our summers. She was tanned from her days at the beach coaching swimming, with arms that were freckled gold. She would stretch them lazily out, almost like she was reaching for something in the reflected sky of the window. I could see the muscles of her shoulders just gently rippling so slight under her dress. Her hands made strange shapes as she twisted them whilst talking. The middle finger curled to the thumb as if she was an orator. You couldn’t help but look. Her back would arch quivering as she'd lean forward to pick up a dirty plate and rub it down, seeming to drift up onto her toes softly. The strain just visible in the raised line of her Achilles and the curve of her feet. I looked up and tried to see her face in the mirror but it was obscured by the light from the evening sun. She couldn’t see me.

In the summer of second year I was on holiday with my family on the Spanish Atlantic coast. We had had our picture taken by a roaming photographer around the marina the day before and were walking to get the photo. The people there were a mix of the European yachting circuit, striped shirts and bright chinos, with shopkeepers and tradesmen from the town. We were some of the few English tourists tolerated for our appetite for overpriced Spanish red. The water had a crisp green hue that seemed to fade to aquamarine, white and black with each gentle, dappling wave. You could hear the creak of the boats as they knocked against each other, little scraps of peeling paint rubbing and collapsing into the water below, the deep cream slowly fading from view as they fall. Mother had just made a comment on another woman’s clothes. Despite being older than some of the fishing boats around, this woman was wearing a bright pair of acid dungarees. She said she’d owned a white pair herself at University. I said that Hannah had a black set she seemed to wear a lot.

“You like Hannah a lot don’t you?”

“I think I do”

We were still living together in the third year. The creaking of her floorboards above my head in the night was a lullaby and an agony. I would stare up as if hoping to look through the ceiling and see myself lying beside her upstairs, her auburn hair laid out around her head as she nuzzles my shoulder, her nose dusting my chest as she dreams. I would look down at her and turn back her hair behind her ear. I would get as little sleep if that were true as now when it isn't.

She makes eye contact with me across the bar and smiles, the lights from the band strobing across her face, turning it crimson, green and blue in succession. Her face seems to shift with each change. The ground thumps steadily with the bass and the floor, covered in a thin film of spilt drinks and dirt that seems to glitter in the passing light, clings to the soles of my shoes. Holding me back almost. I pull myself from the grip and tug myself forward. She embraces me and I feel her hair brush my chin as I see my arms looping around her, my hands in the small of her back. She looks up and asks if I'd had a good day and if I’m enjoying the show. I am. How had she found today. Dull - glad for it to be over. Me? Much the same. She glances up into my eyes every so often when she talks before flicking them away again, like the passing glare that temporarily shrouds and illuminates us both. Her eyes fade from crisp blue to noir depths in an instant before coming back again. She sees her friends behind me and hugs me once more, nudging past on her way to them. My hands are still out in front of me. The delay makes them seem like I’m holding an image. It fades and they fall to my sides. I have another drink.

I get a tap on the shoulder and attempt small talk with someone else.

“Where are you living now mate?”

“The middle of nowhere”

"Shame that"