Staring out of a Window Late at Night

I’m staring out of the window of the bar late at night - just before closing time.

    I’m looking out of the public bar window at the mountain that’s moving towards me like Birnam Wood in the play which name cannot be spoken aloud and I know it’s the drink that talking when in walks my old buddy, Jack O’Leary, tight as a cork in an old bottle of Merlot. We’re in the Angel Hotel, only it ain’t no hotel, just a pub tucked into the side of the hill, and I haven’t seen Jack for a year because I’ve been sailing around the post British Empire world. All those places that now have independence and who’s people are only too pleased to tell me how much better off they are without the British, only I don’t care about Empire. My Dad was raised on it and like Churchill deplored every inch we gave away. And if truth be known we were so broke, the British that is, that we could no longer function with out aid, dare I mention American aid?

   Anyway, Jack couldn’t care less about Empire, or British for that matter, his dad being Irish Canadian, but he does want to know why I’ve jacked in the job, in his eyes a dream job on a passenger liner, being fed at the company’s expense and actually being paid to visit all the world’s greatest ports. Not just getting paid, but getting paid more than working in the ship repair yards at home.

    Jack wanted to know why, why did I finish?

‘Were there plenty of women on board?’

‘Sure,’ says I, it being a liner an’ all. ‘Plenty, oodles of women young women and horny’. And that sort of talk, turns Jack on, and he’s egging me on, to spill the beans and I don’t want to tell him anything because I’m so fed up with the sea. I’m fed-up with the cocktail parties, wearing a cummerbund, having to wear starched whites. whites stiff as virgin jack tar on his first visit to a bagnio, and tired of paying out of my own pay for epaulets, overalls, boots, and uniforms and actually tired of eating first-class when all I want is a beef sandwich with horseradish sauce.

    ‘You had it made, why pack it in?’ and he couldn’t understand one just gets fed up of being a stuffed shirt when all we did was watchkeeping hundreds of gauges and dials and shutting off alarms and sometimes you can’t put your feelings into the English language not the way you want to and it was a summer evening and our mates were out with girl friends or getting married an’ the bar was just dead and the air hung on your face as if you stayed too long you would get as musty and dry as the cool cellar and why should I go on, he wouldn’t understand him being a teacher and all. He wouldn’t understand the heat down there in the engine room, the roar and hiss of turbines and the raw power of superheated steam, nor the biting desire to sleep more than seven hours at a time when it is four on and eight off seven days a week for a whole voyage and when them-upstairs condescend to give one lousy half day off, you’d rather sleep than go on a date with a beautiful Canadian girl. Shit, what sort of life is that.

    ‘I’m fed-up, says Jack. Sick of this place.’

‘Do you know, Jack, what I miss? I miss camping.’ And a look comes over old Jack, something clicked. And he says,

‘Yes, sure, I would like to go camping.’ He tells me about this place called Mwnt in Ceredigion, a beach. Let’s go, he says, when I tell him I’ve got a tent.

    We hike and hitch-hike and get picked up by all different, and odd, kinds of people and Jack is a big guy and looks good in shorts and some of those guys who pick us up they take to him in his shorts, you know, looking so manly and get him to sit in the front and they hang on his every word and old Jack is getting embarrassed and I’m chuckling in the back seat cos, Jack ain’t like that you know, he’s straight down the middle kind of guy. But give him a girl and boy he’s all over that girl like a bee on a blossomed flower.

    Well, we get to Cardigan and Jack says, It ain’t far we can walk in a couple of hours. We camp on the headland. Jack ain’t no camper nor hiker and he’s dead to life straight away as a soon as he lays down on the groundsheet. So early morning I knocks at the farm and a young woman takes to me and sells me eggs, bread, butter, and milk for our tea and she’s really nice but something tells me about her worn look that she’s married. When I say worn, I mean familiar, at ease, she’s at ease with herself and she knows who she is and she likes men and if it was a different time, if the tide was coming in, you know, things could be different. And we do nothing because there nothing we can do but to look and like each other and that’s enough, but if the tide was different, you know . . .

    We spend the week on Mwnt just doing absolutely nothing, sunning, eating, and swimming to get cool and basking like iguanas to get warm again. We were bronzed and clean, no alcohol. It was glorious and then this German girl turns up with a family working as an au pair and Jack says,

‘Go tap her up.’ And I goes over and says,

‘What’s a nice girl doing in a hole like this?’ And it works, because she probably doesn’t understand a word I say. But Jack laughs his socks off cos it’s such a corny line, but more so cos she was digging a hole in the sand for the kids at the time.

    We run out of money and we have to hike back home and an American lady picks me up in her little British car, a Morris Mini Minor, and drives me back all the way home which was kind of her. A middle class American, educated, maybe a teacher, modestly dressed and we speak hardly a word all the way back. And she ain’t looking for action, For her, the thrill is in just picking up a handsome, slim and bronzed guy and sitting in close for two hours, that’s all the excitement she’s banking on and I understand because my thoughts are with the German girl, how the sun shone and sparkled in her blond hair, and how could she be taller by me by half an inch and why she would want to go out with a foreigner like me on such a gloriously bright and sunny day.

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