Good People

The girl was looking at the TV mounted above the bar, watching the small white and red shapes chase around the pitch. She thought they looked like plastic clothes pins. The bar was shaped like a horseshoe; it was coated in a dull bronze glow and getting warm with the night’s business. The girl and three boys were sitting in one corner of the bar. They were all drinking beer, except for the girl who sat with a glass of vodka and coke upon her crossed legs.

“So this girl in the office, she sells them?” asked Calum, the boy with his back to the bar.

“Apparently. She says the money’s unreal,” replied the smaller boy opposite, whose name was also Calum, such that everyone called him by a shortening of his surname, which was Drummond.

“How much?” 

“She says pairs go for thirty-five quid each; three pairs, more than a hundred.” 

“The world is full of generous people, Drum.” Calum swirled the beer around in his glass. “And do you struggle to disguise the fact that you’d like to buy her entire wardrobe?” 

“Fuck off. If anyone would get caught paying for that stuff, it’s you.” Drum smirked hopefully at the other boy to his right, but Dean did not laugh. 

“Probably true – just as well I get all my dirty underwear for free,” said Calum, reaching a long, slender arm over the girl’s shoulders.

She winced and threw the arm off and said, “You don’t pay in cash.”

“I don’t pay in cash,” said Calum, taking a drink of beer. “Unfortunately, that’s just what I have the most of. What do I pay in, Dean?”

“Nothing I know of,” said Dean, who was watching the football.

“What do I pay in, Drum?”

“Self-respect.”

“Fortunately, that’s just what I have the least of – but it’s a bottomless well.”

“Eve’s respect, then.”

“That’s more like it,” Calum agreed, looking at the girl. 

Drum leaned back in his chair and placed a hand at the base of his beer glass. “Not to be one of those guys- “

“Don’t do it,” said Dean abruptly.

“-but imagine it was your daughter.”

“They’re all orphans,” said Calum.

“Nah, but come on – would you let it go on? Some dirty bugger getting off with your daughter’s scants?”

Dean sat quietly. Calum was about to jibe again, when Eve replied, “Usually the men that pose these hypotheticals are actually the ones buying the ripped fishnets from sixteen-year-olds.” 

Drum’s round face curled in a look of chastity. Calum went again to speak but was cut off. “There are a lot of men that don’t have to imagine. If they only knew.”

“And that’s but a little jump,” said Calum.

Drum, fearful of continuing the discussion, finished his beer and wiped the condensation on his jeans pocket. “Right, seal’s broken,” he said, standing.

“I’ll join you.” Calum rose also, and the two walked in a loose single file around the bar to the bathrooms on the far side. The sudden quiet was quickly smothered by the thin static of the TV. Dean sat up in his chair.

“He’s drunk.”

“We’re all drunk.”

“He doesn’t know,” said Dean. It was a half-question.

“No.” 

He looked at the curve of her hair which was cut just below the line of her jaw. Her shoulders were left uncovered by the cropped blouse she wore and in the lowering bar light they were the colour of plain linen. He thought she looked thinner than before.

            “He doesn’t know,” said Dean again. 

            “Is that a relief?”

            “I’m not sure.”

            “You don’t look relieved.”

            “Then maybe I’m not,” he said, rubbing at the tips of his elbows. “I have to tell him.”

            “You don’t have to,” said Eve.

            “We can’t do this.”

            “Why not?”

            “I can’t sleep.”

            “Could you sleep before?”

            “I could eat before.”

            “Don’t be so fucking dramatic.” She placed her glass on the table, centred it neatly on the beer mat, and slouched demurely backwards. 

            “We can’t do it.”

            “What’s to stop us?”

            “It’s bad already; the lie makes it worse.”

             “What lie?” she said.

            “Look, Eve – it’s wrong.”

            “You didn’t mind acting on that account before.”

            Dean looked over her shoulder to the wall. “Don’t make it sound like that.”

            “Alright.” Eve took a drink of the vodka and held the glass on her lap again, continuing to eye it and not Dean. “We don’t have to tell him. You don’t.”

            “You don’t think it will come out?”

            “Why should it?”

            “People can’t hold on to things like that,” he said.

            “There’s nothing to it.”

            “If there’s nothing to it then I don’t know what there is to anything. But it doesn’t feel like nothing.”

            “If he doesn’t know now, what good can it do?”

            “Don’t ask me that.”

            “What good can it do?”

            “Fine.”

            There was a goal in the game. The noise of the crowd pitched to the sound of tarmac through the window of a moving car. Dean drank the last of his beer, holding it in his mouth for a few seconds. It tasted warm and bitter. Eve watched his face. She noticed now that their eyes had hardly met all night. 

A girl came from behind the bar to collect their empty glasses. Dean asked for another round.

            “On the tab?” asked the girl.

            “Please.”

            “Our flight is on Friday,” said Eve, after the woman had left. “Then you’ll forget about it.”

            “Sure.”

            “It’s only what you tell yourself, Dean.”

            “Alright.”

            “It’s only what you tell yourself.”

            “Alright.”

            “It’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.” She paused. “And I’ll be fine with him.”

Dean saw Calum and Drum walking back from the bathroom. They both had red faces and gambolled awkwardly between the mess of chairs. Dean watched them near and said, finally: “It doesn’t matter.”

            The boys sat down and checked the score. Calum turned to the table, rubbing his hands together frantically above his thighs, as was his habit, and said, “We’re getting champagne.”

            “Why the fuck are we getting champagne?” Dean asked. Eve looked below the table.

            “Why the fuck not?” said Drum.

            “Drum has the right answer but wrong working – because good wine makes good people.”

            “What about bad beer?” said Dean. 

“That makes martyrs. In any case, I’m buying, so fuck up and drink.”

The girl from the bar brought over the three beers and another vodka. She set the glasses down on the wet beer mats. 

            “Do you have champagne?” Calum asked.

            “We have a Moet.”

            “That’ll do. Bring the Moet, please. And four glasses.”

            The girl left and returned quickly with the dark green bottle steeped in a mottled silver ice bucket and four champagne flutes held between her fingers. Calum uncorked the bottle and overfilled the flutes with champagne.

“What are we drinking to?” he said.

“To martyrs,” said Dean.

“And to good people,” said Calum, and they all drank.

The pub across the way had closed and handfuls of people were stumbling out onto the street where the rain had ridden the gutters all afternoon. Streaks of white and amber light painted the windows of passing cars and the pavement.  

            Dean opened the pack of cigarettes and held it out to Calum who took one and lit it with the end of the cigarette already in his mouth.

            “There’s still plenty NQ jobs going down south,” said Calum.

            “Yeah?”

            “The place is starved of them – they’ve upped the rates in Jersey; the baby leeches are all headed out there.”

            “You’re suggesting I’m not a baby leech?” asked Calum, tapping ash to the wet ground. 

            “I’m not sure what you are – but there’s a job if you want it.”

            “You’re the one that followed the money, not me.”

            “I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

            “Promise?” 

The two boys smiled wanly to each other. Dean turned to hear the warm-throated screeches from the taxi rank down the street. What a fucking circus this place is, he thought, what a fucking circus. And it’s not about to change, not a spot. Nor me with it.

“Calum- “ 

            “Eve’s pregnant, Dean.”

            Dean took a long drag, blew the smoke down at his feet and nodded once. He felt as if someone had opened a door behind him and an unknown light was pouring over his shoulder. 

            “Right.”

            “Yeah,” said Calum, who looked now like a boy, just the way Dean used to see him after school, dressed in his rugby strip and dragging his heavy bag homewards. After a silence, Dean said:

            “She doesn’t look it.”

            “That’s a fucking stupid thing to say.”

            “I suppose it is. She’s keeping it?”

            “She doesn’t know.”

            “What about you?

            “I don’t know either.”

            “Christ.”

            They heard the cat-like creak of the bar door. Eve was standing narrowly in the doorway. She still held her glass in one hand, the other arm folded across her chest. She walked out to stand behind them on the pavement, looking at them both.

            “Alright?”

            “Alright.”

            At that moment, the August moon broke free from the clouds and cast the street in a pale blaze.

            “It’s a pretty moon,” said Eve, and they all looked up, each of them unsure what the others were seeing.