Brief Encounter

“Anyone sitting there?” said a voice, dragging me from my solitude.
 There wasn’t.
 “No,” I said, waving my hand vaguely at the seat but not turning round.
 “You ok?”
 I looked up, a rather plain faced girl with an American accent sat in the seat I’d been vaguely waving at. She beamed back at me.
 “I’m fine,” I said, in a way that I hoped, but not enough to make sure it did, implied ‘I’m not fine, and don’t want to talk to you about it.’
 “Well you don’t look fine,” she said, after a moment or two.
 I looked at her again, she’d pulled off the large purple bobble hat she’d been wearing to reveal a stock of short red, wiry hair, which she ran her hands pointlessly through.
“Not that it’s any business of yours but I’m just here for a quiet drink and don’t particularly want to be disturbed with idle small talk if it’s all the same to you,” I said, my tone perhaps a little bit sharper than I’d intended.
“Oh I see.” She paused and then turned away from me back to the bar, signalling in vain for the bartender.
And that was just what I didn’t want. To have the fact I’d been rude to and upset a perfect stranger on my conscience as well. As if I didn’t have enough worries at the moment.
 “Look I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just had some bad news today and I wanted a quiet drink, I didn’t mean to snap.”
“It’s ok,” she said, still trying to signal to the bartender, who stood chatting with a waitress by the door to the kitchen. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
I looked back at the double Jack Daniels I hadn’t yet touched and considered for about the millionth time since I’d been in the bar whether to drink it or not.
The girl muttered something that I didn’t quite hear.
“Sorry?”
“What? Oh nothing, I was just wondering what the hell I had to do to get a drink in this place.”
I stood on the rail alongside the bottom of the bar and leaned far over the side, waving my arm as I did.
“Hey mate,” I called, catching the bartender’s attention, “can we get a drink up here please!”
He sauntered slowly up to us and leaned heavily on the edge of the bar.
“It’s a skill,” I said to her, she looked at me, unimpressed.
“What can I get you?” the bartender said, a thick Italian accent giving away his roots.
“What would you like?”
“White wine and soda please. Do you want anything?”
I gestured to my full glass. “Not for me thanks.”
She paid for her drink and sipped tentatively from it, as if it was a steaming mug of tea. I glanced again at my own drink and wondered for the million and first time what to do with it.
“You not going to drink that?” she said, nodding at my full glass.
“I’m considering it.” I finally forced a smile.
“You must be a cheap date.”
And she was right. For the past three years I had been a cheap date, and for the 6 years before that I certainly had not been, or a particularly pleasant date either. In all honesty I wasn’t quite sure what had driven me into a bar after all this time. It could have been the fact that I’d recently split from Gloria, co-habiting girlfriend of two years, within the last 20 minutes, but then I had been through worse stuff in the last three years and hadn’t turned to the bottle then- the death of my father topping that particular list.
Perhaps it was the fact that I was alone now and could do what I wanted. She wasn’t standing over me any longer, making sure I did the right thing, acted the right way, telling me off when I didn’t. It was true, as soon as I’d got off the phone from her I’d headed straight for the nearest bar, letting age old instinct lead the way. Clouded and maybe even comfortable in the fact that I could finally do what I wanted without having to let someone else know where I was all the time. She certainly didn’t appreciate being called a parole officer checking up on me on the phone twenty-five minutes before. But then what girl would? I hopped that my will power and self control came from my own inner strength, and not from the fear of disappointing the person that I loved and looked after me.
“Would you mind if I called you a parole officer?” I said to the girl. She’d produced a well thumbed paperback which she had spread out on the bar in front of her, just about to start reading.
“A parole officer?”
“Yes. Would you mind if I called you one?”
“Erum, why would you do that?”
“Well let’s just say that I did. Would you mind?”
“Mind? Erum…well I suppose not, there’s worse things you could call me. But then, I suppose it depends upon the context really.”
“You see, that’s just what I thought.”
She sighed and closed the book, turning slightly so that she faced me.
“What’s happened then?” she said.
“Oh no. I don’t want to interrupt. I’m sorry for disturbing you, you get back to your book.”
“Look, I don’t think I could sit here with you thinking so loudly next to me and still be able to concentrate on my book anyway, so you might as well tell me.”
“In that case, I just split up with my girlfriend.”
“Yup, thought as much. And any normal red blooded male would already be slaughtered by now. So why aren’t you?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“I think I probably can, but in my experience it always benefits to say it out loud.”
“What are you some kind of councillor or something?”
“Yes, I am as a matter of fact. And you should get as much free advice from me as you can, normally I charge £200 an hour for this type of consultation. Back in the states it would have been double that.”
“I see. Well lucky me then. Who would have thought I’d find the answer to all my problems in a bar eh.”
“That’s called irony.”
I laughed and glanced at my drink. Suddenly it didn’t seem as tempting as it previously had.
“I shouldn’t have to burden you with my problems when you’ve just come here for a quiet drink though.”
“Just get on with it will you.”
“Oh lovely, great bedside manner you’ve got.”
“You’re getting the economy version, which will include kicking and screaming if I so wish. You want tender loving care and free coffee you come and see me on a week day in my office, call my secretary to make an appointment.”
She smiled, just so I knew that she was not being entirely truthful.
“Well,” I started, memories of past discussion groups and personal therapy sessions flooding back to me. “I am a recovering alcoholic. I haven’t touched a drink for over two years now.”
“You must be thirsty.”
I looked down at the JD once more.
“Do you know, not as much as I thought I’d be.”
“No I meant…”
“I know. It’s fine. Funny thing is I think it was just natural instinct that led me here today. I don’t think I even wanted a drink, I didn’t even think about it, it just kind of…happened. Back when I was drinking if anything ever went wrong, which got more and more frequent near the end, then I’d just head for the nearest pub to help take the pain away. They say you drink to forget, but all I did was sit at the bar thinking about whatever the problem was, it certainly didn’t help it go away. I probably would’ve been better off playing football, or doing a degree or something to help take my mind off it.”
“Sounds like you’re cured.”
“Ha! No, seriously, tell me what you think, I’d appreciate your thoughts.”
“Well the whole point of counselling is to let the person talk for themselves. Find their way through the problem and come up with their own conclusions. But it sounds like you know what you’re talking about. People drink because it’s safe for them, they know where they are with a pint in their hand and they know what it’ll do to them. However it is also a drug that your body can come dependant upon if you take too much of it. That’s when it is not even your choice whether to drink or not anymore, it’s not up to your conscious mind, and that’s when you need to get medical help. Was it ever that bad with you?”
I sat back on my stool and took a slow look around the bar. It was Friday evening and people were relaxing into their weekend, chatting amicably in groups or couples, stood up or at tables, tucked away in corners or out on display in the middle of the place. Everyone seemed so happy. The distinction I’d never been able to make was whether that happiness came from the alcohol that they were pumping into their bodies, or whether the drink was just a by-product and was merely helping to enhance their evening. I had never been able to enjoy an evening without a drink and had never known when I had had too many. I had always just tried to fit as much alcohol into my body as I could in one go, slaving under the misapprehension that I was having a good time.
“I am not sure if I was ever physically reliant upon it,” I said, remembering the weekend I had spent shivering even in the brilliant sunshine on a camping trip Gloria’s shirt lived predecessor had forced me to go on.
“Really?”
“Well, I was never like those sados you see on the street, can of special brew in one hand, stinking of piss and accosting young girls for their loose change. I was never like that.”
“That’s just semantics though. An alcoholic is an alcoholic however much money or class he may have. What is it that attracted you to drink in the first place?”
“Oh,” I said, slightly shocked at her bluntness. “Well I dunno really. I just liked the oblivion I suppose, I liked getting off my head, not caring about what I did.”
“And when do you think it started to affect your life?”
“When I didn’t know when to stop. Or how to stop for that matter. Every one has their own definition of what a drunk is, mine is someone who doesn’t know when to stop, doesn’t know where to draw the line and say- ‘enough is enough.’ I also never had a drink first thing in the morning when I got out of bed. Sometimes I would be walking to work with a raging hangover and I’d see a tramp in a park or on a street corner with a can in his hand, 8 o’clock in the morning! That’s alcoholism in my book.”
“And what time of the day would you normally have a drink?”
“Well work always helped. It’d keep my mind occupied so I couldn’t go out and drink. I’d avoid the pub at lunch time and I tried to give myself the rule to never drink before 5pm. Most days I’d make it, some days I wouldn’t. Depended upon my mood really.”
“What about holidays and weekends?”
“They were the difficult bit. Especially weekends. I would generally get as drunk as I could on Friday night, avoiding as often as I could going out with work people, I had no wish for them to see what I was truly like. Then when I woke up on Saturdays the first thing I would want would be a drink.”
“So you did drink first thing in the morning then!”
“No. I said I would want a drink, I didn’t say I’d let myself have one. You have to have rules you see, otherwise everything would fall apart and I would be like one of those guys in the park at 8 in the morning. Generally I’d hold out until lunchtime and then that would be it for the rest of the weekend. I don’t think I can remember any weekend that I had during my 20s. Bits come back to me and friends have filled me in on the rest of the worst but apart from that anything could have happened and I wouldn’t have a clue what it was.”
“If you had such a great system worked out why did you feel like you had to stop?”
“When I started losing my friends.”
I didn’t feel like I should or even could go into it with this girl so I let that statement hang in the air alone for her to absorb. This had been the hardest part about the whole drinking fiasco. When you are a drunk you can blame the drink for lots of different things ‘oh I’m sorry I yelled abuse at you mate, I was pissed, weren’t me talking’, or ‘I won’t do it again love, she meant nothing to me, I was pissed, I didn’t mean it.’ But when do these alcohol fuelled mistakes fall short of the mark when it comes to apologies? When does the alcohol induced sub-life that you use to escape transcend to become the real world, and this drunkard persona- the real you?
Loved ones shouldn’t have to put up with you yelling abuse time after time and then not remembering a thing about it the next day. Friends started not returning my calls and after continued efforts to get in touch would eventually send me an e-mail telling me where to go. They’d had enough- too many late night breakages, too many wanton drunken speals that have caused too much offence to cope any longer. The old excuse of blaming the drink wouldn’t swing anymore, the occasions had clearly become too frequent and too harsh that they started to believe what I was saying when drunk and thought I was expressing my true feelings, and just felt guilty when sober so tried to make up for it, and who could blame them, perhaps that was what I was doing. But I didn’t think so, which made it even harder, because I only had a vague idea what it was that I had done wrong it made it very hard for me to say sorry. No-one wants to hear an apology that is only being said because you feel you have to, it’s almost as if you aren’t really sorry for what you’ve done.
There are two different trains of thought when it comes to drunken talk. Half of people believe that what you say when you are drunk reflects your true feelings and that only because you are drunk are you saying them, and would normally keep them trapped up tight in your head so as not to cause offence. The other half of the world believe that what you say when you’re drunk is just a load of crap, you’re saying whatever comes into your head and much of it is nonsense. Well it seems that the only friends of mine that remained were people that had fallen into the second group. ‘He’s only pissed,’ they must have thought time and time again.
“Perhaps you could give me an example of something terrible that you did that meant you lost your friends.”
She must be reading my mind! I looked about the place again and considered leaving. The thought even crossed my mind to find another pub where there were no troublesome councillors with shocking red hair to make me confess my sins.
“Why do you think that will help?” I said.
“Well it helps for us to face up to our problems, acknowledge what we’re done and then take the consequences, face the music like a man.”
“Erum. Well I know the day that I realised it was the beginning of the end. The day that I realised I probably had a problem and that things couldn’t go back to the way they were and my actions had finally had a permanent affect.”
“Go on.”
“Well it was a normal evening really. Must have been about five years ago now. I was living not far from here, Fulham Palace road, in a house that my uncle had brought to rent out. Myself and three friends had needed somewhere to live so it had seemed like a good idea to move in there. I was celebrating as I’d just started a new job that very day, I’d been out of work for quite a while and so was pretty broke. However with my last £10 I decided to buy three bottles of wine instead of spending it on food or something sensible, like rent.
“Anyway we all settled down to watch a new series of Big Brother and I set to the drinking in a most studious manner. My mouth running away with me as it usually does. Now these three friends I meet just after finishing university and moving to London, back in those days we’d all worked in pubs and record stores and the only things we’d lived for had been pubbing, clubbing and drinking. Invariably matching each other bottle for bottle every night of the week. Was that something that just came with youth though, for as we grew older they all started to drink less and I more so? Until it reached the point where it was just me that was drinking in the evening, every evening. They would wait for the weekends like most other people seemed to. It is a strange experience to realise that instead of counting the evenings that you do drink, you are counting the ones that you don’t, which end up becoming few and far between.
“On this particular evening things descended further and further until I started spouting spiteful things at the three of them. ‘Why do you have to drink so much, it turns you into a bastard?’ My friend Johnny had asked at one point, ‘just to spite you,’ I had answered, the venom behind my voice clear and obvious. Eventually I hadn’t been able to put up with them as I saw it ‘havin a go at me’ any longer so had gone out on my own to a club, not a penny to my name, I wish I could remember what on earth if did for drinks. Several hours and far too much booze later I’d returned to the house, where they were all now in bed, with two young girls who seemed to hang around in my local illegal off licence in tow- cackling and falling all over the place as we half fell and half staggered through the front door. It turned out, from talking to the owner of said shop a few days later, that I had offered them both a place to stay in my flat indefinitely if they so wished as long as they brought me some booze and came back to my flat to help me drink it.
“Each of my flatmates came and asked for us to keep the noise down at some point over the next few hours and all I’d done is yell abuse at each of them in turn, getting louder and louder as the night had gone on, being more and more offensive and abusive. I must have called them every name under the sun before I eventually passed out on the toilet, an empty bottle of vodka in one of my hands.
“The next day I’d woken to a huge hangover, unlike any I’d come across before or since and to an empty house. And when I say empty, I mean ‘empty!’ They’d taken everything. My flatmates were all in work and I was curled up round the u-bend of the toilet dead to the world on the bathroom floor. The two girls who’d come to stay must have seen their chance and taken it, perhaps arranging for a friend to come round and help empty the place whilst it was void of life. It was actually pretty amazing that I had not woken up. How on earth they’d managed to get one of the sofas out of the door without making a sound or to arouse suspicion amongst the neighbours was amazing. I just didn’t understand it. There was no way that I was going to stay there and deal with my flatmates on a hangover so I’d left the home as soon as I could and gone round to a my mum’s house for the weekend. Unable to go to the job that I’d just got, so therefore losing that as well. Quite the night.
“When I’d finally met up with the guys on the Monday evening I had expected for them to come down on me like the proverbial ton of bricks, which they didn’t. I’d expected rows and tantrums and for them to yell at me long and hard and for me to just have to sit there and take it as I had always had to in the past. But strangely enough they remained quiet throughout, sitting high backed three abreast on the sofa in the front room. They were grave and serious and it seemed more like a formal interview panel or disciplinary hearing for a repeat child offender by the school governors than four flatmates sitting around in their empty sitting room.
“‘Lucky they couldn’t get that sofa out the door eh,’ I’d said, making a very ill advised joke about our robbery, due to my bedroom being in the converted attic room I had been the only one who had got away from the robbery unscathed.
“’We’re going to move out,’ said Johnny, clearly elected spokesman for the three of them.
“And that was all they said. Nothing more. A few more lines to let me know they were series and how long it would be before they went, but apart from that they remained stony faced and silent throughout. Perhaps we could have gone on longer but I couldn’t take their looks or plain faced simplicity with how they were treating someone who was supposed to be their best friend. But then I suppose that was the point- they wouldn’t have thought I would ever be able to act like that toward them, saying the things that I did, and inviting people into our house who would steal all their worldly possessions. It was merely my own medicine that they felt they were giving me and boy did it hurt.”
The girl had drained her glass to half empty by the time I’d finished my drink. I looked at my own glass to where the ice had now melted, the last few resilient pieces floating vacantly about in the brown, murky liquid. I had never wanted to drink it so much but also so little at the same time. It really was a paradox being an alcoholic. No matter what you go through, however many friends you lose or loved ones you hurt, no matter how many years you go without a drink, no matter what happens, if you sit down at a bar with a drink in front of you, a tiny piece of your brain will want to drink it. Some part of you will want that beautiful cloudy oblivion that only alcohol can bring. It is exactly why they say that once you are an alcoholic you will always be one, the best you can hope for will be to be a recovering alcoholic, which I now hopped I was.
“So what happened after that?” she said, sipping from her drink in what seemed like a provocative manner. Was she trying to cause a reaction in me? Or merely drinking her drink, the drink that she, as a non-alcoholic was more than entitled to have, after all she had not come to this bar to listen to me go on and on about my problems, but to have a quiet drink to help her relax on a Friday evening.
“Well, after that,” I went on, “they all moved out, about two or three weeks later. And in way of adding injury to insult they refused to pay the final bills, leaving me with £600 to cover on my own, something I really did not need.”
“And what did you learn?”
“Not to invite girls into my house that steal all your things?”
“Anything else?”
“Don’t trust Greek’s bearing gifts?”
“Seriously.”
“Well why don’t you tell me, you’re supposed to be the professional.”
She sat back on her seat and took a good look at me. I suddenly became very self conscious. She was not perhaps as plain as I may have given her credit for when we first met. In fact there was something about her eyes that drew me toward her. Strangely enough there was something there that told me she was listening to me. She seemed to be able to feel empathy just by looking at me, and I could see a hint of sadness as well. Instead of it making me feel uncomfortable and patronised as this normally did, I felt comforted, like there was someone that understood me finally.
“What was the worst thing that you took away from the experience with your friends?”
“The worst thing? Probably the fact that I’d disappointed them, let them down one time too many and they just couldn’t see any other way out of it than to leave me to myself. Let me drag my own way out of the pit I’d thrown myself into.”
“Did you hate them for abandoning you?”
“At first yes. Other friends told me that it was wrong of them to reject me like that. But one day I bumped into Billy, one of the guys I’d lived with, the one I was probably closest to, in the street and we’d gone for a drink. He cried in front of me. Told me how hard it had been having to leave me like that. But they honestly thought that they were doing the right thing. Constantly forgiving someone just for them to turn round and do something worse isn’t the way to help them. They thought that to save the friendship that we had they would have to let me go so that I could sort myself out.
“I think different processes work for different people. I quite easily could have used the rejection as a negative aspect and retreated further into myself, become even more of a drinker as so many people before me had. But instead I chose to use the kick up the arse they had chucked my way. I am not saying that I was cured that day, in fact it took several years after that. But that day was the beginning of the end. That was the day I realised that I had to stop hiding from myself and face up to the fact that I had a problem.”
“And what are you going to do now?”
“Now?”
“Yes, from now on, what are you going to do?”
“Well, much the same as I’ve been doing for the last three years probably. Try and tell myself what a bad idea it is to have a drink. The only thing is- it’s so tiring. It’s a constant pressure, a constant thing to think about, and something that has come to define me as a person. ‘Hey you know that guy Pip?’ ‘Pip? No don’t think I know him.’ ‘Ye you do, the alchy!’ ‘Oh ye, the alchy, I know him.’”
“Yup, it’ll be that. Tiring I mean. For the rest of your days probably. But remember that you’re doing the right thing and you’ll be fine. Keep your pecker up as you English love to say.”
A pause hung between us. The song on the stereo in the background came to an abrupt end and the general hub of conversation in the bar rose to compensate. I realised quite how much I had been speaking, my throat hurt. It felt like a great relief to be getting it all off my chest to someone who did not know me and could only form an opinion on what I said, and what I showed her.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Are you really a councillor?”
“No,” she said, a coy smile spreading across her pretty mouth. “I’m a primary school teacher. Which I suppose has elements of counselling involved with it. But then to be honest there doesn’t really seem like there’s that much to it- ask the right questions and let the person talk away.”
“I was thinking that maybe I could take you for a non-alcoholic drink some time?”
“Really?…well I’d love to but…I don’t think my boyfriend would be too happy about that. It’s one thing sitting in bars with boys and meeting accidentally, but going on an actual date, he might be a little funny about.”
“Boyfriend! Oh, sorry, didn’t realise, I just assumed because…”
“…What? Because I’m sat in a bar on my own talking to you that I must be interested in you?”
“No of course not, I just…well…you know…where is he?”
“He’s late. He’s supposed to have met me here 20 mins ago. And lucky for you that he was eh. Otherwise you never would’ve been able to access the fantastic depth of my extreme knowledge would you.”
“If I ever have a child you can teach it!”
“Well thank you very much,” she said, blushing slightly and sitting back to look about the place.
“What about your girlfriend then?” she said eventually. The music had been raised to an annoyingly audible din, Friday night slowly moving onto the next phase, I imagined in a few hours slow dances and hurried calls to flatmates to clean up any embarrassingly messy bedrooms in advance of regrettable one night stands.
“Ex-girlfriend.”
“Is there any chance of you two sorting it out then?”
“I don’t think so. We’d been drifting apart for a while now, this break-up has been a long time coming and to be honest I just feel a little bit relieved. I think I’ve probably become a bit boring since I’ve stopped drinking.”
“I bet you haven’t.”
“No it’s ok, I don’t mind. It’s better than what I used to be like.”
I looked up at her, she was running her hand through her short hair again, ruffling it about until it lay in a more satisfactory, but very similar way. She smiled warmly at me.
“And what about your boyfriend, everything going well with him?”
She looked up, about to answer me, but then something over my shoulder grabbed her attention.
“Oh, there he is,” she said, waving her arm to attract his attention.
Suddenly a huge bouncer sized guy in a too tight suit appeared at her side and into our little world. He grinned inanely at her and leaned low to kiss her on the cheek.
“David,” she said, “I’d like you to meet…”
“Pip,” I jumped in, suddenly aware that I didn’t know her name either. “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you,” said the beefcake, who had a similar thick Nu Yook accent to the girl. “Sorry I’m late honey, traffic was terrible.”
“That’s ok. Pip here has been keeping me entertained. Shouldn’t we be going?”
“Ye, table’s booked for 8, we’re already pretty late. Pip, let me buy you a drink man, say thanks for keeping my girl company.”
He put his hand in his jacket pocket, ready to take his wallet out. I stopped him by raising my hand.
“No, that’s fine. Thank you but I really don’t want a drink.”
My eyes meet with the girl’s and I noticed that her subtle smile was also now reflected in her eyes.
“It was a pleasure meeting you Pip,” she said, her hand out stretched. I shook it warmly.
“It was indeed,” I said. “And thanks for the advice.”
She nodded and I glanced quickly at David who smiled down at me. I returned his smile rather awkwardly and then turned back to face the bar as they left. I noticed them holding hands as they ambled from the bar, clearly in no particular hurry to make their dinner arrangement.
“You done with that?” said the bartender, leaning somewhat distractedly over the bar and pointing at my still full glass of Jack Daniels, the ice now completely melted, a mere reminder of what had once been.
“Do you know,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “I think I probably am.”

THE END