In every bar, on every street, there’s a lonely man just dying to tell you his life story.  You barely even have to start a conversation with him.  You just have to catch his eye accidently, or shake your head when he askes if the seat next to you is being used by anybody.

‘Wor lass ya see, she’s in the General, but they divnta kna what’s wrong with her…’

This man appears to have no neck.  Or maybe it’s just the coat he’s wearing.  His head is so small I actually marvel at it while he shouts at me over the music.

‘… lungs full of liquid like.  Three weeks she’s been in…’

Jesus.  How did I get into this conversation.  I smile and nod at what I think are the right moments.  Inside I’m containing the urge to scream, run, explode.  I’m always containing that urge.  The man begins saying something about music.  First his dying girlfriend, now music.  I haven’t been listening for a few minutes and suddenly it becomes obvious I’ve been asked a question.

‘What?’ I shout back

‘Are yer muscians, like?’

Here’s my chance.  Warren has been sitting on the other side of me the whole time.  Here’s my chance to drag him in without him even realising.

‘Not me, no.  But Warren’s a DJ’

Lean back and let nature take it’s course.

‘Are ya any good like?’

Warren hesitates but can’t resist talking about his music.  As he begins, I stand and
tell them both I need to take a piss.

The toilets are small and empty except for one other guy.  I don’t feel like standing next to him at the urinals so I head for the cubicle.  I pull some toilet roll and pretend to blow my nose as loud as I can, then take a piss.  This gives the impression that I went into the cubicle to blow my nose and figured I might as well piss while I’m there.  I never see the guys face and by the time I’m finished, he’s dissappeared for ever. 

In the mirror I look good.  Not my best, but good.  My hair is too long but safely pushed up under my black beanie, which sets off my eyes which are big and bright and set between long, thick eye-lashes.  My nose is thin, but mostly anoyomous, as a nose should be.  My lips and mouth are handsome and well-propotioned with my angular, hair-less chin.  I wear an natural expression of silent intensity which startles some people and intrigues others.  I pull back my shoulders to feel broader then I am then head back into the bar.

As I hoped, Warren is now locked in full conversation with the lonely, intrusive man.  I can see his disdain at having to listen but his eyes never move.  Regardless of our money, or cars, or the pints that sit comfortably in our hands, we are still boys, and when unhinged men talk to us in bars we humour them until closing if we must.

I sit back and sip my pint.  My body is tense and my teeth are grinding slowly in my head.  There is a coiled kinetic energy that coarses up and down my right leg, making my knee vibrate violently beneath the table.  I rub my eyes to squeeze some of the tiredness out of them and come across a slight bump near to the top of my left eye-lid.  Immedately my thoughts race to the grimest possibilities: cataract, hemmorage, tumour.  A girl in a short skirt starts walking towards me to the door on my right.  I chance a gleam at her and she does a proffesional job of ignoring me. 

I don’t mind this place.  It is in a basement, for one thing, which I always prefer to something with big windows that you just walk into.  The music is being played by a bald, middle-aged looking man on some decks.  It’s just back-ground stuff, reggea and r’n’b, but he enjoys himself without making a meal of it.  The clinetele is a typical hybrid of Ben Sherman-clad townies and side-partened students, mingling at opposite ends of the floor.  They are the moderates of their respective tribes, who are happy to co-exist on the grounds of mutal appreciation of the bar, it’s prices and it’s tunes.  Even so, I never see the point in staying in one place for too long and I decide I want to leave after this drink.

Warren and the man are in what would appear to be a fasinating exchange of ideas, but when I tap him on the shoulder and suggest we leave he gets immedately to his feet and agrees.  We gather our coats, swallow the dregs of our lager and head for the exit, giving the lonely man a thumbs-up and a smile as we pass.  Just before we get out the door, I notice the man gaze back out across the room, looking for someone else to talk to.

‘Quite an interesting guy’ Warren lies.

I wish he’d admit he was just intimidated.  I wish he’d admit he rather have been looking at girls and quietly drinking for the last twenty mintues. 

‘Where next then, big man?’ I ask cheerfully’

Apparantly there’s an our-door bit to this place, with heaters.  It sounds like fun so we go.

As we walk down the street, Warren and I chat about our new flat and how we should have a party there.  The alcohol is slowly being to pervert our vowels and turn up the volume of our speech.  Suddenly we are rich with good ideas and the conviction to follow them.  We pass a gaggle of middle-aged men outside a pub, all with skin-heads.  They smoke and laugh and when a pretty young girl with loud heels passes them in the opposite way to us I hear one of them say:

‘Fuck me Jimmy, reckon that’s going to the Queen’s tonight?’

and other says

‘Aye I hope so!’.

and they laugh.

And that word, the ‘that’s’, it echoes in me for a little while, and I feel at one with the one who said it and I hate him. 

We walk on through thick crowds of people.  We slope down and out of the chaos.  For a stretch of a hundred feet or so, we pass along the side of the river in virtual isolation.  The street-lamps frown gentley down upon the ripples.  They paint stripes of gold across the black belly of the water, like some kind of war-paint, rolling and rising as though quiet defiance of something, perhapes the gradual distruction of it’s banks that overflow with litter.  A few boats are tied-up out in the middle of the tide, sleeping in the moon-light.  I bet they have amazing dreams, boats.

‘Shit! Haha!  Look at this!’ says Warren.

I look at him and realise he has found a ten pound note.  Inside I grumble with jealously. 

‘Bastard.’ I tell him ‘You’re a lucky bastard.’

He smirks at me and I laugh back and then we laugh together.  We discuss the good fortune of it at some length. 

At the end of the road by the river we turn back in towards the other end of town and see a tramp.  He doesn’t approach us or even say anything, he just sits there cross-legged, with a small dog resting in his lap.  He’s got a baseball cap laid out in front of him, and it’s as I examine that I notice the tramp isn’t a tramp at but a homeless kid.  Warren stops what he was saying, perhaps so that we don’t make him feel worse.  A few feet down the road Warren stops suddenly, turns around, finds the ten pound note and hands it to the kid who thanks him.

‘Are you having a good night?’ askes Warren, which is the only thing that spoils it. 

I understand though.  I wouldn’t know what to say either.

We continue walking, and I tell Warren he did a good thing there and he shrugs and I realise I love him, he is a good friend and a good person.  We reach the bar and walk inside.

The lager in my stomach is making me feel bloated so I buy a double-vodka with coke.  Warren buys a pint of ale because, unlike me, his pallete is refined enough to enjoy its flat warmth.  We sit down and begin to chat.

This place is better then the last.  We’re warm beneath the winter sky and I enjoy this novelty immensley because I know how cold it is outside.  The alcohol is having the effect that I love it for; my knee has stopped shaking and I feel detatched.

Warren goes to get us some more drinks.  I look around.  There are two girls sitting on the table besides ours.

One of them has blonde hair that drapes over her shoulders to an unseen length on her back.  She has a large birth-mark on the nape of her neck and wide eyes.

The other one is older.  She has brown hair; long at the front and shorter at the back.  Her neck is long and thin.  She takes animated draws on a ciggerette and surveys the room with a tired expression.  I get the impression they may be sisters.

‘Do you have a light?’ I ask the youngest one, pushing a box of matches further down into my pockets.

She doesn’t say anything, but begins searching in her hang-bag.  It’s made from patches of Andy Warhol paintings – I like it and I tell her so.

‘Thanks.  It was a present.’ She says. 

At this point the older girl looks at me for the first time.  She examines me with caution then relaxes.

‘I saw some Warhol installations at the Sage’ I tell her.  ‘There was a Dahli excibit on at the same time’

She looks interested so I continue talking.

‘There was a piece of his – I can’t remember what it was called – it was a lobster on top of a telephone.  Apparantely the idea was that…’

‘That you’re speaking into it’s balls.’ said the older girl.

I smile, exhale my ciggerette and rock back slightly on my seat.

‘Well yeah.  If it was male.’

‘Do you always talk about art to impress girls?’ the older one askes rhetorically.

‘More to see if they’ll impress me, I think.’

I’m trying to decided wether that was a good thing to say, wether it was witty, or arrogant, or just sucicidal.  As I do this the girls begin talking with each other.  Thankfully Warren arrives at this moment with our drinks and begins telling me about someone he meet at the bar.  This allows me to pretend I’m indifferent to what has happened.  After a short time I try to catch the younger girls eye, to see if we might share a more positive assesment of things.  It occurs to me that the older girl might be some over-bearing friend, that the blonde girl herself might actually have wanted to talk to me. Instead she notices me looking at her, whispers something to her friend.  A moment later they stand up to leave. 

‘Do I look scary do you think?’ I ask Warren

‘Scary?’

‘Intimidating.  Spooky.  Worrying.’

‘No.’ Warren tells me.  ‘But you do look for too long.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Girls.  You look at them for too long.  It’s meant to be a passing glance, anything more is asking too much.’

‘I see.’ I say, and ponder it for a moment.

More swallowing, more looking around.  Why do I always feel as though I’m in a gallery.  I’m surrounded by beauty, but it’s stuck to a wall.  It’s stuck there out of touch and I didn’t paint a jot of it. 

But maybe I can.  Maybe I can write.  Maybe I’ll write all this down in a timeless diatribe.  I’ll observe all of it through the eye of a rapier.  I’ll shake my fist at the world and some of them will listen.  But if I try, if I stop and really try, won’t I just discover that I can’t?  Where would I be then?  And what will I have left, without being able to get drunk and imagine it’s possible?  I’ll be drunk, that’s where I’ll be.  And hopeless.  No, don’t think like that.  Don’t make more things to think about like that.  Life is good and your problem is ignoring it.  You shake your knee and grind your teeth and knot your hair around your fingers to pull it tight and you do it all day and you never relax but you should.  Life is good.  There is a lot of good in your life.

Warren is talking about his girlfriend.  I’m sure I cared once, but he repeats the same things everyday.  He loves her but he wants his freedom.  When he has a girlfriend, he fantasizes about being single, when he’s single, he’s terrified of being alone.  This is youth.

It is good, this self-concious time of ours.  But a boy becoming a man can’t help but sometimes feel a guitly longing for a time when women were loyal and oblivious.  If it ever existed.  I doubt it ever exsisted.  But what a thought, and I wonder if they share it, women – a dream where men are thoughtful and keen.  We pursue it now, I guess. 

‘Let’s go clubbing.’ Suggest Warren.

I shrug my shoulders and nod. 

We que for the club and dip in and out of our conversation and the conversations of others flow past us in jig-saw pieces and I can fill in most of the gaps.  It paints pictures good and ugly, obvious and strange.  I answer it in my head.

I find some E.  It does nothing.  It used to.  It used to perform mircales.  But now I wonder around the lights and smoke and the snare of the drums and the thud of the bass and I don’t feel anything.  There is nothing good and there is nothing bad. 

I cross the bridge home, over the water.  Over the sleeping boats and the warrior ocean and past the tramps blowing hot air through their fingers and I jump.  I jump and land and the ice swallows me whole.  They told me, they said it to me time and time again.  Don’t drink alone.  Don’t go out and drink alone.