For various complicated historical reasons that I can’t go into right now, I occasionally find myself in the entertaining company of athletic young men.
Actually, perhaps I ought to clear this up before I go any further. In the nicest, most innocent and massage-free way imaginable, I occasionally socialise with a couple of former work colleagues, both of whom are much younger than me. Naturally they have a large peer group. I say naturally because they are yet to reach the age where they will look around them and wonder how it came to be that most of their friends have spun out of their orbit like doomed satellites.
It happens just like that. Life peels them away from you one at a time until you reach your late thirties – until you find yourself spiralling helplessly out of your late thirties, perhaps – and discover that there’s just you and a Big Telly and a couple of blokes from across the road who you occasionally borrow power tools from.
Of course I don’t say anything to the lads about this. I don’t sit down at the table and say, ‘well, make the best of tonight, because tomorrow you’ll start to lose your hair and confiscate stray footballs.’ It wouldn’t do to bring the mood down. And who would believe me in any case? I seriously doubt that at the age of twenty-one I would have believed anyone who told me that I would one day earnestly consider what advantages a small upright vacuum cleaner could bring to my life. At that age, the rest of your life is a far flung corner of existence to which, one day, you may possibly travel (and send back monotonous postcards complaining about bad weather and the price of everything), but more likely will not. At twenty-one you still do not fully conceive of your own towering ordinariness.
So my two former colleagues are often to be found in the company of a large, noisy and occasionally aggressive bunch of young men. I see them rarely, and this is how it should be. In the past few years this has meant joining them for a drink at Christmas, an ordeal I undertook out of a dwindling sense of loyalty to my former colleagues. It isn’t that I hate their friends. It is simply that my idea of a good night out has changed so dramatically and fundamentally over the past few years. It has altered to the point where what I once called fun I now consider to be a kind of dreadful distortion of it, a sort of freaky carnival of discordant music and grinning clownish faces like painted-on screams, hot, throbbing claustrophobia and the rousing current of violence crackling in the spaces between bodies. Not to mention the cider with fucking ice cubes in it.
Actually I quite like the cider with fucking ice cubes in it, but the rest you can keep. For me things have changed. These days the highlight of a night out is when they have made a few sandwiches too many for the pool tournament in the other room, and the landlady brings the tray into the snug, and we all perk up like residents of a nursing home at beverage time, and go, “Ooooo!” They are quite unappetising as far as sandwiches go – they taste heavily of margarine and cheap white bread – and yet at the same time they always seem to come as a wonderful surprise.
The most recent invitation to join my old colleagues and their friends on a night of city centre mayhem came by text message. Not a Christmas drink this time, but an equally traditional celebration along the lines of wetting some or other baby’s head. Needless to say I found the idea of wetting the baby’s head about as appealing as giving birth to it in the first place. But against all my instincts, I said yes.
We will now cut to the dance floor, where I am about to be blessed with a spark of understanding. I have by this time drunk many, many pints of beer. I have drunk so many pints of beer that I am filled with the unshakeable conviction that twenty year old girls want to dance with me.
The realisation that they did not, that I was hopelessly drunk and shamefully out of my depth, came to me in a moment of almost gentle lucidity, like a cushion when you didn’t even know you were fallling. Instantly, without so much as a second’s hesitation, I peeled away from the dance floor and found myself standing outside, suddenly chilly and homesick for my little flat and my geeky walking boots and my boring Crowded House CDs.
I have barely any recollection of how I managed to get home. What I do have is a very soupy, dream-like memory of moving, almost as if I was riding along on one of those endless moving pavements they have at the airports. Well they have them at Manchester airport. At Leeds and Bradford airport they just have a loose carpet that two or three blokes pull from one end. I can’t recall any sounds, only a screamed warning to someone who stupidly walked in front of a car, and the voice of the man in Subway asking the same person if he wanted to make it a ‘foot long’, which at the time was the funniest thing anyone had ever said to him.
My only other memory is of trying to eat a meatball sandwich that was an entire foot long. I remember that every time I bit into one end of this monstrous sandwich, concentrating painfully in the way that only drunks with food and locks to open can concentrate, one of the meatballs would shoot out of the other end and splatter against someone’s shirt or dress, leaving a gooey red splodge like a bullet wound. It was like firing the world’s largest pea shooter.
At some point I remember being on my hands and knees, scrabbling around for lost meatballs between people’s feet, and thinking with remarkable clarity, ‘What I wouldn’t give right now for a pathetic boiled ham sandwich in the snug, served in cheap white bread and tasting heavily of margarine.’
I took that to mean ‘Go home,’ and as if by magic, the god of small fools whisked me home in a jiffy, pausing briefly and mysteriously to remove one of my shoes and throw it in a bush.
