Читать книгу Glover’s Mistake - Nick Laird - Страница 11

They had met in the Bell two years ago. David was trying to mark essays when the barman put some folk music, extravagantly loudly, on the stereo. Miming how to twist a dial, David said, ‘Sorry, mate, could you turn it down a bit? Too much accordion for me.’

‘My dad used to play the accordion.’

David smiled weakly, showing no teeth, trying for polite dissuasion.

‘He met my mum at a church concert. Without the accordion I wouldn’t be here.’ The barman grinned—a kind of slackening that made his face charming.

‘Does he still play?’

‘On state occasions.’

Wearing a grey T-shirt and dark blue canvas trousers of the sort David associated with plumbers, the barman was athleticlooking with very square shoulders; and these he hunched forward as he rested against the glass-doored fridge, so his T-shirt hung concavely, as if blown on a washing line. The hair on his head was short, black, artfully mussed with wax. David’s mother would have said he had the forehead of a thief, meaning it was very low, but his eyes would have won her over. They were widely spaced and a light, innocent blue. The way his heavy eyebrows sloped towards a neat, feminine nose seemed to grant his face sincerity. David liked him—James Moore Glover—at once. A friendship, too, is a kind of romance.

Glover did all the newspaper crosswords when it wasn’t too busy, and since David always sat at the bar, marking at lunchtimes, or for an hour after work, he was often on hand to help. And talking in the sardonic, ruminative, unhurried way of two men who happen to be in the same place, they discovered that they made each other laugh.

A few months after Glover had started in the Bell, he looked up and scratched unthinkingly at his cheek, where light acne scars were still visible, and David noticed he wasn’t working on a crossword. He was circling flat-shares in Loot. He’d been staying with his boss Tom and Tom’s girlfriend, but the couple were splitting up and selling their flat; he had to move out.

After a pint and a half of German lager David said, ‘Mate, you know, I’ve a spare room. You could stay there if you’re stuck.’

Glover arrived with Tom, his worldly goods in the boot of the bar manager’s BMW. It turned out the bar manager was also Glover’s cousin. David and he disliked each other instantly. Tom remembered him from the pub, he said, as if that was somehow damning and odd, and he walked round the flat with a cursory, dismissive air; he’d seen it all before, or if not exactly this, then something close enough. He said, ‘Going to make tea for us then or what?’ and as David carried the tray through to the living room, he heard him whisper to Glover, ‘You’d best make sure you’ve a lock on your door.’ After he’d left, David had made it plain that this certainly wasn’t that kind of set-up, and Glover appreciated, he thought, his candour. James had six wine boxes of books, several bin bags of clothes and a five-foot bay tree in an earthenware pot. The tree had a slim trunk and a perfect afro of thick, waxy leaves. The pot got cracked on the door jamb and they replanted it into the plastic red bucket David used for the mop. It was still there now, in David’s living room, in its temporary home.

Glover’s stopgap fix also settled into permanence. Initially circumspect, tidying up, knocking on doors, apologizing for polishing off the milk, they quickly developed the shorthand of flatmates. Glover came from Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast and his low-pitched voice had the slightest suggestion of an East Anglian accent: he lengthened vowels and weakened the second syllable in thinking, drinking, something. He didn’t take sugar in his tea. His sudden violent sneezes seemed to come in threes.

He was muscular, and stayed fit by running every day along the river and the wind-picked streets of south-east London, his iPod strapped to his waist, his footfalls keeping time with his soundtrack of deep house. Glover claimed that he used to be a lot bigger, meaning fatter, and then at the end of his first year in college at Norwich he’d taken up jogging, and now greeted each day with the devotions of a hundred press-ups and sit-ups. David disliked and admired and envied that disciplined part of his flatmate. Glover’s orderly mind was dominated by its left hemisphere. His toiletries stood grouped at one end of the windowsill, all their labels facing forwards; David’s were scattered throughout the bathroom, or propped upside down in various corners, distilling the last of their contents into their caps. While Glover wired plugs, changed fuses, replumbed the leaky washing machine, David made cups of tea and hovered. He could ask Glover about cold fusion, about the white phosphorus the Americans were using, about a car’s suspension, about enriching uranium, and Glover would explain it with a nerdish enthusiasm. The television occasioned some of his greatest triumphs. A programme about land speed record challengers led to an explanation of how those parachutes that shot out behind the vehicles worked. He fetched an A4 pad and a pen from his room, drew some diagrams to illustrate the dynamics of a drogue (his word). His measured speech, with its tiny lilt, sped up with excitement, and David felt he was one of those swollen, empty parachutes, dragging behind, slowing him down.

David liked the fact that Glover knew, that someone knew, how everything functioned. It was reassuring. These exchanges of information were interspersed with the usual male distractions: anecdotes, comparisons and lists, the one-upmanship of clambering humour; someone would say something funny, and the other would take the conceit one step further. And when Glover cracked up, the husky rev of his laugh never failed to ignite David’s. Watching him put up the shelves that had been leaning in the hallway for three years, David asked if he ever thought he might go back and finish his degree: he’d dropped out of a mechanical engineering course. Glover had a screw in his mouth, and it fell on the laminate floor, hitting his foot and skittering across to the doormat.

‘Yeah, thing is, I came back after the first summer looking a bit different. It was weird. I’d lost all the weight and was taking these antibiotics for my skin—and I couldn’t get over the fact that people suddenly changed. People who wouldn’t give me the time of day in the first year were now all over me like a rash. I didn’t feel like anyone was real. I hated it.’