Читать книгу Seeing the Wires - Patrick Thompson - Страница 19

Eddie Finch met Judy at a party thrown by a friend of someone Jack knew. The party looked as though it had been thrown with some force, if not much accuracy. It was held in all of the open areas of a three-storey town house on the more expensive side of Stourbridge. There was a spiky record playing somewhere, and someone said that someone who’d once been one of Pop Will Eat Itself was being the DJ for the night. Judy talked to me but I couldn’t hear her. I could only hear the record. I was trying to identify it.

I do that with music. I can’t help it. Instead of listening to whoever I’m with, I try to work out what the song is. It isn’t deliberate. It’s my ears. They prioritize. Music over conversation. That may be something to do with the conversations I usually get caught in at parties.

Judy sidestepped a slug of red wine that fell to the carpet with a thud. She looked at me and said something. I laughed, hopefully appropriately. A thin white man with thick dreadlocks gave me a stare that might have cleared the student union bar. It didn’t work in Stourbridge, even on the more expensive side. I gave him a look of my own.

Judy tugged me between people who felt as though they were made of elbows and broomsticks, my can of Supa Brew Ice Special brimming over with high-alcohol, low-taste lager. I saw what she’d seen; Jack, reeling down the stairs, carrying a glass that might have been full before he’d tipped it over a quantity of guests.

Although he’d invited us, Jack wasn’t sure whose party it was. He was fairly sure, he’d said in the Frog’s Sister earlier that evening, that his friend Craig knew someone at the party. It would all be okay. They’d be happy to see us. We could get some drinks from the off-licence on Nail Street and drop in. I wanted to stay in the Frog’s Sister. It was quiz night, and they had easy quizzes if you knew your Black Sabbath albums. When Jack went to the bar to get another round in for himself – ‘You’ve got loads there mate, you don’t need another one’ – I asked Judy whether she’d like to go to the party. I tried to make it sound unappealing.

‘It’ll just be like a student party,’ I said. ‘Lots of people in a house, someone crying on the stairs, someone being sick in the bedroom, lots of people we don’t know. You know.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Judy. ‘I haven’t been a student. I don’t go around with students. I don’t know enough about student parties to know whether I want to go to one or not. It’s just as well you’re here to help me with it, otherwise I might go out and have some fun or something.’

I don’t pretend to know everything about women. I know they like to go in clothes shops for hours picking up things they don’t like and saying how horrible they are. I once asked Spin about it and he shrugged.

‘That’s a shrug, chief,’ Darren said. ‘Easy one. No one understands women, not even women.’

I didn’t understand them. I understood Historic Peculiarities well enough to pass exams. If there had been an exam for understanding women my paper would have been returned with a cutting comment on it and I’d have been forced to retake it the following September. I knew that Judy was in a mood without needing to know anything else. There were clues. She kept putting things down forcefully. She answered questions with sharper questions. She’d mentioned not being a student. That helped. She thought that I was patronizing her by telling her what the party would be like. Add that to her bad mood – and I was usually careful not to add anything to her bad moods, they seemed to get along well enough by themselves – and that was enough.

‘We could go,’ I said. ‘If Jack’s going. I mean, it’s Friday night. It’s not as if we have to get up tomorrow.’

‘Yeah well, if it’s no trouble for you. I’d hate to put you out.’

Just then I wanted to put her out of the window of a moving train, but these tender moments are what makes a relationship special.

‘I’d love to go with you. When I was a student I didn’t go out with anyone like you.’

‘What, female?’

No, beset by inexplicable mood swings. I mean, come on. If I was stuck with a twenty-eight day cycle that sent me insane one week in four – I’m not a biologist, so I might have got some of the details wrong on this – and it started in early adolescence, then by the time I was twenty I think I might just have got the hang of it. I might think, hold on, he hasn’t stopped loving me after all. I might think, I know, I’ll just tell him what the problem is and that’ll be that. I might think, hold on, it’s three weeks since last time this happened, it’ll be menstruation, just like it was last month and the month before that and every other bloody month, and there’s nothing wrong.

Jack returned from the bar with drinks for himself. He’d got a pint and a short. I wanted a pint and a short, and I had half a pint. Judy was drinking gin and tonic.

That’s another thing. If I was female and heading towards the ovary-popping time of the month, I’d steer clear of gin.

Then again, I’ve had plenty of bad times on whisky, and I’ll still drink that if there’s any going.

‘You coming?’ Jack asked, downing his pint. ‘You’ll get in with me. You stick with me,’ he said, arranging himself around Judy and talking into her face from close range, ‘and we’ll be fine. I don’t know about this miserable git though. We might have to dump him somewhere.’

‘Yeah,’ said Judy. ‘What’s wrong with you tonight?’

She drained her gin and tonic and stood up. I followed her to the party, via the off-licence.