Another Friday PB piece

(Yet another Friday night piece from Port Brokeferry)

BUSINESS AT BERLIE’S

Thursday night at Berlie’s many of the rides had been free, at least to start with. Thursday night was always the same, first Thursday of the run. It was about announcing the arrival of the fair. The rides were a little longer and sometimes ran with only three or four people on them. And being the first night, the smiles of those working the stalls were a lot brighter. Making a splash is what Thursday was about, so that Berlie’s would be the talk of everyone’s Friday and that would bring them back in numbers to Berlie’s at the end of the working week.

Friday night was different. It was about making money now. There was a new zeal in the stall-holders as they urged the people of Port Brokeferry to spend spend spend, with the promise of prizes that only ever looked good at the fair where the lights were bright and the music loud. And Friday-night rides did not run until they were full, all the cars filled to bursting and ‘one more in here’ the boy with the leather satchel across his shoulder called.

Kelso was working the dodgems. Looked like he was dancing the way that he moved between the cars, skipping from the bonnet of one to the other. Girls called to him and waved when he turned their way. He flicked his hair from his face – they liked that – and he made jokes with them, and steered their cars into the paths of others, skipping away at the last minute before the girl-scream collisions.

Some cars got stuck. They’d turned the wheel too far in the one direction and could not work out how to get the car out of the jam they were in. Kelso kept a look out for them, then hop-scotched his way to the stuck car and twisted the wheel with an easy expertise, as if by magic setting the car back on course. The boys scowled at Kelso’s superior skill; the girls flirted with him and they called him sweetheart and touched his hand, pretending it had been by accident, and laughing too loud when they did. That was how it was in every place they stopped, how it had been with Evelyn, a whole year back.

They came drunk to Berlie’s some nights, girls in groups with too short skirts and too much make up. Ended up without their clothes, some of them, in the dark of one of the trailers, waking to what they had done and regretting it mostly. Kelso had regretted it too, sometimes. Evelyn was one of those times. They’d got carried away. He’d been drunk, and that explained the tattoo on her arm. He’d forgotten that he’d done it.

‘I thought it meant something,’ she’d said in the street.

It hadn’t. Not with any of them. Just part of the way things were. Except then there was Grace. That was different. He couldn’t really say how it was different, except that he had thought about her for a year. Maybe it was all tied up with the growing sense in him, that he wanted more than the merry-go-round of Berlie’s, but alone in the dark of his trailer he had spun stories of how life could be better and in all those stories he was standing hand-in-hand with Grace.

Then Evelyn said she thought his name scratched under the skin of her arm meant something.

‘Over here, Kelso, over here.’

Two girls in matching jean jackets and white skirts and white shoes, called to him, blew kisses for him to catch and laughed as their car turned away from him.

‘I was drunk,’ he’d told her when she came to his trailer late on Thursday. The lights of the fair were out and Grace had gone home. The air in his trailer smelled of her, the smell of Grace mixed in with the smell of oil and cooked meat and cigarette smoke. ‘We were both drunk,’ he said.

‘Fuck,’ said Evelyn. She was crying. ‘I’ve been wearing your name on my arm for a whole bloody year and all you can say is we were drunk!’

He wanted to say he was sorry. It wouldn’t help, he understood that, but he still wanted to say it. Instead he shrugged his shoulders, as he had done when they’d met in the street earlier. It wasn’t what he wanted for her, but maybe it was easier than telling her about Grace.

She called him heartless and bastard and cunt and she kicked things over in his trailer, broke things. He didn’t stop her. She deserved that.

Kelso helped the two girls in jean jackets climb out of their car at the end of the ride. He could see their pants as they lifted their legs over the side of the car. One of the girls squeezed his hand as she stepped unsteadily on to the flat surface of the dodgem floor. He smiled and let go of her hand.

It was different now.