Friday night in PB

(Here's another Port Brokeferry flash.)

AN ODD FRIDAY NIGHT AT ‘THE SHIP’

They’d gone for a drink after work. Like it was something they always did. Twice in the one week and already it felt familiar to them both. And just as eyebrows had been raised in the staffroom when neither of them had turned up for lunch, so in ‘The Ship’ they were raised when Dodie Bredwell did not take up his usual seat.

They sat at a table in the corner, removed from the rest, and the air in the bar felt thinner than usual and quieter too. There was something out of the usual about that Friday night and there were men in ‘The Ship’ who did not know where to look or did not know how they should be with Dodie Bredwell’s stories out of hearing for the first Friday that they could remember.

It was an odd Friday night in ‘The Ship’, and no mistake. Of course, the fair was in and that always made a difference, but it was more than that. Definitely odd. No escaping it. Guthrie did not meet with Magnus for a game of chess. The board was set up in the usual place and the men in ‘The Ship’ kept looking to the empty chairs as if they knew something was missing but could not say what.

And Lachlan Davie did not look up when Christine was at the bar, stared instead into the froth of his beer, as if there might be a message for him written there. And Christine said him good evening, all smiles in her words. ‘Good evening, Lachlan.’ And in the saying of his name there was more than just ‘good evening,’ but Lachlan pretended not to hear. Christine left the bar without drinking the glass of gin and lemon that she had ordered and paid for.

And Kyle was in only briefly. Leaned across the bar so no-one else could hear and asked for vodka by the bottle. He paid and left without speaking to another soul. There was a mark on his neck, like a bruise, like he was a teenager again and maybe there was a new girl in his arms when he went out into the dark.

And Evelyn, drinking alone and drinking hard, like she was washing away who she was, and she looked as though she had been crying, and she did not speak to the man who sat down beside her, not a single word, so that after five minutes of trying the young man gave up and moved to another table and another girl who could be charmed.

But oddest of all was Alice. Never seen in ‘The Ship’ before this week, and there she was again. Alice and Dodie Bredwell, the two of them turned in on themselves like they had secrets to share.

The barman brought their drinks to the table, carried them through on a small tin tray, and that raised eyebrows, too. He’d thought about draping a white tablecloth over his arm like he was a waiter in a posh restaurant. A bottle of white wine they’d asked for. Picked it from the wine menu that was hidden behind the bar, the plastic leather-look cover sticky with spilled coke. The barman served the wine in a bucket of broken ice and set two long-stemmed glasses down in front of them. Dodie Bredwell only ever drank beer, so that wine was odd, too.

‘He calls her Alley-cat,’ said the barman when he returned to the bar and the men there already deep in their drinks and confused that there was more noise outside than there was inside in their Friday night ‘Ship’. ‘And he keeps touching her, like he’s checking that she’s real.’ The men nodded then, as if they suddenly understood, and they winked and grinned at each other and clinked their glasses together as if toasting some event of small importance. ‘And she calls him Toadie. All these years and he has names for us all, names we were never born to, and he was just Dodie Bredwell with his own seat at ‘The Ship’ and Fridays and Saturdays he holds court here like he owns the place. And she calls him Toadie.’

There was laughter then, sounding louder than it was in the unusual quiet of 'The Ship' on a Friday night, but the laughter did not draw Dodie Bredwell's attention away from Alice Greyling, from the woman he called Alley-cat. She was talking, her hands making bird-like movements in the air like she was performing a spell, and all she was doing was telling him the stories of her life; and he was listening, the man that used to be Dodie Bredwell was listening, and maybe that was the oddest thing of all.