An excerpt from Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
While Carmel was falling in love with Derek O’Toole, Richie was twenty-one and ready to begin his life. Somehow three years had passed since he had left school and to his surprise nobody had made him do anything since the day he walked out of his final exam. He hadn’t made a plan because he wanted to take the summer off to have a good time. When the summer ended he felt no more inclination to do anything than he had before it, so he allowed himself another year to decide on the next move.
In the interim he signed on to the dole and worked cash-in-hand in a few pubs around town when they needed someone for busy periods, and rented a box room in Ballybeg on an informal basis from the older brother of a girl he was seeing. After the girl broke up with him the brother threw him out, sick of his prodigious vomiting and foul-smelling 3 a.m. meals left hardening on the counter, leaving the single box of possessions on the front door step. Following this inconvenience he took the same approach to accommodation as he took to working, taking it up whenever it surfaced but not seeking it with any urgency. In between situations there was always Mayor’s Walk, which was tolerable so long as he used it only for sleep and stayed out of his father’s way as much as possible.
He didn’t know why he had expected an intervention, except that it seemed most everyone else he went to school with had one. Either they had made up their minds to study or train or become an apprentice or their parents had proposed a certain kind of job, in some cases even arranged the interview for them. A few moved far away which was a definitive enough action on its own without also needing a career. The ones who couldn’t find anything and went on the dole like him were making plans to try Dublin and London.
It was so tense in Mayor’s Walk in the final few years of school that all his focus was on the day he could leave and not be under anyone’s control any more, he had never seen beyond that. Nor had anyone broached the subject with him. After a substantial amount of time had passed, Rose would occasionally ask if he had any plans when he called in to the house. She always asked while making the tea or cooking, said it casually as though it was nothing to her either way.
The casualness was not unpleasant, or intended to convey indifference, but because of a natural gulf—an awkward absence of natural authority—that existed between she and Richie because they were not related by blood. This gulf varied in its depth over the years, sometimes feeling hardly present at all, but as he had reached his late teenage years it had shifted into a permanent state of significance, separating the two of them. This estrangement was prodded at and worsened by his father, who would call attention to it at any opportunity. If Rose gave some passing bit of advice, John would reflexively say, What would you know, you’re not his mother, and both Rose and Richie would be embarrassed into silence.
So Rose had not guided him as she surely would Carmel when she graduated. And his father had never brought the subject up except to remind him that when school ended he would be expected to pay rent if he stayed in the house.
His father had, to be fair, assumed a general, blanket stance of apathy toward employment as a concept, ever since he had been forcibly removed from the workforce by a catastrophic injury suffered in the factory before Richie was born. One arm had been crushed to near uselessness, and a network of damaged nerves caused him tolerable but constant discomfort. Perhaps it was because of this he could not bring himself to feign enthusiasm for Richie beginning his years as an employable man. Perhaps he liked to know that his son was of as little material value as he felt himself to be.
The year elapsed and still nothing happened to suggest a course of action. He was surprised that no event had had occurred to shape the future, but not unduly alarmed.
He had always drank with the resourceful enthusiasm of someone afraid it would be taken away at any moment, and he began to realize that was exactly what he had expected to happen—that a plan or circumstance would announce itself in his life to make the way he drank impossible.
He felt a sense of indignance when he began to notice slight physical signs of his abuse—around his nostrils threaded veins were becoming apparent, and the skin around his eyelids was often swollen and a livid corpse-like purple.
How was this possible, when he was only twenty?
His stomach, too, was suffering inordinately for what seemed to him only usual behavior. He shifted restlessly in his bed, the feeling of trapped air migrating around his guts and sometimes suddenly changing tack so that it felt as though it had settled dangerously in his chest.
He wondered could you have a heart attack from constipation and diarrhea, the tension creeping over his heart and around the back of his shoulders, a jagged and precarious net of pain which worsened with every breath he took, so that he could only take small shallow ones which did not move his body at all and he felt that he might lose consciousness.
It did sound worrying, he knew that, but he struggled to feel worried. He was with people every night of the week who drank the same way he did, what made him so different that he was going to die of it? When there was nobody obvious to hand, he walked down to the new clubhouse the bikers had started in a shed off Paddy Brown’s Road, calling themselves the Freewheelers. Of course he did not think yet about the fact that the rotation of people alternated through his own evenings which remained the same, their once-a-week sprees fitting in seamlessly to his full-time pursuit.
But still. Not to worry. Something would make itself known, he assumed, and he would make the most of the leisure now, seeing his friends as much as he liked, long hilarious nights around kitchen tables, the burst of euphoria that came with true, painful laughter was so extreme and powerful that it felt obviously to be the real point of life.
One afternoon in town when he was walking around with a bottle of Lucozade waiting for one of the lads to finish work and meet him, he passed a little store front being renovated in the Apple Market and asked the fellow painting the sign what was coming in.
An Italian restaurant, he said looking pleased. The man who bought it is moving down from Dublin, but he’s from Rome originally he told me.
Richie felt a rare stir of decisiveness and desire and asked if he knew were they looking for staff.
I’d say they must be, come back on Saturday when I’m finishing up and I’ll write down his phone number for you.
He thanked the fellow and walked on feeling warm, wonderful, the glow of volition inside him and rendering the evening ahead rich and meaningful.
Richie had his first shift at Mario’s three weeks later, the day before the grand opening.
Who’s Mario? he asked Bella, the daughter of the owner who was explaining the menu and feeding the new staff little samples in dinky paper cups then demanding they give her three adjectives to describe what they tasted.
Mario is nobody, she sighed, My father thought people would like that name better than any of ours. He’s been called Phil his whole life, which doesn’t exactly sing with Italian glamour.
Why not Bella’s? Richie asked her, this harried, pretty woman in her thirties not wearing a ring.
She laughed. Let’s just say I wasn’t the favored child until very recently, when I was the only one who would move down here to do this, she gestured around at the dangling fairy lights and fake plants they had just festooned the low ceiling with.
Do your brothers and sisters not have any interest in restaurants?
No. My sister is married and has young children to look after and my brothers are interested in having a lot of money and people knowing who they are. Maybe they would have wanted it if it was in Dublin or London or Rome but not down here, she said, and he felt mildly cut.
He didn’t like when people spoke about Waterford as though it wasn’t a real place. It made his lack of momentum feel darker than it usually did. She noticed him turn away and end his curiosity and touched him lightly on his shoulder.
I don’t mean to offend you. I like it just fine here. I think it suits me, and he smiled back at her, wanting to make her like it even more than she did, wanting for things to be a success and her to become the golden child of the family.
The waiters were all given white shirts and waistcoats and green aprons to wear because that was the usual get-up in Italy and he felt pleasure trying it on that evening. He had a room let for eight weeks in Merchant’s Quay and he thought after that he would have enough wages saved to find somewhere more settled, longer-term.
The menu was deliberately crowd-pleasing, almost everyone ordered pizzas and spaghetti bolognese and lasagne, but there was a slightly more challenging special every day which Richie enjoyed hearing about from Bella and tasting. He repeated with fondness her enthusiastic advocation for each one even to families who expressed their forceful disinterest toward him as he spoke, the ravioli filled with squash puree and walnut sauce, the squid and roasted red peppers, the gnocchi made with spinach and goat’s cheese.
Bella had a friend of hers come and help her paint a big mural on one wall of a bountiful table full of food and wine, surrounded by laughing friends touching glasses. Bella wasn’t as good a painter as her friend but Richie could see it was meaningful to her to be a part of it, and he enjoyed seeing the small sliver of tongue poking out of her mouth while she concentrated.
After the first week, having survived his first minor disasters, he began to feel that he was good at what he was doing and that it made sense of him as a person somehow. Bella appreciated him. One evening she came into the kitchen white-faced and said she had accidentally served meat to a man who claimed he was a lifelong vegetarian who had never endured the passing of flesh over his lips before.
Which one? asked Richie, immediately suspicious. She described him, Kevin, a pretentious and pretty boy Richie had gone to school with whose current passion was cultivating an air of long-haired mysticism. He scoffed. Tell him I saw him with his face in a bag of sausage and chips every Saturday night for five years, he told her.
She didn’t, but the knowledge made her laugh, and calmed her down.
Every night was like the beginning of a new play in which he held a peripheral but crucial role.
He was at ease moving around, fluid and intuitive. It was because it felt like a performance, he thought. Every night was like the beginning of a new play in which he held a peripheral but crucial role. There was something extremely soothing in the way he was simultaneously on show and necessarily discreet. It was a situation which addressed the discomfort of his life to this point, the dread of ever being a burden on others and the dread of nobody ever paying attention to him. His fear of other people receded in this specificity, where he had a role to fulfill and information to impart and receive and because he was playing a role he was able to respect himself more than he did at other times, straightening his back and making eye contact and smiling boldly.
Six weeks in, on a Friday evening after service ended he drank three large glasses of leftover wine with Bella and Luke, the nicest chef. He was a gregarious Frenchman who made up for being from the wrong romantic European country with the extravagant smacking sounds of enjoyment he made as he cooked, and a general enthusiasm for bringing new food to this place he had moved to for love and where he had been routinely appalled ever since by the sullenly ugly, limp meals on offer. The three of them gossiped about the other two waiting staff, Deirdre and Thomas, teenagers whom they suspected of recently beginning an affair.
Deirdre is always smiling now, have you noticed that? asked Bella, and it’s ever since we had the night out and the two of them went off together at the end of it.
Maybe she’s just smiling because she loves pasta so much, said Richie, and they laughed and he was pleased.
You love pasta so much, said Luke fondly, reaching over and pinching his cheek, you’re getting nice and fat now.
Hey! said Richie, but he had always enjoyed being teased with obvious affection and he didn’t mind it at all.
No, man, it’s a good thing, said Luke. You looked bad when you first started. Not joking, I asked her if she was sure you were going to keep turning up. But you’re doing so great. My best waiter, no mistakes.
Bella smiled at the two of them dopily, her low tolerance for alcohol sated by her share of the now-empty bottle.
I’m tired. Can you open up in the morning, Rich? Remember we have a birthday lunch booking at midday so get here by half-nine to set up, please. I’ll be here at eleven, and she slid the second set of keys over to him.
When Richie left it was only a little after midnight, and he was exultant in the fine weather and the warmth of his new friendships. He walked down onto the quay and felt his body to be stronger and more useful than before, and a dreamy liquidity beginning in his limbs from what he had drank. It was so lovely to be able to drink only a little bit, he thought. Working at the restaurant had been good for him in that way. He was busy trying to get it right and be present for Bella and the rest of them and hadn’t seen much of his usual crowd, hadn’t drank in that way for a few weeks now. This didn’t feel like a sacrifice because he had a drink with the restaurant staff most nights.
These evenings tended to end with one or more of them yawning compellingly, reminding the rest that they were gathered together because they had worked hard for a long time and that they would do so again tomorrow. There was drunkenness, but not the sort which caused physical intrusions the like of which had troubled him before he started to work there. All of this he reflected upon on his languid stroll, glad and surprised that something so significant could change without any enormous will or effort on his part. He had been right, perhaps, that it hadn’t been himself but only his circumstances which needed shifting. He was so pleased, in fact, so proud of the departure from his old way of being, that it occurred to him he could go and see the usual crowd right that moment, and have some more to drink with them.
He was, as it happened, passing the building where his friend Gary Clancy lived and had hosted drinking sessions every Friday night for the past year, and he stopped and stood outside of the door. He thought for a moment, doing a quick calculation and figured if he got to sleep by three he would be absolutely fine to get to the restaurant for half-nine. Young man, full of health, life, light. He could do anything, do it all.
He was buzzed upstairs and received with a rousing round of whooping and shouts of Here he is, the man himself!, a welcome phrase which had always struck Richie as almost unbearably cheering, that feeling of everyone being happy to see you, telling you the night had been lacking something before your arrival. Sitting around the kitchen table were Clancy and four other fellows he knew to varying degrees, boys he had been to school with, and one older man whom he knew only to see. The man was exotically named Lucien though he was a lifelong local and suspected of giving himself the title. He was also, Richie recalled vaguely, suspected of being gay because he lived alone with two cats and put care into his appearance. This suspicion was overlooked or forgiven though because the appearance he took care with was one of great ferocity, safety pins stuck into all manner of surfaces, and hair spiked into enormous threatening towers. In Camden maybe Lucien would have been nothing remarkable but here the dedication to an image as singular and unusual as this was regarded with a twisted respect. To stand out was so abhorrent and insane that someone who did it fully on purpose was accepted as a mad genius. Richie, who had always despaired of his every variance, could see that it almost didn’t matter what you were—so long as you swore yourself to it with total arrogant pride there was little anyone could do to use it against you.
Two yellow-blonde girls he didn’t know sat on an armchair, spilling limbs over each other and whispering privately, almost primly despite the bottles of sticky cider they were huddled round and the fags with dangling long ash in their hands, occasionally hooting with laughter. One of them looked up at him when he scraped out a chair to join the table, he nodded hello and in response she crossed her eyes very quickly and fully before returning to her conversation, which made him smile. He apologized for not having brought anything to drink.
Not at all, Richie boy, admonished Clancy, and drew out a new bottle of vodka and a two-liter of red lemonade, You probably left this here another time, anyway. Drink up. Where have you been the last while, we missed you.
He enjoyed hearing this, of course he did. He told them about the new job and that he’d been busy settling in, but he’d missed them too. He said this bashfully, but he liked that they were saying these things to each other, it made his being there alright. These were his friends. He tipped his cup toward the other lads and said, Nice to meet you, to Lucien, who winked his approval back as Richie downed his drink in one. They all cheered and a spark of celebration entered the room. Mark—a nice introspective guy who had been derisively nicknamed Dark Mark in school because of his thoughtfulness which sometimes appeared to be moodiness but really wasn’t, not in any bad way—Mark was having a baby with the girl he’d been with since third year in school. He had just found out a week before. They cheers-ed to that again, and Clancy asked him, How does that feel, are you shitting it?
Gary, said one of the girls sharply, so that Richie assumed she was Gary’s girlfriend and did not appreciate the implication that lifelong commitments were something to be avoided.
No, it’s grand, said Mark. It is scary, like, yeah, but I think it will be good craic. I’m one of four and I always thought I’d want the same as that, none of us were ever alone for five minutes but in a nice way, you know, feeling part of the gang.
And Richie thought no, he did not know, couldn’t imagine a feeling like that. He drank again, draining the second cup, feeling it burn into his chest cavity and the bubble of levity and pleasure travel further into his brain.
I’m proud of you Mark, I think you’ll be a smashing dad, said Lucien quietly. He stood up and put on a record, something loud and indecipherable and modern-sounding, exciting.
I don’t know, said Paul, one of the other lads from their year. Wasn’t it Mark who rang Mr Hutchinson that time and told him his son was dead?
There was a moment of quiet while they sorted through the past to clarify the memory and once they had they began to laugh, really, really laugh, until it felt like coming up on drugs and there was no way to escape it. Oh, oh, they cried, wiping tears from their eyes and throwing their heads back, shaking themselves to try and recover.
They had been eleven and it was April Fool’s Day. Their teacher Mr Hutchinson was a friend of one of their fathers, and it was decided for the prank that year they would get his phone number from the father’s address book and call him. Mark was the calmest of them and one of the funniest, so he was chosen, and they pooled their coins at the phone box and dialed the number. It was only as Mr Hutchinson answered that Mark realized they hadn’t actually planned for what to say if he answered, there was no script to follow. Desperately grasping in his mind for anything to fix on, he recalled that Mr Hutchinson had an adult son in Dublin.
Hello? Hello? said Mr Hutchinson.
Hello, sir, said Mark in a gruff disguise voice, and all the rest of them listening instantly dissolved into silent giggles, Mr Hutchinson?
Yes that’s me.
Mr Hutchinson . . . . Panic setting in now, needing to do something, make a big splash, impress everyone, Mr Hutchinson, I’m very sorry to tell you this but your son is dead. Up in Dublin. Your son died.
There was silence on the other end of the phone and surrounding him amongst the gawping faces of his friends. Then he heard a gasp down the line, and weak murmuring sound.
Oh, no, oh, Danny, no, no, please, no.
Mark’s eyes widened and he said in his ordinary voice, No, no, don’t worry Mr Hutchinson, it’s only an April Fool, don’t worry at all, please don’t worry, and slammed the phone down.
He spun round to look at the others, begging them with his eyes to tell him it was going to be okay and he was alright. Richie had his hand over his mouth and was shaking his head side to side involuntarily, trying to go back in time. There was a general sense of appalled shock. Then Paul and another boy had let out a few shrill sniggers, and then the whole lot of them had collapsed with hysterical disbelieving laughter, even Richie. He remembered how it had come flying out of him, out of the depths of his chest like a cough would, hacking and unstoppable. They laughed and laughed at the disgraceful absurdity of it, at how amazingly far Mark had overshot. They knew that it was a dreadful thing, and that they would soon pay for how bad it was, but for the moment they banged and thumped the phone box in their perverse glee, and it was a beautiful thing as well as an ugly one.
They laughed the same way now, ten years later and most of the same lads sitting around that kitchen table. When Richie met the eyes of another of them he started all over again. They reached out blindly for one another’s arms to squeeze for emphasis, and the physical sensation of happiness was so immense that Richie could hardly believe he had almost not come here tonight.
Near 4 a.m. there was an awareness that the drink would be gone before long, Clancy shaking the near-empty bottle as he poured from it.
We’re almost out, boys and girls, he said with a sigh. The room was dense with smoke and good feeling. Richie, could you get a bottle of something from the restaurant do you think?
Richie, vibrantly red in the face already, flushed further and exhaled in a conciliatory way. Ahh, he said, Ahh, I don’t think so. They take the stock all the time.
Clancy put his hand on his heart in a swooning gesture of offence. Of course they do, I’m not suggesting we rob the place, who do you take me for? We’ll get it back to them later today, I’m good for it. It might not be too often we’re all together like this, Mark about to reproduce and all.
It’s only because of this uncivilized country, said Lucien languidly, reclining on the armchair with one of the sleeping girls curled around his shoulders like an enormous drunk cat. When I was in Paris we went out to get bread when the bakeries opened at dawn and bought wine to drink while we queued for it. Only in Ireland do the government treat its people as too incompetent to decide what to do with their bodies.
Richie nodded forcefully despite thinking to himself that this was surely not a quite accurate summary of world politics.
All the same he had to admit that eating a lot of bread and drinking wine sounded an extremely appealing concept in this moment. Maybe there would be bread handy to take at Mario’s as well as wine. The inside of his chest felt hollow and acrid and he wanted to push something soft down his esophagus. He thought also of how good it would feel to have a whole bottle of cool white wine before him. Like vodka, white wine had a quality of bottomless enjoyment. Not only did he have infinite tolerance for consuming them, they also had the capacity to endlessly promise good cheer. So long as there was more of them there was more pleasure to be had. This promise was not exactly a false one. It was true that whatever way they interacted with his brain he could feel no worry or sadness so long as they kept him company. Enough beer made him full and grumpy and red wine made him fall asleep, but there had never so far in his life been a time when he had tired willingly of drinking vodka or white wine, stopping only because he couldn’t get any more.
Before long they had persuaded him that it wasn’t such a big production as he was making it, and they would have the bottles replaced by the end of the day. He did notice that they were bottles plural now rather than singular but this was to be expected. One bottle between them would be gone in a few minutes, if he was going to go all the way there he may as well pick up a few. They were good for it, they weren’t mean lads. For the most part they weren’t short of a few quid. He was only doing this because they couldn’t get it anywhere else.
I’ll come with you, said Lucien, standing and stretching. I need the walk.
A brief absurd flare of alarm as Richie thought of the rumors of him being gay or otherwise odd, then he scolded himself for being judgmental. The streets were empty but strewn with recently abandoned junk food which made him feel a moment of worry as he understood that the things they were doing had ended for the rest of the city.
The night is young, said Lucien, catching his eye and wriggling his brows enigmatically. He was quite handsome beneath the ghostly make-up, a strong big nose and a mouth which stretched so wide it made Richie think of the tragedy and comedy theatre masks.
Is it still night? Richie asked, and began doing the latest and what would turn out to be final set of calculations: If we get back by five I’ll stop drinking at seven and have a shower and then I’ll be fine to get back in to open up. He had stopped kidding himself about sleep now.
There’s no special rule that says it has to be dark when you have a drink, or light when you start work.
Who cares? said Lucien, You decide. All of the things you believe are fixed are just a matter of words. Call them something different and they change. It’s night if we want it to be, because whatever it is, it’s our own to spend. My old man used to obsess over the hours between 8 and 10 p.m., none of us or even my mam were allowed to talk to him then because he said it was the only part of his life that belonged to him. For years I had that too, I believed there was something special and sacred about night-time. And then I grew up a bit, got to see a few things, and I realized it was all a con and a trick to keep people like him in their place. In reality it can be night-time whenever you like—those things we like about night-time, we can have them whenever we like if we just decide to have them. There’s no special rule that says it has to be dark when you have a drink, or light when you start work. Good morning, goodnight, happy Christmas—who cares? Live how you want to, when you want to. That’s the trick.
He had linked Richie’s arm loosely as he spoke which made him feel nervous and luxurious with novelty. They arrived to the restaurant, Lucien singing Christmas songs beneath his breath, light irresistible mania. Richie opened the door and led them toward the storeroom where he picked up two bottles of white wine, feeling relieved by their slender familiar weight. Lucien was picking up more, turning something out of a bag and filling it with red wine.
I don’t think we should take that much, Richie said, mildly.
Relax, kid. It’s only because I don’t drink white wine, said Lucien and shrugged at the perfect and irrefutable logic he had employed.
Richie would not in the future remember a full narrative trajectory from this time onward, only moments and images and the feeling of time dipping in and out haphazardly. When he tried to recall the anxiety he must surely have felt, there was nothing, only smooth absence. For a while, later, this was the focus of his agony: that he couldn’t recall feeling even slightly bothered about what would in a matter of hours fill him with a degree and quantity of shame which he had never withstood before. The mystery of his missing anxiety plagued him in the aftermath, as though there was some moment of transition he could identify if he looked long enough, between the unfeeling person and the feeling one which followed. How could it be, he thought frantically, how could it be that the same situation hours apart could affect him with such wild difference?
But it was true, and there was no mystery to solve. There was no key moment, no switch flipped. He was not repressing a memory of secret panic which he had hidden from Lucien. Lucien had not threatened him with violence, or even with dislike. It was only that the time had come where feelings had ceased and mere sensation remained, and even sensation only at a remove, tickling some phantom limb. He had stood there while Lucien loaded up, and then wandered into the fridge and then the freezer for some reason, wanting something to eat, putting things on the ground, forgetting about them, rifling. One image he retained was of Lucien absurdly leaving the walk-in fridge with a large salami under each arm.
Then it was Lucien with two laden clanking bags of wine on the ground before him, but going back for one more he had seen in the fridge because, he said, it was already open so it would go to waste anyway if they didn’t have it. Out in the dining room as Richie groped for, dropped, and tried to find the keys, Lucien had stood before the mural which Bella and her friends had painted and laughed at it. He said something mildly disparaging, Richie remembered, though he did not remember exactly what—was it that it was bourgeois? Or boring? Or simply bad, badly rendered? The words were lost but he did remember Lucien uncorking the open bottle of red and pouring it into his hands and flicking it and throwing it at the mural, making some joke, Richie laughing at it, there being a feeling of harmless hyperactive fun. He could just about see the image of the mural with splatters of red wine splayed across it.
There was then an image of being back at Clancy’s kitchen table and drawing deeply on the bottle of white wine, which was not even cool as it had been in his thirsty imagination, ash everywhere, the burn in his lungs combined with the acid of the wine deeply satisfying. The girls had gone, he thought. Lucien was putting on more exciting music and was dancing, strutting around the room. Still a feeling of fun, of fuck-what-may-come. There was little concrete after that. Hanging over a toilet, almost-clear vomit. Reaching over and running the shower at full blast to mask the noise. Once he had got it all out, having a ridiculous thought that if they heard the shower run, they would wonder why he hadn’t had a shower. Putting his head under the shower to wet it and make sense of the fact the shower was running. Once he had done that, taking a tube of toothpaste and squirting it into his mouth, putting his mouth to the tap and mixing the two. Collapsing down beside the bath, brain blood pulsing. That for a few minutes and then running the cold tap and shoving his face beneath it. Roaring into the drain to clear his throat. Slapping his face with more water. Going back to the table feeling he had got one over on everyone there, as though they’d never have known what he was doing. Sensation of being annoying, sensation of being pushed into a corner, people laughing. And then nothing until the next day.
In the moment before waking his body was already laden with expansive dread, knowing more than he did. The top part of his chest was so heavy and dense with fright and sorrow that he felt sure he would scream. His pulse thumped disturbingly, erratically, and he put his hand to his throat to touch it, push it back inside of himself. There were too many bad things to think of and he told himself to be calm and slow but it was no use and he sat up on the couch where he lay and put his head in his hands and cried for a few moments. There were two bodies on the other side of the room but they were still and he didn’t wake them with his noises.
He needed to know what time it was but he also badly did not want to know. He would have chosen to remain in his brief suspension if it held any comfort at all or the possibility of returning to oblivious sleep but there was no way to move but forward now, the ignorance as excruciating as the truth would be. He turned on the radio to a low volume and waited until he heard what time it was, just after midday. Some of the worst of the alarm had left his body as soon as he knew how bad it was and that nothing could now be salvaged. The lunch party would be arriving, he thought. He hoped that when Bella had come in it had not been so bad that she would have to close for the whole day. He thought of her having to clean up after him. He thought about how much money it might be that he now owed to her. At least the others would help with that. They weren’t the worst, it wasn’t their fault. It was him. He was the one with the key, the one with that responsibility. She hadn’t given a key to Lucien, had she, only to him. He cringed to think of Lucien and their conversation, their chummy familiarity in the dead night. He wondered about the parts he didn’t remember.
He rubbed his thumb under his eyes and over his cheeks which he felt to be hot and with the small raised bumps beneath the surface which sometimes came. He knew there was no choice but to go there to the restaurant before he sobered up completely and lost his nerve and would hide from it forever. There were the keys to return and he would have to do that or else she would be frightened he would come back again that night and would need to get the locks changed. The idea of himself as a person to be frightened of was so wrong and obscene, and yet he had to credit it. He could imagine how she would feel after this, because it was how he felt too. He had never felt scared of himself before, that he was a suspect person who couldn’t be predicted. He had been sick in the gardens of his friends’ parents’ houses, and kissed girls he had wished he hadn’t, he had been embarrassed plenty, but he had never experienced this depth of shame and total bewilderment at his own actions. He couldn’t think about that now.
Around the corner from Mario’s he hesitated, and took the keys out of his pocket to hold them in his hand like a white flag, so that when she saw him she would know he wasn’t there to make any further trouble. Outside he winced at the window and shaded his eyes, lingering back in the gutter so as not to cause a scene. Elaine and Thomas were near the front by the pizza oven, the two teenage romantics he had been laughing about with Bella not that long ago. They stared at him, not with disgust exactly but with frank and indiscreet interest. Is that what sort of person you are?, their expressions seemed to say. Is that what people can be like?
Luke the chef crossed past them and came out of the door, shutting it firmly behind him.
You get out of here now, man, he told Richie.
No I know, I came because I still had the keys. Is Bella here, can you send her out so I can tell her how sorry I am? And that I’ll pay her for everything? He looked into the window again and saw that there were customers sitting down which gave him a small sense of relief, and he thought he saw Bella’s figure moving in the back.
She won’t want to see you. I’ll take the keys and I’ll make up the bill and make sure you get it. You spoiled a lot of produce too, so it will be a big bill.
Yes, said Richie, almost enjoying the feeling of endless self-loathing reverberating in his chest, glad to have some concrete unpayable debt to focus it on.
Why did you do that? Was it worth it for some party? We had something good between us here and you totally fucked it. There’s no point in begging her for your job by the way, I’ll quit before I let you work here again.
No, no, of course not. No, it wasn’t worth it, and, no, I wouldn’t ask for it back. I understand what I’ve done.
Do you? You really hurt her. This isn’t like some corporation where it doesn’t matter and what you do doesn’t affect anyone. It’s her family, and she decided to trust you. To them, it will be like she did this, like she lost the money.
I’ll pay the money back, said Richie.
Yeah, yeah, a quid a week for a hundred years? With what will you pay it back? How? He sneered, I’ll tell you something now, and it will be the last thing I ever say to you. You want to knock this on the head right now. Today. You don’t want to get into habits. You don’t want to be the old guys you see with piss dried into their pants sitting at the bar every day of their lives who people don’t want to sit near. You’re not cut out for it. Some people are, they can handle it and they can stop when they like to. I can tell by the look of you, you don’t have the energy to live and to keep behaving like this. It will be one or the other, and you don’t have too long to decide which it will be. You’re weak. Weak, weak, weak.
As he repeated this he touched Richie’s shoulder in a way that indicated solace, but then he turned back around and left him alone and that was as far as the comfort would extend, an appeal for Richie to see how weak he really was.
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