4
She found him in the corner farthest from the bar. As
a consequence of this, it was also the farthest point from anything. He was
hunched over a half full schooner that looked as if it hadn’t been attended to
for well over half an hour. In fact, it looked as if Jim was unaware of
anything going on around him—the noise, the smoke, the jostling… the
testosterone—and that he rather preferred his own private world than the one
surrounding him.
She
approached him carefully, unsure of what type of mood he was likely to be in. In
three years of knowing one another, there had never been a situation like this,
something that could probably cause a strain between their relationship. The
five metres between them were both physical and metaphorical virgin ground—an
allegory that Jim might have found humorous at any other time… but now? Emily stopped abruptly, abruptly enough for a
flannel-clad local to plough into her, spilling precious drops of beer onto the
floor.
“Aw,
shit, sorry!” he drawled, eyes crawling over her body. The smile oozing over
his face made his lewd thoughts blatantly obvious. “Does your momma know you’re
here?” he inquired, blowing a foetid cloud of boozy breath into her face.
“Does
yours?” Emily quipped, spinning suddenly, all of her second thoughts dissolved.
She slid onto the vacant stool across the tiny table from Jim, who as far as
she knew had still been staring into his schooner while Neanderthal Man had
ogled her.
Apparently
he hadn’t. “I see Ted’s still trying,” he muttered.
“Ted?”
she looked over at Neanderthal Man for the briefest of seconds, aware that he
was glaring intently at her. Seeing her looking at him, he blew her an
extravagant kiss.
“Come
to drag me home?” Jim asked. His eyes were still fixed intently on the brew
sitting in front of him.
“I’m
not your mother,” Emily told him.
Jim
guffawed.
“John
told us all what had transpired. Minus the confrontation… I heard that from the
office ladies…”
Jim
glanced up for the briefest of seconds. There were large black bags under his
eyes that she had never noticed before, either as a result of the poor light in
the pub or further symptoms of what occurred on Tuesday. Either way, they transformed
his face into a distended, inglorious mask. But it wasn’t until her gaze was
torn from these afflictions to the redness of his eyes that she realised their
true nature. By then, he had lowered his gaze, once more in contemplation of
his beer.
“It
was a very censored account of what happened if that’s any consolation.”
He
pushed the schooner away from him. “I bet it was,” he said. He raised his eyes
again. They were still wet and shiny and red with tears.
For
seconds that felt like hours, Emily could only stare, her heart skipping a
loose rhythm inside her chest. He was staring at her in a way no man had ever
stared at her in all of her life. There was not the Neanderthal Man style of
lust, the loving genuflection of her father, the deep, warm, passionate gazing
of a lover… or the old conspiratorial exchanges shared many times with the man
sitting before her… This was… the look of somebody who was completely and
utterly at a loss. Dark, dilated pupils reflected not only the sordid antics of
the locals behind her, but the disenchanted soul of Jim Hallaron. A soul that
had had its wings cruelly cut and its feet bolted to the ground. Here was an
unanchored galleon tossed on the wild seas of uncertainty.
“I
thought at one stage that I’d be one of those silly fuddy-duddy old professor
types… with kids chucking paper planes around the room while I, in my dotage,
would be reciting shit about Shakespeare, oblivious of everything.” A screwed up smile briefly lit Jim’s face,
until the obvious discomfort this action caused stole it away. There was still
a strange twinkle in his eyes that held Emily fixed to the spot. What she was
seeing was a cauldron of emotions set to brew slowly, each emotion flickering
across his eyes momentarily, before vanishing down to the end of the queue,
ready to start again. “It’s not likely to happen now. Especially after John is
finished with me.”
“Forget
John,” Emily replied, snaking a hand out to clasp one of his. It was like
holding a cold bag of bones in her palm. She looked into his eyes, watching
with wonderment the cascading emotions playing for poll position across their
landscape. What was he going to do?
she asked herself.
“You
know,” he began, giving her hand the tiniest of squeezes. “Once upon a time—I’m
going back about ten or so years… when I was still quite young—I used to be as
quiet as a dormouse. You would be hard pressed to get three words out of me. At
my first job, everyone kept saying to me: ‘Why are you always so quiet?’ They’d always say stuff like that. ‘Why are
you always so quiet? Why don’t you talk
more?’ Back then, I was of the mindset
that unless you actually had something to say, you kept your damn mouth shut. I
thought, Christ, there’s probably two people having twenty people’s
conversation; why the fuck would I want to join in? So I didn’t for a little while. And then… I
don’t know; I was bitten by some kind of bug. Some kind of, I don’t know…
political bug of some sort. The sort of thing where you speak what’s on
everyone else’s mind. Like a fucking politician, I was. Shit, you couldn’t shut
me up for nothing!” Jim paused then, his
free hand busy rubbing underneath his jaw. “Wow, four days off work and I’m
already using double negatives…” He grinned and shook his head slowly. “To cut
a long story short, I transfer here, spout my damn mouth off at everything
nobody else was going to touch with a fifty foot cattle prod. I trod on the
wrong toes, and now, John is casting me out to the sharks. I’d have been better
off being the quiet Jim Hallaron… the one who took the crap good-naturedly. The
non-controversial Jim Hallaron.”
“I
don’t think I would’ve liked that Jim Hallaron.”
“That
Jim Hallaron would still have his job.”
“That
Jim Hallaron wouldn’t be the good teacher I know today.”
The
eyebrow above his battered right eye shot up into a high arch. “Are you
flirting with me, young girl?” he asked.
Coming
from absolutely nowhere, the question pole-axed her. Her hand slipped from his,
rested lazily on the table. He was smiling, obviously pleased with her reaction.
He reached out and reclaimed her retreating hand.
“Sorry
I said that,” he remarked, patting the back of her hand between his. They were
now warm, charged with a new vitality, as were his eyes, no longer stained red
with tears. Even the bags were vanishing… albeit, slowly. “Wanna drink?”
“I…
um…” How could she resist?
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