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My hand was at my chest. My eyes filled with tears. I almost bumped into Dave, stood there with his crusty red hands on his hips, bright copper locks sticking up in an unintentional quiff caused by putting a beanie hat on while his hair was still wet.
‘All right, Dave?’
‘Parched, actually.’
‘Brew?’
‘Go on, if you’re making.’ He handed me the dirty mugs from yesterday, and as he did so, the backs of our fingers touched, which made me go all shivery but not in a good way.
‘Coming right up,’ I said, almost breaking into a run.
I went upstairs to where there’s a grotty little staff kitchen with a kettle, a microwave and a two-ring stove to heat stuff up. There’s a bedroom up there too, where Dave sometimes sleeps when he closes up, a loo, a sink and a very basic shower, the cleaning of which is left to guess who. I put the kettle on and rested my hands on the counter top. My heart was battering in my chest; my brain felt like it was pressing against the inside of my skull.
I already knew quite a bit about Dave, having worked with him for a year or two. But now I saw the dirty fridge, the Xbox and the Domino’s pizza boxes, crusts hardening on the crumby living-room floor of his flat in Duke Street. I saw the ring of dirt around his kitchen sink, saw him sniff a pair of underpants before putting them on in the yellow dawn light. I even saw the psoriasis on the backs of his knees and knew, completely without wanting to, that he never had sex with the light on because of it.
I make myself look straight at Blue Eyes, who remains as impassive as ever. ‘Not right, is it, to know that about a colleague? You think I’m nuts, don’t you?’
She coughs into her hand, shakes her head a fraction. ‘That’s not a term I would use. I’m wondering how much of Dave’s personal life you actually knew. And, as with Phil, how much you tuned into what you already knew about him that day more than other days because of your trauma.’
‘Trauma?’ The hair stands up on the back of my neck. Where she’s going with this, I don’t like.
‘The experience of invisibility. That was a trauma.’
I laugh. ‘Come on, I hardly lost a limb.’
She shifts, crosses her long legs. She has the most fabulous shoes – silver, wedge heels. Not afraid of her height, obviously. ‘Rachel, you don’t need to lose a limb to experience trauma. Trauma is subjective. You might cope with a whole host of terrible things but it might be something relatively small that pushes you over the edge. Can you relate to that?’
‘I can, yes. After Patrick walked out on Lisa, she seemed all right, but then one day she dropped red wine on her trousers and that was it. She wept like a professional mourner. I had to take her in my arms and calm her down, promise her I’d get them clean. I did. I soaked them in cold water and washed them on cool and they came out fine.’
But here I am again, going off topic.
The light alters. A cloud.
‘So, Rachel, with a revised view of trauma and what it might have caused you to believe about your own abilities to know people by instinct, what do you believe when you say yousawthe psoriasis on Dave’s legs?’
‘I mean in my mind’s eye. But I’m guessing I’m not far off. I’d glimpsed his flat once when I dropped off a parcel he’d left at work. And I suppose he had red patches on his hands and in summer, when he wore short sleeves, the same thing on the inside of his elbows.’
‘So you made a deduction?’
‘I filled the kettle is what I did. But yes, I know what you’re getting at.’
She’s right. I suppose I was honing my detective skills, but instead of trying to crack cases, I was trying to crack people. I’d become hyper-aware. Woken. I was looking for connections where I shouldn’t, having little affairs of the mind, I see that now. But that’s all it was. It was all it was ever supposed to be.
I made the teas and took a mug out to the homeless lad, because I did that every day and I knew how he took it: white, two sugars. He gave me one of his lovely smiles and said thanks, and then I went back in to Dave.
‘Here’s your tea,’ I said, handing him his Everton mug.
He put it on the counter behind the bar. ‘Here, look at this.’ He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a blue crest inked into still blazing red skin:Nil Satis Nisi Optimum, a turret and two laurel wreaths. I recognised it, of course. It was the same crest as the one on his mug.
‘New tattoo,’ I said.
‘Come on the Blues!’ He beamed. ‘What do you think?Nil Satis Nisi Optimum. That’s my message to you today and every day, Rachel. Nothing but the best is good enough, eh? Nothing but the best.’
He’d enjoyed the pain of having that tattoo. A bit like Phil, I thought – it comforted Dave to know what was hurting for once. It was all about putting it somewhere. The pain, I mean. You have to put pain somewhere, whether it’s into a slot machine or into your skin or into your veins. I could add that Dave’s a bit of a knob, but I think that’s self-evident from what he said, isn’t it? Nothing but the best? Sod off, Dave. It’s a boozer, not the ruddy Hilton.I didn’t say any of that, obviously.
‘Oh, Dave, that’s smashing is that,’ was what I did say and set about cutting up some lemons.
For the rest of the day, I kept my head down, but customers don’t serve themselves, do they? Our pub is what you’d call a community pub. Our clientele are a little older and we never get any trouble, not even at the weekend, as the younger crowd tend to go elsewhere. Most of our punters are regulars: Sid, who comes in at quarter past four every single day, overalls covered in paint splashes – pint of mild, always one, never more, never less; the couple that show up every Monday lunchtime for the buy one get the second one half price steak and chips offer, pint of lager for him, half for her, and never say a word to one another; and Lena, who generally gets in at about five, half five for her first gin and tonic, always in the high heels, the tight clothes, and always alone. If I do a late shift, I generally see her leave at around ten o’clock, though where she goes I’ve never asked. It’s not my job to know their business; my job is to create a friendly atmosphere for them, and that’s what I did that day like any other. Only that day, as the punters came and went, my head filled with their fears and boredom, their money worries and tiredness levels, their petty bitterness and secret longings, and most of all their howling, fathomless black wells of loneliness. Not that any of them said any of that aloud. By five, my head was aching with it: all that angst, all that anger. All that damn despair.
