The Northern Clemency (61 page)

The purple nooks and mirrored niches of Casanova’s were all familiar to Daniel now; what must be basically a big square space had been made intricate with partitions and semi-circular seating, little intimate caves of velvet and plush, lowered ceilings at unexpected points, raised platforms and short flights of stairs, so that you could hide yourself, place yourself on display, make entrances and disappearances; pools of luxurious downcast lighting melted into gloom and fug. In some of those corners you could imagine going a long way with a girl. There were two bars, one with a mirrored surface where the expense-accounts stood with the people they’d come with. The other was a mock-marble island between the two dance floors, where the dancers repaired with the new partners they’d acquired mid-record, or where you might buy a girl a drink.

Daniel bought John and himself a vodka and tonic each. The ultraviolet light made the drinks shine like radioactive mercury as they went across to a discreet booth where they wouldn’t be clocked by new arrivals; lit up the constellation of scurf across the shoulders of John’s suit.

“Don’t you possess a clothes brush?” Daniel said, flicking his hand over John’s jacket. “Or haven’t you heard of Head and Shoulders? That’s terrible.”

“It’s only the lights,” John said. “I’ve not got that bad dandruff, it only looks like it in here.” But he took off the jacket and, holding his collar in his fist, gave it a good shake before inspecting it and putting it on again.

“You want to have it dry-cleaned once in a while, too,” Daniel said.

“I’m not made of money,” John said. “You sound like my dad.”

They settled back in the gloom. It was a good spot; you could see them arriving, but they wouldn’t be able to see you unless they came right in. Three were already on the dance floor—old favourites, determined to have a good time and ignoring the rules of precedence, the rule that admitted the confident to open the dancing. They’d accepted they’d be going home on their own, and were settling for the pleasures of the dance. Around the floor, here and there, some little groups; a few schoolgirls, probably on their first time here, hunched together and with overelaborate makeup to advance their real ages. Some were sexy and would do all right; one was spoon-faced and too tall, and in a dress she’d been persuaded into, probably some other girl’s. Her left arm was behind her back, awkwardly grasping the back of her right elbow; she laughed too much, too brightly. She wouldn’t be back much. And the others, the real crowd, were starting to come in now. John and Daniel watched them.

There were all sorts of girls. There were the old favourites, the Kellys and the Julies, the ones who’d give you a jolly and not think anything much of it. There were the Tinas and Gayes, who would dance with you and have a drink with you, even buy you a drink, and at the end of the night would say, “You must be joking,” and “You’re terrible, Daniel,” or “Well, you get full marks for trying, anyway,” but with good humour, because you didn’t ask a girl if a fuck was out of the question if you thought it wasn’t. If he’d been them, he’d have said much the same thing. Then there were the hopefuls, who came here looking for someone rich. Chapeltown or Intake, ugly dirty places, had somehow produced something Chapeltown or Intake had thought like Miss World, and they turned up in their ra-ra skirts, rearranging their bosoms in Daniel’s direction. Daniel wasn’t rich, but to girls like that, he looked clean, and in Casanova’s, he looked like a star on a video. There were the old eyesores, too. Daniel had been through the regulars in Casanova’s like a barium meal, and there were a few Tricias and Wendys, girls who’d been in his life for two, three months and had left angrily. There were quite a few stares to confront in Casanova’s these days. The peculiar thing was that the accusing stare was never a single one; these Tricias and Wendys, they always had a new boyfriend who’d been primed with the history, or more usually the same fat best friend. It was always the fat best friends who said, “Get lost,” when Daniel made a point of saying, “All right, Tricia?” to these embittered old conquests; always the fat best friends who wouldn’t in practice mind if Daniel ever had a go in their direction; always the fat best friends who
John had most success with. The situation never became difficult, because it looked as though, with John, once was enough.

“Quiet, isn’t it?” Daniel said, leaning over and shouting.

“I wouldn’t say quiet exactly,” John said. He always said this, pretending not to know what Daniel meant by “quiet,” since the music was at top volume, hopeful in the still-empty club. He got out his cigarette case and lit up. The cigarette case was an affectation to hide the cheapness of the cigarettes he smoked, though he only offered a girl a cigarette where he thought he saw real prospects.

“It’s early yet,” Daniel said. “I said, it’s—early—yet.”

“They’re not going out,” John said, in his sagest style. “It’s the miner’s strike.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Daniel said.

“It’s the first thing to go,” John said, with narrow bravado, “when things are tight, a night out.”

“What—you think they’re miners?” Daniel said, nodding over his vodka at the loose groups around the bar; his attention was taken by a girl in pixie boots and no skirt, her long loose relax T-shirt coming to the top of her thighs.

“No,” John said. “It’s more that there’s not really—”

A girl slid quickly into the booth where they sat; it was Helen. She was someone who’d been around for years, a good sort. She’d history with Daniel; they’d got off the first time they’d met, here, and then one New Year—last New Year—the girl Daniel had come with had slapped his face and walked off, and Helen’d split up with the lad she’d been seeing right after Christmas, so they’d done each other a one-off favour. No charity on either side. She was all right, no phoning or weeping or unspoken plans for their future together. She’d turned down John when he’d had a go at her.

“You’ve not moved since the last time I saw you,” Helen said. “Do you live here or something?”

“You can talk,” John said, in a way not exactly friendly.

“They ought to put a sign up,” Helen said, “and a letterbox, you’d never have to go home. I saw you, last Tuesday it would have been.”

“I never saw you,” Daniel said.

“You were driving past the hospital in that terrible old car of yours,” Helen said. “You can hear you coming a mile off, it’s like a bad case of whooping cough. I was coming out, I’d just finished my shift.”

“Did you kill anyone this week?” Daniel said. Helen was a nurse at the Hallamshire Hospital.

“Mopped up a lot of shit, I’ll tell you that for nothing,” Helen said. “With some people it’s the blood, with me it’s the shit. Had an old fellow start wanking when I was trying to give him a bed bath.”

“It’s a sort of compliment,” Daniel said.

“You can’t blame him,” John said.

“Sod off,” Helen said.

“So do you have to carry on when that happens?” John said.

“Oh, for Jesus’ sake,” Helen said, carrying on talking only to Daniel. “No, I get called away urgently and send in Kevin to finish him off. Is your friend going to offer to buy me a drink any time soon?”

The financial arrangements for these evenings were firmly established, without either John or Daniel ever discussing them. The basis was that John had no money. He bought the occasional round in the Frog and Parrot, to show willing, but when they got to Casanova’s, it was easiest for Daniel to say, “Two,” at the door. The drinks inside were twice the price they were in a pub, and Daniel bought them all night without question. John earned his keep in ways Daniel couldn’t explain, and he paid for his pleasures with the humiliation of his position. He was the serf on the floor at a medieval banquet, waiting with cupped hands for whatever might spill from the laden salvers.

“Well?” Helen said.

Daniel was pretty sure that Helen knew John had no money, and it was outrageous of her to insist, to make John buy a drink for a girl he couldn’t benefit from. “It must be my round,” he said.

“No, it’s mine,” John said, flushing at Daniel’s well-intended lie. “I was just going.”

“I’m all right,” Daniel said, letting John pass.

“Whisky and Coke,” Helen called after him, watching him go with a sardonic smile. “He’s a nice lad,” she said. “Deep down.”

Daniel shook his head, laughing.

“What’s up, then?” Helen said. “I heard you’re seeing that Kelly.”

“What, do you know her?”

“Course I know her,” Helen said. “Her mum’s a physiotherapist at the hospital, she was telling me all about you, what a nice boy Kelly’s found herself. It was a shock when I worked out she was talking about you.”

“I don’t know about seeing,” Daniel said, with the hot sense of parts of his life drawing together. He could almost feel the tight black shoes, the carnation being placed in his unwilling buttonhole.

“That’s not what she thinks,” Helen said. “I’d make a run for it, it
sounds like she’s choosing the cushions and drawing up lists of children’s names.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Daniel said. “I quite like her, I’m not complaining.”

“Well, good luck to you,” Helen said, drawing back in her seat. “How’s your week been?”

“Oh, Christ,” Daniel said. “No, it’s been great. Fantastic. This thing, though, my mother—”

“Bad as that?” Helen said, interrupting him, probably not hearing what he was starting to say; he was quite glad of it, didn’t know why he’d even begun to bring it out. “I didn’t mean to offend.”

“?”

“About Kelly.”

“Oh, that’s fine. Forget it,” Daniel said. “Just got things on my mind.”

“I really didn’t mean it about the car, though,” Helen said. “I quite like your car. I said, I quite like your car.”

“Now, that you’re allowed to be rude about.”

“I like the fact that you can hear you coming a mile off, make yourself scarce if need be.”

“It’s not long for this world, I reckon. I’d get something better, only it won’t be long until the company car. Seems stupid not to struggle on a bit longer.”

“That I look forward to,” Helen said. “Is it going to have the name on the side? Your company’s name, I mean, not yours.”

“I’m not selling wet fish,” Daniel said. “It’s all very discreet, very tasteful. We’re doing well, they’ve said I’ll get the promotion before long.”

“What is it you do again?” Helen said.

“It’s Eadon Lockwood and Riddle,” Daniel said, disappointed. “The estate agents.”

“I like the car you’ve got, though,” Helen said. “It’s one of the nice things about you.”

“Oh, there’s more than one?”

“It’s one of the things that shows you’re not a twat,” Helen said. “I thought you were a twat at first, when I first met you. Most people think you’re a twat, you know, Daniel. But there’s things like your car, and the fact you can’t really dance, and sometimes you’ll say something, I don’t know—well, you’re not a twat.”

“That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me,” Daniel said. “Am I a twat, though?”

“I’ve just told you you’re not,” Helen said. “I’ll tell you who is, though.”

John shuffled back with two drinks; there was some element of defiance in the fact that he’d bought himself another one, even though the first one, still on the table, was only half finished. If he were a girl, Daniel thought, you could discreetly slip him a tenner; but to do so with John would be to acknowledge too much about the unspoken conventions between them. He placed the drink in front of Helen. She looked at it, lifted it up, drank.

“Thanks, love,” she said. “I wanted a whisky and Coke, but that’ll do just as well.”

Daniel said nothing, recognizing in the vodka and tonic a familiar low-level gesture of hostility John often resorted to; it had once, in similar circumstances, been a pint of lager he’d thumped down, something harder to overlook.

“Takes for ever to get served here,” John said. “I was standing there with ten pounds in my hand, and he’s seen me, and he serves them who were there before me, fair enough, but then this girl comes up after me and flutters her eyelids at him and he serves her, and I say something, right, just to make the point, and he says nothing, just serves two more people, they’ve come after me too, before he finally agrees to serve me.”

“We were just discussing whether Daniel was a twat or not,” Helen said. “I don’t know what you think.”

“Fuck off,” John said. In other circumstances, he might have taken a different opportunity, directed his hostility towards Daniel. “Dan’s my mate, he’s not a twat.”

“He just looks like one, a bit,” Helen said. “And acts like one.”

“Don’t mind me,” Daniel said, amused.

“But there again,” Helen said, “he’s not one, because he drives that car. It’s true, Daniel, you spend too much time in front of a mirror, and you worry more about split ends than a girl does, and you obviously think too much about whether you’re going to undo just one button on your shirt, or two, and that’s the shirt of a twat if ever I saw one, and you’ve got the sort of job most people would be embarrassed about admitting they did, but you’re a nice lad apart from all that.”

“There’s the girls,” Daniel said. “You’ve not mentioned the girls.”

“Kelly and that? I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction. You’re not half as much a twat over them as you think you are. Or you want to be. Do you fancy a dance?”

“Go on, then,” Daniel said, not minding at all, and he and Helen stood up, taking their drinks. John stood up, too, but changed his mind about coming with them, and stopped, half crouching over the table; he seemed to be making the sort of courtly gesture he didn’t know how to make. Daniel followed Helen across to the half-filled dance-floor; they placed their drinks on a shelf running round one of the boundary pillars; she put her handbag on the floor, and they started to dance. For a moment Daniel was self-conscious as he started to move, following the instructions he had once been given about dancing in a disco, to move nothing except the vertical foot between navel and upper thigh, but in a moment Helen gave him a broad, saucy grin, lowered her handbag to the floor and started dancing in an almost professional way, her little clenched fists moving from one shoulder to another, her hair tossing. He could smell the fragrant steely scent of her chemical hair-spray; he guessed she could probably smell the fresh clean breeze of his lemony cologne, of Cacharel. In a few minutes, after three or four records, one after the other, the dance-floor was almost full, and he was enjoying himself. At the edge, a crowd was forming, watching the show; at the front, his eyes wandering from girl to girl, nursing his anxious drink, was John. The sight of a good-looking couple doing the moves had, after all, been the signal of approval the nightclub had been waiting for, and all of them—the Kellys and the Julies and the Tricias and the Wendys and the Gayes, and the men who came with them, all of them with their different motives and ideas about what a good Friday night out might be like—they all followed Daniel and Helen onto the dance-floor. That was exactly what they’d been waiting for.