Wild Stacks

Wild Stacks / Issue 1 / December 2010

THE FAMILY ROOM

By NICHOLAS ROYLE

Have you ever sat in a parked car in a storm, counting the seconds between lightning flashes as bright as mercury and the timpani roll of thunder, while condensation slowly claims the windows? There’s an almost-completed crossword on the empty seat beside you, but your concentration has gone, so you look for the half-seen reflection of car headlamps in your rear-view mirror and in the fish-eye lenses of individual raindrops as they trickle down the window.

There’s silence from the back seat where your little girl, three last June, has fallen asleep.

The play of light creates a theatre of illusion: you keep thinking there’s a break in the storm on the left side of the car. A bright patch of sky that isn’t. A doorway out of reality.

Later, when you enter the pub, he’s the first person you see. Alone at a table, a drink in front of him, he lifts his head but looks past you. He’s got ten years on you and seems worn out, but otherwise it’s like looking in the mirror. Perhaps for this reason, you take your drink over to his table and ask him if he minds if you join him.

He gestures at the empty chair and you take the weight off, taste your beer, forgetting to lick the froth from your upper lip.

“Rough night.”

“Yes. I thought storms were supposed to pass overhead. This one’s overstayed its welcome.”

“It’s here for the duration.”

As the other man stares into his drink, you examine his face. Heather-hued shadows have been smudged in beneath his eyes. There are lines taut as kite strings across his brow, frown lines above the bridge of the nose that are as dark and forbidding as prison bars. His eyes are grey as the November skies over Northumberland.

The walls of the pub are partly hung with pictures – black and white photographs of the pub snowbound in the severe winter of 1963 – and partly mirrored. Not in an ’80s disco way; more like a Dublin snug with dark wood, bevelled glass.

“Have you ever been in a position where you don’t know what to do?” the man asks you. “And yet you know you have to decide. Make a split-second decision. It’s a matter of life and death, you might say.”

Your judgment is beginning to look unsound. Having elected to sit with the pub bore, you now find yourself in a position where you are faced with a choice. Move on and give offence, or stay and risk death by a thousand clichés.

You shrug, half-smile, raise your glass. You’re remembering sitting in the car, watching the raindrops roll down the windows. Each one seemed to contain the image of an approaching vehicle, until you actually looked directly at them and the lights vanished. The world seen not in a grain of sand but in a raindrop, and not so much seen as glimpsed – and then gone. The raindrop bumps over the rubber flange at the base of the window, slides down the car door and awaits its turn to drip off the bodywork altogether and land in the puddle that’s forming beside the car.

“Do you see that fire?” the man asks you. “It never goes out. It would be nice that, wouldn’t it? If the fire never went out?”

“What fire?”

“The fire inside you, you know.”

The man was drunk, rambling.

“I mean what fire that never goes out? Where?”

“Over there.”

The man points across to the right side of the bar where, in an enormous hearth partially obscured by a wooden pillar festooned with horse brasses, a few logs smoulder. From time to time, flames suddenly appear, shooting up the chimney, then vanish with as little warning.

“Why?” you ask.

“A hundred and twenty years ago, this pub was across the road. I mean there was a pub across the road and there wasn’t one here. And it burned down, killing I don’t know how many people. Middle of the night. The landlord survived, and, using the embers from the charred remains, lit a fire in the hearth of the building across the road – this building. It’s never been allowed to go out since. So the landlord told me, anyway.” The man raises his glass. “Not the same one, obviously.”

“No.”

“Plus, it gets very cold round here at this time of year.”

“Yeah.”

Now that you know about the fire, you become aware of tiny reflections of its occasional flames momentarily burnishing the wine glasses hanging upside down from their shelf behind the bar. It seems to you also that another, different light flares up now and then on the opposite side of the room. You never see it directly, but catch it in some of the room’s many reflective surfaces.

You get up to go to the bar, noting your companion’s readiness for a refill as you go. Somehow he seems to have kept pace with you. On your way to the bar, two little blonde-haired children cross your path, and you pause to let them go, a rock suddenly lodged in your throat. They disappear behind a pillar and you proceed to the bar, returning with a round of drinks to find the other man gone. You sit down, defeated, baffled. You’d just decided to persevere with the guy and now he’s gone. You stand up, look around, glance in one of the mirrors and there you spot him. He’s back, sitting down now. Accepting his drink without a word. Long, gulping swallow. Beer as thirst-quencher. Where’s the fire?

“What’s over there?” you ask him, indicating the other side of the room away from the hearth.

“That’s the family room,” he says and stares over your shoulder, his eyes red-rimmed, haunted.

His glass is empty again. An unacceptable state of affairs. He visits the bar, comes back with a tray: two pints and a Scotch each. Doubles. He hands you one. Won’t drink his until your own is at your lips. Knock them back together. Beer to take the taste away – put out the whisky fire. He leans closer. So do you. Alcohol fumes mingle.

You wish you’d stayed in the car like before. Freya’s blonde curls visible in the rear-view mirror. Unfinished crossword. Fifteen down: Crash street a measure above logo (4,8). Final clue.

“What was I supposed to do?” He half-stands, grabs your lapels and pulls you towards him. Your eyes swivel, looking for assistance. No one is taking any notice. Eyes cast down into drinks or lost in the fire. The landlord is wearing out his tea-towel polishing glasses that have already been polished. Outside, the dusk has turned swiftly to night and the storm is blowing itself out over the moors. You picture your car in the lay-by, dented front grille, Freya still strapped in her seat.

“What was I supposed to do? What would you do?” The man’s whisper penetrates like a scream. “I’m driving along. I look behind for an instant, less than a second. Checking she’s OK, you know, making sure that she’s still there. Have you never done that? And she smiles at me. It’s like a light being switched on. The sun coming up. There’s nothing more beautiful. You know? Have you got kids?”

You nod.

“Then you know.”

He falters, seems unable to continue. You make a move to disentangle yourself.

“I look back at the road ahead,” he says, strengthening his grip on your coat, “and as I do so my brain catches up with my eye and I develop the snapshot I’ve just taken of my little girl in her car seat. The print comes back from the lab in the time it takes me to refocus my eye on the road ahead and it shows me that she’s undone her safety belt. It’s not the first time, but usually you have time to do something about it. Roll into the side of the road, lean round, do it up, issue the standard reprimand. Only this time, this time I’ve looked back through the windscreen at the road ahead and I see I’m approaching a crossing. There are some people on the crossing. Two little girls and their mother. One of the little girls, baby blonde, is dawdling. Her darker sister is already a yard ahead and her mother is looking back, repeating a previous instruction that she keep up, especially on the road. And then she sees me coming, the mother, she sees my car and her face looks like it’s the one that’s going to get hit, like it’s already been hit. It’s ironed flat, eyes like dinner plates, mouth opening to scream.

“What do I do? Do I slam on the brakes to save the child on the crossing, knowing that to do so will catapult my own daughter out of her seat, over the top of the empty front passenger seat, head first into the windscreen? Or do I keep going, lifting my foot off the gas, as if that will make any difference, but not touching the brake pedal, and hit the little girl dawdling on the crossing with the kind of force that will lift her off the ground, a bag of broken bones, and fling her thirty yards down the road to land on her head? What do I do? What would you do? This goes through my mind like two-plus-two through the brain of a supercomputer. Faster. I still have time to act. Which child do I kill? My own or that of the woman watching?”

“It’s an impossible choice,” you say.

“You think so?” says the man, his hands falling away as he slumps back down in his seat.

Raised voices distract you. The landlord is shouting at the two little girls you saw earlier to get away from the fire. Giggling, they scamper away behind a pillar.

“Kids,” mutters the landlord as he snaps his tea-towel over his shoulder and comes out from behind the bar. “That’s what the family room’s for. So customers can drink in peace and quiet.”

By the time he reaches the hearth, the girls have disappeared to another part of the bar.

You look at your drinking buddy. He looks beaten, defeated, like a fighter on the ropes.

“What did you decide?” you ask him.

“What?” He looks up at you with hollow eyes. “I didn’t. I didn’t decide. I couldn’t.”

You can hardly bear to hold his stare.

“What happened?” you ask.

“You know what happened.”

The landlord is creating again. “One hundred and twenty years,” he’s grumbling in his wounded, resentful voice to anyone who’ll listen. “More than a century that fire was burning. Look at it now.”

To illustrate his point, he plunges a hand into the ashes and retrieves it undamaged.

“Bloody kids.”

You look at back across the table at your drinking partner, who is still staring intently at you.

You break the spell by getting up and walking away. The fire is out. The landlord is scowling behind his counter, pulling his tea-towel endlessly though his rough hands. You walk towards the lights of the family room.

The two little blonde girls – one with straight hair, the other a tumble of curls – are bent over one of the tables, their faces hidden. The family room is over-lit: fluorescent tubes. The tables are Formica-topped, modern, with sticky rings from ketchup bottles, fizzy drinks. The character of the main bar is absent here. Cheap prints badly framed on the wall. This is an afterthought, a grudge-extension, provided out of meanness, decorated with spite.

When the two little girls hear you approaching, they turn round to face you. The harsh lighting suddenly seems particularly unforgiving.


© Nicholas Royle. Originally appeared in Taverns of the Dead ( Cemetery Dance Publications, 2005). Used with permission.