22.5 Hour Party People: Part Two
'Right, you coont,' Herb growls in an undertone; and in the blink of a hummingbird's eye he's on his feet, and in two blinks of one I'm on mine, facing him across the table with my hands, just like his, planted palm-downwards on the tabletop. Then, in slow motion, like something out of a Sam-fucking-Peckinpah movie, I see his hands heading upwards and collarwards; and true to my nickname of The Fastest Shirtshedder in the Postcode, I've got my top three buttons undone before he's even made a proper start on his first. We're each of us down to the last button but two when Ronnie walks up and interposes an arm between the two of us at chest level.
'Lads! Rugger! Berry!' he says, casting us each a reproachful look straight into the okies. 'I'll tolerate no outbursts of shirtiness on my watch. Now let's all three of us sit down and enjoy our pints like civilised cunts; don't forget, we've all got a promise to keep, and hours to go before we sleep.'
He has a point. So, Herbie buttons up his shirt whilst giving a couple of stroppy grunts and a spastic twitch or two of the head; and I, cool as a cue-cummer, button up mine, and we all sit down and do our stroppy best to heed the wisdom of our sheriff. Luckily, in that couplet of his Ronnie has provided me with a whole new shirtiness-free vein of conversation to tap.
So I says to him, 'Whodathunk the words of a New England apple-tree-fucker like Robbie Frost would have come so much in useful for breaking up a Woodside Park shirtfest, what what?'
'Robbie Frost? The TV-interviewing geezer?'
'No, not David Frost, Robert Frost, the poet. You know the poem, right, “Tossing Off in the Woods on a Snowy Evening”?’
'Never heard of him or the poem.'
'Oh, come off it, you cunt. You mean to tell me you improvved that rhyme just now, right off the shirtycuff?'
'Rhyme? What rhyme? Dunno WTF you're talking about.'
Well, I never did get to find out whether Ronnie was pulling my old third leg or whether, indeed, as in that hypothetical scenario of the typing monkeys flying out of Shakespeare's arse, the whole resemblance was just a most improbable coincidence; because, no sooner have these last words of his issued from his gob when I hear a familiar stentorian cry that more pressingly demands my attention (cf. the above exordium), to wit, Jimmy crying: 'ALL RIGHT, VOLKER, IT'S ABOUT THAT TIME. DRINK 'EM UP! YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO HOME--IN FACT, THERE'S A 24-HOUR WIMPY'S JUST ROUND THE CORNER THAT I HIGHLY RECOMMEND AS AN ALTERNATIVE--BUT YOU CAN'T STAY HERE!'
And presently, Jimmy sidles up to our table and asks us, only a bit more quietly, 'IS THERE ANYTHING YOU GENTLEMEN WOULD LIKE FOR LAST ORDERS?'
'Of course,' he adds, quite a bit more quietly, and leaning forwards to address me in particular, 'you and urine are welcome to stay on, after we kick out the gentoozers. Speaking of which--' He breaks off to unload a receipt and a stack of Isabelas from the gracile hand of a doe-eyed, DDG Audrey Hepburn ringer in a kelly green track suit, who (the girl along with the track suit) then exits the building trailed by a butcher's dozen of other nubiles sporting the same uniform.
'Who were they?'
'Just some sodding Cambridge University women's athletic team passing through on their way to a match tomorrow.'
'Which sport? Lacrosse, by any chance?'
'Dunno. Didn't ask. Not bloody likely at this time of year, though, I'd say.'
'Oh, Jimmy, thou Prince of Thickness! Why didn't you ask them to stay on?'
'Do I look like a fucking pimp, Rugger? Am I wearing a great broad-brimmed floppy hat? And a fur coat and gold chains? Do I drive a petrol-hoovering early 70s Cadillac de Ville? No, like you, I drive an early-90s petrol-pinching Japanese compact. Besides, on account of what went down on Bloke Fawkes Night, we've got to make extra-nice to Johnny Law. We can't make it look like we're encouraging people to stay on for afters, or they'll snatch up Mr Sedule's licence faster than you can say...uh...I dunno, "licensing law violation."'
But while he's going off like fucking Shylock, the sheer uncanniness or surreality of the very occasion of our convo-cum-soliloquy finally settles in on me, like a revelation straight out of the 45-minute mark of Groundhog Day: 'Hang on a bit, Jimmy. Let me set my TARDIS for November 25. I mean, why are you asking anybody to leave by 11 tonight?'
'What's November 25 got to do with it? Oh you mean the 24-hour-drinking thingammerbobby. Well, you'll have to take that question up with the padrone. Until he tells me otherwise (and so far he hasn't), I'm calling last orders at a quarter of eleven, like I always do.' And so saying, he moves off screaming at a pitch fit to blow out the larynx of the Cookie Monster himself, 'ALL RIGHT! I'VE WARNED YOU LOT! THIS PUB IS NOW CLO-O-O-O-O-O-O-OSED! IF YOU GANGRENOUS HAEMORRHOIDS THINK I'M STROPPY NOW, JUST TRY STICKING AROUND ANOTHER MINUTE! SO FAR YOU'VE ONLY SEEN JIMMY PHIPPS IN BRUCE FUCKING BANNER MODE (if you will)!'
Meanwhile, I take English leave of the lads and walk over to the bar, where Mr Sedule is busy drying latest round of pint glasses with the skirt of his grubby apron; and I ask him what gives on the 24-hour front.
'Nothing gives, M. McGyv-AIR, because nothing is...how do you say...in the offering.'
'Quoi?'
'I did not apply for one of these 24-hour licences.'
Here's a snag I haven't anticipated, thinking wrongly all along (as I have) that 24-hour-drinking was just going to take effect automatically, and universally, in every pub in the Kingdom. Of course, it all makes sense in hindsight. Always pays to read the fine print, even on a packet of loo rolls, dunnit?
'Well,' I say, 'have you thought about applying for one?'
'Do you regard me as a species of connard? Bien entendu, I have thought about it. For this long. [He snaps his fingers.] That is all the time I needed to realise that I could not afford to stay open beyond the usual hours. The au-dessus-à-la-tête, the...how do you say...the overHEAD, would be astronomical. Right now, everything arranges itself très nettement. Jimmy, Suzy, Van, they all come in at three and leave at half-past eleven. If I stay open even an extra hour, I must either pay out hundreds of pounds a week in overtime or hire, au minimum, two extra employees.'
'Right, but surely you'd have all that extra money coming in to make up for the expense.'
'SureLY? HardLY. Woodside Park, you know, it is not exactly SoHO. Most people here--like me--do not really love the nightlife. En tout cas, I am a vieillard, and do not wish to take such a risk. 20 years ago, pair-HAPS, but not today. The Sedulous Ape, she is my last hope. When she closes, I retire--either in my dreams to a cottage in the CotsWALDS or in my cauchemars to an old folks' home in the banlieues of Par-EE.'
Well, although I think he's wrong, I see no sense in pressing the point further with him--not when there are (so I guess), a hundred 24-hour juke joints within a five-mile radius of this piece. So I head on back to the table and apprise the lads of the sitch, and propose that we blow this here iced-lolly stand (dear though it is to my heart), and migrate to wetter climes.
'Have you got any particular climes in mind?' Ronnie asks.
'Not really,' I say. 'Only I think it would be wise to fly northwards rather than southwards. It's Stellas to Millers that the traffic grid in the inner boroughs is a veritable bumper-to-bumper chain-link string vest right about now.'
So we all three hoof it back to the maisonette and climb into the Mazda and start heading north on Barnet High Road. Round about minute three of the trek, Ronnie, ever the sodding den mother, asks me I'm sure if I'm OK to drive.
'Course I'm sure. Four pints in five hours--that puts me well under the limit.'
'And what if you're over it at the end of the night? We're already too far off from WP to walk back.'
'We'll worry about that if and when the end of the night actually materialises. As of now it's a figment of our stone-fucking-cold sober imaginations.'
Cast-iron logic, nest pa? I'll tell you something, though, about this automotive pub-crawl thing: it adds up to a cuntishly more difficult set of manoeuvres than its foot-powered equivalent, especially at night. No sooner have you come in view of something that looks like a pub--but that for all you know might be a sushi and smoothie stand run by Mormons--than you've already passed it; and you have the choice between turning round and circling back and risking feeling like a total berk if you discover that it's not a pub after all; or pressing on in search of fuck knows what kind of indication that you're approaching the mother lode or El Dorado of pubdom, and feeling like just as consummate a berk when it never turns up. With the lads' consent, I opted for a zero-tolerance press-on strategy, with the result that inside a half an hour we'd already passed the Welcome to Hertfordshire: The Homeliest [sic] of the Home Counties sign and left behind London altogether.
From the county line it's but a skop, jip and a hump to Potters Bar, Proctologitex's home base, and presumptively the next pub-pullulating stretch of the High Road (which has by now morphed more or less for good into the Great North Road). Now, I've nothing against Potter's Bar; it's as fine an exurb as any other in which to get one's drink on; but I've made it a cardinal rule never to hang out there on my own time, ever since the night, about a year and a half ago, when I was out on an after-work date at the Oakmere with this girl from the Bootses round the corner from our shop, and Mike Ayhern and a couple of middle-managerial cunts from quality control barged in, pissed out of their skulls (a long story that merits a post of its own). And so on these personal grounds of mine I nix aloud, and in the bud, any notion of our pulling over in PB.
Whereupon Herb says, 'At this rate, we might as well get on the fooking motorway and head for fooking Bristol or Birmingham.'
'Not a bad idea, Rugger,' Ronnie chimes in.
'Goddammit, no!' I shout. 'I am hell-bent on making this a local night out, and if sticking to local roads and staying off the motorways means driving all the way to the fucking Firth of Forth to find a pub, then so be it.'
So, in the face of the lads' protests, I press on even farther up the Great North Road, towards and eventually into, Hatfield. No soap or suds there: everything appears to be shut up for the night. And then I run into an additional snag. You know how practically in the dead centre of Hatfield the GNR sort of peters out into a kind of glorified footpath? Well, I didn't. And the upshot of my ignorance is that we finish up parked directly in front of the doorstep of the geezer residing at the end of the line, and that short of barrelling through this selfsame doorstep, my only option is to do a yooey and head back south, which I do. And when we're back at the little roundabout that turns on to what looks to be the town's main east-west drag, I call out, 'All right, lads, I'm not admitting defeat yet. What’s it gonna be—east or west?'
'West,' says Ronnie lethargically, from the shogun position.
'East!' says Herb, with gusto, from the back seat.
'Right, west it is!' I say, and hang a roger. Along this way, there's about another five minutes of built up area that leads us through an interchange with the A1(M), and then, suddenly, we find ourselves on a two-lane road in the wide open countryside. And I mean the wide-arse open countryside: there's not a sign of human habitation in any direction, apart from, here and there, on either side of the road, a glimmer of light emanating from some farmhouse or cottage a quarter or half a mile off. Funny thing about GB, innit?—that judging by the raw stats you'd think we were packed into this here island right on top of each other like Chinese sardines; and yet, you drive twenty kilometeres in any direction from the centre of even the largest cities, and you find yourself in some rural shitspot that’d easily double for some corner of Nebraska or Wyoming where the cows outnumber the people a hundred to one.
Well, naturally, I keep my okies peeled for some indication of our approach to another town, but all I see in the first half hour of country driving are a series of signs depicting, à la the Bosty Drog map of Kernevistan, the outline of some weasel-like animal rearing itself stroppily on its haunches, along with a distance marker that keeps rising the farther along we get: 1 , 3 , 5, etc.
'Can either of you suss out what those signs are telling us to be on the lookout for?' I ask. 'I'm foxed.'
'You mean you're stoated,' rejoins Herb. [This is, incidentally, the first halfway clever thing he's said so far all evening.]
'Eh?'
'Those are stoat-crossing signs. You see a lot more of 'em oop north--in the Yorkshire Dales, for instance. They're meant to warn you that round here the stoats are given to dashing in front of cars without much notice, or bothering about reflective waistcoats and suchlike precautions.'
'What's the point of warning us? Are they a fucking endangered species?'
'Not as far as I know. I will tell you this, though: their little corpses are a vixen to untangle from your front axles, once they get caught up in 'em.'
And would you know it, just as Herb's saying this, in the nick of time, barely a car length in front of us, I catch sight of a white, cat-sized, short-leggedy beasty wriggling across the right lane towards the centre of the road as slowly and casually as if it's out for a Sunday stroll. I slam on the brakes, and for a few adrenaline-fueled seconds, I assume I've run the critter over.
But then Ronnie, making a porthole with his hands and peering out the window on his side, says, 'You missed him. He's just made it across.'
A minute or so later, another run-in with another stoat, with the same outcome. Less than a minute after that, another rencounter with another stoat, outcome ditto. By now I'm counting to one in my head and saying (aloud) 'Drink driving laws be buggered, if I had a tall bloke of Stella on me, a jam sandwich tailing me with flashers and sirens on couldn't stop me shogunning the whole tin to the dregs right here and now.'
To which avowal Herbie appends: 'Speak of the Devil-cum-Bad Loock, Roogby. Check your rear-view mirror. There's a police car tailing us—with its flashers on. You'd better pull over.' I glance up the old arse-view. Cor, Herb wasn't just whistling Jerusalem (or Lillabullero, as should go without saying). So I take up his suggestion, followed unfortunately but inevitably by the sammidge, from which (es gibt kein shite) a cuntstable emerges. The copper sidles up to the front of the car, and I roll down my window.
'Got a touch of the elfs tonight, haven't you sir?'
'I'm sorry, officer?'
The copper sighs in a ‘The-kinds-of-gormless-cunts-I-have-to-deal-with-on-this-job!’ kind of way before deigning literally to spell himself out thus: 'Elfs: Ell...Eff…Ess [LFS]. Lead Foot Syndrome. First off, the speed limit's posted at 25, and you're bebopping along at 30. Then, every quarter-mile or so, for no apparent reason, you come screeching to a stop. Perhaps you're having trouble with your brakes?'
'No, sir. Just doing my best to avoid the stoats.' (This is the truth, right? Why then can I not help sounding like the semi-proverbial hospital arrival blustering his way through an account of how a kitchen utensil came to be embedded in his rectum?)
He rolls his eyes and mimes a dirge on an air-bagpipe. 'Yeah, that's what they all say.'
Then, predictably enough, he leans over through the window a bit too close for comfort and wafts a few audible sniffs of my person. 'Hmm. Haddock and jalapeño. Not exactly the kind of fare they serve up at Wimpy's is it? Would you by any chance, sir, be in the mood or market for...I dunno...what's the thingy called?...an er...um...breathaliser test?'
I've never before been stopped on suspicion of drink driving, but I intuitively assume, based on my two-decades' strong experience as a viewer of cop-dramas filmed on both sides of the pond, that the copper's shuffling for my consent is pure pro formica bullshit, and that if I refuse to submit to the test I'll finish up doing ten years' hard labour on a chain gang (or worse, ten weeks' counselling and AA meetings), so of course I say, Jawohl, Herr Offizier (only in English not Krautsprach), and de-car and walk on over to his vehicle; and whilst he's administering the test to me--shoving the little engine in my face and giving me instructions on when and for how long to exhale--I try to distract myself a bit by taking my-first-ever proper gander at the crest of the Hertfordshire Cuntstabulary, which is emblazoned mid-jam-strip on the side of the car. The crest sports the full-body profile of a stag--i.e., a deer, not a single bloke--standing Jay-Christ-style on a few wiggly lines symbolising, presumably, water. 'Why a stag and not a stoat?' I wonder as I'm heading back to the Mazda, where I take up my stand next to Ronnie's window to await the prognosis, diagnosis, sentence, or what have you, while the officer sits in his car looking stroppily preoccupied but actually doing fuck knows what.
'Are you nervous, Rugger?' Ronnie asks me.
'Course not,' I say--again in all apparent sincerity, although the untoward amount of effort I'm having to exert to keep my schphincter taut would seem to contradict my self-assurance. 'These rural cops are notorious for pulling people over on the most cuntishly slight pretexts. They're all about racking up Brownie points towards their promotion to Assistant Deputy Chief Inspector.'
By and by, the copper returns, holding a scrap of paper in one hand and looking stroppy as a nipper who's just pulled a lump of coal out of his Christmas stocking, and motions me back over to the driver's side.
'In my 22 years on the force I've never seen such a thing,' he says to me. 'The breathaliser's giving me a reading of negative .09 per cent.'
Be it owing to a mechanical error or to a one-off violation of the laws of nature and logic, just then this figure of negative .09% means only one thing to me: 'So I'm free to go?'
'I'm afraid so. But I can and shall issue you a citation for speeding.' He hands me the paper. ‘And rest assured, Barnet Boy: Officer Roscoe Q. Coltrane [!] has issued himself a permanent all-points bulletin with your name at the head of it. If I so much as catch you pissing in an unlicensed urinal, I’ll see to it you never work in this county again.’ (I feel my schphincter slacken ever so slightly as I wonder how he’s come to learn I work in this county now.) Then, after stroppily and disdainfully discharging on to the ground from his gob a slimy clodlet of something that just might be chewing tobacco, he returns to and climbs back into the panda, executes a quick three-point turn that sets him facing the opposite way from the one we've all been heading in, and peels out on to and down the road at 70 k.p.h. in search of fresh bail-bait (naturally taking care, in his cuntish duplicity, to keep his flahsers turned on).
Back at the Mazda, I pause with the door open and the dome light on and unfold the ticket so as to apprise myself of the precise figurage of my debt to the Hertfordshire County Constabulary: 150-fucking-quid. What' s 150 quid to me, though? A mere drop in the piss bucket of my outlay on Cuntishly Gratuitous Expenses for Fiscal Year 05-06. Then, without saying a word to either of my passengers, I rev the engine back up and pull back on to the road and continue implementing my press-on stratagem as though the whole stoat-dodging, cop-fellating episode of the past hour has been spliced out of the final edit of the film adaptation of tonight's shenanigans.
Ronnie is the first to speak. 'On the evidence of that little schlong-up,' he says, 'I'm prepared to declare this night out permanently and officially jinxed. What do you lads say to our heading back to Barnet for a brief off-off-licence knackwurst-fest chez moi? After all, we've got a whole nother weekend night to kill. And then tomorrow, we'll get up at the arse-crack of bohemian dawn [that's 10 a.m., for the benefit of the uninitiated], have ourselves a nice Lincoln continental breakfast [coffee and nothing but, again F(t)B(ot)U], and spend the afternoon doing a bit of research on 24-hour pubs in the area--some nergling here, some phoning there--so come 11 p.m. we can have ourselves a proper Saturday late-night pub crawl.'
'Sounds good as Long Dong Silver's to me,' agrees Herb.
But I'm more than a match for these petty cavils of Ronnie's. 'You're forgetting one thing, Ronnie, and that is that we are officially if not permanently lost, and that if we want to make it back home it makes much more sense to stay the course until we get to another town than to turn round and take our chances with these glorified hog-paths they have the hoot's pa to call roads out here. I say we press ahead until we reach a place with a London-bound High Street. If there's a pub that's open in that spot, so be it: we'll weigh anchor there; if not, I'm more than willing to chart a southbound course for the capital along that road and towards the implementation of your Plan B. Fair enough?'
I was of course being too modest; it was more than fair: it was cast-fucking-ironological! But the lads' assent to its fairness, duly offered, was good enough for the purposes then at hand. And in the short run, the rationality of my proposal was indeed borne out. In the long run, though...well, let's just stick to the short run for now. It was too short, in fact, even to be classified as a run--more of a brief stroll on the order of the one you make to the loo or the front door. For no farther along than a mile from the spot where we were pulled over, we reached a four-way intersection preceded by a sign listing the following place names and vectors: 'LUTON 7 (left arrow), HITCHIN 4 (right arrow), LITTLE OFFLEY .5 (up or forward arrow) and GREAT OFFLEY 1 (ditto)'. Luton is of course familiar to all of us as the arsehole within the armpit of Great Britain. And Hitchin you and I know as the home town of that harridan Sarah Slother. But as for these Offleys, it would be the acme of overstatement to say that I was offley familiar with them. To be offley frank--sorry, but I'm an absoulte sucker for the lamest pun--I'd never so much as heard of, let alone visited, either Offley, and neither had either of my drivemates. But our collective ignorance of the Offleys notwithstanding, in deference to the specifications of my proposal we were duty-bound to try for a pit stop in one of them, preferably the Little and nearer one. A bit further along than I was expecting, we reach two tiny clusters of two and three storey houses huddled on either side of the road. The entire layout of the place is so compact that by slowing down to cruising speed, we can suss out every salient detail of every building in the village. I take in a handful of names: The Great Offley Historical Museum, Karzai-Jones's Blacksmith's and Kebab Hut, and finally, at the very end of the line, The Green Guy--which, on account of its apparent Fawkesian riffage on the ever-popular Green Man sobriquet, I can only assume is a public house.
Ronnie says, 'So we're in Great Offley. What happened to Little Offley?'
'We must have missed it,' I say.
Then Herb says, 'It doosn't surprise me. To joodge by the size of Great Offley, you'd need a fooking microscope to see its Little broother.' (Halfway clever remark number two on Herbie's side. If he manages to score a third corner before sunrise, I might just think of allowing myself to warm up to him.)
'But never mind all that,' I say, 'let's see if this Green Guy joint is still serving.' I pull into the frontage of the house and park on the sole bit of sphalt that seems to have been set off (i.e., with parallel lines) for the purpose, and climb out of the car and approach the doorstep. Through the half-drawn shutters of the front windows I can see light and hear the strains of a Montovani-style string arrangement of the Pogues' 'Pair of Brown Eyes'. I give the front door a gentle push, and it yields. Without letting go of the doorknob, I turn round and with my other hand motion to the lads to follow me, and on their arrival, we all enter the pub.
The room is laid out in a kind of backwards-L shape, with the bar being straight ahead of us and flush against the back wall, and the latter stopping short of the right side of the house by a metre or two so as to give on to a hall or passage of which I can only just dimly make out the threshold. I also notice that the floor is liberally strewn with bits of hay or straw, presumably in the service of evoking a retro-Tudorish aura of historical authenticity. There's not a soul in sight, apart from the bartender--a doddering, bespectacled, pink-faced, whispy-white-haired bloke, who, at a charitable guess, won't see 80 again, and who, as we walk in, is up to his elbows in suds, rinsing and racking glasses.
'Good morning, young sirs,' he greets us, unstroppily enough whilst towelling off his forearms.
'Are you still serving?' I ask him.
'Aye, that we are. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks and tuppence a year, since last Thursday.'
His speaks with a mañana-slow, too-cute-for-its-own-good accent of equal parts Welsh and TV Irish. Are we in the presence of the last living speaker of the fabled Hertfordshire dialect, or merely of some senile Swansean expat who's watched a few too many episodes of Ballykissarsehole? Fuck me sans oleo if I know; I'm no Henry Fucking Higgins.
'Right, then,' I say, taking a seat at the bar, with Ronnie and Herb joining me on the right side, 'three draughts of Stella Artwaz, please.'
'Sorry, sir, no can do. Proprietor's orders,' he says, jerking a thumb over a shoulder towards the back wall, and more particularly towards a poster sporting a stylised but plainly recognisable representation of a bottle of my beloved Red, Gold and White inscribed in a circle crossed through with a diagonal line, above the legend STELLA-FREE ZONE. 'Had too many chavs popping over from Luton and asking for it, didn't we? Boss was worried it'd scare away the tourists, wasn't he?'
'Oh, come off it great-great-grandad; there's nothing chavvish about Stella: it's a perfectly respectable mid-priced continental import.'
'No, you coome off it Roogby,' Herbie shouts to me from two seats over. 'Quit elephanting the old boy and ask him for a round of the house piss, chop-chop.'
I compromise by ordering Kronenbourg, which, for reasons entirely inscrutable to me, is thought of as being chav-proof hereabouts. And we sit there for ages, nursing our three pints of Bourg in what would have been absolute silence, had it not been for the nonstop soundtrack of Pogues muzak. And although the pint to hand contains the first drop of alcohol I've touched in four hours, I'm having as much trouble generating a thought, or holding on to it, as if I've been drinking since noon (which fact, when I reflect upon it now, leads me to the tentative generalisation that sheer fatigue must be the better part of bepissedness). Ronnie, I can tell, is fading even faster than I am--he's yawning twice for every sip--whilst Herb seems to be holding his piss more out of stroppiness than anything else. I have just barely enough strength of body and presence of mind to take a groggy gander at the green-dialed Grolsch clock hanging on the patch of wall opposite me. The hour hand is firmly glued to the 6 and the minute hand is just a cunt hair shy of 12. 6 a.m.! I ejaculate to myself. An hour and a half ago yesterday you were hitting the snooze bar on your alarm, and you haven't slept a wink since. Un-fucking-conscionable! And a second clock-gander later, at 6:15 or thereabouts, as the heartrending opening bars of 'Fairytale in New York' wash over us, comes thought number two, which eventually materialises as a question addressed our host, a question as to how business has been under the aegis of the new licensing laws. To which he replies:
'It's a little early to tell, isn't it? But taking tonight's turnout as an omen, I'd say no better, no worse. Come eleven, we had our usual candlestick-maker's half-dozen Friday-night local punters, plus the usual candlestick-maker's couple of foreigners from Hitchin or places slightly farther afield--and by one the lot of 'em'd filed out. Not much sense in keeping a pub open into the wee hours in a little hamlet like Great Offley, is there? I told the boss so, too, and in so many words, didn't I? But he'd hear none of it, would he? He's a barmy fellow--a Yank who won the place two years ago in some kind of swiving contest. The first thing he does after taking over is he changes our name from The Green Man (so it'd been called right on back to the reign of Georgie the Third) to The Green Guy. [So much for my Fawkesian hypothesis.] "There's more Green Man pubs than KFCs or Mickey Dees in this country," he says. "How are we going to grow any kind of brand loyalty in our customers with a name like that?" As if there's any swiving competition in this jerkwater dorf! Funny, though, now that you lot have shown up, I'm wondering whether there mightn't have been a fewmet of common sense in the name change.'
'What do you mean by that?'
'I mean, that's the only thing about this place that could have enticed you to take a turn off the old barely-beaten path and wend your way here, isn't it? I can tell by that tommy-gun way of speaking you have that you're not from this corner of Hertfordshire.'
'No, actually, we're from London.'
'And Leeds!' Herb belches out gruffly into his hand.
'Right. And Leeds by way of London. And actually we were just out looking for a place to have a few pints after hours--the old hours, I mean.'
'And you’re telling me this is the only place you could badger out for that purpose?'
'I'm afraid so, dad.'
'You mean to say you live in London and you can't find a nearer spot for a pint than swiving Great Offley, 30 miles away? Oh, that's rich! That's a keeper, TB-B-B-S!' Now he's literally doubled up with laughter and near to coughing up a lung, as they say; and I'm of half a mind to whip out my mobile and dial 999 for an ambulance, and of the other half to reach for my top shirt button; but before I become a whole of either mind, he suddenly enough pulls himself erect (vis-a-vis his whole person, not his schlong), wipes the tears away from his eyes, and--his phiz now transformed into a mask of the utmost concentration--cups a hand to one ear.
'Do you hear that?'
'No, I don't hear anything but the music. Do you lads hear anything?' Herbie says he doesn't, and Ronnie, having by now dozed off altogether (as I just then notice), says nothing.
'Excuse me, young sirs, I'll be back in a jiffy.' And with--or, rather, during--those words, he dashes to the other end of the bar, through the hole under the end-flap, across the room and out the front door with the agility and speed of some kind of Hertfordshire Jack La Lanne.
Next, in the tarbender's absence, something a mite peculiar begins to happen between Herbie and myself. I don't know whether what's kicking in is the Bourg (at last) or some kind of general principle of social life (one that some wanking sociologist has doubtlessly turned into a syndrome named after a third-tier northern European capital), according to which the disappearance of a total stranger automatically transforms every near-stranger to hand into a friend, but vis-a-vis Herbie, I immediately lose all sense of reserve. I feel that I can suddenly and in a spirit of--I swear--totally disinterested, shirt-free curiosity, ask him the first question that pops into my gourd, which in this case happens to be, 'What does it mean to elephant somebody, anyway?'
'Do whaaaaat?' he drawls bemusedly back at me across Ronnie's slumped and snoozing upper half.
'To elephant somebody, like you were telling me not to do to old great-squared-gramps here. Sure, I get the gist of the idiom: to elephant a bloke or blokess, to give 'em a hard time; what I'm asking about here is, how do you say...the metaphorical logic of the way you're using it. I mean, what sort of picture is it meant to conjure up?The picture of a pugilistic pachyderm pummelling a person with its peniform prehensile proboscis?'
'Course not. It's simple rhyming slang: elephant, short for Elephant and Castle, rhymes with hassle.'
'Really? I always thought elephant was rhyming slang for arsehole, via the same route. That's why I was surprised to hear you using it as a verb. Anyway, how can elephant be rhyming slang for hassle? Castle and hassle don't even rhyme, not by a long stretch.'
'Course they do. Caastle, hahssle.'
'Oh, I get it! It's a regional thing. It works up in Leeds on account of your flat a's.'
'Evi-fooking-dently so.'
'But what are you lot up in Leeds doing making your rhyming slang out of London landmarks anyway? Shouldn't you be mining your own West Yorkshire heritage for that purpose?.'
'You mean cooming oop with soomething along the lines of...temple for gruesome, via Temple Newsam? As in, this pub we're sitting in is right temple?'
'Yeah, yeah, exactly.'
'Mmmaybe. I'll moot the suggestion to the lahds down at the Institute, and see what they think of it.'
'What's the Institute?'
'You know--the Institute for the Preservation and Manufacture of West Yorkshire Folkways, or Ipimmywyf, as we heritage biz insiders soometimes call it. I'm a junior research fellow there--that's me job.'
Never judge a cunt by his knickers, indeed! I'd pegged him as a computer hardware salesman. Not that this Ipimmywyf gig seemed particularly alluring or honourable by comparison, but it sure was different to my original conjecture.
Well, anyway, not to change the subject, but in my capacity as yarn-spinner I'm obliged to: it's at about this time that both of us start to hear issuing from the side passage the most improbable of sounds, to wit the lowing or mooing of cattle. And right about then I see the bartender emerging from the side-passage accompanied by, of all critters, a pair of black-and-white Holstein cows.
Without getting up I ask him what is, I’m sure the reader will agree, the most natural—if not perhaps the most polite—question to ask in these circumstances: 'What are the fuck are these cows doing here?'
'What the swive are you doing here, is more like it, isn't it? They live here, don't they? The Guy is their home in the daytime hours. Isn't it, Elsie?' he continues, in the classic, yet untranscribable, emetic baby-talkish register, whilst scratching one of the cows affectionately between the ears, and then: 'Isn't it, Chelsea?' whilst offfering up a handful of hay from the floor to the maw of the other one. 'What'samatter, dearies? Do the stroppy young men from London scare you? Do you need to go poos? Don’t mind them: you just go right ahead.'
Wellsir, I gots to admit that the apparition of these here two bovines is enough to make even my adamantine resolve crumble. To myself I say, Ronnie was right after all: this whole night-out was jinxed from the start; and to Herb, 'Berry, I think on poetic grounds alone we should consider this our cue to take off.'
'And on more prosaic grounds, too,' says Herb, pinching his nose and rising from his stool as the most noxious of all man-known smells barring burnt marmite begins to permeate the room. Meanwhile Ronnie, likewise through the agency of nature’s perfect smelling salts, is beginning to bestir himself. Leaving it to Herb to get him back on his feet and moving, I fish a pair of tenners out of my wallet, chuck them on to the bar, and with watering eyes and heaving stomach, stagger to the front door. Outside, I stretch a bit, do a few perfunctory calisthenics (deep-knee bends, schpincter flexes, etc.), to jump-start the old animal spirits and calm my queasy innards, and whip out my keys to unlock the driver's door of the Mazda. Everything's going okie-fucking-dokey if you discount the invisibility or apparent absence of the McGyvermobile herself, which, judiciously sober though I may be, I notice only after I've given a turn or two to the key in its conjectural hole. Hard piece of schlong cheese indeed! There's a silver lining to this here invisible Mazda-shaped cloud, though, which is that it expedites my reading of a notice painted in bold but none-too-large caps on the sphalt of the parking space that has here-to-four been blocked by the car: 'WARNING! THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR COW-STAGING. ALL WHEELED OR OTHERWISE UNHOOFED VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED AT OWNER'S EXPENSE BY AND TO SLOTHER AND SONS GARAGE, 210 BURY MEAD ROAD, HITCHIN SG5, HERTS. PHONE: 01462 6321541'.
Crouching down on the ground with my head down and my fists raised heavenward, I start to scream 'FU-U-U-U-UCK YO-O-O-OU KE-E-E-E-E-N!' but my tongue catches on the 'K,' as I realise that we're well outside the London mayor's jurisdiction, and that thus this maledictory formula will never do, and so I do a quick lingual pirouette and finish up, gracefully enough, with 'K-U-U-U-NTISH KOUNTRY BUMPKINS!'
'There, there, Roogby,' I hear Berry consoling me from above. 'Don't take it so hard. Ronnie and I'll throw in to get your car out of hock. Won't we Ronnie?'
'Yeah, yeah, sure.' I hear Ronnie answering.
'That's all right,' I say, brushing pebblets of sphalt-fill off my knees and haunches as I stand up. Horror remains, but all stroppiness is spent. 'It was my fault anyway. Serves me right for assuming round here you can just park wherever you sodding well please. I should have gathered from our run-in with that copper that out here in the sticks the law are even farther up your arse than in London.'
'So I guess we should call for a minicab?' says Ronnie.
'I wouldn't bother,' says Herb. 'Hitchin's at most, what?--a haalf-hour walk away? And at this hour, we'd be waiting twice that long for a cahb.'
I don't know if he's right. But minute-mincing be roundly rogered: what I do know is that I'd be prepared to wriggle my way to Hitchin on my belly for the satisfaction of getting the fuck out of the pissant mock-up of Dodge that is Great Offley toot sweet, and so I say, 'Well then, let's just walk.'
And so, to the warbly accompaniment of the so-called dawn chorus, we hoof it up the road to Hitchin, arriving at Slother's shop at seven o'clock sharp. I will of course spare the reader the gory details of the three-hour-long safari in the bush-thicket of red tape that separated our arrival on the premises from the secure ensconcement of my arse-cheeks in the driver's seat of the Mazda; and merely make mention of a choice bit of fauna that I caught sight of along the way: a framed snapshot of Sarah Slother on the desk of the sexagenarian bloke processing my paperwork. And as we all three stood there shivering our nads off in the unheated front office, I got a good long gander at his shark's profile as well. The resemblance was uncanny, and there could be no doubt that she was my erstwhile prospective paramour's progenitor. I was just itching to register out loud, to Old Man Slother's face, the perversely cuntish delight I was taking in the improbability of the whole scenario, but somehow couldn't suss out a means of doing so tactfully. After all, you can't exactly say, I know your daughter and she's one fiendish cuntess to a bloke; not, at any rate, when he's got you by the short hairs, stranded 30 miles from home. It was only long afterwards, when Ronnie and I were halfway to London, that a suitably flummoxing- and-yet-unshirty sally sprang to mind: I'll give your regards to Sarah--a classic instance of what the Frogs call esprit d'escalier, which idiom, now that I come to think of it, is ripe for updating and anglicisation as esprit du motorway.
But here the reader blurts out impatiently: 'Enough of your cuntish neologising! What about that slip du clavier a line-and-a-half above the colon of the last sentence? You write, when Ronnie and I were halfway to London. Haven't you left something out? What happened to Herbert?'
Well, you cuntish gun-jumper, I was just getting to that. The thing is, you see, Herb didn't accompany us back to London. I'd got directions to the A1(M) from Slother, and from the garage it was eastwards, towards that highway, that I immediately started heading; but before we were even clear of Hitchin Herb said to me, 'Listen, Rooger, I’ve got me rooksack with me; there’s no reason for me to go all the way back into town. Could you do me a big favour and take a side-trip to Luton airport? I can catch a Midland Mainline train to Leeds from there, and you can pick up the M1 to London. It'd shave four or five hours off my trip and only add another 20 minutes to yours.'
'So you're going to head back today?' I ask him.
'Yeah, might as well. Got a lot of library hours to clock this weekend, and it really wouldn't do to try to crahm 'em all into Soonday evening.'
'B-but, Berry,' Ronnie putteringly pouts, 'you'll miss our Saturday night pub-crawl.'
'Oh, will I now?' Herb retorts in the tone of a bookie with an inside tip. 'We'll see about thaht.'
Well, after all we'd been through together, as they say, I couldn't very well say no to Herb. Fast forward 40 mintues later, and we're letting him off at the cabstand at the entrance of the airport. ‘By the way, Rooger,’ he says as he's stepping out of the car, ‘I promise to credit you as a co-author if I nick your West Yorkshire rhyming slang idea in my next proposal.’
‘Much obliged, Berry.’
‘Although, of course, I caan’t credit you unless I know your laast name.’
‘It’s McGyver.’
‘What? As in the American Doctor Who?’
‘Yeah, but without an "a" in the Mc bit. What's yours?’
'Hancock,' Ronnie blasély replies on Herb's behalf.
'As in the smooth jazz bloke?'
'That’s right,' says my new mate Herbie Hancock, a bit ruefully, 'and with the same spelling, I'm afraid.' It seemed the froggish pronunciation had its uses after all. Not that utility is any kind of an alibi for cuntishness.
Well, what with traffic on the M1 being what it is on the smoothest of so-called off-peak hours, it's getting on to about 1 p.m. by the time we close in on Barnet. During this last leg of the trip, Ronnie and I hammer out a tentative modification of his Plan B, involving our meeting up at the Ape to watch the Arsenal-Blackburn match, and then trying to piggyback on to the late-night itinerary of one of our better-informed fellow-punters. I drop him off at his place, and head back to the maisonette, where, without even untying my Skechers beforehand, I do a face-plant on to the bed and fall into a mini-coma.
I awoke to a bedroom stewing in a gentle infusion of sunlight. My first thought was, Christ, that was a short nap; my second thought was What’s the sun doing setting on that side of the house? and I checked the time on the alarm clock. 7:04 a.m. It seemed I'd slept through Saturday afternoon and Saturday night and clear on through into Sunday morning. So this was what Herbie'd meant when he said, regarding our Saturday night pub-crawl, We'll see about that. He didn't think we'd be up to it. Well, I hadn't been, and neither had Ronnie, as I learned when I woke his still-snoozing carcass via phone an hour later. Still, as I reminded him in person back at the Ape that afternoon, over my second consecutive repast of fish and poppers, there was always next weekend. Next weekend, next weekend; I'd fuck you, next weekend; you're only four days away.
'Lads! Rugger! Berry!' he says, casting us each a reproachful look straight into the okies. 'I'll tolerate no outbursts of shirtiness on my watch. Now let's all three of us sit down and enjoy our pints like civilised cunts; don't forget, we've all got a promise to keep, and hours to go before we sleep.'
He has a point. So, Herbie buttons up his shirt whilst giving a couple of stroppy grunts and a spastic twitch or two of the head; and I, cool as a cue-cummer, button up mine, and we all sit down and do our stroppy best to heed the wisdom of our sheriff. Luckily, in that couplet of his Ronnie has provided me with a whole new shirtiness-free vein of conversation to tap.
So I says to him, 'Whodathunk the words of a New England apple-tree-fucker like Robbie Frost would have come so much in useful for breaking up a Woodside Park shirtfest, what what?'
'Robbie Frost? The TV-interviewing geezer?'
'No, not David Frost, Robert Frost, the poet. You know the poem, right, “Tossing Off in the Woods on a Snowy Evening”?’
'Never heard of him or the poem.'
'Oh, come off it, you cunt. You mean to tell me you improvved that rhyme just now, right off the shirtycuff?'
'Rhyme? What rhyme? Dunno WTF you're talking about.'
Well, I never did get to find out whether Ronnie was pulling my old third leg or whether, indeed, as in that hypothetical scenario of the typing monkeys flying out of Shakespeare's arse, the whole resemblance was just a most improbable coincidence; because, no sooner have these last words of his issued from his gob when I hear a familiar stentorian cry that more pressingly demands my attention (cf. the above exordium), to wit, Jimmy crying: 'ALL RIGHT, VOLKER, IT'S ABOUT THAT TIME. DRINK 'EM UP! YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO HOME--IN FACT, THERE'S A 24-HOUR WIMPY'S JUST ROUND THE CORNER THAT I HIGHLY RECOMMEND AS AN ALTERNATIVE--BUT YOU CAN'T STAY HERE!'
And presently, Jimmy sidles up to our table and asks us, only a bit more quietly, 'IS THERE ANYTHING YOU GENTLEMEN WOULD LIKE FOR LAST ORDERS?'
'Of course,' he adds, quite a bit more quietly, and leaning forwards to address me in particular, 'you and urine are welcome to stay on, after we kick out the gentoozers. Speaking of which--' He breaks off to unload a receipt and a stack of Isabelas from the gracile hand of a doe-eyed, DDG Audrey Hepburn ringer in a kelly green track suit, who (the girl along with the track suit) then exits the building trailed by a butcher's dozen of other nubiles sporting the same uniform.
'Who were they?'
'Just some sodding Cambridge University women's athletic team passing through on their way to a match tomorrow.'
'Which sport? Lacrosse, by any chance?'
'Dunno. Didn't ask. Not bloody likely at this time of year, though, I'd say.'
'Oh, Jimmy, thou Prince of Thickness! Why didn't you ask them to stay on?'
'Do I look like a fucking pimp, Rugger? Am I wearing a great broad-brimmed floppy hat? And a fur coat and gold chains? Do I drive a petrol-hoovering early 70s Cadillac de Ville? No, like you, I drive an early-90s petrol-pinching Japanese compact. Besides, on account of what went down on Bloke Fawkes Night, we've got to make extra-nice to Johnny Law. We can't make it look like we're encouraging people to stay on for afters, or they'll snatch up Mr Sedule's licence faster than you can say...uh...I dunno, "licensing law violation."'
But while he's going off like fucking Shylock, the sheer uncanniness or surreality of the very occasion of our convo-cum-soliloquy finally settles in on me, like a revelation straight out of the 45-minute mark of Groundhog Day: 'Hang on a bit, Jimmy. Let me set my TARDIS for November 25. I mean, why are you asking anybody to leave by 11 tonight?'
'What's November 25 got to do with it? Oh you mean the 24-hour-drinking thingammerbobby. Well, you'll have to take that question up with the padrone. Until he tells me otherwise (and so far he hasn't), I'm calling last orders at a quarter of eleven, like I always do.' And so saying, he moves off screaming at a pitch fit to blow out the larynx of the Cookie Monster himself, 'ALL RIGHT! I'VE WARNED YOU LOT! THIS PUB IS NOW CLO-O-O-O-O-O-O-OSED! IF YOU GANGRENOUS HAEMORRHOIDS THINK I'M STROPPY NOW, JUST TRY STICKING AROUND ANOTHER MINUTE! SO FAR YOU'VE ONLY SEEN JIMMY PHIPPS IN BRUCE FUCKING BANNER MODE (if you will)!'
Meanwhile, I take English leave of the lads and walk over to the bar, where Mr Sedule is busy drying latest round of pint glasses with the skirt of his grubby apron; and I ask him what gives on the 24-hour front.
'Nothing gives, M. McGyv-AIR, because nothing is...how do you say...in the offering.'
'Quoi?'
'I did not apply for one of these 24-hour licences.'
Here's a snag I haven't anticipated, thinking wrongly all along (as I have) that 24-hour-drinking was just going to take effect automatically, and universally, in every pub in the Kingdom. Of course, it all makes sense in hindsight. Always pays to read the fine print, even on a packet of loo rolls, dunnit?
'Well,' I say, 'have you thought about applying for one?'
'Do you regard me as a species of connard? Bien entendu, I have thought about it. For this long. [He snaps his fingers.] That is all the time I needed to realise that I could not afford to stay open beyond the usual hours. The au-dessus-à-la-tête, the...how do you say...the overHEAD, would be astronomical. Right now, everything arranges itself très nettement. Jimmy, Suzy, Van, they all come in at three and leave at half-past eleven. If I stay open even an extra hour, I must either pay out hundreds of pounds a week in overtime or hire, au minimum, two extra employees.'
'Right, but surely you'd have all that extra money coming in to make up for the expense.'
'SureLY? HardLY. Woodside Park, you know, it is not exactly SoHO. Most people here--like me--do not really love the nightlife. En tout cas, I am a vieillard, and do not wish to take such a risk. 20 years ago, pair-HAPS, but not today. The Sedulous Ape, she is my last hope. When she closes, I retire--either in my dreams to a cottage in the CotsWALDS or in my cauchemars to an old folks' home in the banlieues of Par-EE.'
Well, although I think he's wrong, I see no sense in pressing the point further with him--not when there are (so I guess), a hundred 24-hour juke joints within a five-mile radius of this piece. So I head on back to the table and apprise the lads of the sitch, and propose that we blow this here iced-lolly stand (dear though it is to my heart), and migrate to wetter climes.
'Have you got any particular climes in mind?' Ronnie asks.
'Not really,' I say. 'Only I think it would be wise to fly northwards rather than southwards. It's Stellas to Millers that the traffic grid in the inner boroughs is a veritable bumper-to-bumper chain-link string vest right about now.'
So we all three hoof it back to the maisonette and climb into the Mazda and start heading north on Barnet High Road. Round about minute three of the trek, Ronnie, ever the sodding den mother, asks me I'm sure if I'm OK to drive.
'Course I'm sure. Four pints in five hours--that puts me well under the limit.'
'And what if you're over it at the end of the night? We're already too far off from WP to walk back.'
'We'll worry about that if and when the end of the night actually materialises. As of now it's a figment of our stone-fucking-cold sober imaginations.'
Cast-iron logic, nest pa? I'll tell you something, though, about this automotive pub-crawl thing: it adds up to a cuntishly more difficult set of manoeuvres than its foot-powered equivalent, especially at night. No sooner have you come in view of something that looks like a pub--but that for all you know might be a sushi and smoothie stand run by Mormons--than you've already passed it; and you have the choice between turning round and circling back and risking feeling like a total berk if you discover that it's not a pub after all; or pressing on in search of fuck knows what kind of indication that you're approaching the mother lode or El Dorado of pubdom, and feeling like just as consummate a berk when it never turns up. With the lads' consent, I opted for a zero-tolerance press-on strategy, with the result that inside a half an hour we'd already passed the Welcome to Hertfordshire: The Homeliest [sic] of the Home Counties sign and left behind London altogether.
From the county line it's but a skop, jip and a hump to Potters Bar, Proctologitex's home base, and presumptively the next pub-pullulating stretch of the High Road (which has by now morphed more or less for good into the Great North Road). Now, I've nothing against Potter's Bar; it's as fine an exurb as any other in which to get one's drink on; but I've made it a cardinal rule never to hang out there on my own time, ever since the night, about a year and a half ago, when I was out on an after-work date at the Oakmere with this girl from the Bootses round the corner from our shop, and Mike Ayhern and a couple of middle-managerial cunts from quality control barged in, pissed out of their skulls (a long story that merits a post of its own). And so on these personal grounds of mine I nix aloud, and in the bud, any notion of our pulling over in PB.
Whereupon Herb says, 'At this rate, we might as well get on the fooking motorway and head for fooking Bristol or Birmingham.'
'Not a bad idea, Rugger,' Ronnie chimes in.
'Goddammit, no!' I shout. 'I am hell-bent on making this a local night out, and if sticking to local roads and staying off the motorways means driving all the way to the fucking Firth of Forth to find a pub, then so be it.'
So, in the face of the lads' protests, I press on even farther up the Great North Road, towards and eventually into, Hatfield. No soap or suds there: everything appears to be shut up for the night. And then I run into an additional snag. You know how practically in the dead centre of Hatfield the GNR sort of peters out into a kind of glorified footpath? Well, I didn't. And the upshot of my ignorance is that we finish up parked directly in front of the doorstep of the geezer residing at the end of the line, and that short of barrelling through this selfsame doorstep, my only option is to do a yooey and head back south, which I do. And when we're back at the little roundabout that turns on to what looks to be the town's main east-west drag, I call out, 'All right, lads, I'm not admitting defeat yet. What’s it gonna be—east or west?'
'West,' says Ronnie lethargically, from the shogun position.
'East!' says Herb, with gusto, from the back seat.
'Right, west it is!' I say, and hang a roger. Along this way, there's about another five minutes of built up area that leads us through an interchange with the A1(M), and then, suddenly, we find ourselves on a two-lane road in the wide open countryside. And I mean the wide-arse open countryside: there's not a sign of human habitation in any direction, apart from, here and there, on either side of the road, a glimmer of light emanating from some farmhouse or cottage a quarter or half a mile off. Funny thing about GB, innit?—that judging by the raw stats you'd think we were packed into this here island right on top of each other like Chinese sardines; and yet, you drive twenty kilometeres in any direction from the centre of even the largest cities, and you find yourself in some rural shitspot that’d easily double for some corner of Nebraska or Wyoming where the cows outnumber the people a hundred to one.
Well, naturally, I keep my okies peeled for some indication of our approach to another town, but all I see in the first half hour of country driving are a series of signs depicting, à la the Bosty Drog map of Kernevistan, the outline of some weasel-like animal rearing itself stroppily on its haunches, along with a distance marker that keeps rising the farther along we get: 1 , 3 , 5, etc.
'Can either of you suss out what those signs are telling us to be on the lookout for?' I ask. 'I'm foxed.'
'You mean you're stoated,' rejoins Herb. [This is, incidentally, the first halfway clever thing he's said so far all evening.]
'Eh?'
'Those are stoat-crossing signs. You see a lot more of 'em oop north--in the Yorkshire Dales, for instance. They're meant to warn you that round here the stoats are given to dashing in front of cars without much notice, or bothering about reflective waistcoats and suchlike precautions.'
'What's the point of warning us? Are they a fucking endangered species?'
'Not as far as I know. I will tell you this, though: their little corpses are a vixen to untangle from your front axles, once they get caught up in 'em.'
And would you know it, just as Herb's saying this, in the nick of time, barely a car length in front of us, I catch sight of a white, cat-sized, short-leggedy beasty wriggling across the right lane towards the centre of the road as slowly and casually as if it's out for a Sunday stroll. I slam on the brakes, and for a few adrenaline-fueled seconds, I assume I've run the critter over.
But then Ronnie, making a porthole with his hands and peering out the window on his side, says, 'You missed him. He's just made it across.'
A minute or so later, another run-in with another stoat, with the same outcome. Less than a minute after that, another rencounter with another stoat, outcome ditto. By now I'm counting to one in my head and saying (aloud) 'Drink driving laws be buggered, if I had a tall bloke of Stella on me, a jam sandwich tailing me with flashers and sirens on couldn't stop me shogunning the whole tin to the dregs right here and now.'
To which avowal Herbie appends: 'Speak of the Devil-cum-Bad Loock, Roogby. Check your rear-view mirror. There's a police car tailing us—with its flashers on. You'd better pull over.' I glance up the old arse-view. Cor, Herb wasn't just whistling Jerusalem (or Lillabullero, as should go without saying). So I take up his suggestion, followed unfortunately but inevitably by the sammidge, from which (es gibt kein shite) a cuntstable emerges. The copper sidles up to the front of the car, and I roll down my window.
'Got a touch of the elfs tonight, haven't you sir?'
'I'm sorry, officer?'
The copper sighs in a ‘The-kinds-of-gormless-cunts-I-have-to-deal-with-on-this-job!’ kind of way before deigning literally to spell himself out thus: 'Elfs: Ell...Eff…Ess [LFS]. Lead Foot Syndrome. First off, the speed limit's posted at 25, and you're bebopping along at 30. Then, every quarter-mile or so, for no apparent reason, you come screeching to a stop. Perhaps you're having trouble with your brakes?'
'No, sir. Just doing my best to avoid the stoats.' (This is the truth, right? Why then can I not help sounding like the semi-proverbial hospital arrival blustering his way through an account of how a kitchen utensil came to be embedded in his rectum?)
He rolls his eyes and mimes a dirge on an air-bagpipe. 'Yeah, that's what they all say.'
Then, predictably enough, he leans over through the window a bit too close for comfort and wafts a few audible sniffs of my person. 'Hmm. Haddock and jalapeño. Not exactly the kind of fare they serve up at Wimpy's is it? Would you by any chance, sir, be in the mood or market for...I dunno...what's the thingy called?...an er...um...breathaliser test?'
I've never before been stopped on suspicion of drink driving, but I intuitively assume, based on my two-decades' strong experience as a viewer of cop-dramas filmed on both sides of the pond, that the copper's shuffling for my consent is pure pro formica bullshit, and that if I refuse to submit to the test I'll finish up doing ten years' hard labour on a chain gang (or worse, ten weeks' counselling and AA meetings), so of course I say, Jawohl, Herr Offizier (only in English not Krautsprach), and de-car and walk on over to his vehicle; and whilst he's administering the test to me--shoving the little engine in my face and giving me instructions on when and for how long to exhale--I try to distract myself a bit by taking my-first-ever proper gander at the crest of the Hertfordshire Cuntstabulary, which is emblazoned mid-jam-strip on the side of the car. The crest sports the full-body profile of a stag--i.e., a deer, not a single bloke--standing Jay-Christ-style on a few wiggly lines symbolising, presumably, water. 'Why a stag and not a stoat?' I wonder as I'm heading back to the Mazda, where I take up my stand next to Ronnie's window to await the prognosis, diagnosis, sentence, or what have you, while the officer sits in his car looking stroppily preoccupied but actually doing fuck knows what.
'Are you nervous, Rugger?' Ronnie asks me.
'Course not,' I say--again in all apparent sincerity, although the untoward amount of effort I'm having to exert to keep my schphincter taut would seem to contradict my self-assurance. 'These rural cops are notorious for pulling people over on the most cuntishly slight pretexts. They're all about racking up Brownie points towards their promotion to Assistant Deputy Chief Inspector.'
By and by, the copper returns, holding a scrap of paper in one hand and looking stroppy as a nipper who's just pulled a lump of coal out of his Christmas stocking, and motions me back over to the driver's side.
'In my 22 years on the force I've never seen such a thing,' he says to me. 'The breathaliser's giving me a reading of negative .09 per cent.'
Be it owing to a mechanical error or to a one-off violation of the laws of nature and logic, just then this figure of negative .09% means only one thing to me: 'So I'm free to go?'
'I'm afraid so. But I can and shall issue you a citation for speeding.' He hands me the paper. ‘And rest assured, Barnet Boy: Officer Roscoe Q. Coltrane [!] has issued himself a permanent all-points bulletin with your name at the head of it. If I so much as catch you pissing in an unlicensed urinal, I’ll see to it you never work in this county again.’ (I feel my schphincter slacken ever so slightly as I wonder how he’s come to learn I work in this county now.) Then, after stroppily and disdainfully discharging on to the ground from his gob a slimy clodlet of something that just might be chewing tobacco, he returns to and climbs back into the panda, executes a quick three-point turn that sets him facing the opposite way from the one we've all been heading in, and peels out on to and down the road at 70 k.p.h. in search of fresh bail-bait (naturally taking care, in his cuntish duplicity, to keep his flahsers turned on).
Back at the Mazda, I pause with the door open and the dome light on and unfold the ticket so as to apprise myself of the precise figurage of my debt to the Hertfordshire County Constabulary: 150-fucking-quid. What' s 150 quid to me, though? A mere drop in the piss bucket of my outlay on Cuntishly Gratuitous Expenses for Fiscal Year 05-06. Then, without saying a word to either of my passengers, I rev the engine back up and pull back on to the road and continue implementing my press-on stratagem as though the whole stoat-dodging, cop-fellating episode of the past hour has been spliced out of the final edit of the film adaptation of tonight's shenanigans.
Ronnie is the first to speak. 'On the evidence of that little schlong-up,' he says, 'I'm prepared to declare this night out permanently and officially jinxed. What do you lads say to our heading back to Barnet for a brief off-off-licence knackwurst-fest chez moi? After all, we've got a whole nother weekend night to kill. And then tomorrow, we'll get up at the arse-crack of bohemian dawn [that's 10 a.m., for the benefit of the uninitiated], have ourselves a nice Lincoln continental breakfast [coffee and nothing but, again F(t)B(ot)U], and spend the afternoon doing a bit of research on 24-hour pubs in the area--some nergling here, some phoning there--so come 11 p.m. we can have ourselves a proper Saturday late-night pub crawl.'
'Sounds good as Long Dong Silver's to me,' agrees Herb.
But I'm more than a match for these petty cavils of Ronnie's. 'You're forgetting one thing, Ronnie, and that is that we are officially if not permanently lost, and that if we want to make it back home it makes much more sense to stay the course until we get to another town than to turn round and take our chances with these glorified hog-paths they have the hoot's pa to call roads out here. I say we press ahead until we reach a place with a London-bound High Street. If there's a pub that's open in that spot, so be it: we'll weigh anchor there; if not, I'm more than willing to chart a southbound course for the capital along that road and towards the implementation of your Plan B. Fair enough?'
I was of course being too modest; it was more than fair: it was cast-fucking-ironological! But the lads' assent to its fairness, duly offered, was good enough for the purposes then at hand. And in the short run, the rationality of my proposal was indeed borne out. In the long run, though...well, let's just stick to the short run for now. It was too short, in fact, even to be classified as a run--more of a brief stroll on the order of the one you make to the loo or the front door. For no farther along than a mile from the spot where we were pulled over, we reached a four-way intersection preceded by a sign listing the following place names and vectors: 'LUTON 7 (left arrow), HITCHIN 4 (right arrow), LITTLE OFFLEY .5 (up or forward arrow) and GREAT OFFLEY 1 (ditto)'. Luton is of course familiar to all of us as the arsehole within the armpit of Great Britain. And Hitchin you and I know as the home town of that harridan Sarah Slother. But as for these Offleys, it would be the acme of overstatement to say that I was offley familiar with them. To be offley frank--sorry, but I'm an absoulte sucker for the lamest pun--I'd never so much as heard of, let alone visited, either Offley, and neither had either of my drivemates. But our collective ignorance of the Offleys notwithstanding, in deference to the specifications of my proposal we were duty-bound to try for a pit stop in one of them, preferably the Little and nearer one. A bit further along than I was expecting, we reach two tiny clusters of two and three storey houses huddled on either side of the road. The entire layout of the place is so compact that by slowing down to cruising speed, we can suss out every salient detail of every building in the village. I take in a handful of names: The Great Offley Historical Museum, Karzai-Jones's Blacksmith's and Kebab Hut, and finally, at the very end of the line, The Green Guy--which, on account of its apparent Fawkesian riffage on the ever-popular Green Man sobriquet, I can only assume is a public house.
Ronnie says, 'So we're in Great Offley. What happened to Little Offley?'
'We must have missed it,' I say.
Then Herb says, 'It doosn't surprise me. To joodge by the size of Great Offley, you'd need a fooking microscope to see its Little broother.' (Halfway clever remark number two on Herbie's side. If he manages to score a third corner before sunrise, I might just think of allowing myself to warm up to him.)
'But never mind all that,' I say, 'let's see if this Green Guy joint is still serving.' I pull into the frontage of the house and park on the sole bit of sphalt that seems to have been set off (i.e., with parallel lines) for the purpose, and climb out of the car and approach the doorstep. Through the half-drawn shutters of the front windows I can see light and hear the strains of a Montovani-style string arrangement of the Pogues' 'Pair of Brown Eyes'. I give the front door a gentle push, and it yields. Without letting go of the doorknob, I turn round and with my other hand motion to the lads to follow me, and on their arrival, we all enter the pub.
The room is laid out in a kind of backwards-L shape, with the bar being straight ahead of us and flush against the back wall, and the latter stopping short of the right side of the house by a metre or two so as to give on to a hall or passage of which I can only just dimly make out the threshold. I also notice that the floor is liberally strewn with bits of hay or straw, presumably in the service of evoking a retro-Tudorish aura of historical authenticity. There's not a soul in sight, apart from the bartender--a doddering, bespectacled, pink-faced, whispy-white-haired bloke, who, at a charitable guess, won't see 80 again, and who, as we walk in, is up to his elbows in suds, rinsing and racking glasses.
'Good morning, young sirs,' he greets us, unstroppily enough whilst towelling off his forearms.
'Are you still serving?' I ask him.
'Aye, that we are. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks and tuppence a year, since last Thursday.'
His speaks with a mañana-slow, too-cute-for-its-own-good accent of equal parts Welsh and TV Irish. Are we in the presence of the last living speaker of the fabled Hertfordshire dialect, or merely of some senile Swansean expat who's watched a few too many episodes of Ballykissarsehole? Fuck me sans oleo if I know; I'm no Henry Fucking Higgins.
'Right, then,' I say, taking a seat at the bar, with Ronnie and Herb joining me on the right side, 'three draughts of Stella Artwaz, please.'
'Sorry, sir, no can do. Proprietor's orders,' he says, jerking a thumb over a shoulder towards the back wall, and more particularly towards a poster sporting a stylised but plainly recognisable representation of a bottle of my beloved Red, Gold and White inscribed in a circle crossed through with a diagonal line, above the legend STELLA-FREE ZONE. 'Had too many chavs popping over from Luton and asking for it, didn't we? Boss was worried it'd scare away the tourists, wasn't he?'
'Oh, come off it great-great-grandad; there's nothing chavvish about Stella: it's a perfectly respectable mid-priced continental import.'
'No, you coome off it Roogby,' Herbie shouts to me from two seats over. 'Quit elephanting the old boy and ask him for a round of the house piss, chop-chop.'
I compromise by ordering Kronenbourg, which, for reasons entirely inscrutable to me, is thought of as being chav-proof hereabouts. And we sit there for ages, nursing our three pints of Bourg in what would have been absolute silence, had it not been for the nonstop soundtrack of Pogues muzak. And although the pint to hand contains the first drop of alcohol I've touched in four hours, I'm having as much trouble generating a thought, or holding on to it, as if I've been drinking since noon (which fact, when I reflect upon it now, leads me to the tentative generalisation that sheer fatigue must be the better part of bepissedness). Ronnie, I can tell, is fading even faster than I am--he's yawning twice for every sip--whilst Herb seems to be holding his piss more out of stroppiness than anything else. I have just barely enough strength of body and presence of mind to take a groggy gander at the green-dialed Grolsch clock hanging on the patch of wall opposite me. The hour hand is firmly glued to the 6 and the minute hand is just a cunt hair shy of 12. 6 a.m.! I ejaculate to myself. An hour and a half ago yesterday you were hitting the snooze bar on your alarm, and you haven't slept a wink since. Un-fucking-conscionable! And a second clock-gander later, at 6:15 or thereabouts, as the heartrending opening bars of 'Fairytale in New York' wash over us, comes thought number two, which eventually materialises as a question addressed our host, a question as to how business has been under the aegis of the new licensing laws. To which he replies:
'It's a little early to tell, isn't it? But taking tonight's turnout as an omen, I'd say no better, no worse. Come eleven, we had our usual candlestick-maker's half-dozen Friday-night local punters, plus the usual candlestick-maker's couple of foreigners from Hitchin or places slightly farther afield--and by one the lot of 'em'd filed out. Not much sense in keeping a pub open into the wee hours in a little hamlet like Great Offley, is there? I told the boss so, too, and in so many words, didn't I? But he'd hear none of it, would he? He's a barmy fellow--a Yank who won the place two years ago in some kind of swiving contest. The first thing he does after taking over is he changes our name from The Green Man (so it'd been called right on back to the reign of Georgie the Third) to The Green Guy. [So much for my Fawkesian hypothesis.] "There's more Green Man pubs than KFCs or Mickey Dees in this country," he says. "How are we going to grow any kind of brand loyalty in our customers with a name like that?" As if there's any swiving competition in this jerkwater dorf! Funny, though, now that you lot have shown up, I'm wondering whether there mightn't have been a fewmet of common sense in the name change.'
'What do you mean by that?'
'I mean, that's the only thing about this place that could have enticed you to take a turn off the old barely-beaten path and wend your way here, isn't it? I can tell by that tommy-gun way of speaking you have that you're not from this corner of Hertfordshire.'
'No, actually, we're from London.'
'And Leeds!' Herb belches out gruffly into his hand.
'Right. And Leeds by way of London. And actually we were just out looking for a place to have a few pints after hours--the old hours, I mean.'
'And you’re telling me this is the only place you could badger out for that purpose?'
'I'm afraid so, dad.'
'You mean to say you live in London and you can't find a nearer spot for a pint than swiving Great Offley, 30 miles away? Oh, that's rich! That's a keeper, TB-B-B-S!' Now he's literally doubled up with laughter and near to coughing up a lung, as they say; and I'm of half a mind to whip out my mobile and dial 999 for an ambulance, and of the other half to reach for my top shirt button; but before I become a whole of either mind, he suddenly enough pulls himself erect (vis-a-vis his whole person, not his schlong), wipes the tears away from his eyes, and--his phiz now transformed into a mask of the utmost concentration--cups a hand to one ear.
'Do you hear that?'
'No, I don't hear anything but the music. Do you lads hear anything?' Herbie says he doesn't, and Ronnie, having by now dozed off altogether (as I just then notice), says nothing.
'Excuse me, young sirs, I'll be back in a jiffy.' And with--or, rather, during--those words, he dashes to the other end of the bar, through the hole under the end-flap, across the room and out the front door with the agility and speed of some kind of Hertfordshire Jack La Lanne.
Next, in the tarbender's absence, something a mite peculiar begins to happen between Herbie and myself. I don't know whether what's kicking in is the Bourg (at last) or some kind of general principle of social life (one that some wanking sociologist has doubtlessly turned into a syndrome named after a third-tier northern European capital), according to which the disappearance of a total stranger automatically transforms every near-stranger to hand into a friend, but vis-a-vis Herbie, I immediately lose all sense of reserve. I feel that I can suddenly and in a spirit of--I swear--totally disinterested, shirt-free curiosity, ask him the first question that pops into my gourd, which in this case happens to be, 'What does it mean to elephant somebody, anyway?'
'Do whaaaaat?' he drawls bemusedly back at me across Ronnie's slumped and snoozing upper half.
'To elephant somebody, like you were telling me not to do to old great-squared-gramps here. Sure, I get the gist of the idiom: to elephant a bloke or blokess, to give 'em a hard time; what I'm asking about here is, how do you say...the metaphorical logic of the way you're using it. I mean, what sort of picture is it meant to conjure up?The picture of a pugilistic pachyderm pummelling a person with its peniform prehensile proboscis?'
'Course not. It's simple rhyming slang: elephant, short for Elephant and Castle, rhymes with hassle.'
'Really? I always thought elephant was rhyming slang for arsehole, via the same route. That's why I was surprised to hear you using it as a verb. Anyway, how can elephant be rhyming slang for hassle? Castle and hassle don't even rhyme, not by a long stretch.'
'Course they do. Caastle, hahssle.'
'Oh, I get it! It's a regional thing. It works up in Leeds on account of your flat a's.'
'Evi-fooking-dently so.'
'But what are you lot up in Leeds doing making your rhyming slang out of London landmarks anyway? Shouldn't you be mining your own West Yorkshire heritage for that purpose?.'
'You mean cooming oop with soomething along the lines of...temple for gruesome, via Temple Newsam? As in, this pub we're sitting in is right temple?'
'Yeah, yeah, exactly.'
'Mmmaybe. I'll moot the suggestion to the lahds down at the Institute, and see what they think of it.'
'What's the Institute?'
'You know--the Institute for the Preservation and Manufacture of West Yorkshire Folkways, or Ipimmywyf, as we heritage biz insiders soometimes call it. I'm a junior research fellow there--that's me job.'
Never judge a cunt by his knickers, indeed! I'd pegged him as a computer hardware salesman. Not that this Ipimmywyf gig seemed particularly alluring or honourable by comparison, but it sure was different to my original conjecture.
Well, anyway, not to change the subject, but in my capacity as yarn-spinner I'm obliged to: it's at about this time that both of us start to hear issuing from the side passage the most improbable of sounds, to wit the lowing or mooing of cattle. And right about then I see the bartender emerging from the side-passage accompanied by, of all critters, a pair of black-and-white Holstein cows.
Without getting up I ask him what is, I’m sure the reader will agree, the most natural—if not perhaps the most polite—question to ask in these circumstances: 'What are the fuck are these cows doing here?'
'What the swive are you doing here, is more like it, isn't it? They live here, don't they? The Guy is their home in the daytime hours. Isn't it, Elsie?' he continues, in the classic, yet untranscribable, emetic baby-talkish register, whilst scratching one of the cows affectionately between the ears, and then: 'Isn't it, Chelsea?' whilst offfering up a handful of hay from the floor to the maw of the other one. 'What'samatter, dearies? Do the stroppy young men from London scare you? Do you need to go poos? Don’t mind them: you just go right ahead.'
Wellsir, I gots to admit that the apparition of these here two bovines is enough to make even my adamantine resolve crumble. To myself I say, Ronnie was right after all: this whole night-out was jinxed from the start; and to Herb, 'Berry, I think on poetic grounds alone we should consider this our cue to take off.'
'And on more prosaic grounds, too,' says Herb, pinching his nose and rising from his stool as the most noxious of all man-known smells barring burnt marmite begins to permeate the room. Meanwhile Ronnie, likewise through the agency of nature’s perfect smelling salts, is beginning to bestir himself. Leaving it to Herb to get him back on his feet and moving, I fish a pair of tenners out of my wallet, chuck them on to the bar, and with watering eyes and heaving stomach, stagger to the front door. Outside, I stretch a bit, do a few perfunctory calisthenics (deep-knee bends, schpincter flexes, etc.), to jump-start the old animal spirits and calm my queasy innards, and whip out my keys to unlock the driver's door of the Mazda. Everything's going okie-fucking-dokey if you discount the invisibility or apparent absence of the McGyvermobile herself, which, judiciously sober though I may be, I notice only after I've given a turn or two to the key in its conjectural hole. Hard piece of schlong cheese indeed! There's a silver lining to this here invisible Mazda-shaped cloud, though, which is that it expedites my reading of a notice painted in bold but none-too-large caps on the sphalt of the parking space that has here-to-four been blocked by the car: 'WARNING! THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR COW-STAGING. ALL WHEELED OR OTHERWISE UNHOOFED VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED AT OWNER'S EXPENSE BY AND TO SLOTHER AND SONS GARAGE, 210 BURY MEAD ROAD, HITCHIN SG5, HERTS. PHONE: 01462 6321541'.
Crouching down on the ground with my head down and my fists raised heavenward, I start to scream 'FU-U-U-U-UCK YO-O-O-OU KE-E-E-E-E-N!' but my tongue catches on the 'K,' as I realise that we're well outside the London mayor's jurisdiction, and that thus this maledictory formula will never do, and so I do a quick lingual pirouette and finish up, gracefully enough, with 'K-U-U-U-NTISH KOUNTRY BUMPKINS!'
'There, there, Roogby,' I hear Berry consoling me from above. 'Don't take it so hard. Ronnie and I'll throw in to get your car out of hock. Won't we Ronnie?'
'Yeah, yeah, sure.' I hear Ronnie answering.
'That's all right,' I say, brushing pebblets of sphalt-fill off my knees and haunches as I stand up. Horror remains, but all stroppiness is spent. 'It was my fault anyway. Serves me right for assuming round here you can just park wherever you sodding well please. I should have gathered from our run-in with that copper that out here in the sticks the law are even farther up your arse than in London.'
'So I guess we should call for a minicab?' says Ronnie.
'I wouldn't bother,' says Herb. 'Hitchin's at most, what?--a haalf-hour walk away? And at this hour, we'd be waiting twice that long for a cahb.'
I don't know if he's right. But minute-mincing be roundly rogered: what I do know is that I'd be prepared to wriggle my way to Hitchin on my belly for the satisfaction of getting the fuck out of the pissant mock-up of Dodge that is Great Offley toot sweet, and so I say, 'Well then, let's just walk.'
And so, to the warbly accompaniment of the so-called dawn chorus, we hoof it up the road to Hitchin, arriving at Slother's shop at seven o'clock sharp. I will of course spare the reader the gory details of the three-hour-long safari in the bush-thicket of red tape that separated our arrival on the premises from the secure ensconcement of my arse-cheeks in the driver's seat of the Mazda; and merely make mention of a choice bit of fauna that I caught sight of along the way: a framed snapshot of Sarah Slother on the desk of the sexagenarian bloke processing my paperwork. And as we all three stood there shivering our nads off in the unheated front office, I got a good long gander at his shark's profile as well. The resemblance was uncanny, and there could be no doubt that she was my erstwhile prospective paramour's progenitor. I was just itching to register out loud, to Old Man Slother's face, the perversely cuntish delight I was taking in the improbability of the whole scenario, but somehow couldn't suss out a means of doing so tactfully. After all, you can't exactly say, I know your daughter and she's one fiendish cuntess to a bloke; not, at any rate, when he's got you by the short hairs, stranded 30 miles from home. It was only long afterwards, when Ronnie and I were halfway to London, that a suitably flummoxing- and-yet-unshirty sally sprang to mind: I'll give your regards to Sarah--a classic instance of what the Frogs call esprit d'escalier, which idiom, now that I come to think of it, is ripe for updating and anglicisation as esprit du motorway.
But here the reader blurts out impatiently: 'Enough of your cuntish neologising! What about that slip du clavier a line-and-a-half above the colon of the last sentence? You write, when Ronnie and I were halfway to London. Haven't you left something out? What happened to Herbert?'
Well, you cuntish gun-jumper, I was just getting to that. The thing is, you see, Herb didn't accompany us back to London. I'd got directions to the A1(M) from Slother, and from the garage it was eastwards, towards that highway, that I immediately started heading; but before we were even clear of Hitchin Herb said to me, 'Listen, Rooger, I’ve got me rooksack with me; there’s no reason for me to go all the way back into town. Could you do me a big favour and take a side-trip to Luton airport? I can catch a Midland Mainline train to Leeds from there, and you can pick up the M1 to London. It'd shave four or five hours off my trip and only add another 20 minutes to yours.'
'So you're going to head back today?' I ask him.
'Yeah, might as well. Got a lot of library hours to clock this weekend, and it really wouldn't do to try to crahm 'em all into Soonday evening.'
'B-but, Berry,' Ronnie putteringly pouts, 'you'll miss our Saturday night pub-crawl.'
'Oh, will I now?' Herb retorts in the tone of a bookie with an inside tip. 'We'll see about thaht.'
Well, after all we'd been through together, as they say, I couldn't very well say no to Herb. Fast forward 40 mintues later, and we're letting him off at the cabstand at the entrance of the airport. ‘By the way, Rooger,’ he says as he's stepping out of the car, ‘I promise to credit you as a co-author if I nick your West Yorkshire rhyming slang idea in my next proposal.’
‘Much obliged, Berry.’
‘Although, of course, I caan’t credit you unless I know your laast name.’
‘It’s McGyver.’
‘What? As in the American Doctor Who?’
‘Yeah, but without an "a" in the Mc bit. What's yours?’
'Hancock,' Ronnie blasély replies on Herb's behalf.
'As in the smooth jazz bloke?'
'That’s right,' says my new mate Herbie Hancock, a bit ruefully, 'and with the same spelling, I'm afraid.' It seemed the froggish pronunciation had its uses after all. Not that utility is any kind of an alibi for cuntishness.
Well, what with traffic on the M1 being what it is on the smoothest of so-called off-peak hours, it's getting on to about 1 p.m. by the time we close in on Barnet. During this last leg of the trip, Ronnie and I hammer out a tentative modification of his Plan B, involving our meeting up at the Ape to watch the Arsenal-Blackburn match, and then trying to piggyback on to the late-night itinerary of one of our better-informed fellow-punters. I drop him off at his place, and head back to the maisonette, where, without even untying my Skechers beforehand, I do a face-plant on to the bed and fall into a mini-coma.
I awoke to a bedroom stewing in a gentle infusion of sunlight. My first thought was, Christ, that was a short nap; my second thought was What’s the sun doing setting on that side of the house? and I checked the time on the alarm clock. 7:04 a.m. It seemed I'd slept through Saturday afternoon and Saturday night and clear on through into Sunday morning. So this was what Herbie'd meant when he said, regarding our Saturday night pub-crawl, We'll see about that. He didn't think we'd be up to it. Well, I hadn't been, and neither had Ronnie, as I learned when I woke his still-snoozing carcass via phone an hour later. Still, as I reminded him in person back at the Ape that afternoon, over my second consecutive repast of fish and poppers, there was always next weekend. Next weekend, next weekend; I'd fuck you, next weekend; you're only four days away.
Labels: 24-Hour Drinking, Herbert Hancock, Ronnie Livingstone, Sarah Slother, Sedulous Ape
posted by Rugby McGyver | 6:14 am
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