‘That’s it. Come with me.’ He steered Alex towards the vending machine by the bar, the lights moving dizzy against the walls.
‘You have money?’
‘Of course I have money. Jesus.’
‘Can I trust you to buy yourself a chocolate bar?’ asked Adrian, glancing back at Evelyn sitting with her book. ‘Or do I have to stand here and watch you?’
‘I will buy myself a chocolate bar, mother. Scout’s Honour, okay?’
Adrian went back to the table, and Alex put a hand on the vending machine to steady himself, blinking a few times until his vision cleared. The machine had several kinds of candy, but he realized now that he was both very stoned and very shaky, and somehow it seemed impossibly hard to operate. He pulled a handful of change out of his pocket, but when he tried to work out what he needed the numbers kept blurring in his mind, breaking up along the shiny glittering edges of the coins under the flickering bar lights, too damn complicated, and then it was quite difficult to get them into the narrow change slot, he didn’t know why they made those slots so narrow anyway. So he didn’t notice the voices behind him until he was fishing out his chocolate bar and heard a glass smashing to the ground; and even then, working the complicated foil wrapping off the candy, he didn’t pay attention until he heard Susie-Paul, on the verge of tears, shouting, ‘Fuck you, then! Just fuck you!’
His mouth full of chocolate, he turned and saw Susie-Paul and Chris, their faces pale and angry. He couldn’t tell which one of them had thrown the glass. They were close together, facing each other across the glittering shards.
‘You’re behaving like a child,’ said Chris, the words hissing between his teeth. ‘Grow up, will you?’
‘Do not, do not, patronize me like that, I will not put up with that,’ wept Susie, and raised one hand, her arm flexed, palm open. Chris grabbed her wrist and pushed her arm down. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘calm down, nobody wants to see a scene in a bar here.’
‘Fuck what they want!’ She pulled her hand away from him. ‘You can’t just blame this on people, you have to talk to me!’
Alex pressed his own fists against his mouth and swallowed, trying to fight back an explosion of anxious laughter. They hadn’t seen him. This was something arcane and private, and he shouldn’t be watching it.
‘I do talk to you, I talk to you all the fucking time, what the fuck do you want me to say?’
‘Don’t ask me what I want, this is not about what I want. Don’t fucking make this be about me, because this is not my problem.’
‘Well, I don’t know whose problem it is, then, because frankly you’re the one acting like you’re crazy.’
‘How DARE YOU!’ screamed Susie. She was suddenly moving, she slammed her hands against his chest and he stumbled backwards. ‘How dare you say that! Get the fuck away from me, you fucking shithead!’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Chris swept a pile of napkins off the bar with his arm as he tried to regain his balance. ‘I might as well, ’cause there’s no fucking point to this.’
‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!’ Susie shouted, and shoved him again, hard. He grabbed at the bar to steady himself, then turned and stalked towards the door and out, and he didn’t look back at her as he left.
The rest of the chocolate bar was melting in Alex’s hand. He took a short step forward, then back, his ears ringing with the music surrounding them. He could feel the shakiness of the hypo subsiding, but he was still dizzy. His head filled with space. She was sitting on a bar stool sobbing, and her hair was the colour of cotton candy, her dress was peppermint, green crushed velvet, ragged and soft. She would never cry like that because of Alex. He knew this, and the knowledge hurt him. She dried her eyes with a napkin, and he could see the dark smear of her mascara on the paper.
She got down from the stool and walked slowly back towards the dance floor, and as she passed she saw him. She gave him a small vague nod of recognition but nothing happened in her eyes at all. He didn’t matter in this, not even a bit. There was no reason that he should.
Alex stood by the wall and closed his eyes, hearing the shift in sound as the tapes ended and another band came out onstage. Looked across the room and saw her kneeling down by Evelyn’s chair, Evelyn shaking her head and putting one hand softly on Susie’s back. Susie wiped her eyes, said something to Evelyn, stood up and shrugged and moved onto the dance floor.
He wrestled a second chocolate bar from the machine, broke off a piece and ate it, and went to the bar and ordered another beer. He understood precisely how dangerous this was, but he needed to drink, he needed to be more drunk, as far outside himself as he could get.
He slumped into a chair beside Adrian and watched Susie-Paul out on the floor, tossing her head furiously, light and shadow moving across her body, the sway of her hips, the sinuous arch of her pale bare arms. Nothing made sense. The singer edged anxiously around his microphone, thin and awkward, belonging here as little as anyone else, in a swirl of rising music.
The bar was emptying out, gradually, the lights turned on to reveal puddles of beer and smashed bottles across the dance floor. It was more than an hour after last call, and Evelyn was nearly at the end of her book. Alex was rolling an empty beer bottle around on the table, watching the yellow smears of light in the amber glass and, at the edge of his vision, Susie-Paul, standing near the stage talking to a little group of Dissonance people. Most likely he could have stood up and joined them. The bottle slid off the table to the floor. Then the soft green folds of her dress as she moved away from the group, and he lifted his head and wondered how he could ever have doubted. She would come after all. She always would.
‘Alex,’ she said softly, sitting down across from him. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say hi before.’
‘No. ’Sokay,’ he said. He had a vague awareness that he was smiling at her like an idiot. ‘You were busy.’
‘Not so much. It was just too noisy, you know?’
‘I just said. It’s okay.’ He reached across the table and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back and didn’t let go. Adrian picked up his guitar and started to fiddle with the tuning.
‘I should’ve talked to you sooner.’
‘You can talk to me whenever you want.’ Alex no longer had a clue what was going on, but he wasn’t sure he cared. Her hand small and hot and soft in his.
‘I guess you saw…’ she waved her free hand in the air.
‘Mmmm.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t care, Suze,’ he said, slurring a bit on her name. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’
‘I’m not really like that.’
He drew slow circles on the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘It’s okay, Susie-Sue. It’s okay.’
The bartender had put on a tape, some kind of quiet folk music that was meant to get people out of the building; it was playing behind them now. And then, without calling any attention to herself, Evelyn put her book down on the table, walked out onto the floor, and began to dance, alone among the broken glass. Dark and slender, a strange formality in her movements, her toes pointed, as if she might have studied ballet years ago. For a moment Alex felt like there were two different screens in front of him, foreground and background fluctuating, Susie’s eyes, her fingers touching his palm, and Evelyn dipping and bending at a distance on the empty dance floor, Adrian watching her intently and making no move to join her. The room filled with mystery. A slick sheen of light on Susie’s gold-painted fingernails, the barely audible singer on the tape invoking lies and dreams and windmills.