The truth was that it had made him see that everyone who died alone had their own version of that chair. Some drama or other, no matter how mundane the rest of their existence was. And the idea that they’d not have someone there to be with them at the end, to acknowledge that they’d been a person in the world who’d suffered and loved and all the rest of it—he just couldn’t bear the thought of it.
Andrew realized he’d been spinning his glass on the table. He stopped and the liquid swirled for a moment before falling into a gentle rotation. When he looked up at Peggy, she seemed to be studying him, as if recalibrating something.
“Well, what a first morning on the job this has been,” she said.
Andrew took a big gulp of beer, enjoying the fact that tipping liquid into his face meant the onus on him to talk briefly disappeared.
“Anyway,” Peggy said, seeming to sense Andrew’s discomfort, “we should talk about something more cheery. Like, who am I going to hate working with in the office?”
Andrew relaxed slightly. This felt like safer territory. He weighed the question up. If he were being professional about it he’d toe the party line and say that while of course it could be a challenging environment to work in, which meant there was the occasional personality clash, everyone always pulled together in the end. But then again he had just had half a pint of lager at one p.m. on a Wednesday, so sod it.
“Keith.”
“Keith?”
“Keith.”
“I think I remember him from my interview. He sat in with Cameron. He kept putting his finger in various parts of his body and eating whatever came out when he thought I wasn’t looking.”
Andrew winced. “Yeah, that’s sort of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his personal hygiene.”
Still feeling somewhat reckless, Andrew found himself divulging his theory that there was something going on between Keith and Meredith. Peggy shuddered.
“Sadly, Keith reminds me a bit of this boy I had a dalliance with in my teenage years. He smelled like unwashed PE kit and had long, greasy hair, but I was besotted. And I wish I could say that was because he was incredibly charming and kind, but he was a complete idiot. He was, however, the lead guitarist in a local band, a band I subsequently joined to play maracas in.” Andrew was instantly transported back to his teenage local and watching the first—and last—performance by Sally and (then boyfriend) Spike’s band, Driftwood, where they nervously murdered Joni Mitchell covers in front of an audience of Andrew and twenty empty chairs. Sally had seemed unusually vulnerable that night, Andrew recalled, feeling a rush of affection for his sister.
“What was your band called?” he said to Peggy.
She looked at him with an unmistakably mischievous glint in her eye. “Get another round in and I’ll tell you.”
—
It turns out that if you haven’t had a drink for a long time, two halves of 4 percent lager on an empty stomach will actually have quite a strong effect. Andrew didn’t feel drunk as such, just fuzzy and warm and aware that he would happily punch a puffin if it meant he’d get some crisps.
As promised, Peggy revealed the name of the band she’d been in (Magic Merv’s Death Banana), and they’d moved on to talking about their previous jobs. Peggy had also been axed from her position in a different part of the council and been shunted across. “I was ‘business support officer for the Access, Inclusion and Participation Team,’” she said, “which was as fun as it sounds.”
Andrew had been trying to place her accent. He thought it was probably Geordie. Was it rude to ask that question? He rubbed at his eyes. God, this was a bit ridiculous. They should really have gone straight back to the office. Not that he had any desire at all to do so. But two beers, though. Two! At lunchtime! What was he going to do next—throw a television out of a window? Ride a motorbike into a swimming pool?
Just then the quiet was broken as a group of women bustled in, all talking loudly over each other. Their boisterousness was entirely at odds with the subdued atmosphere, but they didn’t seem at all embarrassed, as Andrew would have been, to be causing any sort of disruption. He got the sense that this was a regular fixture, a midweek tradition, perhaps: the way they all headed for a particular table without deliberation. Why is it that we find traditions comforting? he thought, stifling a belch. He looked at Peggy and was suddenly struck by the promise of asking her this incredibly profound question. Inevitably, it didn’t sound quite so clever when he said it out loud.
“Hmm,” Peggy said, not looking fazed, to Andrew’s relief. “I suppose it’s probably just because it’s a moment in time where you know exactly what’s about to happen, so there are no nasty surprises waiting for you. I dunno, maybe that’s a bit of a pessimistic way of looking at it.”
“No, I know what you mean,” Andrew said. He pictured Sally looking at the calendar, realizing it was time for their quarterly call. Maybe there was some solace, some comfort, in the regularity of their interaction. “I suppose it’s about having a balance,” he said. “You need to keep making new traditions, otherwise you start to resent the old ones.”
Peggy lifted her glass. “I feel like I need to toast that. To new traditions.”
Andrew looked dumbly at her for a minute before quickly grabbing his glass and knocking it clumsily into hers with an ugly clink.
There was a collective cooing from the women in the corner. Peggy looked past Andrew’s shoulder at them. After a moment she leaned forward and looked at him conspiratorially. “Be subtle,” she said, “but don’t you just love looking at everyone’s reactions when someone’s talking about getting engaged?”
Andrew swiveled around.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa—I said subtle!”
“Sorry.”
This time, he half turned in his chair and pretended to be inspecting a framed caricature of a drunken cricketer on the wall. He glanced as casually as possible at the group before turning back. “Was there something specific I was supposed to notice?” he said.
“Look at their smiles. It’s all in the eyes.”
Andrew was lost.
“Most of them are genuinely happy for her, but there are at least a couple of them who don’t think this is a good idea,” Peggy said. She went to take a gulp of beer, then decided what she had to say was more important. “Me and my friend Agatha, right, for ages we had this game that whenever we found out someone we knew was getting married and we didn’t really approve we’d guess what their first post-proposal argument would be about.”
“That’s . . . that’s a bit . . .”
“Mean? Awful? You betcha. I very much learned my lesson after I got engaged to my fella, Steve. When I saw Agatha I jokingly made her guess what our first fight had been. Unfortunately it backfired in a pretty major way.”
“How so?”
“She guessed that it was because Steve had told me he was already having cold feet about the whole thing.”
“And what was it about really?”
“It was over a badly washed-up spatula.”
“Oh.”
“Yep. Turns out she’d never really approved of him at all. But we made up in the end, thankfully. All it took was five years of stubborn silence before bumping into each other, both hammered, in a kebab shop and putting the world to rights. She even bought me a spatula for mine and Steve’s tenth wedding anniversary. Funnily enough, that was the first thing I reached for to chuck at his head the other night when he came back from a two-day bender having ‘just popped out for a quick drink.’ God, life’s weird sometimes.” Peggy let out a hollow laugh and Andrew joined in, unsurely. Peggy took a long gulp of Guinness and landed her glass with a thud. “I mean,” Peggy said, “go out, get wasted, we’ve all been there, right?”
Thankfully, Andrew judged this to be rhetorical and kept quiet.