The Comedown
A huge puddle had formed outside the door. The rain came down in diagonal lines. The trees opposite me shuddered under the weight of the water. It was brutal. It had been raining for four, maybe five hours now. And we’re talking hard, torrential rain. I peered up at the sky through the pub door’s window. It was grey, thick with water, and covered the street in a gloomy, dull light. I turned away from the window.
It wasn’t much lighter inside the pub. We hadn’t pulled the curtains and a few of the light bulbs had blown when Tom had flicked the switch. It felt like we were stuck in the apocalypse. The place smelled musty; the air felt thick in the nostrils. I would’ve opened a window to get a fresh flow of air into the room if it didn’t mean also letting in the torrents of water. Except for the thin coating of dust that wrapped itself around everything in the room, it was pretty much the same as the last time I was here. I shook the thought away.
My eyes landed on Tom, who was sitting under one of the few functioning lightbulbs in the corner of the room. He had paused from reading the mass of paperwork in front of him to look at me. He raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘when are you going to start doing something useful?’ We were the only two in the pub. We were probably the only two who’d been here in the past ten months, except maybe a metre man. Red seats rung around the room, the bar centre stage. On the ceiling beams hung horseshoes, old leather boots and a fishing rod. Coasters lay scattered on the tables and a sole pint glass hid abandoned on a windowsill. I pursed my lips and turned to the bar. What did we still need to do? Wipe tables, sort glasses, restock the bar? There was a leak somewhere in the roof which needed patching, and most of the wood in the building was unstable. There was also the chunk of paperwork to negotiate but that was a little beyond me. I decided sorting glasses was something I could manage without fucking up, and headed behind the bar.
Tom and I had always been different, although we did look pretty similar. Brown hair, thick, tough eyebrows and sad pasty skin. His beard was better than mine though, it had to be said. It was kind of poetic. He was the one with his shit together. He’d been the one to organise the funeral, to arrange the wake. I was the one who fell apart. Just like my facial hair, a little bit weak. The wake had been held in the pub, of course, and it had been absolutely packed, of course. My dad was a big deal in the neighbourhood. People started caring about you when you gave them cheap alcohol. Mum had made a big ceremony of hanging his photo behind the bar. People clapped, people cried. Everyone expected his boys to keep the place up and running, to keep the spirit of it alive. We didn’t. Instead Dad had been hanging on the wall for ten months, watching his life’s work slowly be buried under particles of dust.
A drip fell from the ceiling. The torrent of rain had obviously wormed its way into the building and was collecting somewhere on the ceiling above. A problem for later. I looked at the crates of glasses that were stacked precariously behind the bar. Wine glasses, pint glasses, half pints, whiskey glasses, champagne flutes, all sorts. My dad was a lot of things but organised was not one of them. At least I didn’t have to wade through the hundreds of pages of paper like Tom. I didn’t understand a lot of what was in those documents, but I knew that there were holes in the numbers. I felt grateful for a moment to have an older brother who simply assumed the difficult jobs. I crouched down and began sorting through the glasses.
When I was fourteen Tom had given me my first beer. I had had sips here and there, of course, but never a whole pint to myself. It had been a rainy day, like today, and we were at home, lounging about after school. Mum and Dad would have been down at the pub, welcoming the first of the regulars for the night. He’d handed me the cool glass bottle and said ‘get it down ya’. I’d tipped the green glass to my lips, heart pulsing and hands sweaty. I didn’t want to disappoint. The beer had escaped the bottle faster than I was expecting and it had slammed into the back of my throat. It had fizzed up my sinuses and out of my nose, dripping onto the carpet. Tom had laughed and walked away, but I didn’t touch another beer until three years later when he taught me how to pull a pint. From seventeen to nineteen there was rarely a night where I wasn’t in this pub, whether it was behind the bar or slumped on it. After university I branched out a little. Whiskey, Valium, eventually cocaine.
A glass slipped through my fingers and shattered across the grimy floor.
‘We’re supposed to be cleaning up this mess, not making one’, came his voice. I didn’t reply. Sitting down on the bar floor, listening to the steady drip drip of water, I closed my eyes and sighed. I knew today would be hard, but I didn’t think it would be quite like this. Tom and I hadn’t spoken in over a month, and other than the time I called him drunk from the airport asking for a lift, we hadn’t seen each other since the wake. I’d jetted out of the UK pretty quickly after Dad died. Yeah it was selfish, but it was so hard being places where he’d been. Visiting mum would mean visiting the wife he’d never touch again. Going to the pub meant drinking where he’d never drink again. Time is not our friend. It is fickle, and a bitch. I could hold my breath and count back to ten and then the bar would be thick with the sound of Van Morrison, the clack of pool balls. There would be the smell of spilt beer, of the dishwasher, of smokers coming in from the cold. It was so easy to imagine. And yet the fact that my dad would never speak again, never laugh again, never blink again was nonsensical. It did not compute. He died ten months ago. He was and now he never will be. It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now.
I stood up and stepped over the glass. Crunch. Drops of water from the ceiling turned steadily into a stream. The buckets and the broom were out the back. As I walked to go and find them, I contemplated popping a Valium. I definitely had some in my bag and it would help, for sure. Just being around Tom was putting me on edge. But I didn’t really want to. Being here felt like a comedown. Maybe it was the weather, maybe it was something else, but I felt more sober now, surrounded by stale beer kegs and dusty bottles of Glenfiddich, than I had in the past year. I had only been back in the country for a couple weeks, but it felt like I’d never left. I’d spent four months in South America, two months in Italy and the rest of my time dossing around in Spain. I didn’t remember a lot of it. I guess I had my dad to thank for that. He always said that he wanted me to do something fun with the inheritance. ‘Don’t you dare spend this repaying university debt’, he’d said, although somehow I don’t think almost killing myself with pills was quite what he had in mind.
Tom, as far as I know, had never seen the appeal of drugs. Even when he’d give me beer and get drunk at the pub he’d be sensible about it. Water before bed, best not to drink after 1am. When he realised the path I was going down he was irate.
‘Dumb son of a bitch is going to be dead at twenty seven’ he’d told mum.
I felt the unmistakable tinge of shame settle over me. Over half the money Dad had left me was gone, spent in back alleys in Naples. No one ever mentioned my habits to Dad. He knew I liked to drink, of course. If Tom gave me my bachelors in drinking, Dad gave me my doctorate. Not that he was an alcoholic, but my dad had a certain kind of respect for alcohol. Over the years at the bar he’d seen it tear people apart, but also create friendships and bonds that are still strong today. He understood the power behind a couple of pints shared between friends.
I located the bucket and the broom and walked them back to the crime scene. The floor beneath the leak was now sodden, and the ceiling was stained and damp. I put the bucket into position. Since I’d been out the back Tom had arranged the mess of papers into a tight pile and was standing at the door, peering out at the rain as I had done earlier. The water had waged another assault and had began to seep under the door, staining the carpet a deep red.
‘We should probably put some towels down’, I said.
He didn’t answer. I shrugged to myself and collected the shards of glass into a pile before leaning the broom against the bar counter. I tapped my fingers together. Maybe I would get that Valium after all. I stood for a moment and listened to the downpour outside and the steady drum of water hitting the bucket.
‘Why did you leave?’
I stopped tapping my fingers and looked over at Tom. He still had his back to me. I was blindsided. He’d never asked me outright about my time away. He had made it pretty obvious that he wasn’t happy with how I’d handled the last ten months, but he’d never spoken about it.
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Do you know what you did to Mum?’
I had no answer for him.
‘She fell apart and I fell apart and where were you? Getting high in some club bathroom in Barcelona.’ He turned around. ‘Do you think Dad would be impressed, huh? To hear you’ve thrown all his money at coke and booze.’
‘I don’t do coke anymore’.
‘Shut the fuck up. Look at this place.’ He threw up his hands. ‘How is this what it’s become? How could you let this happen? Did you for one moment of your little adventure stop to think of me, or Mum, or Dad? Was it that easy to forget about him?’
‘Hey just because I was away doesn’t mean this place had to go to shit. Don’t put that on me.’
‘Oh what you were expecting to come home and find I’d quit my job and taken on this place, huh? I’m just waiting for you to come back to the real world. You’re delusional.’
He walked a few steps closer until he was two metres from me. The stream of water coming from the ceiling was between us, its sound struggling to drown out our voices.
‘When did I ask you to quit your job? I’m just saying this isn’t my fault. I had my own shit to sort out.’
‘Oh yeah, typical. Your own shit. Do you ever think of anyone but yourself? You’re the most selfish bastard I’ve ever seen.’
‘People grieve in different ways, Tom.’
‘Is that what grief looks like? White powder and pills aren’t gonna bring him back’.
And with that the ceiling, rotten from years of neglect and water damage and heavy from the rain, fell through, a heavy oak table from the floor above crashing and splintering to the floor between us.
We both jumped backwards, hands shielding our faces. Breathed, waited a moment, then looked down. The table was a wooden mess on the floor. The stream of water had now subsided to a drip, the last of the puddle trickling down onto the table. We said nothing for a while.
Tom moved first. He disappeared behind the bar and out to the back. A few minutes later he came back carrying a large beer keg, and set it up on the bar counter. He pulled out two grimy glasses and, after wiping them briefly on his T-shirt, poured two pints. I moved over to the bar, and he handed me one. The perfect ratio of beer to head.
‘Cheers’, I muttered, and took a sip. It tasted warm and metallic. Fucking terrible. But we sipped it all the same. I moved over to one of the windows and pulled back the thick curtains. Some dull sunlight streamed in, illuminating the thousands of particles disturbed by the movement of the fabric. I looked back at Tom, standing under the photo of our dad.
‘Cheers’, he replied.
I turned back to the window and the rain eased off.