BrotherHood | Allen Jarvis
The New Globe
There is something amiss in my world yet I am unable to place the focal point of my anguish. It’s not the fact that it’s six-thirty on a Friday night and I’m stuck in the New Globe on the Mile End Road when any other rational and caring father should surely be at home with his wife and young family. Nor is it because each and every one of my office girls has been cheeky enough to call me “Preston” - to my face - in the space of the last half hour (Caroline twice, but I can excuse her abject familiarity as this is her last day at our office). Nor is my distress amplified because we’re surrounded by Queen Mary’s students and would-be-students and has-been students, all of whose word-patterns and affectations and designer rascal-wear should make me feel out-of-place, so out-of-sorts, when I’d have preferred the snug intimacy of our regular haunt, the King’s Arms back towards Stepney Green.
Here in the New Globe I’m faced by a white lady openly caressing with a black man under the stairwell in the corner and two crop-haired girls sitting, legs entwined around two stools at the bar, both couples touching one another in a fashion completely foreign and bewildering to me. Here in the New Globe practically all women present, my office girls included, are found to be acting in a lewd and raucous manner totally ill-fitting the seemliness one might expect from creditable young ladies and more akin to the loony rantings of a rugby scrum.
No, as I sit and peruse this alien microcosm, these pub-land goings-on from which I’m usually so cocooned it suddenly strikes me that the root cause of my uneasiness, the cardinal point disrupting my inner being, is somewhere beyond the scope of my vision, somewhere out there, removed from the realms of this public house, out deep into the pitch night. It’s an uncertain future that brings with it a foreboding threat of imperilment. Some-thing, some-one, is treading an unwanted path towards me.
I take another calculated sip of my orange juice, balking ungentlemanly as an ice cube catches my front teeth, then I swivel slowly, almost purposelessly, on my bar stool to be faced full-on by ... Bernice’s ballooning bosoms!
“Another drink, Preston?” Bernice asks me, her low-slung cleavage impeding my line of vision. “And perhaps,” she adds throatily. “We could make an effort to try some alcohol this time?”
“Oh, er, no thank you,” I’m spluttering, slightly flustered, quickly averting my gaze by straightening my posture, straightening my tie, straightening the creases in my trousers then standing to offer my stool to the diminutive Nazia who’s finally returned to us from the ladies washroom.
“C’mon, Mr Hood,” Caroline complains, jiggling at my elbow. “You haven’t drunk anywhere near your share of the whip yet.”
“Yeah, are you a lightweight or what, Mr Hood?” someone - Lucy, I think? - giggles.
“Maybe just half a lager then?” I sough to appease them.
“A pint it is then, Preston,” Bernice coos then swivels off in her big silly shoes, feet virtually vertical to the floor, shoes sure to be the death of her one day.
“No, Bernice, a half please, I -” is all I can manage in her wake.
“C’mon, Mr Hood,” Katie cajoles me. “Have a word with yourself, it’s early doors yet - Mrs Hood surely won’t mind you home just a little bit late and a little tipsy one Friday night, will she?”
“Yeah, your wife’s not some awful dragon, is she, Mr Hood?” Lucy asks.
“No, my Amy’s absolutely lovely,” I tell them both, mean every word that I say, this utterance written in blood.
“Aaah, ain’t that sweet,” Lucy returns.
“Well then, she won’t complain about you helping me celebrate, will she?” Caroline semi-asks, sort of informs me. “And, just think, you won’t even have to see my ugly mug in the office again come Monday morning.”
I look from Caroline Smiths to Katie Eason from Lucy Lambert to Nazia Ramzan, back to Caroline Smiths again, then mollify the ladies with, “Maybe just the one pint then,” and immediately log a mental proclamation to beat a retreat after this, my first and very last pint of the night.
“That’s what I like to hear ... Preston,” Caroline grates in those barrow-boy tones, voice thick with glottal stops, an accent I still find uncomfortable, even after all this time in the East End, yet one which my wife and all the office girls - Nazia aside - readily share. Caroline then leans forward and moves her hand to my side as if to mimic tickling me and it’s as much as I can do to contain myself from blushing.
I catch sight of Bernice’s reflection in this huge mirror resplendent at the right of the pub as she continues to reel off our round to this barman, young, Billy-goat bearded, perhaps too young to even be seen in a public house, let alone serve in one, hence the need for a silly beard affixing years to his juvenescence. Bernice gives my mirrored-self a silly wave. I unthinkingly react with an equally daft hand signal then wish I hadn’t and stop to think how unladylike it is for a woman to actually order beer and, indeed, go on and drink that baneful brew.
I’m studying myself in this huge mirror resplendent at the right of the pub. I tower above the rest of my office girls, only Bernice can offer any renitence by way of height. My brown mop of hair looks thick and tousled - I need to put a wet comb through it - and my face appears a little rounded, pudgy at this distance and though I know it’s just the mirror contorting my image I find myself sucking in my cheeks nevertheless. My eyes then fall on the two girls with intertwined legs once again and one appears to be preening the other, as if they were wild primates or something. She then places a gentle kiss on the other girl’s forehead and this image is so utterly utopian and tender-hearted, I cannot help but just stare, entranced. I have never seen two lesbians like this before, up close and in the flesh, authenticated, inhaling and exhaling. I didn’t realise they had lesbians in the East End; I’d sometimes assumed they were just a media creation for television people. Oh, Davie’s undoubtedly come across lesbians before, showing off their bosoms and vaginas in garish stageshows or smutty films or in King’s Cross or the Reeperbahn or something, but I -
And then that pendulous feeling wells up inside me again. I’m thinking about Davie, the tension snowballing, but I know that he’s not the catalyst here because he’s so well in the past now and I wonder how on earth I’ve made this connection - from two enchanting girls caressing one another to my dead brother whose name hasn’t infiltrated my thoughts for such a long, long time. I’m praying that this isn’t some god-awful portent, an omen for bad times ahead. There is a director’s chair hanging from the ceiling, STELLA ARTOIS written across its back in red lettering and I do not fully understand (a) why it should be suspended there in the first place, (b) what its presence might actually mean to any of us, (c) whether I should really care?
“Here we go everyone,” Bernice shrills as she struggles back between us, laden down with a tray, full of drinks. Each of the girls dives in, each on alcohol except for Nazia, granted immunity because of her religious persuasions.
Bernice then takes great pleasure in presenting my glass to me. “Real men drink pints,” she tells me.
I’m just about to explain how I don’t enjoy alcohol, that driving sensation of not being in control, reason beaten into retreat and concealed demons wriggling free from their dark places, when Caroline calls everyone to attention with a high-pitched, “Okay then everybody - ‘ere, shut up - I wanna propose a toast.” Caroline holds her pint glass aloft (I still find it befuddling that ladies should be found drinking from pint glasses). “I wanna propose a toast to fresh beginnings for me -”
“Fresh meat, more like,” Bernice interjects. “If the lads in our Dagenham office let you have your wicked way.”
The girls all laugh, except for Nazia who maybe blushes, and me; I just smile, not really understanding what exactly Bernice meant or indeed what “fresh meat” could possibly infer in Cockney rhyming slang.
“Ooh, you are awful, Bernice McKee,” Caroline blusters. “I’m gonna miss you, babes. Now, c’mon everybody, raise your glasses ... I wanna propose a toast ... a toast to fresh beginnings for me and a toast to our lovely scrummy boss, Mr Preston Hood!”
The amassed congregation are repeating Caroline’s sermon verbatim but I just find myself mouthing along with the words, my attention suddenly distracted by the shaved head of this studenty type sitting close to us - a shaved head which appears not to be shorn as a fashion statement (and a witless statement that would be too) but rather because the student’s hair seems to have fallen out in these pseudo-random clumps and you can readily make out little islands of baby-pink flesh marooned in greyer hair-infested seas, the entire scalp area strangely dappled.
“You want something, pal?” the shaved-head turns to ask, prompted by a nod from another student stood opposite me.
“Pardon?” I just bluster.
“I said, do you want something?”
“Me?” I ask, still not entirely sure what he’s conjecturing. “I don’t think so.”
“Everything okay here, Preston?” Bernice steps in, ignoring the student.
“Yes, yes,” I tell her, turn to her for an instant then back to the student.
“Well, what the fuck were you staring at then?” the student hisses at me.
“Oh, er, nothing really.” I’m panicking for something to say, desperate not to bring attention back to this poor boy’s hair, or indeed his lack of hair. “I was just, erm, just staring off into space, you know how it is.”
“Staring ... off ... into ... space?” this student asks, pausing between words.
“Yes, that’s right,” I tell him, merrily, then warble, as if for effect, in this childish sing-songy type voice. “Just staring off into space.”
The student regards me for a moment. “Hear that, Tony?” he beckons his friend, the one who’d pointed out my abstract gawping. “This suit here said he was just staring off into space.”
“Just staring off into space?” this Tony fishes, repeats.
“Yeah,” the first student says. “Like in a focal seizure or something?”
The pair chuckle and I cluck along with them too for a second then stop to ask, quite candidly, “I beg your pardon - a focal what?”
“A focal seizure ...” the Tony one starts, still smiles, then his face adopts this darker facade. “A minor epileptic fit where the victim just finds himself staring off into space.”
“I’m sorry,” I proclaim. “A minor epileptic fit?”
“Probably brought on by ecstasy abuse or something,” the first student sneers at me, says to his friend, “I’ve heard it can be quite common amongst ravers.”
“Ravers?” I ask. “I’m not raving, there’s nothing in the slightest bit angry about me. And what on earth is XTC abuse?”
Bernice materialises beside me again, folds her arms across her chest, still clenching her pint in one hand, then asks the students, quite casually, “Look, do you want to know?”
I’m taken aback, cannot believe that Bernice has had the effrontery to offer herself to these two student boys in such a brazen and public fashion.
“Eh?” the first student asks, open-mouthed, obviously as shocked as I.
“Do you want to know?” Bernice repeats but this time there’s a cutting rasp to her voice.
The second student starts again, appears angered, “Look, darling, I -”
“Don’t fucking darling me,” Bernice hisses, remains staring at the first student. “I said, do you want to know?”
It then strikes me that this isn’t any profane or immoral act to which Bernice is soliciting but she is in fact threatening these two students like some great knight in gleaming armour with me, her fair, erm, ‘damsel’ in distress. I hope my little Lulu develops such self-preservation to match Bernice’s. With my help she’s already well on the way.
“Look, it’s the suit who’s got the problem,” the first student is explaining to Bernice. “He’s the one who started it.”
“Oh, the suit is it?” Bernice snipes. “The suit is it?”
“Bernice, I really don’t think -” I’m attempting to interject but there’s no stopping her, Bernice is on a roll: “The suit here just happens to have a name. This is Preston Hood and he is my boss and my friend and he’s one of the most civil and decent blokes you could hope to find living in the East End” - I look to the ceiling, abashed by Bernice’s philippic - “and Preston has kindly joined all his office girlies for a drink, so the last thing I or Preston or indeed any of our girls needs is hassle off a pair of sad student muppets like you two.”
There’s this baited pause, second hands ticking soundlessly past, then the two students blurt out at the same time, the first saying, “I’m sorry,” the second half-raising his arm meekly in my direction to whimper, “But h-he started it.” Bernice glowers at the pair then they both conform, “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” Bernice sighs.
I just stand in awe at her spectacle of strength, supremacy.
“B-but we’re not students,” the Tony one mentions.
“No, we’re not, we’re actually Admin Assistants,” the piebald one adds, as if in appeasement.
“At Queen Mary’s, admittedly,” the Tony one adds.
“We fucking hate students,” they both repeat in unison.
“Like I said,” Bernice says, maintains her composure, that collected air of authority, though I perhaps sense a hint of clemency swelling her tonsils. “We just don’t want any trouble, okay?”
“No worries,” the two non-students repeat in unison.
“You okay, Preston?” Bernice asks me.
“Can we buy you a drink?” the Tony one asks, this question levelled solely at Bernice, apparently not for my ears.
Bernice looks him up and down then answers, quite intentionally, “Fuck off, muppet.”
The two seem almost pleased with her response, as if just discoursing with Bernice has been enough to make their day.
“Perhaps another time?” the hairless Admin Assistant jokes but Bernice slips her arm through mine, causing me to flinch just momentarily, unsure of her advance, but nobody registers the shock on my face as Bernice purrs, “I don’t think so, I’m really not your type – I’m not inflatable. And, besides, you’ll have to get past my man Preston first,” then blows this bald non-student an exaggerated kiss which even has me almost excited. “Now then, Preston,” Bernice turns to me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Um, yes. Yes, Bernice, I’m fine,” I tell her, smile. Our gazes lock for just a moment too long, eye contact cemented, and Bernice looks oddly enchanting, somehow serene, not the hardened impudent girl who works for me (when she can be bothered), then I switch my gaze back to the pinkie shaven head of the first non-student and find myself feeling sorry for him, having to bear the brunt of such an unfortunate disorder.
“You sure you’re okay, Preston?” Bernice asks me one more time, her hand still to the crook of my arm and I feel a strange warmth, a kind of solace, surging up within me, as I answer her almost dreamily with, “Yes, I’m fine, thank you Bernice, but I really ought to be getting home to my family.”
“Bollocks to that,” Bernice cackles. “I’ve just saved your life, Preston, the least you can do is buy us another round!” and with that all I can do is blush and the girls all fall around laughing at Bernice’s observation. I begin to laugh along too, once I’m sure it’s the right thing to do, the suitable etiquette. There is this sign chalked above the bar which reads UPSTAIRS NOW OPEN FOR LUNCH, even though it’s well past the allotted hours during which most civil people deem to take such a meal.
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