Denis at the door

Luckily, someone inside the door starts pulling on it. The hinges squeak and the bottom of the door grates on something and gets stuck, so the person inside shoves the door towards me and then tries again, with the same result. I hear the man inside muttering and huffing, and he kicks at the bottom of the door and then tries pushing and pulling it some more. I look over my shoulder, expecting the boys to be almost upon me, but I’m surprised to see that they have changed their minds and are walking away from me again, back towards the streetlamp.

The man inside stops battering away at the door, and, through the gap at the edge of the door, I can hear him breathing heavily. I knock on the door with my knuckles to let him know that I am here and so that he won’t be angry with me when he eventually gets the door open [just in case he thinks that it was something that I had done that had made the door jam].

“Who the fucking hell is that?” he shouts, “What are you fucking doing out there? Get this fucking door open!”

“I can’t,” I say, “I haven’t done anything, sir.”

He’s silent for a moment, then I hear him muttering, “A kid, a fucking kid. For Christ’s sake.”

He grunts, like a fat man bending over to tie up his bootlace, and I hear a scraping sound, and then he kicks the door a couple more times and it swings towards me and slams against the frame, then the man opens it fully so that he can come outside. I step back, but as he passes me (smelling of beer and onions and hot fat) he tries to clip me around the side of the head and says, “Get out of the fucking way, you little bastard. Little bastard,” and he waves his hand at me. “Fuck off out of the way. Fuck off,” he says to himself more quietly, and then he laughs.

I stand in the doorway, watching him lurch off, swaying from side to side, off towards the main street.

When I push the inner door open, the atmosphere of the bar is completely different from when pappi sent me to wait outside [bugger, I’d forgotten that he said he’d be ‘out in a minute’ – need to cover that off while he’s waiting outside: annoyance, fear, frustration, impotence]. The air is sickeningly thick with cigarette and pipe smoke, and the sound of the men’s voices all talking and laughing at once is a confused, frightening roar that sweeps around my head and makes me frown and blink.

It’s almost completely dark down at my head level, and when I move in among the drinkers I have to step carefully over the beer-slick floor, gently feeling my way with my fingertips against the rough trousers and jackets of the men, who [lurch] aside at my touch, and by the time I reach the part of the bar where I’d last seen pappi, my head and shoulders have been splashed with cold beer and sprinkled with ash.

Pappi has moved, but there’s a stool free where he was standing, so I use its [footrests] as a ladder and climb up so that I can try and look around and find him. The smoke is so thick that I can hardly see the other end of the bar, but I do recognise the fat man who walked me here; he’s sitting on a stool with his elbows on the bar, and between his elbows there’s a small glass with a clear liquid in it. His eyes are open, but his top eyelids keep drooping slowly down, and his head tips forward in dozy synchrony. When the lids close fully, his chin hits his chest and he jerks his head back up, eyes fully open again. The men standing around him are shouting and waving their hands around, jogging him periodically, but he looks completely oblivious to it all.

Somebody prods me in the side, where the softest skin is, under the bottom rib, and I twist around, expecting to see pappi. Instead, I find myself having to look down at the face of a boy about the same age as me. He’s got a purplish-red birthmark that sweeps down from his forehead, all across one eye, and halfway down his cheek. He smiles up at me, and his teeth on the birthmark side of his face look white against the skin there.

He says something, but I can’t hear him because of the noise and heat [earlier…the heat…]. I shout, “What?” but he shakes his head and turns away, cocking his head to indicate that I should go with him. When he reaches the curtained-off [stage], he parts the curtains and clambers up before looking back at me with his head between the curtains and raising his eyebrows. ‘Come on!’ he mouths.