Denis Again Again

“Denis! Oi, Denis!” – it’s pappi’s voice, but I have to wait until he shouts again before I can find out the direction that his voice came from. But there he is, off to the left, around by the wall where the bar curves inwards towards a door next to the bottles. I find my way around the legs of the men, which make me think of the forest of tree trunks I’ve seen in one of the pictures in my story book. These tree trunks sway and smell, though, and the wooden floor is slippery with spilled beer, and it smells too – the whole place smells of sour beer and cigarettes and dust and fried onions. [care re: sensory/atmospheric similarity to Jan’s barrack drinking den…] Looking up form time to time, I see men tipping back glasses, and the white foam floating on the top of the amber liquid that’s shot through with the whitish light from the window. There are flushed faces and sweaty faces, faces set with stupid grins and faces animated with laughter, bright eyes and fishy-looking eyes, and cigarettes and pipes and bread rolls with meat and onions in them. Nearly everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.

Pappi is leaning on the little folding hatch in the bar, and as I come up to him he has to step aside and let a little man with a twisted, smiling face lift the hatch and come out into the body of the bar. He’s got a cloth folded over his arm, and he nods exaggeratedly at everyone who catches his eye.

“Aye aye, Denis!” says Pappi, and he reaches down and lifts me up, then plonks half of my bottom down on one of the high stools, and I have to grab his arm to prevent myself falling sideways as he lets me go.

“Don’t fuss, son, don’t fuss,” he says, irritation thickening his already drink-thickened voice. I notice that his cheeks are brick red.

“I’m not,” I say, “You didn’t put me on the seat properly.”

“Oo-ooo!” says one of the men pappi is standing with, “He’s a fighter, is he, your Denis?”

Pappi sort of smiles, but not a happy smile, and brushes my hand away and steps back. I can see I’ve made him look silly, and that he’ll be angry with me when we get home. It feels as if all of my body is draining out through my bottom, and I want to sigh and cry.

Pappi looks at me, pretending that he’s not annoyed, and he says, “So, Denis, what have you been up to while I’ve been talking with the boys?”

“Nothing,” I say, looking past his ear, and thinking about the picture of the naked lady in my pocket and the way that I’d jumped all over the tram seats and run around and tried to get into the driver’s cabin. [make sure he did this too – the shiny metal and the mechanisms; precursors of his apprenticeship and his technical aptitude] Pappi says something else, but I’m still staring past his ear, at the smoke-blotched plaster ceiling, and at the ruffled tops of some dusty blue curtains that cordon off the corner of the bar. There’s a gap where the two curtains almost meet, and in the gap a bright white light is being turned on and off, on and off. One of the curtains is brushed against from the other side, and a man on that side of the curtain says, “That’s fine,” and the light goes off and stays off. There’s the sound of a chair scraping on a wooden floor.

“Oi!” says pappi, “if you’re not going to listen to me I’m not going to talk to you. You might as well sling your hook.”

I stick out my bottom lip and look at him. The bar is full of men talking and laughing, and I hear a hollow rush of air and the sound of the street for a moment as someone opens the door and comes in.

Pappi says, “Look…” and fishes in his pocket for a couple of coins, which he gives to me, “go and wait outside. I’ll be out in a while and we’ll go home. All right?”

I nod mutely.