checking on her trolley. It’s a real drinkers’ bar of social design; the bends mean that it would have to be almost empty to enable patrons to sit too far from each other. A mirror runs the length of the pub, making it doubly difficult to avoid eye contact with anyone. He checks the time on the clock framed by green light above the jukebox.
Two neon female forms, both lying prone, boobs and buttocks outlined in the glaring red, impress Lennox. They might have been mermaids, but a leg held up seductively announces both as terrestrials.
The effect is of a slightly seedy but classy joint, with an old clandestine atmosphere of speakeasy sex that its present-day incarnation as a drinkers’ den can’t quite dispel. Lennox sits at the bottom ‘U’ of the horseshoe, close to the door, behind a couple of portraits of Humphrey Bogart and one of Clark Gable. He looks at two old mirrors and their ornate carvings. He realises then that Club Deuce has to be one of the greatest and most beautiful bars of its type, indeed of any type, in the world.
The bartender is a large, tattooed guy, with long hair and a beard and moustache. An ex-biker type, long gone into civvy life, Lennox reckons. He has a big, but slightly shy smile.
— What’ll it be? he asks, arching his brows.
— A Stoli vodka and soda. Lennox rubs at his top lip for the moustache no longer there. He had it for years, and now, like an amputee with a missing limb, he feels it itch in its absence.
The barman looks approvingly at Lennox’s T-shirt as he pours the drinks. — English? he asks.
— Scottish.
— Burns, right?
— It certainly does. Lennox looks at the redness on his wrist that the bar lights have shown up, and takes a swig on the vodka.
The barman studies him, thinks about explaining; changes his mind.
The vodka is a good measure; Lennox liked that about the States, freepour. They didn’t fuck about with all that petty, penny-pinching weights-and-measures shite. That sort of stuff alone made the American Revolution worthwhile. He supplements this with a bottle of drinkable European imported beer.
He eases himself round on the bar stool and looks up at the television screen. American Football; the Bears versus the Packers. Lennox can’t tell if it’s live or recorded. He feels like asking, but reasons that if it’s highlights he’ll find out soon enough. He puts the copy of
The bar is almost empty. Two skinny young white guys, who he reckons are drinking on fake IDs due to the nervous looks they shoot every time the door opens, play eight ball in the corner. Further down from him two women sit at the bar; probably only late twenties, but with life’s pummellings visible. A homeless lady sits in a corner, a hawk-like eye checking her possessions through the window. On the other side of Lennox, a fat guy talks to the bartender in a dissenting squeak about some tax that he reckons is unconstitutional.
Lennox orders another vodka. Then another. His decent tips ensure that the barman fills them up. This man evidently understands that some people, just because they come into a bar alone, and with their drinking heads on, don’t necessarily want company. They want to see if the shit they’ve been trying to think through straight plays any better drunk.
He is contemplating that he’d probably been wrong to walk out on the counselling. But he’d clammed up. He’d tell the sneaky, intrusive bastards nothing about himself, nothing that would go on his personal file, despite their claim that everything was confidential. Lennox had gone twice after they picked him off the floor of the Jeanie Deans pub. The woman, Melissa Collingwood, had only been trying to help, to make a point, but she’d angered him. It was when they had got talking about death. Britney’s death. — I can’t stand the thought of her dying alone, being frightened, he told her. — It’s that that does my nut in.
— But isn’t that how we all die, ultimately? Alone? Frightened? Collingwood had said, her eyes widening in a sincerity that seemed too pained to be anything other than contrived. And he’d reacted to that.
— She was a fuckin bairn, ya spastic, Lennox had shouted at her, and charged out the door, not stopping till he hit Bert’s Bar in Stockbridge. Where he had gone since the case started. Ignoring the messages on the voicemail from his NA sponsor, a cheerful fireman named Keith Goodwin, whose mounting pleas were a voice-over to his descent into oblivion.
Now he has no antidepressants and he wants cocaine.
A country and western song sparks up from the jukebox: a witty number about alcohol. Imperceptibly, the bar has gotten busier. Maybe fifteen people in the room. The homeless lady has gone. Lennox takes a swig of beer. First the talk is louder then the music takes over. It goes back and forth. A few people come and go, but most remain, their elbows on the bar.
From his peripheral vision, he sees one of the women looking at him, being egged on by her friend. He instantly discounts it: his senses are not his to trust. But she slides off her bar stool and approaches him. Slightly built, she wears a short denim skirt and a lime-green top, tied in the middle, supporting her breasts. Her white midriff is bare, and a lip of flab hangs over the waistband of her skirt, a piercing on her belly button drawing attention to it. — Got a light? She pronounces it ‘laht’. Her accent is distinctly Southern rather than the mainstream American that seems to dominate Miami.
— Aye. Lennox pulls out a lighter he picked up in the hotel. It has FLORIDA emblazoned on it, with some palm trees. He clicks on the flame that will draw her closer.
A bottle blonde with skin an almost translucent white, her lipstick-red slash of a mouth is like a gaping wound. Her eyes are sunken, with dark bags under them, which Lennox thinks is bruising until her proximity to the light reveals it as fatigue. Her face is hollowed out. A bit more flesh might have heightened a good bone structure. Its almost total absence makes her look skeletal. Lennox sees a woman chiselled by drugs, though he supposes that bad diet – one based on coffee and cigarettes – could produce the same effect.
— Where’s that accent from? she asks in those smoky, honeyed tones.
— Scotland.
— That’s cool! she exclaims, with an excited verve that animates her to the extent that Lennox immediately feels like reframing his assessment. — Y’all on vacation?
— Vacation… aye… Lennox says, thinking about Trudi. Would she be back at the hotel? Perhaps already on a flight home? Surely not. He can’t tell. His perspective has gone. He looks at the bandaged hand that grips his beer glass. It’s like a foreign body.
— I’m Robyn, she proclaims. — With a y.
— Ray-with-a-y, he retorts. — Funny, it’s only guys that get called your name back home, he tells her. He feels like explaining that it was usually just posh guys, but decides against it. — Are you from Miami?
Robyn-with-a-y shakes her head. — Nobody’s
He faces a woman about five seven, with an elongated face and long, raven hair that curls down on to her shoulders. She has the classic Latin features he’s quietly appreciated in many of the women here since he’s gotten off the plane; brows sculpted into thinly plucked lines to highlight huge, striking dark orbs that could vaporise the unguarded. Her nose is long and straight, of the kind you rarely see in Scotland.
Age, lifestyle and possibly circumstance has almost driven out a classical beauty, but in its remnants a vivacious power has been retained. She wears her tight blue jeans well and Lennox notices the Converse All Star footwear only because it looks the same as the design worn by people in Oxgangs when he was growing up. His gaze goes back and forth from her eyes to a grey-silvery effect top that just about manages to master the formidable cleavage behind it.
Starry gives him a smile of slow, evaluating grace. It’s obviously manufactured but displays a calculating intelligence that in spite of himself elicits his respect. The woman is as tough as nails but something tells him her power is as much hard won as God-given.
