Deep breath now. Don’t move a muscle. Four glasses float by your head and you don’t quite know how the man caressing them like bowling pins in his wide hands hasn’t managed to spill a drop. You’d have been impressed at the dexterity of his movement – which was deft, almost Biles-like – if he hadn’t looked down the front of your top as he pliéd by.
There was a hush before the music. Before the band really started to blow. You could see the anticipation in the slightly raised shoulders of the men standing in front of you. The crossed arms. The stern expressions. They wore matching gilets, reminding you of a huddle of penguins. It was a cold day, the streets were iced over like the back of a freezer. You looked to your left and watched tiny beads of condensation wet the frost-edged windows. A mismatched couple sat on a small round table by the bar and rallied nervous sips of pupil-black Guinness back and forth to one another. You could tell it was their first time at The Palm Tree. It was not your first time at The Palm Tree.
It was quiet, still, and you knew if you made a bit of effort you could hear the world going about its business outside. You forced your eardrums to focus and you could just about make out the soft crunch of footsteps in the snow. If you listen even more carefully, opening your ears up properly wide, you can hear the faint whir of the wind rattling the naked tendrils of the trees. The ka-clunk of the cash register brings you back to the room.
Christmas always makes you feel saudade. You rolled the shape of that word around your tongue before bringing it up to kiss your teeth. It’s a word you read for the first time in an inch-thick book the other day: ‘the vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future’. Nice, that, you thought. You made a mental note to use saudade in a sentence at work, but you hadn’t, yet, been brave enough to say it out loud. Its pronunciation concerned you.
The Palm Tree stands alone on Grove Road, a Grade II-listed relic on a desolate stretch of street that was reduced to rubble during the Blitz. The walk from the bus stop had been a little further than you’d expected – it always was – and it was only now, after sinking two pints in quick succession, that your fingers had started to buzz back to life. You should take your Raynaud’s more seriously, said Sophie, when she caught you rubbing your palms together as if you were trying to start a fire with a pair of sticks. They filmed an episode of Luther here once, you said, ignoring Sophie’s concern. You could feel the blood rushing into your hands in a hurry; blood cells barging past blood cells in a race to be the lucky ones who could boast about returning the feeling to your fingertips. It felt like wearing gloves full of flies.
You hadn’t even noticed that the band had started to play and yet you looked down and saw you were swaying in time to the music. At least, you hoped you were on time. Rhythm had never really been your thing. Your hips were moving parallel to Sophie’s, and before you knew it the two of you were going left-right left-right like two metronomes stacked on top of a baby grand. One misstep, though, and you knew you’d end up jabbing Sophie with the pointy, wing-like part of your pelvis on which you’d sometimes rest your hand. She might have been beside you in the milling crowd, which was getting busier by the second, but she wasn’t all there. Not really. Her ears were listening but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking about Hector.
Hector is her boyfriend, who she lives with. Hector is her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, who she doesn’t. He was somehow both things at once. A possibly dead cat inside of an unopened box. Sophie discovered Hector had been sleeping with someone else – possibly for weeks, possibly for months, and you tried your best to console her, you really did, but you wanted to come and hear the music tonight. Please, Sophie, you said. It’ll be good for you, you said. It’ll take your mind off things, yeah?
You used to come here every year before the Christmas break, just the two of you. A few stragglers had joined over the years but it’s always been Sophie and you at the centre of it all. It’s always been Sophie and you.
