‘You should try piercing,’ Jack said.
‘I don’t want to try it, but if I’m ever taken captive by the Spanish Inquisition I’ll put them on to you. You’d get on like a castle on fire.’
‘What’s that? History jokes from the history student? Three years taking drugs care of Johnny taxpayer and you think you know everything. Seeing as I kept you in beer all that time, while I was working for a living, I’ll let you get the next round in.’
I got the next round in.
‘Is he the full shilling?’ the landlord asked me, nodding at Jack.
‘He’s missing some loose change. Actually, he’s all loose change.’
‘Looks like he’s wearing it in his ears. My daughter goes in for all that. Face like a cheesegrater. I tell her she’ll end up no good, attracting some pervert into kitchenware.’ He subsided and looked miserably at the crisp boxes.
‘It’ll just be a phase,’ I said. He gave me a gloomy look.
‘They said that about bloody disco music.’ He returned to his inspection of the crisps and I returned to Jack.
‘Cheers,’ said Jack, taking his pint. His mouth was pierced but he didn’t have any liprings in. They interfered with drinking. He had a small barbell through his nasal septum, his eyebrow ring, and a cluster of rings and studs in each ear. It was all low-key. I saw worse at the bus stop. But it gave me an iceberg feeling; his most dangerous features were out of sight. Under his clothes there would be all sorts of awful things, tintacks and fishhooks, staples and cutlery. He didn’t have many in his face because of his job. He worked at a printers outside Oldbury and the management didn’t allow facial jewellery. They feared that some dangling item might get caught in the machinery, leading to death or litigation. At the least, that day’s print run would be ruined. It wasn’t a big company. They did special supplements for the local papers, posters for local rock groups, one-off histories of the local area, that sort of thing. Sometimes they’d bring out limited runs of the latest book by one of the local authors. These were sold in local shops to nobody I ever met. Jack had joined as an apprentice and had worked his way up to foreman.
I hadn’t been to the printers. I imagined it to be a huge dark building, enormously lengthy and tall, with remote thin windows. It would be full of complicated machinery, wheezing and huffing; wetly-printed papers would be shuffled all over the place by conveyor belts, carried to the ceiling and thrown into loops and vertical drops like screaming people at a theme park. Apprentices in inky overalls would pull tall levers and operate sprockets; from time to time, with a thin shriek, one of them would be gathered by the machinery and whirled around the room.
Jack emptied his glass.
‘That’ll be your round,’ he said. He’d lost count. It wasn’t worth arguing about. That was all I seemed to do with Jack, hang about on the outskirts of an argument we never actually visited. I couldn’t remember how we’d been at school. Perhaps we’d been exactly the same. I got another two pints. When I took them back to the table, Jack was fiddling with a beermat. I was relieved to see that he’d stopped adjusting his metalwork. It was embarrassing, even though there was only the landlord there and he was more interested in his crisps. He held up the beermat and studied it.
‘We did a run of these,’ he said, ‘with jokes on. For a beer festival in Humberside. We all had to bring a joke in. They didn’t use mine.’
I didn’t ask Jack what the joke was. His jokes were the sort Bernard Manning would have turned down as too offensive. ‘So how is the printing trade? Any interesting gossip from our local reporters?’
‘Someone’s filling the mines with stuff. Banned toxic stuff so horrible you couldn’t even offload it in fucking Guatemala, and someone’s lobbing it under Dudley. The hospital’s sinking into the ground. Teenage literacy is down, teenage pregnancies are up, and teenagers should be seen and not fucking heard.’
‘The usual, then,’ I said. Jack nodded his head in agreement.
‘I saw Eddie Finch the other week,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘Said he’d be in for a drink later. If nothing came up. He has to man the phones in case a story breaks. Pensioner loses cat, cat loses sense of direction, man paying by cheque is killed by everyone else in the supermarket. It must be all fucking go, working on the Herald.’
Eddie Finch worked on the Pensnett Herald, which covered the events in Pensnett. Pensnett was a stretch of road outside Dudley with three shops and a bad reputation. I’d never been there myself, but I knew someone who’d stopped for a newspaper and escaped with stitches and a persistent nervous twitch and was told he was lucky. There was a fun run there once a year, which was like the London Marathon only you ran a lot faster. The Herald was always full of crime reports and obituaries. Like the notices in the local shop windows, it suffered from displaced apostrophes. Eddie covered some of the reporting, most of the horoscopes and all of the frequent letters from ‘Angry of Kingswinford’. He was a minor reporter on a minuscule newspaper. He drank, however, as though he was auditioning for a place in Fleet Street before Fleet Street moved out of Fleet Street. From time to time he’d join us for a drink. Though I didn’t often drink much, if Eddie joined us, I would drink more. More than I could cope with, usually. Then I’d wake up dizzy and lost with a glutinous headache and vague memories of appalling things that, it would turn out, I had done.
‘He said he’d be in by nine,’ said Jack, checking his watch.
‘Is he?’
‘Not unless this is bolloxed. Probably just as well if he doesn’t come in. Lisa doesn’t like him much.’
‘Because he drinks?’
‘Because he’s a journalist. She doesn’t trust them. She says everything you tell them goes in the papers.’
‘I’ve told him lots of things and he hasn’t put any of them in the paper.’
‘You don’t have anything worth printing. Not these days. I think we could have kept him in material when we were young.’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, Lisa’s right. I don’t trust Eddie. Not when he’s drunk.’
‘He’s always fucking drunk.’
‘There you are then.’
I wasn’t sure where I was. The conversation kept heading off somewhere, then turning back before it got there. Jack was on his way to another subject. Perhaps he wanted to talk about Lisa. He usually did. She was his girlfriend. They had met at some sort of convention for body-piercing aficionados. It had been held at Stourbridge town hall. The two of them had noticed each other across a room full of pinned flesh. Chromed instruments curved out of the crowd; by the light of surgical lamps they started to chat, and snapped together like a ring binder. They had met again a day or two later and one thing had led to one more thing. One more thing had gone on for a month, and then Lisa moved in with Jack and Jack decorated several rooms.
It all sounded serious to me. I fell head over heels all the time, but I’d never done any decorating. I watched decorating on the television while I was waiting for a real programme to come on. Decorating happened at a stage of a relationship that I had either missed or never reached. I thought that it would probably be the latter. I could start relationships, but I wasn’t very good at them. It was like starting fights after a few drinks. It made sense at the time, but you ended up with a headache and no money and all of your mates wishing you’d shut up about it.
I hadn’t met Lisa. Jack said she was wonderful, but I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. He was hardly going to say she was an old boiler with a bosom full of rivets. That’s not the sort of thing you say in the first couple of months. If you get through the first six months you can say anything you like. I think. I’ve never