This Is Yr Life

Chapter Twenty

Kyle walked home from work, except he was not going to his own apartment he was walking towards Rebecca Two’s, recently christened Bex, home for movie night.

Since that night with Jessica and then later on Summer and Shaun and everybody else, he had seen them each weekend since. Sometimes, they would go to the same bar, others, they would move from apartment to apartment, house to house, week by week, someone took on the mantle of Host, and had entertained with dinner parties. Last week, they had been at Rebecca One’s house, a nickname that Kyle frequently changed, depending on which one spoke to him first. She had served Mexican food and they had drunk tequila, Kyle now having found a taste for it, now that he understood the salt, shot, lemon production of the whole routine. They had ventured out into her garden on an uncharacteristically warm night though still wrapped in their coats and hats regardless and blindfolded one another and taken it in turns to swing and whack a piñata which ended up with Summer, of all people, losing the grip of the cricket bat employed to replace a baseball bat and which hurtled towards the paper mache model of a donkey and split it right on the nose, spilling out small bottles of alcohol onto the artificial turf that were greedily gathered up by the many gloved hands in attendance.

They had games night at Ralph’s apartment, which began respectively enough with Pictionary and then moved onto quiz games where they were split into teams, Kyle on the side of Summer and Shaun, where they used pots and pans and whistles to announce themselves as the ones that knew the answer.

As with most game nights, though, this soon degenerated into chaos. More drinks equalled greater boisterousness. Friendly arguments over the specifics and technicalities of contentious issues like winners of the Vietnam War, the largest country in the world: land mass or population? What had began as friendly competition concluded with every person in the room standing, their drinks in hand, pointing and screaming and inventing creative insults to sling towards whichever target was unfortunate enough to be within range.

During this, Kyle remained seated, shocked and confused as to whether or not he was witnessing the crumbling of this friendship. He started to pipe up, raising just one finger and tried to say ‘Guys, does it really matter, we’re having fun, let’s just get on with it, yeah?’ But in doing this, he became the target of further abuse.

‘Dude, the newbies don’t get a voice,’

‘Maybe you should be reading up on your general knowledge instead of playing mediator.’

And this caused Kyle to lower his hand and sink into the sofa that accepted him readily. His eyes fell to his drink, nearly empty and still with the slightest of fizz. He sighed, his mind flashing back to school days where he was merely seen and not heard and sometimes, he was not even seen.

Kyle, at first, believed that there was maybe the smallest chance that they were setting him up for some horrible prank. They somehow spoke to one of the boys or girls who used to torment him at school when the teachers back was turned or even when the teacher was staring right at them and would merely narrow their eyes, sigh, and remind whoever the culprit was that this was not the sort of behaviour expected at such a school.

But, it seemed that these fears were entirely conjured in Kyle’s mind.

He experienced something that he had not felt for a long time. There was laughter around him but not directed at him, instead, it rumbled around the room, filled every corner, echoed from mouth to mouth and bounced in and out of every glass.

‘Kyle, mate, we’re joking. f**k, are you even human?’ Shaun laughed.

‘Error: Human interaction failure.’ Ralph said, his arms by his side, angled at ninety degrees, a blank expression on his face.

They were making fun of him, but they were making fun of him in a way that wasn’t malicious.

It was a kind of ritual Kyle had been used to, many years ago, alongside Mike and Jake and Buzz and Hammy where they would sit around in one living room, whichever one of their choosing out of the five possible options, and shoot the breeze with the television on low in the background playing something that no one was paying attention to, and they would constantly be on the lookout for someone making a mistake about anything at all, and then what would always be described as banter would ensue. This was without limits, without remorse, without censorship or restraint.

And they would laugh, every time.

This game night was the first time that they had made fun of him, the first time they had embroiled him in their intimate exercise of saying whatever they like without judgement, where the recipient of such light-hearted derision would not take it to heart, not take it seriously.

‘If we make fun of you, it means we’re comfortable enough with you to do so,’ Ralph said at the end of the night where it was just him and Kyle, sitting around the kitchen table. The only light in the apartment being the one above them and outside, where lights from lamp posts were perpetually out of order and you hardly ever saw anybody taking a leisurely stroll down the road, and the only noise you could hear was the mild rippling of chatter from youths loitering around in the playground, a playground which they were too old to enjoy like they had before adolescence hit, but had nowhere else to go on Friday nights.

Ralph poured the last of the whiskey that barely reached the middle of his glass. He pointed at Kyle’s not-even-close-to-being-finished drink, Kyle shook his head and then laid it down in his arms on the kitchen table.

At Bex’s, everybody was already there. They brought popcorn and drinks and various other snacks which were dumped into bowls and the bowls were placed on the table and the lights were turned off and all eyes were on the screen that spanned an entire wall.

It was just like going to the cinema, a pass time on life support. Kyle sat between Summer and Ralph. The first movie, one Kyle had never seen, but everybody else had many times before, was about magic and elves and lost kings battling an omniscient evil.

‘You’ve never seen it? It’s a classic.’

‘You’re about to experience something truly special.’

‘Don’t ask questions, just enjoy it.’

Kyle watched and watched and everybody remained silent throughout the three-hour cinematic extravaganza. At the end, it was not the end but merely the climax of part one.

‘We’ll watch part two next week.’

‘What did you think?’

‘Yeah, great.’

‘Just great?’

‘It was a masterpiece,’ Kyle said, picking the remains of the popcorn from the bowl in front of him, cracking an unpopped kernel in his teeth as the credits rolled.

Summer told him later as they took a taxi home that they watch it at least once a year. She told him that normally they would designate characters around the group, picking names from a hat, real old school, and each person was expected to go line for line with their assigned character.

‘Why?’

‘For fun. Has this taxi gone the wrong way?’

‘You can just drop me off here anyway,’ Kyle said. The taxi pulled over and Kyle climbed out, stepping onto the frozen ground. He waved goodbye to Summer, to Shaun, and to the taxi itself. He sent Summer a message.

                                                                                                                                                                              Kyle Edwards just now

                                                                                                                                                   Let me know how much I owe you. X

There were no clouds in the sky. The streetlamps that lined the pavement and stretched far, far down the road and disappeared into the dome of orange light that was the city centre. Kyle walked past, counting the streetlamps, stepping into the light and then into darkness and back into the light, and admiring the graffiti scribbled around the bases. He heard nothing but his own footsteps. He saw nobody, and he stepped along the pavement passing closed shops, shut down or abandoned, or merely out of hours.

As he came to the main road, he could see the turn further on that would take him to his apartment. But for whatever reason, the thought of home, the thought of his own bed, the thought of being alone for the next eight or so hours at the very least made his fingers tingle, caused a cool breeze run directly down his spine.

At the main road, he turned right and stepped into the first bar he came across. It was empty, mostly, and populated not by the youthful energy of the bar on Forest Road, the bar where his life had turned a corner, but instead, Kyle saw nothing but old, overweight men and women leaning over their pints of cheap beer poured from seldom-cleaned pipes. There was a stench of smoke in the air and, upon closer inspection, Kyle saw a film of said smoke hanging just below the lights that hung from the ceiling. Music pulsed lazily from a single speaker, a great retro black obelisk, that stood in the corner and was sticky with spilt beer, sprinkled with cigarette ash, and had the slightest screech of feedback emanating underneath the music. The punters sitting around the room seemed either not to notice, not care, or had simply accepted it as routine.

This was not the futuristic or glamourous establishment that Kyle had become accustomed to over recent weeks and months. Other haunts that Kyle, Summer, Shaun, Bex, and the rest had frequented after work, whether it be Fridays or spontaneous midweek pub quizzes that left them regretful the following day were full of light and life. The menus boasted exotic intercontinental cuisine that experimented with your taste buds, they served beer with hints of fruit, chocolate, spices. The staff laughed with the customers, and they felt more like social clubs where everybody was happy to talk to everybody else and there was always a goodbye, no matter how long or how short you had stayed.

At the very back of the room, where the bar was located, sat a woman covered in faded tattoos smoking a long, thin cigarette who stared at her shoes, hoping that no one approached the bar for a drink. She blew streams of smoke towards the ceiling which mixed into the low cloud that hung above them. She coughed, and then took another long drag that illuminated the tip of the cigarette and made her grey skin glow. She looked through the smoke and embers towards Kyle and then everybody in attendance realised that Kyle, a certified stranger, non-local, an alien, had entered their sanctuary of despair and they stared at him standing in the doorway, one hand still on the handle.

But instead of the confrontation that seemed inevitable, everybody turned their heads back to their conversations and their drinks, mumbling under the music so that they and only they were privy to such discussion. Kyle released the door from his grasp and it brushed closed with a gentle pad against the doorframe.

He strode towards the bar. The grey-skinned woman stubbed her cigarette out on the surface of the bar that Kyle realised looked more like an alt-art canvas. Initials were scrawled, doodles drawn and then scribbled out by competing artists. There were blacks and blues and reds that had faded with time and elbow rubs and condensation rings. Kyle pulled a wobbling stool towards him and sat down. He steadied himself and drummed his fingers along the graffiti. He coughed. The barmaid walked behind the bar and moved towards him. Under the solitary light that hung above them, Kyle saw she looked younger than she had first appeared from afar. Kyle’s phone buzzed in his left pocket and unlocking it brought about the most light this bar had seen in decades.

Summer J just now

Oh, don’t worry about it! It’s on the way to ours anyway. Get home safe!!!! X

Are you free on the fifteenth?

He put the phone away, deciding to reply tomorrow. The barmaid lit another cigarette and gestured to the tandem taps that poked out from the bar which contained just two varieties of the same beer.

‘Do you have any tequila?’ Kyle asked.