Beyond Here Lies Nothing (The Concrete Grove Trilogy) Read Free Page B

more drink after this one, and then I’ll leave.
    The room seemed to shimmer around him. He knew he was drunk, of course; but what he didn’t realise was how drunk. He hadn’t stood up for about half an hour, and his legs felt strange, as if they’d blended with the table and the chair and were conspiring to keep him seated.
    He finished the whisky without really tasting it and picked up the Becks bottle.
    When he put the empty bottle back down on the table it was like coming out of a trance. He knew that only seconds had passed between his last thought and the act of replacing the green bottle on the table, but it felt like he’d somehow fallen asleep and lost at least a couple of hours. The air in the room felt different, heavy. The quality of the light had changed, as if the sun outside had moved across the sky without him noticing the passage of time. He was familiar with this sensation of dislocation from drinking bouts in the past, but still it troubled him. It was as if he’d emerged from a lacuna, a blank spot. Anything could have happened while he was away.
    Panicked, he checked his pockets. His wallet and his phone, his car and house keys... they were all still there. He hadn’t been pick-pocketed during his mini fugue. He had no idea how anything like that could even have occurred, yet it made him feel calmer to confirm that everything was still in place about his person. The world might have changed fractionally, but he was still the same.
    He glanced up and around and realised that the Unicorn was a lot less busy. People had drifted away, perhaps going home to their families or seeking a cheaper method to bring on oblivion by raiding secret stores of black market beer and spirits kept in the space under the stairs or beneath the bed.
    The woman he’d noticed earlier was still in her spot by the jukebox, but now she was pushing coins slowly and methodically into the slot, one after another. He’d been aware of music playing but only now that the volume of the drinkers had lowered could he identify a tune. Neil Diamond: Sweet Caroline . That song, he knew, was one of the many that formed the soundtrack to the lives of people who drank in rough pubs and social clubs. Songs like this one – sad and sweet and with an instant hook – were sung by club singers throughout the country. The performance was always the same – a low-rent crooner on a low stage belting out bygone hits through a dodgy sound system. An overweight man in an ill-fitting black suit with white sweat marks under the arms, singing songs about divorce and heartbreak; always delivered in a fake American accent in a small northern town, a desperate attempt to delineate the boundaries of even smaller lives. To Marc, it was one of the most depressing experiences the world had to offer.
    “Jesus,” he muttered. And he fought the urge to laugh at his own bleak musings.
    He needed to do something to break his mood, so he slowly rose from the chair and started moving in a crouch towards the bar. At the last minute he jinked to the right and walked along the length of the bar, following its curve towards the jukebox.
    The woman picked that exact moment to stop feeding money into the machine. She turned around and faced the room. Marc was too close to her by now to back out, so he kept going and only stopped walking when he was right in front of her.
    Suddenly this seemed like a bad idea. It was as if he’d entered another of those drunken fugues and only come out of it when it was too late to make any difference to the situation.
    “Hi,” he said, aware that he was swaying gently.
    The woman stared at him. Up close he could see that she was wearing too much makeup. The dark rings around her eyes looked like week-old bruises. Her lips were thin and her skin, beneath the layer of foundation, was slightly rough, as if it had been sandpapered. But her eyes were beautiful: ice blue, piercing, holding within them the promise of something that he