Offcomer Read Free Page B

was caught.
    The touch materialised her. She was suddenly horribly conscious of her body; vividly aware of the stickiness under her arms, the warm greasiness of the glass in her hand, the raw cut on her ankle.
    The hand that held hers was hairy. The nails were neatly cut. She looked up from it. Squarish specs gleamed back at her.
    “Pint of Carlsberg,” he said.
    She wondered, briefly, if this was the same hand that had touched her before, if this was the same man, or whether some composite had pulled itself together from the soup of limbs and features she’d seen in the snug. He was smiling. The teeth were uneven, tea-stained.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t work the bar. You’ll have to ask one of the barstaff.”
    “I’m asking you. You spilt my last one. In fact, you spilt everyone’s. So you’d better get a round in.”
    She tried to tug her hand away; he held on tighter.
    “D’you want me to call the manager? Because I will.” He leaned forward over the counter, still holding her by the wrist, and stared impatiently down the bar, towards where Gareth stood, angling a glass under a tap, watching it fill. Claire twisted her hand round in the man’s grip. It hurt, reminding her suddenly of school, and the slow sting of Chinese burns. The columned glasses shifted in her grip, teetered. She felt hot; it was becoming difficult to breathe.
    “Excuse me,” the man called, and Claire saw Gareth turn towards them.
    She wrenched her hand out through the man’s fingers, lost her balance, stumbled. The glasses slithered out of her grip and fell. They hit the boards, smashed. Glittering splinters skidded out across the dark floor. The bar fell silent. Eyes turned on Claire. Somewhere someone laughed. Claire cupped her hand round her sore wrist, glanced back up at the man, and felt a sudden stupid urge to cry.
    The man grinned at her, shook his head a little, held his hands up as if capitulating. He turned and walked away.
    “What’s going on?” Gareth was behind the bar.
    “Sorry.”
    He looked at her a moment, then leaned over the counter to glance down at the floor. Raised an eyebrow.
    “You causing trouble again, Thomas?”
    “Sorry.”
    “Here.”
    He passed her a dustpan and brush over the counter. Her hand, as she reached out and took it, looked shaky.
    “You okay?” he asked.
    “I’m okay.”
    “Are you sure? What happened?”
    “Nothing. Nothing. Just me being a dick.”
    And she bent to sweep up the broken glass, crawled among the feet and handbags and chairlegs, breathless, her face burning, her hands sticky and hot.
    The kitchen was empty. Jim stood just outside the back door, in the alleyway, smoking. Unnoticed, Claire lifted down the first-aid kit from the shelf and walked through to the back of the kitchen. She slipped into the store cupboard, sat down at the back on the floor amongst the five-litre tubs of barbecue sauce and giant jars of mayonnaise and pulled off her shoe. The plaster had got rolled up and rubbed off, that side of her foot was tacky with old blood, but the cut had stopped bleeding. The blood was congealing, a scab was beginning to form. She touched it gingerly, with a fingertip. It stung. It always puzzled her, every time, that something that had hurt so little while she did it should hurt so much later, while it healed. She rummaged in the first-aid box: safety pins, antiseptic cream, a bandage and bright blue caterers’ plasters. She stuck one on, pulled on her shoe, tied the laces. The edges of the plaster stuck up above the cuff, conspicuous, but there was nothing she could really do about that.
    Faces blurred now, voices loud and thick. The crowds swayed and stumbled in the viscous, heavy air. Sober, Claire felt as ifshe was walking through a different dimension, in which she alone was agile, alien. She was emptying ashtrays.
    The wooden floor had grown sticky. Spilt drink and ash and spit and dirt off the street churned together by hundreds of feet into a