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Happy Birthday

This bar never changes. She may change -- K may get the odd new wrinkle and layer of cellulite -- but this place doesn’t. K sinks back into the leather cushioned chair pondering the architecture and the patrons. How many birthdays has K celebrated here? For herself, for old lovers, for the bar itself? This she ponders on yet another birthday as she sips at her gin and tonic. The shell of the bar is gothic Victorian, the inside all modern purple paint, mirrors, lights and loud music. Pretty men, rough looking women and all sorts in between.

K just watches now. Considers. When K was younger she believed this place would be the answer to all her problems -- she thought she would belong here. But this place has it’s rules just like outside and K has always been a non-conformist. K is always here with her handbag, wearing chipped nail varnish, liquid eyeliner and sipping her drink through a straw so she doesn’t ruin the dark stained gloss on her lips. They all know K by now. And the young fresh flesh soon know her by reputation if nothing else. K watches the pretty young things dance. K no longer tries to dance with them. Instead she watches breasts and arses bob up and down to the pulsing sound, watching glimpses of skin under lurid coloured lights.

K lives mostly in her mind now. It is easy to visualise her hands on creamy flesh if she closes her eyes and removes the shades of colour -- to imagine the girl’s skin bare, nude, no bright coloured light to distort the girl’s gentle contours. And it is so easy for her to pretend, at least for a while, that the fantasy is reality and her life is how she imagines it to be, how she lives it in her head.

Why does K still come? She knows no different. K has become trapped in the patterns she has built over the last twenty years. Watching bands. Being in bands. Coming to bars like this where she isn’t wanted. Or at least that is how it feels. K is no longer young. K has no partner to kiss in the shadows and laugh with at the young girls on the dance floor. She has no one to love her anymore. The only time K felt loved was when she was on stage -- is when she is on stage -- but K knows that time is no longer on her side. K has been getting less and less chances to play her music. Less and less chances to be loved. She doesn’t stay. Part of her realises she should not, so K finishes her drink and leaves the bar.

She puts up her umbrella and walks through the drizzle, through streets lined with dreary Victorian housing until K reaches the seafront and walks to the end of the pier. The end of the land and beginning of the water. K stands at the edge of the pier watching the current swell beneath. It is raining so hard now that there is little difference between the air and the sea. They are one and the same, liquid and grey.

Her umbrella flaps in the wind sounding like the insane seagulls that circle in the storm overhead. A sound like wings beating. And the cries of the birds reflect how K feels inside. Desolate. Lonely. Staring through the transparent plastic of the umbrella. Staring at the closed down ice-cream stands, beach side shops, candy floss stalls. The plastic barrier between these objects further removes K from her surroundings and into her fantasy world.

Today she is wearing a long PVC white trench coat, white patent boots and a short black dress. K’s tights are laddered and gooseflesh appears in the holes. The sound of the rain is rhythmic on the wooden slats beneath her feet. She thinks it is interesting how you cannot hear raindrops collide with seawater, how the two merge to become one and the same.

Last night she had watched the latest bright new young band. Feet stuck to beer soaked carpet, gaffer tape covering the larger holes and the joins where one carpet meets another. A patchwork of strange disjointed patterns and cigarette burns. Up on the stage were musicians, a pretty singer. K had stared at the girl’s breasts. K is jealous of the bright new things as they have youth and talent -- both things that K no longer possesses. Once that girl was her. Once she was the one cutting demos, playing in London and getting a paragraph review in some music rag. That was K wearing her low-cut top driving the A&R men wild with her cleavage. But that was a long time ago now. That was in a different place and part of K still lives there. She scares the younger people because one day they will be her. The young bands of now will become the washed up has-been almost-got-a-record-deal bores of the future. Many birthdays in their middle-age will pass with them getting drunk and talking about the gig where they supported X or Y or Z. Waxing lyrical about the gig the guy from so-so came to and said how brilliant they were that night. Or they’ll talk about the groupies they bedded.

One day they will be K, be the wreck ageing disgracefully in the corner propping up the bar. They won’t be able to kick as high as they used to when they get on stage. They won’t have as much hair. The black nail varnish which looked good once will make their hands seem older, veins raised beneath the skin, ridges like tree bark. They will still be drawn to the stage. Still they will want to clamber on to it and play. Even if they are going deaf in their middle-age and the spread which accompanies it. All these things are known because they can see them in K, they can see their own mortality reflected in her features. Just as K sees her mortality in the mirror first thing in the morning. Especially today. Like the façade of the hundred year old bar K can see her age in her face and another birthday pass leaving it‘s mark there. This is not good, not for someone who has nothing left.

The seagulls cry like small children. Painful noises. They speak of their pain; K internalises hers.

At the end of the pier is a lone fisherman battling against the wind and rain. Nylon raincoat flailing around him. Reminds K of a black kite gone wild. The fisherman stares out to the horizon looking for something he has long lost. He does not take any notice of K as she clambers up onto the bench at the side of the pier. Wind washing over her, she spreads her arms as if to jump into the cold grey water below. But she cannot do it. After a few minutes she clambers down and walks back to the shore, trying not to slip on the wet wood.

The man reels in his line and his catch -- a bug eyed fish gasping for her life.

this story originally appeared in the Lavender e-zine issue #2

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