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It took a while to remember that it was at a mad, sweaty ska night in an upstairs room of a pub. I’d gone with Trev. We were two clodhopping male dinosaurs in a crowd of supple, energetic 20-year-olds, dancing as if our lives depended on it. Perhaps out of concern for our health, people kept giving us screwed-up cigarette papers containing a bitter chemical to swallow. These were called ‘bombs’, Trev told me in confidence. He advised me not to chew them but to drop them down my throat. He told me in confidence not because the chemical was probably illegal, but because by not knowing what they were, or what to do with them, I was showing my age, and the fact that I didn’t get out much, and this might go against both of us later when we tried to pull.
Naturally, I was further interested to know what the bitter chemical in these bombs was called. But could I ask this without it being obvious that I had one foot in the grave? I could not. These little paper screws seemed so utterly quotidian in that situation, it would have been like going to see a Grand National and asking what the animals were called that those dwarves were riding on. So when one of these bombs was pressed into my hand, instead of handling it with undisguised fear, as if it might actually go off in my palm, I tossed it insouciantly down my gullet with a shrug and a merry wave.
The dancing was so frenetic that at one point I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I fought my way out of the mêlée and went and leant against the bar for a moment to recover my breath and gulp down some lager. A woman was standing alone at the bar. She was staring at me as though momentarily paralysed by the fascination of the horrible. Then I realised that it wasn’t mental paralysis that was fixing her, rather it was a transcendental calmness. Thinking I recognised in her the rare and beatific stage of drunkenness that comes with drinking yourself sober, I grinned. She continued to stare. I held out my hand, inviting her to come and dance. She refused it but came with me. Her idea of dancing was to stand still, move her shoulders slightly back and forth, and stare fixedly at her partner. Now here she was again, holding an old dustbin.
‘If you’re throwing that away, I’ll have it,’ I said. (I thought I might punch holes in it and use it as a garden incinerator.) ‘With pleasure,’ she said, handing it over. She had a strong accent. ‘German?’ I said. ‘Swiss,’ she said. ‘Ah,’ I said. I asked her if she remembered our dancing together at the ska night. She did, she said. Very well. And was she extremely drunk that night? No, she was sober, she said. As a Buddhist nun, sobriety was required of her. Anyway, she much preferred to be sober. ‘A sober Swiss–German Buddhist nun who likes ska music?’ I said. ‘But of course!’ she said, and I saw that immobile face light up with her Buddhist smile for the first time. I’ll say one thing: the smile, when you finally saw it, was a marvellous advertisement.
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