The Fifth Friend by
Steven J. Dines
It’s Friday night, we’re on our way to play pool and drink beer,
and I really don’t want to get out of the car. It occurs to me that the
rain battering the windscreen is Life. Not a wave or a tsunami, as I might
expect, but a hundred thousand fat drops aimed directly at my head. I don’t
want to go out there. Christ, should any of us? We’ve been passing bad
luck around like herpes at a swingers’ party. We’re close, but
we’re not that close.
Walshy’s sitting out of sight behind me, which is good, because he talks
with his hands and I can’t stand looking at him for long. It’s
like watching a bluebottle flying not in a circle but in a kind of jerky box
around a ceiling light. Anyway, he’s griping about how his missus has
been getting more than Bible Lessons from the local vicar. And Walshy a believer,
too. Last weekend he invited the boys and me over to his place for a barbecue.
He cooked his copy of the Holy Book right alongside the meat. We all pretended
it was funny and laughed. Eating one of Walshy’s hamburgers with the
smoke of the Old and New Testaments filling my nostrils was probably the closest
I’ve come to religion since I lost Alice.
I searched the house from loft to cellar for about a week after it. Not a
thing. I’ve since widened my search, but look is all I seem to do. Look
and wait.
I see Big Poof smiling at me in the rear view mirror from the other back seat.
How does it go again? Objects may appear closer than they are…
Big Poof has a deep tan. He spends his money on beauty therapists—professionally
and socially—on MAN-icures and sport pedicures. Seems he’ll take
any kind of cure he can get. We call him Big Poof because he’s so good
with the ladies he’s almost one of them. Whatever product he’s
turned himself into, they’re buying it wholesale. Right now he’s
claiming he’s got a second mobile phone because the first one ran out
of memory to store all the numbers. Liar just doesn’t want his missus
to find out. He won’t leave her though. Says he’d crack up big-style
if she ever split, and yet he’s messing around. I suppose some of us
can be self-destructive like that.
I turn on the radio. Rap.
Drop to your knees over beats like these—
—and I quickly turn it off again. With my limited “options”,
the only thing to do seems to be everywhere in front of me, like the onslaught
of rain on the windscreen. I’m not talking about Life anymore but the
other thing.
Stoopman is sitting on the front passenger seat, eating a hotdog with onions
and mustard. Last week, Stoop didn’t like onions or mustard, but he saw
me eating them and now he does, and that’s the way it’s been with
him ever since we were kids. He’s got a better job than me. Better looking
kids, too, though that’s by default because I won’t be having kids
anytime soon, but if I did his kids would be better looking, I’d bet
anything on it. But I’m not bitter; he is. Listen to him now—Lisa
just went and bought a new Audi on my Platinum card. Blah-blah. Boo-hoo. I’m
driving us to the pool hall in a J-reg Ford Escort, man. Still, it’s
good to hear he’s got himself a passenger these days. What’s the
name of that movie? Pay It Forward. Yeah, it’s a bit like that. Or maybe
shit on a wagon wheel—what goes around comes around. But I’m not
bitter; he is.
And so on to me. On my own since the Mediterranean swallowed Alice. I prayed
it was suicide because then there’s a reason, a note even. I searched
for it, too. It couldn’t just be fate; it couldn’t just be rain
on my windscreen.
And that’s the hardest part. It is just that.
I glance to my right at the roiling, unanswering sea. It’s an echo of
the one that took her and it invites me at forty-miles-per-hour. If I’m
looking for answers, and I am, I am, then I may as well guess what depth it
is, say, one hundred yards out, or try counting the crests of waves as they
roll into shore. Only, these days I can’t see the crests never mind bring
myself to count them. So, I suppose we’ll go for our Friday night of
pool and beer. We’ll stare at ourselves looking back at ourselves in
the pint glasses lined along the bar. And we’ll drink and hope it doesn’t
taste bitter. Then later, much later, when it’s darker still and hard
to tell where land meets sea, when I’m no good with words, I’ll
drive us home. And maybe I’ll be sorely tempted to have one last drink
along the way. The pier is only a half-mile down the road, and I hear it’s
one hundred yards long…
But as the car rattles into the car park and I glance in the mirror, I can’t
help but notice that one of us is missing. Maybe we’ve forgotten his
name because we don’t ever talk about him. He’s as perfect as an
ice sculpture, and maybe we don’t want to look too hard in case we see
the melt. Where is he now? Who knows? Who cares? Like that ice sculpture, I’m
not sure he even exists anymore. But I do know that he’ll never lose
his wife to religion, never use women as therapy, would never try to buy love
with a MasterCard, and never allow himself to melt and drop to the floor.
Since a man is only as good as the company he keeps, we’ll all have
a drink to him tonight.
We’d better.
Steven J. Dines
Steven J. Dines lives in the granite city of Aberdeen, Scotland where he has
been writing short fiction for many years. His work has appeared in Dark
Tales,
Buzzwords, The Writer’s Post Journal, Word Riot, Noo
Journal, Underground
Voices, Outsider Ink, Eclectica and many others. His website, Crayons in the
Dark, can be found here: www.sdines1975.demon.co.uk
