Angela

Rewritten and rerecorded

Content Warning:

References to rape, language

Transcript

Angela

“A pint of Guinness, a pint of Thatcher’s, large Glenmorangie neat please”. The man was large and bald and the domed top of him gleamed red beneath the lamps. The order was fluent and precisely pronounced: in the spell of its authority Roddy reeled around and began to ready the glasses necessary to execute it, with no such fluency. Roddy was a new member of staff, and certain items were not all that easy to locate. He’d worked in pubs before so he wasn’t ignorant in alcoholic matters, but the space around him was new to him and he moved in it with a sense of unfamiliarity. He was often having to ask more seasoned members of the staffing body where certain articles were found, where certain types of glasses were located, that sort of thing. A couple of times already that very evening, drinks and mixers with those drinks all unfamiliar to Roddy had been ordered, and he had to ask Coral, who was terribly busy, where to find this that or the other on the digital system so the order could be logged, and the price generated. The bald man served a twenty-pound note from his wallet and Roddy dispatched it into the cash register, which, though part digital- slick silent touchscreen above, still extruded its vari-sectioned tray with a traditional ungainly noisiness. Roddy immediately started to panic, the order disappearing from his memory…Guinness, what was it, again, whiskey, which whiskey?…did he say with ice…what was the other pint…? He kept having to ask the man to re-state his order.  

Having fished out the man’s change from the till and begun to fill the glasses on the counter with their specified fluids, the large, bald man was pulled a short distance to the side by a friendly chatterer beside him, and further customers deluged forwards towards the bar. It was a busy night. Roddy’s brow furrowed, wet with sweat: he had to keep briefly plunging his hands into a champagne bucket of melting ice beneath the whiskey shelf. 

The drinkers by the large windows, and the larger French windows, were the first to notice the rain. It started, with a softly mounting sibilance on the smoking-terrace, where the moving coils of tobacco smoke wound themselves among unmoving coils of trellis. A few minutes after the rain’s beginning, there was a mutter of thunder. A gentle noise of wonder rose from the massed drinkers at their tables, and at the bar. 

Roddy successfully measured a double measure of the Scotch into the attendant tumbler, having located the Glenmorangie, and not without difficulty. It was as he returned to add the final quarter to a settled three quarters of Guinness in the glass, that he noticed the girl. She was a young woman, or, put simply, a woman: she could be as old as twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, but she was youthful-looking, and Roddy’s mind said Girl not Woman as he looked at her face. Her face immediately captured his attention, there was something eerie and captivating about it, and the hubbub of those all around him was forgotten for a time, as Roddy stared into the countenance that hovered, like a moon, like a pale thing disembodied, over the bar. The flesh was so pale, and the wide blue eyes were almost haunted. Perhaps this explained the youthfulness he gleaned, this uncommon sense of disturbance in her face, these notes of timorous fright in her eyes. It was a scaredness Roddy associated with the childlike.

“How can I help?” Roddy said, with conscious levity, as if to lighten the heavy spell cast by the being of this girl.     

Her lips tittered wordlessly in a sort of shiver, and then the weird words came:

“Can I speak to Angela?” she said.

Roddy was perplexed.

“Sorry?” he enquired.

“Angela…” she looked behind her shoulder. Her look, though slight and scared, was pointed and purposeful, it wasn’t a general glance. It was an animal look almost, the look that prey shoots predator. He ascertained this quality, but did not immediately seek an explanation for it. He didn’t follow her look back behind her to the table she had been at, where a figure was silhouetted, a man, the man, the man with, as a few unsettled female customers had described, the quiet voice. Turning back, the girl said again: “…could I speak to Angela,” the lips moved in tiny motions, the sound only just intelligible.

The bald man roared back into life again:

“Thank you, mate,” and he carefully clasped the two pints and the tumbler of whiskey, carrying them off to his table. The spell was broken, there was an inundation of noise, and she couldn’t be heard anymore.

More customers, in general young and male, lurched forward towards the bar, in a state of some alcoholic disarray, their manner rough with the enthusiasm and discourtesy you would expect from pub patrons at this hour of the evening. The girl was pushed aside. Roddy caught one more glimpse of the haunted eyes, as she looked about helplessly, as though she were lost and looking for guidance. There was another bar, in the one or two o’clock direction from where she was standing. She seemed as if she were about to approach it, but she didn’t. There were so many people there, bunching around it, that it could take her fifteen minutes to reach the front of the queue. If she pushed in, ruffled feathers, caused a stir, a head might turn. She stayed where she was, seemingly willing herself into invisibility. 

A further cascade of youthful faces, all of which were asking to have proof of age demanded of them, came at Roddy and the onslaught of customers was only growing, minute on minute. The pale girl slipped quickly from Roddy’s sights, but the impression she left lingered. She busily occupied Roddy’s thoughts, and his eyes were vacant, distant, glazed over as if with drink. Minutes passed: the conundrum gradually maddened him, it concerned him:  what made her afraid, what had paled her? And Angela? What was that all about? Can I speak to Angela? What was that? Code? Like Inspector Sands in the tube; some sex-ring or prostitution thing. Angela: it didn’t sound, to Roddy, like a gin. Or a cocktail. 

He checked a few IDs, not really bothering to read the dates of birth, and then took an order, but his feeling of unease was remaining with him, stubbornly. Curiosity or conscientiousness? He wasn’t sure. But, together, their petitions were not resistible. He was about to fill a few jars with lager but broke off, saying…

“Sorry lads, just ‘scuse me a moment…” He hastily fled the chorus of puerile umms and aahs. 

Roddy exited and plunged into the shadows, the populated dimness. He cast his gaze all around the pub, which was busy in all quadrants with activity, with chatter and hubbub, and food and drink, and laughter, banter, board games, men, women, kisses, tongues, lips, legs, bums. His worry grew. He grew more fevered in his anxiety. He needed to locate this girl, ask her what she had meant by this Angela, by her request to speak to her. He needed to know that she was safe and well. He continued to study her face, the mental photograph he had taken of it. His curiosity was waxing like a filling moon, like a filling, overflowing pint-glass: why had she appeared so pale and so frightened, so perturbed? He stumbled forward, desperate to find her, see her, talk to her, console her as he had failed to do at the bar. 

Coral came at speed from the opposite direction to Roddy, her mouth moving frantically at the microphone positioned by her lips as she carried a large platter of pints, bottles, wineglasses, and food. She saw Roddy, reeling about in some disarray. She was quick to be cross:

“Roddy, get back to the bar, now…we’re at capacity, service is getting way too slow…there’s a fucking bottleneck developing in the hallway, go on, get back to the bar…”

“Coral…I have a question…” Roddy began.

“Not now, Roddy!” Coral snapped, walking quickly on her way, assuming he was going, for the umpteenth time, to ask her for guidance in some matter he could surely solve himself if he could just muster the initiative to do so. 

“What is…” 

She heard the construction of a question begin in his mouth. 

“Now Roddy!” she called behind her. She couldn’t help him.

What does Angela mean? What does “Could I speak to Angela” mean? Was it some secret of the trade in which he had not been briefed? Some special secret knowledge Coral had forgotten to impart on the training day? Roddy was seized, with great muscularity, by the terrible idea that this uttered “Angela” was terribly terribly important, that the girl who had asked for Angela had been in possession of some knowledge, something she had to tell. But it had fallen on deaf ears, and Roddy could not bear that those deaf ears had belonged to him. He wanted to put it right; he felt disproportionately compelled to do so, as though this girl, and her surreptitious request which Roddy had not understood, were the embodiment of all his sins, of every crime he had ever committed, of every inadequacy that was his.   

Within a minute Roddy had torn through the entire premises. It was raining so no-one was outside now. Lightning flashed briefly, thunder boomed, faroff. The storm seemed to be dwindling, but the downpour was torrential. Roddy searched frantically, his eyes surveyed the peopled scenes in fast, wild orbits: nothing! Every staff member was worked off their feet, the pub seemed to be filling, growing busier and busier and busier, like some planet gradually being overcome, overwhelmed by an exponentially spawning population of creatures, growing nastier, nastier, nastier, with every passing generation. Something had to give. Roddy was troubled by the notion that the influxes would not cease, and he would drown in a sea of people, he would disappear in a sea of coats, his cries would be stifled as he sank down, deep, deeper, into a dark, tenacious marsh of hooded figures, many of them faceless, some quiet-voiced. All those people, so many. Could they all be kind? Could they all be good? Could not one be dangerous? 

Roddy wanted to collapse. He wanted to put his head in his hands and sink into slumber. The sweats that clothed him now were thick and lethal, compared to these the moistening of the brow and palm that he had been feeling before were nothing. And then, just when he had given up hope, he saw it:

His eyes read the eyelevel signs, plastered with blue-tack on a wall a few yards in from the threshold of entrance. He read across the signs on this wall: Under 25…we may ask you for official documentation to prove you are…we do not tolerate abuse at this establishment…if we deem you to be significantly intoxicated upon arrival…and, among these mostly unread, stiffly-worded warnings and disclaimers, there it was: “Could I speak to Angela?” 

Roddy was relieved. He read on: “Are you on a date that isn’t working out? … Is your tinder date not who you were expecting? …Is there someone in your immediate vicinity bothering you or making you feel uneasy? Ask for Angela and we’ll call you a cab, or help you leave the premises discreetly…”

For Roddy, the terrible fear that haunted him, consumed him in the days and kept him awake in the nights that ensued, was the possibility that the girl who had approached him that night had been raped, or killed. Even though he’d merely unsettled her, Roddy couldn’t dispel the idea, the rather fanciful idea, if he was honest, that the man had somehow managed to apprehend her, corner her, coerce her, brutalise her all the same. 

Roddy consoled himself that the chances of such things were small. But even if she had been the victim of no more than a mild assault, the victim of some mild deception, even if she’d had to endure nothing more than five minutes of discomfort, Roddy found himself culpable for that feeling of abandonment- that abandonment she must surely have felt!- by those who might have been her relief or rescue. 

Roddy thought about women, young women, women known to him, women unknown to him. Something lay newly enlightened by this experience. In Roddy’s mind, some peninsula of their existence, that had lain in darkness up to now, lit brightly up: he considered the guardedness of women, their cautiousness when it came to dealing with the opposite sex, their careful rituals. He grew to understand something of his own rejections, of his own being kept at arm’s length and treated with rational suspicion by women, he discovered some sense of how male brutality was realer to women that it was to him, or had ever been to him. He felt sorry for women. He even dreamed that he gave birth to a woman with an adult face and breasts but as small as a baby, and he looked after the baby-woman, and then the baby-woman offered him her breasts. 

In another dream he could hear laughter, but the pub was centuries old, abandoned, filmed in blue dust. Cackling laughter lingered in the silence, remembered merry laughter, its merriness developed into portent. In this fancied situation, Roddy tentatively approached the Angela sign. It was still there, its grave, responsible text: “Could I speak to Angela?”. Angela: the name survived and hung, icy and acrid in the blue dimness. Sometimes he saw storms, he heard soft rumbles of thunder, saw and heard the flashes of light that followed and the rain that drummed throughout. He saw a pale woman, her face fearful, frightened, wretched, walking in bare feet, through the storm. 

He did two more shifts at the pub before he quit. Roddy didn’t share with any staff-member, equal or senior, what had happened. He felt very deeply that it was his failure, and he kept it private, hidden like any shameful thing. 

On his last evening, he found, and with a haste that surprised him, that he couldn’t take it. He kept thinking the girl was going to appear, she was going to come in through the doors, like a kind spectre, and tell him that she was alright, that all was well. He kept glancing anxiously at the doors, the entrance, where the silent, stoic bouncer awaited young-faced entrants and mouthy troublemakers. There would be a pair of policemen. After him, after him, after her, after them, Roddy thought, it’ll be two policemen, stern, serious, moving quickly and with purpose, their helmets in their hands. There was no change to the situation, no developments that might point to the truth. It remained, simply, an intolerable mystery. So he quit.