What Even Is Harmony

The pub sat off a corridor hidden by an open doorway sandwiched between an ice-cream parlour and a stationery shop. The door frame, always with its door opened back during serving hours, tried to mimic those stores’ energy and life by being painted a luminous yellow. It was long since it had been bright and inviting. Years of grime built up to tinge it grot brown, speckled grey and mould black as the city’s pollution reclaimed any lustre from its once-a-decade cleaning. There was no clue a bar lay tucked away unless you stopped to escape the flow of life running past. Its name wasn’t printed anywhere. No antique illuminated signs bore down with marques of traditional local beers. If you did stop and look you would have to gaze deep into the shadows cast down that hallway, along the walls where the paint flaked away to see any signs of a pub; posters and beer mats pasted to the walls, dog-eared and crumbling. To go down that walkway, to find your way to that bar you had to be losing yourself or lost. Slipping into the gloom as you walked in the quiet—claustrophobic and close—there was no hint of the good people, good beers and good cheer you could find behind the loosely hung door.1

Standing down that hallway, before the inner-entrance to that halfway escape from the city I had no idea what I would find when I walked in. Despite spending years worth of nights there drinking drinks, making friends, making a space in the world for ourselves I was empty of conceptions as I stood before the plywood door that was, at one point, always open to me.

I pushed it back. The smell of citrus scented bleach tinged the air and scratched at my eyes. I walked in. No-one greeted me except for some far-away swear words echoing from the store room. I sat myself at the counter.

The seat I took was my usual spot or at least my preferred spot as it gave a view to most of the bar. I had spent many evenings sitting there. I would quietly lose myself to the wheel of the clock as it counted up the time I ignored until I was half-cut and ready for a stroll home to sleep. Getting to that point was an easy effort. Drinks came as fast or slow as I wished, without my even needing to call them, or more truthfully as fast or slow as my bank account allowed.2

At 4pm on that day, apart from the rattle of cursing from the back room, there were no signs of life. Despite my fidgeting, my feet slipping from the rung of the stool and my stabbing short breath I didn’t think of myself as life filling the bar, at least not having just sat myself down.

I looked at the taps and tried to imagine my first sup of beer since I’d gone mad. I tried to focus on simple truths of a bar and its meaning. Would a beer ease my fears as much as it warmed my thirst? Would it fill me with memories of that room bursting with life, a way of being I had been so familiar with? I tried to construct a normality around the act of a drink but I could only give into the feeling of how I had been absent from the pub. It was three weeks since I had been there and the way I’d last left meant this was an unknowable return.

I tried to find my way into the strip-light-intruding silence but its hum and glare offset any feeling of ease.3 Sitting stout and alone in a place normally bustling, or at least bristling with a quiet building of potential, had forced me to worry. For all I had been concerned about stumbling back to a busy bar, walking into a conversation with a shy smiled ‘Hi!’ I hadn’t expected to be filling out the room on my own. I reflected on how that should make it easier. How I could welcome people to me as they came, discovering me proper and poised, relaxed and at ease rather than me arriving back as a shock, with the pub busy and loud, having to place myself into the fold.4 Sitting there, waiting in the empty-cold width of the room, whoever arrived would have to acknowledge me as they came in. They would see me as I was and I could never return from their passing glanced look of ill-ease.5

With an impulse to clear my chest of its stabbing pressure I coughed small and delicate, and without satisfaction. I worried Aaron or Paul or Rachel would come out of the back-room hearing me and presume I had been impatient. More than just worry the cough was a desire to blurt out my piece. I’m OK now, I’m really OK. I wanted to say it, believe it, I wanted the words to soothe me but it was more seeming to cough out to an empty bar-room than to speak my desires out loud. I told myself it was OK to fret but there was no reason for anxiety. The bar was familiar and mine. The swearing continued from the back room.

I wasn’t there. I wasn’t in that bar, brightly illuminated, for any manner of perception. I hadn’t returned. I had to wait out the world working without me.

I turned to look around, to force this all to be appreciated, and so known, and so dealt with. The stained mirrors emblazoned with old cigarette logos were as spottily rusted as ever. The tables— taken from a primary school closed down after its rural parish emptied of all potential young couples—hadn’t been replaced and would never be replaced. The high-in-the-wall, long, and horizontally rectangular windows were frosted but the plaque built on them formed the first order of opacity. It was all the same, I’d only been gone a few weeks.6

I turned back to the counter, still with no-one behind it, and silently practised my order to myself. Inwardly I said the words that would announce me, ever-the-same, asking for my usual round. I felt the wet plosives explode on my lips as I repeated the name of my beer, my call, over and over, “Pint of Beamish, please.”7 I would smile. I would be easy and calm. The bar was always a space to be yourself, distressed as we all were, and my self was no longer frightened by signs conjured from fear. I told myself all this but still I couldn’t withdraw into patience. I just needed to order. It needed to be over with so the sentiment of the bar to simply drink would be achieved.

The pressure of sitting alone with the empty stare of the lights fully up, with no one to offer absolution for my sins, and no stout before me was about to make me stand, take my bag and leave when Aaron ambled distractedly through the doorway.8 He walked out of the store room, sniffing, and wiping his wet hands on his t-shirt, all causing a childish smile to erupt on my face.

He looked puzzled and I looked downwards to hide my sheepish grin, mixed as it was with relief and excitement. It was a nothing, me being back, just a return to normality but I couldn’t force down the giddiness that rose to make it an event.

I blurted out a rapid laughed, “Hi, hello, I’m back,” forgetting the coolness of simply asking for a drink. I blushed from the shame of my enthusiasm.

He paid no attention to my awkwardness and responded with the simple question of a simple bar with its priorities in order. “Pint?” he asked.

“Please,” I said, and that would have been that if I hadn’t asked for more.9 “Do you remember me when I was last in here?”

“Yeah, we were all talking about it. Were you bothered?” he asked.

“A little. Well...” I trailed off. “What did you say, when you were talking about it?” I asked. “About me,” I said, but only to myself.

“The guy is barred, now, anyway,” Aaron said, speaking over my energy that fell given his response that offered me nothing in memory. “No-one who talks like that is welcome here.” I remained silent.

I watched him stand before the taps, waiting for the stout to settle before he would top up its head. He didn’t seem bothered by my return, rapt by his attention to the first serving of the day, or possibly stolen away by worries of another long shift. He reached to the electrics on the wall and dimmed the lights before stepping towards the radio to turn up the music.

Internet station playing he went back to the taps, crossed his hands on the pipework and leaned into the time the stout still waited for.

I turned away from him, but more so my being-poured-beer, so as not to show myself eager for the peace of a drink. I turned to hide my disappointment at the lack of insight into my madness. I focused on the beer mat I spun between my fingers.

Despite my efforts in corralling my thoughts to what I knew were acceptable places I couldn’t help but cast my mind back to that night I ran. I found darkened memories of who Aaron was talking about.10 The silhouette of a perception, the tracing of the man came to me. Vague outlines weren’t enough, but there was hasty imprecise memories of a warping figure, a threatening figure to my recall.

I pictured someone with a blue and pink striped shirt, him as big and obvious as it. The shirt was a thick material, strong and with an expensive stitched logo, much like his voice which I ignored. I had a vague recollection of booming pronouncements—said in fashionable tones—a call to a blasphemous god on what was right in the world, what was wrong, but mostly how all that he found about him in that bar was eroding the good standing of a culture he once took as pride. “The guy with the shirt?” I asked Aaron.

“Yeah, with the blond hair. I wouldn’t have expected it from the look of him, but you can never know.11 I can only offer my apologies.” He lifted the pint to the spout, filled it out, and pulled back the tap leaving the creamed-white texture resting above the lip of the glass. He lowered it with a look at its clouded black normality: a pint poured on a day in a bar in a town in a world that needed a drink. I needed a drink.

“After you left I had words with him. He didn’t take the advice, so he was asked to leave. He won’t be back. Anyway, how have you been?”

“I’ve been going to the hospital,” I said, hastily, without pause for thought. I continued on, explaining, feeling I had to, “Mental health.” It was a hint at what I wanted to know: what the truth of my past few weeks had been and the truth of why I had disappeared from the pub. If the man was asked to leave and they were all talking about me being bothered then he must have said something about my situation. If Aaron didn’t speculate or worry then that man hadn’t hit the nail on the head or the people he said it to were disbelieving. Still, I wanted to know what that man saw in me. What he had found that the others, the people who knew me in sanity refused to see, or at least weren’t willing to broach.

“Mental health is a tough one. More people should pay attention to it,” Aaron said. He inspected the pint a final time as he placed it gently on the beer mat he set before me; as though it was all truth.12

He took a tea-towel from beneath the bar and wiped some of the spillage that had seeped down the side of the glass appearing like foamed waves of a retreating black sea. “You get flare ups, don’t you?” he asked. He nodded.

“Something like that,” I said.

It seemed he really didn’t know and more, I didn’t know what to say to him about what I’d been through. How could you announce to someone that the last time they saw you you were well and truly mad, more than a spark of anxiety or the pull of a common mostly-low feeling. That I needed to be calmed with new, powerful drugs and, bit by bit, had to work my way back into the normality of life. “It’s an appointment, every morning. Just meeting up so they know how I’m getting on. Then I see a doctor once a week.”

“That’s a pain. Going to a hospital. A lump out of your day. Doctors are worse again.” He sighed. “I’ve been going to one for my knee. The cartilage, and the liquid or something beneath my kneecap is fucked. Synotic? Synovial fluid? I think. They told me I had to rest it when it flared up. I told them I worked in a bar.”

“I’ve seen you limp a bit,” I said. “But they’ve been OK for me. They’ll never really get it, but it has helped.”

“Yeah, if it’s working for you and you need it...” he said. He trailed off. “Anyway, we’re all glad to have you back.” He took a wet cloth and began to wipe down the brass on the taps. They looked perfect to me or as perfect as a metal pipe could and should be, which is to say they blended into the surrounds of the bar in their old ornamental feel and the lighting now quiet with Aaron having turned the overhangs off. I felt like a pimple; ugly; inflamed; ready to burst and filled with pus: out on my own with my thoughts unaddressed. I was the only person in the bar and being on my own I had nothing to hide within. There were no people there other than Aaron who was paid to be there. He acknowledged nothing of my madness, let alone show a desire to understand, and I didn’t know what I could say about how I was—about who I was—that would ring true and clear without causing worry or fear. Aaron was forced to listen as a barman, dispassionately, and ease over the rough edges in his workplace. It wouldn’t be right to dump it on him when he had so much to contend with, not least the pain in his knee. I didn’t know if I wanted to force him to care, despite knowing I needed care.

I took a sip of my settled pint and as I did I felt all the anxiety within me seethe in reaction to the fullness of the stout in my mouth. I swallowed it back knowing my almost allergic—at least a pseudo-allergic psycho-spiritual reaction—was a returning of myself to the atmosphere found in the pub.

The old and worn room was quiet but the extractor fan buzzed, clearing away the stain of the bleach in the air to the street outside. I wanted Aaron to turn it off, its thin plastic rattle scraping against my thoughts, instead I said, “It’s quiet. It should pick up soon.”13 I wanted more people to come, to liven the bar around me. A liveliness I could disappear into as experience. Aaron just nodded.

After watching, then not watching, then watching again Aaron drying the taps with a rag, his attention more lost than mine, as he dusted shelves, glasses, and even the chessboard pieces the bar kept, the door opened back. The rawness in my belly rose to my chest, far from settled with the small conversation.

Nick walked in. I couldn’t see a difference at first, other than him being bright and smiley but when Aaron asked him his question I noticed he was sporting a tan. “How were your holidays, Nick?” Aaron asked.

“Blissful,” Nick said, and he smiled at me with the freedom of a week away. “I ate, slept, lied on the beach and swam in the pool.” He clapped his hands quietly.

“Drink much?” Aaron asked.

“Not a bit. I didn’t need to. It was so relaxing that a pint was the furthest thing from my thoughts.”

“But you had a few?” Aaron said.

“Of course. But they were slow drinks, sitting outside the bars on the promenade. Right by the ocean. You didn’t have to be knocking them back, not like here.” Nick looked at me. “How’s things?” he asked, still smiling, hands still clasped together. “Did Aaron fill you in?”

“I told her we barred him,” Aaron said, as he topped off Nick’s pint of lager and placed it in front of him.

“And that we missed her?” Nick asked. He sat one seat away from me. The appropriate leaving of space to another and not the running away of putting two, three or four seats between us.

“I did mention that,” Aaron said. Nick turned his head questioningly towards Aaron. “Or at least we’re glad she’s back, which has the implication of being missed.”

“What a fucking prick!” Nick held his pint before him as though the words he’d said were too disrespectful to take a drink in that moment.14 He shook his head and looked apologetically at me. After the quiet came back to the air around us he took a sup, wiped the head from his mouth, placed it back down and without looking at me said, “It is good you’re back. Don’t let yourself be chased away.”

I tried to take peace in the nothing my return signified. I had been there, I left, I was back. Causes didn’t need explaining, apologies weren’t necessary. If they didn’t see madness or know of madness how was I to tell them of its purpose. Maybe madness was nothing?

Index - Moment 4