What Even Is Harmony

I lifted my pint to my lips and the subtle bite it was famed for lingered, full and strong as it had on my first taste. More-so with the time I spent on it, time raising the liquid to room temperature. I needed a coolness to chill me, refresh me, bring me to the peak of awareness with the people propped up by elbows, pints on the counter, and the noise around me dancing like flames.

I needed a drink on ice, strong and with a punch that would delight my senses as much as the bitterness of the stout I had slowly partook of.

I caught Aaron’s eye, standing lazily as he was behind the bar, impervious to the riot of conversation before him, with me floating on my silence.1 I ordered a gin and tonic. “I’ll pour the tonic,” I said.

He placed the glass with its measure of gin before me. I tipped less than half the small bottle of tonic into the spirit and ice. I took a sip.

The sharpness of juniper traded off my need for a clarifying break and I realised I was tired and full.2 I was feeling the tiredness of having achieved through hard work an afternoon to take pride in. I’d come through the worries of my return to the bar and they’d floated away through a haze of booze, despite me barely drinking two pints.

I looked around me knowing a way to ease back into the life lined up at the bar would come again, seeing as I was separated by my contented place within absence. Now it was a time to ease myself out and collect the treasure I’d found in my store. I stood.

Leaving my light jacket and bag hanging on the back of the seat I wandered over to the table closest to the counter and sat myself down on the deep cushioning of a two-person couch upholstered and re-upholstered, stuffed and re-stuffed. I welcomed myself home as a resting neighbour to the life coursing around me.3

Watching the bar I was fascinated by how small movements, the tentative placing of a hand just before a back, the slight turning of a body to their partner, or even just the tip of a pint to acknowledge another said these people, apart from each other, distinct from each other, needed a closeness I couldn’t imagine them admitting to. Such was the same for me. I had to start by admitting to myself I was in love. I had defied the part of me that had attempted to collapse me, the part of me that wanted me to collapse in on myself. The desire of a mad-brain to reduce to nothing except that madness had been surpassed and now I sat, at peace, with a drink in a slouch that took in the magnificence of simply existing in a moment alert and accepting.4 There was no challenge to overcome. I was without the need for a victory over the parts of myself that were all myself. I watched the bar around me as the movements of the people ceased impressing and took on the smallness of a steady flow of beer, quiet acceptance, and the slow tide as a river flowing in nature.

Hearing the door creak open I watched Samuel walk back inside as he shook his hands dry. He looked at me, blank-faced, and although there was a vibration of energy around me, with the small-world chaos of bodies synchronised to create a pulsing of life, there was a stillness between us, pristine and transparent.

I looked at him through the glass lens of my thoughts and saw him with a clarity large and sharp. He picked up his drink and walked over to me. With slow, precise movements, and without a smile, or a frown, but a rigid emptiness, he drew closer, growing larger, until he stood above me. I had to strain to lift my head to meet his gaze.

I wanted to reach for my gin, to take a drink and so lay the purpose of the bar between us but the contortion of stretching for it would hasten the comfort suddenly escaping me. I was frozen.

“How are you?” he asked. He gripped his pint between two strong, dark hands as though afraid of a coming storm and this a Guinness a life-vest.

“I’m OK,” I said.5

“The last time I saw you...” He stopped. From the timbre of his voice colluding with the soft holding of his breath I could tell he wanted more than a moment of shared recall. He sucked air through his teeth. “You really weren’t well,” he said.6

I interrupted the thought forming in my mind that he knew more of me than I expected even if he didn’t have any depth of understanding.

I said, with determination, “I’m better now.” Then with less strength and more than a little unintended honesty, “A bit, at least.”

I’d admitted to a truth of my health, him seeing my madness, but I was already feeling like I wanted to broach the subject of what wellness was, that it was a relative term for given values of being, I just couldn’t imagine how. I couldn’t see how to calm the waters of a dangerous channel between us.7 In that moment I was cast out, struggling against a tumult of all I wanted to say, shocked that I would have to muster a way to explain not just the past two weeks, or the time I was last in the bar, but all of everything.

The pull of muscles in my neck as I looked up demanded he sit so we could talk. So I could reason my stability. I wanted there to be an ease to my grand reveal, a normalcy to my explaining of madness that couldn’t come from my eyes scaling the height off his silver-grey clouds as he towered above me.

He set a hand against the armrest on the couch, coming closer to me—only through the pull of his arm—less leaning into me and more finding his way out of himself, finding my way to him, or his way to an appearance of me. His eyes were steady and I imagined I could see kindness leak into them. I had said nothing when he spoke up again.8 “Did you get to the hospital?” he asked, his voice quiet but cutting through the thickness of laughter, the pints knocking against hard wood and thin glasses, and the forty-a-day coughing filling the room.

“How do you mean?” I asked. I questioned. I urged myself to give into the peace I had found. I had lost. “I mean, I have been going,” I said. I had to admit to it however clumsy a statement it was. I had to admit it again. I had acknowledged mental hospitals were a part of my life. I wanted to show, to force him to understand, that there was no concern for me other than the health I was in, was surely living, but Samuel had a level of knowing to his questions that presumed I wasn’t ready to answer.9

“You told me you had to go. You were insistent. I’m just wondering if you made it.”

“I did. It was needed. I wasn’t well,” I said. My lungs felt weak and raw but I set them clearing with the cigarettes I had given up while attending the day hospital.

“I could tell.” His body seemed to fill with my confirmation and his understanding joining, bringing us to the eye of the storm. “It was coming a while. I could see how bad you were. You’re better now?” he said. “Or at least feeling better?”

I nodded. He fell silent. His eyes stayed focused on me but there was no indication in his look that I was anything more than a haunted apparition of a soul without form. To him I was emptiness possessed by its own loss.

I knew he didn’t want to hear more. That he believed he was more, but he couldn’t, or didn’t want to allow a sense of being for anyone else, least not me. I couldn’t speak more. It was obvious he had seen some of how I had been and I knew then I couldn’t appreciate how others had taken me.10 I couldn’t experience myself through their eyes and accepted, for that instant within myself, that all my understanding of my part in the world could be made as unsound as I felt in that moment by someone enquiring after my precarious health. Showing care. Showing me.

He turned from me. Took a step away, then turned back. He raised his hand as though waving to a friend passing the horizon, already gone. “Mind yourself,” he said. “You were a little scary.” His step11 was hesitant, almost faltering, as though those words were coming against a rising bodily illness he had to keep down. Whether it was his or my illness I didn’t know, but mine was a steady thrum I became aware as always there. That this beat was me, and mine, just louder in that instance of existence.

I sat with myself and my thoughts quiet for a minute, maybe thirty seconds, or three hundred, or just one recounted again and again, maybe for what felt like an eternity too long, then I wanted me to decide to stand and follow him. As I pushed through my rise from the seat the muscles in my thighs and groin gave despite the impulse of urging I gave to them. I fell back into the couch and fell back into the part of me I thought I had escaped.

But I had escaped madness. That morning I’d felt renewed and it terrified me, but in the bar, much like on the walk from the hospital, I saw fears were allayed by continuing despite them. I had brought myself to somewhere beyond. What Samuel had said, how I had been, was only a recalling of now-gone moments. To live in those moments again would be a denying of the changeable nature of a mind, but more importantly a renouncing of the importance of time since passed. My mind had changed. I couldn’t change anyone else’s. Their view on me was only informed by what I had shown and now I was to show more again.

I stood. This time easily. All the muscles that previously gave way now had intent. I returned to my seat at the bar and ordered another drink, this time a pint, again. “Are you finished with your drink on the table?” Aaron asked, pointing to where I had sat.

“It’ll wait for me there,” I said, and I knew I could return again. I now had two places in the world. One, where I was, and one where I could return to. Go to. Become again an away from it all.12 Somewhere I knew Samuel took nothing from me.

I lifted my way back into a privileged ease by sitting on the stool, fully finding my way marked by me having already been there. Nick was slowly getting back into the spirit of his home country, returned, happy as he was with one pint filled in front of him while the other, half empty, was in his hand. “Did you really need a holiday?” I asked him, as I sat up again full and wary, but denying it.

The pint he was raising to his mouth was lowered and he turned to look at me. “I need another,” he said.

“People need to escape.”

“How is it an escape if you have to come back?” Maurice asked. There was a mixture of laughter and the odd nod from the people now influenced by the weight of their reprieve, sitting at the bar, drinking their way back to a steady return from where they weren’t drinking but here—now again—they would be and were.

“That’s the point, isn’t it? What’s the phrase? A change is as good as a rest?” I said.

“I’ve heard it,” someone said.

“And there’s no difference of outlook, or even look-in, or rarely is there,” I said.

Aaron set the now poured pint in front of me and I lifted it up, taking a deep gulp as soon and as fast as I could such was the thirst caulking my throat.

“How much were the flights, Nick?” a man who I didn’t know but recognised asked.

“There’s no value in last minute, anyway. Not any more,” Nick said. “I thought I could wait out the expensive fares, when they rise the price as it’s mostly filled, and pick up a seat when they realise they won’t sell them all. I was caught out.”

“Escape has a price,” I said.13

“Not one I’ll be paying again,” Nick said.

“So stay here, don’t run away.”

“I haven’t run in twenty years,” Nick said. He laughed. Others laughed. I noticed why they laughed after a moment when he took a breath that inflated his belly.

I waited for a more telling truth to settle into me. It came, slowly at first, then sprinting out of my mouth. “Some people don’t need to run from anything.”

“If I had my way I wouldn’t be back here,” he said. At some level he had strayed from what I pointed out, not heard it, or at least not acknowledged it, but there was a need at the core of his comment, a longing for something solid to escape from, a reason to give up what he didn’t know he had, what I knew he was incapable of having.

“You’ve nothing to run from,” I said, but what I meant was he’d only be staying in the one same spot elsewhere. He didn’t run, couldn’t run: there was nothing standing in his place that forced him away. He couldn’t even think of escaping with the signs of difference around him always the same.

“We all have things we want to get away from,” the man I didn’t know but recognised said.

“But running is something more, that’s not just getting away. It’s urgent. Fleeing would be a better word. Mad, manic. Running, real running to escape. Like I said, fleeing from the worst around you.” I didn’t say the worst part of you.

“Come on!” Nick roared. “What’s there like that? What in this country would anyone need to flee? This place is a paradise compared to some places.” He set his pint down.

“Could you leave here behind?” I clarified.

“What’s keeping me here?” Nick said. His cheek pulled towards his eye revealing his canine tooth, a deep-felt twitch brought on by nervousness firing nerves, or maybe anger.14

“The pleasant company, the quick wit and a well poured pint is what’s keeping you returning here every day,” Aaron said as he took the change laid out for the drink he’d just handed to Samuel.

“I’d drink in a ditch if the pints were ten cents cheaper,” Nick said.

“The company might be better,” Maurice said.

Nick feigned a double take, faking a choke on the gasp he drew. “With me gone?”

Everyone laughed.

“You said it,” Aaron said. All laughed again.

“Would that be a holiday?” I asked. “Ditch pints?”

“They taste off,” Maurice said.

“Ditch pints? I’ve had a few,” Nick said. “There’s some chancers running bars out there.” He raised his pint directionally to indicate a general beyond.

“None here,” Aaron said, placing a new stack of beer mats in a holder.

I spoke up and tried to change the space given to the people in their ever-same places. “I mean, if a change is as good as a rest, and you can rest in a ditch, but it’s also a change of view, maybe ditch pints are the more affordable version of a too-expensive last minute flight? However bad they are. And that’s their good point. They’re available to all.”

“One ditch pint for Natalie,” Nick said. I saw Samuel take a sip of his pint before he became aware of me looking at him. His focus was intent, if cold, but he didn’t say a word, didn’t smile, didn’t turn towards the conversation. Staring, I was fully sure he’d take a bigger sup to confirm his desire for a quick escape but he set it back on the bar without giving it the acknowledgement of his lips.

I realised the conversation had continued around me. Nick spoke up, “It’s not a ditch pint, but it’s not far from it.”

“Everything we stock is of the highest quality,” Aaron said.

“Is your taste more suited to foreign beers, now?” Maurice asked.

“I think I just need another to compare,” Nick said.

“You’d keep drinking ditch pints?” the other man said.

“I would, even though Aaron charges an extortionate price for them,” Nick said.

“And yet you keep paying,” Aaron said. “Which means they’re not as bad as you’re saying. And if they were I wouldn’t serve them.”

I lifted my pint and saw how it still hadn’t settled. Whether my haste to drink from it kept it in some state of flux I couldn’t know but I suspected the speed I had engaged it with, and its hazy body, was a reflection of the mire I’d found myself in. It was a fine pint, far from the ditch-water Nick was angling for a free sup of, but the whole bar along with the pint had sunk beneath me. The stout—clouded as though soy milk in coffee—was the organic waters we were in, slick with microscopic life floating and frolicking unaware, but I wasn’t ready to stop and pick out the smallest traces of existence from what I’d found.

I knew the bar, my drink, the people were the same as ever and it was me that had changed. I had set foundations beneath me as the people around me wallowed in the comforting silty muds, cleansing their pores, filling their bellies, letting raw waters wash them in dirt. This wasn’t a ditch pint in taste but it came from a hole in the ground on the daily routine we all were too tired to stray from.

I turned to look at the gin sitting on the table I’d left behind me. My change of perspective had brought me to a new lookout.

I stood and twisted my body behind the tight pack of chairs to pick up my jacket from the back of my stool. Pushing my arms through its sleeves I asked, “Where’s the worst pint in town?”

“Murphy’s,” Nick said.

“Molloy’s,” Maurice said.

“Malone’s,” the other said.

“You’re just naming bars that start with M.” Samuel said. His eyes passed over me, Nick, Maurice and the other and back again to himself as though his scrutinising gaze only ever looked into a mirror. I looked at myself as though through his mirror. It was terrifying, but true.

“The worst pint is always the last,” Aaron continued.

“The last pint is the most dangerous,” Nick countered.

“Because you’ll want another,” Maurice explained.

“It’s the last one that does the damage,” Nick rejoindered.

“You’re all damaged,” Samuel assured us, and as he did his glance caught on me, and he laughed, and then he turned quietly back to his drink, the only one to welcome his return to silence.

I rested my hands on the counter to find my level and wondered where I would go for the worst pint I could drinkably conceive. Whether it was even possible to levy that award such was the balance between what I sought and what would poison me. “I won’t go to Murphy’s, nor Molloy’s, nor Malone’s,” I said, proud of not having tripped over such a lexical fancy. “I enjoy them but they’re probably a little quiet for me. I want a more obviously noisy silence to enjoy my ditch-pint in.”

“As long as you don’t end up in one,” Nick said.

I made my way back towards the exit that would lead me to a world I didn’t know, or more didn’t want to know, even if I could ever fathom its ways. I wanted to be lost among something new again.15

I pulled back the door. “I’ll see you all,” I said as smattering of, ‘Mind yourselfs!’ came from the people solid and stuck in that room.16 Samuel reached out to take my shoulder and I couldn’t tell if I wanted him to succeed in his reach. I turned and walked out.

Index - Moment 5