Hemingway’s Chair

barman he was grateful to
those who took their sadness quietly and caused him no trouble.
    Trevor
was in his mid-forties. He was a philosophical man. Life had been a series of
failures and each one he had accepted more philosophically than the last. His
job here was perfect. A failure working amongst failures in a pub that was
slipping slowly into the sea. He pressed a measure of Bells into a whisky
tumbler and set it on the bar alongside the beer.
    He
took the money. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked unhopefully.
    Martin
nodded and did not look up.
    ‘I
tell you,’ said Trevor, taking a cigarette out from behind his ear, ‘if you
could lay all the problems I’ve had in my life end to end, they’d stretch from
here to bloody Lowestoft.’ He struck a match and lit the cigarette. ‘But I
don’t let them worry me. Quite the contrary.’
    Martin
took the beer and drank deeply. Trevor noticed.
    ‘I
draw inspiration from them. You know what Jesus said. “Come unto me all ye that
are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Well, I like that,’ he said,
dropping the dead match into a chipped ashtray. ‘But then I’m more heavily
laden than most.’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw Martin dispose of the
Scotch in one swallow. Classic symptoms.
    Trevor
sighed heavily, it’s nothing to feel bad about. Failure. It’s meant to be.
Whatever’s happened to you has happened to somebody else at some time so you
might as well just accept it.’ He pulled on his cigarette, taking the smoke
gratefully into his one remaining lung. ‘Otherwise what do you do? Kill
yourself.’
    Martin
slowly lifted his head. Through the numbing haze of alcohol there shone a
sudden shaft of light. A ray of hope. A beacon in the darkness, an answer among
questions, a something in the nothingness. A hovering, beckoning embraceable
Holy Grail that would cleanse all his wounds and wipe away all his tears.
    Killing
himself was so startlingly clear and simple a solution that Martin felt a
powerful surge of elation. He looked with new and grateful eyes on the grim
surroundings of the Lifeboat Inn. He took in the bristle tiles on the floor and
the flock wallpaper on the walls and the formica tops of the tables. The sounds
of sharp cackled laughter, boozy argument, and droning television commentary
merged into an indistinct cosiness. The smell of tobacco, beer and HP sauce
fused into a cheap, familiar fug.
    He
could think himself in Sloppy Joe’s in Key West or the Cafe des Amateurs on the
Rue Mouffetard. Hem had loved bars. Bars provided almost everything Papa had
needed. A drink, a glass, a table to write on, an audience to talk to, an
opponent, a lover, an argument, a story.
    Having
made up his mind to kill himself, Martin was suffused with such fondness for
the place that he decided one final pint would not go amiss. He consumed it
with gratitude, and Trevor took quiet, if misguided, pride in the fact that his
simple wisdom had saved another lost soul.
     
    *
     
    Martin
peed for a long time, ran his hands under a thin trickle of cold water, held
them for quite a while under a condom machine until he realised it was not the
hot air dryer, found the hot air dryer, failed to make it work, wiped his hands
on his trousers and made his way unsteadily out into the crisp fresh air.
    As
his bicycle bumped and rattled across the car park and on to the main road he
felt himself a heavyweight at last. A potent, uncontainable force about to be
released from trivial rounds and common tasks to play a final, apocalyptic
role. He blatantly gave no hand signals as he turned left, flagrantly ignored a
red traffic light and rode quite shamelessly across the path of an oncoming
bus.
    Martin
found himself, still alive, on a road he was not familiar with. It wound inland
from Hopton between fields and farms. He put his head down and cycled fast and
emphatically along the wrong side of the road.
    After
a minute or two it became clear that he had chosen for his last great gesture
of defiance a thoroughfare entirely devoid of traffic. He pulled up alongside a
five-barred gate, out of breath and no longer clear as to where he was or why
he was where he was. Wherever it was. He waited, panting, for his head to swim
back into focus. As it did so, something caught his eye, off to the left in the
field on to which the gate opened.
    The
light was flat and waning but there was unmistakably something there. He looked
again. Then out of the shade it came. A magnificent