SPIRITS

When it was his round, my uncle Ern always bought an extra pint for himself to drink while he was waiting for the rest to be put up. 'Working a flanker' was the technical name for this, though from what textbook in alcoholic and social strategy it derived I have no idea. Nobody ever saw him the worse for wear. It was generally assumed in the extended family that he had hollow legs - but not on the Douglas Bader model (though Len Deighton's consistent description of the latter as 'legless fighter ace' would seem to suggest that Johnny Walker played a larger part in the Battle of Britain than is generally acknowledged).

I remember when you could buy a round for twenty people for what a single pint costs nowadays. In that far-off era, BCC (before credit-cards), when your mail didn't consist of letters offering to lend you more than you could ever pay back without winning the lottery, and when roll-over only had a sexual significance, drinking was a social pastime, and assisted in the development of key transferable skills. Whenever it was your round, you not only had to remember everybody's order, you also had to do the mental arithmetic to see if you could afford it and have one yourself, since you'd only come out with a pound on you - plus a crinkled old brown ten-bob-note stuck together with sellotape.

As you can see, I believe in the romance of alcohol. Probably a genetic thing, though I've no idea whether my uncle Ern was in the direct blood-line or just married into a family of drinkers who were renowned for opening over-lively Guinness all over the ceiling of a tee-total cottage where they'd been billetted during the war. What worries me about drug-taking (though it may be physically no more harmful) is its introverted privacy. Buying someone a drink is a crude way of externalising your generous feelings towards them. It's better than buying them a duty Christmas present, because at least they can say what they'd like, and the gift itself is consumed, and doesn't hang around unwanted at the back of a cupboard and clutter up the rest of their life. Like the feeling of generosity, it's there, and then it's gone, and has to be renewed - or forgotten.

Once upon a time, there were three kinds of houses: private, public, and disorderly. The last meant a brothel, and they could take you to court for keeping one, but the first two were both legal and complemented one another. In Southampton, the local meant just that: it was the house on the corner, which, with its double frontage, had the space of two poky front rooms to accommodate people who preferred to spend the evening in someone else's parlour without the need to invite them back. All gone now, in favour of economies of scale, and gin-palaces run by managers from the brewery or the leisure conglomerate.

But, hidden away, there are still some bars of the old kind. Soft music and soft lighting that help you not to face hard facts. The one I go to is usually tended by Joe. Goodness knows if that's his name. Good bartenders are positively Buddhist in their extinction of the self. The first time I went in there, I said, 'Set 'em up, Joe,' and he answered, 'So you've got a little story you think I ought to know?' and we took it from there.

Now, I've got a little story I think you ought to know. So here it is. I went into Joe's early one evening for a shot of the usual, before going on somewhere else that I didn't particularly want to be. ('The usual' - you see how that helps you define yourself? How it promotes discipline, and order and identity? Not just a habit, but part of who you are - )

'What do you know about spirits?' asked Joe.

'High or low?' I answered.

'Sniff,' he said, and passed me over a shot glass with an oily brown liquid in it.

I sniffed. 'Can I taste?' I asked, and he nodded, so I took a drop on my tongue and rolled it round my mouth.

'Italian digestif,' I said, 'probably from the south, because the wine base is thicker than it would be in the north. At a guess, I'd say Averno.'

'That's what I'd say,' said Joe.

It's always fascinated me that Averno isn't just the name of an Italian bitter. It's also one of the Latin names for the underworld. But I didn't press this fact on Joe. Bar-tenders usually have more information than they need, and certainly more than they want.

'So what's the problem?' I asked.

'We don't have any,' he said.

'End of the bottle?' I asked.

'We haven't had any for six months. Not since Luigi died. He was the only one that ever drank it. There were three, four fingers left, so I passed the bottle over to the mourners at the wake they held for him in here. My contribution. Ceremonial. You know.'

'Luigi died?' I said. 'What of?'

'Secret of the confessional.' said Joe. I respected that. Bartenders don't have it easy. Counsellors talk to their supervisor. Priests can confide in a cardinal if they have to. But bartenders can hardly share their secrets with the Budweiser rep.

'And this?' I said, pointing to the drink.

'Found it on the bar when I came to clear up yesterday evening.' said Joe. 'I thought it must have been part of somebody's round that they forgot to take - or the person they ordered it for changed their mind, or had to go in a hurry - or something - '

'What are you going to do?' I asked.

'Leave it, of course,' he said. 'Maybe they'll come back for it. You can't just throw drinks away.'

I knew what he meant. First the grain grew, or the grapes. Sun and rain and wind. Then the harvest. Then the pressing, or the malting, turning the seeds over heat till they sprouted with new life and transformed their sugars. Then the fermentation. Life in that muddy sludge, that cloudiness in the liquid, producing carbon dioxide, as we all do. Then patience, while things clear, and it 'falls bright', as they say. Something that doesn't often happen with human beings, however patient you are. Finally, with spirits, distillation, boil off the unnecessary, condense the vital vapours, let them run together again, and then allow that raw and fiery energy time to accommodate itself to the human palate, years sitting in the dark, in oak casks imbued with sherry. You can't just tip it down the sink! But then, I'm the sort of person who never throws anything away. (Not as bad as Dylan Thomas, though. He used to go round the débris of wartime parties, pour all the dregs into one pint glass and drink it. The furthest I go is sniffing glasses of clear liquid, to make sure they really are water.)

Early next evening I called in again, curious. There were two glasses sitting on a shelf at the back of the bar, one the familiar dark brown, the other a lurid blue, like a dentist's rinse or the pre-med for a tonsilectomy. I looked at Joe and raised my eyebrows.

'Bols,' he said. Given the circumstances, I refrained from the joke, and he amplified. 'Curaçao. I used to use it in a drink called "Green Fields" - orange juice, sparkling white wine, and the curaçao to make it all go green.'

'Aha - " 'a babbled of green fields" - ,' I quoted, unable to resist the opportunity. And fair enough - Falstaff, whose death was being described, was very much at home in public houses, and Mistress Quickly, who was describing it, kept a house which was not altogether orderly.

'That's the suggested reading.' said Joe, who always knew more than you thought he could, 'the Folio says "a table of green fields." '

'What're you going to do?' I asked.

'See who else joins them,' he said. 'You don't want me to drive my customers away, do you?'

'Are they the kind of customers you'd like to have?' I asked.

Joe thought a while. 'They're quiet,' he said, 'they don't pester me to serve them when I'm busy, because they serve themselves. I know who they are - I've known them quite a while - and I find their company quite congenial. Yes - even if I don't talk to them, I like having them around.'

'They obviously like the atmosphere here,' I said. 'What do you think attracts them?'

'The spirit of the place,' said Joe. And he would have smiled - but he told me once, in a rare moment of communicativeness, that he'd given it up when he was eighteen and never found a reason to start again.

I began calling in regularly, and staying all evening.

Other customers came, drank and went. They started the evening at Joe’s, they finished the evening at Joe’s, they passed through, on their way between two places they thought they’d rather be. Enough of them for Joe to make a decent living. No one makes a decent living out of people like me, who sit there quietly all night and cradle a glass or two. But that’s what I did. Unlike the rest of them. And I was rewarded with what I'd hoped for. No one else stayed around long enough to notice or realise what was happening. The ownerless glasses multiplied. It wasn't Joe who did it. They were just suddenly there, beside me, on the bar. All kinds of different drinks, cocktails and bitters and straight spirits.

You know the way you make jokes about 'the micro-climate' when you find your glass is empty sooner than you thought it should be, because things are good and time is passing faster and more easily than you expected, and life is full and welcoming - well, I watched these glasses empty, and then be re-filled, without ever moving from their spot. It was like some seventeenth-century experiment with air-pressure, or one of these twee modern imitations of it, a barometer working with coloured water.

I can't pretend I knew who all these people were - or had been, to get the verb right - the single malt, the snowball, the brandy and Babycham, the rum and black, the rum and coke, the rum and pep, the pina colada, the Old-Fashioned, the Tom Collins and so on. But I grew to have a kind of feel for their personalities. They were a group of friends. An inclusive group, not an exclusive one. Why, they even filled up my glass on occasion! And then, halfway through the second week, the number of glasses began to decline.

'What's happening?' I asked Joe.

'They're moving on,' he said, 'that's life.' He thought about correcting himself, but just said, 'You know what I mean.'

I knew. Nothing lasts. Not even in a realm that you might think of as permanent. I wasn't sure if I found that consoling or not. Existence (let's use that word - it's easier) is all about moving on at the right time - and staying still at the right time, too. When you reach a good bit, you hope it'll last for ever. But sometimes trying to make it last for ever means it stops sooner than it would have done. Orpheus shouldn't have looked over his shoulder. While he still thought Eurydice was following him, she was. Wanting to make sure just proves that you're uncertain. The awful thing about death is that it stops the process, and often at a terribly random point.

After a while, there were only the two glasses left. And then the curaçao stayed empty, and Joe washed it and put it away. The bar was quite full of people that night, but to me it felt terribly empty.

'Do you want to tell me all about it?' I asked Joe.

'No,' he said, ' but thanks for the offer. It wouldn't be right, though. It was their business, and it still is.'

The glass of Averno seemed fuller than I'd ever seen it before.

'It's time,' said Joe. So we shared it between us, passing it to and fro, in a very careful and considered ritual, while I thought about and remembered all the dead people I had ever known.

'Any theories?' asked Joe. 'You're always strong on theories.'

'If you can't have domination, you might as well have explanation,' I said. 'No. No theories. Only a quotation I can't keep out of my head.'

'In a learnèd language?'

'In a learnèd language. Facilis descensus Averno.'

'Averno slips down a treat?'

'You know better than that, Joe. The descent to the underworld is easy.'

'I don't think my version's that far off. Though from what we've seen these past few days, the ascent from the underworld may not be quite as difficult as we both believed.'

He picked up the glass. There was less than a quarter of an inch left. He poured it carefully on to the bar-counter.

'For the Gods,' he said. 'A libation.'

He spread it around with his finger. Before very long it had evaporated and disappeared. After all, that's what spirits do. Then he polished the bar counter with a big yellow duster until there was no mark left at all.

2nd February 2001 2pm to 7.50pm