Who Knew Georgie Williams?

Robert stands at the sink in the kitchen above the pub. His view takes in a bus stop where a woman nervously smokes, picking bits of loose tobacco from her teeth. The bins at the side of the Indonesian restaurant are overflowing. Cars crawl along, stopping, starting, whenever a pedestrian wants to cross the road, which is often. The Army Navy Surplus Store is opening its shutters three doors down from the restaurant. On the river, a ferry boat takes passengers to the other side. It is cheap and worth it. The bridge is a mile downstream.

It begins to rain.

Robert’s head is customarily sore at this time of the morning, so he drinks sweet tea, cup after cup, until the sugar makes him queasy. Builder’s tea, mind. He is not without affectations, but Robert has no time for the rose hip and chamomile chuggers. (He conveys much of what he wishes to say with the rise of a single brow, but a herbal tea enthusiast will merit two).

And so the day begins, sobering up and getting more sober as the day runs along. The next time he drinks will be at eleven o’clock tonight, (triple gins and soda water), when he holds customary lock-ins with his favourite night owls.

Roll out the ashtrays, roll up the cigarettes, and fuck the government. His pub, his people, his rules.

*****

There’s a man in the doorway of the pharmacy who looks like he might be dead. He’s slumped on the mosaic tiles where Edwardian boots once tip-tapped, hurrying in, hurrying out with their patent medicines. A couple of the tessera are missing, like the man in the doorway has a couple of teeth missing. Adie Wickes, long-time street cleaner of the parish, has learned the signs of death as opposed to a drug-induced torpor. Death slumps when you kick its foot. Torpor kicks back.

The face, mottled and oblong, is exposed by the movement and Adie takes a step back, not in shock but in sorrow. Ah, no! he thinks. Not Georgie …

They take him away before the pharmacy opens, but word has already begun its march down Broadway, and it reaches Robert in The Prince’s Motto at 8.45am, as he’s re-mopping the floor because the staff don’t know how to.

The postman raps on the window. ‘Georgie’s dead,’ he mouths, and makes a gesture with his hand across his throat. Ah, no!, thinks Robert. Not Georgie …

He runs up the narrow stairs to tell his partner, who bursts into tears. He’s emotional and maybe a little touched in the head, but twenty years they have been together and the roots run deep. Robert often thinks a rough bar is no place for him.

‘I’ll make sandwiches,’ Michael says, anxious to spread his sorrow on white bread. Robert tells him not to. Not yet.

Something troubles Robert. Georgie was unwell, it is true. He drank too much, smoked too much, and God knows what he ate. Robert opens his doors to such people every day. This is their place, where they talk with broken voice boxes, their faces animated by spidered veins and cemetery teeth. But always the eyes twinkled. They carried surnames much like in medieval times, pertinent to their trade or the goods they peddled inside: Jonno the Scaffold, Paul the Builder, Jimmy the Cheese. In the daytime hours, before the loud, smooth flesh of youngsters intrude, this place is the local Palais of the ruptured spirit.

But yesterday, Georgie had arrived late and stayed too long. It was closing time when he left, passing Robert his customary beer mat on leaving. There was a scaffolder in the bar, (not Jonno), with his blowsy girlfriend, and he thought Georgie was looking at her. There was an altercation; Georgie throwing his hands up, telling the young blood he was merely drawing her face. Look! And he pushed the beer mat toward him. Stella Artois, circular, white background. Georgie’s favourite canvas. Robert has hundreds of them in his safe, all signed with a flourished ‘G’ and a Wm.s in the curve.

Georgie left, and shortly afterwards so did the scaffolder, leaving his girlfriend surrounded by her chickadees, with their pink gins and their faux outrage at the ‘dirty old man.’

Robert opens his safe and takes out a small representative pile. They are exquisitely observed caricatures of the clientele, often drawn when the mat was damp, lending them a blur they were probably feeling. Always with a black Bic, kept in the top pocket of Georgie’s tweed jacket. The dried beer stains lend a sense of antiquity, as though foxed by the passage of time. Robert strokes a sketch of Daisy Peel, recently deceased. Every day at the same time she would come in and order a triple gin. Never with words, but a glance at the optic. She sat at the bar and rarely spoke, unless Bobby the Spiv put her favourite song on the juke box - and then Daisy would dance and talk about a lover long gone. When the song was over she would return lifeless to the bar, like her winding mechanism had run down.

Yet still, Robert misses her, and it is this protective spirit which drives him to call the police.

*****

It was death by natural causes, they said. There was evidence of bruising to Georgie’s lower rib, but drinkers walk into things. No clear proof of a fist. His organs were beyond repair, and if not on that night, it was implied that Georgie would have died on another night soon after. Ten days later they held his funeral, a simple cremation on a windy hill. A red brick building with a tall chimney where white smoke belched like a papal conclave: Yes, we have all agreed that Georgie is, indeed, dead. There were not many in attendance, but those who were there paid for the disposal and the flowers.

Later, at the wake, Michael got to make his sandwiches, and an old tea urn was brought out from the back where the barrels were kept. Builder’s tea, of course, which goes better with brandy.

Robert notes that the scaffolder drinks elsewhere now, and the gossip lingers.

And then, in a different season, a news story breaks. Georgie Williams, who had died intestate and inadvertently left his possessions and property to the council, was a great artist. The late-latest thing. The man with the dusty clothes and drinker’s breath is now the town’s favourite son. His art depicts the underbelly of town life, the druggies under the viaduct who have lost limbs and wheel themselves with adroit aggression, the prostitutes along the City Road, and the poor old men and women shopping for no one but themselves. But most were of the drinker’s in Robert’s bar. There is old Daisy Peel, drinking gin, and Robert, glasses on his head, doing a crossword while he is waiting for the dray. Each study in oils elevated the downbeat and the dissolute into something else, into people of profound merit, stroked by the hand of a tender god.

There were so many of them.

The faces were the same as those locked in Robert’s safe. Preliminary sketches, left in his care with a nod and a wink, the strokes memorised and later set down on canvas. His patrons often ask what happened to those beer mats, and Robert always says he threw them away, and he says this with a regretful shrug at the missed opportunity.

One day, when the council has sold them all to pay for their pensions, or on the day when Georgie’s first painting sells for a million or more, Robert will begin to release those beer mats, singularly or perhaps all at once: perhaps at that moment when Michael tells him he can’t live this life any more and that he craves a place in the sun. Perhaps then.

But Georgie, Georgie Williams.

Who knew?