The Lock-In

By midnight
the pub no longer felt like a pub.
The lights were off
apart from the glow behind the bar
and the blue flicker of the fruit machine
nobody had touched for hours.

Some old blues record played quietly in the background.
A voice that sounded like it had lived long enough
to stop pretending.

We were drinking whisky by then.
Or brandy.
The sort of drinks men order
when they want to feel older
than they really are.

Outside,
the town had almost disappeared.
Inside,
time moved strangely.

Two o’clock arrived unnoticed.
Then three.
Then suddenly somebody checked their watch
and swore because it was nearly four
and none of us had realised.

Nobody wanted to leave.
That’s what stays with me most now.
How easy everybody felt with each other.

No performance.
No endless piss-taking.
No one waiting
for their turn to be funniest.

Just conversation.
The sort men often reach
too late in the night
to know what to do with.

Real conversation.
About work.
Marriage.
Getting older.
The kids.

One of the dads admitted
he’d cried at his daughter’s school play
and immediately looked embarrassed afterwards.
But nobody mocked him for it.

Because underneath all the jokes and noise,
all of us were trying, in our own clumsy ways,
to become the sort of fathers
we probably needed ourselves.

Another talked about lying on the floor at midnight
playing dolls with his little girl
because he’d been working late all week
and felt guilty.

I remember saying
I loved reading to my daughter before bed.
Doing the voices badly.
Making her laugh too much.
Getting blamed afterwards
because now she was too awake to sleep.

The mothers were at home, of course.
Probably exhausted.
And there we were
in a dark pub
drinking whisky
and talking like we’d finally figured out adulthood.

Still, for a few hours,
it felt safe in there.
Safer than most places
men manage to make
without meaning to.

Which is maybe why I still think about it now.

Because years later,
one of those men took his own life.
And none of us saw it coming.

Not because nobody cared.
Not because he was alone.
But because men become very skilled
at making pain sound like personality.

Some men disappear into themselves quietly.
Others make enough noise
to stop anybody noticing
how frightened they are.

Maybe both are asking the same question underneath.
Just in completely different voices.

And maybe that’s what all the noise was for in the end.
Not attention.
Not ego.
The hope
that somebody, somewhere,
would answer back.