Surviving Hal. Penny Flanagan

two of his brawniest mates to physically remove Hal from the premises at the first sign of trouble.

      As it had turned out, it wasn’t Hal who needed to be handled but Stan. Heavy-headed with drink, Stan swivelled on the dance floor while doing his best Boogie Fever and found himself face to face with Hal. Stan blinked. Hal licked his lips. The music stopped for a millisecond between songs. Andy caught his brawny mate’s eye and the guys moved forward. Stan, drunk, stumbled back then righted himself. His right shoulder shifted ever so slightly as he prepared to take a swing. Then, instead of his arm moving forward through the air and cracking Hal Straw on the jaw as he had so often and so satisfyingly imagined, his arm was taken hold of gently and used to steer him back to his table.

      Stan was moved off the dance floor just as Eye of the Tiger pulsed to life, as the silver disco ball spun into action twirling white spots of light across the dance floor. Hal found his nerve and uttered these parting words to Stan’s broad retreating back, just loud enough for those around him to hear, but not loud enough to have him escorted from the premises as prearranged, “Go on, you fat fuck.”

      The crowd of jerking, gyrating wedding dancers folded around Hal and he shimmied in triumph, leering at my then-workmate Jessica, who was wearing a tight black minidress and was drunk enough to smile back and egg him on with a shoulder shaking, forward-bending, breast-jiggling dance move. Ever the opportunist, Hal made sure to put his hands out just in time to accidentally cup her ample assets as she shimmied toward him.

      Meanwhile, Stan was sat back in his seat, furnished with a large glass of water and was heard to mumble something about wanting to kill Hal Straw.

      After the panic leading up to the wedding, the hysterical expectation that Hal would cause trouble, it was strangely disappointing when he didn’t. We would have to wait another ten years before the prophecy was finally fulfilled.

      9.

      After Hal had surprised everyone by behaving so impeccably at our wedding, Andy softened towards him a little and made an effort to see him more regularly. The most vivid memory is the time he took us to the Tattersall’s Club for our birthdays, which were conveniently two days apart. The venue was his choice because he was a member and got some sort of discount on the meal. It was a tired old place in a dormant part of town, a pain in the arse to get to. Anyway, we went. If only because it would keep Hal off our backs for a while.

      Helen was out of town on business and so we were expecting just Hal. Looking back, this fact was probably more significant than we realised. Their marriage, which was always so carefully presented to us by Hal as his happy coda to the harrowing event of Maude’s leaving him, was ever so steadily decaying from within. It was only a matter of time before the brittle veneer of it shattered and revealed them both. In hindsight, it was a shame their marriage ended.

      If Hal had stayed married to Helen, there is no doubt that things would have turned out differently and I would not be carrying this small deceit, holding it covered in my hands, carefully carrying it through every ensuing day, nursing it to my grave.

      That night we were just racking up our second game of billiards when Hal breezed into the billiards bar with some other slapper and introduced her to us like it was all very normal.

      No one around me reacted, so I followed their lead and shook her hand, claimed it was nice meeting her. She then attached herself to me like a limpet for the duration of the meal and seemed utterly determined to make a deep connection with me.

      Tom and Anita were there too and everyone got more and more drunk, while I became more and more sober. I was three months pregnant with Daniel, our first child, and so I was denied the anaesthetising effects of alcohol. Things became sharper and sharper as the night wore on, the blurred morality more acute, the audacity of Hal bringing his mistress to our birthday dinner more and more offensive. Why should I care? I kept asking myself. I don’t even like Helen, so why should I care?

      She had a pug-like face that had probably been attractive for about five years in her early twenties, bottle-blonde hair arranged into a cut and wave, a leathery décolletage and a snappy little figure that she flaunted in a short flippy skirt that I considered inappropriate for her age. As the night wore on, her face sort of melted and became sloppy with drink, her speech slurred and slowed like she was underwater, her hands wandered to my forearm, which she alternately patted and gripped. One of her eyes turned in.

      Perhaps because I was pregnant with my first child this woman’s presence offended me beyond what it normally would. That and the way she and Hal carried on like randy teenagers at the table, then slipped off to the dance floor with gropes and giggles as though we should all be happy for them. There was a galling sense of smugness about it all. Flaunting it in our faces like that while we all sat impassively and pretended it was perfectly acceptable. In a way, Hal had snookered us. He knew we had no fond feelings for Helen, so how and on what grounds could we possibly object?

      As the night wore on, I felt this sordid liaison degrading my unborn child via association. I was feeling extremely righteous and pious, full of the self-importance of any first-time mother-to-be. Suddenly, my life had a purpose beyond my day-to-day existence, a purpose as pure as creating life. I couldn’t look at her. She was plying me with questions about the baby, mouthing off with her theory of how ultrasounds can cause an unborn foetus irreparable damage (just as Andy had recounted our first ultrasound anecdote). She was mouthing off generally. Telling me about her son as though being mothers would make us both the same.

      She had plonked herself down next to me and was trying to look deeply into my eyes in that way drunk people do. At one point, when I’d had enough of her slurring babble and was trying to pretend that the light fitting directly above my head was enthralling me, she demanded of me,

      “Why won’t you look me in the eye?” She then shouted to Hal across the table. “She won’t look at me. Why? Why won’t she look me in the eye?”

      Hal guffawed nervously. Andy gave me the look he gave me when he thought I was upsetting the apple cart. That was the crux of it. Don’t cause an upset. I guess Andy’s seen enough upsets to last him a lifetime. But out of everything, that was the thing that I found the most difficult to take. The stretched tension, the hideously misshapen bubble of normality as Hal pushed the boundaries and the rest of us struggled not to react.

      It was shortly after this birthday dinner that I began to excuse myself from attending as many Hal-associated social occasions as possible. No longer concerned about what impression I was making, I became more concerned with trying to maintain an optimistic view of my husband and the gene pool that he may be passing onto our children.

      Above all, it was the feeling of being gagged and silenced in the face of Hal’s always awful behaviour that I found so frustrating. According to Andy, I had to let Hal do what he did and I was not to challenge him. Because Andy, normally such a bull-headed and forthright person, always chose to work around him instead of confronting him head on.

      In the early stages of our relationship, I made the mistake of thinking less of Andy because of this. Then one day it dawned on me that somewhere in the past there had been a confrontation that had resulted in this curious Straw family dynamic; where no one challenged Hal and the way he behaved.

      I realised then that it only has to happen once. From then on, just the threat of it is enough to keep everyone in line.