Paula Fraser.
I was, and possibly would forever be, in awe of Paula Fraser.
We met in a pub; we courted in a pub; we fell in love in a pub; we argued in a pub; we made up in a pub; and we split up in a pub. And that pub was The Basement.
The Basement was my favourite bar for months before I started working there. I, and a few other futureless idiots who didn’t think attending lectures and seminars was all that important, used to head down to The Basement at least three times a week to get blootered. It’s a funny thing about student life - no matter how skint we were, we could always scrape together enough coppers for another pint of snakebite and blackcurrant (if we were flush we’d throw a Pernod in and call it a red-witch).
The Basement was aptly, if a little obviously, named. A steep set of concrete stairs ran from street level down to the, well, basement, of a swanky office building in the city centre of Glasgow. Even on an eye-burning summer’s afternoon it felt like the middle of the night by the time you reached the bottom of those stairs. Once you pulled open the creaking wooden door this impression was bolstered by dull, orange lighting and a ceiling Danny Devito could have clattered his head off with a decent jump. Everything was made of wood - deeply-stained, chipped, generally knackered-looking wood. The floor, the tables and chairs, the bar itself and the wobbly barstools facing it were all identically mahogany-hued. Even some of the staff appeared to have grainy skin and a plank-like demeanour, although that may just have been the lighting.
The day I finally admitted that a Business Studies degree was unattainable and even less desirable, I marched directly from the college to The Basement and practically demanded (with pleading) a job. Luckily Sammy, the manager, knew me fairly well by that point. Even more luckily, he had recently sacked one of his full-timers for ‘arsing around with the no-sale button’ (which I later discovered meant omitting to ring drinks through the till and pocketing the cash). He gave me a job on the spot.
Paula Fraser already worked there. She was part-time though, and only worked weekends, so I’d been making a merry-tit of myself for five days before we met.
I’d been on day-shift all week, and was nervous about working my first Friday night. I’d never been in The Basement at the weekend, all of my previous visits being limited to times when I should have been learning the economic theories of Adam Smith or some such bollocks. I knew it got busy, though.
‘Pint of Moosehead, mate,’ some swine said at six o’clock, nodding towards the tap that had become my mortal enemy.
This was the early nineties, when beer cooling technology was still in its relative infancy. Moosehead was a Canadian lager whose claim to fame was that it was ‘double-cooled’, which meant that the pipe feeding the font passed through its own wee fridge-unit underneath the bar as well as the big one in the cellar all the other draught products went through. This was supposed to provide the aspiring alcoholic with an ice-cold beverage experience to match no other. In reality, it provided the punter with a minimum ten-minute wait, and the poor sod pouring it (i.e. me) a trial of Herculean proportions battling the excessive foam spurting and farting from the tap. For every pint successfully served, at least three went down the sink in the form of froth. It was a right bastard, even for the staff who knew what they were doing.
As my face was being sprayed with CO2 propelled yeasty bubbles for the umpteenth time in five minutes, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen brushed passed me, clearly trying not to laugh as she opened the wooden door beside the till that led into the tiny office/cloak-room/staff-room/skive-area.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say I had to rub my eyes, unsure of the veracity of the angelic vision I’d just witnessed. In this case, though, it was true. By the time I cleared the bulk of the sticky, stinging, bloody-freezing Canadian gold from my bleary lids, she was back out of the office and behind the bar.
‘I take it you’re Jim? I’m Paula, good to meet you,’ she said, with an Irish accent I hadn’t been expecting.
‘Eh, hiya. I’m Jim,’ I said hastily and, on reflection, unnecessarily. I thrust out a hand to shake hers. Unfortunately my vision was still fairly limited thanks to the recent beer-bath my eyes had received, and I spectacularly misjudged the distance between us. Instead of exchanging a polite greeting with this Venus, I somehow contrived to shove my right hand directly into her left breast, with a reasonable amount of conviction.
I like to think it was more shock than pain that led to Paula taking a speedy step backwards as I cried: ‘Holy Christ bollocks shit sorry!’
To her credit Paula maintained a smile, just about, as she set about having nothing to do with me for the rest of the shift.
It’s not a term I’ve used either before or since but, for the remainder of that Friday night, I remember regularly repeating to myself the phrase ‘prick-wad, you’re a prick-wad, you stupid prick-wad’.
The one benefit to come out of my blurred vision was that I got to view Paula in an, albeit painful and irritating, halo of soft-focus. They use this effect in crappy TV movies when the lead actress isn’t as stunning or young as her agent keeps telling her she is, but in this case it added to the ethereal quality I had already assigned to Paula.
She was only an inch or two shorter than me, which put her at around 5’7 or so. She had a big, long, curly, brown perm (it was the early nineties, remember), and, in all honesty, the nicest bum I had ever seen in my life - her skin-tight faux lizard-skin jeans helped there. Her eyes were hazel, her teeth were white, her nose was cute and her skin was somehow both pale and full of life. She smiled at everyone (not so much me, that night), and had an aura of joy and, I’m not joking, unadulterated goodness, about her that I had never come close to witnessing in anyone before. Thanks to me her bust was probably a touch on the sore side, but it looked fabulous. She was by far the most attractive person I had ever punched.
By the end of the shift I’d served God-knows how many customers, wrangled twelve more pints of Moosehead, developed a new and surprisingly intimate relationship with the glass-washing machine, and said not another word to Paula Fraser. And I was bloody knackered.
Once the bar was re-stocked and the floor swept and the chairs lifted onto the tables and the drip-trays washed and the wine glasses polished and the ashtrays cleaned and the toilets checked and the floor mopped and the rubbish put out (tasks which, even at the time, I knew it was a bloody liberty to make me do on my own because I was the new boy), I got to sit down and have a beer with the five other staff, who were well into their second drinks by then.
I was so buggered, I chose not to notice the mixture of disgust and fear that crossed Paula’s face when she realised the only empty seat at the table was next to her. I plopped myself down with a sigh and tried to smile as I raised my pint to my lips (I can’t remember what I’d poured for myself but it wasn’t bloody Moosehead, I know that).
Sammy lifted his pint from the other end of the large round table. ‘Well done, Jim,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the underground.’
I stopped drinking quickly and smiled again. Was that a signal I had been accepted into the fold?
‘Do yourself a favour, though,’ Sammy went on, ‘and stop walloping my barmaids in the tits, okay?’
I cringed, and felt Paula do the same next to me as everyone else laughed.
‘I’m so sorry about that,’ I said quietly to Paula, as the rest of the table resumed their various conversations.
‘Yeah, don’t worry about it,’ she said dryly.
‘Normally I wait till the second meeting before attempting a fondle.’
This got a smile. ‘So, did you get the hang of the Moosehead?’
‘Nah, I’m still its bitch,’ I said.
‘Tough titty.’
‘Don’t put yourself down, it felt pretty soft to me.’
Paula reddened and gave me a look.
‘Sorry, sometimes I just say things,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking of getting counselling.’ I gave her what I hoped was my best puppy-dog expression.
‘I can see I’m going to need to keep an eye on you,’ she said. She was still smiling, thank God.
‘If you insist,’ I said.
‘Jim Cooper, you are by far the biggest wanker I’ve ever met.’
This wasn’t quite the start I was hoping for to our first date.
‘I’ve been sitting here like a twat for half-an-hour, where have you been?’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said, sitting next to Paula. ‘It all went a bit wrong, getting here.’
Paula waited expectantly. I just waited.
‘And?’ she said.
‘Oh right, well. I was all set to go for the bus when my mum started going on about my career and shit, I think she’d had a wine, and probably a fight with my dad. Anyway, by the time I got rid of her I’d missed my bus. I tried to get a taxi but none were passing so I had to wait for the next bus. Sorry.’ I tried the puppy-dog thing again. ‘Do you want a drink?’
Paula managed to shake her head and nod at the same time. I went to the bar, thankful for miniscule mercies.
As it turned out, the night was a good ’un. I was telling the truth about my mum delaying me, so I didn’t have any guilt to hide.
We had planned to meet for a quick drink then go to see Jurassic Park. That was one of the things we had most in common, a love of big, dumb popcorn movies. As it turned out, we skipped the cinema and stayed in Nico’s drinking till shutting time. By eleven, we were inebriated enough to think our sarcastic comments about the state of everyone else’s dress sense were both hilarious and discreet. By midnight, we had drunkenly bonded enough for it to feel natural when I draped an arm around Paula’s shoulder as we waited in the taxi rank in Sauchiehall Street.
We had a wee kiss in the taxi queue. We had a bigger kiss in the taxi. I pretended I really needed the toilet, thus eliciting an invite up to Paula’s flat.
I’m struggling to think of a polite way to say I had the best fucking shag of my life that night (I should probably just have said that, but without the ‘f’ word). She floated my boat; she rocked my world; she blew my mind (ahem); she did every other hackneyed cliché you can think of to me. It was bloody brilliant.
We were together for two years. Not, I think, coincidentally, we both continued to work in The Basement for those two years.
When Paula graduated from University she got a proper job as a languages tutor (she’d studied English and German, and ended up qualified to teach both) in that very same University. In the equivalent time span the only thing I had graduated from was my inability to pour a pint of Moosehead, and even that remained shaky at best.
It was a Wednesday and I’d been on a lunch-time shift. As usual when finishing at four, I’d had three pints by five-thirty when Paula came in to meet me after her work.
‘Hiya,’ she said, perching on the barstool next to me. She looked tired.
‘Hey, all right? Drink?’ I said.
‘Just a coke.’
‘No worries.’ I ordered a coke from Sammy. He poured it from the gun, so I didn’t have to pay.
‘Can we get a table?’ Paula said.
I kind of already knew something was up, but Paula’s face as we sat down at the corner table confirmed it. Her eyes were as red as mine had been the night we met, but for patently different reasons. Her hair was pulled tightly back in a pony-tail and she didn’t have any make-up on. She was far paler than she deserved to be, and wore the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. I knew what was coming.
I braced myself. What would it be? ‘We need to talk’? ‘I’ve been thinking’? ‘We’ve been drifting apart for a while now’? What gentle way would she find to say it?
‘Jim Cooper, you are by far the biggest wanker I’ve ever met.’
That was unexpected, if consistent. ‘Eh,’ I said.
‘Two years, two years.’ Paula shook her head. ‘We were both nineteen, now we’re twenty-one.’
This was both factual and correct. Beyond that, I couldn’t see what she was getting at. ‘Hmm, yes,’ I said, in an attempt at wisdom.
‘You don’t have a feckin’ clue what I’m talking about, do you?’
Again, factual and correct. ‘Not ... specifically, perhaps,’ I said, winging it.
‘Where’s your life?’
‘That depends; define your terms.’ I hoped some levity might help. It didn’t.
‘The life you said you wanted. You were going to look into going to Art School or something; you were going to find a way to prove your father wrong. What happened to that?’
‘Ah well, that would be the whole entropy thing.’ I was still trying for levity. It still wasn’t working. In fairness, I was only 21.
‘I’ve been offered a job.’
‘Another one? Bloody hell, well done.’
‘It’s in London.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s a good offer.’
This was the time for me to say something devastatingly witty, intelligent and endearing, in order to make her stay with me. ‘Is the money good?’ Pathetic, utterly pathetic.
The thing was, I knew I couldn’t keep her. Paula was way beyond me; I’d known that since the day we met. Our paths happened to merge for a couple of years, and I knew I was a lucky bastard to have the time I’d had with her. She was always cooler than me; she was always going further than me; she was always smarter than me; she was always, when it came down to it, bigger than me.
And, that day, she chucked me.
So, that was the first time I was in love.
The last time I was in love? Now there’s a story.
She was, I’m neither afraid nor ashamed to say, a goddess.
Ah, there was a girl. She had the eyes. That’s always been the thing for me, the eyes.
They could look at you, through you, past you and deep inside of you, all at the same time. They could see the truth of you.
A simple colour doesn’t do that justice. They were, pure and simple, home.
She had the finest of hair, the sweetest of smiles, the most perfect of faces, the most beautiful of personalities. Fortunately for me she also had, for a time, the lowest of expectations.
When was this?
It was the year before, the month before. It was the day before, it was that day. It hadn’t faded, yet.
The last time I was in love? Same as the first.
The last time I saw her? Years ago.
She was Irish, and her name was Paula Fraser.
***
It’s funny what you think about when you’ve just turned 33 and are walking home from the pub in the rain, cursing your insistence on continuing to use hair-gel despite not having had enough hair for it to matter for at least three years. The rain had been forcing the gel down my forehead and into my eyes, making them sting like buggery; much as they had been that first night I met Paula.
I made it back to my flat and went into the kitchen, automatically opening the fridge for a second in case it had somehow been filled with food in my absence. Nope.
I trudged into the bedroom and collapsed on the unmade bed, fully clothed. I’d always preferred unconsciousness to sleep.