My Dear Friend Of Dorothy

"Sally, give me a beer, will you?"

I looked up and there was Ben, hopping up onto a bar stool and looking at me almost impatiently.

The only friend of Dorothy I knew that drank pints and not Bacardi and coke.

"Nothing like drinking before four o clock on a Sunday is there?" I muttered to him but he wasn't listening.

"You wouldn't believe the day I had. Seriously. I don't think that anyone could have had a more disagreeable day than me!"

The problem with being friends with an actor is that they insist on being not only melodramatic but almost entirely self-centered.

"Sally, I'm going to lean over and drink straight from the tap if you don't hurry up!"

Particularly when they were 'resting'. There was no outlet for their flamboyant natures. Meaning the rest of the world had to endure tantrums worthy of Joss Stone and primadonna rants from the 'poor arteests' until Lady Luck finally took pity on us and gave the struggling thesbian a break. Or, at the very least, an understudy role.

"Keep your hair on!" I barked at him, handing over the best pint of Carling I'd poured all day. "Two sixty."

"You see," Ben continued, handing me what I suspected was his last tenner, "I was down at The Three Horseshoes which was completely dead again when in comes Cheesy Pat."

"Oh yeah?"

I have become the master of feigning interest. I sipped my diet coke, trying to picture in my head my daily hunk from facebook. It was the only application that I could stand. Ben had introduced me to it after a drunken evening in Soho once and ever since I'd been hooked. The day before yesterday had been James Franco.

"Anyway, he sits down and makes me guess what he's going to drink. Like I care! I know he's going to order Carlsberg. Because that's what he's had every time he's come in for the past seven months. I'm not so shit a barman that I can't remember what the most boring man in the world orders when he comes in. In fact, I tried extra hard to remember it just so we'd have one less thing to talk about. But he went on shat on that plan, now didn't he?"

"Hmm," I agreed.

A downside of barwork was that you were a sitting duck for every lonely boring sod off the street who wanted someone to talk at for a couple of hours. If the bar was dead, you had little to no escape from them. None whatsoever.

"He kept telling me about his feet!" Ben squealed at me, screwing his face up with the grace of a Machiavellien road pirate. "His horrible, disgusting, diseased feet! If he hadn't got a bandage round the most of it I swear he would have got the bloody wound out and stuck it up on the bar and shown it to me."

"I haven't seen a cripple get to you this much since secondary school. When Natasha Harper broke her ankle when that play you were doing - Dead Things That Crawl?"

"God, don't get me started on that Sal!" Ben cried, putting his head in his hands. "What kind of moron goes around jumping in puddles the day before you're about to go on stage?! It was just lucky that Violet was a tomboy so it was believable that she'd have done something dangerous enough to warrant wearing crutches."

"And that scene where she had to run away from the ghost was much better."

Ben covered his mouth with both hands, breaking into loud peels of laughter.

"Oh God, Sal, sometimes I miss school. Well apart from the work and the teachers and seven hundred and thirty nine of the students. But the drama stuff we did was always so much fun. You should have applied to Guildhall with me. Bet you would have got in."

Ben giveth.

"Maybe after a year or two of trying."

Ben taketh away.

Ben was one of the only people I knew who had been accepted at eighteen to drama school. He had demonstrated many a time his successful audition where he had had to weave in and out of twenty people in his group, convincing a person behind him in Shakesperian prose to follow him and not to be sad.

"Anyway, back to the story. So Cheesy Pat is sucking on his Carlsberg when in walks another bloke who he greets with surprising warmth. The guy sits down, orders the guest ale and they start chatting away like old friends. And, as I'm standing there as you do, I overhear the second guy saying to Pat - 'It's all a different language. All them blacks and foreigners, they're filling up our streets!'"

"What?"

"No kidding, that is what he said. And then Cheesy Pat starts agreeing with him, chanting, 'Where is England? Where is England?'"

Ben shook his head and took a short sip from his pint. "I swear, Churchill would be rolling over in his grave."

I nodded, although I wasn't altogether sure Churchill would have cared, vaguely remembering from some history class over a decade ago that Churchill had favoured letting Gandhi die if he went to the trouble of going on a hunger strike. But since Ben was in full rant, it seemed churlish to interrupt. It was always better to correct things later once he'd simmered down.

People do get so cross if you correct them when they're in the middle of something. That used to happen to me so much at school and later at university.

"I was so angry though and ... " Ben stopped of a sudden and for the first time in three years had a look of shame about himself.

"What?" I could feel myself becoming more interested in the story. "What?"

"I did the worst thing I could have possibly done."

I raised my eyebrows, leaning across the bar intently. This was going to be good. Ben had once thrown a tantrum at a sales girl in a shop just off Bond Street because he had seen her asking someone to leave for no apparent reason and had then spent the entire week re-telling the Pretty Woman-esque tragedy to everyone he met.

"Yeah? What did you do?" I asked.

I heard the awed whisper just after it was too late to retrieve it. Thankfully Ben was too preoccupied to mock my intrigue.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" I repeated.

"Nothing," Ben told me again dumbly.

I paused, feeling fairly certain that somewhere along the line I must have missed the point of this unpencilled account. Yet Ben looked so thoroughly miserable that I felt certain that this, whatever it was, was the thing that was depressing him. And therefore, the point of the whole telling of it.

"Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again. And mend your speech a little," I added, looking closely at him with an overly manic grin on my face that would frighten any IT fearing infant out their skins and into their parents beds.

However not even my cheeky, slightly inaccurately ordered Lear quotes were cheering up my dear friend Ben. He took a sip from his pint and then asked me to make it a Steve. I complied but only because my manager wasn't there, as he often wasn't on a Sunday afternoon.

Steve had worked in The Red Lion before I had. Before I had started working in here, it had been something of a hot spot meeting-wise for us and our selection of friends and fake friends. And, more often than not, when we drank together we would drink pints because our student status made us paupers in the eyes of the capitilist monks who held our treasured unbought possessions captive. The most important of which was alcohol. In every shape and form.

One night, Steve introduced for us a new beaverage. Stella with a shot of vodka stuck in the middle of it. It wasn't a new drink in terms of invention really, but we had never thought to mix our grains and potatoes so recklessly. Once introduced however, it was far away the greatest pint in the world. Particularly since the vodka was almost always free. Steve and Ben had an agreement of sorts. Beauty being in the eye of the beer-holder, so to speak.

"Ben, you may have to take me through this again," I said to him as I passed him the Steve.

"Sally, weren't you listening? I did nothing. I stood there while two of the stupidest, most xenophobic, rascist bastards ever sat and drank and I did nothing. Because I didn't want to lose my job. I didn't want a scene."

This was highly unusual, not to mention extremely amusing, coming from Ben but I didn't smile.

"You didn't do anything wrong, mate. It's a difficult situation to be in. There's no right or wrong."

"What are you on about, of course there's a right and a wrong thing to do. God I don't know what I'm more angry about, the fact they were saying these things or the fact that I did nothing about it."

"Well, what were you supposed to do? Yes, it's unpleasant when people discuss their disgusting views on foreign policy right in front of you - "

"Uncouth!" Ben shouted then. "That's what it is. To sit and shout your political preferences across a bar. The other guy even looked across at me at one point and said, 'I better be careful what I say here'. Didn't stop him from turning the air green with his stupid ... words."

"Why green?" I asked him.

Ben shrugged. "It's the just colour ... I associate it with the Nazis."

"Ben, just because you read Nineteen Eighty Four in school it doesn't mean you're suddenly Che Guevara," I couldn't help telling him, gently. It was true.

"I'm more political than you! I've been on loads of marches and I voted, unlike some people."

"My voting card hadn't come through!"

"You don't need one - oh this is stupid. All I was saying was, I feel guilty," concluded Ben curtly.

"Liberal guilt."

"Yeah, exactly."

"Well," I hesistated and then decided to say it, "Just think of it this way. An immigrant wouldn't endanger their job to defend a homosexual's right to a Civil Partnership."

This was the wrong thing to say.

"Oh my God, Sal, that is such bollocks! For one thing, I'm not looking to build an alliance here between me and every other minority being shit on in this country."

"Then what would be the point then?"

"Oh I don't know. A little thing called integrity?"

I took his pint from underneath him and filled it up, glaring at the foam that was pouring into the glass. I tipped it as far forward as it would go, turned the tap off and emptied the foam out.

"But it isn't always the best time."

"Again, that is bollocks!"

"No, it's not!" I argued, putting the tap back on again. "OK the other day, I was at my Grandpa's and his neighbour Chris came round. She was telling us about her father who was up in some Yorkshire hospital and she said, 'Lovely place. He's well looked after. All white nurses. Yorkshire lasses.' Then when she saw that I was looking uncomfortable, she added, 'Let's put it this way - he could understand them'. Now, my Grandpa is very deaf and not very well. And Chris is old and very, very set in her ways. So I decided that this would not be the best time to have it out with her, especially as I didn't want to upset my Grandpa."

Ben sipped on his pint. It wasn't another Steve.

"What do you mean, 'set in her ways'?"

I frowned, annoyed by the question. "I mean, she is set in her ways. Traditional. Rights for whites. I don't bloody know. She's just set in her ways."

"Never too late to teach an old dog tricks."

I raised my eyebrows again. "I'll pretend that didn't just come out of your mouth."

But Ben waved this barb aside. He appeared to have found the radioactive lamb that he'd been searching for from the beginning of the story.

"But that's just it, isn't it? There is always going to be some reason not to say something. Whether it's to do with where you are and who you're with. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that's why more people don't speak up against stuff like this."

"Don't want to upset the apple cart?" I put in, jokily but, again, Ben waved this aside, choosing to carry on with his new lamb.

"No, it's more than that. It's like ... you ... people ... don't want to ... " Ben seldom struggled with anything except not giggling hysterically at funerals. "They see this thing happening, right? Happening through a window. And ... and if they wanted to do something about it, they could, but that would mean smashing the glass and making a scene. And I just wish that ... that more people would smash the glass."

"I swear you once wrote a poem using that metaphor in a different context."

Ben was a staunch mocker of the emo trend racing through our streets. We had made it something of a hobby a couple of months ago to go through myspace, laughing to the point of tears at all of the people posing, with the camera held above their heads, their hair longer on one side and their eye make up black, heavy and flawless.

"Will you stop taking the piss for one minute Sally and listen to what I'm saying?" Ben suddenly snapped. He glared at me. "If everyone did something - "

"Do you mean about rascism as a whole or the little things like this?"

"No, I mean, the little things. It's the little things that make up almost the whole prejudice, you know what I mean? They shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. They're the ones who should be left standing about feeling embarrassed, not us. Don't you think?"

"No. Course I do."

"The other thing is they were going on about how soft the government is nowadays."

I snorted. "That's just tabloid fodder."

"Yeah, I know," Ben agreed. "Whenever Cheesy Pat leaves, I use The Sun to line Archie's litter tray."

"You know, the thing I don't understand about the BNP party and all those people like Pat and that," I said slowly, "And I don't pretend to be an expert on this at all, but how do they think we became England? Do they not remember the Normans and the Saxons? Or the Jews coming over after the War?"

"Yeah!" Ben cheered, glugging down the dregs which I remember someone in here once referring to as Spaniards.

"And what about when England 'owned the world'?" I added, shovelling yet more coal upon the inner-engine, "People coming over here to try and find work is surely a lot better than people coming over here and trying to claim it as their own. I mean, don't Australia still recognise Queen Elizabeth as their Queen?"

"Exactly! You've got it exactly right!"

"Well I don't know about that," I replied, picking up an empty crisp packet that a little boy had left earlier and walking with it across to the bin, "It's just what I think. I might be wrong."

"But you're not!"

But I'd by now thrown the shovel down. I was not a political woman. I was an observationalist. Nothing more than a narrator. Sometimes I wonder how a fairy like Ben and a monster like me ever even became friends. But we were. And we were set in our ways.

"It's all small minded town talk," I murmured softly, taking out the Guiness drip tray and tipped the contents down the sink. "Prejudice is what happens when people are brought up on localism and hearsay."

"Ah Sally, that's why you and I get along so well. Brighton was a free-thinking, neo-hippie, Goa rules, yellow brick road sort of place. God bless Brighton." Ben lifted his glass then. "To Brighton, Sal. In all it's glittery glory. To Brighton."

Ben's glass and mine met in the middle over the bar.

"To Brighton."