Teach Me(55)

“What was it like growing up here?” she asks as we head back across the bridge toward the Newcastle shoreline.

“That’s sort of a broad question,” I point out, swinging her hand between us. “What’s it like growing up anywhere?”

“Fair point.” She wobbles her head a little as she considers this. “What do you like most about your city?”

My city. Is it my city anymore? I left it so long ago, half the pubs have changed in my absence, and the people I knew here have either moved away to start their own lives elsewhere, or else they’ve settled down and grown up into people I wouldn’t recognize if I ran into them on the street. Adult people with whole different lives and worries and hobbies than we had when we were teenagers mucking about this town, catching buses in from the suburbs to pretend we were university students already, not yet aware that being older was not always better than being our age.

But I guess, in some ways, it will always be my hometown. “My favorite thing is . . . Well, it’s a place.”

Her eyes flash with interest. “Show me?”

“It’s a bit of a hike from here.”

Harper kicks up her feet at me. She’s donned flats for the walking around part of the day, with heels stashed in her bag for—for later, I tell myself, stubbornly refusing to think about what, exactly, happens later. “If you insist,” I reply.

We cross town, and then I take the back route up from the river. Meandering through little bridges across a small creek off the Tyne, we take a narrow path alongside said creek past a few strands of ducks, nestled into the grass along the banks. One last bridge to cross, and then we’re at the little pub where I used to go almost every weekend. Mostly because they didn’t card, but also because it’s one of the few old-school pubs that’s survived in the city.

Granted, on the weekends it turns into a club just like the rest, and yes, I definitely knew which bartenders didn’t card, and lurked around the bathrooms while it changed over when I was still underage, so we could stay inside without facing the bouncer or the cover charge out front.

All in all, this pub had everything a growing boy needed. Fried food, loud music, and the promise of alcohol if you were smart enough to earn it.

It looks smaller inside than I remember, the dance room at the back half as big as it looms in my memory. But it smells just the same, like beer and old wood.

Harper smirks at me. “This is your favorite place in Newcastle? No wonder you left.”

“Oi.” I swat her arm to shut her up before the bartender overhears. “I’ll have you know this place has plenty of charm, if you know where to look.” We pull up two chairs at a table near the bar, and I take the liberty of ordering us both the fish and chips (for nostalgia’s sake). Then I spend the next hour boring her with stories of everything that went down in this pub. Breakups and makeups and fights and my first kiss, actually, with a girl who turned out to be twenty and slapped me when she found out I was only sixteen, right there on that barstool in the far corner.

By the final story, she’s doubled over with laughter, and I have to admit, my teenage self, in retrospect, was not as suave as I remembered.

Then my gaze falls on the wall behind the bar. The last story I’d been about to tell. The day I, overage now, but only barely eighteen, decided to take on a friend in a very ill-advised contest, somewhat fueled by how many shots of Jäger we’d already consumed. We were both trying to throw our drink coasters onto the highest shelf, where the bar stashes funny old knickknacks that are still up there today, old-school toys and creepy dolls from the late eighteenth century.

We may or may not have smashed an entire shelf of the latter. And been escorted straight into the back of a police wagon.

The one and only time I’ve ever been in trouble with the law. We were lucky in that when we explained what happened, the policeman who’d brought us in doubled over in hysterics, and the pub didn’t want to press charges anyway. But now that I’m remembering the whole story, anticipating telling it to Harper, I think about the ending, and my mood crumbles as hard as that shelf did once upon a time.

My father was the one who picked us up at the station. He drove us in stony silence the whole way home, and I was sure, I was sure, based on everything he’d done in the past, the way he’d always treated me, that I was done for this time. He was going to throw me out of the house, lock me out without waiting for the word go.

But when we got home, and my mother came screeching to the door, wringing her hands, asking what on earth had happened, what was that policeman saying, my father looked at her, and he said, “All a mix-up, Suzanne. They brought in the wrong kid.”