Art Pact 136

They took their apathy to quite an extreme, avoiding the slightest hint of any news that might cause them to become concerned for something or someone outside their limited group of friends. In fact even within that group they attempted - wherever possible - to keep any extraneous information about a person's history or motivations firmly out of the light of knowledge. It was as if, to them, each of the others were a black box or an atom, perfectly formed and with no internal information or state that might be analysed to provide an insight onto their behaviour. They were simply the people that they were, and their actions might as well have been random. They were, of course, consistent - it would be obvious to even the most lackadaisical of inspections that the group of them could not long have held together in the face of unpredictability, but it pleased them to allow themselves to think otherwise. To care about another would have seemed a lot of trouble - and, in some ways more importantly, would also have appeared somewhat gauche.

They met regularly in the saloon bar of their local pub, an establishment finely balanced between the chrome-fixtured hard-drinking family gastropub and the stick-mahogany dimly-lit old man's drinking den. The Lame Duke was run by a blowsy Welsh-woman in her late fifties who disliked everyone and therefore was not above allowing the group of them (who even in small numbers other people often found profoundly irritating) from colonising the west-most area of the pub, the leg of a big L which the open floor of the building formed around the bar. It was as far from the main door as it was possible to get, which suited both them and the landlady perfectly - they because they were not constantly interrupted by the coming and going of other drinkers, and her because they did not disrupt the constant coming and going of other drinker who (had the group been seated closer to the door) might have taken one look at them and fled to the Wetherspoons down the road, giving the whole place up as a bad job.

"They do drink," she said to one of her other regulars, a tired-looking old woman called Ruth who seemed to only exist during licensing hours. "I'll give them that. And they never get handsy."

Ruth looked up from her gin and crossword and gave the landlady a surprised look. She thought it very unlikely that anyone would ever attempt to get handsy with the landlady. Ruth had been a looker in her youth, and had never quite got over the habit of judging everyone (herself included, to be fair) by the standards of attractiveness she had once attained. The landlady was not a handsome woman, by any stretch of the imagination, although there was a certain je ne sais quoi about her which had captivated one man away from his wife ten years ago. Perhaps, Ruth thought, it had been the constant slight smell of alcohol about her.

"They don't start fights, either," continued the object of Ruth's musing. "They never ask for credit, they tend not to vomit on things."

"They sound ideal," Ruth murmured, staring at the grid in front of her: 13D: Boutique food shops turns on the darkness, 7 letters, she read out silently.

"I just wish they weren't so... you know."

Ruth did not know, but she sensed that she was not necessarily a required part of the conversation and kept her mouth closed.

"Ah," said the landlady. "There's not a problem that the sound of money going into the register can't solve, now is there?"

Correctly surmising that this was likely to be a theme that the landlady would expound upon at quiet-shattering length if not nipped in the bud, Ruth fumbled in her pockets and stuck a fiver on the driest part of the bar within reach.

"One more Bombay Sapphire, please," she said, staring over at the group of young people in the corner. They didn't seem quite so bad to her as the landlady seemed to think they were, but she was the first to admit that she was no real judge of modern youth. The group - ten of them on this night - sat around a small circular table in a tight huddle, talking intently. Every so often a head would turn to face the rest of the bar, revealing itself to be powdered to a deathly white (the boys as well as the girls, Ruth noted), although they lacked the contrasting dark eyes and lips that would have marked them out as emo or goth.

She had unwittingly stumbled upon the one area of their behaviour about which it was considered acceptable to care - their appearance. It had long been the fashion among them (if fashion can be used for such a long-lasting phenomenon) to affect a pallor only slightly north of the grave. It had begun with a woman who had now left the group, a young woman for whom apathy and cynicism had come with her genes, so it seemed. Aping her either unconsciously or consciously in order to somehow bask in her reflected nihilism, the others had therefore adopted a uniform of sorts, although it extended as far as the face and no further, their clothes generally picked so as to be as unobtrusive as possible and thrown on with an uncaring hand to produce no effect other than a lazy muddle of styles. That was the way they liked it.

The landlady, having poured out Ruth's drink, placed it in front of her next to the half-finished glass of her previous round, inhaling the fumes from the glass as it passed in front of her on the way to its destination. She then rang up the sale and grinned at the satisfying "CHING!" from the antiquated register.

"Delightful," she said.

Good lord, Ruth thought to herself, scribbling the word DELIGHT into thirteen down. The sound of money going in really does solve all problems!