Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
Shaking hands can hold on to things. I watched his – they were thrust forward across the table. It seemed a privilege that I was the only one to notice their slight tremor; a secret thing, not apparent to the casual observer. We were out the back in the beer garden and the service was shit, the garden smelled like stale alcohol and cigarettes. The edge of the table was some sort of metal…fucking hipsters, why do they have to go and make everything so attractive yet also so uncomfortable? Our drinks were long since drained so we were talking without the benefit of anything to sip between remarks.
His body language was persuasive. It was a congenital tremor but I couldn’t help feeling infected by anxiety when I saw that slight movement travel the whole length of his hands. A long time has passed and I’m remembering his drink seemed warm but that’s fanciful re-imagining. Really, it was just a few dregs of beer left in the bottom that were soaking up the afternoon sun. We talked about politics and women’s lib and whatever book he’d just read by Plato but his fingertips were all I could concentrate on, though they were barely visible in my peripheral vision. Our esoterica was perfectly appropriate for this environment; the service was so bad that nobody even came to take away our empties. We spoke slowly and turned the glasses to lubricate them with the sweat of our palms.
I remember I was wearing men’s trousers that day and a V-neck T-shirt. Whenever I wear that uniform my arms feel like they belong to someone else. They are browned and weathered enough to belong to a thirty-five-year-old man. That afternoon my limbs felt sublime, actionable. I wanted to take both his hands and fold them into stillness.