1 may 2005
The Cloakroom had been busier than Michael expected, but he supposed he should expect magical pubs to see a boost in sad sacks drinking the night away, when the anniversary of the war's end approached. Hence the belligerent fellows in back; hence the weepy ones in booths.
Michael found it all very tiresome, seven years on. Maybe he didn't have any stones to throw about wanting to drink the night away just now -- after all, here he was, too -- but at least he didn't carry on so. He was sure there was some trite, overused idiom that encapsulated his dilemma, that he was perfectly fine not to commemorate any of these unhappy dates whatsoever, perfectly fine to let them fade back into the empty squares of a calender they deserved to be, except that when everybody
else was making such a fuss about never forgetting their failures and their faults, it was rather difficult to simply ignore the date.
Every year he tried, to no avail. He picked up extra shifts and wound up on call at meetings or charity events where it seemed like the attendants were trying to one-up each others' war guilt. His friends or girlfriends never seemed to share his empty detachment from all of it. Cordelia, right now, was off celebrating (mourning) Luke's birthday. Obviously, Michael was not, for which he was a little glad; it seemed like a fool's errand to celebrate someone's birthday posthumously. Luke, surely, no longer cared.
(This was a sort of cruel belief; he felt vaguely ashamed of it, vaguely uneasy that he couldn't let it go. He was glad that his father, for all his faults, was more difficult to be all weepy and mournful over -- Doug would think all of this memorandum shite was a waste of time and money. Doug would have balked at the price of his
own funeral, which had not been elaborate in the least.)
"It's like a Ponzi scheme," he was saying animatedly to the woman at the bar beside him. Michael fancied himself good at spotting a scam -- his mother fell for them constantly. "It doesn't matter what they're buying, what they're
actually buying is a share of the national conscience. If they don't keep the money moving, if they stop buying and selling it to each other, they'll realise it's worth nothing, they'll realise that all the dressing up and drinking they do at their stupid charity events can't make them good people, can't fix what they did and didn't do during the war -- or what they
could and
couldn't do -- and they can't stand that."
He finished off his latest drink, set the glass back down on the bar with a
clunk. "I don't even
hate them for it," he added, trying to focus his eyes on his companion in the gloom of the bar. "Is that weird, should I? I just think it's so exhausting."
@Maeve Mordaunt 
