by Neil Gaiman
This evening Kathy asked why I had not invited her to meet any of my friends. I could tell by the look on her face that she was wondering if I thought she wasn’t good enough, and so I was forced to admit that I didn’t really have any friends to whom I could introduce her. She was more reticent than most of the girls I had met until then, more private. She acted as though there was something on her mind that she didn’t want to share with me. When I asked her to specify the problem, she either wouldn’t or couldn’t. To be honest, I think the problem was me, and that was why it didn’t work out between us. Something about my behaviour made her uneasy, right from the start. There was no trust between us, which in itself was unusual, because most women are quick to confide in me. They sense my innate decency, my underlying respect for them. I look at the other drinkers standing around me, and witness the contempt they hold for women. My God, a blind man could feel their disdain. That’s probably why I have no mates – I don’t like my own sex. I’m ashamed of the whole alpha male syndrome. It only leads to trouble.
I made the effort of asking Kathy if she would sit for me, but knew in advance what the answer would be. She said she would prefer it if we didn’t meet again, and yelped in alarm when I brushed against her hip, so I had to beat a hasty retreat.
The King William IV, High Street, Hampstead
Paula chose this rather paradoxical pub. It’s in the middle of Hampstead, therefore traditional and okay, with a beer garden that was packed on a hot summer night, yet the place caters to a raucous gay clientele. Apparently, Paula’s sister brought her here once before, an attractive girl, judging from the photograph Paula showed me, and such a waste, I feel, when she could be making a man happy. I wondered if, after finishing with Paula, I should give her sister a call, hut decided that it would be playing a little too close to home.
We sat in the garden on plastic chairs, beside sickly flowerbeds of nursery-forced plants, but it was pleasant, and the pub had given me an idea. I resolved to try someone of the same gender next time, just to see what a difference it made. I picked up one of the gay newspapers lying in stacks at the back of the pub, and made a note of other venues in central London. I explained my interest in the newspaper by saying that I wanted to learn more about the lifestyles of others. Paula squeezed my hand and said how much she enjoyed being with someone who had a liberal outlook. I told her that my policy was live and let live, which is a laugh for a start. I am often shocked by the wide-eyed belief I inspire in women, and wonder what they see in me that makes them so trusting. When I pressed myself close against her she didn’t flinch once under my gaze, and remained staring into my eyes while I drained my beer glass. A special girl, a special evening, for both of us.
The Admiral Duncan, Old Compton Street, Soho
Formerly decorated as a cabin aboard an old naval vessel, with lead-light bay windows and a curved wood ceiling, this venue was revamped to suit the street’s new status as a home to the city’s homosexuals, and painted a garish purple. It was restored again following the nail-bomb blast that killed and maimed so many of its customers. Owing to the tunnel-like shape of the bar, the explosive force had nowhere to escape but through the glass front, and caused horrific injuries. A monument to the tragedy is inset into the ceiling of the pub, but no atmosphere of tragedy lingers, for the patrons, it seems, have bravely moved on in their lives.
In here I met Graham, a small-boned young man with a gentle West Country burr that seemed at odds with his spiky haircut. We became instant drinking pals, buying each other rounds in order to escape the evening heat of the mobbed street beyond. After what had occurred in the pub I found it astonishing that someone could be so incautious as to befriend a total stranger such as myself, but that is the beauty of the English boozer; once you cross the threshold, barriers of race, class and gender can be dropped. Oh, it doesn’t happen everywhere, I know, but you’re more likely to make a friend in this city than in most others. That’s why I find it so useful in fulfilling my needs. However, the experiment with Graham was not a success. Boys don’t work for me, no matter how youthful or attractive they appear to be. We were standing in a corner, raising our voices over the incessant thump of the jukebox, when I realised it wasn’t working. Graham had drunk so much that he was starting to slide down the wall, but there were several others in the vicinity who were one step away from being paralytic, so he didn’t stick out, and I could leave unnoticed.
The Black Friar, Queen Victoria Street, Blackfriars
This strange little pub, stranded alone by the roundabout on the North side of the river at Blackfriars, has an Arts and Crafts-style interior, complete with friezes, bas-reliefs and mottos running over its arches. Polished black monks traipse about the room, punctuating the place with moral messages. It stands as a memorial to a vanished London, a world of brown Trilbys and woollen overcoats, of rooms suffused with pipe smoke and the tang of brilliantine. In the snug bar at the rear I met Danielle, a solidly built Belgian au pair who looked so lonely, lumpen and forlorn that I could not help but offer her a drink, and she was soon pouring out her troubles in broken English. Her employers wanted her to leave because she was pregnant, and she couldn’t afford to go back to Antwerp.
To be honest, I wasn’t listening to everything she was saying, because someone else had caught my eye. Seated a few stools away was a ginger-haired man who appeared to be following our conversation intently. He was uncomfortably overweight, and undergoing some kind of perspiration crisis. The pub was virtually deserted, most of the customers drinking outside on the pavement, and Danielle was talking loudly, so it was possible that she might have been overheard. I began to wonder if she was lying to me about her problems; if, perhaps they were more serious than she made them sound, serious enough for someone to be following her. I know it was selfish, but I didn’t want to spend any more time with a girl who was in that kind of trouble, so I told her I needed to use the toilet, then slipped out across the back of the bar.
The Angel, Rotherhithe
Another old riverside inn – I seem to be drawn to them, anxious to trace the city’s sluggish artery site by site, as though marking a pathway to the heart. The interesting thing about places like The Angel is how little they change across the decades, because they retain the same bleary swell of customers through all economic climates. Workmen and stockbrokers, estate agents, secretaries, van-drivers and tarts, they just rub along together with flirtatious smiles, laughs, belches and the odd sour word. The best feature of this pub is reached by the side entrance, an old wooden balcony built out over the shoreline, where mudlarks once rooted in the filth for treasure trove, and where you can sit and watch the sun settling between the pillars of Tower Bridge.
As the light faded we became aware of the sky brushing the water, making chilly ripples. Further along the terrace I thought I saw the red-haired man watching, but when I looked again, he had gone. Growing cold, we pulled our coats tighter, then moved inside. Stella was Greek, delicate and attractive, rather too young for me, but I found her so easy to be with that we remained together for the whole evening. Shortly before closing time she told me she should be going home soon because her brother was expecting her. I was just massaging some warmth back into her arms – we were seated by an open window and it had suddenly turned nippy – when she said she felt sick, and went off to the Ladies. After she failed to reappear I went to check on I her, just to make sure she was all right. I found her in one of the cubicles, passed out.
The Ship, Greenwich
The dingy interior of this pub is unremarkable, with bare-board floors and tables cut from blackened barrels, but the exterior is another matter entirely. I can imagine the building, or one very like it, existing on the same site for centuries, at a reach of the river where it is possible to see for miles in either direction. I am moving out towards the mouth of the Thames, being taken by the tide to ever-widening spaces in my search for absolution. There was something grotesquely Victorian about the weeds thrusting out of an
cient brickwork, tumbledown fences and the stink of the mud. It was unusually mild for the time of year and we sat on the wall with our legs dangling over the water, beers propped at our crotches.
Melanie was loud and common, coarse-featured and thick-legged. She took up room in the world, and didn’t mind who knew it. She wore a lot of make-up, and had frothed her hair into a mad dry nest, but I was intrigued by the shape of her mouth, the crimson wetness of her lips, her cynical laugh, her seen-it-all-before eyes. She touched me as though expecting me to walk out on her at any moment, digging nails in my arm, nudging an elbow in my ribs, running fingers up my thigh. Still, I wondered if she would present a challenge, because I felt sure that my offer to sketch her would be rebuffed. She clearly had no interest in art, so I appealed to her earthier side and suggested something of a less salubrious nature.
To my surprise she quoted me a price list, which ruined everything. I swore at her, and pushed her away, disgusted. She, in turn, began calling me every filthy name under the sun, which attracted unwanted attention to both of us. It was then that I saw the ginger-headed man again, standing to the left of me, speaking into his chubby fist.
The Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich
I ran. Tore myself free of her and ran off along the towpath, through the corrugated iron alley beside the scrap yard and past the defunct factory smoke-stacks, keeping the river to my right. On past The Yacht, too low-ceilinged and cosy to lose myself inside, to the doors of The Trafalgar, a huge gloomy building of polished brown interiors, as depressing as a church. Inside, the windows of the connecting rooms were dominated by the gleaming grey waters beyond. Nobody moved. Even the bar staff were still. It felt like a funeral parlour. I pushed between elderly drinkers whose movements were as slow as the shifting of tectonic plates, and slipped behind a table where I could turn my seat to face the river. I thought that if I didn’t move, I could remain unnoticed. In the left pocket of my jacket I still had my sketchbook. I knew it would be best to get rid of it, but didn’t have the heart to throw it away, not after all the work I had done.
When I heard the muttered command behind me, I knew that my sanctuary had been invaded and that it was the beginning of the end. I sat very still as I watched the red-headed man approaching from the corner of my eye, and caught the crackle of radio headsets echoing each other around the room. I slowly raised my head and for the first time saw how different it all was now. A bare saloon bar filled with tourists, no warmth, no familiarity, no comfort.
When I was young I sat on the step – every pub seemed to have a step – with a bag of crisps and a lemonade, and sometimes I was allowed to sit inside with my dad, sipping his bitter and listening to his beery laughter, the demands for fresh drinks, the dirty jokes, the outraged giggles of the girls at his table. They would tousle my hair, pinch my skinny arms and tell me that I was adorable. Different pubs, different women, night after night, that was my real home, the home I remember. Different pubs but always the same warmth, the same smells, the same songs, the same women. Everything about them was filled with smoky mysteries and hidden pleasures, even their names, The World Turned Upside Down, The Queen’s Head and Artichoke, The Rose and Crown, The Greyhound, The White Hart, all of them had secret meanings.
People go to clubs for a night out now, chrome and steel, neon lights, bottled beers, drum and bass, bouncers with headsets. The bars sport names like The Lounge and The Living Room, hoping to evoke a sense of belonging, but they cater to an alienated world, squandering noise and light on people so blinded by work that their leisure-time must be spent in aggression, screaming at each other, shovelling drugs, pushing for fights. As the red-haired man moved closer, I told myself that all I wanted to do was make people feel at home. Is that so very wrong? My real home was nothing, the memory of a damp council flat with a stinking disconnected fridge and dog-shit on the floor. It’s the old pubs of London that hold my childhood; the smells, the sounds, the company. There is a moment before the last bell is called when it seems it could all go on forever. It is that moment I try to capture and hold in my palm. I suppose you could call it the land before Time.
The Load Of Hay, Havistock Hill, Belsize Park
The red-haired officer wiped at his pink brow with a Kleenex until the tissue started to come apart. Another winter was approaching, and the night air was bitter. His wife used to make him wear a scarf when he was working late, and it always started him sweating. She had eventually divorced him. He dressed alone now and ate takeaway food in a tiny flat. But he wore the scarf out of habit. He looked in through the window of the pub at the laughing drinkers at the bar, and the girl sitting alone beside the slot-machine. Several of his men were in there celebrating a colleague’s birthday, but he didn’t feel like facing them tonight.
How the hell had they let him get away? He had drifted from them like bonfire smoke in changing wind. The Trafalgar had too many places where you could hide, he saw that now. His men had been overconfident and undertrained. They hadn’t been taught how to handle anyone so devious, or if they had, they had forgotten what they had learned.
He kept one of the clear plastic ampoules in his pocket, just to remind himself of what he had faced that night. New technology had created new hospital injection techniques. You could scratch yourself with the micro-needle and barely feel a thing, if the person wielding it knew how to avoid any major nerve-endings. Then it was simply a matter of squeezing the little bulb, and any liquid contained in the ampoule was delivered through a coat, a dress, a shirt, into the flesh. Most of his victims were drunk at the time, so he had been able to connect into their blood-streams without them noticing more than a pinprick. A deadly mixture of RoHypnol, Zimovane and some kind of coca-derivative. It numbed and relaxed them, then sent them to sleep.
But the sleep deepened and stilled their hearts, as a dreamless caul slipped over their brains, shutting the senses one by one until there was nothing left alive inside.
No motives, no links, just dead strangers in the most public places in the city, watched by roving cameras, filled with witnesses. That was the trouble; you expected to see people getting legless in pubs.
His attention was drawn back to the girl sitting alone. What was she doing there? Didn’t she realise the danger? No one heeded the warnings they issued. There were too many other things to worry about.
He had been on the loose for a year now, and had probably moved on to another city, where he could continue his work without harassment. He would stop as suddenly as he had begun. He’d dropped a sketchbook, but it was filled with hazy pencil drawings of pub interiors all exactly the same, and had told them nothing. The only people who would ever really know him were the victims – and perhaps even they couldn’t see behind their killer’s eyes. As the urban landscape grew crazier, people’s motives were harder to discern. An uprooted population, on the make and on the move. Fast, faster, fastest.
And for the briefest of moments he held the answer in his hand. He saw a glimmer of the truth – a constancy shining like a shaft through all the change, the woman alone in the smoky saloon, smiling and interested, her attention caught by just one man; this intimacy unfolding against a background warmth, the pulling of pints, the blanket of conversation, the huddle of friendship – but then it was gone, all gone, and the terrible sense of unbelonging filled his heart once more.
Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels and thirteen short story collections, including the ‘Bryant & May’ mysteries, about two Golden Age detectives in the modern world. His latest books are the thriller Nyctophobia and The Bleeding Heart. He has a weekly column in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. ‘“At Home in the Pubs of Old London’ follows my continuing fascination with obsessives,’ explains Fowler, ‘coupled with the realisation that London pubs are in some strange way a constant feature in a fast-changing world. It’s odd how pubs largely keep their clientele through all kinds of social upheavals. I particularly recall the interior of a local p
ub where I grew up in Greenwich, and went back recently to find that although the furnishings had changed, it held the exact same atmosphere as it had when I was seventeen. In terms of psychic geography, pubs hold key positions, and they’re vanishing fast (something like five a week in London) so to my lead character they represent something special.’
Barking Sands
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON
ON VACATION.
Hawaii. Where fat, brown people treat flowers like Jesus.
All us.
Mommy. Daddy. Grampa Don.
My brother who came out of Mommy with less brain than a cat.
He smiles at everything. I call him Kitty. Daddy thinks it’s funny.
Kitty can only open his mouth and stare and shake. Like there’s a maraca inside him.
We rented a Toyota Tercel.
‘Cheapest car worth dog-fuck.’
That’s Grampa Don talking. Mommy hates it when he says dirty stuff. But he’s always drinking beer. Loses track of where his tongue is pointing and just says it. Grampa Don’s always making trouble.
We’re on our way to Barking Sands.
It’s a beach on the southern tip of Kauai. The sand barks there. Big, bald-headed dunes of it chirping and growling like someone is poking it while it sleeps. The wind does it; like a ventriloquist using the grains of sand as its dummy. It’s a very sacred place. They say the ancient tribes are still living on the cliffs way above Barking Sands. I say that inside the Tercel while it bounces over the muddy road. The mud is red and splashes the car so it looks like it has scrapes that are bleeding. Like when Kitty falls down and cries and I just stand and watch him and hope he bleeds to death.
‘There’s no tribes still living,’ says Mommy, eating an ice cream cone I couldn’t finish, making sure it doesn’t drip on the upholstery.
Her tongue moves around it like a red bus going up a twisty road. Daddy breathes in the air and says it hasn’t smelled like this in Los Angeles since cave men went to work in three-piece fur suits.