These new trainers were supposed to make you light on your feet. Mine were heavy with foreboding. The last sixty hours had been a whirlpool of half thoughts, broken ideas, and I was being sucked down into the maelstrom of the unknown. Now I faced the final black hole at the bottom of that rotating tunnel. With all my senses stunned during my new awakening, I was incapable of understanding what I’d done in my life to get me into this terrible position.
As I re-entered the pub from the rear yard the horribleness of my position became clear. Mushbies were enjoying more of Dawn, not knocking three times, but now with Tony Orlando tying yellow ribbons. I didn’t know anything about the current pop charts but didn’t believe everything could be this turgid. I strolled over to the not so mighty Wurlitzer. The first five listed records included some people called Peters and Lee, The Sweet and the Simon Park Orchestra. I noticed that Gary Glitter featured several times. I put my money on David Bowie and “Life on Mars”. This was how I felt, like I was living on a different planet.
“Nuvva pint, Pete?” Billy the landlord asked me.
“No, Billy, I fancy one of those new bottles of Heineken you’ve got in the fridge,” I replied, and was duly served by Billy who’d broken off serving some mushbies to get my drink. The embryonic nerd’s were getting into the evening and starting to swill down the pints now with a little added something to liven up the proceedings. I was hoping for a big enough diversion to allow me some breathing space. I’d put a small amount of the liquid LSD into the tanks of beer and lager, not too much at first, and then on second thoughts a little bit more. With the vast quantity of beer I didn’t know if my mass medication would work in the slightest, or I might have overdone it! The tainted crazy beer had not yet arrived at the pumps, and my tainted murderous friends, if that’s what you could call them, hadn’t arrived either.
The mushbies were now singing along in chorus to something called “Part of the Union” by The Strawbs. I’m not sure if any of them worked or had anything to do with a union. Most of them were unemployable until the onset of the computer when, like butterflies, they spread their wings and became nerds.
“Why has your face turned blue? And why has your face gone yellow?” I could hear this from over in the corner. The beer couldn’t have been at full strength, but already a big man with wild hair was delicately touching the faces of the people opposite, incredulous because the colour didn’t come off on his fingers. He couldn’t believe they’d suddenly changed colour. He thought they were taking the piss by putting make-up on. He started to rub with a rough vigour at the face of the maroon one, who happened to be a girl, a mushbiette.
“Don’t touch me with your tentacle. I didn’t know they allowed octopi in the pub!” she screamed in his face. “Life on Mars” started to play on the jukebox, and against my better judgement I laughed to myself. This wasn’t funny but I was hysterical with fear. Unable to run for fear of reprisal against my sister Jane, I was trapped into this meeting.
I was by this time well down my fourth drink, my senses softened by the alcohol. Fighting against my urge to laugh was difficult. I couldn’t stop myself when one of the pool players climbed onto the table. He was a big man wearing a Liverpool team shirt. This was ripped without ceremony from his torso by his own massive hands in order to display a huge tattoo that shouted Liverpool down the length of his chest. My hysteria increased when I discovered the tattoo didn’t end in the letter L. This statement about his favourite team ended in the letter O by design. The L was for the bedroom and made his team triumphant by desire.
“Gary! What the hell is Liverpoo?” one of his friends was shouting.
“I’ll show you wankers!” the big man said, at which he started to pull his trousers down and all became clear as he starting to exercise himself to produce the letter L.
The landlord Billy didn’t know which way to look. In the last quarter of an hour the whole pub had turned into a madhouse. Billy himself was starting to see everybody in a glowing light with all his favourite customers looking like angels. Billy ignored the mayhem and made his way along to where I was sitting.
The bar curved around into the corner producing a little alcove. I was sitting at the end of the bar watching the staff work. The staff, if that’s what you could call them, consisted of just two people, Billy, and Mabel who offered lots of forty plus cleavage with endless innuendo. He insisted I was an angel and deserved one of his best foaming pints. I took it with many thanks and as soon as his eyes left me I pushed it along the bar into the corner well out of my way. My drink was bottled lager, straight unadulterated bottled lager. One beer that didn’t reach places other beers do.
“Saving this pint for me, arsehole?” Dave Hartley Sparrow enquired. He leaned heavily against my back, whispering the words into my ear. He was so close to my neck I could feel the moisture on his breath. There was sinister intimacy in the way he was leaning against me. His lips so close he was almost kissing my ear like an ardent lover. His arm pushed against my back with a harsh pressure. I had a feeling he was going to crush me, consume me on that spot, and make me disappear. He reached around me and stretched to lift the pint from the bar. Dave downed half of it in a single refreshing drink. My internalised laughter increased.
Liverpool man had been dragged down off the pool table and was lying on his back between the table and the domino players. He clutched the black ball in one hand and was intent despite his drunkenness on spelling the last letter of his favourite football team.
“Nobody is having the black ball until you’ve seen Liverpool in all its glory!” he was shouting for everyone to hear. Many of the mushbies had gone over to study the phenomenon. One of the mushbiettes had changed her spectacles in order to see more. The whole pub was stamping its feet along with Suzi Quatro Canning the Can, urging our drunken hero to fulfilment.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Double-Barrelled Dave asked. I shrugged my shoulders in the worldwide gesture of I have no idea. Dave downed the remaining dregs of his pint and shouted down the bar for Mabel to get him another. She was serving nobody because the whole rugby scrum of a pub was down at the pool table end, the octopus and the coloured people included.
Dave placed his elbow on the bar and propped his head against one hand. His malevolent smile was only inches from my face. He said nothing, he didn’t move, we were locked eight inches apart in a game of who will speak first. He was trying to panic me into a confession or something. Then I realised he wanted me to take him on, he wanted me to make the first move. I did. I reached for my lager and took another small drink. This gave me an opportunity to look away from his continuous unblinking stare. He broke off this intimidation as his second beer arrived on the bar. Dave didn’t move away physically, but gazed towards the beer. His zone was firmly overlapping my space.
Dave’s arm was slowly reaching out for the second pint, but it never got there. John Smith pounded his fist hard down into the spread right hand of Dave Hartley Sparrow. I could swear to this day that I heard an audible crunch as he did so.
“I could have you any time, and I’m having your pint… now!” John Smith said. His smile was radiant, happy to have inflicted pain.
Double-Barrelled Dave muttered something heavy under his breath. I thought I heard the words “kill” and “tonight”. He moved away to the other end of the bar near mushbie corner. The Liverpool display had come to a sticky end and the mushbies were returning to their enclave, stopping at the jukebox to load it up with even more nonsense. “Paper Roses” by Marie Osmond had started to play. If I hadn’t been so distracted I think I would’ve cried tears of despair, except inside I already was.
John Smith finished his pint of John Smith’s in seconds, and was in the process of ordering another from Mabel. She thought he was the best thing since sliced bread, and always served him before anyone else regardless. No words passed between us, but he had replaced Dave Hartley Sparrow. John wasn’t invading my space. He was standing three feet away looking in am
usement at this crazy pub on a Monday night. Before ever a word was spoken between us he drank half of his next pint. I’d seen the effects on the mushbies after just one pint!
“Lenny’s got what he wants from life. He’s got all the local business and Baby Doll,” John said.
“You mean?” I said.
“Yes. She was teasing you in the kitchen to wind up Lenny. The soft git could see into the utility room from the library.” John said.
“So she didn’t want to shag me?”
“No, not any more, she tired of us,” John said. Tired of us! I was horrified, but in no place to be worried. Baby doll was working on Lenny, something I would have known about under normal circumstances.
“How did Lenny manage that?” I asked. I was pretending I didn’t know Harry the Pocket was dead.
“Harry the Pocket’s dead, killed by that big fat arsehole Walt Nice. Harry went down fighting, and he managed to shoot Walt before he died. Tidy,” John said. His usual pearly grin was much wider than normal. I had nothing to say, I really didn’t know what to say other than make allusions to us working together.
“So, where do I fit in to the team?” I asked. I think my voice had gone up to a higher pitch. It was hard to tell with all the mayhem inside the pub. John never had the opportunity to answer as a lanky greasy mushbie began stroking his hair.
“It’s so golden. Is it real gold? It must be real gold,” the mushbie said, entranced by the beauty. He caressed the locks as if they were the most precious thing in the world until John knocked him cold with a single blow. The greasy youth slumped to the floor. In the growing madness nobody noticed. John, however, glanced across the bar and seeing Hartley Sparrow he went rigid, he almost looked afraid. My Nazi twin screamed out something about Dave’s red eyes destroying his brain, he raged for a few seconds about the injustice of such an arsehole possessing so powerful a weapon. John wasted no time, he attacked, weaved at great speed through the throng at the bar, pushing no one as he passed through with the magical grace of a hunting cougar.
My best hope now was that they would kill each other, or Dave would manage to maim John to the extent he needed my help. I didn’t expect Dave to survive. In the Monday night lunacy nobody would have witnessed anything that could have stood in court. I left my position at the end of the bar and walked towards the rear courtyard. My welfare depended on the outcome of the battle. What I hadn’t calculated on was the effect of the LSD.
John had hunted down Hartley Sparrow as he was going I suspected to where he’d secreted the not so lovely Millicent. Dave only made it halfway across the yard before a brutal blow from John’s cosh brought him down. I didn’t witness the first blow. What I saw was John with the cosh high above his head ready to swing down for the second killer blow. This second blow would be well aimed to shatter Hartley Sparrow’s skull.
It didn’t come. John Smith was standing almost like the Statue of Liberty, the cosh held high and symbolic of his violence. His other hand was rooting around in his pocket for something. Then he pulled it out of his left-hand pocket to fumble fruitlessly in his right-hand pocket. He was looking for something. A knife? A gun? I had no idea.
What happened next shocked me. John took a huge swing down with his cosh making contact with Hartley Sparrow’s right arm. The harsh cracking sound as his radius and ulna shattered under the weight of the hard driven weapon is a horror that sticks in my mind. I was looking out from the shadows inside the doorway. John raised his cosh once more and I wondered if this would be a killer blow to the head, or the other arm. It was neither.
John Smith slowly brought his arm down and touched Dave on the cheek with his cosh. Was Dave aware of it? I’m not too sure he registered it in his semi-conscious state.
“You’re not going to burn me with those red eyes! I’m going to put them out!” John said very slowly.
I heard it with shocking clarity. Was I going to run out there and prevent John from cutting Dave’s eyes out? This was more awful than his brutal slaying of Smiggy. He was looking for a knife to cut out those burning red eyes. The cosh had disappeared inside his beautifully tailored jacket. He was fumbling with his trousers again and at that point I made my decision. I was going to intervene and stop this abomination from carrying out his brutal butchery upon Dave Hartley Sparrow’s eyes.
My Nazi twin attempted to put out Dave’s eyes, but he didn’t have a knife and had no intention of using one. Before I could move John Smith had got his weapon out and was using it. I laughed out loud without thinking, and the man putting out the eyes looked over his shoulder and laughed along with me. He was pissing in Dave Hartley Sparrow’s face, his LSD driven hallucination was being quenched by water. I thought he was fumbling for a knife, but he’d been fumbling with his zipper. He seemed to possess an enormous bladder because he pissed on a semi-conscious Hartley Sparrow’s face for what seemed an age.
Before he’d finished I slipped back into the mayhem of the pub. The whole place had now moved into the bizarre. There was an elderly couple possibly in their fifties wearing very little and sitting cross legged on a table, they were gently stroking each other’s faces. Stranger and more disturbing was one of the mushbiettes seemed to be experimenting with lovemaking in a corner, a horrible mixture of spots, greasy hair, groping and sweaty expectation with another mushbie.
All the worshippers of the arcane in that band of mushbies were in deep discussion about fire eating. Without asking they’d gone behind the bar and collected all the spirits they thought could be used to blow fire from their mouths. The discussion had become more like a science debate with a dozen ashtrays already in play as test tubes to examine the burning properties of the different liquors. The madness in that corner was compounded by one guy claiming he could see ancient figures dancing in the flames. Others then joined in a discussion about pagan religions and the influence of fire on worship.
Elsewhere in the pub people were fighting, others were arguing about the colour of the sky when viewed through the huge hole in the roof. No such thing existed. Billy the landlord was lying on his back on the bar smoking a cigar demanding Mabel install snooker lights above the entrance to the toilets. Billy suggested you needed the bright light to guide your balls into the corner pocket.
I returned to my seat at the end of the bar which was now occupied by a young girl in glasses who announced she was an eagle in her eerie. I pushed her out of the nest and took my seat. I was waiting for the return of John Smith and had no idea what would happen next. I started to wonder if he’d gouged Hartley Sparrow’s eyes out after deciding that pissing was not doing the job. It had been several minutes and I helped myself to a stiff brandy from the optic behind the bar. The brandy hit me with its warm intoxication, and like a sailor on rum I was ready for the fight, or I thought I was.
John Smith appeared at the end of the bar and walked very slowly towards me. He stopped twenty feet away looking at me through the mayhem. He seemed to be puzzled by my appearance and I looked back shrugging my shoulders with the question of “what”? He then raised his voice into a loud shouting chant,
“Red eyes, red eyes, red eyes, everybody’s got red eyes! You’re their leader, you must die!” As he shouted he moved towards me. The hunting cougar had returned for its prey.
Before John was upon me I managed to grab my bar stool to use as a weapon. It might’ve been the LSD slowing him down, but I managed to swing the stool holding its legs and made hard contact against his shoulder. I was aiming for his head but this blow managed to knock him down to the floor. I didn’t have time to put the trainer in or hit him again. John was off the floor in a second and looked at me filled with a black anger. I swung the stool again in the confined space and managed to catch him a glancing blow across the cheek which sent him spinning away. He didn’t make the floor. He clutched at clothing in the crowd stopping himself halfway down.
I was on the move towards the door figuring I could run faster than a drugged John Smith. I was driven by the adren
aline of terror, but he was driven by the LSD madness and the thrill of the chase. Driven by fear I moved quickly, pushing my way through the crazy throng inside the pub. The main entrance was blocked by a rugby scrum playing a game of God knows what with a pool ball. The idiots were blocking the doorway, but I’d made them idiots so I suppose I deserved it. I made for the side door, the very door Bob and I had walked through two years ago.
An enormous flash of heat burst up in front of me as I approached the rabid mushbies. Whatever liquid they were playing with had caught fire and taken hold of the heavy curtains covering the window behind them. The reactions varied from fascination to wild panic. In only a handful of seconds there was an inferno up the back wall. A crowd of retreating mushbies dived into the passageway leading to the side door, my exit was blocked. I swung round and dived below the clutching arms of John Smith as he lunged to grab me. He ploughed on into the crowd of mushbies. In frustration he lashed out at three or four of them, giving me time to go for the fire door. My escape had me passing very close to the inferno and into the corridor towards the back door. Cool salvation and freedom awaited me in the yard if I could move quickly enough.
I headed down the corridor past the toilets towards the back yard. I would have to climb over the gate to gain my freedom, but I was fired up with so much adrenaline this would be no obstacle at all. It would put space between me and John Smith. Not enough space it seemed. The corridor was long and I was halfway down it. My pursuer was close behind me, but at the other end of the corridor, waiting, bloodied and vengeful was Dave Hartley Sparrow.
Conscious, with his useless right arm dangling by his side he waited. His shoulders were saturated as if he’d been walking in the rain. I think I could smell him on the breeze being sucked towards me by the rising heat in the pub. Millicent was not her usual steady self, his left arm never used to wield the shotgun. It didn’t matter. His intentions were clear. He raised it and fired. The unfamiliar left-handed stance saved my life.
Acid Bubbles Page 36