by Lloyd Jones
No, just a hunch said the carpenter. What else would they be? The way they stood close together at the end of the bar drinking tonic water, their leader a wall-eyed man who surveyed you with his one good eye in a way which made you look away immediately. They’d stayed all day, eating and talking sparsely at a table outside, all of them with their backs to the gable end. He remembered the glare of the linen tablecloth and their crisp white shirts, done up to the top button but tieless; gold cufflinks, and bespoke alligator shoes from Carreducker. Smart as hell, and each of them with a wad of fifty quid notes rolled up in the back trouser pocket, as if they were at a gypsy funeral. No one except them was allowed to pay for drinks; they fed the bar for a whole afternoon, until they left shortly after nightfall. Maureen had brought out a lantern and they’d sat there smoking and talking quietly to Pryderi and Big M.
So Big M was in on all this, said Lou.
No, said the carpenter, Big M wanted nothing to do with it. Big M was a steady, regular guy. He’d had enough trouble in his life. Big M wanted a nice easy time running the bars, enjoying a few scoops with his friends at night, wandering around the county with his girl Rhiannon and generally living the good life.
What sort of man was he? asked Lou.
Really nice bloke, said the carpenter. Sound as a pound, easy going and fun to be with. No nasty bits at all, sunny side up all the time, great sense of humour. Incredibly quick on the uptake and good at everything he did. The carpenter recalled a wet Sunday afternoon when Big M had picked up a set of darts, and within a few hours he was beating all-comers. Same on the pool table, and the same when it came to drinking, he was good for a long enjoyable session. When he wanted to be alone he’d go off fishing, he’d take his big silver sea rod and he’d come back in a few hours with a bagful of bass, or the first mackerel of the season. Have a look for yourself, said the carpenter, pointing to the framed photographs on the wall.
And although he’d stared at them many times, Lou went over to look at them again.
There he was, Big M, at the centre of most of them; in the national rugby team, or behind the bar, or holding up a huge bass with a small crowd around him. Going up close, so that his nose almost touched the glass, he took a good look at the man. He was big, and still in good shape; broad-chested with a trace of a six pack underneath the t-shirt. Underneath the thin cotton Lou could make out the outline of a little blue mouse. The famous tattoo. Big M was clean shaven but dark chinned, an A-list magazine model if ever you saw one. There was something about the eyes which reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t think who it was. There was a stand-out feature in all the pictures at Hotel Corvo: Big M always had a smart pair of shoes on his feet. Yes, Big M was a real dandy when it came to footwear, ranging from huge cowboy boots to brothel creepers, Oxfords, Bluchers, Chelsea boots and brogues, right down to daps and espadrilles, the man was a maniac for footwear. Lou was known for being natty down under himself, but he wasn’t a fetishist. The carpenter made a joke of it.
Notice his feet? he said. Always the smart shoes, but he crept around at night like a big cat, nothing on his feet at all, know what I mean?
He grinned slyly and looked down at Lou’s expensive trainers. He didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t help looking up towards the pictures again.
Lou ordered a last round of drinks before he went to bed, and although they made a show of protesting, he insisted. One last one, to remember the good old days, he slurred. He was nowhere near as competent as this lot. He ordered a double Jameson, and watched the barman take the dust off the bottle before decanting the whiskey.
‘Hasn’t seen any action for a while,’ said Lou when the bottle went back on the shelf.
‘Not since Big M left, probably,’ replied the barman. ‘It was his favourite.’
They all raised their glasses and they toasted the good old days. It was a strange end to the evening, with Lou slumped on the settee and seven performing elephants swivelling in unison before raising their trunks to him; that’s how it seemed to him. The whiskey was burning his pipes by now and he was feeling a bit sick.
‘Pity to see the place like this,’ he said thickly to no one in particular.
‘Want to know why it’s like this?’ asked the carpenter, his head suddenly right next to his, large and pendulous.
‘Sure,’ said Lou.
‘Then come with me,’ said the carpenter, putting one hand lightly on his shoulder and pointing the other towards the door.
Lou stumbled after him, a shambolic figure by now. He must have left the place in a similar state many times when he was a kid.
Outside, the sea mist had thickened and the car park had faded into a milky dream. The night air was chilly and the whole place seemed suddenly gothic, threatening. A black and white film scene drifted across his consciousness, something from Rebecca or The Night has Eyes. Invisible waves dragged and bullied the shingle below them, accentuating the silence.
Framed in cameo against one of the car-park lights, the carpenter was pointing upwards, towards the gable. Lou’s eyes took some time to adjust to the light, and he failed to identify the point of interest.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Up there, the iron brackets,’ said the carpenter.
Finally, Lou saw a couple of black metal arms stretching out from the wall, with two rusty chains dangling from them.
Well?
‘That was the sign,’ said the carpenter, dropping his arm and turning to face him. ‘A painting of Hotel Corvo with the rooks above it, real work of art. That’s because I did it myself,’ he grinned.
‘So what happened to it?’ Lou felt helpless now, aware that the story was being stretched to its limits for dramatic effect.
He got the full story inside, over a last foolish double – he knew that he’d suffer terribly in the morning.
When the men with the Irish accents had left Hotel Corvo it was dark, he was told. Everyone returned to their routines, the banter restarted and the place returned to normal, with Big M behind the bar, giving free drinks and fooling around. Pryderi had been leaning against the bar, said the carpenter, when there was an almighty bang and the whole place fell silent. Just the one explosion, but it shattered the peace at Hotel Corvo. Pryderi had swivelled round to look at the door and his face had gone all white. Shotgun, he said under his breath, and then louder, that was a bloody shotgun.
A barful of people froze, waiting for the next development. But silence returned to the clifftop and after a while Big M went outside to see what had happened. The first thing he saw was the hotel sign on the ground, peppered with shotgun pellets. After looking around to see if there was anyone there, he carried the sign inside and took it round the back, into their office. He and Pryderi made a joke of it, and the rest of the night passed uneventfully, but a big change arrived at Hotel Corvo when the next day dawned.
The mist had gone, but so had the customers. After that single gunshot the public had voted with their feet. Even the seven silhouettes had gone elsewhere, leaving Hotel Corvo alone, unloved, and completely empty. The place became a landlocked Marie Celeste, rusting away as the weeks became months.
Lou finished his drink and said goodnight to the men. His bed was damp but he didn’t care. He was asleep, slumped face down on the grubby sheets, before he could take his clothes off.
IV
Lou was back at his college desk, talking to his screen. He’d always hated Skyping people, it was so unreal and it made him feel odd. At the other end of the link was Colin Dorton, an English academic who’d helped him previously with the Big M story. But Dorton didn’t want to play ball any more.
‘For chrissakes get out of that Celtic scene, it’s as dead as a doorknob,’ Dorton was saying to him, a fraction of a second before his lips moved. He looked ghostly and blurred; someone from an old sci-fi series maybe. Quatermass and the Pit.
‘Celtica’s gone, it’s dead and buried,’ he was saying, as if to jangle Lou�
��s nerves even further. ‘Look to America, that’s where it’s at. You’re nobody unless you’ve got an American angle. We’re the fifty-first state virtually. You’ve sidlined yourself, nobody’ll take any notice of you, Lou.’
Later, after their chat, a gaping depression swallowed him. He hadn’t felt like that for ages, not since the time he’d sat alone in his room for weeks during an awful episode when a student party had got out of hand; a girl had accused him of something, along the whisper lines, and he’d been ostracised. He’d felt very lonely, and he was feeling just as lonely today. Useless too. He’d been beaten by the machine during seven consecutive games of Mahjong Titans and he’d become so frustrated he’d cheated with the H button to get his final clearance. Catrin seemed to have no problem with Mahjong Titans, she had a near hundred per cent record and all he could manage was a lousy twenty-two per cent win rate. If he was useless at Mahjong Titans, what else was he useless at without knowing it? How could he clear up the Big M thingy if he couldn’t win a little computer game? He’d have to cheat all the way.
He was staring at his screen, and it had a new picture on it, a view of Hotel Corvo which he’d taken with the light fading at dusk; this accentuated the dark green of the trees and the yellow lights in the hotel windows. His mouth suddenly tasted of whiskey, as if to remind him of his night there.
Dr Colin Dorton was right, probably. With the morning yawning before him, Lou felt isolated and lonely. He’d noticed already that without lectures to deliver and seminars to host he’d become detached from college life. History, language, literature – they were all to do with personal ambition and career paths, really. They seldom stayed pure. Academia had become a passive silence outside his door, tainted with the smell of irrelevant old books, and punctuated very rarely by the squeak of occasional shoes and distant banging doors. Life was passing him by. He’d made a mistake; revenge had led him up a blind alley. Lou was wasting away, emotionally and intellectually. His old colleagues still greeted him when they met, but since he was out of the loop now they left it at that. Dead in the water. He missed the gossip, arrivals and departures, the shagging news. A couple of new faces passed him with the vaguest of nods. Lou McNamara had messed up, career-wise. And his home life wasn’t a barrel of laughs either; sidelined now by the later stages of pregnancy, he felt surplus to requirements there too.
Approaching the endgame, Catrin had gone off sex and spent most of the night reading Roth, Don DeLillo or Walter Abish by the light of her bedside lamp, as if to highlight her husband’s error of judgement.
Black with self-loathing, Lou opened Feeney’s second chapter. It resumed where the first had left off, with the gunshot at Hotel Corvo and its aftermath: all the clients had taken fright and disappeared into thin air. Pryderi had got involved with the IRA, or mobsters, or top-end loan sharks who’d felled the hotel sign with a single gunshot. The blast had echoed around the chough nests on the cliffs below, then a deep silence had arrived. Nary a soul had bothered them after that and the place had become a Welsh Jamaica Inn, habituated by four benighted humans and a barful of ghosts, all of them peering forlornly through grimy windows as thick sea mists obliterated the world outside. Salty little weeds struggled through widening cracks. Rust raced along the railings. Hotel Corvo, the most happening place in the county, had become the restaurant at the end of the universe. Dead, as dead as Lou’s career. This was when all the staff had left; Lou had gone up to Oxford well before that and his ma had faded from his life.
The second chapter documented a forlorn period in the history of Hotel Corvo. Dr Dermot Feeney had sailed across the Irish Sea to trace Big M’s story during the great silence, and his morose tone matched perfectly the autumnal decline in the hotel’s fortunes as the quartet waited for something to happen. But it never did.
Apparently Feeney’s stay at a B&B near Hotel Corvo had been suitably mist-shrouded, as if the village had donned its own invisibility cloak and played dead among the damp, silvery spider webs which shone eerily in the encircling gorse. Feeney had been a big man with a bumpy face, corpulent and grumpy, looming along the coastal path in a huge gaberdine mac and a ridiculous leather bush hat. He grumbled in his notes that the food was poor and his bed damp. Service was virtually non-existent, glassware and cutlery dirty. But he’d managed to find one person who was prepared to talk to him. Lou knew that person – it was one of the seven Corvo regulars, the carpenter who’d taken him outside the hotel and showed him the shot-off sign. He’d been commissioned by Pryderi to paint a new sign for Hotel Corvo, and he’d visited the place to measure up and discuss the contract.
Without any customers, the four friends had locked up and closed all the shutters on the ground floor, which gave the place a wartime feel, bunkerish and Frankensteinian. According to Feeney it had reminded Ziggy of a bad winter when she was a child, when snowdrifts had covered the ground floor windows of her home and partially blinded the place; downstairs at the hotel had been equally ghostly and other-worldly.
When spring came they’d started a vegetable garden in the back and you could still see the potato ridges, but their hearts weren’t in it and very little produce reached the kitchen. No, they’d lived with the gun and the rod, and of course the freezers were full of food which lasted for quite a while. They stayed there, in total seclusion, for a year, Pryderi ranging across the countryside with his shotgun, Big M looming out of a fog with an eight-pound bass dangling over his shoulder.
And so they lived on in that strange seething silence which envelops social pariahs. With the world erased, they’d sat outside daily at a table below a large green parasol with a white frill, drinking wine and picking at fish and rice dishes with the best silver service, discussing their slow activities outside Hotel Corvo: Pryderi stalking his prey and trying to come to terms with messing it all up; Big M, cool as ever, half-asleep on the rocks below as the shoals swarmed around him; Rhiannon on her horse, an occasional silhouette on the hill above them as she returned home; Ziggy stationed in a chintzy chair in a big bay window overlooking the sea, worried, drinking too much, overdressed and over-gilded, consumed by her husband’s foolishness.
And when the sea mist thinned sometimes in the afternoon heat they’d find Big M sitting alone at the table outside playing solo chess with his Lewis set, the board glistening with dampness and a hoar of tiny droplets covering him like icing sugar.
One year became two. They found honey from wild swarms and ate it with their hands, sweet golden liquid around their lips, in their hair, jewelling their worn shirts.
The carpenter disclosed in his statement to Feeney that one day, when he went to check up on them, he’d opened some of the freezers in the basement and they’d held some food still, though one of them revealed a sorrowful sight with a small pile of frozen prawn sachets stacked in one corner and a pile of frozen sprouts in another, indicating that no one much like frozen prawns or sprouts. The bar was still relatively well stocked when they finally gave up and asked the carpenter to board up the windows. Pryderi, Big M, Rhiannon and Ziggy departed one lunchtime in Big M’s vintage three-litre Bentley, with the top down. It was a fine, clear day: the first they’d experienced in ages.
But it wasn’t a shortage of food which forced them to leave their island in the mist. It wasn’t even a lack of booze. Maybe a shortage of human company played some part in it, but the main reason for their departure from Hotel Corvo was quite mundane. It was Big M’s feet which propelled them onto the open road again.
One day, stooped over his chess set with one of the shrunken little figures in his hand, he’d looked up as Rhiannon and said: We’ve got to go, girl. We’ve got to go.
Dr Feeney had tried his hand at some humour in describing this episode but he was a fish out of water when it came to levity. There was nothing particularly funny about it anyway. Rather sad, really. Big M had leant back in his chair and placed one of his famous feet on the table, displaying a battered leather shoe. Once it had been a bespok
e, hand-stitched Saddle Oxford in light tan from John Lobb. Top of the range. But Big M was down in the dumps, he’d had enough. His trademark shoes – his Ones and Twos, his Rhythm and Blues, his Scooby Doos were falling apart on his feet. Big M was down at heel, quite literally.
So what? said Pryderi, placing one of his own feet on the table and showing a cheap pair of black boots in equally poor condition. Inside one of his ribbed stockings they could see the familiar bulge of his compact Beretta 92. He was never without it these days.
Nah, said Big M. We’ve got to go.
After all he was a sex god, and sex gods didn’t walk around in shit shoes.
Hotel Corvo was a big black hulk, a sunken liner sleeping with the fishes, when they drove away. Big M behind the wheel, Pryderi by his side, Ziggy and Rhiannon in the back. Old-fashioned style, women in bright summer dresses and chiffon scarves, a wicker hamper between them. Rhiannon had leant forward, ran a hand through her lover’s hair and said someone needs a haircut, loverboy.
Some decent boots, that’s all he hankered after. He longed for the creak and perfume of a new pair of leather shoes on his feet.
Pryderi was ready to go too. So tired now, he’d been continuously on edge since the gunshot. Bloodshot eyes, stubble. Nasty tremor when he held a young deer in his gunsights; he’d lost his nerve. Didn’t want to shoot innocent animals any more either. He was superstitious: it could be him next in the firing line.
So where are you taking us, Twinkle Toes, he asked Big M.
But Big M didn’t have a masterplan. Never had, really. Go with the flow, have a nice time, don’t waste energy on trouble and strife. He didn’t want any angst or head games. That’s the way Big M lived his life. Never collide with the modern world, that’s what he used to say. Go round it, go under it, keep your head down till it’s gone right past, but don’t take it on head to head. It’ll wear you down, sap your batteries, suck away your life juice.