by Peter Ackers
"…MASHED EGGS AND SOME BREAD AND BUTTER…"
The bar area was square with the bar itself a smaller square in the middle. It had one till, facing the entrance. Each side catered to something different. Drinks were sold from the till-side; clockwise the bar featured snacks, then tobacco products, then memorabilia for tourists. But this memorabilia was not based on the national park and its heritage: it seemed instead to glorify motorbikes, just like the young guy’s arms. I figured right then that the guy wasn’t just hired help. If he didn’t own this place, then his dad did.
The rest of the décor, however, was basic and boring. Yellow walls, probably to hide the inevitable stains caused by tobacco smoke. Pitted round wooden tables. A dull red carpet worn thin. In one corner was a squared section that was smooth wood, maybe a dance floor. There was certainly a long desk-like setup that could have been used as a DJ’s station. But currently there was a pool table in that area, covered by a cloth and pushed against the wall, obviously not in use either. None of this suggested that the Dark Cave was a thriving social outlet. Way out here in the middle of nowhere, how could it?
There were areas on the floor that were tiled, not carpeted. These were like lines of demarcation, as if they showed where walls had once stood when this was a typical house with a number of rooms on this floor. I guessed that the wooden-floored section had once been a kitchen. If my guess was right, then I was looking at one large room that had once been four smaller ones.
There was an area in front of the large front window, near a roaring fireplace, where four tables had been pulled into the centre to create one large table with a hole in the centre (because the tables were round). Three people sat here, while an empty chair, a bottle of vodka, and an open laptop computer suggested the barman had been seated there, too. They had been sat chatting when, somehow, they had been alerted to my presence coming up the garden path. Perhaps a surveillance camera. Maybe remote viewing. Maybe a lucky guess.
The three other people didn’t even look at me as I came in, as if the place was thriving and I was just another guy coming in for a drink. They probably didn’t care. Maybe the barman was known for inviting all sorts of characters into his pub and his friends no longer got intrigued by it. Maybe I was so nondescript that they didn’t think anything I said, did, had already done, owned, believed in or wanted could be of any interest at all to them. Who knew, eh?
“Take my seat, yeah?” the barman said. “What’s your swallow?” He moved behind the bar and waited, like a good barman.
I pointed. “Gin.”
Instead of getting a glass, the barman brought me a full bottle of gin, unopened. There was no label and the top was taped in place, and I immediately thought this was something the barman had brewed himself - illegally. There was a ball inside, something that looked a little like a marble, or a fruity gobstopper. When it rolled or otherwise moved inside the bottle, it released a flurry of bubbles. I should have then, but didn't - didn't wonder what this marble-thing was. I just took the bottle, swallowed a big gulp of Dutch courage, briefly thought about the forker’s form thumping away between my girl’s legs, then turned and went to the table(s). I sat. The others didn’t look up. I looked at them, one at a time. I put my bottle down with a crack. They each had similar marble-bearing bottles from the barman's own illegal stash.
I looked up and saw that while the two people to his left were studying their notepads, the man immediately to my left was staring at me.
The guy staring at me introduced himself, and afterwards added a nod of the head. The Nod is a sign of greeting that's one step short of some utterance like "alright, mate?" The others weren’t even acknowledging me, but this guy now seemed very interested. He smoked a pipe without the use of his hands, and spoke around it so it danced in his mouth like a conductor’s stick.
He was fat, early forties. He wore bleached white jeans and a sleeveless bomber jacket over a dirty white T-shirt. There was a home-made choker around his neck and a similar piece of cloth around his head to keep his prematurely greying hair back. Shockingly, he wore a small fire-axe strapped to his back upside down, so he could grab it over his shoulder, much as Robin Hood might pluck an arrow from his quiver.
Axe-wielder jerked a thumb to his left, at the older man sitting beside him. “This is . . . well, we just call him names about his teeth. Say hi, gnasher.”
Teeth-bloke grinned, and that was when I understood. The man’s teeth were bright white and perfect, but they were obviously false. Instead of a row of individual gnashers, he wore two smooth semi-circular pieces of bone (I think it was bone) with vertical black lines drawn on to give the impression of separate teeth, which didn’t work. From a distance, maybe the illusion worked. Not from just across this table, though.
He was about seventy years old, slim, and wore bikers’ clothing, just like Axe-wielder and the girl on his left. I shook his hand; it was smooth, soft, and I knew from its feel that this guy had had an easy life. He wore a tattered baseball cap; out the sides sprouted no hair, so the guy was completely bald.
The girl was young, maybe my age. She wore a tight, pink and sleeveless T-shirt that said “psiren” on it in glittering black. Her fashionably feral hair was pink, and so was the make-up plastered area around her eyes and cheeks. She wore red-pink low-rider jeans whose crotch rode high into her. . . pink. The result was pink overload, but I found her instantly attractive - and yet her captivating image somehow made assessing her face impossible: I couldn’t decide if she was pretty or not. She had the ambiguous face of some princess in a dark Manga flick, and a rough-riding tomboy image, almost sexless, that together gave her an air of cartoon-like unreality. Not a babe you would rely on, or trust. Just fuck, maybe. And then I thought: nymph, a psiren was a nymph. Maybe that was a hint on her part. I envisioned a just revenge against my girl, then quickly dismissed it.
She shook my hand, just as Axe-wielder had, and told me her name, just like Axe-wielder had. She saw me glimpse at her chest again and tapped her breasts so the word “Psiren” wobbled. I blushed then, I know I did.
“So what are you guys doing?” I said, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I really was.
“You police?” said Teeth-bloke. He lit up the world’s thickest cigar. Smoke rose to the high ceiling.
“Don’t be nosey, or silly,” the barman - who I now thought of as Surfer-dude - said as he came over with another chair and table, carrying them so effortlessly they might have been hollow shells filled with helium. Everybody shuffled and shifted so the fifth table could be slotted into the pattern. He sat on my left, between Axe-wielder and me. I glanced briefly at the laptop. Some drawn city map was displayed on the screen.
Teeth-bloke picked up something that had been lying on the table. It was a ten-sided die. I saw the word “WEATHER” on it just before Teeth-bloke dropped it on the table. I understood that this was some tool used for determining the subject of a conversation. The word facing up from the die was “POLITICS.”
“You vote in the last election? You vote Labour?” Teeth-bloke said immediately, glaring at me, as you might glare at someone that you know has wronged you. I gulped.
“No,” I said. “I never bother.”
Teeth-bloke shook his head. “Don’t you care who runs your country?”
“I just don’t think my vote would count for much. If someone came to me and said the count was a draw, and my vote would swing it, then yes, I’d vote. But otherwise it’s a waste of time, I think, when the winners always have a big margin.”
Surfer-dude settled himself in his chair, repositioned his laptop to see it better. “Yeah, well, what if everyone thought that way? No one would vote.”
“But you would have voted Labour, right?” Teeth-bloke again, not letting up.
“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” I believed in this theory. If the country didn’t slip into the gutter or start bullying tiny nations, then I saw no reason to sweep out one government and insert another.
> “I sometimes think it would be cool,” Axe-wielder said, “if this country was a bit more dirty and violent and more like some third world country.”
“You would,” Nymph-girl said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. I didn’t want to engage such a hulk as this axe-wielding man in a talk about how he would prefer more violence in our little country.
He stroked his beard, clearly thinking. “All this drag-on mush with elections and shit. Wouldn’t it kinda be cool if every few years you turned on the news and found there’d been a coup?”
“You’re a twat," Nymph-girl said, shaking her head. She seemed to know where he was going with this, as if it were something they’d discussed before. Teeth-bloke’s ten-sided die did look pretty worn, as if from overuse. I imagined long nights in this bar, drinking gin, planning Hells Angels riots against gay marches, and tossing dice.
“Imagine it," Axe-wielder continued. “A newsflash cuts into the soap operas. Instead of Labour winning by vote, they just got a band of mercenaries, promised them some shit once they was in power, and kicked the conservatives out. All their heads on a stick outside number ten. Imagine it all. The Prime Minister and cohorts in front of cameras, not in suits but in military garb, brandishing machine guns, screaming about reform. The entire Conservative Party hanging by the neck from trees in a park.”
“We’re more civilised than that," Surfer-dude retorted.
Axe-wielder shrugged. “Pen is mightier than the sword.”
They all considered this. While they did, I drank.
"Hey," Axe-wielder said. "You didn't ask him if had mental problems."
Surfer-dude shrugged. Obviously the question was directed at him. "You fantasise about unknotting old women's intestines, or you taking anti-depressants?"
That pair of questions was directed at me. I waited for a punchline. The wonder was painted all over my face. It made Surfer-dude laugh. "There," he said to Axe-wielder. "I know people."
Teeth-bloke tossed the die. I saw: HISTORY. He seemed to sneer as if this subject displeased him. He picked up the die again.
“So what brings you here, to our little village?" Axe-wielder asked. For some reason, I looked at the woman calling herself a nymph - maybe because she was female, and a female had brought me here.
“I saw them arrive,” Surfer-dude said. Then he spoke to me: “You and a girl, in a car. Then I saw that car leave without you. Now you’re here alone, drinking my gin in front of four bikers.”
I jerked. How had the obvious passed me by? They all had biker tattoos, they wore the gear. Even the dainty Nymph-girl seemed to fit the image, albeit leaning more towards groupie than hardcore biker. I became aware just then of a common denominator: all four wore a sewn-on badge with an embroidered picture of a forked road and an eagle’s head in the crook. Above the picture, curving around the inside of the circular badge, was written: “THE SHEPHERDS.”
“You all live here?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was a bit scared now. How many times in places across the world had young men entered premises and never returned alive? I could almost see right through the hulking monster named Axe-wielder; could almost see his axe, with which he could axe-all. I picked up my gin bottle by its neck, held it down by my side, out of sight under the table, figuring I could smash it against Axe-wielder’s head in a second if anything kicked off here.
The Surfer-dude closed his laptop. “Me and him -” he nodded at Axe-wielder, then jabbed a digit at Teeth-bloke “- he moved here a few weeks ago, lives local. She travels in. If you saw the camper van parked out by the park, that’s her home. This is our meet night. I guess you figured we call ourselves The Shepherds?”
The bottle would smash open against Axe-wielder’s head and spray glass and gin across the Surfer-dude, the other formidable opponent here. He would be distracted long enough for me to take him down with a few headshots.
“I invented that name," Teeth-bloke said somewhat triumphantly. “I had a band of brothers in the seventies, but they were just idiots, man. These guys here are the new blood, the new hope.”
Shocked at seeing two of his people go down, Teeth-bloke would freeze up, allowing me to escape from the table.
“We may have room for one more,” Nymph-girl said. She never took her eyes off me.
And the girl would likely not try to tackle a man who’d just put down two others in three seconds. I would turn and flee, out the door, across the road, out of the village. No chasing cars would find me in the dark as I scaled a crumbling stone wall and took off across a field. I’d find the next road, flag a car, call the police, send them here and tomorrow read about the arrest of a freaky splinter group of bikers calling themselves The Shepherds.
“Want a suckerball?” Teeth-bloke said, brandishing a small bag of sweets. He was sucking on one himself. I guessed sugar had cost him his teeth. Everyone one of them, and every molecule. I thought if I popped one of those things in my mouth, my teeth would abandon ship instantly and patter on my shoes.
I let out a laugh just then. How paranoid I was being! I drank more gin. I asked them what they were doing here all alone. I even took one of Teeth-bloke's golf-ball-sized sweets, but put it into my pocket instead of my mouth. I'd throw it away later.
“You gay?" Axe-wielder said. I pictured his axe again, once more nervous. I replied that I was not. Hadn’t he remembered what Surfer-dude had said about seeing me arrive with a girl? “Can you pass as gay? Pretty boy like you. You and the girl here, Moses and his Missus. Moses and Missus.” He laughed, obviously liking the sound of his own voice.
Surfer-dude: “The chap’s been in the door five minutes, dude. Give him a second to take all this in before designating jobs. Maybe he has his own problems, yeah?” He was looking at me. I nodded.
Nymph-girl patted my hand. “Never fear, we are here. What’s your ailment, honey? That girl of yours? She cheat on you? I see anger and hurt in your face. Only someone cheated on by a sweetheart can mix those two emotions at the same time in a single pair of eyes. I know.”
My head was throbbing. It was hot. The gin might as well have been helium, filling my head and trying to lift me off my chair.
“She fucked my friend,” I said, and everyone here gave an Oooohh.
“And you just found out, right, babe?" Nymph-girl said. She patted my hand again. Hers felt warm and soft. I looked away so I didn’t fall for her. The gin was making me feel funny. I suspected it might have been spiked. Or maybe alcohol and my current state of mind were not two elements that mixed successfully.
My eyes fell to the ring, the ring I had planned to glue my girl and me together with. Nymph-girl was still holding my hand, and tracing the edge of the ring with her finger.
"You don't want to give her this now, do you? I recognised it as a gift from a man to a woman." I kept looking, somewhat transfixed. The gin I'd drunk was still burning my mouth. My tongue seemed almost to spark with taste, as if I'd drunk something carbonated rather than still.
"It was in a little black box," I said, unable to think of anything else. Perhaps silence would have been less embarrassing.
"Well, that's not how you give a gift of a ring," Nymph-girl cooed. She put her right hand against my left, fingers touching and outstretched like mine, so it might almost seem as if she were my freaky reflection in a mirror I was touching. Then she easily slid off the ring, along my finger and over hers, with the smoothness of a train passing from one pair of rails to the next. In a moment, she was wearing a piece of jewellery meant for my soul mate. And I wasn't moved by this in any way, good or bad.
Nymph-girl sensed this. She glared at me. "She must have hurt you deep."
Axe-wielder stuck his arm over his head, just like Robin Hood going for an arrow. He returned it with his axe firmly in his fist. He stroked the head, and I saw the blade was so blunt it was flat and a full half-centimetre thick. “And you want her dead, right? You want us shepherds to wipe her out?
Yook-she-hal-lom.”
Nymph-girl reached past Teeth-bloke and smacked Axe-wielder’s thick chest, hard. “Don’t talk like that, twat. Apologise.” She had used the hand wearing my ring, and now that hand fell down by her side all innocently, as if it had never been away on a burglary mission. I didn't know what to do about it!
Instantly, but without emotion, Axe-wielder said to me, “Sorry for the insult.” Then he focussed on Nymph-girl. “Anyway, that’s not the side I play. Man shouldn’t get bloody help to do in his girl. Man shouldn’t really do girls in at all.”
“Aaawww, sweet," Nymph-girl said with fake concern. “You cheesy sod. You sexist sod. Okay for you to batter people senseless with that silly axe, though? You ever attack a woman with it?”
“Only in self-defence.” He looked at me. “Only in self-defence. Man shouldn’t do in his own woman.”
“Just someone else’s, then?” She waited for an answer; Axe-wielder just shrugged. “Well, his girl is someone else’s. His. He’s someone else. So we could do it?” She glared at him. It seemed to me to be a tense confrontation, but I also suspected these guys fought like this all the time and that there was no problem or danger here.
Axe-wielder shrugged. Nymph-girl slapped his chest again. He shrugged again. Her hand came up, ready, threatening, warning. They grinned at each other. My assessment that there was no problem here was confirmed with that exchange of smiles.
“Not our place to get involved," Surfer-dude said. "But every case needs to be heard, and as always we vote - for fairness against arbitration.” A pause. “For action against this individual’s girl for emotional damage.”
“Emotional damage, I like that," Teeth-bloke said with a giggle. He stuck his hand in the air. Nymph-girl did the same. I sat there, numb, hot. Axe-wielder slumped in his chair, like a kid showing his disdain. Surfer-dude didn’t move, except to point at Nymph-girl. She tensed, as if suddenly put on the spot by a teacher asking a question. She spoke:
“Woman is man’s property. Man builds this world for woman, therefore woman is his servant. Woman who steps out of line must accept punishment.” This from a woman!
Surfer-dude turned his finger upon Axe-wielder. The big guy shrugged and said, “Men are stronger, the stronger sex, in all ways. Man should be able to talk or bribe sense into his woman. A lesson should be dished out if they wrong him, sure. But women are little works of art that shouldn’t be destroyed.” This was like some freaked-out job interview.
“Oh, and what about the ones that’ll be on the bridge?" Nymph-girl snapped.
“Anonymous, faceless. Don’t count.”
“Stop this, you two," Surfer-dude cut in. He pointed at Teeth-bloke, who sat up straight to deliver his line.
“Power. Dog eat dog world, this green planet. You fuck up, you expect consequences. Simple as that. Cheating’s a crime and she should pay the price.”
Surfer-dude pointed at himself. “I don’t think cheating’s such a crime. Mine’s a negative vote. Two-two. Draw.” He looked at me, and he actually looked sorry. Like a doctor about to impart bad news to an unsuspecting cancer patient. “Sorry, we can’t kill your girlfriend for you. It doesn’t fit with The Shepherds’ policy. You want a sandwich?”
I was stunned. In little over a minute, this band of strangers had heard my problem, offered to fix it, then apologised because - this only just decided, mind you - they were actually not allowed to kill my girlfriend!
Surfer-dude got up. Axe-wielder patted his belly. “Bet it’s bloody egg again.” His pipe, jiggling up and down again as he spoke, waggled free of his mouth and fell into his lap. He looked down with a grunt and began clearing up tobacco from his lap.
“It’s always egg," Nymph-girl said. “Don’t you ever learn eggs’re all your man eats. Protein for his two big bicep muscles.”
“Four," Surfer-dude said as he scuttled off towards the squared bar.
“Eighty-eight percent of protein, or something like that. Some fact involving protein and eighty-eight percent. Whatever. For his bicep muscle.”
“Plural!" Surfer-dude hollered. “Two on each arm! Biceps. Bicepsssss.”
There was a hiss from the bar area as, or so it sounded, Surfer-dude opened a fridge door. He came back with a tray holding a bowl of mashed eggs and some bread and butter. For the next few minutes, we made ourselves sandwiches and discussed my girlfriend. The gin was starting to take away my inhibitions and I told them all about her. Not too much, though, because I didn’t know these people and didn’t know how they’d use the information. If that sounds a bit silly or weird, I don’t care. It was how I felt. I kept the subject on what had happened in my life tonight. Afterwards, Nymph-girl called for another vote, but the score was a draw, just like before. No opinions had changed.
“What about if we can get her on the bridge?” She looked at me. “Your girl pro-active for gay rights?”
I didn’t think so. Told them so.
“Think she would attend a gay rights march?”
The four of them started to talk amongst themselves. At first it began as a general voicing of ideas, but then it became an argument that got louder and louder, two people facing off against two others, until Nymph-girl stood up and waved her arms and called for silence. She got it. A nice pair of tits can do that.
“Not our choice. Okay. If he wants his girl dead and dust, it is his choice. Just as we can suggest the best poison or gun to use, or a suitable building to push her off, so can we suggest others methods of death. Telling him he has only to put her on that bridge at a certain time is not wrong. It isn’t criminal. It is not immoral. Anyone have a problem with that? Nitric acid is good for tossing in an enemy’s face. Am I to blame if someone I say that to goes out and tosses acid in someone’s face? Am I? Am I?”
There was no answer. Nymph-girl jabbed a finger at Axe-wielder. It seemed she found it easy to intimidate that hulking monster.
“No, no, no,” he said somewhat sheepishly. What a sight - big guy like that, wielding an axe yet bowing before a petite girl arrayed in cosy pink.
Surfer-dude rapped knuckles against table wood. “New vote.” All fell silent. “We show and tell. Then we let him decide all on his own what he wants to do. We give him the when and where and wash our hands of it after that. Yep? Vote. For telling?”
Surfer-dude had switched his allegiance, although the subject up for vote was now different. He voted with the Nymph-girl and Teeth-bloke. Only the axe-wielder, meanest-looking of them all, didn’t raise an arm. Instead, he looked bored and indifferent as he chomped on an egg sandwich.
Nymph-girl put her hand on mine again. “Welcome to our world, honey.”