“I promise that I won’t go in there.”
“Say you promise that you won’t go in the Bonnie Minstrel.”
“Geez, yes—”
“Hey, you aren’t trying that lying loophole crap with me,” my Dad said, smirking now. “I want it verbatim.”
I laughed and promised, and it was an easy promise to make because I had no intention of ever going into that shithole. One, because it was dangerous, and two, because there were certainly no girls in there, or at least none that I’d want to try and screw.
And yet here I was, years later, not only breaking my promise to my father, but going inside the Bonnie Minstrel with the delirious intention to commit murder. My parents were far away, and worse, it dawned on me that if my father were here, he would stop me from doing this. He would somehow protect me from these men, would tell me to quit, and to let the girls die. I knew this. He wouldn’t want me to commit murder for any reason. He wouldn’t want me to have to carry that guilt with me for the rest of my life. My dad had endorsed my actions that night in the bathroom because we were the same. However, were he there in that car park, he would have stopped me for the same reason. He would have stopped me because he knew what it would do to me.
I knew that I could never truly go home again no matter how all of this played out.
“I wish I could kill you,” I said to Klaus, wiping the tears from my face. “I wish I could kill you both.” I didn’t need to look at him to know that his expression hadn’t changed. I got out of the car, took a deep breath, and began to limp towards the pub.
***
Part Two: Overcoming Objections
“Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse and regret.” - Don Miguel Ruiz
Chapter Four: A Change Of Premises, Understanding Different Cultures, and Speaking To The Supervisor
***
I never officially moved out of my parents’ house when all this was over. I just packed a bag and left them a note saying I’d gone to stay with a friend down on the coast for a few weeks. Most of my old stuff is still at their house as far as I know. Those few weeks turned into a year, with various bullshit phone calls home to give fake updates on where I was and what I was doing. Sometimes I was in Spain, working as a PR guy for a bar and schilling cheap cocktails to holidaymakers. Sometimes I was in France, working as a chalet boy and having a great time with new friends that I’d completely made up. They were pleased and said that they missed me, even though my mother never let me forget that I hadn’t said goodbye. After the first year, they began to ask if I could at least come home for Christmas. I made my excuses, but after year three, they started the emotional blackmail. It’s ridiculous. You can manage to come and see us at least at Christmas. We’ll even pay your airfare.
Eventually, I relented—I wanted to see them, as difficult as I knew it would be—but got around going home by renting a cheap holiday house in Scotland for two weeks and telling them that it was where I lived. I rented the same place each December for the next two consecutive years—I booked it a year in advance every time—and had them come up to visit each Christmas. It was far enough from home to make it difficult to visit on a whim, and if they asked to come up at another time, I made my excuses and said I was booked for something else. Ironically, I did actually end up living in Scotland for a year, but I still rented that place in December. It was my little house of lies.
Plus, there was still a rule in place. I had to bear that in mind at all times. I had to protect them.
I told them I worked as a social media marketer, a skill they could believe I had picked up online and one they knew little enough about as to be unable to pick holes in my story. They couldn’t call—no one in my generation used a landline—and my phone was always off unless I called them. When I did call, it would be via Facetime, once or twice a month, ten minutes each time. Surface talk. Enough to satiate them, and brief enough for me to be able to stand it. I only allowed the Christmas visits to last for a weekend, making my excuses to keep them from staying longer. That was the maximum period I could spend wearing the mask of my old life; the one that didn’t have a rotting bag of acid-ridden flesh on the inside. That’s how it always felt when I had to pretend I was still the person they knew.
When the dark side of the world comes at you, it’s a fist wearing brass knuckles. It leaves you desperately trying to feed on—to draw sustenance from—the beauty around you in an attempt to heal yourself, but you’re doing so with a shattered jawbone. You wait for it to heal. It does, but it isn’t the same.
For better or worse.
***
It was a different kind of fear I felt as I pushed open the door of the Bonnie Minstrel; one from another plane of existence than the kind I’d experienced at Neil’s house. This anxiety had started in my legs as I hobbled from the car to the pub entrance, a weakening sensation that had worked its way up and into my chest, constricting and electrifying. It even made me forget about the pain in my foot. By the time I put my hand on the door’s brass PUSH plate, I thought I was actually, genuinely, going to piss my pants. I knew what this place was, and I knew the way the scum inside would feel about me. I’d chosen this pub because I knew violence would follow - and I was not a fighter.
I actually hyperventilated slightly as the door started to open, but I gritted my teeth with a quiet grunt and headed through it. I didn’t look back at the car park or my car containing Klaus and his headphones. I didn’t want to risk losing my feeble resolve.
The view before me was as I’d expected. The pub hadn’t been even half updated since the mid-80s; it was designed in the ‘60s. A cheap vinyl-tiled floor covered with furniture of which not one piece—tables, stools, or the bar itself—was free of chips, tears, or stains. Even the yellowing white paint on the walls had random holes and marks everywhere. The only thing in the room that told me which decade I was currently in was the large flat screen TV on the distant wall to my left. In front of me, opposite the front door, was the flimsy-looking bar itself. To my right was a pool and darts area, the last remnants of the insulation tape oche line still clinging desperately to the floor. The only active lighting came from the greyness seeping through the grimy, sticker-covered windows and the TV. To my utter lack of surprise, the flag of my country had been hung over the bar. These fuckers had tried to claim it, as they still do to this day.
One of the great ironies of the human condition is how, in extreme situations, the head and heart can be opposed beyond belief. The relief I felt as I saw that not one of the eleven people in the room was looking at me—their gazes instead fixed on Sky Sports—was like a cooling wave. The response from my head—that I needed them to notice me and that this was not what I wanted—was barely acknowledged.
This won’t last.
Anxiety uppercut me again, and I practically fell into a seat at the nearest table to my left. It was that or fall down. My hands were shaking like something out of a cartoon. Only two occupants of the room weren’t sporting shaved heads, and one of them was the barmaid.
The men there were of varying ages, some only a year or two older than myself, and some the same age as my father. That was an utterly baffling concept to me at the time. Though none of them were facing me, I could see their profiles as they turned to one another to speak. They looked so fucking rough. I don’t mean that in a snobby way; I meant that they looked like they fought every day. Here I was, a middle-class kid who had never had a fight in his life, surrounded by people who not only looked like they fought for fun and hated me for the colour of my skin, but would see my presence in their midst as the equivalent of deliberately spilling all of their pints simultaneously.
What time is it?
I looked at my watch. It was 12:56 pm. One hour and forty-seven minutes until Olivia’s arm would be cut from her body.
Remember the plan. Sit tight and be ready to run.
I was close to the door at least, as I’d planned, but I didn�
��t know how much use that was going to be when somebody was standing in front of my seated body and screaming in my face. Or if they were blocking the path to the door.
Wait, wait. You can’t sit tight. They have to notice you.
They’ll notice me eventually.
You can still save her arm!
Yeah, well the arm is expendable! Give me a break for five minutes here!
I sat still and tried to breathe slowly, watching the utter cunts on the opposite side of the room with my peripheral vision. I didn’t dare get caught watching them, not yet. I wasn’t ready. I went through the plan again, trying to get used to the concept while actually sitting in the pub.
The first version of the idea had been to listen to their conversation and identify who, in a room full of racist scum, was the biggest racist scum. Then, once he’d been identified, I would leave the pub, drive to the other side of the road, and stake the building out in the car. This was because I would have a room full of witnesses if I somehow committed murder on the premises. The Man in White had been very clear in telling me that he—or they—couldn’t help me if I was caught on public film, but I didn’t think this ancient shithole had CCTV. A quick scan of the ceiling confirmed it.
All good in theory, but as I’d driven to the pub I’d been going through my logic and looking for the Magic Because… and realizing that it wasn’t there, or at least it wasn’t strong enough.
If you hear someone being a racist, it could be bravado. It could be someone trying to blend in with a group. They might not mean what they’re saying.
Then I would listen for anything incriminating in what they said. Who they’d assaulted perhaps, Chinese takeaway places they’d burned down, whatever.
But that could all be bullshit too. Bravado.
So I’d realized that there was only one way to identify who was scum enough, who was enough of a waste of human flesh so as to be a detriment to society, someone who would attack other people because of the colour of their skin. I had to get one of them to identify himself by actually attacking me.
Ideally, it wouldn’t fully go that far, and I would get out of there before I had to take more than a few punches, but even that was terrifying to someone who had never been in a fight in his entire life. By which I mean me.
None of them had turned around yet. None of them had seen me. It was the most tense I’d ever felt in my entire life, even more than I’d felt at Neil’s. That combination of desperately wishing not to be seen and knowing that I had to be.
I watched them without openly watching, observing them out of the corner of my eye, and trying to control my breathing. I looked at the barmaid, expecting her to spot me first and say something to one of the others, but she was as engrossed in the game as everyone else. Five minutes passed. Nothing. It was excruciating. I felt a mad compulsion to make some noise, to draw some attention to myself somehow, but I was frozen.
Half-time. They’ll all want to go to the bar at half-time.
But that was an age away.
And then one of them suddenly stood up, turned around, and began to walk towards the bar. He spotted me immediately, and I just about shat in my already sweat-soaked underwear.
The guy actually did a double take, believe it or not. It was like something out of a comedy. He’d been laughing as he stood, amused by something one of his skinhead friends had said, and he was still gently chuckling as he made his way to the bar. His eyes had passed over me, his expression still smiling, and had continued their progress to make contact with the face of the barmaid… and then they’d snapped back, his expression somewhere between surprise and anger. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so busy shitting myself.
I wanted to look away, to not antagonise, but I couldn’t help but stare back. My eyes flitted to the barmaid, who was now looking to see what Sir Thugalot was looking at. The expression on her face squashed any doubts that I might have had about whether or not my plan was going to work. She looked terrified, but not of me. She was terrified of what was going to happen to me. I’m not sure if it’s ironic or not that her skin turned even more white than before.
She immediately looked at the other men in the room, then back at the guy at the bar, who was now staring at me with laser-focus. She touched his arm and got no response. She touched it again, gripping it fully now. He looked at her, annoyed, then looked straight back at me and pulled his arm away from her. Using the same arm—the one attached to the hand holding his empty pint glass—he pushed the spent vessel back towards her, indicating that she should fill it. All the while his eyes were locked on me, and all I could do was sit there and not bolt for the door.
What seemed like ten minutes passed while she filled his glass. He continued to stare, using that very particular expression that men of a certain mentality master from a very early age. At the time, I had never seen it before. I have seen it many times since, even with leaving the house as little as possible. I should think, if you are reading this, are male and of a certain age, that you have seen it too. It’s unique and unmistakable. It is a perfect balance of threat, challenge, and attempted dominance. Its overriding purpose is to communicate a sense of utter comfort with the concept of violence, whether that comfort is real or not. And this cunt was turning it up to eleven.
I wasn’t even twenty-two years old yet, and this guy had to be at least forty-five. I feel my heart rate rising as I write this. Some of it is thinking back to being there again and feeling the fear, but most of it is rage. Now, that is. All rage was forgotten back then. I was just a scared kid in a pub full of thugs.
The glass was returned to him, full. He took it without looking, put some money on the bar, and turned away without a word to the barmaid or a pause to collect his change. I watched him sit back down at his table. He shared it with six other guys, with five more sitting at the table next to them, and of course I then saw him say something to the guy to his right. His friend immediately turned around, saw me, then turned back sporting a furrowed brow and slightly open mouth. My skin crawled as he actually began to chuckle, bemused, shaking his head slightly. Then surprisingly, he turned back to the game. No one else turned around.
Two minutes passed.
The friend then turned to the guy on his right, slapping gently at his friend’s shoulder. This other guy turned around, and that was when I finally had to look away. It was starting. But it was also barely past lunchtime, so maybe they wouldn’t be drunk enough, or maybe—
My eyes caught the barmaid’s again, and I saw that she was still staring at me. The scared expression was still on her face, but now she looked conflicted; I wasn’t drinking anything. I was just sitting there. I could almost feel what she was thinking. Should she use that as an excuse to get me to leave and thus avoid causing a scene? To do that, she’d have to call across the bar and then everyone would look. She didn’t have a clue what to do.
And that was when I realized I had to be more brazen.
I stood, feeling detached, as if I was watching my own body hobble its way to the bar, towards the group of men who came here to drink in unity of their hatred of people with the same colour skin as me. The barmaid, comically, looked even more panicked. Her eyes widened, and again I could read her mind as she thought kid, what the fuck are you doing, you’re gonna get killed?
I wondered if this was just a weekend job for her, some extra pocket money, and perhaps she only shared a “slight” racism with these men. Maybe some part of her was actually scared for my well-being too, and not just for the potential jail sentence that I could bring to one of her patrons. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my proximity causing ripples among the seated men as I approached the bar, a domino effect of stunned curiosity and growing anger as they turned one by one and stared.
Just like a pack of wolves. That was exactly how it felt.
I reached the bar and placed my trembling hands upon it. I was practically holding myself up.
&nb
sp; “Paffof stully, pluzz,” I stammered, my throat thick and my lips dry. Confusion penetrated her growing panic.
“You what?” she asked, and looked even more scared. I wasn’t just a black kid. I was clearly a black kid with a mental disability; one who had wandered, unknowing, into the worst place in the city that he could possibly find himself.
“Pint,” I corrected myself, speaking a bit more loudly. “Pint of Stella. Please.”
“You got any ID?” she asked, her face flushed as she could feel all eyes on her too. I was dimly aware of a distant amazement in my mind that none of the men had said anything yet. Then I realized she had asked me a question.
“ID…” I didn’t. I’d deliberately left my wallet at home, not wanting even the slightest chance of leaving something at a crime scene that could identify me. “Uh. No. But I’m twenty-one. I can tell you my birthday.”
She looked immediately relieved.
“No ID, I can’t serve you. You can’t even be in here. It’s the law.”
Now it was my turn to panic. I could feel twelve pairs of eyes lasering through me. I wanted to run for the hills, but this was the best plan I had and time was running out. My mind raced.
Say something racist to her. Goad them.
It would have worked but a: I was too scared to even think about that; and b: that would have been cheating. The Magic Because had to have no loopholes, no catches, nothing where I could say well you pushed them into attacking you because you said something wrong. There was nothing wrong with going into a bar; it was their choice if they took that as taunting. It was their ignorance, but if I insulted one of their own? That was giving them an excuse.
Refuse to leave.
I could do that. But then I would get thrown out and that would have been the end of it. Was there any way I could stay there longer and wait for someone’s bigotry to make them snap?
The toilets.
“Ok, I understand,” I said, my own face so red now that I felt like I would faint, “can… I use your toilet, before I go?” She nodded rapidly in response, clearly happy that I was leaving even if I was taking a pre-exit bathroom break.
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