Weirdo (8 page)

Goths, weirdos, emos, whatever they called themselves … He’d come across a few in his time; they were usually the ones on the receiving end of the violence in London, not the instigators. Interesting cross-pollination of imagery between their music and the gangsta gangs’ though: horror elements binding them both, skulls and Mexican wrestling masks, Gothic script tags. The juvenile delinquent way of time immemorial, Sean supposed.

He went back into the bedroom, took off his shirt and hung
it in the wardrobe, replacing it with a plain black T-shirt. Put his leather coat back on and checked his reflection.

Satisfied, he stepped back through the front door of The Ship, turned right past the bank and then up the alleyway beside it, as Francesca had instructed, the discomfort of his legs easier to ignore now that adrenalin was pumping and, in a perverse way, now he could be glad if he no longer passed as normal. He was going to a place where that would be a distinct advantage.

Halfway down the cutting, a pub sign hung over a side door. Black background, white face. A man with a wide-brimmed hat pulled over one eye, twirly moustache and pointed beard. Flames dancing yellow around his visage and above, medieval script spelling out:
Captain Swing’s
.

Sean didn’t go straight in. He walked to the top of the alley. On his right was the white-painted pub, on his left a secondhand bookshop. A narrow road and beyond it a car park, the back of a department store.

He turned back towards the pub. The face on the pub sign looked familiar. Sean had first seen it on May Day 2000, in the thick of the riot at Trafalgar Square, an eerie glimpse of a stark white face through flailing arms, shields and batons: took him a couple of seconds to realise it was a mask. He noticed it again some months later on a T-shirt worn by one of the scrotes at Meanwhile Gardens Skatepark. A colleague with teenage kids explained where it had come from – a comic strip about a futuristic anarchist who modelled himself on Guy Fawkes. Now here he was again.

Sean pushed open the heavy oak door and walked into a waft of warm air, Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” riding on top of it. An improvement on The Ship, at least. He took in
a walnut, horseshoe-shaped bar with a brass top. To his right, a row of tables and chairs beside the window were taken by a smattering of teenagers, multi-coloured hair worn in long fringes or razored spikes, pierced eyebrows and lips. Resting against the bar opposite them, a much older guy in biker’s denim and leather, snake of a plait running down his back and a salt-and-pepper goatee beard on his chin.

Nearer to where Sean stood, where the bar curved to the right, sat a couple of men who could have been the fathers of the emo kids. A big bloke in a green army fatigue jacket sitting on a bar stool, a wide face with not dissimilar features to the fearful Pat, although lit with a more approachable smile. Next to him, standing, a shorter man in a battered black leather jacket,
KILLING JOKE
painted onto the back of it. His short, spiky hair was defiantly dyed black, despite having receded to the middle of his crown.

They looked about the right age. Sean moved in their direction, passing them to hone in on a spot where he could subtly examine the opposite side of the pub too, noticing the sort of crutch he was all too familiar with, propped up beside the larger man’s bar stool.

Sean leant against the counter. He hadn’t seen any sign of a landlord, so far, but three men were talking by the side of the pool table that dominated this side of the pub, along with an old-fashioned jukebox, the sort that still played 7-inch singles. Sean turned his head and saw one of them break off his conversation, walk over and lift up the hatch, coming around the bar to greet him.

“Good evening, sir,” he said. “What can I get you?”

The man looked to be in his early forties, a round, smiling face with brown eyes, crinkly ginger hair and sideburns, an
old beige cardigan with leather buttons over a striped shirt. He spoke with a London accent.

“Pint of the Foster’s, please,” said Sean. He had already overdone it with the booze tonight but he could scarcely come into a place like this and ask for a mineral water.

“Right you are,” the landlord’s smile was as crinkly as his hair.

“That’s an interesting jukebox you’ve got there,” said Sean, taking his wallet out of his jacket pocket. As he spoke, Martha and the Vandellas replaced Bob Marley. “Jimmy Mack”, one of his all-time favourites. “Good music and all,” he added, as the landlord placed the pint down on the mat.

The man beamed. “Glad you think so. You could say it’s a pub heirloom. Most of the stuff on that jukebox has been there twenty years. You a bit of a connoisseur then?”

“I was brought up on it,” said Sean, handing over a fiver, antennae prickling. “You’ve not been here twenty years yourself, though?”

“On and off.” He took the note. “Come here, went away, come back again. Ilford, Israel, Arizona, Ernemouth – maybe I should have that written over the door. You’re from London, ain’t you?”

“Ladbroke Grove, born and bred,” said Sean, feeling prickles running up and down his legs, feeling eyes on him now.

The landlord handed Sean his change.

“Thanks,” said Sean, “Mr …?” he realised he’d forgotten the name Francesca had told him, hadn’t taken notice of the publican’s sign above the door when he came in either. Not like him. He’d been too busy thinking about Captain Swing.

“Farman,” said the landlord, offering his hand. “Marc Farman.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Sean shook.

“And you are?” the landlord asked.

“Sean Ward,” he said, thinking:
Farman was here twenty years ago, how many of the rest of them were?
His eyes made a quick swoop around the pool table.

The two guys playing were old punks, the taller one still with a black Mohican that flopped sideways on his head, his shorter friend with a shaved head, a row of sleepers up one ear lobe. A couple of girls watched them, one small and dark, the other, much younger, with a bright pink barnet. To their right, on a different table, another biker type with a beard and granny glasses sat with a girl with long black hair, wearing a leopardskin coat.

Was Farman part of Corrine’s gang, come back to reclaim his old roost?
He picked up his pint, took a contemplative sip, as the landlord leant across the bar towards the guys who had originally caught his eye.

“Mr Ward here’s interested in our jukebox,” Farman said. “He’s a man of taste. Mr Ward, these are some regulars of mine, Shaun and Bugs. They can remember when the thing was installed.”

Shaun, the one with the crutch, offered his hand. It was big, thick and calloused, the hand of a manual labourer. “Had me first drink in here the summer of ’81,” he nodded confirmation. “What bring you round here then?”

“I work for the government,” Sean improvised a line from a discussion he’d been half-listening to on the radio earlier. “Green industries. You know, wind farms, bio-fuels. I’m doing a sort of recce, seeing what’s feasible.”

“Oh,” Shaun’s thick black eyebrows shot up. “Green industries, we could do with a few more of them around here.
See this?” he motioned to the crutch. “Industrial accident. Local poultry producer,” he tapped the side of his nose, “in the days before Health and Safety.”

“You something to do with that wind farm,” asked the one called Bugs, a more nasal voice, a more suspicious look on his face, “what they now put up over Scratby?”

“That’s partly it,” said Sean, “wind power, sea power, new crops that can be farmed for bio-fuels … Area’s ripe for redevelopment, isn’t it?”

“Could say that,” Bugs said into his pint. “Now all the oil’s run out, people don’t care too much about us no more.”

“I just have to put in the research first, the geography, the chemistry of the soil,” Sean warmed to his theme. “Then there’s the planning for expansion, how much land would be available, how much work it could generate. Get a study written up for the department …” He could see Bugs’s face start to glaze over. “So really,” he said, not untruthfully, “I’m just nosing around.”

“Right,” Shaun said, his smile deepening, “but what I meant was, what brought you here? To this pub? That in’t the first one visitors normally come to …”

“Oh,” said Sean, “I just found it. They put me in The Ship Hotel, and I didn’t care much for the music there.”

“That’s right,” Bugs nodded.

“So I just took a walk, saw the sign for this pub and it lured me in. You got to admit, it’s unusual. Who’s Captain Swing?”

Farman leaned over his taps. “An old legend,” he said. “’Bout two hundred years ago there was an uprising round here and he was the leader. The oiks against the toffs, you know.” He chuckled. “That’s why the pub’s named after him, ’cos most people round here think that’s what we are.”

“He looks like Guy Fawkes,” said Sean.

“Well,” said Farman, “no one knows what he really looked like. I had a new sign painted when I come here, Bully done it,” he nodded towards the punks at the pool table. “Owner before me changed the name to The Royal Oak and took the old sign away, put in big screen sport like every other half-arsed boozer round here, run it into the ground. We just wanted to make it like it was, didn’t we? Only that old sign was a bit corny, so Bully done a better one.”

“You see that little old bookshop next door when you come in?” asked Shaun. “Old Mr Farrer who run it, he could tell you more. Know all the local history, he do.”

“Thanks,” said Sean, “I might pay him a visit, then. Now, can I get you gents a drink?”

He passed another half an hour with them, letting them tell him about themselves. Shaun had retrained on the pay-off he got from his former employer, now made a living in IT. Bugs had been unemployed since the last oil rig was dismantled.

As he left by the side door, he nearly walked straight into the girl in the leopardskin coat who was talking on a mobile phone out there.

“Sorry,” he said, putting out an arm to catch his balance on the wall. An almighty pain shot up his left leg, like an intravenous injection of molten lead.

“I better go,” she said into her phone. “Yeah, see you tomorrow.” Then she turned to him. “Are you all right?”
Something about her voice
. Sean tried to bite down on the agony, as he looked at her. Thick black hair cloaked her features and the street lighting was too dim to make out very much more.

“Yeah,” he said, dredging up the ghost of a smile. “Old war wound. Plays me up in cold weather something chronic.”

“Right,” she said, putting her hand on his arm for the briefest of seconds. “Well, mind how you go.” She moved past him and back through the door of the pub, but not before he had registered the strange tattoo on her hand, an eye staring out between her thumb and forefinger, like the ones Greek fishermen painted on their boats to ward off the evil eye. Only bright green instead of blue.

Another nutter down a dark alley
, Sean thought, as he walked down to the quay.

“What does that thing mean,” asked Samantha, “on Debbie’s jacket?”

Corrine looked across the room, to where her neighbour was sitting in a huddle with Darren and Julian, the garment in question hung on the chair beside her, painted with a head and a star, the letters
M
and
R
on each side of it.

“I don’t know,” said Corrine, annoyed that Sam was still taking such an interest in Debbie. “Some band she like, I reckon.”

“Must be a funny kind of band,” considered Samantha.

“I know,” said Corrine, “she get it all from Alex, the boy what live next door to her. He go to the art college and whatever he do, she have to copy.”

Corrine blushed as the words left her tongue. She didn’t know why she was being so nasty, or why she felt so jealous. How things had changed so much in the space of what was really only a few weeks.

After Sam’s nan had shouted at her, she never expected to be allowed into the enchanted kingdom again. But the next day at school, Sam had brushed the entire incident off, told her she’d put the old girl straight. Corrine didn’t have to worry,
they could go back up the Leisure Beach again next weekend, bring Debbie along as well, if she liked. Granddad had
said
.

Feelings stirred in Corrine that she had never known before. Even the crush she had been nurturing on Julian was long since forgotten.

“What makes him so special?” Samantha asked.

Corrine snorted. “He’s one of them weirdos,” she said. “Like them pair,” she glared at Darren and Julian, telling herself she was angry with Debbie for going off with them, convincing herself that it had been that way around. “Hanging round Swing’s the whole while. Like that make them hard.”

Julian stared back at her, a faint smile playing on his lips.

“Right,” said Samantha, nodding thoughtfully.

Debbie looked up and her stomach lurched. Samantha Lamb was staring right at her, Corrine beside her, scowling. She hadn’t realised that they had come in to the art room at last, but she might have expected it. It obviously wasn’t enough for Lady Muck to walk off with her best friend; she must want something more, something that was hinted at by her attempts to mess up her posh hair, how she now wore her tie skinny with the top button undone like Debbie did. The way she kept on looking at her with those X-ray eyes, scanning every inch of her clothes, her hair, her bag …

Samantha tried to smile at her, so she quickly looked back down at the picture she and Darren had been working on. Tried to lose herself once more in the design for a fictional record cover for her favourite band that she had been so enjoying only moments before.

“I want to go there,” said Samantha.

“You what?” said Corrine.

“To Swing’s.” Still looking at Debbie, Samantha smiled.

* * *

“You’re the one who wants to be a beautician,” said Samantha. “Go on, put it on.”

Saturday afternoon in Sam’s grandparents’ bathroom. Corrine still didn’t feel comfortable being there, even though the old girl was out with the rest of the blue rinses and Granddad was at work. She didn’t trust that either of them wouldn’t walk in at any moment and find out what they were up to.