by Jason Ayres
Andy was there, of course, in his usual attire of ancient blue denim jacket and matching jeans. Kent noticed that his rapidly thinning hair looked even more greasy and unkempt than usual. He didn’t look as if he’d washed for days either. He knew Andy had lost his job a few months ago and it seemed he had really let himself go since then. Was this what happened after redundancy? Did people just give up?
Nobby the Professor, the pub’s self-proclaimed betting expert, was also there, complete with the Racing Post on the bar. A dapper, well-dressed man with an immaculately groomed beard, he was deep in conversation with Craig about the next day’s runners.
Alongside both of them was Kay, a divorcee who was the same age as Kent. He had known her for a long time. They had been in the same year at school together. Back then, she had been drop-dead gorgeous, a beautiful, blonde bombshell that he and most of the other boys in his class had fantasised over during their formative years.
She was clever, too, top of the class and tipped for great things. But she had been too fond of having a good time and a few bad choices of men hadn’t helped. Never finding her true vocation in life, she had long passed the point where she had been someone with potential. Now she was just someone who could have been someone.
Just like Andy, she was seriously letting herself go. Her face and body had seen better days and she was becoming an irritating lush on the booze. Despite that, she rarely went home alone. But the men who wanted her now weren’t ones who wanted to romance her or form a meaningful relationship. They were the sad, desperate types that hung around the pubs at closing time, desperate for sex and not caring how low they stooped to get it. She was a prime target for them, even more so as her reputation as an easy lay had grown.
Even the fact that several of her front teeth were missing didn’t seem to put men off. In fact, he had even heard one bloke crudely boast that it enhanced her performance in one particular sexual act. How Kay had lost the teeth in the first place was the source of much speculation. She claimed it was down to botched dentistry work but the word on the street was that she’d gone to bed with the wrong woman’s husband and got her teeth knocked out by the irate wife in return.
Right now she was wobbling around in clothes twenty years too young for her: high heels, a cropped leopard skin T-shirt and a black leather skirt that she must have used a shoehorn to get into. She was standing at the bar trying to gatecrash Nobby and Craig’s conversation, with an extra-large glass of white wine in her hand. It was sloshing about all over the place as she tottered around on her high heels. Amazingly, seemingly more by luck than judgement, none of the wine was escaping from the glass despite rushing up from one side to the other in time with her wobbles. It was a strange skill that Kent had noticed in a lot of heavy drinkers, including himself.
“My ex-husband was a right bastard, you know,” she was saying to the others. “Expected me to cook and clean and look after the house for him, but he wouldn’t let me have a career of my own.”
“Yes, we know,” remarked Craig, in an annoyed voice. “You have mentioned it a few times.”
“And do you know what he was doing all the time while I was cleaning for him? Shagging some little tart from the accounts department, that’s what. She can’t be twenty-five if she’s a day! Now he’s kicked me out and moved the bitch into our old house. Twenty years of my life I wasted on that man, and what have I got to show for it?”
She paused, building up for dramatic effect, “A crappy little flat above a chip shop, that’s what.”
“What do you fancy in the 12.40 at Ludlow tomorrow, Craig?” asked Nobby, completely ignoring her.
Kent had caught the tail-end of this conversation as he approached the bar. Unfortunately he also caught her eye, and as soon as she spotted him, she made a drunken beeline for him, her wine crashing against the side of the glass like a wave against a harbour wall in a storm.
“Here’s a man who’ll understand,” she said. “Won’t you, Richard?” she said, flashing her bloodshot eyes as wide as she could at him.
Kent tried to squeeze into the gap between Andy and Nobby’s bar stools to try and gain a bit of protection from her.
“Pint of the usual, Richard?” asked Craig. He was already pouring it.
“Cheers, Craig.” If he could engage the landlord in conversation and keep his back to Kay, she might give up and go away.
“Where’s that Australian chap you had working here?” asked Kent. “I haven’t seen him for a few days.”
“He’s buggered off back to Oz. Didn’t fancy the winter weather here, apparently. That’s left me short-staffed again.”
Andy, who had been uncharacteristically quiet up until now piped up. “Hey, why don’t you give D.I. Kent here a job? Or should that be ex-D.I. Kent? The word on the street is they’ve given you the push.”
So they knew. Well, that suited him just fine. It would save him having to explain it to them, just as he hadn’t had to explain it to Debs. Whoever was gossiping about him was doing him a favour.
“They haven’t exactly given me the push, Andy. I’ve decided it’s time for a change of career,” said Kent.
“Bollocks they kicked you out,” insisted Andy. “Still, you must have got a decent payout so how about a round of drinks on your redundancy money?”
“What do you think? You take the piss out of me and then ask for a drink,” said Kent. “I’m hardly likely to say yes, am I?”
“Well, I can take the piss as much as I like now, can’t I? There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“You’re right, Andy, there isn’t. But I can still decide who I buy drinks for. Craig, get yourself a drink on me. And whatever these two are having,” he added, gesturing at Nobby on his right and behind him to where he knew Kay would still be standing.
“Tosser,” said Andy.
Offering Kay a drink might not have been the wisest move because it gave her a free pass into the conversation.
“You poor thing, losing your job like that,” she gushed. “You know, I don’t care what the others said about you, I always thought you were a brilliant policeman.”
She slammed her glass down on the bar and said, “Make mine another large white wine please, Craig.” Then she turned back to Kent.
“You must feel awful. Do you want a hug?”
“No, thanks for the offer, but it’s OK,” replied Kent.
“I’ll have a hug,” interrupted Andy, looking up at her, hopefully.
“You won’t,” replied Kay. Although she had lowered her standards considerably in men over the years, there were still some depths to which even she wouldn’t plummet.
It was a minor crumb of consolation to Kent. He wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole, but it still gave his ego a small boost to know he was still above Andy in the pecking order. He wasn’t at rock-bottom just yet.
“Why not?” asked Andy. “What’s wrong with me?”
“What’s right with you?” said Craig from behind the bar and everybody laughed.
“You would have jumped into bed with me like a shot fifteen years ago,” said Andy to Kay. “I could have any woman I wanted back then. They were falling over themselves to get a piece of me.”
“And now they’re falling over each other trying to get away from you,” said Nobby, the cue for more laughter. Kent liked the way this was going. The emphasis was on Andy and not him.
“You can laugh, but I bet I’ve had more women than you three put together,” added Andy.
“So what went wrong?” said Kent, and instantly regretted it. He knew what would be coming next and so did all the others.
“That bitch Carrie got me drunk and made me fall off the stage,” began Andy, launching into a rant they had all heard dozens of times before.
Andy had never got over the one huge disappointment of his life, the time when he really could have been someone. Back in the early noughties he had been a talented singer who used to get gigs in local pubs. He had the voice, he had the body a
nd he had the looks. It was enough to get him accepted for an audition for a major TV talent show.
He had made it through all of the qualifying rounds and was one step away from being chosen as one of the finalists when disaster had struck. And it had all been down to Andy’s own worst enemy – the dreaded demon drink.
On the day of the final audition he had been incredibly nervous and had turned to alcohol to calm his nerves. What had started as a couple of social drinks before the show had got way out of hand. By the time the live show began he was drunk and it wasn’t long until catastrophe struck.
He was still haunted to this day by the embarrassing clip of him falling drunkenly off the edge of the stage. It was still shown all too often for his liking on various TV blooper programmes.
It had taken him a while afterwards to piece together in his mind the events of what had occurred that day. Over time he became convinced that it was down to Carrie, the singer, who had ultimately won the competition and gone on to pop superstardom. She had pretended to be his friend and even slept with him the night before the live show. It had been her who had encouraged him to have a few drinks on that fateful day.
It may even have been more than just a few drinks. He wouldn’t have put it past her to have slipped him some sort of drug that had caused him to end up in the state he had. His memory loss from the day couldn’t just have been down to the booze.
His singing career ended there and then. His previous promising performances were forgotten, completely overshadowed by his final shambolic appearance.
Andy told varying versions of this tale to different people in the pub on a regular basis. He altered it for some of the younger people who came in, conveniently leaving out the bit about falling off the stage. He knew that they were probably too young to remember it. And even if they had seen him on TV, he was unrecognisable from the man he had been fifteen years ago.
It was usually the girls that he tried to impress, but it didn’t get him anywhere. Whether they believed his exaggerated tales of his rockstar past or not, their perceptions of him ranged from at best ‘sad old git’ to at worst ‘dirty old man’.
The ones who thought he was dirty old man were usually the ones that Andy had been over-lecherous towards and they had made numerous complaints about him to the bar staff. These incidents were becoming increasingly frequent but Craig always managed to smooth things over.
Despite the fact that he was an incredibly annoying drunk, Andy was never violent or abusive. The bulk of the complaints were down to either outrageously sexist remarks or trying to get far too up close and personal with girls half his age. Craig put his behaviour down to Andy “being a character,” and gave the offended party a free shot and that normally sufficed.
Andy interpreted Craig’s support as friendship but it wasn’t really. It was all about the money. The pub trade was going through a tough time. The smoking ban, ever-increasing rents, a move towards drinking at home, and various forms of rival entertainment were all taking a savage toll on his business. The likes of Andy were a dying breed, but without them the pubs would die, too.
It took about two minutes of incoherent rambling for Andy to get all of this off his chest, by which time most of the others weren’t even listening. Kay had left her wine glass on the bar and gone to the toilet to get away from it. The only one who was listening was Kent. It was giving him some food for thought.
If there was ever anyone crying out to go back and relive a day it was Andy. His whole life had hinged on that moment. He wondered what Andy and the others would do if they had been given the same opportunity as him. He decided to ask him, repeating word for word the first thing the angel had said to him when they had met.
“If only you could go back, eh?” he asked.
Andy looked at him, gratefully. It was rare for anyone to show any interest in his tale of woe, especially someone who had heard it as many times as Kent had.
“Too right,” he said. “My whole life could have been different if it hadn’t been for that cow. I’d be the famous one now and she’d be the one sat in some shitty little pub drowning her sorrows.”
“Oi!” said Craig, overhearing. “This is my pub, you know. If you don’t like it you can fuck off to Ye Olde Craphole up the road. But I don’t think they will put up with as much of your nonsense as I do.”
Ignoring Craig, Andy continued.
“I would go back to that day, knowing what she was up to, and turn the tables. She knew full well I was her main rival – everything she did, sleeping with me, the lot, it was all part of her grand plan to get me out of the way. Well, I wouldn’t fall for it a second time.”
“You probably would,” said Craig. “You’re an idiot. As soon as she bought you the first pint you’d down it and ask for another. You can’t help yourself.”
“Well, we’ll never know, will we?” said Andy. “But while we’re on the subject, get me another pint.”
They never would know, thought Kent. Even if Andy could go back, he’d probably find he couldn’t change anything, just as he had. As to why, that was still a mystery but one he was determined to get to the bottom of. That angel had some explaining to do.
While Craig was pouring Andy’s lager, Kent decided to ask him the same question. In fact, he decided he would ask all of them.
“So what would you do, Craig? If you could go back in time and do things differently?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have bought the lease on this place for a start. Like a millstone around my neck it is.”
“You do alright out of it, though, don’t you?” asked Kent. “It’s always packed in here at the weekends.”
“On Friday and Saturday nights, yes,” replied Craig. “But then I’ve got to pay for the disco and the door staff, so I’ve got to shift a lot of pints to cover that. And the rest of the time it’s dead.”
Gesturing towards Andy, he added, “If it wasn’t for the likes of him, I’d have gone bust by now.”
“This place could be a little gold mine if you did more with it,” suggested Kent. “Why don’t you open up the restaurant again? The people who were here before you used to do Sunday lunches and all sorts. That’s where all the money’s supposed to be these days, isn’t it? In food?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start, to be honest,” said Craig. “It’s a lot of hassle and I’d have to employ a chef and more staff. I just haven’t got the money to invest in it.”
“You just need the right person,” he said. Debs could do it, she’d be perfect, but he decided not to say so. He wasn’t sure how he would feel about having his wife in the pub where she could keep an eye on him. Besides, she had her heart set on having her own restaurant. He doubted whether she would want to run one for someone else.
“I have had a few ideas to try and get some more people in,” said Craig. “In fact, I was thinking of running some of them past you guys. What do you reckon about me starting a quiz, maybe on Monday nights?”
“Wouldn’t work,” said Nobby, looking up from his paper. “It’s way too easy for people to cheat these days. They can look all the answers up on their phones.”
“What about a music quiz, then?” asked Craig. “Like that thing they do on the radio where they have to identify clips of music. They can’t look that up, can they?”
“I take it you’ve never heard of Shazam, then,” replied Nobby. “That can identify any clip in seconds.”
“Well, what about if we confiscated all the phones beforehand and gave them back at the end?” suggested Craig, becoming frustrated with Nobby’s negativity.
“Ha. Good luck with that. No one can bear to be parted from their phones for five minutes these days. I certainly wouldn’t let you have mine. How would I keep up with the evening racing results?”
“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence,” replied Craig in a deflated tone. “I did have one other idea, if you want to shoot that down in flames, too. I’ve been thinking about starting a karaoke night in here on Thursdays.
What about that?”
“Ooh, I like the sound of that,” said Kay, who had returned from the toilet as Craig was speaking. “I love singing. I would be well up for it.”
“We know,” said Nobby. “We’ve heard you enough times when you’ve been drunk. You can count me out. Karaoke is for losers like him.” He pointed at Andy as he spoke.
“How about it, Andy?” asked Craig. “This could be a chance to redeem yourself and be a star again!”
“It’s hardly TV stardom, is it?” replied Andy. “Besides, I don’t even know if I can sing anymore, it’s been years.”
“I’m sure you can,” replied Craig. “I could even put a poster up on the wall, something like: Karaoke here every Thursday, featuring TV’s Andy Green.”
“Hilarious,” said Nobby, laughing, before adding sarcastically. “That’ll pull them in! You should get hold of that clip of him falling off the stage and play it on a loop on the screens, too. We can stand him on a beer crate or something. Then, when he gets really pissed he might do it again.”
As Andy, Craig and Nobby continued to banter amongst themselves, Kent found himself once again the subject of Kay’s unwanted intentions.
“Hey, Richard, what say we ditch these boys and their silly squabbles and go somewhere quieter? My flat’s not far from here.”
She was once again right in his face, wine glass in severe danger of emptying itself all over him. It could only defy gravity for so long. The smell of alcohol on her breath was overpowering, even though Kent was drinking himself.
“Look, Kay, I’m not going home with you. I’m a married man.” He left out the word ‘happily’, that would be stretching it a bit, but even so, he wasn’t jeopardising it for a squalid encounter above a chip shop.
“What’s the matter with you? You used to fancy me at school, I know you did. Remember when we had that summer ball? I thought you were going to ask me to that, but you didn’t.”
“Really?” This was news to Kent. It was true that he had fancied her when he was a teenager, everybody had, but he had considered her way out of his league.
