Weirdo

by Cathi Unsworth

  “I expect you’re good at art as well?” Samantha continued.

  “Well, I in’t bad,” said Corrine modestly. “I just … Oh, hold up, what’s that?” She heard a scratching at the door and went towards it, opening it up a crack. “Ahh,” she said, regarding the furry nose that poked through it and crouching down to stroke it. “What a sweet little dog.”

  “No he isn’t.” Behind her, Samantha’s voice turned icy. “He’s a nosy little sneak.”

  Noodles gave a sudden yelp and shot backwards, seconds before the shoe that was hurled in his direction pinged off the doorframe.

  “What the …?” the missile deflected off Corrine’s shoulder and she slammed the door in shock.

  “Ha! That told the little rat!” Samantha started to laugh.

  “What’s going on?” Having reached the top of the stairs, Edna was just in time to see a lace-mittened hand reaching towards her pet and his violent retreat from it, Noodles shooting across the landing and disappearing under her bed. When she heard Sammy shriek, she raced towards the door, her own voice shrill in her ears, and pulled it open.

  Corrine stared back at her with round, startled – and to Edna’s mind, guilty – eyes.

  “What you now do to my dog?” Edna demanded.

  “Nothing,” Corrine protested.

  “Don’t you nothing me,” pent-up rage now coursed freely through Edna’s veins, “He just come running out of here like a bat out of hell! Now what have you—”

  “Nana!” Samantha jumped to her feet. Edna’s eyes locked onto the sluttish apparition that appeared to be speaking with her granddaughter’s voice.

  “—done?” she finished, the word choking in her throat.

  Corrine didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. “I’d better go,” she said, bending down to snatch her bag off the floor.

  “No, wait!” Sam called after her.

  Corrine glanced backwards. “See you at school,” she said, dodging past the old woman and clattering down the stairs, out the front door, before anyone could catch her.

  “What did you do that for?” Samantha snarled into her grandmother’s face.

  * * *

  Corrine ran halfway down Marine Parade before she got the stitch and had to slow down, still looking nervously over her shoulder every ten seconds or so. Well, that’s that ruined, in’t it? she thought. I’ll never get invited back there again. She kept jogging until she reached the safety of the Front, the panic of being shouted at propelling her to get as far away from Sam’s house as fast as possible. Corrine never stopped to think when people started getting angry. Experience had taught her that flight was safer than fight.

  By the time she was at the ’musies, sadness had replaced fear. The thought of all those treats slipping from her grasp. Still, thank God she had put the lip palette in her pocket before it had all gone off.

  She caught sight of a clock as she slipped into The Mint, wondering if anyone was about. Seven-thirty, it said. She scanned the room rapidly. No one here she knew. She fished in her jeans pocket for change. There weren’t much there.

  Corrine thumbed some coppers into one of the slots. The machine ate the lot, laughing back at her with an electronic whoop and whistle.

  Worry started to replace sadness. The season might be over, but Corrine’s mum still didn’t expect her to come home empty-handed of a night. Corrine thought of that fiver, so easily given to Sam, so easily spent by her. Grimaced at her own stupidity, thinking she could win that much on the one-armed-bandits.

  She leaned back on the machine, slowly counting out what little she had left. Gradually noticed the man looking at her. A lead weight came down on her stomach, her heart.

  * * *

  Corrine came out from under Trafalgar Pier and went straight across the Front to the public toilets on the other side of Marine Parade. In a piss-stinking cubicle covered in graffiti, she leant over the bowl and was sick, fairy cakes and ice cream curdling with a more recent addition to the contents of her stomach. Kept spitting in the bowl, trying to get the taste out of her mouth. But before she went back to the sinks and the drinking fountain, she made sure the green note was still in her pocket.

  Outside, she leant against the wall for a moment, lighting up a JPS. Noticed a man hurrying out of the Gents, his head down, hands inside the pockets of his Macintosh. A few moments later, another figure appeared at the doorway and stopped there, leaning against the doorframe, one ankle crossed over the other. Smoke wreathed his head like the tendrils of a sea mist. He raised the cigarette to his lips, the light briefly illuminating a pair of green eyes behind a thick, black thatch of hair.

  “Reenie,” he said, his voice soft, his accent not quite the Ernemouth norm. “And how’s the night treating you?”

  “Bollocks,” said Corrine and spat on the pavement. “As usual.”

  “Hmmm.” His eyes ran her up and down slowly as he took another drag on his cigarette. “Well, I could say the same myself. You got enough now, or you hanging round?”

  Corrine shrugged. “Reckon I have,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Don’t feel like goin’ home much, though.”

  “Come to mine, if you want,” he offered. “It’s safe. And I can show you something that makes all this a bit more …” his eyes flicked up and down the seafront, “ … bearable. Something I’ve been learning.”

  “I don’t know,” Corrine frowned. She’d heard talk like this before. Normally from the stoned mouths of the druggie losers her mother entertained.

  The boy laughed. “God, Reenie. You should know you’re safe with me by now.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Corrine felt herself blush. “I in’t doin’ no drugs is what I mean.”

  “Not drugs,” he said, shaking his head. “Magick …”

  9

  Nocturnal Me

  March 2003

  Sean stood on the front steps of The Ship Hotel. The music had changed in his absence, blaring loud enough to spill out onto the street, along with a babble of voices. The bar was full of people, competing to be heard over Michael Jackson’s histrionic appeal on behalf of planet Earth.

  He and Francesca had lingered another half an hour over the balloon glasses of twelve-star Metaxa, coffee and Cyprus Delight that Keri had provided gratis with another one of his film-star smiles. As he had promised, the upstairs remained empty until nine, and they had been able to talk further about the case. Francesca seemed to know the background. Suggested that some remnants of the scene that produced Corrine’s gang still lingered around the place that had nurtured successive generations of Ernemouth weirdos and was undergoing something of a renaissance these days: Captain Swing’s pub. That if he wanted to find anyone with a long enough memory who might be persuaded into giving him some local insight, then that would be where to look.

  She had left him with a brown envelope stuffed with cuttings as she got into her cab outside the restaurant. He might have seen them already, but this was the most interesting stuff the Mercury had printed. How she had ascertained that, she didn’t say.

  Sean felt for the room key in his jacket pocket, pushed the front door open. Two women standing chattering in the hallway snapped their heads round as he crossed the threshold, running him up and down with glittering eyes. A thin, mousey blonde with a servile expression and a short, thickset brunette, whose pugnacious countenance was in no way softened by a liberal slathering of make-up.

  Sean felt their eyes on his back the whole way down the hallway. Back upstairs, he put Francesca’s envelope on the bed. Music pulsated through the floorboards, bass-heavy, tune-light, with an over-emotional diva Whitneying away over the top. It was meant to be good-time, party music. But it had the same edge to it as the tunes of the high-rise pirates booming out of the estates on Sean’s former beat: narcotic emptiness underpinning vocal hysteria. Like an itch that you could never scratch.

  It made his instincts prickle. He moved into the bathroom, picked up some hair wax and rubbed it on his fingers,
teasing his hair upwards.

  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 sa
id, 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.