Night Trip

by Peter Ackers

"…WORTH A THOUSAND PINTS…"

  There was a pub across the road with its peeling red doors open, and a sandwich board on the pavement announcing cheap beer from 7-11. In the morning? Beer served in brown paper bags instead of glasses, designed for consumption not in the bar but in the alley out back? I crossed the road and braved the doors.

  Typical flea-pit pub - check. Jukebox full of crap, pool table with tears and chalk rings, fruit machines with hypnotic lights - check. One of those places that caters mostly to a collection of regulars who know each other; they come in at set times, sit in the same old seats and drink the same old crap. There’s always some good-looking young guy who should be elsewhere, some tattooed guy and his bedraggled wife who sit alone and bicker, and a collection of misfits who crowd the bar and talk about crap you can’t discern. The barkeep’s always a blotchy-legged woman trying to pass off clothing her daughter should be wearing.

  And the obligatory fat old weirdo who sits alone; this guy never goes to the bar, never seems to touch his drink, but somehow he’s already plastered and gets worse with time. Places like this are only frequented by young drinkers if they're passing by onto better pastures; they pop in as virgins, see the state of it (the walls are usually covered not with promotional material but with photos of some ancient local football team and pictures of the landlord and -lady; doubtless the strapping men in the black and white photos, all white smiles and 70s bushy microphone hairstyles, are the same toothless and shiny-domed gimps now infesting the pub - maybe they talk of missed goals?) and either move on immediately or stay for a quick one and an equally rapid game of pool.

  But for now, the place was empty. All the chairs were up on the tables, which gave the impression the place was closed. But money is a good jimmy for any door. The landlord (okay, so not a woman this time – but I bet his legs were blotchy) was behind the bar, trying to fix a bottle to an optic. His back was to me, the back of his head smiling with grey-brown hair beneath a bald pate.

  "Toilet?" I called.

  "Says it on the door. Not a public toilet this, you know?"

  "I'll be quick, " I said as I headed across the a sickly white door marked, as promised, TOILETS. Inside, two more doors, one for men, one for people who weren't men, denoted respectively by a stick image of a man and one of a similar creature with triangular hips. I pushed open the relevant door.

  The toilet had only one cubicle, empty. I could see it was empty not because I couldn't see feet under the door, but because I couldn't see a door. Gone, along with both hinges. There was no damage where the hinges had been, and the toilet window looked big enough to slide the door through. Case closed. Should I run next door to the ladies? No, the place was empty, so I wouldn't be disturbed.

  Ah, but then I wouldn't be disturbed here, either, and wouldn't need to hide behind a door. Here, at least, there was no risk of being considered a transvestite freak if I got caught.

  I slapped the rucksack on the floor and opened it. I laid all my stuff out in the order I needed it.

  I filled a sink with water and dyed my hair blue. There were no paper towels so I had to stick my head under the hot air dryer. When my hair was dry, I slapped a double handful of styling wax into it and spiked it up and out, so I looked like a hedgehog, or a character from Tekken. Then I grabbed a handful of hair each side of my head and squeezed out two horns, about four inches in length each. The grimy mirror showed me a scary looking guy, more Manga than Marvel. I liked it.

  Next I climbed out of my clothing. I wore a T-shirt, which I had to rip at the neckline to make it big enough to slip over my head without messing up my horns. I tapped the spikes to make sure the wax was setting hard. I slipped into the blue coveralls, nearly fell, wondered how women slip into dresses so smoothly, and zipped it up tight to my neck. I stepped into the boots, tied them and wrapped masking tape around the tops, securing my coveralls to my boots. For some reason, I wanted to be waterproof - the coveralls were cotton, but hey, I didn't expect to encounter water today, anyway. I put on my goalie's gloves, taped them up too, and stood before the mirror again. I was ready. Almost -

  The door grated open against the floor. The landlord was there. If aliens researched human stereotypes and sent one of their own undercover amongst us as a pub owner, this is how he would have looked. Do landlords have big bellies for the same reason Gym bosses have big muscles?

  "Just so you know, the toilet door's bust," he told me. He looked surprised the moment he stepped in, yet didn't falter in what he was saying. I read somewhere that larger dinosaurs had slow reactions, sometimes not registering feelings, or even sights, for minutes, and this guy was big. Could I slip past him and out the door and be away down the street before he saw my image step towards him?

  "Hey, what you doing?" But he didn't mean my new outfit, he meant my old one. He was pointing at my clothing tossed on the floor. "Don't be littering this place. It ain't Buck Pal, but it ain't yours, either. Bin it."

  "I will. I'll have a pint. Out front. Be there in a sec."

  He said nothing. Left.

  I turned to the mirror again. I dropped the coin necklace over my head, slipped on my wraparound sunglasses. Yeah. The Avenger was ready. The world had better be.

  Out in the bar, the landlord was filling a pint glass from the drip trays, which his staff obviously hadn't emptied the night before. I watched him from the toilet doorway, off to his left in the same wall as the bar itself. I waited till he'd finished, wiped the wet sides and placed it on a beermat, then I closed the door with a bang so he'd hear. He waved me over and slung a beer towel across his shoulder, like a boxing cornerman. I went round the bar until I was in front of him.

  "One nine-nine," he said. No float yet, no change."

  Pre-poured when he told me that. I imagined he would be hoping I'd only have a note, no coins, and would be too afraid of his tattoos and his bulldog face and gorilla arms to refuse to pay so much. I wondered how much money this guy had robbed from people with his hefty prices and shallow tricks. And in my mind he crossed a line.

  One handed, I took the coin from around my neck, let it dangle by the twine. The trinket removed from a dead body in the back of the truck. I beat down the memories as they broke the surface like drowning swimmers.

  "This is worth a thousand pints, don't you think?"

  I dropped it in the pint glass. The landlord, captivated like a kitten mesmerised by a crawling spider, bent to stare at the treasure on the bottom of his glass. I bent, too, so I could see his hall-of-mirrors face through the glass and the watery, flat beer. A line had been crossed, remember.

  Below the bar top, out of sight, I had been fiddling. Now I brought the Black Widow catapult up, pulled back on the elastic, and fired a marble right at the glass. It blew the receptacle into a thousand pieces, all of them sharp, and more than enough shredded the landlord's ugly mush to make him drop, clutching his face, screaming.

  "Hey, it'd hurt a lot more if you didn't water your beer down, so think yourself lucky."

  I retrieved the necklace from the sodden bartop and left. He was spitting foul threats at me from down behind the bar somewhere, like a rugged troll terrorizing children from beneath a dark bridge. Based on those threats of death against me, I didn't think he did consider himself lucky.

  Out on the street, the sun was climbing high, but there were a few drops of rain in the air. I took a lungful of crisp air, happy with my lot. I felt good having dished out punishment to someone who deserved it. I wanted more. This was why Superman didn't piss off around the world and sample the world's beaches and mountains and other planets: saving people, being a hero, felt good.