Hammerport

Over a wheat cereal and a glass of ruby grapefruit juice, the senator reflected on his strange dream that he had not yet realised was no dream at all.

Marion had parked herself before the dining room window, a patient, human eclipse of the morning sun. She asked the senator, “You’ve been sitting there for half an hour, now, sir. Would you like me to… clear anything away?”

The senator was still muddled in thought but replied, “Half an hour?”

His wife, who had been pretending to read the New York Times while peeking over the top of the newspaper at his faraway face, sniggered. “Oh yes you have, Mr. Senator.”

“Shucks, I’m really sorry Marion,” he apologised, grinning with mild embarrassment. “I guess I must still be a little tired after yesterday, although, truth be told, I feel quite rested.” After an almost meditative pause, he added, “Tell you what, come back in when I call you. I’d like to discuss something in private before I’m ready to abandon the breakfast table for a another day of boring work up on the Hill.”

“Of course, you just let me know if there’s anything you need, sir,” said Marion and she retreated to her sanctum, the kitchen.

“Honey, I’m can’t say sorry enough, I was so down last night, I just felt, like, at my wit’s end, you know how it goes,” the senator began. He suddenly banged the table a few times with violent rapidity, inducing an earthquake across the breakfast crockery landscape; some milk spilled onto the table, but no one cried over it.

“Today, it’s all change inside! I feel… invigorated!” he continued with his arms animated like a pair of high-tension power lines whipping around with newfound freedom. He was thankful to the Lord for all of the things that were. He thanked the Lord for the wings of insects, the hue of the sky and the songs of poets. He gave thanks for the children his wife would one day bear for him. He was thankful for being brought to a unique and special moment in his life. He was going to begin hiking into unknown territory, getting off that senatorial train once and for all. Yesterday was a day of selfish self-pity. Today was not.

His wife put down the newspaper as there was no longer any reason to hide behind it. “I know, something is definitely changed in you today,” his wife replied, blinking softly.

The senator composed himself, sitting upright yet relaxed. He asked his wife, “Do you know why I went into politics?”

“Now that’s a tough one. I don’t believe you’ve ever spelt out your reasons. I would think the reason would be that you wanted to change things, but I can see that you have a little more to tell me than that,” she replied. She leaned forward, resting her head on one arm and waited for his words with famished eyes. It had been a long time since the senator had spoken to her with such passion and verve.

“Yes, I have more to tell you,” the senator explained, stretching his arms out wide with a smile to demonstrate something epic. He had to tell his wife a new story that, to him, was a crumpled, dusty, old one.

“I never really told you much about my mother. Mom used to be an important woman running errands as an accountant for a big firm. But she really had enough of it in the end. It gets to you after a while, doing the same thing, day after day. You get surrounded by people who have this self-inflated concept of importance and you all believe the same common good. What’s good for the company is good for you and good for the country, apparently. And no one talked, of course, about what was good for mankind because that just wasn’t interesting enough to be part of a corporate credo. Heck, no one would have believed in a company that said it believed in mankind anyway. Or God.

“Anyway, I’m rambling. As she had no real power to change anything, she tore up her five-figure salary and decided to spend more time in church. She canned her career completely. She threw it all away because, to her, it had become worthless. Career wasn’t a treasure to be prized… it was the millstone around her neck. She wanted to do good things. She wanted to change the world for the better, in bite-sized chunks if she had to.

“And you know what? Our family was happier. There was a darn sight more empty space under the tree at Christmas time, but it didn’t matter one bit. She was so positive. She started to love herself more than she had for a long time. When it’s not about ego, but simply about liking what you see in the mirror in the morning, that kind of love spreads out across us all. It was a great, humbling lesson to me – it’s all about the love you have in your cupboard. Wow, you wouldn’t have guessed that my Mom and Pop used to have such screaming matches… but devoting herself to the happy man upstairs changed not just her life but our whole family.”

The sparkle in his eyes began to melt and tears slowly dripped from his face. His wife rose, to hold and comfort him, but the senator motioned for her to sit down.

“And so… I still find it difficult not to shed a tear or two when I talk about her death in Chad.”

In his unfamiliar accent that seemed like a peculiar composite of Indian and Italian, Weldon said, ‘I tell you gain, sugar. You say word, I kill you. I kill your family. I kill everybody. I even kill small baby rabbits with fluffy ears and floppy tail.’

Guinevere was still unsure whether to take Weldon’s threats seriously. He was a touch melodramatic for someone who claimed to have invented the solar system. Thinking that Al Gore had been misquoted for over a century for ‘inventing the internet’, she had asked whether he had really meant to use the word ‘invent’. Perhaps he had meant to say ‘discover’. Weldon protested that the question demonstrated a gratuitous lack of faith and issued another threat that culminated in the mutilation of small rabbits.

‘I told you, it’s all a haze, Myron,’ she said, with a carefully chosen minimalist description that contradicted nothing she had said previously. Lies were easy to maintain when they were kept short, like I love you.

‘Like hell it is, Gee,’ Myron shouted, trying to keep pace with her. ‘And could you just stop for a second!’ Myron had taken the male inability to multi-task to great heights; walking and talking was apparently too much for him.

‘No,’ Guinevere giggled, ‘I don’t think it was anything like hell.’ She stopped and turned to look at Weldon, who was shaking his head furiously like an angry schoolmaster, wagging a cautionary finger at her. He then opened his hand and a small, white rabbit appeared atop his palm. Completely oblivious to the threat that had been made at its expense, the fluffy ball of cuteness twitched its nose and stared at nothing in particular with impassive, opal eyes from beneath the shelter of two canvas-like ears. It demanded to be hugged.

‘Aha! So you do remember something!’ Myron fired back.

Weldon scratched his head with his free hand, apparently concerned. A moment later he realised what was wrong and a top hat popped into existence on his head. He took off the hat and lowered the rabbit into its depths with open-mouthed mock terror on his face. ‘You say something, I kill baby bunny dead.’

Myron cried, ‘For god’s sakes Gee, if I have no results, they are going to close my project! They want some proof that the damn thing works not oh I’m sorry don’t remember, pass the biscuits, hmm nice cuppa tea cheers.’

Guinevere said, ‘Look, Myron what do you want me to say? Would you be happy if I just said something like I passed through the gate and instead of finding myself on the rim of the galaxy I ended up in heaven and met a handsome man who said he was the god Weldon and invented our solar system and threatened to kill bunnies if I told anyone where he was and what he was like and right now he’s standing behind you and only I can see him threatening me not to say anything?’

Myron’s jaw dropped.

Weldon tapped the rim of the top hat with a wand he had chanced upon behind an ear and something noisy started happening inside the hat. It made the kind of noise a coffee grinder might make.

‘That’s not true, of course,’ Guinevere felt compelled to add for the poor animal’s sake. Weldon tapped the hat again and the noise increased in pitch and volume, making it sound more like a blender.

While Myron had no capacity for multi-tasking, he was quite adept in the arena of hysterics and yelled, ‘You’re completely lock-me-up-and-throw-away-the-bloody-key crazy! You’re going to get my project canned. What’s the BFD? Keep this up, I’m going to have to go through myself with the last dregs of the budget.’

Guinevere shouted back over the blending noise, ‘I THINK ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS RE-CALIBRATE A LITTLE.’ After all, that was what Weldon had suggested, but given his penchant for jocularity, it might just send someone to the unpleasant surface of Io. No one would want that, certainly not Myron’s wife after failing to persuade her husband to take out some life insurance. Gate technology is dangerous, she had argued with some precision, but Myron had retorted with a watertight argument. He was not the one having to go through the gate, he had explained, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to point out Guinevere, the current project victim.

‘Why the hell are you shouting?’ asked Myron.

The grinding noise stopped. Weldon pulled the rabbit out the hat in one piece, with a mischievous, toothy grin. ‘See I do magic. See my great magic trick! I am bloody good. You love me, I think.’

The last thing the human race needs is to meet Weldon, Guinevere thought, as he was not exactly the god it had had in mind.

‘Oh dear dear,’ Weldon said, as one of the rabbit’s feet fell off, dropping back into the hat with an unsettling plop. ‘But this lucky charm, yes?’

The senator had met his wife at one of the churches on the election rounds two years earlier. He had spoken to the congregation, putting forward his personal opinions on the role of faith in political leadership. Although he was experienced in the art of public speaking and was as usual engaging every face in the audience, he felt that his focus had been on just one special lady. He had been hypnotised by her hungry eyes whose pupils blossomed with gorgeous intensity whenever he spoke, seemingly feeding on his tireless, impassioned oration; her appetite for his words was voracious. The effervescent chemistry that bubbled in the church that day could only have one conclusion. When God brings two perfectly matched people together, resistance is blasphemy, the senator joked at the wedding three months later.

“I will go with whatever you decide because I am here for you not for your career,” she said, beside him in the bed. “Just be sure that what you decide is what your heart truly wishes.” She laid her head on his shoulder.

He never wanted to be without this understanding, patient woman whose dark hair was a warm forest of delight. Snow White might be lost in this forest too, he thought, but she would never have cause to leave and Prince Charming would be in tears. It always smelt inviting; he kissed it with marital expertise. “I love you so, so much.”

He had watched Warren Beatty’s senator in Bulworth suffer a nervous breakdown and throw his career away just to say, for one exciting and subversive day, all of the truthful words that had been bottled up inside him. He had found the film amusing back then, despite its uncomfortable leanings to the left, but he did not find it amusing any more. He found it sad. “Honey, why don’t you turn the light out?” he asked.

His wife turned away to switch off the bedside lamp. The senator saw her breasts hang freely within her loose nightdress and felt not only pangs of tired lust but other, more important emotions. Gratitude. Humility. Responsibility. He wanted to be happy to enjoy her and start the family of five they had talked about. He needed to get off this doomed senatorial train permanently; the two of them rarely stopped at the same stations anymore.

In the darkness, the senator began a silent prayer. He wanted to ask for forgiveness for thinking the unthinkable thought and also, if God was not too upset with him already, for some guidance, a way out, a solution to his distress. Fitting the conversational trend of the evening, his prayer was also left unfinished – halfway through his mental recital he began to snore.

At 3:19 am, Elvis appeared in the bedroom.

Ten minutes later, the senator was roused from sleep by the sensation of being watched, but he thought he was dreaming when he saw the black silhouette of someone hunched over in the bedroom corner. In his semi-conscious state, he was unperturbed by this discovery and asked in a hoarse voice, “Who’s there?”

The silhouette did not move and the senator thought it might be a statue until the statue spoke. “It risssesss,” it whispered in an unnerving voice that sounded like the words were sculpted from white noise; a random, hissing, growling madness.

“What rises? Who are you?”

“You are Paragon!” it hissed. “Beeee my commandment!”

The senator slipped back into slumber unaware that Elvis continued to observe him for a full hour before taking his leave.

The first time Elvis appeared to him, the senator was submerged in deep sleep after a turbulent day of dealing with the pro-death lobby.

In the minutes before slumber took him, he was sitting upright in bed, his back cushioned by soft, luxurious pillows. Silk pyjamas wrapped his lean body under smooth, freshly cleaned sheets that his bare feet enjoyed, careening around in a reckless manner just to feel the gentle friction tickle his heels. The air conditioner guzzled humidity and regurgitated out a soundless, cool, dry breeze. Naturally, all he could think of was how uncomfortable he felt.

“I just can’t…” the senator started to say, unable to finish the difficult sentence. The day had bartered all of his energy for another double helping of regret. He had been compelled to enter into negotiation with the snap snap crocodiles of the liberal vanguard against his wishes, against his better judgement. He never let slip any of the words that he wanted to say. All the dynamism and self-confidence that had propelled him with great speed into the Senate had now become their own burden; keeping them under house arrest was painful and tiring.

“And I don’t want…” the senator said, giving birth to another sentence without a conclusion. It had started with small, bite-sized compromises here and there in pursuit of the bigger picture. The problem was that he was not the painter of this bigger picture, merely an adept enabler for someone else’s grand political artwork. This artwork had nothing to do with his own American vision and thus he realised he was just a tool, an implement to be employed at the administration’s discretion. He saw the Devil’s handiwork here.

“How can they…” the senator asked, shaking his head to try to wrest the words from it, but they would not come to his aid. He had known for years that it was the corporations that had used the American Dream to create a broken, soulless society that was held together by paper ideas of commerce and law. It was an era where the vote no longer counted, because the few people that did vote chose spectacle and pyrotechnics over knowledge and wisdom. With every election, the PR magicians were brought onto the stage again, to conjure up intriguing tales and wholesome images that would draw in the crowds. Unseen hands would cast ideological stones at opponents, identifying them as evil incarnate. The public had got the Hollywood politics they had encouraged, or perhaps deserved.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he eventually confessed. His wife, the most important thing in his life other than God, took his hand and squeezed it tight. She always gave him fortitude and support when he felt himself begin to waver. Love and compassion were the real fuels of the engine of society; there were in such short supply these days. Liberals talked about freedom and tolerance, when all they did was snipe and degrade. A daily diet of tragedy was their sustenance; death was their breakfast, rape their lunch and paedophilia their supper. War could satiate their wicked hunger for months.

This was the same forlorn place where he had been six years ago. The only difference now was that he was thoroughly exhausted. Hopelessness was around the next corner, ready to waylay him with the unthinkable thought. He was trying not to think the thought. The thought that the Lord had abandoned him.

“I suppose you checked him out, you paranoid piece of shit,” said Mr. Alpha. “And don’t give me that ‘observation is root’ crap. Your observations are not the most insightful, mate. Just take Grimmer today. I remember you said he was going to be a bloody pushover. Christ this tastes like shit.” He could not even bear the smell any more and plonked the glass down as far from himself as he could.

Mr. Omega did not reply to Mr. Alpha’s touching critique; something was wrong with the glass in Mr. Alpha’s hand. For all the hatred the young Clothman was directing at the hapless vessel, he had not let go of it, not even once. It seemed as if the glass were permanently attached to his hand, a new part of his body. And then: the penny dropped. For all his bluster and bitching, his junior was not taking their recent failures well. Mr. Alpha needed the beer all right, but not to drink and drown his selfish sorrows. Gripping the glass allowed him to control and conceal a secret, a rebellious tremble in his left hand. Observation is root.

Mr. Omega said, “I bloody hope The-God-To-Be, when we meet him, isn’t a bloody woman.”

“You what?”

Mr. Omega peered into the recesses of the cobwebs above, as if he was disinterested in the conversation. “A woman. That’s not my cup of tea, I can tell you.”

Mr. Alpha was confused. “So what?”

“Well, picture it, mate. I don’t want to be staring at the Almighty’s mighty jugs when I’m being judged. Do you think a mortal man, even a Clothman, could resist the perfect beauty of the divine bosom? What’s she going to think when she sees the rocket in my pocket?”

“I suppose it’s a good point, mate.” Mr. Alpha drank some more of the beer, without moaning this time, weighing up what Mr. Omega had said. “I wonder if she would consider it an affront if we didn’t have it upfront? Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me and all that.”

Mr. Omega chuckled, “You see! This kind of dilemma is exactly why The-God-To-Be has to be a bloke!” If Mr. Alpha had known about Ragnarok, the conversation would have taken a different turn. Mr. Omega would relate that particular open secret another day, when Mr. Alpha was neither so stressed nor so belligerent. Of course, he might still be waiting for that on his deathbed.

Mr. Omega continued, “Look, he’s not watching us, but I do think he’s in need of some cleansing.”

Mr. Alpha brightened a little and a smile seemed to be hiding behind his serious expression like sunlight threatening to peek through a gap in the clouds. “The old geezer with the pipe over there?”

“That’s exactly who I’m talking about. We have discretionary powers, mate. Time to apply a little of that magical discretion. The man has a pipe and that’s illegal. Illegal is immoral and that has to be seen to and cured. I think he had something going on with his dead niece, too.”

“Motherfucker,” gasped Mr. Alpha.

“Niecefucker is probably more accurate,” corrected Mr. Omega, which prompted a natural guffaw from both of them.

Mr. Alpha released his glass with a steady hand and stood up, empowered.

“Belief is rock,” he recited, staring through the dusty bottles stacked behind the bar, beyond the mirror behind the stacks and through the ramshackle office at the back where the obese barman once force-fed the old man’s niece his tongue and far more while she tried to fight with overpowered arms and tearful screams that no-one had heard. Mr. Alpha saw only the Weave.

“Truth is ghost,” answered Mr. Omega who also stood up with the same intense feeling of empowerment. They were invested with divine authority to tackle the most noble of challenges – to sew the Weave and bring about the future. His skin prickled with that familiar, thirsty anticipation and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He was ready for fixing sin, the only real vice of a Clothman.

And they took the dejected, lost old man from the pub and marched him to a gloomy niche fragrant with the stench of piss at the far end of the bridge tunnel.

And in that dark place bathed in shadow, they cured him together.

Although he had his own batch to draw from, Mr. Omega cocked his head to one side in disbelief. “How the fuck,” he said quietly, “can you not have lots of needles left, you stupid bastard? Didn’t you stock up when you had the chance?”

Mr. Alpha replied, “Jesus fucking Christ, I’m sorry, alright! If you hadn’t been giving me the shittiest time on the planet about Morgana then I might have remembered! It’s always your fucking fault but somehow, some fucking how, you pin it on me! You’re a top bloke, I mean it from the bottom of my fucking scrotum.”

Mr. Omega primed himself to fire back a most profane volley at the whiney, young twat but a scraping noise like claws on a blackboard beat him to a reply.

The Clothmen turned towards their captive to see that Grimmer had managed to launch the sofa across to a balcony that was fucking missing a fucking balustrade while they were arguing about fucking needles. He said, “Sends her love, gents,” and then eased the sofa backwards off the balcony as if pushing away gently on a child’s swing.

But it was no swing and Mr. Omega ran to the balcony mouthing the word “no”, the lenses of his overbearing glasses filled with the milky whiteness of desperate eyes. He was stunned to discover that Grimmer and the sofa were nowhere to be found when he peered over the edge. Five floors down, there was no trace of Grimmer’s suicidal descent. No interrogation subject. No chintz sofa. No, just no.

They raced back to Grimmer’s home but what they found was an empty house that seemed quite different from the one they had evicted Grimmer from. It now had all the appearance of a disused property that had been uninhabited for some years. It was just like one of the many other abandoned buildings that were frequented from time to time by abandoned people. Someone had shat on the bathroom floor a few inches away from the toilet, as if the toilet was too much trouble to reach. Litter was sprinkled across one of the bedroom floors like evil confetti made of shiny crisp packets and used fluorescent condoms. A rotten window frame had invited a howling, cold wind into the house, which filled the forsaken maisonette with unsettling, disembodied whisper. A small gap, a break in logic, a mistake in process: that was all that was needed for something to enter and penetrate… or for something to escape and expand.

Head in his hands, Mr. Omega said in Grimmer’s living room almost tearfully, “Holy giant mother of cock, you had to go screw it up again, didn’t you?”

It was an unrepentant Mr. Alpha that shouted, “What the fuck? You know I’m not the knots guy, I told you again and again. I don’t do fucking knots, please listen to my fucking words, read my bloody lips. No more taxes, I don’t do knots. I don’t know the first thing about knots and shit like that. I didn’t go to fucking girl scouts! I suppose you did and got all the fucking badges.”

Earlier that afternoon, they had found Grimmer. They had been told that Grimmer had been in contact with the renegade bitch, the foot-long thorn in their side. Of course, if Mr. Alpha had kept his fucking eyes on the ball in first place then they would not have needed to find Grimmer and they would still be assigned to the Weave as every Clothman is meant to be.

They dragged him out of his house by his hippy mane of hair, in front of his wife and children who Mr. Alpha, to his credit, shut up with a good, hard stare that would have made Medusa and her pretty sisters proud. They took him to the fifth floor of an abandoned block of flats, carefully decorated with graffiti and the colourful detritus of the broken lives of the homeless and the drug-bound. Strike one.

There were so many derelict buildings in the vicinity to choose from – it was more like the town itself had been abandoned, suffering from an unending economic quarantine after Thatcher’s government had put a bullet in the head of the coal industry. Grimmer had chosen his bolt-hole well. Or perhaps it had been that bitch who had done the choosing.

Mr. Omega strapped Grimmer to a faded sofa with a non-threatening flower design. Real flowers would have withered and died by now, but these flowers were consigned to a living death in discarded furniture, fabric trapped in a town where inconvenient lives had been conveniently brushed under the carpet. Mr. Omega used some aerial cables they had found lying around to lash Grimmer to the sofa in a makeshift arrangement that should have been sufficient to immobilise him. He asked Mr. Alpha to check the knots were tight. Strike two.

“My name is Mr. Omega. My partner here is Mr. Alpha,” opened Mr. Omega.

“Hi,” said Mr. Alpha.

Sniffing back tears and mucus, Grimmer said meekly, “Hello.”

“Where is she?” Mr. Omega asked.

Grimmer cried them a river, his unkempt beard becoming matted and salty in the process. “Please, please, oh my God, don’t kill me!”

“Where the fuck is the whore?” Mr. Alpha interrupted with a grandiose delusion of authority. Mr. Omega glared at him, irked because he told Mr. Alpha, in very precise and moron-proof terms, to keep his trap shut. They wanted to go back to the Weave and could not afford to screw this up.

“Please! I want to see my daughters grow up! Please! Please!” pleaded Grimmer.

Mr. Omega said, “We are of men of the Cloth. We do not hurt others out of desire, only need.”

“Not like you, you piece of shit,” Mr. Alpha spat, intervening again, rising so far above his station that if he slipped and fell back down to his station by some unfortunate mishap he would have broken his neck, and Mr. Omega would have been just fucking fine with that. “You probably want to see your sweet, pretty daughters grow up so you can touch them once they bloom. That’s what people like you do, isn’t it? When you’re not blaspheming in your hand, you’re blaspheming in your head, aren’t you? You fucking heretics make me sick.”

(Later, Mr. Alpha had tried to explain to Mr. Omega that he wanted to try out a good cop, bad cop strategy. Mr. Omega had glowered at him, retorting that they had higher standards than fucking cops.)

“Please! I don’t know who you’re talking about! Who is this woman you’re talking about? I haven’t done anything! Please, I love my wife so much! Oh sweet Jesus, please!” begged Grimmer, his face all sweat and tears. All he was missing was blood so Mr. Omega punched him in the nose.

Mr. Omega followed this with a kind request. “Will you please stop saying please?”

Grimmer was extremely apologetic, his face all blood, sweat and tears, and switched to saying sorry profusely instead. They did not have time for a long drawn-out interrogation so Mr. Omega said to Mr. Alpha, “Time for needles.”

His younger partner got out his needle-case, took a brief peek inside it and admitted, “Shit. I’ve only got a couple left.” Strike three, mate, you’re out.

“Old man,” Mr. Omega said to the old man. When the pipe and the cap did not respond, Mr. Omega repeated without change in intonation or volume, “Old man.”

The old man extricated himself from a private world. He had not been reading the paper at all, he had been daydreaming. Without removing the pipe from his mouth he said, in a garbled Scottish accent, “What can I do you for?”

Mr. Omega swelled up his body like a balloon, a seemingly difficult task for a man who knew someone else had called him a mop, and asked, “What are you doing, mate? What’s so interesting in this paper here, eh?”

The old man’s eyes became wistful and moist. He took in a deep breath and sighed with theatrical gravitas; he had obviously been taking a lot of deep breaths and doing a great deal of sighing for someone’s benefit. He shifted his position to reveal the pages he had been engrossed in and his bone dry mac squeaked with every movement.

There was a big-fucking-deal news story about a local death; some woman in her forties had slipped on a toy truck which had the ability to change into a robot and fallen from a second story window to her death. The old man said something that Mr. Omega could not make out because his emotional theatrics had wrestled the words into inaudibility.

“What? What did you say? Speak up,” Mr. Omega demanded.

“She was my little niece,” the old Scot explained. “She understood when no-one else-”

Mr. Omega turned around without a second’s hesitation and strode back to the bar with an impressive aura of disinterest. Although slipping on a child’s toy to your death from only the second story window was embarrassing, and toys which changed into robots were not even fucking cool anymore, it was probably not as bad as dying in two inches of water, the absolute minimum requirement for death by drowning. Mr. Omega had a Viking-like fear of dying an ignoble death. Mr. Alpha, ever the cheeky git, had enlightened Mr. Omega that Klingons also shared this belief. “A Clothman with Klingon philosophy, that’s got to look good on the CV, man.”

Plus, he thought some more, at least your niece is dead. Be grateful for the small mercies that The-God-To-Be graces you with. Tragedy is final and comprehensible.

What had attracted Mr. Omega’s eye was the newspaper. The headline was at least a year old – Britain Gives In, Stubs Out: Smoking Illegal – and the old man had not turned a single page since they had entered the pub. He puffed his pipe, crossed his legs, uncrossed his legs and put on the best heartfelt performance bar none of “ordinary elderly gentleman #6”. While Mr. Omega knew his reaction would probably be mistaken by that young fuck for hair-trigger paranoia, he was merely well versed in the teachings of the fearsome Cloth pedagogues. Observation is root, it was said. The old man was feigning the bystander.

“That twat needs to be dealt with,” Mr. Omega said to Mr. Alpha.

Mr. Omega scanned his memory, wondering if he had seen the old man before. Was there something… familiar… about that hunched-over figure? That dull, navy mac that seemed as if it had endured many a bad day at sea. Those bifocals bent slightly out of shape, that a little money could easily have fixed. Those white threads of hair shooting out from beneath a cap like the fading smoke trails of a firework. It all came together. Mr. Omega was jolted with sudden, shocking certainty – he had never seen this man before in his entire life.

“I want to check him out,” Mr. Omega said, turning to Mr. Alpha who was engaged in uncharacteristically amiable banter with the bar man.

“I can get some in,” said the bar man.

“Don’t worry about it man,” Mr. Alpha responded, “we won’t be around these parts again.”

The bar man broke into a smile of relief, complete with missing teeth and bad breath.

Mr. Omega asked the little shit who was still playing with his half-empty glass, “Well, what do you fucking think?”

Mr. Alpha turned to Mr. Omega and responded with restrained eloquence. “What the pig god of fuck are you whittering on about?”

“Manners, boy. Why don’t you go wash your mouth out with some fucking soap? I am talking about Mr. I-am-so-fucking-minding-my-own-business sucking on a pipe over there. He’s watching us. He’s been reading the same fucking page of that paper ever since we got in.” Mr. Omega banged the bar with his fist, startling both Mr. Alpha and the bar man, to add emphasis that he thought necessary to ram the point home like a blunt pencil through an eye.

Mr. Alpha answered politely but a smirk piggybacked his words. “Well I guess he obviously needs checking out.”

“I’m going to check him out, mate.”

“You do that. I’ll be right here. With this fucking sodding beer.” Having apparently reminded himself of his difficult plight, Mr. Alpha suddenly yelled at the dead air in the pub, “I can’t believe you don’t have any bloody lager!”

The air appeared rather unmoved by his outburst, but the bar man began to waddle backwards with his hands clenched into incomplete fists against his chest, as if securing the remainder of his life within them, a valuable treasure that would never be recovered if stolen.

Mr. Alpha responded, “I really fucking hate beer. There’s no lager, fuck it.” He looked up at the sweaty blob of a man behind the bar whose vertical dimensions paled in comparison with his horizontal ones. He was a walking, breathing, nightmarish advert for the alcoholic delights available in his fine establishment, although how much longer he would be walking and breathing for would be anyone’s guess. “Why don’t you have any lager, mate?”

The bar man reached under the bar and pulled out a sea-blue cap like a rabbit out of hat. He put it on back-to-front, clashing with the lime green polo shirt that failed in its one and only task: to shield an unsuspecting world from his blubber. He leaned forward with his best intimidating face. “I was in the marines, lad.”

“That twat needs to be dealt with,” Mr. Omega said to Mr. Alpha.

With the conciliatory tone of a dictator armed with an arsenal of WMDs that could be launched in 45 minutes, Mr. Alpha said to the bar man, “Too fucking right he does. You don’t like the suit, is that it? It wasn’t my fucking choice, alright? Or is it you don’t like a couple of Londoners in your quaint toilet water of a town that no one wants to fucking visit anyway? What’s your problem, mate? An ex-marine, huh? What did you fuck up to get yourself kicked out of the marines?”

The bar man leaned forward even more, which was an impressive feat considering the enormous bulk of his belly had already invaded half the bar with such aggressive force that war crimes had surely been committed. “I did my time, lad. What have you ever done for your country?”

Mr. Alpha had been taught to apply the tools of implication and intent in confrontations whenever possible; action carried the possibility of unwanted exposure. He responded to the fool’s manoeuvre by staring directly into the bar man’s gaze while sliding the half-full beer glass aside with calculated deliberation that implied the potentiality of an event between them. His face seemed to harden and became like sculpted granite. Emotions were no longer in attendance.

“You don’t want to fucking know what I’ve done,” Mr. Alpha began coldly. “You really don’t want to fucking know. You want to mind your own fucking business, you fucking fat shithead. Truth is ghost.” He did not blink, but did permit himself a soft smile, knowing that this would not come to blows.

The bar man acquiesced and retreated with his own smile, a weak, conciliatory alternative to Mr. Alpha’s composed edition. He had realised, at last, that he was in the presence of dangerous urban legends made flesh. Tread lightly, Mr. Alpha had intimated, because it is thin bloody ice beneath your encumbered feet this day.