“It’s Owen, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Owen.”
“Some of us are going for a drink, if you fancy it?”
“I don’t really drink.”
“Well, have a coffee or something?”
He looked at his watch. “Okay, yeah. Alright.”
Now, as you can probably guess, the Railway Arms was not the sort of bar that served coffee. There was no family area or smoke-free zone, traditional bar meals were not served all day, and there was no wine list. There was a quiz night every Monday, and it was the sort of quiz where all the rounds were about horse racing or the filmography of Clint Eastwood, where any question about the periodic table or South American geography was met with cries of, “It’s no University Challenge!” and, “Come on, Paxman, this is a working man’s pub.”
However, Spocky didn’t know this. Spocky joined us, and this slight deviation, this jolt, would veer us into the future, reminding us that stories can be retold, that we don’t always have to follow the tracks, that sometimes people like Owen can make a difference.
“Jerry? Gordon’s here,” called Deborah as we entered the bar. “Drinking in the afternoon again, Gordon? Hi Wayne. Jesus, who’s died?”
“One of our customers,” said Lucy.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Deborah. “I thought yous were looking glum.”
“He used tae drink in here sometimes,” said Gordon.
“Oh, really? Here, Jerry, listen to this—one of the punters has passed on.”
“Oh aye, who’s that then?” asked Jerry without looking up from his paperwork.
“Old bloke,” I said. “Big guy. Lot of gold rings.”
“What was he called?” asked Deborah.
“Dinnae ken,” said Gordon.
“He had a frozen face, kind of like—” Buzz girned an impersonation of the Teddy Boy’s paralysed face.
“Who would that be, Jerry?”
Jerry peered over his half moons. “Naebody ah ken; looks like the Queen Mum.”
“His face was kind of pockmarked,” said Kit.
Deborah shook her head.
“He liked Elvis,” I said.
“You sure he drank in here?” asked Deborah.
A man with a big moustache, who’d been listening to the conversation from his seat at the end of the bar, now put down his newspaper. “Sure, that’s yer man. What did ye call him—Jesus, hang on. He had a tattoo of Elvis, so he did. Gary… Gary Thompson his name was.”
“Oh aye,” said the old man with the pipe, “he’s always playing that bloody jukebox. The boy’s a pain in the arse. What aboot him, anyway?”
“He’s passed on,” said the guy with the moustache.
“No he hasnae.”
“According to these young ones he has.”
“Havers—he was here not forty-five minutes ago.”
“Aye,” said Gordon, “then he went across the road and died.”
“Well, fancy that. It’s this wind, I tell you; it’s the Devil,” said Deborah. “I ken who you mean now. Gary… Are you sure his name was Gary?”
The old man looked sceptical. “Across the road where?”
“That burger shop,” said Deborah.
“Ach no. That’s no place tae die.”
Deborah shook her head. “Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it?” She smiled at Lucy. “What can I get you love?”
7
Nobody knows exactly how Benny’s Resistance Army started. Conventional history focuses on Spocky for introducing the idea and on Buzz for suggesting the name; Marxist interpretations point to a developing conflict between material productive forces and existing relations of production; the feminist analysis contends that Kit and Lucy’s contributions have traditionally been under-theorised. The truth is that nobody remembers: Spocky had gone home and the rest of us were pissed. This isn’t a problem if you’re writing about the Warsaw Pact or the Declaration of Independence. Nowhere in Robert Service’s three-volume biography of Lenin will you find “The Politburo was divided over whose idea it had been to introduce War Communism: Trotsky blamed Stalin, who pointed to Kamenev, who insisted it had been Comrade Lenin himself. The truth is that nobody remembered; they had all been absolutely steamboats.” But such were our inauspicious beginnings.
However, regardless of the ins and outs of the matter, by December’98, Kieran was convinced that a plot existed, that some kind of intrigue was being spirited by some sort of… cabal. Although his understanding of the conspiracy was vague, he was certain he’d identified at least some of the conspirators. In Kieran’s version, Spocky was the commander-in-chief, while Buzz, Gordon, and I were his lieutenants. Kieran wrote lengthy reports with titles such as “Staff refuse orders and vote for who should empty the bin,” or “Plug from sink missing, theft suspected.” He always included the full names of suspects and witnesses, along with the exact times and dates. When he finished a report he would read it back to us and close by musing “Dawn’s going to be very interested to read this. Oh yeah.”
But Dawn, the restaurant manager, wasn’t interested in much that happened at Benny’s. She referred to items of equipment as “The thingummyjig... you know, the big thing that makes that loud noise.” The only work she had any enthusiasm for was typing signs—she enjoyed typing signs. Maybe she’d have continued to ignore Kieran’s paranoid intelligence reports had several of her signs not been defaced. In Kieran’s reports, this vandalism, like the power cut in November, like the time the drains blocked and the kitchen flooded with faeces, like the time he lost his fucking car keys, was attributed to conspiratorial sabotage.
“Have you, or have you not, been drawing penises on official company notices?” Dawn had a scrotum beneath her chin, and it swayed from side to side when she spoke. Face up on her desk, next to a bumper book of puzzles, lay a freshly printed notice:
IMPORTANT: ALL STAFF!!!
THE NOTICEBOARDS AND
NOTICES THEM ARE
COMPANY PROPERLY!!
ANYBODY TAMPERING
WITH OR REMOVING OR
DEFACING GOMPANY
NOTICES WILL BE
DISCIPLINED!!
YOU HAVE BEEN
WARNED!!!!!!!
