He took a deep drag on his cigarette, then hastily removed it from his mouth. Kelly made his own roll-ups, and this one had burned so close to the end that it felt dangerously hot to his lips. He stubbed out the remains in an overflowing ashtray. Its contents were all Kelly’s own work, an unedifying pile of tobacco waste produced entirely by his own appallingly abused lungs. Smoking was Kelly’s sole remaining vice, although he’d only given up the others because he’d had no choice. He smoked a lot and he didn’t care any more. The only thing about smoking he intended to give up was even pretending that he wanted to stop.
Automatically, he reached for the tobacco and the packet of Rizla papers in his pocket. Then the boy on the floor made a sort of half-strangled gurgling sound. The elderly couple bent their heads so close to their plates of lasagne it looked as if they might be about to disappear into them. Kelly glanced down at the boy without enthusiasm. Oh, shit, he thought.
‘Charlie,’ he called anxiously across the bar. ‘Charlie.’
The young man rolled over onto his side and made an unsuccessful attempt to rise up on one shoulder.
‘Charlie,’ called Kelly again. There was no reply. Kelly leaned over the bar and peered down through the open trap door. There was a light shining up from below, but if Charlie was still in the cellar he made no response. The pub was built on the side of a hill and Kelly knew that there was a delivery door to one side of the cellar leading out into the yard and the beer garden beyond. If the night outside were not so bleak he might have suspected that Charlie had finally done a runner, for which Kelly would not have blamed him one bit. Charlie, a city boy who had previously been a motor insurance salesman, readily told the story of how throughout his adulthood he had dreamed the romantic dream of life as a country publican. But The Wild Dog, while being just the place for a writer who can’t write to torture himself in, had given Charlie a rude awakening, Kelly reckoned. It was, in Kelly’s opinion, a morgue in the winter and a tourists’ hellhole in the summer.
Wondering what on earth he was doing in the place anyway, Kelly leaned a little further across the bar, until his attention was again demanded by more gurgling sounds from the floor. He swung round on the stool for another look. The young man’s eyes were popping and his lower jaw drooped alarmingly. Kelly had a dreadful feeling he knew what was going to happen next. And he was right. The young man began to retch, great heaving motions racking his body.
‘Oh, fuck,’ said Kelly.
He’d always been able to move fast for a big man, and somewhat amazingly he still could. In a single smooth movement he was alongside and bending over the fallen drinker. With one hand, he caught hold of the collar of the boy’s jacket at the back of his neck, while at the same time hooking the other beneath one of his arms.
‘Right, sunshine, up!’ he yelled.
The couple eating their supper shrunk further into their chairs, their heads buried even deeper into their lasagne. Meanwhile the young man, perhaps startled into something loosely resembling consciousness by Kelly’s authoritative voice, began to at least come close to finding his feet, and, with Kelly’s help, rose almost upright, still retching. Ducking to avoid the gnarled old beams laced across the pub’s low ceiling, Kelly half dragged, half lifted him into the gents’ toilet, kicking open the door with one foot. Once inside, he pushed the boy’s head into the nearest latrine. He knew there wouldn’t be time to get him into a cubicle.
They only just made it. The boy was at once resoundingly sick. Kelly leaned against the door breathing heavily. He might still be able to move fast, but all those years of self-abuse had left him monumentally short of breath nowadays whenever he took any form of exercise, however brief. And heaving a near dead-weight drunk into a toilet was actually a pretty demanding sort of exercise.
Kelly began to feel slightly nauseous himself. But he stood his ground. He told himself he didn’t want the lad to choke on his own vomit, and that he was quite out of his head enough to do so. But there was also a further element of self-punishment about it. So-called writers who spend the best part of an entire day playing computer games don’t deserve to have a good time. It seemed only right and proper to Kelly that he should suffer that day.
The boy remained slumped over the latrine for several seconds after he had finished vomiting, before lurching to one side and swinging himself around, leaning against the wall for support, so that he was looking directly towards Kelly. His face was flushed and blotchy, and he was of very average height and build, but through the drunkenness Kelly could see that this was an extremely fit young man. There was not an ounce of spare flesh on him, and his light reddish-brown hair was cut extremely short, shaven at the back and sides and only slightly longer on top. He could well be a boy soldier or a young wannabe marine out of Plymouth, thought Kelly idly as he turned away to bend over a washbasin in order to splash his own face with cold water.
‘What’s your name, mate?’ he asked conversationally, straightening up and running the fingers of one hand through his thinning, once black hair.
The boy focused on him uncertainly, his eyes still glazed. He did not speak.
‘Your name?’ repeated Kelly, rather more loudly, and with exaggerated clarity.
‘Whassit to you,’ came the muttered reply.
‘I was going to buy you a drink,’ responded Kelly. ‘And I only buy drinks for people whose names I know.’
Kelly spoke the language of drunks. He understood the logic. He was quite sure of the response he would get to that remark, and he was not disappointed.
‘Oh, right, yeah. It’sh Alan, my name’sh Alan.’ The young man spoke with a heavy Scottish accent which made it even more difficult to decipher his slurred tones. But Kelly managed it.
‘OK Alan, time for a bath.’
Kelly moved quickly again, crossing the small room in two long strides and once more catching hold of the young man by the back of his jacket. Then he half dragged him, barely protesting at all, over to the basin, which he had already filled with water, and dunked his head in it. Alan spluttered a bit, but was uncomplaining when Kelly let go of his head and allowed him to stand upright again, or rather, as near to upright as he could manage. He was still very drunk and his eyes were glazed as, dripping water over himself, he propped himself uncertainly against the washbasin. Kelly threw him a handful of paper towels, then, reckoning he’d done quite enough thank you, and that it was time to leave the lad to it, he headed for the door back into the bar.
‘Just clean yourself up, there’s a good boy,’ he said.
With the resilience of youth Alan seemed to recover almost immediately, enough to be able to walk, anyway, which in his case that night was a considerable improvement. He quickly followed Kelly into the bar, arriving just as the would-be writer was settling on his stool again and as Charlie emerged from the trap door.
The lad looked uncertainly around him. ‘Where’sh my pint?’ he asked, still barely able to get the words out, and equally unable to see that his half-full glass remained where he had left it further up the bar.
Charlie, perhaps indicating that he had been well enough aware of what was going on but had chosen to leave Kelly to deal with it, promptly removed the glass of beer, but was not quite quick enough. The young man, with perhaps surprising comprehension under the circumstances, both saw and grasped exactly what was happening.