‘’Ere, I want my pint,’ he half growled, making a real attempt to appear aggressive.
‘Now, now...’ began Charlie.
Kelly sighed again. If there was one person in the world who knew all about dealing with drunks, it was John Kelly. After all, he’d been there. In spades.
‘It’s all right, mate,’ he said. ‘Come and sit down with me, and I’ll get you another one.’
He steered the boy to a table by the wall and more or less pushed him into a chair. There was something about Kelly that allowed him to get away with it where another man might not. Perhaps even in his drunken state the lad could sense something of Kelly’s chequered past.
At the bar he ordered a pint of ginger ale for the lad and another pint of Diet Coke for himself, resigned to the fact that he was going to do nothing constructive with the rest of that night, anyway, so he might just as well stay a little longer in The Dog. The ginger ale was warm, wet, pale brown and slightly fizzy. Kelly had a small bet with himself that the boy wouldn’t even notice that it wasn’t a pint of bitter.
He put the drink on the table next to the young Scotsman who picked it up and downed half of it in one swallow. Then he sat back in his seat and studied the glass in his hand with some puzzlement. For a moment it seemed he may not have been fooled and that he was about to comment on the true nature of its contents, but Kelly didn’t give him chance to dwell on the matter.
‘You a squaddie or something?’ he asked.
Alan did not reply but looked directly at Kelly, obviously making a determined effort to focus. In his eyes there was just a glimpse of something beyond drunken incomprehension, but Kelly was not quite sure what it was.
‘Well, are you?’ Kelly repeated.
Alan nodded, reached for his glass again and, in doing so knocked it from the table so that it fell, sending a cascade of ginger ale over both Kelly and himself. The glass smashed into hundreds of small pieces on the flagstoned floor.
‘Shit,’ said Kelly.
Alan slumped back in his chair, eyes blank again, looking as if he was only vaguely aware of what was happening.
‘Right,’ said Charlie, finally playing the role of publican, as he approached from behind the bar with a cloth and a dustpan and brush. ‘That’s it. You’re out of here, mate.’
The order was entirely wasted. Alan’s eyes were closed and he seemed to have fallen asleep, or certainly slumped into drunken semi-consciousness.
‘It’s all right, Charlie, I’ll sort him out,’ said Kelly, who had been unceremoniously removed from more than his fair share of pubs in his time and saved from the same fate in numerous others thanks only to the assistance of various drinking companions.
Kelly shook the young man by the shoulders. Alan’s eyes shot open, unnaturally wide.
‘Look, I think you could do with a bit of a helping hand, old son,’ he said gently. ‘Where are you stationed? Why don’t I call one of your mates. Somebody will come and pick you up, for certain.’
‘No. No, I don’t want that. No. You mushn’t call anyone.’ Alan shouted. He was still having difficulty getting his words out, but he had no difficulty whatsoever with his message. Kelly was mildly surprised by the strength of his reaction. He sounded quite alarmed at the prospect of being collected by his army mates.
‘Well, you can’t stay here, you know,’ Kelly continued. ‘Maybe I could drop you off.’
It wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He might just as well, he thought. It would get him out of the pub anyway, and maybe on the road back to a late-night writing session after all.
‘No.’ The boy was adamant.
‘Well, how else are you going to get back to your billet, Alan? Don’t tell me you’ve got a vehicle parked outside? There’s no way you could drive, anyway.’
Alan shook his head, in an almost dreamy sort of way. ‘No, I walked here, didn’t I?’
‘Right.’ Kelly thought for a moment, trying to remember an army base within anything like walking distance of The Wild Dog. He knew the moors, indeed that whole area of South Devon, extremely well, but could think of nowhere military nearby.
‘So where did you walk from?’ he asked casually.
‘Hangridge,’ replied the boy, and then seemed to realise that he’d divulged information he had not intended to. ‘But I’m not bloody going back there, so don’t even think about it,’ he continued, so emphatically that for just a moment he sounded almost sober.
‘Hangridge,’ Kelly repeated. He knew about the place, of course. The isolated barracks built on a remote Dartmoor hilltop was the headquarters of the Devonshire Fusiliers and a major infantry training base. Farmers settled in moorland valleys, the army always chose hilltops. Hangridge was known not only for its bleakness, exposed by its geography to the most vicious of Dartmoor’s elements, but also for the toughness of the regime endured by the young recruits stationed there. But the Devonshire Fusiliers was an elite regiment with a proud history, and Hangridge’s training programme was designed to produce only top-notch professional soldiers. Idly, Kelly wondered how a Scots lad had come to join a regiment which he knew still drew around sixty per cent of its intake from Devon, its home county.
Kelly had been to Hangridge once, the previous year when his paper had sent him to cover an anniversary visit by the minor royal who was the regiment’s colonel in chief, but for a moment he couldn’t quite place its exact location in relation to The Wild Dog. He attempted to visualise a map of Dartmoor. The pub was on the south side of the moor, on one of the highest points of the road between the villages of Hexworthy and Buckfast, just forty-five minutes’ or so drive out of Torquay. Hangridge was considerably further north, on the far side of the moor heading towards Okehampton. Kelly half closed his eyes, trying to measure the distances involved.
‘Shit, Hangridge must be almost twenty miles away,’ he said. ‘And you say you walked here?’
‘I yomped it,’ muttered the boy, suddenly exhibiting just a flash of the military pride for which the Devonshire Fusiliers were famous. ‘Came over the hills, didn’t I? Not sho far that way.’
He slumped into his seat again, the moment of near-erudite diction behind him, his legs thrust out before him. For the first time, Kelly noticed that his jeans were stained with mud almost to the knees and that his boots were also caked in mud. A damp parka lay in a pile on the floor over by the bar.
‘That’s still quite a march for a pint,’ said Kelly mildly.
Alan glanced around the bar before he replied. Kelly thought he seemed nervous.
‘I was heading for the main road. I was going to hitch a ride. But I was wet through and so bloody cold...’
Alan interrupted himself with a sudden bout of hiccups.
Kelly finished his sentence for him.
‘So you came in here. Where were you going on a night like this, anyway?’
‘None of your fucking business,’ Alan replied through his hiccups.
‘Fine,’ said Kelly, who had too much experience of drunks to be offended. ‘But you’ve had a few now, so why don’t I run you back to Hangridge. It won’t take long in a car.’
He was unsure of why he was prepared to go so far out of his way. After all, the barracks were almost directly in the opposite direction to Torquay. Was he just being kind, or was his generous offer prompted rather more by the curiosity he was already beginning to feel about this young man? Something did not add up, and Kelly could never resist even the hint of a good human riddle.
However, he had no time for further introspection. Alan reacted almost as if Kelly had hit him. He shot upright in his chair and would no doubt have jumped to his feet had he been capable of such sudden movement.