Sometimes a beer is just a beer.
Harry took another swig from his bottle and sighed at the burning satisfaction it left in his chest. When he pulled it away from his lips it was two-thirds empty.
For some reason, Lucas had begun staring at him inquisitively from inside the flickering cocoon of his candle-light. “So what’s your story, fella?” he asked Harry. “What’s the meaning of your life?”
Harry swigged the last of his beer then pushed the bottle toward Steph, who was already on the case with a replacement. “My life,” he said, “has no meaning. Not anymore.”
Lucas frowned. “Come now, everybody’s life has meaning. We all have a purpose.”
“Really? Then why don’t you tell me what mine is, because I sure as hell don’t know.”
“I can’t tell you that.” Lucas smiled. “Every man has to find his own path and his own destination. Who knows though, maybe you’ll find yours tonight.”
Harry started on his next beer with a hearty swig, gasping for breath afterwards. He looked Lucas square in the face. “Sorry, but I find that hard to believe.”
Lucas stared back, his face unflinching like a handsome slab of sculpted granite. He patted Harry on the back. “Well, Harry Boy, perhaps what you need is a little more faith.”
“Faith? You think I should believe that there’s some almighty-being up there responsible for everything that happens?”
Lucas shook his head. “Like hell I do! Everything that happens down here is because of man and man alone. The Good Lord’s not here to babysit us. We can only blame ourselves for the things that happen in our lives. Well, we can blame ourselves or other people.”
Harry felt his blood heat up, fighting back against the chill in his veins. He took offence to a stranger offering him ‘life-advice’. No one could understand what he’d been through. Harry looked down at the scar on his hand, shaped like a star, and thought about the events that led to it; thought about Julie and Toby twisted and shattered in the remains of the bright-red Mercedes he’d been so proud to buy. Only 8,000 miles on the clock. Good as new! That night Harry had discovered that material possessions meant nothing, as the only truly important things in his life slowly bled away from him. There had been so much damage that he couldn’t tell where his wife and child’s broken bodies ended and the crumpled metal of the car began. It looked like some abominable piece of modern art sculpture. Harry had fallen from the car with nothing more than a bad headache and a scratched nostril; he was free to watch as his family died in front of him, one laboured breath at a time. Where had the justice been in that?
“Whoever is to blame for my life,” Harry told Lucas, “can go screw themself.”
Lucas moved a half-step away from Harry. “Easy, fella, not looking for an argument. You just seem like a bit of a lost soul, and I like to take an interest.”
“An interest in lost souls?”
“Absolutely. The only wisdom left to be found is from the pain men feel, and you strike me as a man with a belly full of it.”
Harry put down his beer. If he was honest he didn’t really know what the man was trying to get at. “Sorry to let you down,” he said, “but I don’t feel anything. Not anymore.”
Lucas continued smiling, as though he had the wisdom of the world in his back pocket and was about to share it. “You can lie to me, Harry boy, but it would be a shame to lie to yourself. Men who say they feel nothing, usually feel too much. And that always leads to trouble. That, my friend, I can promise you.”
Harry moved away from Lucas.
###
The Trumpet was an old pub with an old history. A baby boy had once been born in its claustrophobic toilets, the England Cricket team had once rented the place out after a win in nearby Edgbaston, and someone had even been murdered there once (although that was a long time ago). It was a place with personality, history, and colour. A proud relic of working men’s pubs. Full of ‘proper blokes’ clocking off from a hard day’s graft for a fag and a pint. But, like all relics, its day had come and gone. Now, the fag smoking was ostracised to exist only outside the building, the over-taxed beer was high-priced and watered down, and the colour had faded as literally as the bleak wallpaper.
Things had not turned out the way Damien’s father had led him to expect. The golden years of smoke-filled boozers, loose women, and high-grade drugs had been clamped down on. Drugs were getting harder and harder to push and women were getting harder and harder to shag – stupid TV shows like Sex And The City making them think they had the right to self-respect. It had taken all the fun out of being a gangster.
Screw it! He’d been born in the wrong time. There was no tradition anymore. Damien’s father and Grandfather had drunk in The Trumpet and had pretty much run the place in their days. Now you had people like this fuckface Irishman waltzing in and acting like they owned the joint after just five minutes.
He needs to be taught a lesson about who really runs this place! In fact he needs a good smack, just so he remembers.
Damien stood from the sofa and turned towards the bar. He had enough to deal with tonight without loud-mouthed strangers giving him headache.
###
When Harry saw Damien rise up from the sofa, and start making his way toward the bar, he cringed. “Shit!” he whispered in Steph’s direction, hopeful that her authority behind the bar would be enough to stem any bad behaviour. He’d seen Damien’s lack of hospitality towards strangers before and it was something he could go without seeing again.
Damien moved towards the middle of the bar, towards Lucas, and stopped half-a-foot away from the Irishman. He stared intensely like a sight-impaired person reading a menu. Lucas behaved as if he hadn’t noticed, facing forward and sipping from his bottle calmly. Damien continued to glare, eyeballs bulged like squids and only inches from Lucas’s face.
Lucas leant over the bar toward Steph and spoke in a very clear voice. “Darling, you want to tell this young fella to wind his neck in before his peepers fall out on my shoes?”
Harry waited for combustion as the air in the room seemed to disappear, everyone in the bar sucking in their lungs like a disordered line of vacuum cleaners.
Lucas turned his head to Damien, who looked like he was about to go off like a firework. “Listen, laddy, I’m not a work of art, so take your beady little eyes off me and find something better to do.”
That’s it, Harry thought. The cat turd just hit the propeller.
Damien’s face contorted like a broken whiskey bottle, full of crags and sharp edges. His wiry arm drew back as his young body tensed up, ready to unleash a furious right hook.
In a move that seemed both casual and urgent at the same time, Lucas stepped back from the bar and slinked past his stool with leopard-like grace. At the precise moment Damien’s punch began its arcing descent towards him, Lucas threw a punch of his own. It was quick – it was vicious – and it connected perfectly with Damien’s incoming fist. There was a loud crack as the two men’s knuckles collided at full force.
“Goddamnit!” Damien howled, clutching his withered hand against his abdomen. “Jesus-goddamn-Christ!”
Lucas – who was clutching his own injured hand – began to laugh in what seemed like genuine amusement. “Not quite – but I’ll send you to go see him if you try that bollocks again, you little shithead.”
Damien glared. “You’re dead!”
“Wrong again, Sonny Jim. Unless you mean dead bored, which if I’m honest, I’m starting to get a wee bit. You’re keeping a man from his drink.”
Damien looked more furious than Harry had ever seen him. He was about to speak, no doubt to make more threats, but Steph cut him off first – not with her voice, but with the landlord’s bell pulled out from under the bar. She rang it vigorously in the faces of the two arguing men.