The Final Winter

Chapter Six

Harry shivered as he started his next beer. It was getting colder and the scar on the back of his hand started to ache in response, reminding him of things he’d rather forget. Things he drank to forget. He swigged deeply from his beer bottle.

The Irishman, Lucas, turned his attention to Old Graham at the end of the bar. “So, Father Time, you must have been around a fair few turns of the world? You ever see snow like this before?”

“Well,” Old Graham began, visibly delighted at being the centre of attention. “There was a time in the fifties where things got a little chilly as I recall; and of course me old man told tales of winter in the Ardennes that sounded far more hellish than this.”

Nigel piped up from the opposite end of the bar. “Yeah, well that’s the Ardennes. It’s normal to have snow there. The amount we’ve had here the past couple days isn’t natural. Not to mention that it’s snowing everywhere. All over the world. In every country. Maybe it’s because of the ozone layer or something?”

Lucas chuckled. “Give over, man! You think a couple of cow farts has the ability to change the weather?”

Harry joined the debate. “What do you put the snow down to then, Lucas? I mean I haven’t known it to ever snow half as much as this. It certainly seems like something made the weather mad.”

“The world is a gazillion years old,” said Lucas, putting his beer bottle down on the bar as if to make a point. “I bet there’s been weather like this before – just not in your lifetime. It’s a tad unusual, no doubt, but I don’t believe in all that ozone layer nonsense.”

Nigel seemed disgruntled in the light of his candle, maybe even angry. “That’s your opinion, isn’t it?” he said. “Don’t mean I’m not right. We’ve been abusing this planet for decades and it can’t go on forever.”

Lucas put up his hands. “Calm down there, fella, no need to get your hackles up. It’s just the beer talking, you know? Makes me feel a thousand times older and wiser than I should ever admit to. You’re probably right though, humanity has been abusing God’s green earth for a fair few years now, and maybe it can’t go on forever. But, right now, my only concern is having a good time with a wee tipple to keep me warm.” He looked at Steph and winked. “And maybe a good woman wouldn’t go amiss either.”

“You’re an alcoholic letch,” said Nigel, a candle-lit half-smile on his face.

As I said before, I’ve come to the right place then.” Lucas laughed out loud, hoisted his bottle up into the air and said “cheers!” The others joined him in the toast, although the word alcoholic being bandied around made Harry feel uncomfortable. It was such a dirty word that encompassed so many types of people. Not everyone drank for the same reasons. Not everyone had to deal with the same burdens.

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 fuck 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 fuck – 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 shit 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.

“Fuck!” 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.

“Pack this shit in!” she hollered. “I’m in no mood for child’s play. Especially from you!” She scowled at Damien. “It’s freezing cold, we’re all stuck here, and we’re in the bloody dark. Do you two not think we have things bad enough without fisticuffs? Because you know something? If one of you gets hurt, I doubt there’s an ambulance in the world that can get here tonight.”

Or even this week, Harry thought.

Damien allowed his glare to turn into a grimace, before finally settling on a look of irritation. Lucas got back on his stool and quickly finished off his beer. He slid the empty toward Steph and said, “Two more, please. One for me and one for my new friend here with the broken hand.”

Damien hissed. “It isn’t broken, and I’m not your pissing friend.”

“Well,” said Lucas, offering a bottle of beer to Damien. “Perhaps you should be. It would make life easier.”

“Come on, Damien,” said Nigel from the far end of the bar. “If we’re all stuck here, we may as well have a drink together. Could even be a laugh.”

Damien turned his animalistic stare to the large, sweaty man at the end of the bar. “You think I want to waste a minute hanging around with a bunch of losers like you?”

Harry took offence. Being called a loser by a piece of scum like Damien did not sit well with him at all. “We don’t want to be stuck with you either,” he said, “but shit happens.”

Damien turned his glare to Harry, his body coiled and trembling like a pissed off panther. A panther ready to attack, thought Harry, regretting his comment already.

Before further words were exchanged though, Lucas pushed the bottle of beer towards Damien. “How bouts I buy your beers all night if you sit down and join in? Be an amicable chappy!”

Damien smirked. “I don’t need you to buy my drinks. I have enough money to buy your whole fucking family.”

Lucas smiled his cheeky grin. “I very much doubt that, lad, but why don’t we say I’m doing it to show my respect. I’m the new boy here and I obviously don’t know how things work now, do I? So accept my offer as an apology.”

Harry watched in anticipation as Damien scrutinised the man’s suggestion, but it seemed obvious that it had settled down his need for bravado. Harry admired Lucas’s savvy. The man had swallowed his own sense of pride and manipulated Damien into behaving. The young thug thought he’d won, but it was apparent to everyone else at the bar that Lucas had just used a modicum of intelligence to control the situation.

“Okay,” Damien finally said, snatching the bottle from Lucas. “Guess I can lower myself for one night and share a few beers with the peasants.”

Everyone was happy to ignore the insult, ready to play along with Lucas’s charade if it meant having peace. They raised their beers in the air and mumbled agreement.

Lucas put his hand on the bar; it was swollen and red in the candle light. “Don’t suppose you could get me some ice, luv?”

Steph sighed and nodded. “Sure.”

Damien suddenly slammed down his own fist on the bar and made the rest of them jump. Like Lucas, his hand was also swollen. “Yeah, I think I could do with some too.”

There was a brief silence before Damien began laughing. It was the least hostile Harry had ever seen the lad and, before long, the entire bar was sipping their drinks and laughing right along with him. The tension seemed to float away.

But Harry had a feeling it wouldn’t last.