Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

The carpet in the entrance was threadbare and sticky. There were two doors facing each other inside — one to the taproom, the other to the lounge. Ben went into the lounge first. The room was long, with a brown carpet, upholstery and curtains, and a pervading smell of stale beer. No one was about and steel shutters were drawn over the bar. He let the door swing shut and went into the taproom.

A blue haze of smoke hung in the air. A handful of men nursed pints at the Formica-topped tables. The solid crack of ricochet came from the pool table where two middle-aged skinheads played with stubby cues. The bar was lit but he couldn’t see anyone serving.

One or two men glanced incuriously at him as he hesitated in the doorway. No one seemed to recognise him. He tried to appear relaxed as he walked in. There were only scuffed, non-coloured lino tiles on this side instead of carpet. An upbeat Elvis song was blaring from the wall-mounted jukebox, giving the room a semblance of liveliness.

“Bar, Sandra!” a man playing dominoes on a nearby table shouted as Ben reached the varnished wood counter. Suddenly what he was doing seemed like a very bad idea. In fact he couldn’t even recall how he could have thought there was anything good about it. He made up his mind to leave, but before he could a door behind the bar opened and Sandra Kale came through.

She stopped when she saw him. Her mouth compressed into a thin line that matched her plucked eyebrows.

“What do you want?”

No reasonable answer presented itself, except the obvious one. “A pint of bitter, please.”

She stared as if she wasn’t going to serve him, then took a glass from below the counter, put it under an electric beer pump and pressed a button. She didn’t speak as the glass began to fill, and Ben guessed she was trying to come to terms with the situation as much as he was.

Or perhaps she just had nothing to say.

She set the full glass on the counter. “One eighty.”

Ben reached into his wallet and gave her a note. On impulse he said, “Would you like one?”

Her eyes flitted to the room behind him. “No.” She handed him his change then folded her arms below her breasts like a barrier. She wasn’t wearing lipstick and her lips were pink and chapped.

A wayward regret that he hadn’t seen her getting dressed that morning blew across Ben’s mind. He brushed it away.

She regarded him, unsmilingly. “Why’ve you come here?”

It was odd hearing her speak after the dumb-shows he was used to. He took a drink of beer to hide his confusion. It was chilled to tastelessness. He put it back down. “I was passing. I thought I’d see how Jacob is.”

“Steven’s fine.”

“How’s his cold?”

“Comes and goes.”

“I suppose it’ll probably come when I’m due to see him again and go straight afterwards, won’t it?”

Something that might have been a smile touched a corner of her mouth. She shrugged. Her breasts lifted, then settled again on her folded arms.

Ben took another drink of beer and wondered what she would do if he told her he knew she had sex with men for money. The thought strengthened him. Whore, he thought. Slag. Slut. Tart. He realised he was growing hard inside his jeans and felt a rush of pure lust that left him light-headed and faintly shocked. Jesus, what do they put in the beer in this place?

As if she had caught the drift of his thoughts, he sensed an imperceptible shift in the currents between them. The casual antagonism he’d felt from her was replaced by a sort of awareness.

She tilted her head slightly to one side and moved her arms, pushing her breasts closer together and so out towards him. “Have you any idea what he’d do if he knew you were here?”

There was no need to say who ‘he’ was. Ben drank some more of the tasteless beer. “He doesn’t, though, does he?”

“Supposing I tell him?”

He put the glass down. “You don’t tell him everything, do you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

It was his turn to shrug. He saw uncertainty touch her face and felt a corresponding throb in his groin. There was a movement next to him at the bar.

“Any problem, San?”

It was one of the pool players. He glared at Ben as he asked the question.

“No. It’s all right, Willie,” Sandra said, but the man stayed where he was.

He was short and thick-set. He grasped the cue around its middle in an overhand grip as he looked Ben up and down. “You’re that cunt who had John’s kid, aren’t you?” he said, loudly.

The music didn’t stop, but Ben could sense everything else in the room grinding to a halt; the desultory conversations, the domino games, all breaking off at this new entertainment.

“Suddenly, it’s fucking Deadwood.”

“I don’t want any trouble, Willie,” Sandra snapped.

The man ignored her. His head wasn’t completely shaved, Ben saw. It had a fine fuzz of pale stubble on it. His partner, also with a cue, came and stood behind and to one side of him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Having a beer, what’s it look like?” Ben heard his own tone of voice and marvelled at it. On the jukebox Matt Monroe began singing ‘Born Free’. He felt giddy with an unexpected recklessness.

The one called Willie stared at him. “We don’t fucking want you.”

Ben stared back, gripping the pint glass like a weapon. “I don’t give a fuck.”

Part of him stood aside from himself, watching this stranger with amazement, but the rest of him was borne up in the thick, hot gorge of aggression. His limbs and head felt pumped full of blood. Only a thin membrane of sanity restrained him. He pressed against it, feeling it give, wanting an excuse to break through.

“You’re already on one warning, Willie. Any more and you’re fucking barred,” he heard Sandra say, and later he would wonder at her apparently taking his side, but right then her words didn’t mean anything. He and the man faced each other, on the lip of violence.

The man spat on the floor.

“Fucking London ponce,” he said, turning away.

The tension in the room was released. The other customers went back to their beer and dominoes.

Ben watched the two skinheads go back to the pool table, laughing at some muttered insult, and felt as if he’d woken up on top of a precipice. He put his beer glass down on the bar with a hand that was suddenly shaking.

Sandra Kale shook her head. “If you really want to kill yourself you should come here on a Saturday night.”

He didn’t say anything. He would have asked for a brandy, but that would have made his weakness obvious. The thought of the pool players coming over again terrified him. He drank half of the beer left in the glass. It had warmed up but didn’t taste any better.

Sandra was still watching him. “So what did you really come here for?”

I don’t know . Reaction from the near-fight was setting in. He wanted to get out of the pub very badly.

“I’m not going to give up,” he said.

He immediately regretted the pointless bravado. Sandra Kale’s face closed down again, but not before he saw the tiredness that stole across it.

“Please yourself,” she said, and walked out through the door behind the bar.

Ben finished his beer. He didn’t want it, but he didn’t want to be seen to be rushing out either. Putting the empty glass down on the counter, he walked out past the pool players without looking at them.

No one followed him out, but by the time he had unlocked his car and driven away he was clammy with sweat. He went past the Kales’ house, noticing that the scrap in the front garden had also been added to and moved around since the last time he’d seen it, and followed the road up to the wood that overlooked the town. He pulled into the gateway where he usually parked and turned off the ignition.