Хилари Боннер - No Reason To Die

The young man fell heavily. His right shoulder hit the floor first and the pain made him grunt. Then the rest of his body followed quite slowly. It was a bit like the final act of a very bad ballet. His head bounced just once on the ancient flagstones, while his arms flayed the air desperately searching for something to hang on to, until, after a final, ineffectually limp, kick of one leg, he lay spreadeagled, limbs outstretched, face up, eyes and mouth wide open in surprise.

There was a trickle of blood on his forehead where he had caught it against the edge of the bar on the way down. After the grunt he did not make a sound, but then the fall must have made it even harder for him to speak than it had been before. Neither did he attempt to move. But movement had also been pretty difficult before.

Kelly was sitting on a stool in the corner, as far away from the pool table as possible. Kelly didn’t like pool in pubs. The cues, and the gyrating bottoms of those brandishing them, turned your average bar room into an obstacle course. There was nobody playing pool that evening, but there were some things in life which even Kelly would take no chances with.

There was actually hardly anybody in the pub at all. It was a wet Monday night in early November and the rain had been falling incessantly since early morning. It had been almost horizontal across the car park when Kelly had arrived a couple of hours earlier, and the driving easterly wind had been so strong that walking against it had not been easy. This had hardly been a day for a drive over the moors to The Wild Dog, an isolated eighteenth-century coaching inn, built alongside one of the handful of roads crisscrossing the heart of Dartmoor. Kelly, however, was prepared to undertake almost anything almost any time, except the things he should be doing with his life.

An elderly couple were sitting at a table at the far end of the bar, in the lounge area which Charlie Cooke, the landlord, a likeable but inadequate amateur from Birmingham, now used as a glorified dining room. Apart from the young man lying prostrate on the floor, they and Kelly were the only customers. In summer The Wild Dog was packed, and even in the winter, over weekends blessed with half-decent weather, the old inn attracted a quite respectable level of business with customers motoring out for lunch and dinner from the towns and cities on the edge of the moors, like Plymouth, Newton Abbot, and even Kelly’s own home town of Torquay down on the coast. But The Dog had little or no local drinking trade and, in common with so many country pubs, had come to rely entirely on the provision of food and the seasonal influxes of tourists. Pubs just weren’t pubs any more, thought Kelly morosely.

He had watched the young man’s fall with a kind of detached fascination. It had been more of a slide really, head and shoulders first, as he had bent at the waist so far backwards that gravity had refused to allow his body to remain any longer on the stool. Then there had been that last almost lazy kick-out with one leg, as he had gradually descended to the floor, the weight of his lower body causing him to slide along the flagstones, worn slippery with age, until he lay full length, his head nearly inside the mighty old inglenook which dominated the room. He was, however, in no danger of burning. Only a small modern oil stove smouldered fitfully in the centre of the huge fireplace.

The elderly couple continued to concentrate very hard on finishing their microwaved frozen lasagne. Charlie’s wife, who did most of the catering herself, didn’t cook on out-of-season weekdays, but Charlie reckoned he was a dab hand with the microwave. Kelly didn’t agree. He’d once eaten Charlie’s microwaved lasagne. It had been cool and soggy in the middle, dry and chewy round the edges, and totally and utterly tasteless. However, when the young man fell off his stool the elderly couple focused every bit of their attention on the sorry meal before them, as if it were a mouth-watering gourmet experience. And they gave absolutely no sign whatsoever of noticing the only bit of action The Wild Dog was likely to see that day.

Kelly noticed. But then Kelly noticed everything. It was his life’s work really. One way or another, he had made a living since he was a boy out of watching and listening and then writing it all down. He had been a journalist for many years, at the very top in Fleet Street until he let the demons get to him, and then back to his local paper roots in South Devon. But that was all behind Kelly now. Kelly had had enough of destroying lives. He was no saintly philanthropist and he’d been a damned good investigative reporter, with a real nose for a story — the type of journalist who, by and large and with one or two notable exceptions, had achieved marginally more good than harm. It was the destruction of his own life Kelly had wanted to halt, far more than that of anybody else. He had decided he was going to be a novelist. Indeed he was already a novelist — in as much as that he had given up the day job and written half a treatment and almost two chapters of his first novel.

However, Kelly was at the displacement activity stage. It seemed to be lasting rather a long time and Kelly suspected that it would probably last throughout whatever passed for his writing career.

He put his pint glass down on the bar. It contained a couple of inches or so of warm, flat, Diet Coke. Kelly didn’t drink alcohol any more, not because he didn’t want to but because he knew, and this time round he really did know, that if he ever started drinking again it would kill him. Simple as that. But there was only so much Diet Coke a man could force down, and Kelly had been sitting in his corner of the bar for two hours, pretending to think. It had been a sorry pretence; his mind had remained more or less blank throughout. And the young man’s fall had been the only real diversion of his day.

Kelly stared idly at the still prostrate figure on the floor. He supposed somebody should do something. He glanced towards the bar. On the other side of it he could just see the top edge of an open trap door, but there was no sign at all of the landlord. Charlie had disappeared into the cellar more than ten minutes previously, ostensibly to change a barrel. Kelly thought it likely he was bored rigid and wanted a change of scenery, and couldn’t say he blamed him. Business was hardly brisk.

Kelly’s back ached from sitting on the tall, angular, wooden stool for so long. He reached behind his head to rub his neck muscles through the thick oily wool of his dark blue fisherman’s sweater, then stretched his arms above his head. He didn’t know what he was doing in a pub at all, to be honest. It was habit, he supposed. That morning he’d spent three hours at his screen playing computer games and periodically checking his email, which invariably consisted of unsolicited messages from suppliers of deeply sad soft porn and little else, before giving up even kidding himself that he was about to start writing at any moment. He’d made himself some scrambled eggs on toast for lunch and then gone through the same charade for most of the afternoon. By teatime he’d had enough. In a state of total frustration he’d taken off in his car and had made himself head for The Wild Dog, rather than a potentially cheerier hostelry nearer to home, so that he would be unlikely to find disruptive company. He was, after all, he told himself, merely looking for a change of scene, seeking out some new and convivial surroundings in which to plot his next chapter. Kelly sighed. Yet more self-deception. He had been just as unable to concentrate on the great novel in the pub as he had been at home, and The Dog was hardly convivial, as he had of course known it could not possibly be, in that weather, on a Monday evening in November. There was often just a touch of sackcloth and ashes about his behaviour, Kelly reflected.