An Unpleasant Man

a ghost story

The eaves of the pub were strung with fairy lights, just as they were in my youth, to attract drinkers of an evening. Seeing as the pub was somewhat concealed near the termination of a suburban road, those multi-coloured bulbs drew the eye like a caravan in the desert, promising that here, at last, is hope, or at least a decent drink with which to finish your seaside stroll. The gang gathered in a part of the pub that when I was a teenager was known as the smoking carriage. This was the section my father would disappear into at the end of a family meal, while I played in the pub garden and my mother shared a bottle of wine with some friends.

As an eighteen-year-old, it was where my mates and I had our first legal pints and cigarettes. The smoking carriage was our tabernacle, where we performed the last rites of childhood and became adults. (Or at least felt that we did.) So it made sense that it was here we met again, thirty-two years later, as men about fifty, though I'm not sure how significant the choice of venue was to anyone else. I'm a newspaperman, I sell stories, and so I like to see patterns in life as much as any novelist or poet. For all I know, most others may just bounce from scene to scene without much thought or remembrance, not considering or caring about linear narratives.

I stood at the bar with my pint for a long time, just watching everyone turn up and greet one another. There were due to be about sixteen of us in total, two from the school days had died in the intervening decades, and one doing some obscure thing in Thailand. There was another of our graduating class, I seemed to recall, whom no-one liked much and had probably forgotten by now. Lord knows I had before I heard him beside me, and turned to see a face that tore open memories with dizzying force. 'Almost makes you sick, seeing all the old faces' he had said. I turned and there he was, leaning beside me, his face not having lost a single freckle, it seemed, though having gained many wrinkles.

He wore a cloth bowler and one of those heavy green jackets that you associate with gentleman farmers and gamekeepers. Remembering him, the costume seemed appropriate. If any of us could have suited the image of a gentleman farmer it was Paul Whitsun, who had been a pretentious and priggish boy, a snob in the way that some children are. We all go through phases of writing bad poetry or making bad music, or just making a nuisance of ourselves in our childish entitlement, thinking we're better and purer than the old generation.

I didn't know how to reply to his remark, but he didn't seem to need one and wasn't looking at me, anyway. His nose wrinkled as though he'd just stepped into a pig shed that no-one's mucked out for a fortnight. He drained the dregs of his pint and turned to face the bar. 'Fancy another?' he asked.

'I'll get it', I said.

'Very kind of you.'

'God, I haven't seen you since we were kids!' I couldn't help saying. He snorted. 'Not surprising, I doubt any of this lot have. At least you remember me.' It occurred to me that I hadn't seen him shake hands with or talk to anyone else. I felt deep stabs of sympathy for the man. However irritating he may have been as a teenager he was an adult now, and besides, we were all idiots back then. I myself hadn't exactly been popular, just one of those kids on the periphery, who gets invited to parties but is never the life of them.

Paul had been a lanky, awkward boy, who probably tried to make up for that with what he thought of as a swagger, but which everyone else saw through at a glance. His parents had been very middle-class; they sat on Neighbourhood Watches, funded the National Trust, and lamented the decline of their narrow sense of Englishness. I suppose he inherited his snobbery from them, but really he wasn't a hateful child. He would run to classes so as not to be late, brag about studying into the small hours, and called any kid who liked a drink and smoke - or, heaven forbid, a joint - a "loser with no future". In short, he was the kind of kid who walks the school halls with a giant flashing "BULLY ME" sign just above his head.

I took a moment to study him as the barmaid poured our pints; I had the opportunity because he was busy ogling her. I wondered if she was deliberately ignoring him. She can't have been much older than twenty, and while I'm sure she wasn't so unused to the occasional appreciative glance, Paul was really being unsubtle and lecherous about it. She accepted my money in silence and walked away. 'Don't see stuff that good-looking where I live these days.'

'Simon Walters!' someone called to me as they entered the room. It was Luke Barry, as flamboyantly dressed as he was in the mid-eighties when he worshipped Boy George and dreamed of being in the audience for Top of the Pops. He'd gone to America and set himself up as a theatrical agent, or something in that line. He wore a powder blue suit and salmon-pink tie with a stud denoting some gentleman's club. We exchanged pleasantries and small talk before he left to give his greetings elsewhere.

Beside me, Paul made a disgusted noise. 'Looks like a clown' he said. I chuckled. Poor Luke, he really did, with his loud colours and frizzy white hair, not to mention the makeup he was wearing to seem younger than his years. 'Always knew he was a poofter', Paul continued, 'couldn't miss it if you tried. How he didn't get the shit kicked out of him I'll never know.' Because the bullies were too busy with you, I felt like replying.

'I saw him in the town yesterday, swanning about with a lad young enough to be his son. Some Yank fairy he picked up in the nightclubs over there.' I am by nature a polite and socially submissive person; it's a habit that's useful as a journalist when you need to give an interview subject room enough to talk. So I let Paul rattle off his bigotries without interruption, which must have been a grand encouragement to him.

Next in his sights was Marcus Bailey, a specialist in exotic medicines who at school had always professed a desire to travel Africa, which he referred to in hushed tones as the "Dark Continent". He sat by the window picking at a packet of crisps and talking to another of our former classmates. He'd grown very overweight and kept a cane at his side. One of his feet was propped at an angle which suggested that it was no longer flesh and bone.

'Would you look at this old gasbag?' Paul fairly chortled. 'Fine upstanding man, let me tell you. Marries a local girl, gives her three kids, then lets her raise them on her own while he pisses off to some jigaboo country, and finally comes back riddled with their diseases. And how do you think he got them? All I'll say is that girls are cheaper over there than they are around here.' He glanced at the barmaid, who stood on her toes to replace an optic.

As Paul ranted and leered a memory struck me, inexplicably, without warning. It had been half-past three, and I was walking an empty school hall after staying late to finish some revision. As I passed a stairwell I heard sobbing from the hollow underneath it, where students would conceal themselves from passing administrators. Against my reservations, I followed that noise and found the seventeen-year-old Paul, his long, awkward limbs bunched up like the legs of a spider withdrawing from a human hand. His face was pressed against his knees. He seemed to be in a state of distress so profound that I sat down beside him before even saying anything. He shot a look at me, narrow-eyed and suspicious, then just wearily accepting.

'I suppose you're going to have a go as well' he said, solemn and toneless. 'Why would I do that?' I said. He stared at me. 'You didn't hear?' I shook my head. Just beyond us, a window looked onto a grassy courtyard. The sun beat down on its emptiness and gave the impression of an abandoned building slowly being reclaimed by nature. Paul wiped his eyes with such force that a lasting bruise felt possible. 'It's Anthony' he said, referring to Tony Johnstone, whom like everyone else he insisted on referring to without contractions, like a teacher. 'I asked Amy if she wanted to go to the cinema, you know, with me...' He let out a bitter bark of laughter. 'My father said that if I'm confident enough she might say yes, and even if she doesn't it won't be the end of the world. Guess I shouldn't have listened.'

'Tony heard you ask her.'

'Oh, he heard. Next thing I know him and three of his braindead buddies are laughing at me, pushing me around. One of them throws me on the ground, and Amy, Amy... She just looks at me like I'm a piece of dirt, and walks away...' The tears were starting up again. I gave him the cloth that I used to polish my glasses. He wiped his eyes. 'Can I keep this?' he asked. 'Sure.' He stuffed it into his shirt pocket. We sat together in silence, just looking at the empty courtyard.

The memory ended and I was back in the pub with the now grown-up Paul, whose invective seemed to be winding down only because he had assessed all the attendees at the reunion. Now he was talking generally, concluding his apocalyptic sermon on our class of '86. 'As if anyone would really care if all these fucking idiots just died... I for one would be first in line to shit on their graves, and trust me when I say we need not wait for long...'

That last remark troubled me. I turned my head and looked hard at him. Remembering the name Tony Johnstone had stirred another, more recent memory... Tony was one of the two of our classmates that had died. A professional, and by some accounts rather successful gambler, he was driving home from a televised poker tournament when his car was struck by a lorry. The driver had fallen asleep at the wheel, and Tony's car was propelled from a high bridge into a canal below.

It was a miracle the vehicle hadn't exploded, though not really a blessing, as that would have at least destroyed his remains and not left his widow with a ruined corpse to identify. I had spoken to Mrs Johnstone at her husband's wake, where she shook uncontrollably. At one point she wailed that she couldn't get the image of him out of her head, almost decapitated and with bones sticking out like sticks of broken furniture.

'I was there too' said Paul, 'but you didn't see me then. Or did you? I was standing at the buffet, getting my share of the widow's sandwiches.' He smirked like he'd gotten away with something, and that smirk was what brought it back, the last piece of a puzzle that I hadn't realised I was putting together. I'd seen that smirk on the front page of the Flaxton Bugle, our hometown paper.

Five years ago I came back down from London to visit family and picked up a copy when I recognised a face on the cover. Paul was being led from court by two police officers, handcuffed, as reporters took pictures and asked for quotes. The story was this: Paul Whitsun, car dealer, 44, convicted of murdering his business partner with an antique police baton that had hung on the victim's office wall. The scene was grisly enough to attract the red-top tabloids. The baton had belonged to the victim's father, a policeman in the fifties, and I suspected now that it must have amused Paul to use that weapon on the poor man.

The motive? Discrepancies in the business' accounts. Paul had been ripping off customers for years, and as soon as his partner discovered then expressed moral reservations about this, Paul had beaten his brains clean out of his skull. The suit Paul was wearing was found stuffed into a laundry hamper, soaked in gore and grey matter. I pictured Paul calmly dusting the worst of his late partner's brains and bone-chips from his polyester jacket. A year later he'd be found dead in his cell, overdosed on heroin that had somehow been smuggled in and sold to him by another inmate.

He finished his second pint and put it on the bar. 'See fatty over there?' he said, gesturing at Marcus. 'He's not going to make it out the parking lot. Heart attack. No-one'll be shocked, fat bastard like that. Whose name do you think he'll cry when he dies, alone, struggling to keep his grip on the driver's side door? His wife's? Or some jigaboo whore's? Either way, I'll be standing over him and laughing, just like he did to me that day at school. I really hope my face is the last one that fat fuck sees...'

The sun was setting below the horizon, and pleasant evening sunlight filled the bar as this unpleasant man, or shade, or whatever he was at that point, laid out his plans before me, knowing I couldn't stop them, couldn't warn anyone, perhaps hoping that I'd share in his sadistic delight. My fleeting act of kindness all those years ago, when I sat beside him in the hollow of the staircase, is enough, I hope, to spare me from his wrath. Certainly, he didn't look at me like he did at the others that day, with utter contempt. To me, he gave only his amused bitter smile, a sick parody of the face of the boy he had been.