Dish Best Served Cold

‘Ever heard of the man on the roof?’ Jenson rubbed his thin moustache - it had taken him fifteen days to grow the abominably small collection of hairs above his upper lip, parted by a clear gap - and blinked at the sound of a smashing bottle, signifying that Malcolm was in the shop again, and once Malcolm entered the store you could count on at least ten minutes of mayhem. Anyway, Jenson tried to gather the crux of the story in his mind as Phil drank from the bottle of cheap vodka, which he thought tasted better than any other brand of vodka. He had read of the man on the roof in a collection of horror stories his grandmother had given him on his last visit to her in hospital; she had taken the book from the woman in the next bed and had told him not to be scared because ghosts can’t hurt you, they can try and throw things at you but the good forces in this world mostly prevented those items from hitting you. It was one of those rare events when she was lucid and bright but not fresh, and she had signed her name on the first page along with the regret that she hadn’t bought Jenson a lot of things in his life, what with her being on a tight budget all the time, but she scrimped and saved when she could. ‘I don’t know whether young lovers still drive to lonely places in their cars so they can chill without being seen, but this happened quite a while ago and -‘

Another bottle smashed. Maybe it was a coffee jar this time. Whatever it was, one of them was required to clean the spillage, and Phil wasn’t in any state to do any work, for he had arrived late (again) and drunk (again) and Jenson supposed he wouldn’t last to the end of the evening shift if Roger happened to visit from wherever he was. No doubt Roger was treating his high-maintenance wife at a fine restaurant, though he wouldn’t order anything other than the house wine to drink, unless he was feeling a bit sick and needed water, but he wouldn’t be in a restaurant if he felt sick and, trembling slightly, Jenson walked out onto the shop floor, nodded and winked over to Ashley, the new sales assistant who never left the counter and approached the stoned Malcolm. In no mood to make eye contact, let alone talk, or let anyone within five yards of him, Malcolm knocked another bottle of Corona from the shelf before leaving the express supermarket, the last independent store in the village of Gruntley, four miles from Calverton and several miles from Notttingham city centre, the place where most of the village’s inhabitants worked. It was for all intents and purposes a commuter town that still possessed the spirit of a pre-industrial dwelling; thatched cottages, a market, a pub, a field where cricket and football were played. The grammar school closed two years ago to no protests; the concerned people of the village had given up protesting the closure, deciding (rightly) that the government would go ahead with their plans to close the grammar school when people grew tired of complaining. The new topic of interest and cause for protest was the restoration of a church that had been abandoned since the 1920s. Why fix something that wasn’t broken? They liked it as it was, thank you very much.

‘Something needs to happen in this place,’ Phil moaned from the staff room.

Three hours later, somewhat pleased to be unemployed once more, Jenson burned his work t-shirt and trousers in an alleyway before ambling home in his underwear. Nobody seemed to notice his lack of clothes and his mother, blocking the stairs, asked what he wanted for tea, they had some new ready meals in thanks to her relationship with Gary from Asda, or they could go out to the new Burger King where the old railway tracks used to be and have a quick bite to eat. Picking the latter, Jenson hurriedly changed into a tracksuit he hadn’t worn before, listened to two new tracks from Arn-Bru, an up-and-coming rap artist who used to live two doors down before he made the daring move to London, and walked a little behind his mother to the Burger King store, which was so full they had to eat standing up near the counter, irritating two staff members there. Jenson knew his mother knew something bad had happened at work, and he knew she hadn’t liked him working at the express supermarket in the first place, so he blurted out that he no longer had a job and added, ‘I might join Barry at the garage. He’s always moaning about washing all the cars. I could wash the cars for him so he can focus on selling cars.’ His mother agreed, then added the disclaimer that Barry didn’t like working with people and didn’t he and Barry hate each other after the fight at school? ‘School was ages ago. Can’t even remember most of it,’ Jenson said, eyeing a new car in his mind, maybe a silver fifteen-year-old Jaguar or a fifth-hand red Porsche, if such a thing existed. Yes, he could make his fortune and his name at the garage on Silverstone Road, an apt name for the place. It was obvious that someone like Barry, a man who couldn’t remember what happened the day before yesterday, would have forgotten a pathetic playground fight seven years ago. After eating the first burger he tried, in vain, to get his mother to order another burger, this time with extra burger sauce, and joined her in Gary’s Vauxhall Corsa with its tinted windows and unnecessarily loud engine. Gary took them to the cinema but walked out when mother and son couldn’t agree on what film they should watch and instead took them to Gruntley’s small football ground to watch Gruntley Giants warm-up for the evening match due to take place the next evening, if everything went according to plan. A storm of some sort, maybe the remnants of a devastating storm, had been forecast for the next day.

The Corsa’s air conditioning peeled Jenson’s face back as he said, ‘It wasn’t my fault. I was sacked with him cause I hadn’t done anything to stop Phil drinking vodka on every shift, which is unfair cause Phil doesn’t listen to anyone.’ Jenson received another text from Phil, this one more puzzling than the previous seventeen texts (his terrible spelling didn’t help reveal the context of the strange things he wrote) and replied with a question mark. He then sat back, vowing to enjoy this new period of doing nothing whilst pondering the future, and turned his mobile off. Gary drove through two red lights in succession, then stopped at a third red light because a police car had turned out in front of him and he had instinctively honked his horn. ‘I didn’t steal any stock, yet he sacked me for stealing stock,’ Jenson said as he unscrewed the lid on a large bottle of Pepsi. Gary and Pamela, the name Jenson’s mother went by (her real name was Deborah, and she still hated her parents for not calling her Debbie, which sounded shorter and sweeter), lit Richmond cigarettes in unison. ‘Guilty by … what do they say?’

‘Guilt by association,’ Pamela said. ‘Thought you didn’t want to work there anyway?’

‘There aren’t many other places I can work, mum. Apart from the garage.’

Gary chuckled, spat his cigarette out - either that or let it enter his mouth - and swerved to the side of the road, scaring two children in Halloween fancy dress costumes. The effort of working out what the two children were dressed as calmed Gary down and ensured Jenson didn’t walk home. ‘Is it Halloween?’ he muttered. ‘Is it Halloween, Pamela? Halloween’s next week, int it?’

‘Today, Gary. It’s been all over the bloody adverts for the past two months and the shops have been filled with bloody costumes and special sweets for weeks. You had your eyes closed, mate?’

‘Forgot about it,’ Gary mumbled. Every Halloween he and his brother, Steven, made recordings of themselves telling horror stories, and last year they had almost gone through with their plans to make a fake documentary, a mockumentary, about an end-of-the-world incident. They had gone as far as to send a handwritten letter to the local BBC television studio asking if they could have the services of one of the studios for three or four hours. Perhaps the local BBC bosses were put off by the handwriting. In any case, the request was never answered and the plan had failed to come to fruition, and the brother, usually at odds with one another, had forgotten about it. But it was too late to revive the plan now. Pressing his ear against the cold wheel (everything about the car except the radio was cold), Gary wondered if he could phone his brother that night and begin making plans for the next Halloween. Then again, his brother was in either Majorca or Morocco with his new Costa Rican wife (not a mail-order wife, Steven had assured him in a shaky voice) and probably wouldn’t return to Britain.

Forced to walk home after making an unwelcome joke involving a priest and a prostitute, Jenson began walking home from the disused brewery on the outskirts of the village, where old, rusted beer bottles could still be seen, and the smell - according to old-timers - of the brewery could still be smelled on windy days, but was forced to take a long detour upon seeing Phil stumbling down the road with a can of Fanta in his hand. Unfortunately, Phil saw him standing stupidly for six seconds before he moved, and thus had the chance to shout out twice to him, and since Jenson didn’t answer, Phil ran and tackled him onto the obscenely cold ground.

Wiping the bleeding cuts on his face, Jenson listened as Phil ranted about revenge. He was glad the drunk’s anger wasn’t turned on him, for the time being, and supposed he had adopted the right kind of concerned expression, though he realised Phil could turn on him without provocation. Nonetheless, Jenson had never disliked working with Phil, for he had surmised that Phil couldn’t do him much harm in a working environment, other than the odd slap to the back of his hand and the more common pulling down of trousers. ‘Where does he live?’ Jenson asked, rising to his feet as a police car passed by. The two officers had been staring ahead. The traffic light was stuck on red; drivers had quickly learned that stopping was futile. Once or twice two or three cars nearly collided in an undramatic and boring way.

Phil got the message. Maybe Phil had already thought about going to his former employer’s home to cause havoc, but now he wasn’t alone he had greater confidence in his ability to scare the man to death. Might cause a heart attack, he thought. That’d be good. Leading the way, Phil skipped over to Hondale Road, knocked on the door of number eighteen and waited almost half an hour to Ben Musgrave to answer. Ben, an estate agent, had been friends with Phil until the day Phil awoke with an unmistakable change of personality. He wasn’t the only person alienated by this new Phil. However, they stayed with him, showing true loyalty, until as a collective they decided it wasn’t worth being Phil’s friend; it was like being in a violent relationship, or a bad marriage. ‘Where does Mr Smith work?’ Phil asked.

‘Mr Smith?’ Ben snapped a baguette in half, spilling crumbs onto his feet, the welcome mat and his puppy. ‘What Mr Smith? The Art teacher?’

‘He means Malcolm,’ Jenson said. Then: ‘No he doesn’t. He means Barry. I’ve got Malcolm stuck in my head.’

‘We can have him an’all, if you want.’

Wiping the blood from a deep cut on his cheek, Jenson said, ‘He does need a good kicking, can’t deny that.’

Eyes nearly shut, Ben pointed to his car as he said, ‘Barry from the shop? You should know where Barry lives, you both work at the f*****g shop.’ Then he slammed the door and opened it four seconds later to allow his puppy back in the house.

Man’s gonna explode. He’s gonna do something outrageous and you’re gonna be done with him cause you won’t have stopped him, you don’t know how to stop him. Can’t stop him anyway, you’re too scared for that, you know he’ll break your teeth with a punch, and he’ll knock you out with the same punch. ‘Should have asked him for a f*g, Phil. He bought loads back from Amsterdam.’

‘He’s also a tight b*****d who doesn’t do any favours for anyone cause he knows no one likes him!’ Phil raised his voice considerably at the latter part of this sentence as he looked up at a window with the light on. He pulled the drainpipe away from the wall before walking away, leaving Jenson to deal with a hostile stare from a woman who was either Ben’s older sister, girlfriend or mother. He fled as the woman tried aiming her smartphone’s camera at him. She hadn’t had much practise taking photographs with that device.

The question of why mobile phones were getting bigger, not smaller, though he had seen some tiny mobile phones in documentaries set in prisons, filled Jenson’s head, casting out doubts about Phil’s state of the plan and whether they’d end up at in custody by dusk, as he followed Phil around the neighbourhood, first helping him ask people he knew the same question he had asked Ben and then helping him search for Barry’s address on the internet, a task that sounded easier than it was.

By seven o’clock most trick or treaters had gone home, having knocked at houses belonging to people they knew, heeding the advice given by the local primary and secondary school, though many secondary school pupils scorned trick or treating, preferring to watch horror films, chat online (as they did all the time), watch the same programmes they always watched or play scary video games. The villagers were a mixed assortment of people, as in everywhere, but they had the tendency to value privacy, which meant that, to the more imaginative of the villagers who also valued privacy, they had dark secrets. The imaginative villagers never stopped to wonder if the other villagers thought they too harboured dark secrets.

‘Can’t just go in there like madheads,’ Phil said. ‘Got to appear as something else. You got any skin paint?’

Jenson, like Phil, failed to open the bottle of cheap rum they had stolen from the express supermarket where they used to work. They had stopped asking passers-by to help. Phil had stopped trying to get Jenson to open the bottle with his teeth. Their mood improved when they saw Malcolm leave what was locally known as the druggie cottage. Strangely, he looked sober (his face wasn’t as bloated as it had been earlier that day) and walked in a straight line, and seemed to wear new shoes, albeit red Converse.

Imagining the next day’s headlines in the Gruntley Gazette - Established 1819. All Your News in One Place! - Jenson ran faster than Phil, leaving him behind on the small park where the council were building a new children’s play area at the cost of three hundred thousand pounds. ‘Had away with him,’ Pamela said as Jenson passed her in the hallway. ‘He won’t be coming back tonight. Not that we parted on unfriendly terms.’

‘I didn’t mind walking home.’

‘Almost got worried about you, Jens. What did you do, go to Leicester and then Derby before coming here?’

Taking advantage of his mother’s utter lack of interest in her son’s social life, including where he went at night and who he was friends with, Jenson replied, ‘Met someone on the way back. An old friend’ and spent the rest of the evening lying on his bed, matching the dots on his ceiling together to form eerie constellations, human body shapes and new countries.

Jenson got up earlier in time to greet Phil at the door. He had dreamed the greeting only a few hours beforehand, and together they searched for body paint on the internet. ‘Put human body paint and it won’t come up with car body paint,’ Jenson had said. Phil duly obliged and ordered human body paint - green, blue, red and orange - from a specialist website that didn’t include special delivery as a delivery option.

Meanwhile, during the next two days, Phil plotted his revenge. Yes, he wasn’t without humbleness; he knew he wouldn’t have been sacked had he not got drunk on the stock so many times, but that didn’t give Barry the right to dismiss him in the way he had - Barry had called him a lazy useless b*****d who won’t get anywhere in life, adding that Phil was the ugliest person he had met (not just his looks) and was bound to end up behind bars. Yes, Barry could have said worse, and perhaps Phil might have said worse if the roles were reversed, but the man had to pay. The man was going to get the shock of his life. 

‘Doesn’t mean anything here. It’s an American import. Export. Whatever. The fact of the matter is it isn’t a British thing. Like black coffee and that strange rugby type game they play. Anyway, people make too much of it. I remember when nobody talked about it thirty, twenty-five years ago. Now it’s all over the place. Halloween this, Halloween that. I had to put some decorations up for my grandson yesterday. Had to buy them before I put them up. And then he fell asleep at about half eight halfway through that film with the mask killer. Bloke with the mask. Anyway, it’s all a big con like Fireworks Day. Bonfire Night. Guy Fawkes should have blown Parliament up. I can think of better buildings to put up on that spot.’ Jenson’s grandfather, Michael, recently returned from an extended stay in a bed and breakfast (he was close with the owner, the mother of a former Page 3 model), pocketed a second bar mat and emptied the pepper pot onto the table.

Luckily for Jenson, who was on the verge of explaining to his grandfather that they hadn’t had a Halloween party, Ben turned up with the package of body paint he had collected from the post office. ‘Where’re you going?’ Michael asked before turning to his stupefied interlocutor, Raymond (stupefied by the post hip operation drugs he was on), pint in hand.

They got naked in Jenson’s dark bedroom at quarter past five, as an acid-house track played on his iPod (the only acid-house track he had), applied body paint to themselves - Ben had briefly suggested smearing it on each other - and got dressed again before realising they didn’t look right. They searched the bedroom for green items of clothing.

Marvelling on how little green body paint they had used on their bodies, especially considering Phil’s large body, the two lads left the house at a little past six wearing green clothing and reached the bottom of the road, where a streetwise black cat froze at the sight of them. Concluding it was too early, too light, they returned to Jenson’s house and waited. Why bother planning? The best laid plans sometimes don’t happen, after all, and they didn’t want to get carried away in the preliminary stage. What if Barry wasn’t home? Then they’d steal some stuff, if there was anything to steal and if they had room in their pockets, and wait for him to come home. Then they noticed their clothes didn’t have pockets, for they wore green t-shirts (Pamela had bought several plain t-shirts in a closing-down sale, two of them green, the rest grey) and green shorts (ditto) and so decided against stealing anything. That was as far as their planning went.

Darkness came and with it the end of their binge-watching. Deciding they had time to watch the last episode of the new superhero series set in Baltimore, they settled back into their seats, letting themselves relax until they forgot what they were going to. Then, seeing the headlights from Pamela’s Mini Cooper, they jumped off the sofa and left via the back garden, climbing over several garden fences before reaching Clock Lane, the village’s quietest road. Jenson, suddenly realising a light green towel was flung around his neck (they had sprinted across a few clotheslines), took it off, spread it out and wrapped it around his neck.

‘Too late for masks,’ Jenson said.

‘I was just thinking of masks. We’d look all right with green masks. Different kinds of masks, but still green.’

Jenson stopped outside the first house on Barry’s road, the most prosperous street in Gruntley. ‘Covering our faces is a -‘

‘Find something in there. You can use that towel thing.’

‘What are you gonna use?’

‘Dunno. I’ll find something when I’m there.’ As a car approached the two lads turned at the same time and lowered their heads as if inspecting something almost non-visible on their shoes and walked with their heads lowered this way until they got fed up of walking that way and then ran to Barry’s house. What luck it was to see him sitting with his back to the window, a party hat barely resting on his big head. He clapped, knocking over an empty mug. He moved his hand back in an idiotic attempt to close the blinds, then got up and went out of sight.

There were two bins two and a half feet apart at the side of the house. Jenson and Phil sat between the bins and watched a woman wash the dishes in the next cottage along. Either the woman hadn’t seen them or was pretending she hadn’t, or she had seen them and didn’t view them as a threat to her. Jenson knew his dignity and possible freedom relied on this woman holding a fiery, gruelling grudge with Barry. After six minutes it seemed that she did indeed not care about their presence at the side of the cottage, for she had looked their way several times and had even, at one stage, nodded her head at Phil, who she might have recognised if she was a daily reader of the Gazette. Now how were they to gain access to the cottage without being seen and heard? And what would they do once they were inside? They didn’t look scary; they had enough wherewithal to know this, and had made peace with this fact, and thus they had an extremely slim chance of scaring Barry, a hard-hearted, broad-shouldered former army officer, on first sight. But could they make him laugh so badly he’d keel over and die? On the other hand, they could make him laugh so badly he’d change his mind and rehire them on the premise that Phil stay away from the booze, a sensible compromise.

‘Does he have a family?’ Phil asked, calmly rising from between the bins.

‘I’d say so. Can’t be alone in there, can he, unless he’s playing charades with himself. Must have a wife. Money attracts.’ As Jenson was putting his next sentence together, a three-hundred-year-old cannonball launched from a two-hundred-year-old cannon landed on the cricket and football field fifty yards behind them, vibrating the bins.

Terrified, the two lads ran home without pausing to look, trusting their luck, and washed their body paint off before putting their previous clothes back on. At least twenty people, most workers fresh from a day in Nottingham, filmed them and uploaded the videos onto the internet under headlines like, Real life INCREDABLE HULKS! and Weirdos in green paint running. Although the videos amassed disappointing viewing figures, they had an impact on a minor journalist at the Gazette office, who went with the story that two people on a new type of legal high were on the loose. The article did little to ease the moral panic that already prevailed in the village about the availability of legal highs, after one man, a visitor to the village who had wandered away from a tour bus bound for London, had got high on a unique form of bath salts in the village square before embarking on a vandalism spree that cost around thirteen hundred pounds. He managed to evade capture by wandering back to the motorway; nobody knew what happened to him after that.

The reconstruction of an early and indecisive civil war battle took place every weekend on the apparent site of the battlefield, though the real site was said to be eight miles away and had the backing of every eminent history who researched the matter. Despite this, thirty villagers, also the mixed-gender bowls team, fought a fake battle using fake guns and a real cannon. They were celebrating the first successful firing of a cannonball postdating the civil war when the lads sat down to watch them. ‘The daughter’s key,’ Phil said. ‘I don’t know her name, I just know we can get to him through her. We can get some money out of him.’ He nudged Jenson lightly the first time and sent Jenson onto his side the second time. ‘What do you think?’

What choice did he have? Jenson straightened himself and stretched before yawning. A woman swayed past them.

‘Seen the ghost yet?’ Phil asked her. ‘Been looking for it long enough.’

‘Kiss my arse.’

‘With pleasure. Come on, you can do better than that.’

The woman slowed her swaying pace. ‘Kiss my arse, you ugly tramp.’

Phil flicked his cigarette at her high heeled shoe. The other shoe on her other foot didn’t have a high heel. Indeed, it was a blue and white striped Adidas trainer. ‘Listen, your looks will fade in time, and then you’ll be a bit attractive, vacuous and thick.’

‘Yeah but you’re ugly and thick.’

‘Keep chasing your little ghost, love.’ Once the woman had disappeared, and once the fifteen people on each army faced one another, ready to unload their muskets, Phil asked, ‘What’s Barry’s daughter’s name?’

‘Fucked if I know. Didn’t know he had a daughter. She probably lives with him.’ Partly ignoring the urge to urinate, Jenson asked what the woman who just passed by had to do with ghosts. Phil’s brown eyes brightened, making him look marginally intelligent. ‘She says she saw a ghost near here a few years ago. Made a video of it. You can’t see a ghost in the video, it just looks like a tree. So she’s been going back to the same spot all the time. Used to go out with Ben.’ He rose and pretended to fire a light machine-gun at the bowls team slash civil war battle fighters. ‘Start as you mean to go on.’

‘Can’t you let it go?’

Phil’s face contorted and he screamed. After pulling his jacket off, he mumbled rapidly to himself before grabbing Jenson by the hair. Things moved too quickly for Jenson to note; only pain registered.

Jenson screamed as he lowered himself into the bath. Bruises filled most of his chest, making him regret getting a full wax at a spa weekend with his uncle. His heavy arms ached. His eardrums hadn’t yet popped. He wondered where he could hide from Phil.

‘I’ve seen her around with that lad, what’s his name, looks like a sheep. Apparently they’re cousins and the lad she walks around holding hands with - he makes her laugh a lot, from what she was saying - is her cousin, he comes over sometimes when he gets bored of the home they put him in. Special needs.’ Realising he was talking to himself, Phil entered Jenson’s house, touched the radiator (about right; he didn’t like heat too hot), wiped his muddy shoes on a pair of white boxer shorts that had fallen from a washing pile meant for the airing cupboard, looked again at the photograph of Chloe, Barry’s daughter, on her Facebook page (it was the only photograph she had made public, and it was also her least photogenic photo, though she didn’t know this), put his black Nike gloves on, rubbed at a fleck of green body paint on his wrist and joined Jenson in the living room, where he was watching a dull wrestling match between two thin men who couldn’t have been taller than five foot eight. Phil dearly wished to enter that wrestling ring and bang their heads together before giving them a thrashing, for which the audience would hate him, judging by the people in the audience. He repeated his statement to Jenson whilst sitting close to him. Jenson would have complimented Phil on his use of the term special needs instead of disabled, or a worse word, but he wasn’t sure of the reaction he’d get, and so continued watching the, to him, entertaining wrestling match. He already knew Phil’s plans for the evening: Phil was to take Chloe on a date, having wooed her, if he could woo her, and would use his charm (Jenson had suppressed a laugh at this part as Phil explained the plan over a bad phone connection) to get her under his wing, as it were, or under his thumb, and would then humiliate her by … well, he hadn’t reached that point in the planning processes, and rather hoped to do something random when the moment came. Anyhow, he was close to getting his revenge, depending on how quickly and easily he wooed Chloe, if he wooed her at all.

‘I like feet,’ Michael said as he raised his empty pint for the waitress, who he hadn’t noticed until he had uttered the second word in his three-word sentence, to take away and perhaps refill. ‘Feet are the best part of a woman’s body. Tits come close. What puts me off is the bloody axe wound in the middle of a woman’s body. Been a while since I’ve had the pleasure of a woman’s touch, like, but there are these dating things on these good phones that do everything, and you can get in touch with a woman my age. Plenty of them about. Doesn’t matter if they’re widows. All the better if they’re widows, like. Do anything.’ At this, he rolled a cigarette using a pinch of tobacco that wouldn’t take up more than one fifth of a normal factory-rolled cigarette and looked his drinking partner, a former bank clerk who took little notice of Michael when he wasn’t drinking, and made what might have been a smile if he had moved his lips and mouth muscles more. Keeping her distance, mostly due to Michael’s smell, the waitress returned with a pint of bitter. Now Michael looked over at his grandson and didn’t say what he wanted to say, which was that Jenson reminded him too much of his first wife, Jenson’s grandmother, in the stub nose and the extraordinary blue eyes, instead saying, ‘Cold night out there. Colder when you aren’t wrapped up. What are you doing? Waiting for someone? Someone stood you up?’

To preserve time in case Phil hurried in and yelled at him to leave the pub before something awful happened, like an armed police raid, Jenson nodded without looking at his grandfather, drank half his coffee in a daring gulp and checked the time on his mobile phone. Phil had promised to secure Chloe on a date by seven, and it was ten past six. He couldn’t rule out the chance that Phil would resort to sickening and cruel methods to get this date, including drugging her, and supposed he had done the cowardly thing by agreeing to stay away from Phil during the pre-date stage. What was he doing? You couldn’t call Phil a charmer, but he could talk, and Jenson guessed that people who like talking, and thrive on talking, lie from time to time. He cheered himself up by picturing himself as a strong bodybuilder capable of dismissing Phil’s ideas without worrying about suffering immediate damage. Not unattainable, he thought. But lifting weights was too much hard work and it would take too long to become a bodybuilder, and he wasn’t going to allow Phil to get to him. Better to hide from Phil, even if he had to move somewhere new, like Sunderland or Cardiff. His stomach rumbled and then started aching.

His stomach didn’t stop aching until Phil entered the pub and called him over to the medieval monk outfit display beside the toilets. A small piece of cardboard, unevenly cut, claimed the monk outfit was worn by a monk in the thirteenth century in a monastery that used to be on the same patch of land. No description of the monk was given. Only a handful of people in the pub’s history had shown an interest in the costume. The glass display was left alone, as if everyone knew that to touch the display was to risk imminent death. ‘Ring of Fire’ by Johnny Cash played somewhere above their heads, audible to those people gathered at that section of the pub. A woman of around forty, wearing a shawl, took a fudge chunk from a bowl and passed the bowl to the man opposite. Jenson was wondering which former Prime Minister this man looked like as Phil said, ‘I’ve got her hook line and sunker, mate, so she’ll be all mine by the end of the date. She hasn’t been on a date. That’s what she said, not me. Think she’s a virgin.’ He suddenly acted as if a stranger had just given him three hundred grand in cash: first he withdrew into a stony silence, pale with shock, and then, livening up, performed an energetic jig that encouraged witnesses to feel happy along with him, and soon half the pub was celebrating as if England were winning three-nil in the eighty-ninth minute of a World Cup final against Germany. The celebration died out quickly, as the people celebrating didn’t know what they were celebrating.

‘There’s one snag though,’ Phil said when he had calmed down. ‘I told her I’m you.’ Knowing better than to ask why, even in a polite and harmless manner, Jenson nodded. ‘So I can either keep on being you till she finds out I’m not you, or you go to the date and do your duty. Lot of people know me round here, mate. They’re gonna see me on a date with a cutie and ask me who she is and they might say my name.’ A man in a fluorescent jacket sat with his back to them playing a jackpot gambling arcade game on his mobile. Phil picked up the fresh pint beside the man, cleared his throat, spat into the pint, sloshed the beer around and put the pint back. ‘Paradise City’ by Guns ‘n’ Roses began playing.

Body don’t fail me now, Jenson thought, breathing in. No doubt his stomach pain would last for the end of the night, keeping him awake, extending the length of a bad evening. It only occurred to him that Chloe wasn’t expecting him when he saw her kicking a tennis ball against the front door. A lad her age, and Jenson’s age, jumped up and down with his arms out on a trampoline that filled the garden and a bit of the drive. Jenson jumped, unconsciously emulating the lad, and then, understanding that this was a futile move when a car was heading towards him, sidestepped in time to avoid getting pushed back by the car. Barry got out the car, gave Jenson a pitying look, as if Jenson had spent the past five days living on Barry’s drive with only a blanket to keep him warm and a tin of cold beans to eat, slapped the bonnet of his car as if thanking it for getting him home and shouted, ‘Get the hell off that trampoline and get that trampoline out of here! Told you to shift the bloody f*****g thing twice now!’

Admiring Barry’s assertiveness, and the obvious control he had over his family, Jenson abandoned his friendship with Phil and set about forming a new friendship with Barry, who could serve as his bodyguard for the inevitable period time in which Phil would seek revenge. Immersed in the joys of schadenfreude at Phil’s plight - he wouldn’t have anyone to hang around with unless he befriended one of the older villagers - he followed Barry into the house, said ‘I’m sorry I stood back and let Phil get drunk at work all those times’ to his back and stiffened, expecting either a verbal or physical blow. Barry turned slowly as if expecting to see a fire-breathing dragon behind him and pulled a face that could only be described as one of pure elation.

Treated as a prodigal son, Jenson was given a fish and chips takeaway meal with an extra serving of the worst mushy peas he had ever tasted whilst everyone else ate cheese on toast (Barry had toasted the bread in a tainted toaster (it popped the toast up every fourteen seconds), put several slices of cheese onto the toast and put the toast and cheese into the microwave for half a minute). ‘Are you Chloe?’ Jenson finally asked after two hours of deliberation. Born with tunnel-vision, Jenson hadn’t noticed Chloe staring at him for long periods during the dinner, but even if he had he would have put it down to envy at the feast he was enjoying. But Jesse, her cousin, knew better, and now said, ‘You two should get a room together or something’ and sat back smugly, basking in imaginary sustained studio applause.

Those two were in the kitchen. No conversation passed between them. Sensing Phil’s restlessness, Jenson thought about warning the household of an incoming attack and decided to defend the house from attack by keeping watch from the side of the house, for he was aware Barry’s mood had turned and his welcome was being outstayed. Chloe gave the impression, though he wasn’t an expert on girls, or women, that she was indeed innocent of sex. He couldn’t explain to himself why this was so and he couldn’t convince himself that her virginity didn’t matter. Why make a big deal of it? Maybe because every other girl he had known had lost their virginity at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen respectively. He could testify on oath to a court of law that they weren’t virgins by the time they were sixteen. Chloe was different. Hasn’t had the chance, he thought. Could be that. Leaning against the oven, harassed by his churning stomach pain and a strange hot sensation in the side of his forehead, he wondered if Chloe was frightened of sex. His auntie, a shadowy figure in his life, had stopped eating out after reading an article about a fast-food restaurant infested by rats and cockroaches. Maybe Chloe had read an article about sex being painful and had taken it to heart. Could he convince her otherwise? As a virgin he didn’t know whether sex was painful or not and no longer thought about sex, at least when he wasn’t in bed, and decided this was the same with Chloe.

‘Protect her,’ he whispered. ‘Keep her from Phil.’

‘Why, what’s he done?’ Barry licked his plate clean of gravy and rammed it into the dishwasher before forcing the door shut. The dishwasher wouldn’t start.

‘Will you let me stay the night if I tell you?’

‘No, but you can sleep in the shop. Staff room.’

After accepting this compromise Jenson told Barry of Phil’s plans.

Jenson climbed onto the recycling bin and reached up. ‘Stack the other bin onto it,’ Barry said.

‘I’ll just come in like any other time, like nothing’s wrong, and then I’ll let you in when he’s distracted. All right?’ Jenson didn’t have time to wonder where this newfound confidence had emanated from but he hoped it would last for the time he was in Phil’s house, for he needed such confidence to go through with the violent plan Barry had created. Still, maybe Barry would do all the violence. Then again, maybe Barry wouldn’t want to do all the violence and would get violent with Jenson if he stood back and did nothing. Just get this over with, he thought, knocking on Phil’s front door.

Green Giant was Chloe’s first thought as she saw Phil outside the back garden, revealed by the automatic light on the shed. But Phil wasn’t tall enough to be the Green Giant and thinking of the advert featuring the Green Giant was had made her hungry; she set about cooking some fr`ozen sausages.

‘He isn’t in,’ Jenson said. ‘He’d have answered by now if he was in. He’s probably waiting for to report back to him at the pub.’

‘Can’t do anything in the pub,’ Barry said. ‘How about -‘

‘How about you give him his job back and then get him there?’

‘Can’t do it in a public place. Call him back here, say you’ve been on the date and it went well, best date of your life, and Chloe’s in your pocket.’

Thinking that Barry was enjoying this too much, Jenson cooled him down by suggesting he apologise to Phil and finish this for good.

A regular caller used to take deep breathes down the phone line before getting to the matter of selling fake internet protection software, and at first Chloe assumed the regular caller had re-established contact with her and was ready to keep him on the line for a good twenty-odd minutes before hanging up, as in the past, but she dropped the landline when she heard, ‘What kind of music do you like?’

How did he have her number and why was he still outside the house dressed in green clothes with green stuff all over his skin? Phil had always been weird but this was taking matters too far. She unlocked the door, opened it so she had enough space to fit some of her face through and said, ‘Go away, Phil. Nobody wants you here. Jenson’s gone.’

One of those forgettable people, Phil guessed. Otherwise he’d have remembered who she was. He certainly hadn’t spoken a word to her during school and she must have kept out of his way because he hadn’t recognised her and now, having achieved his primary objective of getting into the house and scaring her, he didn’t know what to do next.

‘Stay calm! You can’t burst in there and fling yourself at him. He’ll be expecting that. You have to -‘

Barry swung an arm without the intention of hitting Jenson in the mouth and then ran down to his house, frothing with rage.

Struck in the mouth, Jenson sat and stared at the house, sometimes wincing when he heard noises from within. In the beginning it sounded like Barry was winning, then Phil seemed to gain the upper hand, then Barry again, then Phil again, then Barry, then Phil. Where was Chloe? He took his hand away from his mouth, rose and, minding the pain but not devoted to focusing on the pain, he entered the house, grabbed a solid black leather polished shoe from the bottom stair and ascended the stairs.

Acting dead, not dead. He can’t be dead. He’s probably unconscious. Is he unconscious?

Whilst washing his hands Phil looked back occasionally at Jenson with the look he normally reserved for when The Simpsons was starting: a look of unadulterated bliss. ‘Got it,’ he said, closing the taps. ‘Coming to the pub?’

That was the last Jenson ever saw of Phil. Later that night, as he sat in the police station’s interview room, he decided to ask whether Barry and Chloe were dead before telling them what had happened, knowing he wouldn’t be as confident in telling his story if they were dead. As it was, they were dead, and his confidence sapped. It took him four hours to tell them what had happened.

‘Still haven’t found him.’ One more pint won’t hurt, Jenson thought, wishing he hadn’t worn the shirt he had bought earlier that day; he had hoped it would expand the longer he wore it, but it was getting tighter. The woman opposite him, a PR or advertising person, was already losing interest in him now his story had been told. Oh well, one more pint alone wasn’t a rare thing for him. ‘I hope he’ll be found in a state of repentance, having tried to get revenge on his own revenge, if you see what I mean.’ The woman smiled and sipped her drink, leaving red lipstick on her glass. Wondering whether she had left the lipstick-stained cigarette nubs outside the pub, Jenson walked over to the bar and stayed there for ten minutes after ordering his drink. The woman had gone when he looked back.