‘Ya got any oil barkeep?’
‘Um, oil?’ asked the bartender, somewhat thrown by this incredibly odd request.
Taking a moment to run the question over again in his mind, he attempted to discern the state of his new patron approaching the bar from the shadows, almost slinking from movement to movement like a bead of molasses dripping through a keyhole.
‘Oil son, be it crude, sump or olive, what oil have ye?’ The man spoke with yellowed teeth and a grey tongue. A hot waft of cigarettes permeated outward from seemingly every crevice of his dishevelled clothes.
‘Lamp…I guess. Sorry, but it isn’t something that I usually sell to patrons-’
‘Usually is a fairly bendable word squire,’ snapped the patron, cutting off the barman’s stammer and stressing each word with a singularly hostile tense. ‘It just is that I usually put a few squirts of the dark stuff into my tea, on account of the troubles, and I don’t want to be remitting to toxic shock now would I? Ha-ha! I’m a loose cannon barkeep, and I just may stab you later…What’s your name my little petal?’
‘Paul,’ stammered the barkeep, attempting to seem placative as possible while reaching for his behind-the-bar lump hammer.
‘Well, well, bless my dainty little cotton socks, me mother’s name was Paul! Pleasure to meet ye Paul the barman, I was wondering if you could spare a moment for a tale? I’ll not take no as an answer of course.’
Feeling only the lump hammer’s hook and the missing space around where it once hung, Paul had a panicked moment and remembered that he had just lent the damn thing to Becca for building her blasted greenhouse.
Seeing no help from the two elderly patrons asleep by the hearth Paul chose to politely nod and pray that the man may retire to a suitably dark corner with the intention of mugging a fellow patron on their way to the lavatory.
‘It all begins with a name, Paul, which is why I chose to ask yours to begin with; it’s propper that way, so we’re all friends,’ sitting down and leaning over the bar the reek of this strange man began to fowl the clean pint glasses stacked behind the service counter. ‘The name’s Andy, Andy deHands: word was that the family line were called TheHands at one point, but me dad was a simple man o little patience; he was the kind of man that couldn’t spell his way out of a tin of macaroni with a box of dictionaries–It’s just I-s Paul! It’s a tin full of nothing but the letter I! He was an idiot Paul-’ Andy began to rave, his eyes, bulging from their sockets, sat above a mad smile that sprawled across his face as if it was drawn by a nail dipped in tar. ‘deHands are a proud family, very proud; we’re proud of thevin’, proud of hostile conversation, proud of broken knuckles, we’re what you could call a continental kind of family. Have you ever been to the continent Paul? Full of bastards it is-’
Now beginning to contemplate his escape options, Paul noticed that he had left the trap door down to the celler up and he could probably dive down if things began to take a turn for the worse.
‘-I was a troubled boy, my friend, always burning things and doing the type of stuff that made me old cup of rum sad. Livid she was, and not only because I kept putting her shoes in the oven–they needed baking Paul and when I sees a thing I does it.
So I leave home and fall into some work as a financial advisor, mostly just advising people to give up their finances or I’d slash them; good honest work this was boy, I even paid me taxes as memory allowed me to.
But it’s tiring, you see, nine to ten, working sometimes as much as five times a week, it’s likely to stagnate a man.
Me dad used to say “work is the folly of the clever mind” so I give up the trade and then sent a letter to me dad telling him that he’s a pillock; I got hair on my brain Paul and it tells me to do things!’
Edging ever closer to the cellar door, Paul was managing to maintain enough terrified eye contact with Andy that he assumed to have his full attention. Seeing an expanding gap in the madman’s rant, Paul realised, much to his horror, that it was his turn to speak. ‘Yes me too, rather common they say; if you’ll excuse me I might pop down to the keg room and change the larger barrel,’ he weakly lied, hoping that without someone to talk to that Andy might wander off back into the street.
‘I’ll not hear of it,’ laughed Andy as he tumbled over the bar and began to climb down the cellar ladder, ‘I, a guest in your fine tea house, and honorable gentleman, shall do this for you. Away your hands from this odious task and bath them in a teacup of milk, mon frere. I shall be as quick as it takes to kick a pigeon into a fountain.’ Closing the trapdoor as he descended, Andy was then heard to loudly sing some terribly blue folk song intercut with something quite unmentionable regarding the mother of the cellar broom.
Gently latching the trap door and wondering what to do next, Paul sat down on the floor and opened a bottle of white rum that he had hidden under the towel cupboard. It was dark in the cellar, maybe Andy would go to sleep, maybe he’d find the door to the town sewers and live with the rats for a while, it was hard to say.
Whatever happened Paul knew that he would probably have to hose out the keg-room later.
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 