The Ghost of The Red Lion

I was sort of like the main barman in the Red Lion in Leytonstone, E11. It was never down in writing or anything but I lived there and I was barman so a lot of the stuff like cellar work and that was left to me to sort out (raging hangovers and draymen rolling kegs of beer down at you of a morning are not things you’d relish unless you were a strange sort of masochist). 

The guvnor was a Scot like me and his wife was an extremely pretty English girl. On their night off – usually a Tuesday – they’d leave me in charge and responsible for locking up the pub and taking the cash-tills upstairs as they went out to do what pub guvnors and their wives did: visit other pub guvnors and their wives in other pubs!

The Red Lion was huge with three floors, the bottom being the two bars, the middle a ballroom where bands like Roxy and The Who had once played, and the top where the living quarters were. 

After closing time I locked all the doors and left one light on for he and she when they came back (which wouldn’t be until the small hours as guvnors always had ‘lock-ins’ for other guvnors) and trundled up the stairs with the cash-till and to bed. There were several beds in the large room I slept in but I was the only person to sleep there at that time.

I must have been dozing off when I heard it: I realised that I could hear evidence of another person in the room with me. It sounded like an old man, though not snoring but breathing in a laboured, heavy way and it seemed to be coming from the bed right next to mine. My own breathing seemed to almost stop as I lay there in the dark frozen with fear. Yes, there it was! The sound of an old man sleeping only feet away from me.

I was up out of that bed like a shot and back down the stair and into the light of the bar. But, I had nowhere else to sleep! I couldn’t leave the pub and I definitely couldn’t wait for his lord and ladyship to come back and ask if I could snuggle in with them.

I had a good several vodka and oranges and chain-smoked for about an hour, then I had sufficient courage to go back up.

Wonder who he was? Maybe some old barman from years before who stuck around and haunted the place!

The Old Jumper

It was a cold summer morning and a heavy haar hung in the air like a shroud. This veil of mist gave the impression that East Lothian and Fife had completely disappeared from the perspective of Portobello Prom, indeed the tenements and churches in the small town were visible only in silhouette form.

“Fucking Brigadoon!”

The sea lapped gently up to the beach and McSloan wondered at the women out swimming in the surf.

“Fucking Baltic!”

He felt this was a morning for expletives. His right shoulder creaked miserably and in pain and his mood was agitated. His thoughts were jumbled as if his head was a tumble dryer, fears and worries chucked up and folding, falling and re-appearing, now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t.  He tried to think mindfully like they’d told them at all those sessions. Notice your thoughts and let them go like little rafts on a lazy river. The trouble with him this morning was that these little rafts were appearing like gunships on the gloomy horizon of his consciousness. He longed for that state of mind when one stopped to appreciate the pretty flowers and smile at the children frolicking on the beach. He wanted his mind to be as calm as the Buddha on a floating raft instead it was as frenetic as an American quiz show on a fucked television.

A herring gull was pecking at something on a bench over by the Coade Stones in the little garden area off the prom.

“Fucking seagulls!” cursed McSloan. The seagulls around this former resort were like sky-gangsters. Little Jimmy Cagney’s strutting around like they owned the joint. In fact, the reason he was out at all was because they had a ‘breeding ground’ on Scotmid’s roof directly below his bedroom window. 

Being awoken every morning to the sound of seabird’s shagging was something Freud never talked about, but if you found yourself semi-awake and semi-stiff with thoughts of Onanism at their rhythmic screeching, then you had something to talk about at your next therapy session.

“It’s the seagulls, Signund. When I hear them shagging in the morning, I get so hot”

“You mean hot, as in…?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so”

That would give the old perv something to write about!

T

here was something about the item the gull was pecking at. It was obviously a garment of some sort, brown and white with sleeves. He shoo-ed the seabird away, not that it was very pleased about this. Herring gulls are never very pleased about anything. They have a constantly bad-tempered look like so many Norah Batty’s chasing Compo away from the bins. Finally, and with mind-bending astonishment, he recognised it as an old and favourite jumper of his from his childhood.

But, how could this be? Geographically and in time and space, this was surely impossible! He picked it up as if it was somehow diseased and there was somehow a certainty about it. This was the jumper he’d worn every day for months when he’d lived in Kennishead High Flats as a boy of fourteen. His mother would joke that he’d ‘need surgery to remove it’ so attached was he to this woollen jumper.

He was used to his mother buying (or somehow inheriting) some very weird clothing indeed – mustard yellow roll-necks, purple baseball boots white stars, ‘smart’ Farah slacks in powder blue – clothes that none of his contemporaries would be seen dead in and for which he was mocked and teased mercilessly. This jumper, though, stuck out as a jewel among the hideous dross. That is why he insisted on wearing it so much.

It was in the Bay City Roller style of the day only a tad classier. Brown and white as has been said its main front panel had these colours in a hooped style with a brown waist fringe and colour. The sleeves were also brown but with a white ‘college-style’ hoop up toward the shoulder on each arm. In the vernacular of the day ‘it wiz gallus’.

I

n his dwam of memory, he’d forgotten a very serious question. How in the name of all that was holy had this ancient item ended up here on Portobello prom more than forty years later? All around him appeared as normal. Dogs bounded across the beach chasing balls flung by blokes in cords, the little green van sold green tea to green-minded Porty punters, cyclists trilled bells to annoy prom wanderers. All seemed the usual Sunday morning fare, except this jumper from teenage days long ago on another coast altogether.

All at once, he found himself taking off his TKMaxx bought cagoule and donning his old brown and white jumper. Why he had stopped wearing it all those years ago he couldn’t remember. Perhaps he had worn it out, rendered it baggy and bereft of its lustre, yet here it was all these years later in pristine condition as if only just bought from the shop.

It fitted him perfectly and off he trotted feeling brighter than the day.

For some reason, he fancied climbing a tree!

“Fucking too right!”