July 10th, 2021
There are certain places which you approach or walk past and you’ll get this stinging feeling telling you that you’ll probably die in there. I felt the sharp poke of that feeling when I first looked upon The Cottage, a derelict pub which looks like it’s seen the worse end of a thousand years, and I knew immediately that I just have to go inside. You see I have a bent sort of fascination with putting myself in the most questionable of circumstances, it gets the adrenaline surging through the body and keeps the arteries all clean.
A dark grey cloud reserved just for this very day crept across the entire sky and bucketed the streets with rain, but if the interior looks anything like the exterior of the place, then I knew it would probably be a lot more unpleasant inside. Large chunks of paint flaking off every wall suggests that this place was once painted red, but the last time these walls probably felt the caress of a paintbrush was eons ago. The black wooden sign up front is struggling to show the words “The Cottage” through the thick layer of wear and degradation. And what the fuck is that in the first-floor window? A creepy doll about the size of a 7-year-old child is peeking out the window at everyone walking past. Maybe it was put there on purpose to deter any faint-hearted fools who might be having any bright ideas about coming in here. Only if you can get past the horrific doll wearing a dirty clowns mask can you come inside for a drink. This place is rated 1 out of 5 on the food hygiene scale. Just what sort of hellish infestation took over the place, what manner of hygienic craziness went on in there to leave the place hygienically destitute? Maybe someone choked on a shard of glass concealed in their steak and ale pie. What I find admirable however is that rather than doing something about their lack of hygiene, they just stopped serving food altogether. That food rating means nothing if there’s no food in sight. From all the external signs it seems that this is the sort of place which actively strives to keep people out, which just made me want to go in there even more, despite of the gnawing feeling inside of me that I probably won’t walk out of this place alive.
I was with my dear friend Malu when we visited the place because I felt like I needed some sort of protection when going into a place like that. Let me tell you a bit about Malu, her liver is made of some sort of military grade metal that the public has no access to and was never considered for mass production, which means she can out-drink us all. I felt like whatever language the patrons of this pub spoke, Malu was quite fluent in it.
Picture the new guy who walks into an old western town. An outsider who is completely privy to the customs and ways of this totally deranged place. Everything about this person is a damning affront to the eyes of citizens. No wear and tear on his ridiculously brand-new leather jacket and boots with an obscene number of engravings and tassels. The sort of guy who you’d throw rotten fruit at if you saw him walking through your town. As he ambles over confidently to the local saloon and walks through the door, he drives a wedge of silence through the drunken hustle and bustle. Everyone stops what they’re doing and all stare at this fool. These are the sort of faces that are so beaten and roughed-up, you wouldn’t want to be the ones messing with them, and all of them are gazing icily back at this bastard who picked the wrong place to walk into. The poor kid doesn’t even make it to the bar before he’s full of holes. This is what I imagined the scene would be like as me and Malu pushed through the door of The Cottage, but there was barely anyone there. I was wondering whether all the crazy faces that would welcome my arrival all simultaneously had to go to the toilet. I gave it a moment, but no one appeared. I could only spot three people in the whole place, and all of their eyes were fixed upon the football game on the TV. Even though there was no one around, those strange vibrations persisted and I felt like my mortality was still in jeopardy.
An awful sort of quietness hung all over the place, punctuated even more by the sound of the football game faintly humming out of the TV in the corner. Stale white lights illuminated the place with a dim phosphorescence of boredom and banality. This weird musty sort of smell crept up my nostrils and played odd tricks on my mind, I felt like a tree rotting into weak twigs over the space of a millennium. Once I broke out of that strange trance, I scanned the place with my eyes and realised how stained the walls were. White walls stained like a chain-smoker’s teeth suggested that back in the day, whatever day that might have possibly been, this place was thick with a billowing haze of cigarette smoke. Stools were placed upside down on the bar for their presence was no longer needed. This place is far too big for the little amount of people who are hanging around here. Just where on earth is everyone? Me and Malu took some tentative steps into the building and our presence seemed to attract the attention of who seemed to be the bartender, as if there were eyes at the back of his head, hidden underneath a thick bush of black hair. The man was sat on the faded green pool table, the moment his mind was awake with awareness of our presence, he swung around like a pendulum and approached us calmly. The other two guys kept their eyes intently upon the game.
“How are you guys today?” he asked us cordially.
“Wet and in need of a drink” I said as we stepped towards the bar.
I was expecting to see one or maybe two bar taps from which we’d have to pick the lesser of two vile liquids, but I was quite pleasantly surprised to behold five – alright, two of them were broken or not hooked up to the kegs but three is still pretty good for what my expectations were settled upon. Our choice was rather limited; shit cider, shit beer or Guinness.
“Two pints of Guinness please.” I asked the bar man and before I could even finish the request, he was reaching for the Guinness glasses and holding them under the tap as if he was used to that kind of ask. The frothy black liquid began to pour into the glass, collecting a most satisfying creamy cloud on top of it. He proceeded to pour the second one half way while the first one settled its vaporous cream down to the pit of the drink. Once he was fully done finishing both pints, he handed over two perfectly poured pints of Guinness. Two of the blackest looking pints I’ve ever seen, I felt like the void was staring back at me through a glass shaped hole in reality, with an evenly sized thick creamy heads floating atop of each pint. Say what you will about the place, but this bar man really knows how to pour a proper pint of Guinness, this could have something to do with the vast number of those he’s poured. With an impressed nod I handed him a rolled up £10 note and asked for the change back for the pool table which I was eyeing up since I saw it through the window outside.
Drinks in our hands, we headed towards the back corner of the bar, a small table right next to the pool table. On my way there I spotted two more people in the bar out the corner of my eye as I was clocking the place for potential threats and ways out. There was a man and another one sat a few seats from him, both calmly drinking a pint of what looked like shit beer, losing themselves in some bright corner of their memory as their eyes struggled to break out of the effervescence of their drinks. That’s when a grand realisation about the sort of people who come to this place hit me smack in the nose. This is the manner of place where you come only for one drink and leave, or you come here bright and early in the morning and drink yourself slowly throughout the next few days. Me and Malu are obviously the former. You don’t see people get kicked out of this place because they’re too drunk and are causing a raucous. There’s no bouncer waiting at the door because there’s no need for one. There’s one thing expected from the patrons of this bar and one thing only, to drink your alcohol with poise and confidence. You don’t come here to down your drinks and ply your liver with enough alcohol in a half hour to send you down some crazed animalistic spiral of debaucherously epic proportions. No, you come here, grab a drink, sit down, savour every sip of it over the space of 10 minutes, then get another one, rinse and repeat endlessly. These are the sort of people who basically live here. What is or isn’t waiting for them back home? Is home even concept for these men? I wonder how a conversation with one of these fine specimens would be like? I have a feeling that if they did indeed manage to get any words out, it would be completely disconnected from the last. Their reveries are their homes, dwelling in a purely visionary realm. I’d like to peak into what memorial film is playing on the cinema behind their eyes.
On our way to the table, I spotted another which seemed to hold some significance, as in it was more worn down than all the tables around it, tucked away in a little space opposite the bar with a wooden plank that seemed to denote the place as the “Compost Corner 2.0”. What the fuck? An explanation was desperately needed, that’s a task for later. At our remote little table, we sat down and I felt like the chair was alive. I glanced down at it and it matched the state of all the other pieces of furniture littered around the place, extremely old. Not vintage, but prehistoric. If someone tried to pass this stuff off in an antique store, they’d get thrown out right before the furniture is tossed out after them. As I began slowly sipping my perfectly poured drink, I noticed some oddities around the place. Monstrous, carnivalesque murals were painted at random spots on the walls around the bar. The very first one I saw took me by surprise, the emaciated dishevelled face of an old man stood on a railway track was shooting arrows of horrific glances out of that strange painterly window out of the wall at me. After that I spotted these cartoonish faces on just about every wall my sight pinged towards. My mind was turning into a pressure cooker on the point of explosion, my curiosity was reaching cataclysmic heights and I just needed answers to all these desperate questions which were popping into my mind like anti-matter particles.
“I’m going to take this up with the bartender. I’m gonna get to the bottom of what is going on around here.” I proclaimed as I hoiked up my drink and headed towards the bar.
Malu said after me as I was mid-step, “alright, but be nice.”
I responded to her entreaty by waving my hand over my head as if to meet her words by fanning them away, or into my head.
I took a long sip of that heavy black liquid which sat afloat in my glass like an ocean of vertical ink and attended the bar. The bartender’s attention was at that time taken by the procession of empty glasses that had built up on the bar, about forty of so glasses all emptied by no more than five people in the last half hour. His head lifted as I put my hand down at the bar and he politely asked, “what can I do for you?”
“If I could just have a moment of two of your time, I’ve got some questions about the place.” I uttered.
Quickly pouring himself a drink, as if to prepare for this line of questioning, he took a sip and walked around the bar to where I stood.
“What would you like to know?”
“What is this place?” I said and completed the question with my eyes.
He seemed to immediately get what I was trying to get at here. At that moment, in my mind, I thought the gig was up, that I had pushed my security in oblivious anonymity too far and that I had latched onto some hidden conspiracy or dark blood-freezing secret which no one should go digging into.
“I’m spent!” I thought to myself in that split-second before he gave me a most anti-climactic answer.
“You have to be bit more specific mate.” He said while smiling a confused smile.
“You have to admit, this is a bit of an odd place. I just had to see for myself what’s going on in here because my imagination has been running a bit too wild here.” That nonsense is what I saw fit to say to him, but it seemed to really clear things up for our poor bartender who just happened to be on the wrong end of a madman’s questioning. The confusion in his smile began to fade as we finally landed on the same wavelength and he asked me what I wanted to know.
“Just exactly how long has this place been standing?”
We both looked around the place to work out an uneducated guess about the age of this prehistoric establishment, and then he said, “before any of our time.”
That statement seemed to conjure up quite a whimsical image of this place still being around during the wild era of the dinosaurs… T-Rex’s stampeding past the place, roaring their deafening roars while clenching the corpse of a smaller dinosaurs between its blood-splattered teeth. Then I began thinking about what dinosaurs would be like if we began supplying them with booze. Did a dinosaur run this bar back then? Are the current owners closer to their reptilian provenance than us? Before this unbridled vivid tangent took on a surging tendency, I rubbed my eyes and flung me back to the conversation. I realised that he had been talking to me while I was knee deep in this alcoholic dinosaur fantasy, something about how many renovations the place had been through.
“What?” I begged.
“This place has been reconstructed and renovated more times than any of us can even count.” The barman said to me.
Funny. Despite all those major touch-ups, this place still looks around 70 years behind the street upon which it stands.
This man was definitely in charge here, whether be in the proper sense of the word or if he was just filling in someone’s shoes.
I asked him who the big cheese is around here.
“This place is ran by a brewery.” He told me which was received with much flummoxed surprise.
What brewery in their right mind would want to run a place like this, I thought within the confines of my skull. This whole place seems like the slowly failing business venture of an old man who is holding onto the last possession he has in this world for dear life. A place that stands the test not only of time but of big business real estate. It’s a fucking miracle that three bulldozers haven’t razed the place to the ground to make way for a small block of flats or even a new house. But the continued survival of this place is properly accounted by the fact that it’s owned by a brewery.
I later found out what brewery actually has this millstone of a pub wrapped around their ankle, a fairly large and seemingly respectable company called Admiral Taverns. The thing about the working relationship between places like The Cottage and their parent companies are that, the deeper the place sinks in dereliction, the more hopeless it’s rescue becomes, the writing begins to appear quite starkly on the walls of the pub that soon enough the parent company will cut the cord and send the place floating away into financial oblivion. This has happened before and I’ve witnessed it with my very own two eyes.
Around the corner from the place where I used to live about two years ago was a pub called The Tavistock. The curtains on this small, ominous looking place were always drawn, and the smell of old-age always hung over the place like a menacing pall of passing time. One’s imagination would always start to run marathons when walking past this place, just what sort of funny business is going on in there? I mentioned earlier than places such as these actively strive to keep people away by sin of their outward appearances, letting only the ones made of steel enter, unfortunately that tactic doesn’t quite work on the morbidly curious. And so, I went in, where on the way I say a huge sign with a red dragon hanging over the doorway. This place is owned by Brains, I thought a surprised thought. For those who aren’t that plugged into breweries or those who don’t live in Wales, Brains is one of the largest breweries and pub chains in country there, owning plenty of pubs around the place. Now defunct, they’ve been swallowed whole by another brewery, which as irony must dictate, is an English brewery called Marstons. On a technical note, however, Brains is still alive in some miniscule respect, as the Brains pub which was my place of work, also their biggest and most important venue, is still under some managerial control by Brains. Not much though, which means this faint pulse is diminishing by the day.
This terrible tangent doesn’t really paint a clearer picture so let’s just abandon it where it stands in the middle of the desert on this page and continue down the road to perdition.
In short, the fact that The Tavistock was owned by Brains made it seem like a less horrifying place. Little did I know that the most grave and sorry environment was to await me once I made it past those thick, worn down wooden doors. Two old men were sat in the far corner with pint glasses in their hands, their sulphurous stare pinging right over to me as I entered. After a nanosecond of looking at me and probably realising that I’m no threat, even to fly, they went back to their chin-wagging. I looked over at the bar and witnessed something I had never before in such a place. Fast asleep with his head down on the bar was presumably the bartender, but the age of the man suggested otherwise, he was the owner. Right next to him was a scribbled note on a piece of paper saying,
“Pour your own drinks and leave the money on the bar”
A large pile of coins next to that sign attested to how long the owner had been in dreamland for. Just as I was about to imagine how that scene would’ve looked like had I been there to actually witness it, one of the aforementioned old men from earlier get up with his empty glass, strolled over to the bar and poured himself a pint. Not a very well-poured pint, but one nonetheless, which he payed for by tossing what looked like £3 on the bar and re-joined his comrade. I was stone baffled; this sight has rattled by brain so much that I just couldn’t leave the place. I quietly walked behind the bar and next to the dozing owner, who smelt like an entire distillery had gone up in flames, reached for a pint glass from under the bar and poured myself a pint of cider, gingerly setting a £2 coin on the bar, because if I’m going to pour my own drink I’m going to pay only for the cost of the booze. In my head I thought that this was an elaborate trap I’d walked into, like a fly in venus plant, that any moment this sleeping bear of a man will erupt into my face and beat me until my lungs bleed. Thankfully, none of that happened and I lived to finish not only that drink, but many others over the course of the next few months.
I found myself visiting the place once a week, just for a drink. In spite of the face that the place crawled with dirt and would be the perfect feeding ground for a colony of dung beetles, something about the vibrations of the place, something so wholly horrid about it drew me back sometimes. Over these visits I learnt more about the owner/bartender, Mark. Well, all I learnt was that he was a Canadian raging alcoholic who liked to have his toes sucked by his wife. Soon enough Brains caught wind of the way this place was run, and what I found hilarious was that none of the patrons seemed like the sort to rat on Mark, they are as loyal as old men alcoholics can be to a pub, so the only conceivable way Brains found out was probably through an inspection and I can imagine a crystal vision of how this interaction went down.
*knock knock*
“Hey Mark, I’m xyz from Brains, could you let me in please?”
*knock knock knock*
“Mark I’m here for the inspection, we called you a few weeks ago, you seemed quite incoherent on the phone but you agreed to this inspection, can you let me in please?
*KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK*
Those hard knocks manage to open the door because it wasn’t locked in the first place and our poor soul lets himself in to find Mark asleep on the floor with a spilt bottle of vodka next to him, two old men sitting behind the bar helping themselves to a drink and a very tall man walking up to him with violent purpose. Being aware of what is about to happen to him, xyz loosens his tie, drops his clipboard and runs out of the bar with his arms flailing behind him like tinsel.
First came the heavy blow of Brains dissociating themselves from the bar when the sign was removed from above the door, then with no financial backing and a sinking ship of a pub, the council took over with a demolition order to reduce the place into a clean pile so they could build a small block of flats. Last I heard, the place is under new management and it managed to slip the councils noose and made it out of the gallows alive. Whether the place is still the same spine-tingling hive of dirt and decay it was before or not, is a completely different question which I’m sure someone else can answer for me.
Compared to The Cottage, The Tavistock is an extreme example however, though the same kind of people drink there, it’s not ran by impulsively destructive alcoholics. So financially speaking, The Cottage is here to stay, for a little while longer at least, until one chasm of mental collapse sends the owners and bartenders into a whipping spiral of irresponsibility. That day is still a long time away, for good or ill.
I’ve completely lost track of my place in the story, and in the world altogether. I started writing this piece when I still lived in Cardiff, now I’m living in a very strange neighbourhood in London where there are more busses than cars. My position on the timeline is beginning to fade, this music is too loud and I can’t even hear myself thinking. But I suppose overpowering thoughts and reasons are the perfect way to lash together such a jangled and terror striking piece. Onwards and downwards.
The bartender in The Cottage, after telling me that the place is under the financial eye of a brewery, was bombarded by another question which was eroding away my restfulness. I began wildly pointing that the strange murals of faces staring at me from the walls.
“Who are these people? And who’s responsible for them?” I ventured.
Smiling, he pointed towards the group of people who were transfixed by the football game near the front of the bar.
“See the bald man? He does caricatures of some of the people that drink here.”
Indeed, there he was, as bald as a cue ball, the back of his head and whatever strange notions were filled in it were shining, all polished and clean, back at me.
“So, all the regulars?” I furthered the line.
“Yes, all the people that come here regularly.”
“So is there one of you?”
“Oh yes, let me show you.” Said he as he began walking into the direction of where his mural was.
Tucked away behind a pillar was a mural which looked like a circus poster peeling off the wall. There was our humble bartender, masked with clown make-up and wearing a silly purple top-hat saying,
“This pub is one clown short of being a compete circus” meanwhile two clowns are throwing up into a bucket in the background.
He then led me around the place, showing me all manners of murals splattered on the walls. Strangely lifelike caricatures of some of the bar’s patrons; morose looking, some with hose like necks, one of them singing into a fish in front of a make-up mirror, another one looking more like a mugshot on an iPhone with ears so big he could circumnavigate the world. Alongside some small novel paintings of cigarette lighters and rolling papers propped up against the wall, I even found a mural of the artist himself, his hand protruding out of the wall in a vision defying manner as it paints himself onto the wall.
Once he had shown me around, like some sort of museum tour guide, the paintings on the walls, he began walking in the direction of our table where Malu was sat patiently sipping her pint of Guinness while her thoughts were in some far-off cinematic realm. His footfalls came to break right in front of that infamous part of the pub that was denoted by the “Compost Corner” sign.
“Ah, I was wondering about this place.” I blurted out to the bartender as the heavy drink began to take over my volume knobs.
“A long while back, this was the table where all the oldest men of the pub used to sit and complain about everything, so we started calling it the Compost Corner.” He imparted this weird gem of history to me, as it sunk into the ocean of my understanding, I followed with,
“What?”
“Yeah, they would all sit around here from morning to night, complaining. But because they were all very old, one by one they began dying…”
“Well what else do you expect people of that age to do?” the insensitive thought echoed in my head and I just about managed to keep it from slipping out onto my tongue.
“…and once all of them but one had died, the last surviving man took the Compost Corner sign back home as a memo.”
Somehow, whether it was through some psychic power that I was hitherto unaware of or just the sheer conventionality of the direction the story was headed in, I instantly know what this last man’s fate was going to be before our barman took us into that narrative territory.
“Then he died too.” Echoed the barman.
“There it is!” that sadistic, terrible side of me said.
The barman continued, “Then after some time passed, a new group took over the Compost Corner and did the exact same as the old group did, complained, which is why this is the Compost Corner 2.0”
What came booming out of my mouth was, “fucking incredible! I’d love to meet these Compost people sometime; I have a feeling I’d be right at home among them.”
At this juncture our bartender was visibly becoming intimidated by my antics, it was sure a blessing for him that he ran out of things to show me around the bar. “That’s pretty much everything out of the ordinary I can think of about this place. Anything else you want to know?” he asked quite politely.
“Well, if that’s the thick and thin of it, then we’re good here. Thank you very much for humouring me here!”
And off he went back to his duties behind the bar or drinking and watching the game with the other two people.
As I sat back down and joined Malu, I was lost in thought for a moment. Just what exactly compelled this second generation of Compost people to do exactly the same as the first? Do all humans share a strand of DNA designed purely to complain? If so then mine is working overtime, making up for those who aren’t quite fulfilling that nascent purpose. Or was it their energy which stuck around, clinging to the very chairs and tables they sat on, infecting everyone who would sit on those pieces of furniture long after them with the same whining predilection? After my chat with the barman, I was left with more questions than answers, but I had a feeling he or anyone else for that matter wasn’t equipped to answer them for me. They’re better left in the box of speculation somewhere in my mind for these questions to come plague me late in the night many months later.
“Did you learn anything interesting?” asked Malu.
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“What about all the paintings on the wall and stuff?”
“What paintings? This is a pub, not an art gallery.”
After smiling a cryptic smile at her, she got on the train and we went in the same direction.
The vibrations in the place were beginning to get restless, I just couldn’t sit still any longer, so I suggested a game of pool. Both of us are quite handicapped in our skills at pool, but what worked in my favour was that Malu is in a league of her own when it comes to sucking at the game. As we played this casual game, I walked around the general area of our table while Malu took her time aiming and then failing, and noticed something very subtle yet more bizarre than anything I had noticed in the place so far. Upon closer inspection of the thin red curtains, there were small burn holes in them the size of bullets. These could only come from two possible places, the barrel of a gun or some drunkard repeatedly burned a hole through the curtains with his thin cigar. I still haven’t managed to figure out just what terror the ramifications of this spells out to me, but it’s still something great. All I knew is that I didn’t want to be on the other end of this person’s gun or cigar.
“Everything in this place is oddly out of place” Malu said as she finally managed to pot a ball. And then everything fit into place, even more so when I looked around in surprise and noticed another little detail which my eyes had glossed over, a small teddy bear with an eye-patch sitting next to the spirit bottles on the back bar. My goodness, she’s absolutely right. Every single thing in this place, each individual item of furniture, every single person, every drink poured into every single glass, exists in its own little bubble, operating on its own laws of time and space. Nothing fits, there’s no consistency or theme. Even us, two misfits looking for trouble having walked into this alien establishment have been on a completely different clock. For all we know, not a single moment has elapsed outside. Once we finished up our game of pool and all the balls had returned to their little tube on the inside, we finished out drinks and left without a single glance backwards. Our minds had taken in enough of this place, any longer and we would’ve turned into its perfect prey. While walking back home, suddenly it all made perfect sense to me, just like in the first few moments of the universe, in that incomprehensibly hot sphere where everything is floating in complete freedom, unbothered about what it around it, everything in this bar is doing the same, albeit in a far less eventful manner. When Dante clambered up mount Purgatory, all those wistful souls he came across were on their own separate journey of absolution, their had their own closet full of skeletons to dust off and their own footfalls to look out for. Their journey would’ve been a hell of a lot easier had they stopped by for a drink at The Cottage.
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