Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee (uplifting book club books TXT) 📕

never have been alive. These poor buggers were buried under the foundations around the 1590s to protect the building. There is also a huge painting in the bar perpetrated by a local artist in 1901. It depicts a Scapegoat—that is a human man, not a goat—as in the more famous artwork by… (who the hell is it? Holman Hunt? I’ll have to look it up…) He is loaded with chains and in filthy rags, and stands at the edge of some sort of narrow river, staring and mad. A nasty sight to have hanging over you as you quaff your pint. But it turns out this is exactly where Mrs Jones always sat. At least, when she was—in that particular mood. This is how Josh the pub landlord, put it. Mood.

“You mean… the man?”

“One of them,” said Josh.

“Right. There were two—yes?”

“Well, I only saw two.”

“And this one was how?” I asked.

“She’s sat under The Scapegoat. And he, this one, he’s the bloody maddest. No one what hadn’t seen it before, well, they’d laugh out loud. Or it’d go all quiet. I used to say, it’s fine, she’s no trouble. She wasn’t. And some of them, well, they’d come in just to look at her. Some of them always laughed. One or two took pictures on their phones. You know. She didn’t seem to, like, notice. But she was often talking to someone.”

“To herself?” I asked.

“Nah. Someone else was with her. Only no one else was with her, you get me?”

There was a dog, he said, too. No, not a real dog. But real to her. The dog was always doing something wrong. And then it wasn’t there. “I mean, it was never there—but now she said it wasn’t.”

“Did she talk to you?”

“Sure. She’d want a coffee, or wine. Sometimes beer. She had a funny way of wording it, but I got the drift. And she wasn’t loud.”

“Just her clothes.”

“Yeah. Just her clothes, like.”

“So what were they?”

“Big hat. Big floppy shirt. Big coat, long lapels. Just scruffy baggy old trousers. Men’s, I think. Nearest I can think with the whole get-up—like Pirates of the Caribbean. That kind of stuff.”

“Historical.”

“S’pose. Like a kid dressing up. Fancy dress. Amateur theatrics. Yeah, that’s it. Feather in it,” he mused.

“In what?”

“His hat, mate. Her hat. The man. The second man.”

OK

“Who was the first man, the other one?” I asked a bit later, after the lunchtime rush had eased.

“Eh? Oh that. He was—er, he was just like some bod from some London firm. Suit. More casual at weekends. Hair slicked back. Well, it was a wig, you get me? And the other one, that was a wig too.”

“What other—oh, right. You mean the other man had a wig too.”

“Sure. Long brown curls, him. A woman’s wig, or that’s what Posie says—she’s bar staff. But they used to wear their hair that way, like, fellers then. 1700’s? But the city guy in the suit, hair’s short. But her hair wasn’t like that. She had long hair. Most of it grey, she was knocking on. She used to put it up, or when I saw her in the street, when she was, well, when she was just being normal, it was up in a kind of bun. Used to call it that, didn’t they? My mum called it that. A bun.”

I checked all this over with him. They were things mostly I’d heard before, but his take was, for all the vagaries, more condensed, more decided. One long-haired man in period costume, or at least an approximation. Another man with short hair in a suit, or more casual modern masculine wear.

I asked him if the man in the suit spoke to other people not actually visible or apparently real.

“Not often. Last time I saw him though yeah, he did. I’ve just remembered too. There was a girl. No, not with the man. I mean she was being this girl. She had her own hair down then, and a bright red T-shirt. Of course, I say girl. I mean, sort of. You know. She drank… one glass of lager. She kept quiet. She seemed sort of looking for someone. I didn’t like the look of her. Funny thing to say. Because, well, it was all the same, wasn’t it? But this girl—only not girl, though dressed up like one, this old girl in her tight jeans and her red T-shirt, she had a look… You could just believe she’d stab you or something. Something… like that. Can’t explain it. Come to think of it, though, I saw her in the High Street an’ all once. She was chatting away to someone then. I mean, someone what wasn’t there. ‘Micky’ she called him. ‘Have you got enough cigarettes,’ she said, ‘Micky?’ And something about the way she said it, even though it wasn’t to no one as was there, made me go cold. Blimey. You’ll think I’m as bloody bonkers as she is.”

“Was,” I said.

His face grew solemn and respectful. “Was,” he echoed. “Poor old cow.”

OK

To straighten this out a bit.

Mrs Jones was often in the bar of The Black Sheep. Sometimes dressed as a guy from the 1700s, (probably around 1760-70, from the type of clothing Josh, and others, described.) Or she came in more rarely as a city guy, in a suit, or casual wear at weekends. He, the last one, was more deliberate—“Never more than one double vodka, or a pint.” The 1700s guy, who spoke in a flowery manner, (elsewhere someone else also commented on his speech being—“Like Shakespeare—or Samuel Pepys”), this character was a drinker. Only in a very funny way. One glass of wine and a jug of tap water, and then keep filling up the wine glass, as the wine shrank, with the, water, and keep drinking. The same with the beer, though the single coffee was usually unwatered. A cheap date, then. Posie, who I later interviewed, remarked that the old woman-dressed-as-a-man seemed to get ‘really