Chapter Six

6


The Pig in Muck Inn

The Pig in Muck Inn occupied a small but prime piece of real estate at the duck pond end of Skipton-le-Beans’s village green. It was the only pub in the village. Yet somehow, this still represented typically English excess: Skipton-le-Beans only comprised ten houses. There were no shops. Not even a news agent. Just a pub. Such was the way here and I could almost imagine how that initial village planning meeting had gone way back in 1066: ‘Right, nowt we have agreement on brand of beer to be served t’Moorside Elementary School Fete, we have one uther item of business to conclude: best application t’vacant lot at dook pond end t’village green. All those in favour t’post office, ‘old out right ‘and an’ I’ll chop t’off. All those in favour of convenience store, wait t’gallows. All those in favour of pub, say aye.’

‘AYE!’

Austin Hogg pulled the family Range Rover into a vacant spot outside the Pig in Muck Inn, which was every spot outside the Pig in Muck Inn as they were all just empty puddles of dirty water, his spot of choice the one right outside the front door and facing the wrong way up the muddy lane. If it wasn’t for us, Skipton-le-Beans wouldn’t have been busy. It wasn’t sleepy, it was comatose. At six-forty on a Friday night, a street walker would have had to go door knocking to drum up any trade. Perhaps even locals realised it was fucking cold (unseasonably cold I’d already been reminded a dozen times). Perhaps everyone was in the Pig in Muck. We dismounted the Range Rover into heel-deep mud and sloshed inside.

First impression: It was tiny and warm. Second impression: It was empty and deathly quiet. A fire raged in a corner. But then fires always were able to rage without music or ambience or alcohol. Clearly only the last of these was available here and I needed it badly. Aside from the understandable nerves associated with being bailed up by my future wife’s yokel father and yokel half brother in a yokel country pub, boredom was settling in like a heavy tarpaulin over my jet lag as I gazed around at the tiny fun free establishment and saw how ghastly my night was going to be. I wanted to go home. My friends were right: England did begin and end in the pumping bars and clubs of London. The only way this place would pump was if someone brought in a cow.

“What’s ye poison then, Barely?”

This vaguely jocular remark had emanated from an unlikely source – the mouth of Austin Hogg, who obviously became ever so slightly animated at the prospect of a pint. He’d squeezed his way through a crush of bodies to the bar and was waving me in beside him in a small channel he’d created in a sea of girls in hipster jeans and guys in suits and skinheads and screaming drunken teenagers ogling the bargirls…No. That must be London again. He’d actually squeezed past a chair, a crush of them in fact, in the middle of the room, all empty and all hard in against empty tables with plastic ashtrays that looked like rugby union tees. And there were no bargirls. Just a ridiculous looking fat barman with ruddy veined cheeks and a comb over like a wet feather on an egg.

This barman was wordlessly if thoughtfully pulling pints of a beer called Black Sheep for customers I couldn’t see. Not a pleasantry had yet been exchanged between him and his only customers, not an order given; just the bar-leaning Austin calling ‘What’s ye poison then, Barely?’ and the sullen bar-leaning Simon, and the wordless wet feather pulling pints. I suspected orders had been placed years ago.

I wrenched my eyes away from the walls of the inn, every inch of which were covered in faded framed prints, all depicting various forms of animal cruelty – fox hunts, pheasant shoots, quail shoots, deer shoots…and gawped down at Austin, noticing as I did, that he had virtually no eye brows.

‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ I said a little offhandedly.

‘Aye,’ said Austin and he nodded at the barman. ‘A few jars wean’t harm if tha dun’t ower do it.’

‘Mmmm,’ I said, in the hope Mmm was sufficiently versatile to sit on the back of whatever he’d just said. I needed an interpreter desperately. And a pint.

‘Drink in, wits out,’ he said sliding one down the bar in front of me. I understood that one completely and echoed the sentiment with a toast of my pint. Unsure what the North Yorkshire etiquette was when it came to pint drinking – did I wait until all three were poured before tucking into mine? – I placed it back on the bar and waited.

‘Go awn, lad,’ said Papa Hogg with a twitch and a snort. ‘Tis a drink, not an ornament.’

And go on I did. Having never drunk anything with sheep in the title before, I began with a tentative sip. This passed without incident, so I sculled a third of the pint, finishing with an audible ‘Ahhh, that’s not bad,’ before plonking it back on the bar.

‘Aye lad. Yorkshire born an’ Yorkshire bred. Strong in t’arm an’ thick int’ ‘ead.’

I got the gist of that one, but Austin Hogg and his accent and inane jingoisms were going to make for a long night. It was hard to believe we were speaking the same language. He may as well have been an Inner Mongolian exchange student so vast was the chasm between our dialects. And he was the one from the Mother Country.

All three pints had now been poured. Austin held his in the air. He was clearly going to propose a toast. Or a toast of sorts:

‘Oft tha’s made me friends mi foos,’ he began with stern eyes and a dip of his head. ‘Oft tha’s made me pop me cloas. But noa that thas so near me mose, up tha comes an down tha goas.’

Something about fools, clothes and Moses. I drank to all three. He tipped his pint and drank, coming up for air with a white moustache. Beside him the sullen Simon sculled his pint in two shut eyed visits, fished in his overalls while blinking hard at the floor, then flicked a ten pound note on the bar. I noticed that the wet feather had whisked his glass away and was pulling a fresh one (in the same glass) before Simon went for the pocket, an unspoken ritual I had no doubt had been going on for some time.

The ten pound note was now on the bar. The wordless barman was pulling Simon’s pint. Mine was nearly empty. Austin Hogg’s was half full. Simon was staring thoughtfully at the fire. Papa Hogg was staring thoughtfully at the fire. The wet feather pulling Simon’s pint was staring thoughtfully at the fire. I was staring thoughtfully at them and the fire and hoping like hell all this thoughtful staring at the fire was going to end soon with some sort of conversation starter because it was beginning to feel awkward.

No, it had felt awkward from the outset, what with the Inner Mongolian exchange student father-in-law-to-be and his mute son and their odd ways. I searched the bar for sources of background noise – a radio, a juke box playing Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’ on repeat, anything to drown out the silence.

Nothing. Just the crackle and pop and hiss of damp wood behind a brass grille. That fire was our audio (aside from the odd wet sniff and dull thud of a pint placed back on a coaster). It was our visual too the way my co-drinkers were staring at it. And it soon dawned on me that the only one ill at ease with this silent vigil on the flames amid tilts of Black Sheep was me. I was the odd one out here. To everyone else that fire was Parkinson.

Conversation, or its facilitator, came from an unlikely source and well into the fire’s first celebrity interview. I was unprepared for this, quietly, mentally building as I was to broaching the subject of another beer. I’d studied the options, asking for one being the most obvious. But my drinking ‘buddies’ were so deeply engrossed in whatever little world the combination of this pub, that fire and a pint generated, I didn’t have the heart to say something as mood-fucking as ‘Any chance of a pint?’. So I leant on the bar and looked at those gazing at the fire and did some fire gazing myself and crossed and uncrossed my feet and tried to catch the wet feather’s eye, which was hopeless because he was gazing at the fire.

‘B-Barely,’ said the fidgeting form of Simon Hogg peering over the fire-spotting form of his father. ‘How have ye f-found the weather so far?’

I’d learnt my lesson, albeit only after a quiet word from Gabriel. ‘Um. Lovely,’ I said with a slow, sincere nod and left it at that, any elaboration only opening the door to diplomatic incident.

‘It’s n-not too c-cold for ye?’ fished Simon, eyes leaving mine at speed the moment mine hit his.

‘No,’ I said, pleased he had discovered the gift of small talk with two pints under his belt. ‘It’s positively balmy.’

Simon seemed sufficiently pleased with this, bracing the bar with both hands and biting his lip as he nodded at nothing in particular for an uncomfortably long time, said 'Mmm,' at the end of this, and then plunged back into his pint with sudden, tooth clinking gusto. His father meanwhile had regressed to a standing version of his afternoon demeanour (he would not say another word the entire night). He stared up at me from close range twitching and sipping, his only audible contributions now confined to a limited repertoire of whistling nostrils and involuntary grunts. It was all very unnerving.

‘S-so you’re Australian then, are ye, Barely?’ Simon said suddenly from out of the silence, perhaps warming to what was clearly not a natural role for him - that of conversation facilitator.

‘No, I’m a Kiwi,’ I said, inwardly annoyed that the smile felt tight and forced.

‘Oh, you’re a Kiwi? S-sorry.’

‘Not at all.’

A smile, quite a nice smile, spread across Simon’s gaunt, haunted face, the first I’d seen grace his beer wet lips, and his eyes momentarily twinkled into mine before falling to earth. ‘I suppose it’s a b-bit of an insult to be called Australian.'

‘Not at all, mate,' I said licking and wiping my flavour savour having satisfied a sudden need to chug my own beer. 'Australians get more offended if they’re called Kiwis, but we don’t tend to mind. I think they hate us more than we hate them.’

‘What are Australians like c-compared to Kiwis?’ he asked swallowing hard, eyes now serious and averted.

‘Ahm, Similar. I like Australians in the main, but they’re not the most sophisticated lot in the world.’

‘Are Kiwis more sophisticated?’

‘I’m not sure we’re more sophisticated.We’re gentler, softer people. More English. Australians are more American. They’re more in your face. Which is probably why they’re better than us at…well, pretty much everything. But then most countries are.’

‘You’re g-good at rugby,’ Simon said with real enthusiam, his eyes widening as he pushed an empty pint at the wet feather who soundlessly went about pouring a new one.

‘We are quite good at rugby,' I said, then scoffed into my pint. 'It’s about all we are good at.’

‘What d’ye mean?’

I wiped my lips with an arm. ‘Well, we’re just so small and ineffectual as a country really. We just fiddle about down there beside Antarctica barely raising a ripple. About the only way we can get in the news anywhere else is if a Frenchmen bombs one of our boats. If the world was a stage, New Zealand would be a cardboard tree, that’s how important we are. We don’t even have a defence force, not that that’s a bad thing. If Britain invaded right now with our relative military might, New Zealand would last about five minutes. And that’s allowing for about three minutes of hiding under the stairs. We’ve got a Minister for Rugby, you know.’

‘R-really?’

‘I wouldn’t have clue. But it wouldn’t surprise me. We’ve got a Minister of Defence as well, but he spends most of his time defending our crap defence force. New Zealand’s a proud nation but military-wise, there’s not a lot to be proud of. We just can’t bully people like you and America. We’re too small. That’s why we’ve put so much of our national resources into rugby. We want to be able to bully people at something. And in the average year there’s going to be more test matches than world wars. So instead of factories churning out tanks, we’ve got factories churning out twenty stone Polynesians.’

Simon laughed. The wet feather laughed. Papa Hogg just stared.

‘Not very patriotic of me, but there you go.’

‘No no,’ said Simon, as if he’d cleared this with the embassy. He smiled wistfully at his glass. ‘I’ve always w-wanted to go to New Zealand. It’s a long way.’

‘You need to go for a few weeks to make it worthwhile. The scenery is pretty amazing.’

‘I only get two weeks holiday a year and I always g-go to G-Greece or T-Turkey, don’t I, Dad?’ Papa Hogg nodded sagely at the fire. ‘I’ve been to Turkey the last two years. All inclusive packages at this resort I found. All your m-meals and alcohol are included and I was d-drinking eight pints a n-night!’

‘Good effort,’ I said. I was impressed with the whole Greece and Turkey thing, which had taken me by surprise: Here I was thinking Simon was some unworldly daddy’s boy beavering away in chicken shit all day never leaving the farm except, perhaps to stare at a fire in the Pig in Muck Inn. Greece and Turkey? To a kiwi, it didn’t get much more exotic or remote. Simon was talking about Greece or Turkey like he’d just popped over to Fiji.

And so the night continued and improved. Half of Skipton-le-Beans ultimately shuffled in adding a welcome background murmur, the odd local shuffling in to join us, greet the new boy and chat.

Overall I was pleased with my performance. I had stuck to the game plan – to drink moderately and tread cautiously; to present only the courteous, factory farm-friendly side of myself. The more we drank, the more Simon opened up and, strangely, conversely, the more Papa Hogg, after a dominant and indecipherable start, retreated into himself. I saw a positive in this: His blatant stares of the early evening had either been designed to unsettle me or seek out flaws in the man who intended to marry his daughter, or both. When they ceased it was a victory of sorts. Either he’d failed to unnerve me or, better still, failed to find any glaring glitches in my character.

His behaviour had been, in a word, peculiar. He was an odd little man with next to nil social skills. Yet there was something about the way he carried himself – the way he cast those sour eyes about the bar or stared up at me for uncomfortably long, unblinking periods – that tacitly revealed the power he knew he had, the money he knew he had. In so many ways he was entirely unlikeable and forgettable. In every other way, he was latently dangerous.

Simon Hogg had been the surprise package of the evening: warm, animated and enthusiastic, albeit artificially stimulated. That night I saw latent potential in Simon Hogg. Pity he had chicken blood on his hands; an immovable obstacle to any meaningful friendship