Haunted

​I was at the big hardware store pretending to read the label on an adaptor plug, but really, I was looking at the little blonde Saturday girl on the checkout. Lisa.

​The plan was to catch her on lunch. She didn't eat; she always went out front and chain-vaped, but I guess I’d arrived too late. Well, I was working up the courage to talk to her. I'd feel like the store was dying down almost enough, but then a person or a family would pass by and that reset the whole thing. I'd repositioned myself way back behind her, hoping she hadn't seen me hovering by the coal sacks earlier, when I had this feeling someone was watching me. Maybe it was hyper-awareness, being in such an anxious state as I was, but somehow I felt eyes all over me like bugs on my skin. When I looked over my shoulder there was a guy with thick-rimmed spectacles ogling my arse. He looked up and did something with his eyebrows I didn't know how to interpret.

​"Can I help you, mate?" I said, turning around.

​"There's something on your trousers," he said, pointing.

​I looked down.

​"No, no. On your backside."

​I tried to twist and see, but my forty-four-year-old midsection wouldn't let me. "What is it?"

​The guy walked around his trolley and stooped to get a better look. "Looks like oil."

​"Fucking hell."

​"Thank God," he chuckled. "I thought it was shit."

​Well, the plan had to be abandoned. I left the store quickly, careful to stay out of Lisa's line of sight. I was going to go straight home, shake it off—not the end of the world, I told myself. But, walking through the car park, I felt the sting of tears welling, and it felt quite like it was the end of the world, inasmuch as it would have to carry on unchanged.

​I ran to the other side of the commercial estate, to Shane's. Shane's is the trendy bar and restaurant; all commercial estates have one like it, all of them shitty, all called some guy's name in the possessive. To remind you you don't live there, I suppose. I went in and sat at the bar and knocked back a rum and coke. The bartender tried to sell me three for two on vodka Red Bull, but I had another two rum and cokes, then a double whiskey, and the numbness was setting in nicely when the guy from the store sat on the stool next to mine. Luke.

​"Oh, you," he said, noticing me looking at him.

​"Me," I said.

​"Yeah..." He did the thing with his eyebrows again. "Look, I didn't mean to embarrass you back there," he said.

​"You didn't."

​"No, no. Come on, let me buy you a drink."

​Twenty-five years ago, Shane's was called Concourse, one of the nightclubs where me and the boys would go on the pull, the boys being me, Chris, Dazza, Dave, each of us nineteen going on immortal. We lived for clubbing and girls and getting smashed and brawling, and why not?—England was a playground back then. New Atheism. Alt Comedy. The internet was still a novelty; we'd pile round that one mate's house to look at HotorNot, SteakandCheese; girls and gore, basically. Politics wasn't really a thing; E put conversations around New Labour back in the hands of the adults, while teenagers were busy gloriously misunderstanding Fight Club. The Matrix came out around the same time as American Pie, and that fucked everyone up. Aphex Twin came along and whatever we had to say was said with detuned bells and reverb and whiplash breakbeats. Then 9/11 happened and we all had to grow up a bit. But we couldn't. Well, one by one the nightclubs in town all closed, and these franchised dives became their eerie doppelgängers.

​"Think about this," I said, now slurring a little. "It's a thought experience—experiment, I mean... If you had a time machine and you beamed back a song from today, Ed Sheeran or whatever, beamed it back to 1995, what do you think they'd make of it? I'll tell you, they wouldn't believe it was from the future. They wouldn't. Because it's exactly the same shit they had in the charts back then. Now... If you beamed, say, Drum 'n' Bass music, a little Ed Rush or Photek, just one decade earlier into the '80s, it would blow their fuckin' minds how different it was. You see what I'm saying? Culture isn't moving on, man. You and me, we're zombies from the twentieth century."

​Fair dos, Luke had been patient listening to me ramble on, and I felt better. He was my age, about my weight. He looked vaguely familiar, but then, doesn't everyone after a few? I was on my fourth double whiskey when I noticed he had a wedding ring. It made sense then that he'd ordered a shandy and was drinking it slowly.

​"What were you in the hardware store for?" I asked him.

​"Oh, just, bits and bobs," he said.

​"Don't you have to be getting home?"

​"I can stay a little longer."

​"Okay. Do you live around here?"

​"No, no. I live up in New Town, er, you know where the bank is?"

​"Hold that thought," I said. "I gotta piss."

​He nodded and I went to the toilet.

​The toilet looked a lot better than it did in the '90s, I'll say that for Shane's. No graffiti on the walls, no puddle of stinking piss on the floor. As I stood at the urinal, I remembered the time me and Dave fooled around with a couple of birds in here. Mine was the blonde—I don't recall her name—wearing a tight yellow YSL dress. Sonique was playing a set that night and we'd each dropped a mitsi turbo. Before I could get her knickers down we heard Dave's bird puke violently, followed by Dave screaming, "What the fuck! What the fuck!" and bursting out of the cubicle. Chris and Dazza never let him live it down.

​I was washing my hands when I saw the reflection of my back in the mirror behind me. There wasn't a stain on my trousers as far as I could tell.

​I turned to the hand dryer and Luke was right there in front of me, not saying anything. He'd taken his spectacles off, leaving a hardened expression underneath that I didn't know how to interpret.

​"Oh, hey man."

​He inhaled sharply and headbutted me. The alcohol dampened the pain, but straight away I knew he'd knocked my front teeth out. The next blow came to the stomach and I dropped, heaving, onto my hands and knees, bright blood slapping the pristine white tiles. He kicked me in the gut. I retched up more blood and spat it out.

​"Luke…" I wheezed. "What did I do?"

​Another kick and this one sent me flat on my front with no hope of getting back up.

​"Stay clear of Lisa," he said.

​"Lisa?" I moaned. "Are you her boyfriend?"

​A hard kick to the head.

​Stop. Please stop.

​"I'm her father, you creepy bastard! She's half your age! Stop bothering her!"

​Another kick to the skull and everything went warm and quiet. I wished the boys were with me. I hadn't heard from any of them in over a decade. Dazza, I heard, caught a long stretch at HMP Wakefield. Chris lives in Thailand now. I've no idea what happened to Dave. Me? I doubted I'd die there, on the toilet floor. But that wasn't to say I'd ever make it out of that fuckin' commercial estate. In fact, I knew I wouldn't.