Lights out

Lights Out – 1500 words

John’s flagon hung above the bar with a few dozen other regulars at The Rose. Oscar filled it to the brim and slid the lager over to the edge of the bar, quoting the price.

“Really?” John responded.

Oscar looked at John from behind the bar with old serious eyes and the brow of a concerned child. “Of course. How else do you expect me to make a living?”

“Make a living Oscar-” John’s arms tore up the air as he gestured towards the large televisions, reserved normally for Rugby, and the off important footy game. The room was just as full with spectators as it would be on a busy match day, where beer would be spilt lovingly over one another and air would be thick as a biscuit with sweat and conversation. Today the air dared only to tremble. The men of hushed voices jabbed each other in sides, pulled hands over faces and pointed up now and then towards the TV screens. The same story had been looping for an hour. It was 3pm on a Wednesday. “Take a look at the bloomin TV’s, there will be no living soon.”

Oscar sucked his lips inwards. “You really think it’ll happen?”

John’s animations had ceased. The warmth from the pub, kept at a deliberate thirsty 24oC and the uncharacteristic gesticulations sullied his forehead with shine. He sighed and looked at old man Oscar as if he were a puppy. “Yes Oscar. I do. I’m sorry. They don’t know when, but it’s going to happen.”

Oscar shook his head and exhaled through his nostrils. The thick white hairs under his nose quivered. “I just don’t understand it. I just don’t. How does a thing like this happen?”

“How does anything happen.” John picked up some roasted peanuts and dropped them in a stream back into the small oriental looking bowl. “First gradually, then suddenly.”

“That’s good that.” Oscar remarked.

“Hemmingway.” John replied, head cocked sideways and line of vision to the blurred corner of the fruit machine. The buttons lit up in succession as if the electricity sprawled through each one like a millipede.

Oscar nodded and licked his lips, his eyesight raised back up to the screens. John leant forward on his stool, laying his head onto the sticky bar, feeling like one of the trapped insects caught on the strips of fly paper he could see in the kitchen through the hatch.

“That’ll still be £3.50 though son.”

John peeled himself upright. “Oscar we’ve been through this!”

“No, no I get it, I believe you, but it’ll just be the electronic money right? All the debits and stuff. So I’ll need the paper money more than ever. How else will we buy things?”

“Oscar, you don’t get it! You said it yourself, paper money. Paper. It doesn’t mean anything. If there’s not electronic currency, there’s nothing. The paper will just be paper.”

“Right, right.” Oscar nodded and used his finger and thumb to comb down his beard. “And the change, that’s got to have some worth? It’s metal after all. I’ve got plenty of those in the till. Mind you, that’s electric too! Better get those out, coppers and all I spose. Got any change son?”

John began to squint as if spritzed with something irritant and threw his hands as protest in the air. “Okay, listen.”

Oscar leant in across the bar. “I’m listening.”

John picked up his flagon and drank to the halfway mark before continuing. “The change too, all of it will be worthless. I don’t feel like you’ve thought this through Oscar, you won’t need money to make a living. What will you need it for? Everything is going to shut down. Everything and every service we rely on is going to end.”

Oscar nodded again. His eyes began to widen. John started to nod with him.

“Understanding?”

“How’m I going to keep the lagers cold?”

John heaved another sigh, more private this time, and returned his head to the sticky bar continued looking at the twitching legs of flys in the white-tiled kitchen. “Oh I don’t know Oscar. I really don’t know.”

Oscar began to count things on his fingers looking back and forth, between the TV screens and the taps.

John sighed. "Will you take this?" He ventured, digging a heart-shaped locket from the scrunches of his pocket.

Oscar's eyes gleamed, then fizzled. "I couldn't," he replied, in remembrance.

*

The light in the men’s bathroom always took a while to switch on. A wooden loop hung down on a tatty piece of string, hitting you in the chest as you enter. Those who weren’t acquainted with the pub tugged on it a couple of times, causing the light to hum in anticipation of coming on, only to be ordered to cease before it had the chance. Men on excursions to the toilet in The Rose were therefore forced to stand for a moment in the darkness of the room, and wait. With the contrast from the light at the bar, the eyes took a while to adjust. The men of the Rose assimilated into the dark disappearing like Cheshire cats. After the usual whir, and the grinding hum, the light would start to flicker, and in the epileptic moments between light and dark, a sense of uncertainty would often fill the men’s guts, as if, in the trembling light, they expected to be confronted with something prior unseen. As if the darkness had cloaked a danger that only a light bulb could stave off. When the light came on as a constant, the men would be met with a face inches from their own. A cracked mirror above a white sink the only grubby culprit.

*

Three days passed and the regulars still came. They helped board up the windows for old Oscar. The nights were becoming dangerous. Already the street lamps had been switched off to preserve power. John looked over the room from his spot at the bar. Some of the wives had come tonight, wearing their best tired smiles. Oscar pulled the odd pint. Most of the men had started to help themselves, thanking the old man each time as if he had served them all the same.

“Pork scratchings please Oscar,” John asked his old friend.

Oscar pulled a pack down from the cardboard sleeve and chucked them across to him. “Thought you didn’t eat pork like?”

John shrugged, what had all too quickly become a familiar shrug. They had come to realise what this meant the past few days.

It had been this way since Thursday. Oscar had screened an old film to raise the spirits and shut off the news channels, which had become, consequently, every channel. A poll was done. The Italian Job drawn with a roar out of a hat. The men laughed in all the same places, all the same Michael Caine lines. But when the end came, and the team hung off the edge of the cliff, the room became silent. The view from the edge seemed so much deeper than they had remembered, and the van, less balanced than they had realised in previous viewings.

That was the night the powercuts started to come in waves. At first they were met with the same cheer you would get with the drop of a glass. As the night wore on, the men sipped their warm beers in silence and waited for the lights to come back on and reveal each other safe and sound. A game of wink murder was jokingly proposed. The room laughed nervously.

It would happen any day now. Each time the electric cut out, John bit down his back teeth and waited for the sing of the fruit machine in the corner to alert them of its return, like a songbird announcing artificial dawn, and until this night it did.

No-one was exactly sure of the time. Mobile phones had started to unsync and wall clocks were no longer to be trusted. But it was a Sunday moonless evening as John ate his first pack of pork scratchings in 26 years when the lights slammed off again. No one knew they wouldn’t come back on this time for sure, but the wives in the dark corners started to sob, and the dark began to claim scalps of fear from each man with their drink. There were no shadows in the town. Dogs barked and the sound of windows being smashed sputtered throughout the streets.

Behind the wooden boards of the pub, somewhere in the black old man Oscar called out to his friend. “John?” He whispered. The anonymous bodies of the darkness wiggled in response.

“I’m here.” John replied at the bar, stiff and invisible, his fingers still salty from his snack.

“What’s going to happen now?” Oscar said. A car alarm whirred in the distance.

“I don’t know Oscar.”

Oscar would have been nodding in the light. A crash in a nearby street shook the ground a little. “Is this it?” he asked, after a moment.

“Maybe.” John replied to the dark.

A smash sound arouse from inside the pub.

“John?” Oscar asked.

“John?”

The locket crushed under Oscar's feet as he took a step forward to find his friend.