Last Chance Saloon

“Welcome to The Last Chance Saloon,” said Dad as he unlocked the door to the pub that was to become our new home and his new job.

“Are you changing the name, then?” I asked. “It says The Dog and Duck on the sign.”

Dad sighed. He’d done a lot of that lately, sighing I mean.

“No darling. It’s just a figure of speech.”

“What’s a figure of sp…?”

“Shall we just get in and have a look at the place?” said Grandad, pushing me gently inside, or as gently as he could with a suitcase in each hand.

Now it was my turn to sigh. No one seemed to want to answer my questions any more and I had lots and lots of questions about lots and lots of things. So much had changed for us in the past year.

First of all I’d had my 11th birthday and had to move up to big school, and, because I’d passed the 11-plus exam and my best friend, Jenny, hadn’t, we’d ended up going to different schools. Just as I’d got used to not seeing her every day and had almost worked out how to get around the warren of corridors to find the room where my next lesson was without being late or getting trampled on by herds of kids much bigger than me, Mum and Dad announced that we were moving to the country because it would be better for Mum’s health.

“But I don’t want to move,” I’d said. “What about my friends?”
Dad’s face had gone a funny colour.

“Nothing’s more important than your mother’s health, Susan. I’ve had to get a new job and I’ve got to make new friends. You can do the same. Stop being so selfish and grow up a bit.”

Mum was lying on the sofa under a blanket. She’d been doing that a lot since my last birthday. She’d stretched out her arm and grasped Dad’s wrist. I remember thinking how tiny and fragile her arm looked next to his.

“Bill. Don’t be so hard on her. She’s just a child. She doesn’t know.”

Mum died not long after we’d moved and no one really explained what cancer was to me - certainly not Dad, who’d been at home for ages before Mum went to heaven, and not Grandad, who just kept crying every time I mentioned her name. Grandma did try. She’d been a nurse before she was a grandma and she said that bodies were made up of cells and, sometimes, bad cells took over and killed good cells and that was why Mum had died. She couldn’t make more good cells to kill the bad ones. It was a bit like a war, Grandma said, and, sometimes, the goodies got overwhelmed by the baddies and didn’t win. That, she told me, was life.

I didn’t quite understand that. Surely the baddies winning and Mum dying was death? Death, I did understand, since Dad’s mum and dad, my other grandparents, were dead, and I was told how much they’d loved me when I was a baby. But I didn’t remember them and I’d never seen them, so death meant gone. But I was also confused; in all the stories I’d been told, the baddies had never won in the end.

Anyway, back to what I was saying about how things had changed for us over the past year. Dad lost his new job not long after Mum died. He said they weren’t too keen on people taking too much time off.

“So, lad,” said Grandad, putting down the suitcases with a bang on the tiled floor and looking at Dad. “Here we all are. Let’s get on with it. Tell me what you want me to do.”

Gran and Grandad had stopped working a while ago. Well, about six months before Mum got sick.

“This pair of old hippies,” said Gran at the time, “are going to sit back and watch the daisies grow.”

They’d moved down to Devon first and now Dad and I were here, too.

“It smells in here!” I said, looking around the room with its red-tiled floor, dark oak bar and brass fittings. There were wooden kegs with stained brass tops all around and chairs and benches with ripped red and purple covers. There were strange metal things hanging from the ceiling and attached to the beams. I later found out they were farm implements and horse brasses.

“It’s a pub,” said Dad. “It’s bound to smell of beer and fags.”

“I smell old rope burning, too,” said Grandma. “You’d better put a stop to that if you don’t want to end up in jail.”

The strange, sweet smell didn’t go away. In fact, it often smelled stronger at the table Dad often sat at with his regulars.

Dad often didn’t get up in the morning to take me to school. But he worked late hours on the ‘lock-ins’, so it wasn’t really his fault.

Grandma was the one who usually gave me breakfast and sent me off the school whilst Grandad was dealing with the big lorry that made the deliveries.

The day that we found Dad down in the cellar with a broken neck and ‘dead as a doornail’ so Grandad said, after feeling his neck and listening to his chest, changed everything again.

The coroner’s report said that he had attempted to receive a brewery delivery after having had no sleep and whilst under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and had opened up the cellar doors, and then somehow fallen backwards through them. The verdict was ‘misadventure’.

Grandad started up his gardening business again as well as trying to run the pub. Grandma and me helped out.

I’m 18 now, and at art college, and I was down on the beach having a barbecue and surf party with my mates when the verdict came through, texted to me by my Gran. I completely lost it - didn’t go home for three days.

“Do you want to keep on living here?” asked Grandad.

“Well, I don’t wanna move,” I said.

“You’d better get used to being a barmaid, then,” he said. “And either sell some of that daft arty stuff of yours or get a proper job. God knows how I’m going to run a pub at my age as well as running my gardening business.!”

“I’ve got a job,” said Grandma. “I’m lending a helping hand at Susan’s college.”

“What job?” said Grandad. “How can you have time after doing the sandwiches and looking after me?”

“As I said,” said Grandma. “I’m lending a hand at the art college. I’m a life model and it pays quite well.”

“Life model?” Grandad spluttered. “You mean you’ve been showing off your body to horny, beardy, hippy weirdos?”

“Not really,” said Grandma. It’s more Goth, these days. All black nail varnish, black lipstick and tattoos, and that’s just the boys.”

I should have known that Grandad, being the belligerent fellow that he is, would appear at my college the very next day. I saw him march past the room I was in listening to history of art. Then I heard him explode when he went into the studio where the life modelling went on. All he actually found was Grandma in a towelling gown letting students draw her hands.

It’s just as well that he never found out that the study of hands came after the whole body drawing thing.

The pub’s doing well now, especially since Noah, our brilliant chef joined the staff. It’s also just as well that Grandad doesn’t know what Noah and I have cooked up. He’s going to be a great-grandad soon.

END