It is one of the men in black. A ripple of silence emanates from him, goes along with his voice. He shouts and they quieten. I can see it crossing the room, and it looks like fear to me. They are afraid of this man. Who does not even bother to reveal his gun. Everyone already knows he has it. Even if no one knows who or what he is. No one has ever explained. Some things we just accept.
‘Quiet,’ he says finally, when he no longer needs to shout, and the whole bar is already quieter than it’s ever been before. He looks round to catch the eyes of the room, and none of them seem inclined to meet him. Then he looks at me, and I look at him and I can’t look away. He’s younger than I thought. Just about my own age. Then he smiles, so quick it makes me doubt I saw it.
‘Just pipe down, alright?’ he says as he looks at me.
Then he sits down with the others and they resume their drinking, all in silence. And so does everyone else, but only in fear, not because they want to. They don’t dare look at the men in black, but they look at me, and they haven’t forgiven.
I want to go over to the table where the men in black have settled back down. They are not looking at me. I want to see if I recognize the others, if one of the men is perhaps a woman. If they have new friends now. Not that it matters. But Sal has grabbed my arm and pulled me back behind the bar.
‘You’d better go,’ he says. ‘You might not be reading any more, but you’ll live, if you’re lucky. There’s always a job in the kitchens, right?’
He pushes me into the back room, the one with the still. A yellow liquid bleeds through thin tubes where Sal turns water into whisky. I think to go back into the bar but then Sal would probably kill me himself, so I lift the trapdoor and go down the ladder into the dank lower decks, the rank smell of salt and rotting seaweed, the fetid warmth