Closing Time

Jack Fennell loved last call.

He had loved it since he was fourteen and had first stood behind the bar of the New Inn on a Friday night, on a crate, because he was not tall enough yet to see over the pumps, and watched his mother do it. You could tell everything about a bar from how it did last call. You could tell everything about the person doing it. There were people who shouted it like a fire alarm, and people who rang a bell at you as if you had done something wrong, and people who said it so quietly that nobody heard and then were cross with everybody at ten past for not having heard. And there was his mother, who said time, please, ladies and gentlemen in a voice that was exactly loud enough and not one bit louder, and then went on doing exactly what she had been doing before, and somehow the whole room was on its feet by twenty past and nobody could remember being asked.

The woman at Giligin’s was good. He had known she was good from the pickle juice. He knew it for certain now.

She had called it once, from the middle of the bar, over the music, and then she had not called it again. She had not needed to. The music had gone down, not off, just down, a notch, so that you noticed it without being told to. The man on the door had stood up off his stool. Two people Jack had not seen before had come out of somewhere at the back with trays and were going round the tables taking the empties, not the full ones, never the full ones, just the empties, so that everybody’s table got emptier round them without anybody’s drink being touched, and you looked down and found you were the only thing left on it.

“Look at that,” said Jack.

“At what?” said Hanover.

“Her. Them. All of it.” Jack nodded down the bar. “She’s not rushing anybody. Nobody’s been told to go. Look at them. They’re all going.”

Hanover looked.

He looked the way he looked at everything, properly, as if he might be asked about it later, which with Hanover he very often would be. He was standing at the bar with the empty whisky glass in front of him and the back of his hand clean and pink where she had wiped it, and he looked happier than Jack had ever seen him, including Bonfire Night, including the cricket, including half past twelve at the end of the bar at DJ’s.

“How do you know they’re going?” said Hanover.

“Because they’re putting their phones in their pockets. You watch. Last call, everybody gets their phone out to see what time it is. Then they put it away. Once they’ve put it away, they’re going. They just don’t know yet.”

Hanover watched a man at the next table take his phone out, look at it, and put it in his pocket.

“That’s a fact,” said Lukas, from further along the bar, with deep interest.

“Facts don’t count,” said Jack.

“That one counts,” said Lukas. “I am going to tell it to Alex’s mother.”

---

At ten to three Theo went off to the gents, and Alexander went to look at the fishing nets with his hands behind his back, and Jack leaned on the bar beside Hanover and said, out of the side of his mouth:

“You’re going to tip her.”

Hanover turned his head.

“I’ve got one pound.”

“Then you’re going to tip her one pound.”

“Is that enough?”

“It’s everything you’ve got,” said Jack. “That’s always enough.” He nodded at the bar. “Don’t give it her. Don’t hand it over. She’s busy. Just leave it. On the bar. By the glass. She’ll see it.”

Hanover took the last coin out of his pocket. He looked at it for a moment, at the little head on it, at sixteen, facing right. Then he put it on the bar beside his empty glass, very carefully, exactly in the middle of the space, and took his hand away, and stood back from it half a step, with his hands behind his back, and inclined his head to it about an inch.

He had put it down, Jack thought, exactly the way people put down a wreath.

“Hanover.”

“What?”

“It’s a tip. It’s not the Cenotaph.”

“I’ve never left one before.”

“I know,” said Jack. “I can tell.”

The bartender came back up the bar a minute later, wiping down. She picked up the empty glass. She saw the coin. She picked it up, and Jack watched her look at it, the second time tonight she had looked at one of those, the head on it, very small, under the light from the Wheel. She did not look at Hanover. She did not need to. She closed her hand round the coin, and put it in the front pocket of her jeans, not the till, which was where a tip went, and went on wiping.

“She’s going to frame that one,” said Jack, with great satisfaction.

“She is not.”

“She is. You don’t put a pound in your pocket. You put a pound in the till. You put it in your pocket when it’s yours.” Jack looked at her with enormous approval. “That’s going on a wall.”

“It’s a pound.”

“So you keep saying,” said Jack.

---

At three o’clock the lights came up.

They came up all at once, white and bright and merciless, so that everybody in the bar looked suddenly ten years older and slightly ashamed, which was the point, which was what the lights were for, and every landlord in the world knew it. The music stopped. The last of the people at the tables stood up as if they had always been about to.

The bartender came down the bar towards them, wiping her hands.

“That’s us, gentlemen,” she said. “Thanks for coming in.” She looked at Theo, who had come back from the gents and was standing with his can from Milwaukee and the watch on his chest and his face all lit up under the merciless lights, the only face in the bar that the lights could not do anything to. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” said Theo. “For the drink.”

“You bought me one,” she said. She nodded at the cork board behind the bar, where a slip of paper was pinned with all the others. “I’ll have it in about forty minutes.” She glanced, once, at Hanover, and then back at Theo, and said nothing at all, and went to the door, and opened it for them.

Jack went out last but one. He stopped in the door, because he could not help it, and said to her, as one professional to another:

“That was a really good last call.”

She looked at him, a red-faced boy from Gloucestershire with a can in his hand, as if this were the strangest thing anybody had said to her all night, which, at Giligin’s, Jack supposed, it might have been.

“Thanks,” she said.

“My mum runs a pub.”

“I could tell,” she said, and Jack went out onto the plaza feeling as if he had been given a medal, and Hanover came out behind him, last, holding the door.

---

The torches were still burning. The misters were still hissing. The tiki man was still holding up his coconut to nobody. It was ninety-two degrees, and the plaza was empty except for the people coming out of the bar behind them and going off in twos and threes towards the streets, and somewhere a sprinkler was still going tick, tick, tick, like the Wheel.

Theo stood in the middle of the plaza and looked at his phone.

“It’s not my birthday any more,” he said.

“It was until three,” said Hanover. “Bar time.”

“Is that a thing?”

“It is a thing,” said Jack. “Ask anyone. Ask my mum. Your birthday goes on till they put the lights up. Everybody knows that.”

Theo looked at his phone again. His face changed.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing till ten to five.”

“Nothing what?”

“Buses. There’s no buses. The buses have stopped.” Theo looked at the phone as if it had done this to him personally. “There’s a night one that goes along Indian School, and it’s gone, and the next one’s at four fifty-one.”

“So we walk,” said Jack.

“Where to?”

Nobody answered that.

Jack looked at the four of them. He had worked out, at some point between the pickle juice and the whisky, that he was the only one of the five of them who had ever been thrown out of a bar at closing time before, and that the other four did not know what you did next. Theo knew buses and Hanover knew how to stand and the Germans knew everything about everything, and none of them knew that what you did at five past three in the morning on the pavement outside a bar was stand there for a bit, and then decide something stupid.

He was about to say so when Theo, beside him, said:

“Freddie.”

“I know,” said Hanover.

“I’ve been not saying anything since Boondocks.”

“I know.”

Jack looked where they were looking.

At the end of the plaza, where it met the street, under a tree, with its engine running and its lights off, there was a big dark car.

Its lights came on.

It came up the length of the plaza at walking pace, a dark people carrier with seven seats and tinted windows and a hire company’s sticker in the corner of the back one, and stopped beside them, and the driver’s door opened, and a very large man in a grey suit got out.

Jack had seen him in the lobby of the Biltmore yesterday afternoon, standing behind a sofa, and on the lawn at the reception, standing behind Alexander. He had not said anything either time. He walked round the front of the car, in his jacket, in ninety-two degrees, at three in the morning, and slid the side door open, and stood beside it, and looked at nobody in particular.

“Kessler,” said Alexander.

Kessler inclined his head, about an inch.

That was all. He did not say Majestät. He did not say get in. He stood by the open door.

They got in.

They got in badly, the way five people get into a car at three in the morning. Alexander went in the front, upright, with his hands on his knees. Theo and Hanover and Lukas went in the middle. Jack climbed into the back row and lay down across it at once with his arm over his eyes, and the cold air from the vents came down on him like a blessing, and he thought that he could stay there until October.

Kessler got in, and shut his door, and put his hands on the wheel, and looked in the mirror.

He did not ask where.

Nobody told him. From under his arm Jack could hear the quiet go on, and on, until Hanover said, in the middle row:

“Somewhere we can hand ourselves in.”

“Not a hotel lobby,” said Theo.

“No.”

“Not a police station. They’d have to write it down.”

“No.”

“Somewhere good,” said Theo. “If we’re doing it. Somewhere we’d want to be.”

Jack thought about it. He thought about the end of a night, and how you always wanted, at the end of a night, to be somewhere you could see from, and how the best end of a night he had ever had was on the top of the hill above the village at four in the morning after the harvest supper with the whole valley going grey underneath him.

“Top of something,” he said, from under his arm.

There was a pause.

“There,” said Lukas, quietly.

Jack took his arm off his eyes and sat up to look.

Lukas had his face against the window and was pointing, west, and above the low roofs of the plaza, against the orange glow on the underside of the sky, there was a shape. A long dark hump, and a head at the end of it, raised, like an animal lying down in the desert with its head up, black against the orange, a long way off and a very long way up.

Jack looked at it.

When he had said top of something, he had been thinking of the hill above the village, which you could walk up in twenty minutes with a pint in your hand. He had been thinking, if he was honest, of something more like a car park.

“Camelback,” said Theo.

“Is there a way up?” said Alexander.

“There’s a trail. Echo Canyon. My mum looked it up. She said if we went up it in August she’d kill me.”

Jack lay down again, slowly, and put his arm back over his eyes, and did not say anything at all.

Kessler put the car in gear.

Nobody had said Camelback to him. Nobody had said Echo Canyon to him in German. He put the car in gear anyway, and pulled away, slowly, down the plaza, and Jack, who had found that he could not keep his arm over his eyes after all, because of the mountain, sat up again and looked out of the back window instead, at the plaza going away behind them, the torches and the tiki man and the bar with its door open and its lights up white.

And saw her.

She came round the corner from the street at the far end, on foot, running, a woman in a dark jacket with a short black fringe, and behind her, not running, walking very fast, a broad grey man in a patterned shirt whom Jack had last seen in the corner of a bar in Soho, laughing. She ran straight up the plaza to the door of Giligin’s, which was still open, with the bartender standing in it, and stopped, and said something, and the bartender said something back and pointed, and the woman turned round and looked down the plaza, straight down it, at the back of the car, at the back window, at Jack.

He knew her. He had known her since September. She had stood by a drainpipe in the yard of the New Inn on more Friday nights than he could count, watching Hanover as if he were a kind of weather.

“Hanover,” said Jack.

Hanover turned round in the middle row and looked.

They watched her, the two of them, through the tinted back window, until the car turned out of the plaza into the street and she was gone: a woman standing very still at the far end of an empty plaza at five past three in the morning, three minutes after they had come out of it, with her hands at her sides, looking at a car she could not see into.

Lukas had seen her too. He looked at Hanover, and then out of his own window, and did not say anything.

Nobody said anything.

Jack lay down across the back row again, with his arm over his eyes, and the cold air coming down, and thought that he had seen a great many people arrive at a great many bars just after closing, and had never seen anybody look like that, and that if she had come into the New Inn looking like that his mother would have sat her down by the fire and got her a water without being asked, and not said anything, and let her stay as long as she liked.

He hoped somebody would get her a water.