Twice Shy

'Big man. Didn't know him. I told him where your cottage was.'

He scowled at Betty, who was obliviously peeling grapes. 'I told him you were out.'

'Did he say what he wanted?'

'Nope.'

He shed an apron and took his bulk into the bar. 'Too early for you?' he said, easing behind the counter.

'Sort of.'

He nodded and methodically assembled his usual breakfast; a third of a tumbler of brandy topped up with two scoops of vanilla-walnut ice cream.

'Cassie went off to work,' he said, reaching for a spoon.

'You don't miss much.'

He shrugged. 'You can see that yellow car a mile off, and I was out front cleaning the windows.' He stirred the ice cream into the brandy and with gourmand enjoyment shovelled the first instalment into his mouth. 'That's better,' he said.

'It's no wonder you're fat.'

He merely nodded. He didn't care. He told me once that his size made his fat customers feel better and spend more, and that his fat customers in search of a miracle outnumbered the thin.

He was a natural eccentric, himself seeing nothing unusual in anything he did. In various late-night sessions, he'd unbuttoned a little of his inner self, and under the surface geniality I'd had glimpses of a deep pessimism, a moroseness which looked with despair at the inability of the human race to live harmoniously on the beautiful earth. He had no politics, no god, no urge to agitate. People, he said, were known to starve on rich fertile tropical earth; people stole their neighbours' lands; people murdered people from racial hate; people tortured and murdered in the name of freedom. It sickened him, he said. It had been going on from pre-history, and it would go on until the vindictive ape was wiped out.

'But you yourself seem happy enough,' I'd once said.

He looked at me darkly. 'You're a bird. Always on the wing. You'd be a sparrowhawk if you hadn't such long legs.'

'And you?'

'The only option is suicide,' he said. 'But right now it's not necessary.' He'd deftly poured himself another brandy, and lifted the glass in a sort of salute. 'Here's to civilisation, damn it.'

His real fore-names, written over the pub doorway, were John James, but his nickname was a pudding. 'Bananas Frisby', a hot fluffy confection of eggs, rum, bananas and orange, was an item nearly always on his menu, and 'Bananas' he himself had become. It suited his outer persona well, but his inner, not at all.

'You know what?' he said.

'What?'

'I'm growing a beard.'

I looked at the faint shadow on the dark jaw. 'It needs compost,' I said.

'Very funny. The days of the big fat slob are over. What you see is the start of the big fat distinguished innkeeper.' He took a large spoonful of ice cream and drank some of the liquid as a chaser, wiping the resulting white moustache off on the back of his hand.

He wore his usual working clothes: open-necked shirt, creaseless grey flannels, old tennis shoes. Thinning dark hair scattered his scalp haphazardly, with one straight lock falling over an ear, and as Frisby in the evenings wasn't all that different from Frisby in the mornings I couldn't see a beard transforming the image. Particularly not, I thought interestedly, while it grew.

'Can you spare a tomato or two?' I said. Those Italian ones?'

'For your lunch?'

'Yeah.'

'Cassie doesn't feed you.'

'It's not her job.'

He shook his head over the waywardness of our domestic arrangements, but if he had had a wife I wondered which one of them would have cooked. I paid for the beer and the tomatoes, promised to bring Cassie to admire the whiskers, and drove home.

Life for me was good, as I'd told Cassie. Life at that moment was a long way from Bananas' world of horrors.

I parked in front of the cottage and walked up the path juggling radio, beer and tomatoes in one hand and fishing for keys with the other.

One doesn't expect people to leap out of nowhere waving baseball bats. I had merely a swift glimpse of him, turning my head towards the noise of his approach, seeing the solid figure, the savagery, the raised arm. I hadn't even the time to think incredulously that he was going to hit me before he did it.

The crashing blow on my moving head sent me dazed and headlong, shedding radio, beer cans, tomatoes on the way. I fell half on the path and half on a bed of pansies and lay in a pulsating semi-consciousness in which I could smell the earth but couldn't think.

Rough fingers twined themselves into my hair and pulled my head up from its face-down position. As if from a great distance away from my closed eyes a harsh deep voice spoke nonsensical words.

'You're not-' he said. 'Fuck it.'

He dropped my head suddenly and the second small knock finished the job. I wasn't aware of it. In my conscious mind, things simply stopped happening.

The next thing that impinged was that someone was trying to lift me up, and that I was trying to stop him.

'All right, lie there,' said a voice. 'If that's how you feel.'