He only did it once.

Only the once. Not twice. Certainly not three times.

That was how he recalled it, and that was how it was.

One innocuous and tiny act when measured against the span of a lifetime, and the foundations of his whole life shifted sideways, tearing the walls down and leaving him dazed, confused and filled with a fire that, far from being a passionate rage, propelled him downwards, removing anything left of worth until he felt like he was going to implode, crushed by a black hole of pain.

When it was done, he went back to the Red Lion on many an occasion, but he never saw Stan again. 

After the first few return visits, he mustered the energy to ask the barman if he had seen Stan.

“Stan who?” the barman asked.

He shrugged, “I think his surname began with an A.”

The barman returned the shrug and went on with his glass polishing, there wasn’t much he could do with that snippet of information, so he didn’t grace it with a worded reply.

One day, he resolved to remain at the Red Lion. He’d already lost any hope of seeing Stan again, so this was an act of sheer bloody mindedness that helped mask his real intent. This was an attempt at replicating the original circumstances of his chance meeting with Stan. He had once read somewhere that recall was aided by creating the same context, in that matching context the memory would be conjured forth. 

He had gotten to the point where conjuring forth seemed like the only good idea left to him. There must be a detail that he had missed. Something had to have slipped him by and so this was a way of recreating that day. He wished to peer back into the past, sift the sands and discern the true manner of his demise.

*

He had had a bad day. 

This bad day was a humdinger of a bad day made all the worse by the fact that it had many brothers and sisters, some of which he was yet to meet, but he knew they were there all the same, waiting in the wings and not about to miss their cue.

Things had gotten on top of him and it was all getting a bit too much, but mostly he was pissed off. The pressure was building and as he left work that day he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He was dizzied by the events of the day and until he had a pint in his hand and was threatening to upend the contents into his mouth in their entirety, he had been totally unaware of his surroundings. As it was, a third of his pint was missing as he ceased his pouring and returned himself to his here and now.

That was when he met Stan.

“Bad day?” ventured Stan.

He had taken it as a question, but it was more a statement. The evidence of Stan’s eyes gave him all he needed to reach the bad day conclusion.

“One of many,” he had replied.

“I am aware of such things,” Stan had told him. Then he had turned to the barman, “buy this man another pint!” he had commanded of the man behind the bar.

The barman had obliged without taking any offence at the way Stan had ordered him about. Some people had something about them. It wasn’t that they got away with things others dare not do, it went beyond that. They were built differently and so they operated differently.

He had thanked Stan for the drink. 

“Don’t mention it,” said Stan, dismissing the thanks, “least I can do.”

As he recalled that fateful day, it seemed to him that Stan arranged a great many more pints for him, so much so that he had had to switch to whisky to avoid becoming too bloated. The trouble with a switch to spirits was the rate at which they were imbibed matched that of the much weaker beer that had preceded them.

Twas a wonder he had made it home, but he had. But not before a booze-fuelled heart to heart with Stan though. He had had just the right amount of drink to loosen his tongue and also his emotions. Or was that just the wrong amount of drink? With the power of retrospect he felt that on balance, it was probably the latter.

“My life is shit,” he had told Stan.

“You should do something about that,” Stan had told him.

He had considered knocking Stan’s block off at this juncture. He had now drunk the required amount of alcohol to bring the threat of violence to the fore. Something prevented him from doing so though and of this he was glad, not only because he considered himself a man who was not prone to violence, such that it would have appalled him to have resorted to such physicality, no, there was something about Stan that made him realise violence enacted upon Stan would be most unwise.

He had fetched up his whisky and knocked it back instead, “what is it that I could do?” he had asked, his throat burning with the after effects of the amber drink.

Stan leant in. He did so in a manner that could only be called conspiratorial and suddenly there were only the two of them. Everything else faded and faded until it was all gone away, “I could do something about your predicament,” said Stan.

He was puzzled at this and he wanted to tell Stan where to go in no uncertain terms, and then he didn’t, even before Stan furnished him with some interesting detail that drew him further inwards.

“A promotion would help, wouldn’t it?” Stan did that thing again with a question that was not really a question.

He nodded.

“And a bonus,” added Stan.

He gave another nod.

“That would help with the bills wouldn’t it?” said Stan.

It would. And then some.

Stan addressed the then some with his next words, “it would certainly give Sally less to moan about wouldn’t it?”

He nodded enthusiastically at this. Part of his current bad day routine was coming home to a barrage of verbal abuse from Sally. He did not know how it had come to this. Neither did he know from whence it had come. It had crept up on him like a shitty ninja and pounced when he really couldn’t be arsed with it all. Swiftly, it had gotten to a point where he didn’t even defend himself. If truth be told, he couldn’t defend himself, not after litany after litany of his failings had eroded his defences and taken his energy prisoner. Sally’s words had worn him down and now he was going through the motions at home as well as work. That was all he had left and that was all he was. She’d taken the best of him and left him with next to nothing.

“As well as that,” Stan rubbed his chin thoughtfully, as his eyes sparkled, “I think it’s high time you came into some money.”

He should have questioned this. He should have done more than question it, but instead he saw something of what Stan was offering him. Mostly he saw that there was a way out of his tortured life after all. Initially, he had dared to hope. Hope was more than he had had in a long time. On the heels of this newfound hope there was a vision, and as that vision flickered between them he thought he saw a happy reality, a happy reality that he deserved. 

He was well overdue a break.

He did ask one question though, and maybe it was this question that was the original source of his woes, “what’s the catch?”

Stan had smiled a smile that wasn’t a smile at all, “there is no catch. You are due this! You deserve it!”

He had nodded, because he certainly did deserve it. He’d worked his nuts off and done everything that had been asked of him. He’d bloody well earned it. This was his due. He was entitled to this.

“There is one thing,” said Stan.

“And what is that?” he had asked.

“I will give you the promotion, and not just a poxy half-cocked promotion, but a real humdinger of a promotion. I will give you a bonus so you can take Sally on that holiday you both used to dream about, and I will arrange for you to come into an amount of money so you can move to a house that eclipses the house that that stuffed shirt John bought two years ago. The one that Sally just can’t shut up about. You’ll get the house with that money and have enough to upgrade both your cars to something you don’t have to worry will get you down the road without costing you a few thousand quid in repair bills. I will do that and more, but…” Stan’s eyes seemed to twinkle all the more as he left that word hanging there in the air between them.

“But?” he asked.

“If you deny me to anyone in the next twenty four hours, instead of giving you those things, I will take from you in equal measure,” Stan told him.

“As if I would,” he said.

Stan straightened up and offered his hand across the small table to seal the deal, “you will,” he said quietly, but those words although heard, were not attended to and were dismissed in the moment before he took up Stan’s hand and shook it.

*

There was a minor mishap between leaving the pub and getting home.

The mishap was something and it was also nothing.

Mostly it was nothing, because he didn’t remember all that much at all once the fresh air outside the pub had mugged him of the majority of his senses.

The police arrested him and said something about affray as they handcuffed him and took him to the station. He barely touched the guy. Words had been exchanged and then a slap or three. It was a miracle that he connected any of them, such was the level of his inebriation.

He tried to cooperate with the police as best he could. They didn’t seem to think he tried hard enough. In his cell, partially sobered by this piece of bad fortune, he sat with his head in his hands, when a sharply dressed man burst in and demanded his attention.

He looked up, but for some reason, he could not see this man’s face. He heard his words well enough though.

“We have reason to believe that you are an associate of Stan…” the man said more, but the shock of the man’s entry into the cell together with mention of the strange man in the Red Lion distracted him.

“Pardon?” he said as he realised he had been asked a question, but hadn’t heard it.

“Do you know the person of which I speak?” the sharply dressed man asked again.

“What!? No! Of course not!” he protested.

“You deny knowing him?” the man asked.

“Yes I do! I don’t know who you are talking about!” he confirmed.

“Thought as much,” muttered the man, and with that he was gone.

And so was everything else that had ever mattered.

*

Sally was livid when he got home the following morning. More so when she heard where he had been. She told him she’d worried her self sick over him, but he doubted that. She did not look sick. She told him she had thought he was having an affair, that an affair would have been preferable to what he had actually been up to. Then she looked at him as though he were the contents of a dog poo bag and told him she doubted anyone would want him. Not as he was. She called him a loser before storming out of the room.

Work were also not best pleased with his unexplained absence. His manager, an oaf of a man, bollocked him and enjoyed every moment of the bollocking, then he was issued with a written warning and docked pay for his unauthorised time off.

There had been whispers of redundancies. He was now top of the lists of likely candidates, when that day came along. 

As it was, the redundancies never affected him, he didn’t even get his redundancy money. That was because the man he had assaulted never woke up from his coma, and then he added insult to injury by dying.

It had been an innocuous scuffle. Handbags at dawn, as they sometimes said. The other man had started it with that smart mouth of his, but in court it didn’t sound like that at all. In the stark, artificial light of court it sounded like a nightmare. He sounded like a nightmare. Early on in the proceedings, he remembered the way his defence lawyer had looked at him, as though he was the very devil himself. 

And then everyone else joined in with those accusatory looks, including the judge. 

He had spent a long time in prison and it had been hard time. Inside, he had not been liked and the other inmates made sure he knew he was never going to win a popularity contest. He kept himself to himself and ground each and every day out until one day he awoke to his freedom. 

His freedom was a joke. He had nothing, he was worse than nothing and he did not relish starting all over again, not when his starting point was with him in this awful guise of penniless pariah. His real life had been stolen from him and he was forced to shuffle around in a skin that didn’t fit him and act in a way that made his bones ache and his mind throb with a rage-filled indignation.

Now he was out, and he intended to find Stan and have it out with him. He had served his time and made amends, but now he wanted to even the score with Stan. 

This was all he had thought about during his jailtime. 

Finding Stan and making him pay was what had kept him going. It was what he had lived for.

*

At closing time in the Red Lion there was a commotion.

The landlord heard the noise and came down to see what the fuss was about. He kept a good, honest pub and trouble knew better than to come a-calling. There were better pubs for that sort of thing and some of them traded on it.

“What’s all this!?” he bellowed as he saw an old man scuffling with his young barman.

“I need to know!” cried the old man, and as he turned away from the barman, the landlord saw him properly for the very first time.

“You!” said the landlord.

“You know me?” said the old man, the wind falling from his sails.

“I don’t, but I could never forget you,” said the landlord, “you killed that poor old man ten or so years back.”

“Fourteen,” the old man nodded, “I came back looking for the man I was with in here that night,” he said, “Stan.”

The landlord shook his head vehemently and decisively. It reminded the old man of the judge all those years ago, “you were in here alone that night,” he told him.

“No! That can’t be right,” the old man protested.

The landlord shook his head grimly, “it is, but I will tell you something for nothing…”

The old man was all ears. Suddenly still, a chill of awful presentiment assailing his drunken and derelict old frame.

“You were ranting on that night all those years back. Slurring your words you were. It wasn’t Stan you were saying back then though,” said the landlord.

“What was it I was saying?” said the old man, trembling noticeably and close to tears now.

“Satan,” said the landlord, “you repeated that word over and over again. You were… You frightened me and I wanted you out of here. If I’d known…” he trailed off.

The old man was silently crying now. Fat tears tumbling down the crags of his well-worn face. The landlord and the barman watched him shuffle off and out of the pub. Shaking his head and mumbling softly to himself, over and over.

“Stan with an A.” 

“It wasn’t Stan.”

“Stan with an A.”

“It wasn’t Stan after all.”

“Stan with an A.”

He was laughing through his tears as he crossed the road, the blare of the cars’ horns as they swerved and skidded to a halt could not drown his laughter out. He wasn’t finished with recreating that fateful day fourteen years back. Not yet he wasn’t…