tales of the green fairy

I can’t even remember what it was that we were commemorating…. If it was a birthday or other kind of celebration, I have no idea. Details of events before that morning have become blurred in my head, as if the absinthe has erased them for good. All I can remember is… that dream, rather the nightmare that preceded the morning after, when we met again. That night was the first time we had seen Fletcher after a very long time. None of us really knew the reason for his distance during the last year. He came up with all sorts of reasons: work, a new girlfriend, being skint… but in the end, he knew we didn’t believe him, that we all knew there was something else. From the age of fifteen, we had been best friends and at thirty, we still were… well, except for Fletch, that is. Maybe, is just that he’s a grown up now and doesn’t want to hang out with his infantile childhood friends. I reckon he changed the moment he got that job in the city. Charlie, the oldest (and wisest) amongst all five of us, thought that Fletcher was doing drugs – not the usual stuff we all used to take together, like the random pill or a joint, but actually weird shit. They had been closer to each other than to any of us, so we believed he probably had very good reasons to think that way. Anyway, it didn’t matter because Fletcher just stopped coming out with us altogether a year ago and whether we believed Charlie or not, there was no way we could know ourselves. Which is why, when Fletch turned up on Friday at the pub, we couldn’t believe our luck. Finally, at last, all five of us together again – at least for one last time (and maybe for the last time?). He didn’t look well, his cheeks were sallow and he had lost a lot of weight. Still, after a couple of drinks it was all fine, like it had always been. Fletch was in good shape and seemed funnier than ever, or perhaps I had forgotten how sharp he was. My last clear memory of the night is Fletch whispering something on Charlie’s ear and then both of them suggesting we move on to another place he knew, some underground club. ‘That’s it… after that I have flash memories of a basement bar, and a strangely beautiful barmaid with long purple hair and a bright green dress burning sugar for the absinthe’- I told my girlfriend. ‘And after that?’- She asked. She didn’t look amused. I told her the rest. That I didn’t remember anything from the moment the barmaid poured the absinthe until I woke up in the morning, except for the dream. ‘It’s weird that you can remember that dream with so much detail… well, specially since you can barely remember my birthday!’ – sure, I don’t always remember important stuff, but this… it’s not about it being important, it’s just how fucking weird and vivid this nightmare was… and that, since that night, we haven’t been able to find Fletch and Charlie. Once I managed to get rid of my girlfriend for the day, I called Johnny. Johnny is the clever one. He always comes up with a solution to each trouble without struggle. When Johnny answered the phone, he sounded quite anxious. ‘Dave, man. I don’t know what else to do. I called their mobile phones, I left messages in their landlines, I called Charlie’s girl – she hasn’t seen him since Friday. I called the police and they said that we have to wait for at least 72 hours and it has to be the next of kin who reports the missing… or 48 hours, I can’t remember’ ‘Have you called their parents? I don’t have their numbers, but I’m pretty sure my mum will have Fletch mum’s number – Our mothers had been best friends years ago, in fact, it was because of them that Fletch and I started to hang out. ‘Not yet, that’s the last thing we want to do. I don’t want to alarm their folks for nothing’ – said Johnny, cool as a cucumber again. I wish I felt the same way. Since Saturday morning, I have the terrible feeling that I’ll never see those two again. Johnny finally suggested we go back to all the bars we visited on Friday to try to work out what happened. But since neither Johnny nor I could remember anything about that night after the purple and green barmaid, we called Andy in the hope that he might be able to help. Andy hadn’t been in touch since Saturday morning, which was weird considering we had just lost two of our best friends on a night out. But then, Andy was prone to get wasted – really wasted, embarrassingly wasted – then suffer a three-day hangover after a night out with us. Besides, we suspected he was under house arrest after not getting back home until Saturday afternoon – the first night he’s ever spent away from the wife since they’ve been married. He got hold of Andy, and although he was able to speak on the phone, he was ‘grounded’ and couldn’t come out with us to help – like a kid who forgot to take the rubbish out! He did, however, remember the name of the bar/club where the green and purple barmaid worked: it was called ‘Sirens’ – and suddenly it made so much sense that the barmaid had purple hair and a bright green dress. It also explains why I had blurred memories of Neptunes and giant squids on the dance floor. He couldn’t remember where it was, but taking into consideration we started the evening at Jono’s in Camberwell New Road, and that we walked to the club (although he couldn’t remember how long it took to get there), ‘Sirens’ couldn’t be that far. I met Johnny an hour later at Jono’s. We wanted to talk to (whathisname) the fat guy who’s either the owner or the manager and who’s always giving dirty looks to every single female that walks into that shit hole. But he wasn’t there. Matt, the Polish barman said that no one had seen him since last Friday. That would make it three people missing on one night. He also said that he didn’t remember anything unusual about us that Friday except that we were five instead of our usual four (Matt was fairly new so he’d never seen Fletch) and that ‘our new friend’ looked as though he was pretty ill, kind of grey in the face. Anyhow, he assured us that we left the snooker club sober and that if anything went wrong, it must have happened somewhere else. Neither Matt nor the other barman had ever been to – or heard of – a club called ‘Sirens’. Johnny tipped him a fiver and told him we would be back later. He also gave Matt his card and asked him to get whathisname to call him if he turned up. Our next move was clear. We walked up to Johnny’s flat via the off license. We got a bottle of red and a pack of beers, as well as some peanuts, in the hope that we could put something in our stomachs as well as fluids. Neither of us had been able to eat since Friday night, and although we saw the added value of loosing a couple of pounds, it was more than unusual since we don’t remember having taken any drugs. Once at Johnny’s we divided in the hope that we could work faster. I took the phone and he took the laptop. Sitting on the couch, we both worked like well paid private investigators. I was onto direct inquiries (trying out the whole range of 118 numbers in case one of them had information on the ‘underground world’). I also rang a couple of Fletcher’s friends we had meet once in an outing with the ‘city boys’ (the only one, which was also the last time we saw Fletch before Friday). A couple of them were involved in recruitment for their firm and handed me their cards in case I ever decided to get a serious job – as if video game design wasn’t serious enough! Direct enquiries proved a disappointment, although I didn’t really know if ‘Sirens’ was a club or a bar or even a legal establishment and I couldn’t tell them where it was except that at some walking distance from Jono’s but not sure on which direction. Fletch’s friend Alex hadn’t heard from him or seen him since Friday. He said he had never heard of ‘Sirens’ either, although he had heard Fletch talk about some underground club in the south. He didn’t know exactly where it was but he thought it might have been around Elephant and Castle. Johnny’s investigations, via googling on the laptop were unsuccessful. The only entry on a bar called ‘Sirens’ was a blog written by some bloke describing, with quite a bit of detail, the outfits the barmaids were wearing. It turns out the weirdly beautiful barmaid wasn’t wearing a green dress, but a mermaid tail that wrapped her all the way to the waist, with two shells covering her breasts. According to his account, mermaids hair colour varied – he describes them with blue, purple, bright red and silver. The doormen all look like Neptune and bouncers like giant squid, and the only alcohol served in the club was absinthe, in the form of different cocktails or in its traditional form, with burnt brown sugar. As we carried on reading – or rather, as Johnny carried on reading aloud – we reached the end of the entry only to realise that this guy was describing a dream he had before he woke up one morning on a park bench, barely remembering what had happened the night before, except for a horrible nightmare. We were now faced with the possibility that such place never existed and that it was all a dream. But, how could we all have had the same dream? It’s true that we all remembered different details about it, yet, if it had been a dream, it would be impossible for all three of us to have dreamt the same thing on the same night – particularly if some other bloke we never met had the exact same one some other time. Johnny, in a total eclipse of logic, thought that maybe the Neptune doormen had little devices like those used by the ‘Men In Black’ and flash a little red laser on your face to make you forget everything. Initially, it seemed like a ludicrous idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. None of us could remember much about the club and we all felt as though we had been robbed of our memory. At the bottom of the blog, an email address suggested an opportunity for contact, and left with little choice, Johnny wrote him a couple of lines in order to obtain a little more information. As the home based investigations advanced little, we headed back to Jono’s for a couple of drinks and the hope of viewing their CCTV for Friday night; maybe even have a chat with whathisname – the fat landlord. On arrival, Matt greeted us with anxiety and said the landlord’s wife had called earlier for him, saying she hadn’t seen him since Friday. It wasn’t unusual for him not to go home on Friday or Saturday night, as Jono’s opened 24 hours those days, but we was usually back by Sunday evening. When Matt said he hadn’t been seen since Friday night; she reacted initially with anger and jealousy, then, remembering what her husband looked like, with preoccupation, as it was extremely unlikely he had pulled. Matt, now temporarily in charge of the bar, suggested all three of us look at the CCTV together. He guided us through a labyrinth of dark back rooms and side doors, down some spiral stairs and finally into the tiny, badly lit office. The system was fairly modern in comparison with the rest of the place, and the recordings were digital, which meant we could get to Friday night without the complications of finding the tapes and rewinding and forwarding… thank fuck for technology. With a drink in one hand and puffing furiously on a cigarette held on the other, Matt watched nervously the very spot were we had been standing, commentating on every move as if we hadn’t been there. Nothing looked unusual. Pat (previously whathisname), as Matt said he’s called, joined us for a drink – as he often did with regulars – and he was with us for a while, mainly talking to Charlie and Fletch. However, there was nothing suspicious on camera, we were all there, laughing, drinking and smoking; taking the piss out of each other and playing pool. Just before we left, Pat brought us shot glasses and filled them with spirit from a bottle. Neither myself not Johnny remembered having had any shots in Jono’s and it was a really weird experience to see yourself do something you would have otherwise sworn you hadn’t. Matt zoomed in to see what the bottle was, but he couldn’t see a label. Johnny and I started to think that the origin of our problems was inside that mysterious vessel and that perhaps it held the answer to all our questions. The obvious next step was to hunt that bottle down… which would definitely take time. The bar at Jono’s is huge and the back storage spreads over different rooms off endless doors in an endless dark corridor. As Matt pointed out, if Pat had the bottle at hand, it would probably still be at the bar somewhere, which in a way gave us some hope. As we walked up the stairs and discussed our course of action, I switched on my mobile and called my ‘ball and chain’… pretty much knowing what kind of reaction I would be getting at the other end of the line – still, it would have been worse had I not called her. This time around, I could tell that all of my ‘Oh Jenny, baby’ wouldn’t work their usual magic; and even when I plugged in the (only in case of emergency) ‘you know I love you so much’, I couldn’t manage to appease her anger. It was time for me to go home, and leave the guys to work their magic. I had been summoned home and that’s where I headed. * * * * * Yeah, easy for Dave to blame it on his girlfriend and slip out of Jono’s and leave me with that polish nut case, Matt. Jesus, he wouldn’t shut up. Alright, I was worried about Charlie and Fletch, but they are grown up and, we had spent the whole Sunday looking. It wouldn’t have been so much of a bother if he hadn’t left me alone in Jono’s with Wannabe-fucking-Schwarzenegger telling me about his daily training routine, which he started back in his glorious days in the army; his nutrition plan to build bigger muscles, all this whilst looking for the bottle Pat had poured us shots from. It turns out the guy is a devout Catholic, who’s never drunk a drop of alcohol (apart of course from sacred wine at mass), never taken any drugs and, at 21, we was still a virgin intending to remain so until marriage – no wonder he spent all day long at the gym. I was in Jono’s around three hours, looking for the god-dammed bottle after Dave had left, without any success whatsoever. There weren’t any bottles that looked like it on the shelves and we even looked in all of Pat’s secret stashes for privileged customers (i.e. him) without luck. On the CCTV, we couldn’t work out where he got the bottle from because, for about ten minutes, he’s out of the scope of the cameras, which is pretty fucking weird considering the amount of them that are spread around the place. He just turned up next to Fletch as if out of nowhere, bottle at hand. The same thing happened when he walked away from us, out of sight for a few minutes and back again as if out of nowhere. At that point, Matt started telling me all this weird stories about Pat not being the same lately and that, in the last four weeks he hadn’t go home to sleep between shifts, just stayed at the bar day and night. Initially, Matt thought he was having problems in his marriage – more evident through the increased interest he professed for any female around – and he tried to give him the Catholic man-and-wife priest-type of talk, to which Pat responded with a threat of sacking him if he didn’t shut up. I would have done the same. More and more, I started to believe that Pat wasn’t actually the missing, but simply sick of this G.I Joe. After a while, Matt insisted I go back in the office and look at the camera again but somehow, I managed to blurt out an excuse and get out. He insisted I took his number – and yes, he typed his number on my mobile and rang himself to make sure he had mine – so we could call each other the next day and spend time together solving the mystery. Clearly, when you are a total abstainer, you have a lot of energy and very little to do with it, but I had no intention to carry on with this nonsense. On my way home, I popped in the local police station and explained it all to the officer in charge (without the spooky details, that is), who then spent half an hour filling in paperwork, then told me to get in touch with the parents or someone closer than I, so they could report them missing. I called Charlie’s girl to give her instructions for the next day; and pretty much explained that it was up to her now, as the police didn’t consider us close enough to the guys – and we weren’t fucking private investigators. In a way, I was pissed off to have spent a whole Sunday looking for them whilst she was at home watching the Eastenders omnibus. I got home at quarter past midnight, about two hours past my Sunday bedtime. I was knackered, I hadn’t eaten since Friday, I stank and I looked like shit. I took a shower and prepared some pot noodles, but couldn’t stomach a taste. The red light of my answer machine was blinking, until then, I hadn’t realised that my mobile had run out of juice hours ago. I had two messages from Dave, the first one apologising for leaving me there by myself, and the second, just asking me to call him back as soon as I could. There were two more messages on the machine but they sounded static, as if someone had been cut off. Dave’s mobile was off, and I didn’t want to call him home, first, in case he was asleep and second, because I had no desire to speak to his missus – we didn’t like each other very much. I left him a message with the updates (or lack of them) and told him I had passed on the responsibility on to Charlie’s girl, as there was nothing else we could do. After the day I had, I’d thought that it would have been easy to fall asleep, but it wasn’t. I was incredibly tired and worn out but couldn’t close my eyelids for a second. So I put the telly on, in case there would be something good (as if), and I lied down on the couch for a bit. As there was nothing of interest on, I put on the news channel, hoping to catch up with the world for the last three days...besides, if there was a TV program that could make me fall sleep, the news was it. About 1am, my mobile rang. It was Dave, he had just woken up from a terrible nightmare, the same one that he’d had the last two nights, except, this time, he had managed to see more and further into the dream than before and he said he knew where the guys where. We had all experienced terrible nightmares since Friday, all similar – we assumed that they were influenced by the absinthe we had drank, or thought we had drank on Friday night. Dave announced he was on his way over to mine and that we would go to Jono’s. It would take him at least an hour to get ready and come by taxi, so that would only leave us with a couple of hours in Jono’s, which didn’t seem worth it. When I told him that we had to work tomorrow and that it wasn’t a good idea, he just said: ‘we’ll have to call sick tomorrow, the whole week if necessary’. He was at mine in 20 minutes, still wearing pajamas and slippers and very jaded. Once I got him to wash his face and put on some of my clothes – he looked real funny, my trousers were really tight on him and the seam at the back was going up his ass crack – we walked to Jono’s and Matt-fucking-Schwarzenegger was working, he was really pleased to see us. ‘My friends’ – he said, ‘I have some important news for you. I found the bottle; I went through all the bin bags outside and found it! It’s in the office, come and see’. We followed him silently. Dave, still on sleeping mode, kept whispering that he thought a place like that should recycle bottles instead of putting them out with the rubbish. ‘Such places should be fined, you know. What’s the point if I recycle the three bottles I go through a week when this guys put hundreds in the bin, what a waste’. ‘Leave the eco-warrior aside mate, right now we’re here to find the guys, remember?’ I replied, and he kept quiet for a bit. Once in the office, Matt made us some instant coffee and we sat down to examine our first piece of evidence. The bottle was empty, but we could still smell it had contained some really strong liquor, pale green in colour. There were no labels and it had a weird octagonal shape, really old fashioned. ‘They are really old this bottles, like the ones my granddad used to have at home, he’d use them to keep his own home made brews’ – Matt added, proceeding to show us pictures of different bottles he had found on the internet, none of which looked exactly like ours, but very similar. According to the information we managed to get out of this – very interesting- bottle websites (with much help of Matt, who was translating the Polish text for us), an octagonal design was the classic in former Czechoslovakia to bottle absinthe in the early 20th Century. As the drink became banned (in its traditional production) in 1915, the production of these bottles was discontinued for good. Matt looked at us as though the answer was as clear as water. When we told him we already suspected/thought/knew we had drunk absinthe on Friday night, he looked puzzled - ‘Why didn’t you tell me that, my friends, it’s a very dangerous drink, you could go loopy in the head’, yeah, well, we knew that. We also knew that he was loopy himself without having any alcohol. What we didn’t know however, is that Pat had poured us a shot in the bar; a shot we don’t remember drinking. We all remember drinking absinthe in ‘Sirens’, we all remember the mermaid that poured it, only we’re not sure if she’s real or a machination of our very fucked up minds. Matt seemed to remember the source of the bottle. He believed an old Slovakian regular who hadn’t been back for a while had given it to Pat, and Matt knew where he lived. ‘I know where everyone that walks through that door lives’, he said – it was a little scary when he first said it, but then he reminded us that it was a members snooker club and that he had all the addresses on file. It was time to close the bar, well passed 4am on Monday morning. No hope for a normal day today either, even if usually a normal Monday is horrible – it would have been blissful as I knew that today, I was going to have the most absurd Monday of them all. We arranged to meet Matt at noon, as he wanted to go to sleep for a bit. Dave and I went back to mine, so he could tell me all about his latest dream. It had been pretty much like the others, just longer and more horrific, a lot of details lost almost immediately after he’d woken up, covered in cold sweat and choking. He did, however, managed to grab a piece of paper and draw an image that was new, that hadn’t been there before and that to him was the key clue as to where Charlie and Fletch were. It was a piece of paper with a map on it, it had Jono’s at the center of it and five dots circling it, with names next to them. One of the dots said ‘Sirens, the only problem is that they were no streets on the map or a scale. It was like going on a treasure hunt. Dave was a lot more positive, he thought the name of the other four places were bars that we had gone to on Friday night and that we would just have to find one of them to work out directions and scale. It was 5am, we both agreed we should try to sleep for a bit, then get to work, even if we were both afraid that the nightmares will take us over in our sleeps not to let us go again. For the first time since we have known each other, over fifteen years ago; we both knew that our fear was greater than all of our other hang-ups. Without saying a word or even thinking about it twice, we both laid on my bed, side by side, knowing that if our worst fears came true, we wouldn’t be alone. We were woken up by the phone ringing and, as I opened one eye with great difficulty, trying to remember where I was, I saw the time: 9am. I didn’t manage to answer the phone, but about a minute later my mobile started to ring. It was Andy, who was on his way to work. I told him our plan and he interrupted me to say he would call me in five minutes – which was a bit weird, as I hadn’t had the time to say much. I took a leak, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and then the phone rang again. Andy had called in sick too – what a great idea – and he was on his way to mine. Dave was in the living room reciting a list of symptoms to his boss whilst I went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. As I realised I had no coffee or tea left – or anything at all, truth be said – I suggested we took a walk to the supermarket and stock up for the day. We walked passed the Italian deli and felt hunger for the first time since Friday, aroused by the aroma of the freshly baked bread and roasted coffee, and we couldn’t resist. We both ordered large breakfast with coffee and buns and everything we could think of and I called Andy so he would join us there. Never before had I felt so much pleasure, the soft warm bread, still steaming inside, soaked up with egg yolk; the crunchy bacon, the beans, the gorgeous Italian sausages (home made) so crispy outside and soft inside, made of real meat; the glorious smell of a good Italian coffee, properly made… heaven. We ate without saying a word to each other, even Giorgio, the owner, was surprised at our appetite. By the time Andy arrived we had finished eating and were on our second coffee. * * * * * It really pisses me off that the guys thought I was ‘grounded’ on house arrest by Anne, they always make me feel like such a sissy. It was not so, I was just being careful not to piss her off again, after what had happened on Friday night. The worst was, when I woke up on Saturday on that bench near Oval, I didn’t know where I was and had to call her to get the A-Z to give me directions to the nearest tube or bus stop. And it’s not as if she told me off… well, kind of, but at the same time, she was right. Something terrible could have happened to me, I could have been mugged or worse, killed. Of course, like the others, I had no idea what I had done, where I have been or how did I get to that bench. Anne’s used to me getting wasted with the boys, but I always make it home. I could see that she found the whole thing a big fishy, with the sirens, the squid and all that. Anyhow, she didn’t ban me from leaving the house, she gave me a choice, if I left, I would be single again. So I stayed… mainly because I can’t be bothered to go through the whole process of meeting a girl and all that… Anne is alright, a bit bossy, but alright. When I managed to get through to Johnny on Monday and he said both of them were calling in sick I thought ‘bonus: day off work, day with the boys and Anne won’t find out’ – I hanged up and called in sick straight away. On my way to Johnny’s, the guys called to say they were having breakfast at the Italian deli. It definitely wasn’t the best place in the world, but hey, I was hungry for the first time in ages – and that was more unusual than the nightmares and the guys disappearance. As I approached it, my senses were taken over by freshly baked bread, as if the fragant steam had become a rope that was pulling me into the deli, almost hypnotised. By the time I got there, Johnny and Dave had finished breakfast and were thinking off dessert whilst sipping on their second coffee. I ordered a large breakfast with coffee for myself and gorged on it whilst they discussed whether to order tiramisu or cassata. (to be continued) 'Tales of the Green Fairy' is a fragment by P Cox