1 Prospero Vint

I wish I’d never met Prospero Vint.

That was his name. It really was. It sounded like something made up for the front man in a prog-rock band. He once showed me a birth certificate and an article with a photograph from the Hereford & Worcester Times. He’d been arrested after broadcasting pirate radio from a caravan on the Brecon Beacons. Not for the radio business. The caravan was parked in the Military Training Area used by the SAS. He’d told me two skinny guys had pointed guns at him while a third blew up his caravan. It had been an Airstream, he said, worth more than the radio station equipment. They disappeared before the police arrived in the company of a Captain Yossarian, who looked more like a soldier. At least he’d had a uniform.

We met in a pub. I meet most people in pubs. I’ve tried writing in cafés and libraries, but… No, I’ll be honest, it’s nothing to do with people shouting ‘Oatmilk Latte for Zbig- Zbigna- you over there with the moustache’ or people complaining that the internet is slow: they don’t know that it’s me hogging the bandwidth. Well, in the library, Mrs Brautigan, the librarian, does, but she’s another reason I don’t use the local library. It was a misunderstanding, that’s all. She’d thought I’d be interested, I thought she’d be interesting, but neither of us were. Besides, I was writing. Maybe when libraries start serving beer, I’ll go back.

I was in a dark wooden booth, with line of sight to both the doorway and the bar. the seating was like pews. It was a pub that dated back to the days when people went religiously to their local, after all. When I needed another drink, I’d catch the person behind the bar’s eye and by the time I got to the footrail, he’d poured it. We’d come to that arrangement when I’d walked in an hour ago. I was just turning to go back to my seat and my open laptop, when I saw him sitting behind it.

He might have been anything from a tired thirty to a sprightly sixty. His beard was more pepper than salt and his lank hair was the other way round. I expected him to stand up, stutter some apology while bumping a knee on his way to getting out from behind my laptop. He winked at me over the laptop lid.

‘Published anything?’

‘Yes… Well, no… Double D-ed.’

‘Didn’t that use to be something to do with beer?’

‘Not much to do with beer at all, as I recall.’ I rounded his age downward a couple of decades.

‘Oh, haha. That bad was it? Before my time, of course.’

I still wasn’t convinced there was any ‘of course’ about it.

‘It was what there was,’ I said.

‘So what’s “Double D-ed”?’

‘De-listed and dropped.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘The only thing worse is being cancelled and pulped. Never to go on sale.’

He nodded, in a manner that some might call "sagely". I thought it made him look vacant.

I still hadn’t asked him why he was sitting behind my laptop. So I took a swig of Black Sheep and put the question. He gave a high-pitched laugh,

‘Oh, sorry, yes. You must think me incredibly rude.’

I raised my eyebrows, having never mastered raising just the one.