Chapter 17: Barred

The pen landed in a flower tub by the smoking shelter.

Steph walked off up North Street without looking back.

Sandra stood alone under the lamp post with her passbook.

Nobody went to her.

I picked the torn share transfer off the gatepost and held it up to the light.

Her signature had gone through to the wood.

"Is that it?" said the barmaid behind me. "Is it yours?"

"It's mine," I said.

The noise the beer garden made brought the cook out of his kitchen with a tea towel on his head.

On Thursday morning my own bank lent me eighteen thousand six hundred pounds on my own name, and I paid it to theirs before lunch.

The careful man rang to say the arrears were clear.

He sounded almost pleased for me.

On Friday at five, the young barman borrowed bolt cutters from the hardware shop.

North Street came out to watch.

He cut the chain off the front doors of the Gold Hound and it dropped on the step with a clank.

He held the cut end up over his head.

Everyone cheered.

Then he pulled the big doors open, and I walked into my own pub through the front.

It was the first time since the semifinal.

I stopped at the place where I'd stood with Alfie's pint.

Six feet from the bar.

The flags were still up. Red and gold, every beam.

"Do you want them down?" the barmaid asked.

"Not tonight," I said. "Tonight people want to drink under them."

By seven it was standing room only.

The salon girls. The baker. Nic in a sequinned top she said was for "owner's night".

Number twelve had brought her husband, who nobody had ever seen before.

Nathan was at the end of the bar, off duty, eating the cook's chips out of a basket.

"How does it feel?" he asked.

"Like I've bought a house with a hole in the roof."

"So, normal."

He grinned and pinched one of my chips.