On the seafront were three bed and breakfasts, next to each other, Sea View, Mon Repose and Shub Niggurath, each with a neon Vacancies sign turned off in the window of the front parlour, each with a “closed for the season” notice thumbtacked to the front door.
There were no cafes open on the seafront. The lone fish and chip shop had a closed sign up. Ben waited outside for it to open, as the grey afternoon light faded into dusk. Finally a small, slightly frog-faced woman came down the road, and she unlocked the door of the shop. Ben asked her when they would be open for business, and she looked at him, puzzled, and said, “It’s Monday, dear. We’re never open on Monday.” Then she went into the fish and chip shop and locked the door behind her, leaving Ben cold and hungry on her doorstep.
Ben had been raised in a dry town in northern Texas: the only water was in backyard swimming pools, and the only way to travel was in an air-conditioned pick-up truck. So the idea of walking, by the sea, in a country where they spoke English of a sort, had appealed to him. Ben’s home town was doubly dry: it prided itself on having banned alcohol thirty years before the rest of America leapt onto the Prohibition bandwagon, and on never having got off again; thus all Ben knew of pubs was that they were sinful places, like bars, only with cuter names. The author of A Walking Tour of the British Coastline had, however, suggested that pubs were good places to go to find local colour and local information, that one should always stand one’s round, and that some of them sold food.
The Innsmouth pub was called The Book of Dead Names and the sign over the door informed Ben that the proprietor was one A. Al-Hazred, licensed to sell wines and spirits. Ben wondered if this meant that they would serve Indian food, which he had eaten on his arrival in Bootle, and rather enjoyed. He paused at the signs directing him to the Public Bar or the Saloon Bar, wondering if British Public Bars were private like their Public Schools, and eventually, because it sounded more like something you would find in a Western, going into the Saloon Bar.
The Saloon Bar was almost empty. It smelled like last week’s spilled beer and the day-before-yesterday’s cigarette smoke. Behind the bar was a plump woman with bottle-blonde hair. Sitting in one corner were a couple of gentlemen wearing long grey raincoats, and scarves. They were playing dominoes and sipping dark brown, foam-topped beerish drinks from dimpled glass tankards.
Ben walked over to the bar. “Do you sell food here?”
The barmaid scratched the side of her nose for a moment, then admitted, grudgingly, that she could probably do him a ploughman’s.
Ben had no idea what this meant, and found himself, for the hundredth time, wishing that the Walking Tour of the British Coastline had an American-English phrasebook in the back. “Is that food?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Okay. I’ll have one of those.”
“And to drink?”
“Coke, please.”
“We haven’t got any Coke.”
“Pepsi, then.”
“No Pepsi.”
“Well, what do you have? Sprite? Seven-up? Gatorade?”
She looked blanker than previously. Then she said, “I think there’s a bottle or two of cherryade in the back.”
“That’ll be fine.”
“It’ll be five pounds and twenty pence, and I’ll bring you over your ploughman’s when it’s ready.”
Ben decided, as he sat at a small and slightly sticky wooden table, drinking something fizzy that both looked and tasted a bright, chemical red, that a ploughman’s was probably a steak of some kind. He reached this conclusion, coloured, he knew, by wishful thinking, from imagining rustic, possibly even bucolic, ploughmen leading their plump oxen through fresh ploughed fields at sunset, and because he could, by then, with equanimity and only a little help from others, have eaten an entire ox.
“Here you go. Ploughman’s,” said the barmaid, putting a plate down in front of him.
That a ploughman’s turned out to be a rectangular slab of sharp-tasting cheese, a lettuce leaf, an undersized tomato with a thumb-print in it, a mound of something wet and brown that tasted like sour jam, and a small, hard, stale roll, came as a sad disappointment to Ben, who had already decided that the British treated food as some kind of punishment. He chewed the cheese and the lettuce leaf, and cursed every ploughman in England for choosing to dine upon such swill.
The gentlemen in grey raincoats, who had been sitting in the corner, finished their game of dominoes, picked up their drinks, and came and sat beside Ben. “What you drinkin’?” one of them asked, curiously.
“It’s called Cherryade,” he told them. “It tastes like something from a chemical factory.”
“Interesting you should say that,” said the shorter of the two. “Interesting you should say that. Because I had a friend worked in a chemical factory and he never drank cherryade.” He paused dramatically, and then took a sip of his brown drink. Ben waited for him to go on, but that appeared to be that: the conversation had stopped.
In an effort to appear polite, Ben asked, in his turn, “So, what are you guys drinking?”
The taller of the two strangers, who had been looking lugubrious, brightened up. “Why, that’s exceedingly kind of you. Pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar for me, please.”
“And for me too,” said his friend. “I could murder a Shoggoth’s. ’Ere, I bet that would make a good advertising slogan. ‘I could murder a Shoggoth’s.’ I should write to them and suggest it. I bet they’d be very glad of me suggestin’ it.”
Ben went over to the barmaid, planning to ask her for two pints of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar and a glass of water for himself, only to find she had already poured three pints of the dark beer. Well, he thought, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and he was certain it couldn’t be worse than the cherryade. He took a sip: the beer had the kind of flavour which, he suspected, advertisers would describe as “full-bodied,” although if pressed they would have to admit that the body in question had been that of a goat.
He paid the barmaid, and maneuvered his way back to his new friends.
“So. What you doin’ in Innsmouth?” asked the taller of the two. “I suppose you’re one of our American cousins, come to see the most famous of English villages.”
“They named the one in America after this one, you know,” said the smaller one.
“Is there an Innsmouth in the States?” asked Ben.
“I should say so,” said the smaller man. “He wrote about it all the time. Him whose name we don’t mention.”
“I’m sorry?” said Ben.
The little man looked over his shoulder, then he hissed, very loudly, “H. R Lovecraft!”
“I told you not to mention that name,” said his friend, and he took a sip of the dark brown beer. “H. P. Lovecraft. H. P. bloody Lovecraft. H. bloody P. bloody Love bloody craft,” he stopped to take a breath. “What did he know? Eh? I mean what did he bloody know?”
Ben sipped his beer. The name was vaguely familar; he remembered it from rummaging through the pile of old-style vinyl LPs in the back of his father’s garage. “Weren’t they a rock group?”
“Wasn’t talkin’ about any rock group. I mean the writer.”
Ben shrugged. “I’ve never heard of him,” he admitted. “I really mostly only read Westerns. And technical manuals.”
The little man nudged his neighbour. “Here. Wilf. You hear that? He’s never heard of him.”
“Well. There’s no harm in that. I used to read that Zane Grey,” said the taller.