The Whisky Wall

“Two mysteries,” said Jack, at the bar, at ten past two, with his elbows on it. “Please.”

“Two?” said Theo.

“One for you. It’s your birthday. You’re having a mystery whether you like it or not.”

The bartender with the pencil in her hair looked at the two of them, and at their hands, which had no X on them, and went to a cooler at the end of the bar and came back with two cans. They were cold and beaded and the labels on both of them had been covered over, so that there was nothing to read on them at all, only the shape of a can, and she put them down in front of Jack and Theo with the air of a woman setting out a hand of cards.

“Three pounds,” she said.

Jack paid. Theo let him.

“I would like a mystery,” said Lukas.

The bartender looked at the back of his hand.

“No,” she said.

“I would like it noted,” said Lukas, “that I have now been denied two mysteries.”

“That’s two,” said the bartender, and wrote nothing down, and went to the till, and Lukas looked, Frederick thought, more satisfied than he had looked all night.

Theo opened his. He drank some of it. He did not have to think about it at all.

“Milwaukee,” he said.

“You can’t know that.”

“I know that.” Theo pulled the cover off the can and turned it round, and there it was, a lager that Frederick had seen in the Hartigans’ fridge on the fourth floor every week for six years, between the milk and the ketchup. “It’s the one Dad drinks. It’s the one everybody’s dad drinks.” He looked at the can with great tenderness. “I came two thousand miles.”

“That’s not a mystery,” said Jack. “That’s just your fridge.”

“Do yours, then.”

Jack opened his. He did it properly. He smelt it, and held it up to the light from the Wheel, and tipped a little into a glass that the bartender had put down for him without being asked, and looked at it, and drank some, and held it in his mouth, and swallowed, with the face of a man who had pulled pints since he was fourteen and was not going to be told by a can.

“Lager,” he said. “Not from here. Not from round here, anyway. Too sweet for here.” He drank some more. His face changed. “Hang on.”

“What?”

“Hang on.” He drank again. “I know this.”

He pulled the cover off.

He stared at it.

“It’s ours,” said Jack.

“What do you mean, ours?”

“It’s the one Mum’s got on. At home. At the New Inn. It’s on the left-hand tap. I’ve pulled about ten thousand of these.” He held it up, at arm’s length, as if it might explain itself. “Five thousand miles. A pound fifty. Covered over, so I wouldn’t know. And it’s the one I pull.”

He put it down on the bar and put his forehead on the bar next to it and began, without any sound at all, to laugh.

“That’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Jack, into the bar.

“You said that about the tambourine,” said Frederick.

“This is funnier. This is much funnier.” Jack lifted his head. His eyes were wet. “I’ve got to tell her. I’ve got to ring her. What time is it at home?”

“Ten past ten in the morning.”

“She’ll be doing the cellar.” Jack looked at the can. “She’ll say it’s a sign.”

“Of what?”

“She’ll think of something,” said Jack, and drank his mystery, which was not a mystery, with enormous happiness.

---

Alexander had not said anything since they came down. He was standing a little way along the bar with his lemonade in both hands, by the bottom, and his head back, and his lips moving very slightly, and Frederick knew what he was doing before he asked, because he had seen him do it with the stars at Potsdam and the pipes of an organ in Berlin and, once, the medals on a general.

“How many?” said Frederick.

“Four hundred and sixty-one,” said Alexander, without lowering his head. “So far. I have not done the top shelf. The light is bad on the top shelf.”

“They’re all whisky?”

“Not all. That part is tequila.” Alexander nodded at a section by the Wheel without looking at it. “But most.”

“Facts don’t count,” said Lukas.

“These do,” said Alexander. “These are bottles.”

Frederick looked at it.

It went from the bar to the ceiling, the whole length of the room behind the bar, shelf above shelf, bottles of every shape there was, tall and squat and square and round, brown and gold and amber and nearly black, with labels in a dozen languages and some with no labels he could read at all, and the light from the Wheel coming up underneath them so that the whole wall shone, like a window in a church that somebody had made out of drink.

High up on the left, two shelves from the top, there was one bottle that did not shine. The label was old and the glass was dusty and it was a little apart from the bottles beside it, the way a chair is a little apart at a table when it belongs to somebody.

The bartender came back past them with a cloth.

“What’s that one?” said Frederick. “Up there. On its own.”

She looked up at it.

“That’s for a man who comes in on Thursdays,” she said. “He asked for it once. We didn’t have it. So we got it in for him.” She went on wiping. “Nobody else has ever had any. Nobody else has ever asked.”

“You bought a bottle for one man.”

“We’ve got a few of those.” She glanced along the wall. “People ask. We get it in. Then it’s theirs.” She went on down the bar.

Frederick looked up at the bottle on its own.

He had been given things all his life. He had been given, by people he had never met, a great many things that had been made for him, and engraved for him, and chosen for him by committees, and sent to him in boxes with letters on top, and he had written to thank them all, and he did not know where most of them were. Nobody had ever bought him a bottle and put it on a shelf in a bar because he had asked for it once and they thought he might come back.

“You can’t have one,” said Jack, beside him, gently. “Hanover. You’re an X.”

“I know.”

“I’m only saying. You’re looking at it like you’re going to.”

Frederick put his hand in his pocket.

There were five coins in it. He had come out with twenty, on Monday morning, out of the blue dish by the north-wing kitchen door, and he had spent fifteen of them since eight o’clock, on lemonades and a toasted sandwich and five bottles of water out of a machine in Ahwatukee, and he had kept the last five, at Coach House, when Jack pushed them back across the bar, in case.

He took them out and looked at them in his palm.

“In case of what?” said Theo, who had come up on his other side with the can from Milwaukee, and was looking at the coins.

“This,” said Frederick.

---

The first whisky of his life had been in London, on the tenth of May, in a bar in Soho down six stone steps, with Castellanos on one side of him and Kimura on the other and Jack watching, and Castellanos had ordered it for him, and the barman had kept the five-pound note Frederick had put on the bar, the one with his face on it in a little window, and said he was framing it. It had been like being hit in the mouth by a bonfire. He had said it was horrible. Jack had said it was meant to be.

He put the five coins on the bar in a stack.

The bartender came back up the bar towards them, and looked at the stack, and looked at him.

“A small one, please,” said Frederick. “A good one. Scotch.”

Jack turned his head and looked at him.

“That’s Castellanos’s,” said Jack.

“It’s the only one I know.”

The bartender picked up the top coin, to see what she had been given.

She stopped.

She was holding it between her finger and thumb, the right way up, under the light from the Wheel, and Frederick saw her see it: the small head in profile on the face of it, young, facing right, crowned with nothing, with the letters going round the edge. It was a face, he thought, that she must have handled a hundred times a night for two years without once looking at it, because nobody looks at a coin. She looked at it now. She looked at the young man on the other side of the bar with the sunburnt nose. She looked at the coin.

She looked at him.

She looked, last, at the back of his hand on the bar, at the black X, gone grey.

Then she took the wet cloth off her shoulder and reached across the bar and took his hand, quite gently, by the wrist, and turned it over, and wiped the X off the back of it in two strokes, and let it go.

She did not say anything.

She turned round to the wall. She did not go to the top of it. She reached up, a long way, to a shelf about two-thirds of the way up, and took down a bottle without having to look for it, and took a small heavy glass with a thick bottom from under the bar, and poured into it, about an inch, gold, and put the bottle back where it had been, and set the glass down on the bar in front of him.

She put four of the coins in the till.

The fifth she slid back across the bar to him, with one finger, the way Jack had at Coach House, and left it by the glass.

Then she went down the bar to the next customer.

---

Nobody said anything.

Theo was holding his can from Milwaukee very still, halfway to his mouth. Jack had stopped laughing. At the end of the bar the Germans were standing side by side with their lemonades and their two black Xs, perfectly upright, perfectly silent, like a pair of witnesses at a signing.

Frederick looked at the glass.

It was the first drink of the night that anybody had sold him that was not a lemonade. It was the second whisky of his life. He looked at the back of his hand, which was clean and pink and a little damp where a stranger had wiped it, and at the coin by the glass, with his own head on it, at sixteen, facing right, and at the glass.

He picked it up and drank some of it.

It was not a bonfire. It was not anything like a bonfire. It was warm, and it went down slowly, and it tasted of something he did not have a word for, something like honey and something like smoke and something like the inside of an old wooden box, and it stayed in his mouth after it had gone, like the end of a piece of music, and he stood at the bar of Giligin’s with the glass in his hand and found that he did not want to say anything at all.

“Well?” said Jack.

Frederick put the glass down.

“It isn’t horrible,” he said.

“It’s meant to be horrible.”

“This one isn’t.”

Jack looked at the glass, and at the wall, and at the shelf two-thirds of the way up, with an expression of deep professional respect, the way he had looked at the barman at DJ’s.

“She’s good,” said Jack, quietly. “She’s really good.”

“She’s not going to frame it,” said Theo, looking down the bar at the bartender, who was pouring somebody a water and not looking at them at all.

“It’s a pound,” said Frederick. “You can’t frame a pound.”

“The man in Soho framed a fiver,” said Jack.

“That had my face on it in a little window.”

“So’s that,” said Jack, and nodded at the coin by the glass.

Frederick picked the coin up and looked at it. It was warm from the bar. He did not know what to do with it. He had never had a coin left over before. He put it back in his pocket, on its own, where the twenty had been, and drank the rest of the whisky slowly, because it seemed like the kind of thing you should do slowly, and the others stood round him at the bar and did not say anything, which was, he thought, the nicest thing anybody had done for him all night, and somebody had wiped an X off his hand.

“Second whisky ever,” said Theo, at last.

“Yes.”

“Better than the first?”

“Much better than the first.”

“Better than lemonade?”

Frederick thought about it, honestly, the way he had been taught to think about things.

“I’ve had six lemonades,” he said, “and a pickle juice. Everything’s better than lemonade.”

From the far end of the room, over the music, a voice from behind the bar called out across the whole of Giligin’s, and the patio, and the plaza:

“Last call!”