Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

“I’ve had no complaints for a while.”

“What sort of thing do you do?”

“Try me.”

“Would a curry be a possibility? Something along those lines?”

“What do you Southerners think goes in one of them?”

“Anything that’s edible,” said Jessop, feeling increasingly awkward. “That’s the idea of a curry, isn’t it? Particularly on board ship, I should think.”

“You don’t fancy scouse.”

“I’ve never tried it. If that’s what’s on I will.”

“Brave lad,” the barman said and thrust a tankard full of brownish liquid at him. “Let’s see you get that down you.”

Jessop did his best to seem pleased with the inert metallic gulp he took. He was reaching for his wallet until the barman said “Settle when you’re going.”

“Shall I wait here?”

“For what?” the barman said, then grinned at everyone but Jessop. “For your bowl, you mean. We’ll find you where you’re sitting.”

Jessop didn’t doubt it, since nobody made even a token pretence of not watching him carry his briefcase to the only unoccupied corner, which was farthest from the door. As he perched on a ragged leather stool and leaned against the yielding wallpaper under a net elaborated by a spider’s web, a woman who might have been more convincingly blonde without the darkness on her upper lip remarked “That’ll be a good few hours, I’d say.”

“Can’t argue with you there, Betty,” said her companion, a man with a rat asleep on his chest or a beard, which he raised to point it at Jessop. “Is she right, Jessop?”

“Paul,” Jessop offered, though it made him no more comfortable. “A couple, anyway.”

“A couple’s not a few, Tom,” scoffed a man with tattoos of fish and less shapely deep-sea creatures swimming under the cuffs of his shabby brownish pullover.

“What are they else then, Daniel?”

“Don’t fall out over me,” Jessop said as he might have addressed a pair of schoolchildren. “You could both be right, either could, rather.”

Resentment might have been a reason why Daniel jerked one populated thumb at a wiry wizened man topped with a black bobble cap. “He’s already Paul. Got another name so we know who’s who?”

“None I use.”

“Be a love and fish it up for us.”

At least it was Mary who asked in these terms, with a hoarseness presumably born of cigarettes. After a pause Jessop heard himself mumble “Desmond.”

“Scouse,” the barman said—it wasn’t clear to whom or even if it was an order. Hoping to keep his head down, Jessop snapped his briefcase open. He was laying out papers on the table when the street door flew wide, admitting only wind. He had to slap the papers down as the barman stalked to the door and heaved a stool against it. Nobody else looked away from Jessop. “Still a student, are you, Des?” Betty said.

He wouldn’t have believed he could dislike a name more than the one he’d hidden ever since learning it was his, but the contraction was worse. Des Jessop—it was the kind of name a teacher would hiss with contempt. It made him feel reduced to someone else’s notion of him, in danger of becoming insignificant to himself. Meanwhile he was saying “All my life, I hope.”

“You want to live off the rest of us till you’re dead,” Joe somewhat more than assumed.

“I’m saying there’ll always be something left to discover. That ought to be true for everyone, I should think.”

“We’ve seen plenty,” Daniel grumbled. “We’ve seen enough.”

“Forgive me if I haven’t yet.”

“No need for that,” said Mary. “We aren’t forgivers, us.”

“Doesn’t it make you tired, all that reading?” Betty asked him.

“Just the opposite.”

“I never learned nothing from a book,” she said once she’d finished scowling over his words. “Never did me any harm either.”

“You’d know a couple’s not a few if you’d read a bit,” said Joe.

“Lay off skitting at my judy,” Tom warned him.

For some reason everybody else but Jessop roared with laughter. He felt as if his nervous grin had hooked him by the corners of his mouth. He was wobbling to his feet when the barman called “Don’t let them scare you off, Des. They just need their fun.”

“I’m only…” Jessop suspected that any term he used would provoke general mirth. “Where’s the…”

“The poop’s got to be behind you, hasn’t it?” Betty said in gleeful triumph.