Free Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth

chattering in the hallway snapped their heads round as he crossed the threshold, running him up and down with glittering eyes. A thin, mousey blonde with a servile expression and a short, thickset brunette, whose pugnacious countenance was in no way softened by a liberal slathering of make-up.
    Sean felt their eyes on his back the whole way down the hallway. Back upstairs, he put Francesca’s envelope on the bed. Music pulsated through the floorboards, bass-heavy, tune-light, with an over-emotional diva Whitneying away over the top. It was meant to be good-time, party music. But it had the same edge to it as the tunes of the high-rise pirates booming out of the estates on Sean’s former beat: narcotic emptiness underpinning vocal hysteria. Like an itch that you could never scratch.
    It made his instincts prickle. He moved into the bathroom, picked up some hair wax and rubbed it on his fingers, teasing his hair upwards.
    Goths, weirdos, emos, whatever they called themselves … He’d come across a few in his time; they were usually the ones on the receiving end of the violence in London, not the instigators. Interesting cross-pollination of imagery between their music and the gangsta gangs’ though: horror elements binding them both, skulls and Mexican wrestling masks, Gothic script tags. The juvenile delinquent way of time immemorial, Sean supposed.
    He went back into the bedroom, took off his shirt and hungit in the wardrobe, replacing it with a plain black T-shirt. Put his leather coat back on and checked his reflection.
    Satisfied, he stepped back through the front door of The Ship, turned right past the bank and then up the alleyway beside it, as Francesca had instructed, the discomfort of his legs easier to ignore now that adrenalin was pumping and, in a perverse way, now he could be glad if he no longer passed as normal. He was going to a place where that would be a distinct advantage.
    Halfway down the cutting, a pub sign hung over a side door. Black background, white face. A man with a wide-brimmed hat pulled over one eye, twirly moustache and pointed beard. Flames dancing yellow around his visage and above, medieval script spelling out:
Captain Swing’s
.
    Sean didn’t go straight in. He walked to the top of the alley. On his right was the white-painted pub, on his left a secondhand bookshop. A narrow road and beyond it a car park, the back of a department store.
    He turned back towards the pub. The face on the pub sign looked familiar. Sean had first seen it on May Day 2000, in the thick of the riot at Trafalgar Square, an eerie glimpse of a stark white face through flailing arms, shields and batons: took him a couple of seconds to realise it was a mask. He noticed it again some months later on a T-shirt worn by one of the scrotes at Meanwhile Gardens Skatepark. A colleague with teenage kids explained where it had come from – a comic strip about a futuristic anarchist who modelled himself on Guy Fawkes. Now here he was again.
    Sean pushed open the heavy oak door and walked into a waft of warm air, Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” riding on top of it. An improvement on The Ship, at least. He took ina walnut, horseshoe-shaped bar with a brass top. To his right, a row of tables and chairs beside the window were taken by a smattering of teenagers, multi-coloured hair worn in long fringes or razored spikes, pierced eyebrows and lips. Resting against the bar opposite them, a much older guy in biker’s denim and leather, snake of a plait running down his back and a salt-and-pepper goatee beard on his chin.
    Nearer to where Sean stood, where the bar curved to the right, sat a couple of men who could have been the fathers of the emo kids. A big bloke in a green army fatigue jacket sitting on a bar stool, a wide face with not dissimilar features to the fearful Pat, although lit with a more approachable smile. Next to him, standing, a shorter man in a battered black leather jacket, KILLING JOKE painted onto the