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“Bob? Hello?”
Shirley's voice and the insistent wave of her hand in Hob's face jolted his thoughts back up into the buzz of noise in the pub. Her face, inches from his, changed from an expression of mild concern to mirth.
“God, you're as bad as our Joe for your daydreaming,” Shirley half-scolded, shouting over the noise to make herself heard. “I said, one more? I’m calling time at midnight, ‘member, so you’d better get in now while there’s still time.”
Hob glanced at the time. Ten to midnight.
Ten minutes left of the year and still no sign of his companion.
From behind him over the flurry of noise from the music and the raucous shouts of the people around him, Hob heard the door open, the gust of frigid wind from the cold night rushing in as he span on his stool; but the pang in his chest at the sight of the other barmaid coming back in with a crate of bottles, was yet another melancholy reminder that he had definitely been stood up.
That his companion seemingly hadn’t changed his mind.
Rearranging his face into a cheerful expression was taking the very last portion of his strength, the part that hadn’t been consumed by dread at this very scenario. He turned back to Shirley, sweat shining on her brow under her fringe at the heat of the people here, and pushed his glass towards her.
”One more, please, Shirl. Thanks.”
He gave what he hoped was a winning smile to her; in return she gave him a suspicious, curious look a mother might give her child, picking up his pint glass. “You sure you're alright?”
“Right as rain.” He nodded fervently, but Shirley’s expression didn’t change.
“I mean, you've been here every day, looking at the front door all the time, since - I don't know. August?”
Seventh of June actually , was the only answer Hob's mind could conjure. He stretched his smile across his cheeks until it ached him, digging in the pocket of his jeans.
“Just thought … I just never expected this place to be closing. It's been here as long as I can remember.”
Shirley sighed. “Yeah. Lots of memories of the old place. Still, nothing stays the same forever, does it? A change is as good as a rest.”
Hob waited until her back was turned, until she was going towards the pump, to let his smile drop, to let dread creep back up his spine, chilling his thoughts like frost.
He knew all about change. But in amongst all the chaos that change brought, the uncertainty of six centuries of life, Hob clung to the steadfast knowledge that the tavern had always remained, that his dark-haired companion with the fascinating eyes and enigmatic power would return. Hob clung to it like a lighthouse in a storm, desperately needing the reassurance that something, something would stay the same.
Now, the lighthouse was crumbling, and Hob was being hurled into a dark grey tempest of thoughts, twisting and turning, so fast he could barely catch onto them to make sense of them.
It’s the end of the White Horse. The end of 1989. The end of … me?
“Here you go, love.” Shirley’s face dissolved back into Hob’s vision, holding the now-full pint of lager. “One-ten. Hey, are you daydreaming again Bob?”
Her laugh was swallowed up by the clamour of voices in the rest of the pub, but when she leaned towards him, even though her voice was quiet, the words were pointed.
“Look, Audrey isn’t going to come to you , you know; you need to go to her instead of sitting here moping.”
Hob blinked, his neck growing warm.
Does Shirley really think I was thinking about Audrey just now?
Not that Hob could blame Shirley for her assumption, because he definitely did think about Audrey sometimes. Her radiant smile behind the bar when she was on her shift, her cheerful chatter about virtually every thought that came into her mind, had made it less daunting to wait here the last six months. It was easy to listen and nod and smile at her joy at life, at her eagerness to share herself.
Tonight though, she was a customer like everyone else, instead of pulling pints and picking up empty glasses and being a therapist to old drunk men.
Hob shot a glance in her direction across the bar; in a flash Audrey turned her body away from him, showing her the back of her curly head, while her two friends - Lynn? Sue? Maybe? - absorbed her in immediate chatter, all carefully ignoring him.
”Bob.” Shirley placed the glass down on the counter of the bar. It was now full of lager, and Hob picked it up, peering into the amber bubbles as if it held all the answers.
“Maybe - maybe I’ll speak to Audrey next year.”
Shirley rolled her eyes at Hob’s - admittedly terrible - attempt at humour. “Good one, I haven’t heard that one at all tonight. Ten minutes to go then and I’ll hold you to it.”
You may not have to.
But Hob just pursed his lips and kept the chilling thought safely hidden from view.
He shouldn’t be afraid of change, he scolded himself for the millionth time. It was an inevitability of life that everything would change, but this one was almost symbolic, a change in the very fabric of destiny, that Hob was about to drink his last drink in this sacred place.
With a dark chuckle to himself, Hob realised that whenever he met his companion, ironically, all he seemed to talk about was how things in the world had changed.
Hob had fantasised, imagined over and over what he might say, playing out like a scene from Will Shaxton’s - no, he was now known as Shakespeare - now celebrated plays. The fast pace of changes that had even outstripped the previous hundred years. Inventions, Marconi becoming radio becoming music on cassettes. Bicycles becoming cars, transport less in horse and cart and now longer roads and motorways as well as trains. The earliest daguerreotype cameras becoming video, fleeting seconds of recordings turning into silent movies and talkies and now colour films.
But whenever Hob talked about the changes to the world, in his mind his companion had grunted, a stoic indifference to all the information behind his pale eyes which faded to sudden concern.
What about you, Hob? What’s changed for you?
And Hob would give a carefree laugh and say that he’d spent time in London, in Manchester, in Edinburgh. That paperwork, passports, documentation meant it was becoming more difficult to disappear and re-appear thirty years on as his own son. That work was precarious the last ten years or so, but he’d found himself a steady post in London again eventually, and that life was quiet, but he had a home and food on his plate and he could still afford the rising prices of this place.
Hob found himself swallowing a lump in his throat at what always came next.
I’ve still yet to find a lover like Eleanor, though. I've had no children since Robyn.
“What’s with the fireworks, eh?” A shout in Hob’s ear interrupted his daydream, and gloomily he looked up at the man before him, pointing to the door, eyelids drooping. “‘S not midnight yet, what are they playing at?”
“I know, they’re early!” Hob forced a laugh. “They obviously want the nineties to start already!”
The man was already walking away, pushing back through the crowd away from the bar, holding three pints and almost spilling two of them on his walk away.
The door opened again, but Hob’s glance was almost resigned to his fate now; and sure enough, it was Shirley with another crate, the sound of fireworks exploding into the night behind her.
Honestly, if his companion did by some miracle turn up in the next five minutes, Hob could picture his surly smirk at the crowd.
I think we should go elsewhere, Hob. Somewhere quieter.
And Hob would grin wolfishly, and say my place or yours?
… oh.
That addition to his daydream was fairly recent, only the last hundred years or so; but after their last meeting, from which his companion had swiftly and unceremoniously left, Hob had had some peculiar dreams almost immediately after. Usually Hob only dreamt of his companion the night before he saw him, where he had appeared to give Hob the time of his arrival, but after he had last seen his retreating back a hundred years before, the dreams had become more frequent.
Dreams where he and his companion met again, for far longer this time. And instead of talking about Hob’s life, and whether he wanted to continue to live, they discussed deeper things, exchanging laughs and smiles and occasional touches to each other's hands that had made tingles shoot like bolts of lightning down Hob’s arms. A sensation he knew, a sensation he hadn’t felt since he had been with Eleanor. A sensation that was both exhilarating and petrifying, but one he didn’t fight any more, one that he lived in his dreams for.
Until one day, maybe seventy years ago, those dreams had evaporated.
Since then, Hob had slept terribly; fitful, dreamless sleep that left his imagination gasping for air.
Shirley was right. He probably was as bad as her uncle Joe for daydreams.
It’s the only sort of dream I’m having right now, anyway.
But it was either daydream or soak in the conversations happening with the other customers around the packed bar tonight. And try as he might, Hob couldn’t help tuning in to different frequencies such as “this Poll tax is coming in April now, April! I swear this will lose Thatcher the next election” or “If I have to hear that fucking Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue song one more time -” or “Did you see Corrie this week! Do you think Deirdre will take Ken back?”
So he let himself drift away, back down into the mire of his daydream; let the roar of voices in the bar be muffled by the noise of his own thoughts, smoggy as they were from his terrible sleep.
It’s every hundred years. Always. If he was going to come, tonight would be the last night he could. In more ways than one.
When the poster had gone up in the window of this tavern back in September, telling everyone that it would be closing at the end of the year and that Mick and Shirley were throwing a New Years Eve bash to “Party like it’s 1999, give or take ten years” as Mick had joked with Hob every day since, it seemed like half of Fulham had turned out to see them off before their move to a new pub in Crawley.
Hob hadn’t seen this place packed with so many people since the 1890s.
Even though long gone were the days where a party in a tavern meant music from a lyre and lute, boisterous song, and dance that knocked over tables and chairs; somehow Hob pined for those days. Rather than the present; sitting on a stool at the bar, hemmed in like cattle by people who stood talking instead of singing and dancing, virtually drowning out Shattered Dreams playing for the hundredth time on the cassette player and Clive James on the 80s on the BBC, muted on small television above the bar that a handful of people still craned their necks to watch.
For the first time in six hundred years, Hob didn’t know most of the people here. When he’d left last time, back in 1949, going up to Manchester again, Hob thought he would come back to at least one familiar face to announce that he was, yes, yet another Robert Gadling Junior for the thirtieth time. And it wasn’t as if Hob wasn’t used to people coming and going; hell, he’d seen that happen for six hundred and forty years and counting. Friends crossed paths briefly and then hurried on their ways.
But Hob’s companion - friend? - always turned up like clockwork, appearing in Hob’s life like two delicate threads tied in knots at exact intervals. Departing and returning, forming a pattern in the tapestry of history and eternity.
Or was it?
Their sixth meeting was now due. And he hadn’t arrived on schedule, the White Horse was serving its last drinks this very moment, and after six hundred and three years of coming here, dread spread down Hob’s limbs at what this could mean.
Was Hob's life linked to his mysterious companion's arrival? Did his absence this year mean that Hob would drop dead at the stroke of midnight tonight, that he would not live to see 1990 at all?
Hob didn’t know, and as fear wrapped like choking vines around his throat, he was reminded that he still knew virtually nothing about the dark-haired man he had first met in 1389.
His companion, by contrast, appeared to know everything.
He’d known Lushing Lou - no, Hob, corrected himself sternly, Louise Baldwin - from one proposition in the doorway of the tavern. He’d known Johanna Constantine’s unspoken demons as soon as he’d laid eyes on her. He’d had a conversation with Will Shaxton of all people, and four years later Will had changed his name and published the first of a series of plays that were still performed and read to this day, four hundred years later.
Just like Will and Johanna and Louise, he must know everything about Hob, all his deepest secrets - yes, maybe even the burgeoning feelings Hob harboured now - so why had he come back every century? Why was he still wanting to hear Hob speak about himself, if he knew it already?
Hob had thought he’d had the answer.
But vocalising it had driven his companion away, propelled by pride and pettiness, plunging into the shadowy streets with Hob shouting at his back, and yet … and yet there had been no denial of Hob’s words.
And the subsequent dreams? Did they have any meaning? The dreams where he met his companion again and again, embraced him, held him, let himself be held like he was with Eleanor again?
Even if the dreams had no meaning, the emotions were real.
Almost four centuries had stripped the naïveté of love away. Yes, Hob could enjoy their company, but since then his partners would come and go without truly connecting, leaving no lasting imprint on his thoughts, no fingerprints on his heart. For how was he meant to invest himself emotionally when mortality was so fragile?
Until a hundred years ago, at least.
That familiar tingling sensation in his chest arrived at the same time as his companion, who Hob realised, had not asked if Hob still wanted to live since the seventeenth century. He knew Hob didn’t want to die. He must also know that Hob didn’t want to love anyone again, to leave his heart open for more fingerprints, unless they were also not to die.
Maybe his companion felt the same.
But what was the reason that he could know Hob entirely, his hopes and dreams and desires, but when Hob wanted something, anything! the smallest crumb - even his name , for God’s sake - from his companion, it had driven a wedge between them?
Had Hob really been less interesting than Will bloody Shaxton ?
Yes, he didn’t write sonnets or plays like Will had, but Hob had done so much else. Notably, he thought at least, that he refused to die. His companion, apparently, also did. And he could be doing anything with his own eternity, and yet he chose to meet Hob.
Until now, anyway; pride having closed the door between them like the doors of the White Horse would close in …
One minute. One minute to midnight.
“A minute to go!” Someone was getting excited early. Hob could still hear faint sounds of fireworks from nearby, even as the television was turned up to watch the countdown, the music and chatter fading a little to watch.
Celebrating a new year in this way left a hollow place in his chest, one he had no idea how to fill.
Behind Hob the door to the tavern opened again, and he span around so fast his knees knocked into the person next to him.
… and there he was.
A flash of black hair. A long shadow in the doorway.
A sudden overwhelming rush over Hob’s whole body, a tidal wave of emotion Hob had kept behind a dam. The noise faded to silence and the room blurred behind relieved tears, but all Hob could hear was him , as if they were the only people left on the planet …
“You were right, Hob. Of course you were.”
A lump rose in Hob's throat, a shaky inhale. “So. Friends? Or … or maybe …?”
No response, just a curl of his companion’s lips into a wide smile, not the usual triumphant smirk but a beaming smile, warm and friendly, arms opening to welcome Hob like a long lost lover -
“What did you say, Bob?”
Hob blinked, looked up into Audrey's face beside him, and the world rushed back into his peripheral vision.
A frantic glance back at the door told him that the person Hob had believed was his centennial companion, was actually merely a dark-haired man called Fred, if the way his friends were loudly greeting him was to be believed, shouting his name like a football chant.
He’s not coming. He’s not.
“You were mumbling something.” Hob turned back to Audrey, her forehead crinkled with concern, her blue eyes piercing him.
Hob shook his head. “Nothing, nothing at all.”
“Oh. Well, Bob, I wondered if -“
But Audrey was cut off by the sudden cheer, the noise fading into numbers, counting down the seconds.
“Ten, nine, eight …”
I don’t want to die yet, I’ve still got lots of living to do!
“Seven, six, five …”
Vines crawled up Hob’s throat to choke him -
“Three, two, one -“
He screwed his eyes shut so tightly he heard blood rush in his ears -
“HAPPY NEW YEAR!”
Cheers and shouts and whoops made Hob look up, knuckles blanched from holding onto the bar until Audrey seized one hand and someone else grabbed the other and he was tugged out of the mire and into the cacophonous familiarity of Auld Lang Syne sung by a hundred other people, out of tune and full of life.
He hadn’t gone. He was still the same. Still the same Hob Gadling that had seen in the last six hundred new years. Still the same beating heart, thrumming with life.
I’m here. It’s 1990 and I’m here!
He couldn’t fight the beaming smile spreading across his face now, the elation flooding his body. The sea of people propelled him from his stool and into the crowd, tears smarting his eyes as he laughed, accepted kisses on the cheek and good wishes for the new year from strangers.
I’m still not going to die. I refuse!
And when Audrey kissed his cheek, murmured “Happy New Year, Bob,” into his ear, his heart leapt at the knowledge that he still had a lot of time.
He couldn’t just stay living in a dream.