May 21, 2025

Closing Time
By Robert Kibble

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast

​

It had definitely been – almost still was – a yellow chrysanthemum.  Struggling to hold on to the shape and beauty it had once had, but this was a battle it had already lost.  Propped in a vase by one of the few graves which had been tended in the decades this graveyard had been otherwise abandoned, it still stood as proud as it could in front of a young woman’s gravestone.  She’d died in October 1918,  a month before the end of the first world war.  Tragic time to go.  She’d been twenty.  A nurse.  I suppose they’re all tragedies.  But someone had kept this one cleaner than the surrounding graves.  Maybe parents?  They’d have long-since died.  Maybe a younger sister, or even nephews or nieces.  
This was all a distraction, though, from the important find.  The open pub ahead of me, welcoming seating out front, no obvious other clientele, and probably not food, so not as good as the pub I’d been meaning to go to.  That was shut on Mondays.  I should have noticed on their website.  These little out-of-the-way places often don’t open all week, but I’m used to the big city.  It was only on a whim two weeks back, realising I had so much leave yet to take, that I decided on this walking holiday.  My GPS told me I was two miles from my B&B, even though I’d got hopelessly lost earlier.  Don’t know what you’d do without phones.  I had some snacks back in my room, so a beer here and then a half hour to home, and then – with blessed relief to my feet – bed.
First, beer though.  As I said, important.
I ducked to get through the door and was met by one of those olde worlde pubs – you know the sort of thing, with bits of farm machinery stuck to the walls for no reason and ancient pewter jugs hanging from the ceiling.  Books on bookshelves that screamed out that they’d been bought by the yard by those companies who survive by outfitting olde worlde pubs.  Not one could have been taken down and read in decades.
Nice interior, though, in many ways.  Lots of snugs, nooks and crannies, places which I knew from bitter experience made being bar staff an absolute nightmare when people didn’t bring their glasses back to the bar.  Not an issue tonight, though, as the place was deserted.  Only a solitary barmaid, tapping away on her phone.  They had bar stools, so I went up to the bar, plonked myself on one – to the relief of my feet, although I did tell them not to get used to the comforting rest – and nodded to her.
“What can I get you?” she asked, stepping across to stand in front of me.
Four different beers on tap.  Always a good sign, but surprising with the place being empty.  Still, it was a Monday.  I looked through the options.  “Mmm,” I said.  “Half a Landlord.”  A half meant I could have a second half of one of the others in a bit.
She smiled.  A man could fall for a smile like that, but barmaids must get that all the time, so – I thought – be the gent.  I’m on holiday, probably only coming here once, don’t start getting stupid ideas.  Even if you could equally fall into those dark eyes, now intently focused on the task in hand – that of getting me a half of Landlord.
“There you are,” she said, placing it carefully in front of me.  No spillage – another of my bugbears when it came to serving staff.
“Thank you.  Quiet tonight.”
“Always is early in the week.  Only gets busy for the live music nights.”
“Surprised you’re open at all.”
She turned to get the card machine, her hair beautifully swishing as she did so.  Long dark hair.  Right, I thought – find something to say which isn’t anything to the effect of why an attractive young woman is in a bar in the middle of nowhere on her own with a single man.  Don’t say that.  Obviously having consciously thought that I couldn’t think of anything less creepy to say, so I got my card out and paid, having not listened to how much the beer even was.  
The machine pinged.  She put it away, giving me another swoosh, enough for me to notice a small yellow flower tucked into her hair, contrasting with the dark.  I’m not normally like this, I should say.  Maybe it was tiredness.  But something about her…
She turned back and I looked away, probably too late to avoid it being obvious I’d been staring, but what else was there to look at in this otherwise-empty building?  The farm machinery?  Some of those old sepia pictures that again I suspected they sold by weight or volume?  One of them behind the bar was clearly this building, though, so relevant at least, but why put a picture of a building inside itself?  It had two middle-aged ladies – Victorian dresses – standing in front of what looked like a pub unchanged from how I saw it.
The barmaid followed my gaze.  “Ah,” she began.  “Those two ran this, back in the day.  It’s them that haunt the place.”
“What?”
She smiled, as if what she was saying was the most natural thing in the world, with a disarming lack of concern – the kind of concern I feel I’d have even as a man being alone in a building I so confidently said was haunted.
“What do you mean, they haunt this place?”
She leaned slightly forward, dropping her voice.  “Oh, they rattle the plates in the kitchen.  They were doing that earlier this evening.  And people in the toilets have seen them in the mirror, standing behind them.  And sometimes, when I’m closingup, a gust of cold smokey air wafts along the bar, covering it for a second.”
I looked up and down the bar, and then back into those so-delightful eyes.  “What?”  Not a great conversationalist, me, at least not when distracted by someone this pretty and an insane story of haunted bartops.  “Have you seen them?”
She laughed.  Well, a half-laugh.  As if what I was asking wasn’t stupid exactly, but was too obvious to answer.  She stood back up.  “You get used to them.”
“And you’re not scared?  Here, on your own…”  Oh, damnation, I said it.  Basically asking if she was scared of being alone, now with a strange man in her pub, heading into the latter part of the evening.
She didn’t appear to notice.  Instead she looked round the room.  “I sometimes FaceTime one of the other staff when I’m closing up.  Chat to them.  Someone to keep me company.”
It was still alone.  I was oddly feeling protective of her now.
“How late do you stay open?”
“I’d have been thinking of shutting up if you hadn’t arrived.”  She put up a hand as if to say stop.  “Oh, but don’t worry.  It’s fine.  Nothing else to do tonight, so if you want another or anything don’t feel you have to stop.”
I’d finished my half already, so I asked for a half of a local brewery – Hunter’s something – weird lettering which made it very hard to read in the dim light.  Had it been that dim when I got in?  Maybe just the sun going down.
We went through the dance of pouring and paying again, and this time she opened the conversation.  “I didn’t notice a car.  Did you walk?”
“Yeah.  Walking holiday.”
“Far to go?”
“Only a couple of miles.  GPS says right out of here, then left along past some kids farm place, and I’m staying just beyond that.  AirBnB place.”  It wasn’t AirBnB.  Why did I say AirBnB?  To impress her?  To say, look, I’m up to date with things?  To distract from the fact I was probably ten years her senior?  To fill a space in which I’d otherwise blurt out how amazingly her dark eyes shone in the pale light, and how if she smiled at me I’d stay here forever…?
“That’s good.  It’ll be dark soon, and some of the drivers down that road.  God, even though it’s 30 out front they speed past us like they’ve got a deathwish.  There have been several crashes out front.  And for years there was a primary school just down the way.  The building’s still there, just back behind the Tudor-style empty house.”
“I’d noticed that place, coming up here.  Looks like a lovely old building.”
More smile.  “Bit of a fixer-upper.”  She picked up her phone and was either checking for messages or checking the time.
I took another gulp of beer.  I could stay here all night.  I could drift away into fantasies about a dark-eyed maiden suitable for a romantic poem about highwaymen.  I wondered if offering to stay while she shut the place would make her feel more worried.  She was used to it.  Although I could have another half.  Just a snifter for the road, and all that.
I pushed my empty glass over the bar.
“Maybe one last half,” I said.
She glanced behind me, then back at me.  “Are you sure?”
I looked down at my watch.  “Unless you want to close up.  Sorry – I don’t want to keep you.”
“No, it’s fine.  Just checking…”
I didn’t know what to make of it.  I wanted to stay.  God, I wanted to stay.  I’d been walking for hours – an extra half wouldn’t hurt, would it?  One last half.
I pointed at one of the other taps, a green one I hadn’t tried before.  I should photograph them and fill them in on my beer tasting app later.  Something to do to distract myself before bed.  To avoid thinking about her.  Why was she getting into my head quite so much?
“There you go,” she said, her hand staying long enough round the glass that I felt her cool fingers briefly when I picked it up.  “Enjoy.”
I took a sip, and noticed she was staring at me now.  The smile had gone, replaced by a sadness.  “Why?” she asked, but not of me.  Yet there was no one else there.  “Oh, damn it, why did you have to ask for another?”
“What?  Sorry.  If you’d wanted to close up…”
“No, I didn’t, but now they had a chance to see you staring.”
“What?  I’m sorry, but you are…  I mean…  I didn’t mean to…”
She looked past my left shoulder and shouted.  “He was going.  You don’t have to keep trying to set me up like this.  You don’t have to do these stupid stupid things.  Why are you such arseholes?”
I heard another voice, somehow.  Yet there was no one there.  A whining whisper “Is that any way to talk to your mother?”
“I’m fine alone!” she suddenly shouted, almost making me spill my drink.  “I’m fine!  And if I’m not fine, I can deal with it!  Look!”
She leant over the bar, grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me forward into a kiss, which I’d only just got over the shock of when she pushed me away again.  “See!”
I didn’t know what to say.  She was staring behind me, so I turned round, I was still holding my drink when I realised she was now standing next to me, rather than behind the bar.  I hadn’t heard her move.
“They don’t let me, you see.  They don’t let me choose.  I’d have chosen…  Well, not to.  Not to do this, exactly, but I like you.  I do.  You seem… nice, I guess.”
She put out her hands and placed them gently on my upper arms, holding me.  I felt shivers running through me, racing through me.  I looked at those lips again, now talking, that I had been kissed by seconds before.  She leaned closer, and I felt her grip tighten.  I felt I was falling, but not sideways.  Directly down.
“They want you to stay with me for a while,” she said, as I realised I was dropping throug the floor.  “They think I need company.  And I can’t say no to my mother.”
It went dark.  There was only a smell I recognised.  A chrysanthemum.

                                                                   💀💀💀

Robert lives west of London with a wife and two cats, and a cornucopia of half-finished writing projects.  A few have been published over the years, which – it has to be admitted – is very pleasing.  If only a less creative day job wouldn’t keep getting in the way, he’s sure it would be more.  You can find him at www.philosophicalleopard.com where you’ll find more short stories, links to his novels, and musings on why zeppelins don’t ply the skies.