44. SUSPECT 7: Paedo Grin

Don't Look Now...

Old Lennie. Lonely old Lennie. Laughing Lennie. Lennie the Grin. Actually, nobody really knew Lennie’s name, just the sight of him. A day time drinker who always sat on his own and never took off his fedora and beige rain jacket, he made half a shandy last two hours, and would occasionally walk across the pub to interrupt someone else’s conversation, quickly turning the focus on to his own tragic life and it’s defining chapters such as the suicide of his wife in the 1960s or the imagined life of his estranged heroin addict son whom he kicked out of the house and hasn’t seen for twenty five years. This was all annoying enough, however tragic the truth of it might have been, but he did all this with the most cutting toothy grin, the type of grin that made his eyes permanently screwed tight like crushed walnuts. It was the coldest rictus grin since the creepy old preacher dude from Poltergeist 2. Lonely Old Lennie started developing a habit of stepping behind the bar, just half a yard through the flip door, which was always up by the partition during opening times, and was strictly verboten to Alden. He’d banned people for it, like when Rocco tried to catch Trisha under the mistletoe he’d brought in specifically to catch her under. Pffft, out until January 2nd. The absolute worst time to get banned. Lennie escaped the ban for his transgressions perhaps because of his getting on in years, and perhaps partly because he did it when Alden was out and one of the girls was looking after the quite midweek lunch time shift and they would never have dobbed him into Alden and seen an old man get a telling off. Not all that long ago, Moses started being the object of the old man’s Uber-tragic narcissistic anecdotes, and when he’d come in after lunch to have a pint and do the G2 crossword, over Lennie would come, that grin coming toward him like the billowed sail of a gigantic whaling ship. Moses’s heart would sink, wondering how long this one would go on for. Lennie went on, his face getting bigger, his teeth getting bigger, the grin so cold and isolating it was borderline assault. It was the story of his son again, lost to the bilious anger and confusion of an old man still without empathy for his drug-sickened child, or maybe the one where he came home and found he had to pull the top half of his wife out of the oven, or maybe it was a rant about immigrants or welfare claimants or the Swedish (his wife may or may not have been Swedish), but when Lennie eventually shuffled off back to his seat at the back booths, pulled along by the prevailing wind caught in his teeth, Med came over and cleared the ashtray and asked if Moses was okay as he looks a bit jaded and although Moses says Agh no I’m fine his eyes are sallow and Med sniggers sympathetically for him and is about to turn back to the bar with a Well, if there’s anything you need just give me a wave but then he says it and he doesn’t know where it comes from and he immediately regrets it but there it goes: “Fucking Paedo Grin ruining my crossword.” What can you add to that? Med looks confused for a moment, as if the pieces are falling into place in her mind, and then she puts her hand to her mouth, her cheeks rise up, she flushes out, and tears come to her eyes. The ones that escape as she holds back loud hysterical laughter. She can’t look at Moses, but she keeps turning back to him as if she has a duty to do so, and eventually, after a few attempts, she walks off and through the doors to the cellar. Any shame Moses might have felt for bestowing such a cruel moniker on an old man with a horrendously tragic past is quickly washed away by the warm glow of having made someone laugh so hard. So hard they felt shame enough to run to another room to be alone and unseen. That’s a good feeling. What was not a good feeling was finding out the name had stuck. And two weeks later Moses was at the bar doing his crossword and the welder boys come in to neck their lagers on their lunch break, and when Lennie comes in a few minutes later one of them smiles and from behind his cuff says, “eh up, Paedo Grin’s in.” “What did you say?” Moses turns and asks them, unable to believe his ears. Lennie has already shuffled off with his half a shandy. “We call him Paedo Grin,” Boff says, and he points to his own mouth doing an impression of Lennie’s fixed expression. Moses doesn’t say that it was in fact he who made that up. He just smiles as if to show he appreciates the genius of their humour, these drunk welders. But inside he thinks, fuuuuuuk, what have I done? Other than make a load of people laugh really hard, what have I done? But this isn’t why Paedo Grin makes Moses’s list. The reason was that Moses couldn’t shake the guilt. This little old man with his billowing sail grin. And so one afternoon, Moses finds himself going over to him – nobody had ever approached Lennie before. Nobody. And it showed on Lennie’s face. The grin stuck but it hid something approaching terror at the foreign feeling of being approached. Moses asked if he could sit with the old fella, and Lennie moved his bags a few inches from the foot space beneath the table. Could they make friends? Could Moses soften the blow that Lennie would likely never feel anyway because nobody bullied anyone in the open in the Pips. It was all good fun and well-whispered. Moses knew it went around about him just like it did everybody else. Respectfully. The old man is guarded but goes into the same old stories, or at least the familiar territories where those same old stories could be found and drawn upon if needed. And it became apparent that the suicide of his wife some forty years ago had been the reason both for his son’s drug addiction and for Lennie’s own inability to deal with that addiction that resulted in him throwing his boy out of the house. Anger was all through the old man, he was riddled with it, he was in its control, and it was clear he had no control of his own over anything, over his views on race and immigration, on his verbal outpourings to strangers, on his lack of understanding of other people’s personal space, of his fucking grin. And at one point he leans in to Moses in that back booth, his half a shandy untouched the last hour, and he says, “You know if I could round up all the drug dealers in this town I’d line them up across the rail bridge and I’d put a bullet in the backs of their heads and watch them drop onto the tracks like rag dolls and then I’d piss all over their corpses from up there, yes I would I don’t mind telling you that.” And Moses felt the blood drain out of his face as the old man said this. The sheer fucking rageful tragedy of it all. And the whole time the grin didn’t fade although the feel of it did. Paedo Grin, Moses thought. Still funny.