A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(2)
“I think I was at . . . the Custom House?”
The Custom House was the sort of pub that the town council kept wanting to find a good reason to close down. The dusty whitewash on the outside gave one a clue that here was an inn the carpet of which could have been the subject of a TV nature special by David Attenborough. As you headed for the bar, your footsteps crunched. The walls inside were bare, the cloth on the pool table ripped, though people still played on it. The fruit machine’s soundboard had once had a pint tipped into it, resulting in strange, muffled, warblings. However, the landlord, Malcolm, kept the beer pipes clean, and for the Custom House’s clientele, that was the only required saving grace. After you got to know people, the décor became a feature, not a bug.
But yeah, there were often fights.
“Why did you decide to go there?” Shaun’s tone suggested that no nice young lady would. Autumn tended to end up at the Custom House having had a couple of drinks at one of the other pubs, become slightly angry with something someone had said there—but not enough to want to cause a fuss—and thus decided to move on. Her light complexion, what her best friend Lizzie had once called her “had clothes fall on her accidentally” sense of style, and, she supposed, the fact that she’d always been around, all distracted from the fact that she was, as they said these days, a person of colour. So she overheard things in those other pubs: perfectly nice people who’d never use the N word still saying “chinky” and, incredibly, “pikey”; people on her own social level knowing they were being risqué when they’d had a few, making jokes that started with “Jewboy and Mick walk into a pub.” When she’d been younger, she’d always spoken up at that point, and had been pleased when there’d often been whoops of applause rather than dismissal. Some of it was “oh ah, here she goes again,” but some of it had always been that feeling that she was to be congratulated for speaking up for “her own people.” Not that she knew, apart from her extended family in Swindon, any of her own people. Not since her Dad had passed away. She was literally the only non-white person in the entire town. That, she suspected, was the only circumstance in which you’d get that welcoming reaction, when the majority thought of you as the sole representative, and therefore harmless. Of course, in Lychford, there were also Sunil Mehra and his employees, but she’d never felt they had much in common. Sunil was part of the “reception for the Prince of Wales” crowd in this town, who’d probably see himself as “one of them,” while she was . . . whatever class it was that owned magic shops.
She was aware that, as she’d gotten older and still overheard things in pubs, she’d stopped speaking up so much. Because when you stopped being a teenager, you started feeling less sure of yourself, and not everything seemed like it was life and death. And she liked fitting in. She was quite popular, wasn’t she? And these were good people, really. Really. But it hadn’t eased off like she used to think it was going to. It had gotten worse. It had gotten more normal. The ones being “risqué” seemed to find it easier to say.
And then last year, that bloody year.
The walk through the marketplace on the day after the Brexit vote had been like something out of a science fiction movie. And that was saying something, coming from someone who was getting used to seeing magical beings. Which of these people, she had thought, looking around herself on that market day, had voted to saw themselves off from the rest of Europe? Which of these people, in their heart of hearts, wanted a Lychford that was “just like it had been in the 1950s”? Which of the shops she spent money in were owned by people who wanted the full emulsion white paint job, corner to corner, maybe without even having thought about it enough to know that was what they wanted? Which of the coffee shops contained people who were cheering inside today? She’d never know, because this was Britain, after all, and nice people don’t talk about anything that might cause trouble, and so all that day the town had been weirdly silent.
She’d gone down the pub that night, and people hadn’t talked about it there, either, but Autumn had overheard things, a lot of things, and that had been the first time she’d found herself going down the road to the Custom House. In the weeks and months that had followed, she’d found herself going there more and more. And now the General Election was approaching. And she felt more worried and scared every day. She’d talked with Lizzie about how she felt, and that always made her feel better for a while, like going on the Women’s March in Bristol after Trump’s election had made her feel better for a while. But the trouble with talking about this with Lizzie was that Lizzie would never understand how much these things made Autumn feel like an outsider in her own town. It had been months now, and she still couldn’t find a way to haul herself out of the pit that social media dropped her into every morning. She looked at the future, and for the first time in her life, the way ahead looked uniformly grim. There were such incredible things in people’s lives now, like photos from space probes around Saturn, and such incredible things outside those lives, the magic only the three of them knew about, and yet still, still, these tiny bloody people with their pent-up little bloody fears—! Even if she could have put it all into words, she couldn’t be sure Shaun Mawson would ever understand.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why I went to the Custom House.”