Colin had chosen the The Crown & Cushion in Heaton Chapel for two reasons:
- It possessed a screen large enough to qualify as a minor civic building.
- It was fifty-eight paces from the 192 bus stop, thus limiting unscheduled exercise.
United were busy failing to break down attacks on the left wing. And the right wing. In the real world, pints sweated gently, a fruit machine blipped like a needy child, and Colin occupied a stool with the air of a man determined to do absolutely nothing constructive until further notice.
The match should have washed over him like any other Saturday broadcast—but every clipped pass, every mistimed volley, made his mind loop back to the Pier Wanderers. Three weeks Tuesday. Half seven. The stranger’s grin. Drag-back, top corner, bosh.
He still couldn’t fit that sentence anywhere sensible.
On impulse he fished out his phone and opened the calendar. It was peppered only with work commitments. No five-a-side fixtures. No Pier Wanderers.
Did I… add them drunk and delete them drunker? he wondered, shoving the device face-down against a beer mat. Unsettling, yes—but also weirdly flattering. He’d never considered himself imaginative enough to fabricate a football schedule.
An ironic cheer burst from the television—some long-distance sighter into row Z—prompting scattered groans around the bar. Colin flipped the phone upright again and typed Pier Wanderers football Blackpool into the browser. Result: local five-a-side league homepage, garish as budget confetti. Fixtures, standings, a blurry crest involving a seagull doing something anatomically implausible with a football. All real.
Facebook next. Same album, same trophy night. He scrolled—thumbnail, thumbnail, thumbnail—until the photo bloomed: teammates shoulder-to-shoulder, medals winking, but where Colin had once been...grinned a complete stranger, occupying his outline like a souvenir stand-in.
Colin leaned back, letting pub noise wash over him. Work had turned vicious, and in recent months alcohol had slid from treat to habit. Under stress some people looped into odd obsessions—he might just be one of them.
Still.
He ordered another lager (thirty-one paces to the bar, thirty-one back) and tried assembling a rational timeline. Blackpool last weekend: three pints, friendly nod, strange praise. Saturday morning scroll: fixtures, photo, calendar entries that seemed to pre-explain themselves. Today: fixtures intact, photo changed, calendar scrubbed.
A systematic hallucination? Unlikely, but “unlikely” was getting crowded.
Out the window the sky dimmed from pewter to slate. Rain needled the bus shelter like static. Three separate times Colin thought of catching the next service into town, walking the familiar S-bend, and hopping the train west. Each time he pictured that pier wind cutting through his coat—and something in him clenched, the way a hand closes over loose change.
No, he told himself. Enough seaside for a lifetime.
He finished the lager and shouldered his bag. At the door he hesitated, glanced at the silent phone one last time, then slipped it into a pocket as though pocketing the thought itself.
Tomorrow would be Sunday. Monday would be Monday. Manchester was real, rain-soaked, and sufficient.
As for Blackpool—he would simply stay away.
He stepped into the drizzle, counting paces to the bus stop, each one meant to land him further from questions the town by the sea seemed far too ready to answer.