His face was etched into my mind

His face was etched into my mind; his lopsided, gormless smile and protruding eyes looked through me, already corpse-like in my head. His too-big ears and static forehead lines that aged him twenty years older than his thirty-four years overlay his ovular head, covered by sandpapery pink-yellow skin that, if the medical student in me was on the ball, would hint at potential liver disease. ‘MISSING’ was ingrained in my head: ‘JIM O'NEIL. LAST SEEN NOVEMBER 20TH.’ A whole week ago. I shuddered. Missing for anything over two days would significantly worsen prognosis, on an almost exponential scale. I shook myself. Blocking out the emotion, the science would filter in. Ironic that I’d use medical terminology to help dehumanise a situation when medics were painted as the most delicately human of beings. Not true, I smirked inwardly, recalling the Consultant’s harried dismissal of last week’s ‘patient to avoid’. I shook my head again. Stop, I warned myself. Head in the game. My mind was wandering too much.

“You okay?” the boy two metres from me nervously laughed, his eyebrows creased momentarily in a frown. I reddened; had he been watching me that full time?

“Yeah. What?” I sounded more staccato than I intended, the casualness lost in my disjointed speech.

“Looked like you had a fly in your hair,” he half-grinned, inverting a pint glass to stand head-down on the racks below the bar.

I laughed, a slight pause following as I hadn’t prepped what I was going to say next. I was weirdly disorientated; being lost in your own thoughts for too long was a good way of scrambling your head.

“Just thinking,” I admitted, “You know, about Jim.”

His smile faded, and his nervous eyes darted horizontally. “Don’t talk about him too loudly,” he muttered, coming closer. “Leanne’s going mental about it. Calling anyone who talks about him a glory-hunter, screaming they never knew him.”

I raised my eyes, but was unsurprised. Leanne had been sleeping with him for a year and a bit now, despite posting loved-up Facebook posts with her boyfriend-potentially-fiancé every two days. “Five years together and its never been sweeter xx” she’d write, punctuation always minutely off, and her boyfriend’s thin alien-like head perched on her shoulder, camera too close and smiles too filtered. What her boyfriend did or didn’t know was that after she finished her shift, she would change into a thin floaty Primark top that dated back to the 2010s, covering thin jeggings and purple, calf-high imitation-Uggs. She’d take the hair-bobble out her thin, dye-stained hair leaving a soft indentation half-way down, and scrape her hair out from behind her white ears. Anaemic-looking, a bruise periodically appearing on her right or left forearm, depending on her boyfriend’s shift patterns, she’d skulk across the room, looking too shaky and apprehensive to be meeting proper friends, and she’d sit with them, that group of raucous thirty-year-olds. Day-in day-out, they started too early for it to be the post-work booze.

They all looked at least ten years older, and that was when the lighting was flattering and makeup was done. There were two women and three men usually, and Leanne joining would satisfy the gender-equality requirements. The most dominating woman, Sammy-Jo, had bright ginger hair, thick and often curled, sitting staidly on her left shoulder and curving down past her breast. She was skinny, but not as thin as Leanne. Sammy had slightly more curves, but as the weeks went by, her buttocks became flatter and her hips carried that bit more pudge. She was size eight, and wore proper jeans. Her black heeled boots would be knee-high and her top was a Topshop number rather than Primark, but still too young to match the rest of her. It would usually be low-cut, an unsubtle V-neck that was, much like everything else about the crowd, entirely outdated. Her face was darker than Leanne’s too, a mix of her dysfunctional liver and her several layers of cracked Estée Lauder foundation. She wore bright red lipstick and dark flicked eyeliner, creating two faux pas’ that were a further indication to her age: one) eyes or lips, and two) who paints on thick black anymore? Her teeth were straight, but yellowing due to the smoke.

She was objectively pretty, from a distance, and definitely had been maybe four or five years ago. She’d known it too, but hadn’t known how to handle it. The years of being passed around the men her father’s age showed, and now she was nothing more special than any of their old, fat wives stuck at home. She pretended that she was still femme fatale numero uno, though, and wiggled her hips a little too vigorously as she walked from her table to the toilet and back again. I’d met her in the toilet a few times, when I was down doing the checks, and she had drawled at me, slurring her words and becoming a little over-familiar. “My bloody haaayyur,” she’d half-spoke half-sang, and I’d laughed politely, “I know the feeling.” “You’re gORjus, sweetie,” she’d crooned, “What I’d do to be eighteen again.” I was actually twenty-two, not that it mattered. I couldn’t tell if I was flattered or offended by her inaccurate estimation, and figured that if I was flattered, it was a sure sign I was aging, too.

Her friend, Samantha – they called themselves the ‘Two Sams’ and referred to one another as ‘Sam 1’ and ‘Sam 2’, the tacky redhead being the first, obviously – was a stout woman with blonde hair painted onto permanently dark, greasy roots. She wore significantly less makeup than her counterpart, which would do her good in the long run but granted her no favours short-term, and again, frumped about in a selection of V-necks from F&F. She was much smaller; whilst Sammy sat at about five-nine, her long legs catching the attention of newcomers to the bar who weren’t aware of her scandalous dating history, Sam 2 was a mere five-three, which, combined with her slow metabolism and love of cider, did nothing for her “orange on sticks” appearance. Sam 2 had a long-term partner, and so she didn’t have as provocative a past as her drinking buddy. However, she wasn’t against soggily wetting another man’s lip on a Friday night, if the shots were flowing and the atmosphere vaguely party-like. Her small frog-eyes were beady and, if you were a kind descriptor, you might say she looked as though she’d once housed some intelligence behind them. Years of keeping up with the ‘cool kids’ had forced her out of her third year of college and landed her with an enduring love of the nicotine buzz and a need for a daily drink.

Their three male colleagues were relatively unremarkable guys. Two looked near enough the same from a distance: two moody men, one thinner than the other who housed a pot belly under his manky Adidas t-shirt. Their third friend was about five or six years older than them, approaching forties but looking as though he was well past fifty. Despite his advantage of added years, he was by no means the ringleader. His dulled mental capacity meant he followed the dynamic duo around, living in constant hope of more drink and more women. He was short with an ugly pig-like face, and nostrils that flared at the smallest of inconveniences. His hairline was receding, and he was being left with a progressively reducing circle of dark brown-grey hair taking centre-stage on his shiny dome. The bar staff were kind to him, witnessing his perpetual rejection from both his circle of ‘friends’ and the ladies he so poorly tried to pursue. He spoke nasally and smelt of car grease, but not in the good way. His beer-bellied friend was five-ten, with strawberry-blonde hair that looked permanently dusty and an expression that was permanently glazed. He ordered Tennents in twos and drank to get drunker than the day before. He was a man of few words and yet always surrounded by ‘pals’ with a similar affection for Scotland’s golden syrup.

The thinnest man was the one in charge. His word was law and it was his mood that dictated the course their evenings would take. He was tall, perhaps 6’2, and had ears as wide as his pea-head that stuck out halfway down. His stubble had become a permanent tattoo on his lengthening jowls, the only evidence of any fat existing on his slim frame. He wore football tops normally, even though they were banned, the excess fabric crinkling across his bony torso, quickly stained by large splashes of lager. A man of many moods, the brightness would swing into his glassy eyes a few pints in and before long he’d be demanding rounds of pink Sambuca for his table of loonies, all swinging and dancing.

And then Leanne would scuttle over, her white masculine hands flattening her dark hair down onto her clammy forehead. Her jeggings hugged the free space around her knees, her bony legs lacking all shape and her hip bones peering keenly from the top of her pelvis. Her rose-pink gel lip gloss conjured up mixed feelings of repulsion and pity within one, looking like it had come from an eight-year-old’s first makeup kit, and her sparkly eyeshadow clogged together in blotchy patches on her lids. Her flat chest held no promise of allure and, with a small remnant of self-awareness, Leanne would not buy or wear low-cut tops.

The skinny man was Jim O'Neil, and his pot-bellied friend, Billy McGhie. The small fat man that accompanied them was called Pete, and no one knew his last name. No one asked and no one cared.