It was a Tuesday evening when I finally relented and accompanied Nico to the nameless little cocktail bar at the far end of Stone Street. He’d been a few times now, always raving about how cool the place was, this strange little cocktail joint with only the street address as point of reference. The building simply had the street number above the door, hence its colloquial appellation, ‘Numbers.’ Painted a dull, dark blue, with a few tables on the double-width path outside, it wasn’t much to look at. Indeed, I hadn’t noticed it was there at all, despite having gotten coffee in the Turkish cafe next door several times since moving back to Stone Street. During the day it may as well have been a derelict.
My impression changed fast when Nico led me through the front door and into the one small bar room. Ten little tables, half of which had couples or small groups huddled over them, black and white photos of acts at Woodstock and stills from the sets of classic Film Noir shoots, ’60s and ’70s blues, rock, and folk playing at a respectable volume. The bar itself was tiny, barely big enough to accommodate the two black-shirted bartenders and the ceiling-height shelves full of tequila and American whiskey. There was a real air of vintage Americana in the place, a sense of authenticity that was missing in most of the try-hard hipster cocktail bars in the city centre.
Nico approached the bar slowly, reverently. I followed in kind. The older of the two men manning the shakers locked eyes with each of us in turn, offering a slight smile and hearty nod. ‘Welcome, chaps. What can I do for you?’ His voice had a slight Northern lilt, though weathered and seasoned with some time overseas, if I were any judge.
I sat at one of the stools against the bar, Nico positioning himself to my left. The menus were photocopies of some hand-written master copy, on something akin to glossy magazine paper. They were stained with all manner of spirit and mixer. Though some might find this amateur or unkempt, I thought it reflected a pragmatic DIY ethos. There were forty or so drinks on there, mainly stone-cold classics and their variations. I went for a Rye Old Fashioned, Nico a Tom Collins.
‘We’ve got a special gin in at the moment that would be perfect for that Collins. Can I tempt you?’ The barman asked.
‘Tell me about it,’ Nico responded. That was a very ‘him’ response. Endlessly curious, always wanting more information, more conversation. It made him a superstar in the sales department at the casting company we worked for; he always knew more about what the customers needed than anyone else, was always more familiar with their processes and our own and could figure out a way to mesh them together for mutual benefit. Me, I just did QA. Couldn’t handle all the customer facing stuff. Give me hard numbers, tools, and a quiet room.
‘So,’ the barman began, ‘As far as I understand, this is a new company using an old recipe. Classic Old Tom gin made right here in Ferenbrooke, at the disused – well, not disused anymore, I suppose – distillery on Blackwell Road. The company’s just called The Ferenbrooke Distillery, and this particular bottle,’ He tapped a squat glass vessel standing by the till and continued, ‘Is called Tomcat Gin. They sent a rep in here a few weeks ago and I thought I’d buy a case and see what’s up.’
Nico’s mouth split into a toothy smile. ‘Sounds perfect.’
The barman set about measuring and mixing, smoothly pouring a generous double measure of gin while his colleague grabbed a bottle of rye for my Old Fashioned. The two bartenders moved with a strange sort of harmony, sharing a very small work area and one and a half sets of tools. Efficient, unobtrusive movements and no flair. Oddly hypnotic, in its way. My anticipation grew as I saw the second bartender carefully select from a line of eight bottles of bitters. I was far from an expert, but I knew enough about old whiskey cocktails to know that choosing the right aromatics could make or break a drink.
The Collins arrived first. Nico eagerly sipped at it, immediately letting out a satisfied grunt. ‘That is spectacular,’ he said. ‘Try it.’
David handed me a straw and I poked it into the pale, cloudy highball. Nico was certainly not wrong, I have to say. The lemon’s acidity was balanced perfectly with sweetness and the gin’s botanicals shined through admirably. It was the Tom Collins we all hope for when we order one.I told Nico as much, and he nodded sagely. Still, I was in a rye mood. Luckily I didn’t have to wait long for my Old Fashioned and it, too, was exceptionally competent. Nico elected not to try mine since he had over-indulged on Scotch the weekend prior and couldn’t face a brown spirit just yet.
We sat and sipped our drinks, chatted mindlessly about work and relationships. The barman got involved a little here and there, and thus we learned his name was David. For our second round, I went with a Manhattan and Nico stuck with the Tom Collins. Eyeing his phone, face-up on the bartop, I saw that he was on the website of the Ferenbrooke Distillery.
‘You’re really loving that, huh?’
‘Yeah, man. Thinking about visiting the distillery. They take visitors, though they don’t have a tour set up as far as I can tell. You up for it? Thursday, maybe?’
I gave my assent and we hashed out the details while we finished our drinks. My Manhattan was good. Great, even. I was sad to see the glass pass through the rear doors to the bar’s kitchen, carried reverently by a young waiter with a Spanish accent.
We decided to call it there, paid our tab and said our goodbyes. We both lived about the same distance from the bar but in opposite directions. I lived in a flat above a plant shop further down Stone Street, Nico in a nice little two bed house just off the nicer end of the road, over the bridge and nearer the town centre. While walking back, I considered how the presence of Numbers on this side of the bridge was a compelling sign of the times. When I was a kid, this end of Stone Street was rough. The town end had always been home to a vibrant mixed community of immigrants and bohemians, but this end was were the drug clinic and the council’s emergency accommodation was. It had once been a separate village called Cambrey which had been swallowed by an ever-expanding Ferenbrooke back when the train station was built between the two back in the early Victorian era and they lined Stone Street with terraced houses to have somewhere to put all the workers. The bridge went over the railway line and that point is where the investment ended. There were cheap, shitty houses, tonnes of homeless people and drug addicts, and a general air of hopelessness in Cambrey, now simply known as the shit end of Stone Street. Over the past couple of decades though, the hipsters had run out of affordable places to live closer to town and so the gentrification of Cambrey began. Now we had fancy coffee shops, a bar or two, even a couple of respectable restaurants.
It still all felt very new to me, in some ways. I’d grown up in Cambrey, watching the changes from my mum’s council house down a grotty side street than ran between Stone Street and the train station. Those of us here before the glow up could tell each other from a glance, even if we’d never met. We all bore a constitutional distrust of the change in circumstance, I think. A vague disbelief. Perhaps a sense that things had quite gotten away from us in some way. Though that could just be me. It was not as if I was in the habit of talking about these matters with other locals.
Back at home, I ordered a curry for delivery from one of the older places, one that had been on Stone Street since I was a kid.
Thursday rolled around with unbridled haste. I’m not entirely convinced that we even had a Wednesday that week. The clock appeared to run out of steam by the morning, though, judging by the sludgy pace of the work day. Nico popped down to the QA lab, seeking confirmation that we were still on for our distillery tour after work. I’d already confirmed via text, but Nico was the sort who didn’t view anything as real unless it was right in front of him. It sounded like an exhausting way to live, but he was pretty chipper with it.
Once the day was done, my Vernier calipers safely back in their case and the laser turned off, we reconvened in the lobby of Raymond Castings and marched off to the bus stop for the shuttle back to Stone Street. Our firm was positioned in an ageing industrial estate on the eastern edge of Ferenbrooke, a village-turned-suburb and claypit-turned-park between us and Cambrey. The bus journey took ten minutes, dropping us by the community hospital. We chatted mindlessly about current work projects, demanding customers and production mishaps, on our way up the road towards the old distillery. Blackwell Road branched off Stone Street on the other side of the bridge. The old distillery was just a short ways up the road, visible from Stone Street proper. I had vague recollections of standing outside it as one of a clutch of teenage boys, sharing a cigarette after youth club. Just one of many disused relics, its fallow grounds and chipped bricks hadn’t seemed worthy of note to my young mind. Indeed, until we rounded the corner onto Blackwell Road and it filled the sky in front of us, I couldn’t quite conjure a solid image of the place. Even now, looking back, the exact angles elude me. The slope of the roof surely wasn’t as steep as I remember it, the angles at which the walls met could not have been as sharp as my mind’s eye holds them to be.
The front door of the distillery was fortress-like; two and a half metres tall, dark wood banded with wrought iron. Above the door and to the left was an old iron clock, the hands rusted solid and still at three o’clock. Only two small windows were visible on the front of the building, both high above the ground, where the top floor would be on a three storey townhouse. The height of the place struck me as we approached the twisted metal gates that separated the small yard and the steps to the door from the rest of the street. It was taller than any of the houses or shop fronts around, an imposing titan of Victorian vice on a mostly residential street.
The gate was unlocked. Nico led the way through, his step slowing slightly once he crossed the threshold into the cobbled grounds of our destination. He glanced back at me with high brows and a faint smile. I was so sure I’d be hearing him nerd out about this place for weeks. We continued up the path, approached that old imposing door. It had a large knocker, a brass grotesque wearing an expression of anguish. Nico reached for it only to find his hand hanging in the air as the door swung open.
A jovial man, middle-aged and heavy-set, stood before us. He was bedecked in the attire of an old-timey bartender; white shirt and bowtie, waistcoat and sleeve garters. He had a trimmed grey beard and a full head of grey hair slicked back. ‘Hello!’ He bellowed. ‘You must be the lads here for a look-around.’
He stepped out, leaving the door open behind him. ‘We’ll actually start out here. Specifically, round the side. There’s something there you’ve got to see.’ He started walking to the north side of the building, where there was a gap of about a metre and a half between the wall of the distillery and the yard’s fence. ‘I’m Neil, by the way. Part owner, along with Derek and Suzie. I’ve got to say, it’s nice to see some Stone Street locals taking an interest. I’ve been dying to start up a tour; not so much as a money-maker but just because I’ve been obsessed with the history of this place ever since I first learned about it. What would become the distillery started life as a clothing factory, funnily enough. Back in seventeen forty-three. That did not last long. By seventeen fifty, the place stood empty. In fifty-one, Baron Edward De Gryn, a cousin of the local viscount, bought it and set it up for gin production, sparing no expense. He’d apparently managed to surreptitiously acquire the Old Tom recipe from one of the better London distilleries and set about taking over the local market. This actually caused a bit of a ruckus, what with the illegal bathtub gin trade that had already been well-established in Ferenbrooke. Centred where else but here on Stone Street, of course. The train lines and cheap houses, general air of deprivation, and – to put it bluntly – terrible vibes made Stone Street the natural home of Mother’s Ruin in this town.’
We followed Neil round the side of the building, hanging off his every word. He had a pleasant voice with a teacher’s cadence. He stopped about a third of the way down the side path and gestured at an alcove in the wall. In that alcove was a wooden plaque in the shape of a rather perturbed cat with an open mouth, its left paw extended with a pipe extending out.
‘This is De Gryn’s Tomcat plaque. Back in London, they used to use these as a way of dispensing gin. They’d have it on the outside of pubs, you’d walk past, put a penny in its mouth, and a measure of Old Tom would come out of that lead pipe. Apparently this was a way to try and dodge all the taxes and licensing for gin, which were implemented due to all the issues they had with alcoholism among the poor in the capital. De Gryn actually rigged it up to work here and paid off the local constabulary to not interfere. He was determined to put the home distillers out of business, it seems.’
I couldn’t take my eyes off the plaque. It had some measure of essential catness that defied its amateurish carving, some sense of true contempt in its lifeless eyes.
‘Seems a bit of an odd choice, having it inside the wall.’ Nico said.
Neil smiled. ‘Well, yes. The wall was a later addition. In the distillery’s third year, a gang made up of the local bathtub gin distillers – led by a man named John Key – and other unsavoury elements actually came and attacked the distillery. They threw bricks and lit torches through the windows, kicked the door down, and broke just about everything. De Gryn was not the sort of bloke to take that laying down, mind, and he got things back up and running in three months. That’s why there’s such a strong door now, and these walls.’ Neil patted the yard’s exterior wall, looking up at the wrought iron spikes atop it. ‘Of course, that was the end of our tomcat’s dispensary career. Since then, he’s stuck around as mascot. The original distillery kept on going for almost a century, closing down in eighteen forty. It’s been used here and there since then, as a storehouse for a local art dealer and as a bomb shelter during the war, most notably. But for most of the last two centuries, it’s been empty.’
‘A miracle it’s lasted this long, really.’ I said.
Neil nodded. ‘Yes, funny, isn’t it? With the rapid pace of change in Ferenbrooke over the twentieth century, you’d think this place would have been knocked down or turned into flats or something. Seems nobody wanted to touch it. If you ever come across a spooky blog called Freaky Ferenbrooke, there’s few accounts on there of ghost stories and other strangeness about this place. Perhaps that had something to do with it. Can’t say I’ve seen anything myself, but you never know, do you? Anyway, shall we head inside? I’m sure you’d like to see what we’re up to in the present day. It’ll be empty, of course. Production hasn’t ramped up to the point where we need an evening shift yet.’
Neil led us back round to the front and then into the distillery proper. The lobby was sparsely decorated in neutral tones, numerous old photos of the distillery on the wall. We walked through various chambers, Neil stopping and talking about the various stages of the gin making process, from making the initial spirit to infusing it with carefully selected botanicals (many of which were dried on site in a room off to the south side with several industrial sized ovens) and distilling it again. We marvelled at the stills, two of them each large enough to hold a small family. The pipes running about the factory weaved an angular pattern that defied following eyes; Neil informed us that it had been set up according to the original designs of De Gryn’s distillery. ‘Not sure any of us entirely understand it, but it passes inspection and it all works.’
We concluded our tour with a tipple in the office. Neil fixed us all a Martini with their Tomcat Gin and served it alongside a shot glass of another product. ‘This is yet to hit the shelves. Strawberry and rhubarb flavoured, but otherwise the same as the Tomcat.’ It was damn good. By the time we’d finished our drinks and made it back to the front door, the sun was lazily slipping down the sky and pub-noise permeated the otherwise still evening. ‘Thanks, chaps,’ Neil said, ‘It’s been a pleasure hosting you.’
‘Pleasure was all ours,’ Nico replied. ‘You really should make the tour a formal thing, you know. You’d make a killing. Get yourself an on-premises licence, set up a little martini bar out front, you’ll be well away.’
That said, we shook hands and Neil closed the door.
‘Don’t reckon he lives there, do you?’ I said.
Nico chuckled. ‘Fuck, I would, given the chance. Let’s have another look at that cat plaque before we go, yeah?’
I nodded and followed him round the building.
At the cat, I was once again struck by a sense of genuine personality in the thing. Something about the way the old wood’s grain meshed with the carver’s erratic ridges and valleys. Almost as though it were grown into that shape rather than taken and formed into a feline facsimile. I dug into my pocket, retrieved a ten pence coin. Nico regarded me with one raised eyebrow. I shrugged. ‘Only seems proper,’ I said as I slid the coin into the cat’s open mouth.
All was still for a few long seconds. I don’t know what I was expecting, but a glance at Nico showed me he’d been expecting it too. Nevertheless, neither of us were quite ready for the laboured gargling that came from the tom cat. Nico stared at me, eyes wide, waited two breaths then dove and put his lips around the end of the lead pipe. My heart hammered in my chest as I watched his cheeks expand and then his mouth withdraw from the pipe as he choked down the liquid it had dispensed. I saw that the pipe was still running, and I crouched and tasted it.
It was not the same gin we’d been drinking. This was sweeter and more potent, less refined. Its effect was immediate. If a normal gin and tonic was like laying your head on a pillow at the end of a long day, this was being smothered by a psycho with a sandbag after fighting a horse.
I coughed and leant against the yard’s wall. ‘Why did we do that?’
‘You started it,’ Nico responded, sitting on the ground with his back against the distillery. ‘What even was that? We saw the other side in the main distillery room, the cat’s not hooked up to anything.’
‘Parting gift from Neil, maybe?’
‘Nah, man. The guy loves what he does and is well into the history, can’t see him pouring booze through a lead pipe. That’s a health and safety violation if I’ve ever heard of one. Could get shut down over that.’
I eyed the tom cat. Its eyes were painted gold. I hadn’t seen that before. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.
Nico rose, nodding, and we turned to leave. We took two steps, then our path was blocked by an honest-to-God carriage, drawn by horses.
Made of dark, gnarled wood, its cabin was small and unadorned. The driver sat high, his features entirely obscured by a wide brimmed hat. All I could see of his face were two pinpricks of light bearing down on Nico and I, his eyes reflecting a street lamp like a cat’s would. I backed up a few steps. Nico seemed to frozen; I patted his shoulder and we both turned to run.
‘Where’s the wall?’ Nico asked, frantic.
I couldn’t respond. I had nothing to say. He was right, though. The wall that surrounded the distillery’s yard was gone; where there had been maybe a metre and a half of rough paving, there was now three metres of cobbles between the distillery and the fencing surrounding the Stone Street cemetery.
I bolted, glancing back to ensure Nico followed. He did, and past him I saw the carriage door open. A slight man stepped out, moustached and wearing a flat cap. His face was sallow and grim.
Ahead of us, our path was quickly blocked by a crowd of men dressed in archaic clothes, pre-Victorian peasant-wear. I stopped quickly; Nico less so. He ended up nose-to-nose with a ruddy bloke whose oil-stained clothes reeked of ammonia. ‘Going somewhere?’ The ruddy man enquired.
‘Heading home,’ Nico stammered.
Footsteps behind us. ‘Where is home for you? Are you a Spaniard?’ The man in the flat cap approached. His voice rasped, though his words were clear. He was flanked by a couple of large guys that could’ve been twins, though it was hard to tell through the caked-on grime and chalk stains.
Nico smiled, though he couldn’t hide the slaughterhouse livestock look in his eyes. ‘I’m originally from Milan, been in Ferenbrooke since I was five, though.’
The man in the flat cap nodded. ‘Local enough for me.’ He turned his hazel eyes to me. ‘And you?’
‘Born and bred,’ I said, not meeting the man’s gaze.
The man with the flat cap spoke. ‘Well then, your strange choice of dress notwithstanding, you’re both fine by me. He, however,’ he gestures towards a high window above the cat’s alcove on the wall of the distillery. ‘Is not. A petty noble interloper, come to our town and driving good folk out of business. It’s time we showed him that Stone Street is not for the taking.’
For the first time, I met his gaze. His eyes were fierce despite yellowing sclera and heavy bags beneath. He was not a large man by any means, not impressive by any physical measure, but his presence was commanding. A prince among the paupers. The crowd around us were a mixed crew of shoddily dressed working men, a range of outfits and stains and builds. Some of their faces wore masks of uncertainty, others grim resolution.
The ruddy man who first spoke cleared his throat. ‘Key,’ he said, ‘everyone’s in place. At your word.’
The man in the flat cap nodded. He met the gaze of each of the assembled men, leaving Nico and I for last. His eyes rested on Nico the longest.
Nico was wide-eyed, moonstruck and frantic. He was tracking something behind the crowd. I turned to look and saw the number fifteen bus to the train station. It was heading down Blackwell Road – our Blackwell Road. It disappeared behind the distillery after a brief stop to pick up a couple of tracksuited youths. Once it was out of sight, I looked back at Nico. He was no longer surrounded, his back was against the wall of the yard.
‘What the fuck was that?’ I asked.
Nico shook his head. ‘Let’s get gone.’ He marched towards the gate, eyes locked on Blackwell Road.
I followed, averting my eyes from the distillery. I suppressed the urge to look back at the cat plaque. I had the sense, though, that its golden eyes followed me as Nico and I advanced towards the gate.
A cacophony of shattered glass and screams erupted behind us. I turned to see the windows of the distillery broken, an orange glow with flashes of blue from within, and shouting men running in every direction. Standing by the door – not the fortress-like door from the modern distillery, but a lighter door that had been thoroughly kicked-in – was the man in the flat cap. He faced away from the distillery, thumbs in the pockets of his waistcoat.
The frantic clatter of irate horse hooves striking cobbles rang out from the street. I cast a look over my shoulder, saw an ornate carriage pulling to a stop where the gate would one day be. A powdered wig emerged from the door, the man beneath it enraged and red.
‘Key, you bastard!’ The man in the wig called out.
Key raised a finger to his cap. One side of his mouth was turned up into a wry half-smile.
‘Keep up!’ Nico called. He set off at a run, heading for Stone Street.
I followed, overtook him as we got onto Blackwell Road. The cobbles beneath our feet slid and stuttered, becoming modern asphalt in a process that gave me something like seasickness. Nico tripped. I stopped and turned, ready to reach out a hand, but Key was already there.
‘Mister Milan,’ Key said, ‘let’s have a little chat.’
I glanced behind me, saw modern streetlights and people in normal clothes on Stone Street, and turned back to an empty Blackwell Road.
The distillery looked as it should, there were no carriages or soot-stained men, and no Nico. I called for him, wandered the surrounding area, but saw no hint of my friend. I pulled out my phone, but his number was gone. Our chats were gone, and his profiles had disappeared from social media services.
Around midnight, I began to attract worried looks from locals peeking out of their houses, old ladies half-covered by curtains and younger folks who were more brazen in their voyeurism. I’d been aimlessly circling the area, occasionally calling Nico’s name, averting my eyes from the distillery as far as possible. It was unchanging now but felt wrong, a solid brick wound in reality. I made the decision to head home.
The next day, at work, I asked after Nico. All I got was confused glances. I stopped pressing the matter. Looking through the work Slack channel and all the various employee contact information documents, I found no trace of him. Indeed, since our trip to the distillery, it’s as if Nico had never existed at all.
I made another visit to the bar, Numbers. David recognised me. ‘Alone this time?’ He asked.
‘Yeah. Don’t suppose you’ve seen the guy I was with last time, have you?’
David paused, scrunched up his brow. ‘You know, I can’t quite recall who it was that you came in with.’
I nodded. I’d expected something like this. Nobody remembered Nico. Nobody but me.
I slowly became obsessed with the distillery’s history. Though I couldn’t (and still can’t) bring myself to actually look straight at the place due to the inherent wrongness of it, I spent a lot of time, initially online and then in the local archives, digging up every bit of information I could about it. It was deep within the local history section of the university archives that I found an old news article about the exploits of John Key. He would, it transpired, follow on from his orchestration of the distillery burning by evading the law and living out his days as Ferenbrooke’s own Robin Hood analogue, working against the interests of the local gentry with the aid of common folk, in particular his right hand man, Domenico ‘Nico’ Colombo.
Key’s crime spree would come to an end when Lord Bayemont, the last viscount of Ferenbrooke, led a private crusade against Key’s organisation. Key, Colombo, and a dozen other men were hanged in a makeshift gibbet on the cobbles outside the distillery.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. Nico Colombo, that was his name. Nobody thinks he was here in the modern day except me. I’ve explored possibilities ranging from psychosis to rapid onset lead poisoning from the cat plaque, nothing sane and reasonable entirely makes sense. That just leaves me with the crazy stuff. Time slips, ghosts, a four-dimensional model of time and space. I don’t know. I just continue living my day-to-day life, pretending that the world and my place in it consistently behaves the way we’re told it should and hoping not to be proven wrong.
I still live by Stone Street. It’s my home and I don’t feel I can leave, despite everything. I still walk the length of it, averting my eyes from the turning to Blackwell Road and the distillery that dominates the skyline with its too-sharp angles and a blackness that goes past colour. I’m never quite right around it, never settled. Every now and then, usually at night, at the mouth of an alley or peeking out from behind a delivery truck offloading to one of the many businesses, just right at the edge of my peripheral vision, I’ll catch a glimpse of a moustached man in a flat cap, winking at me.