Pint and a packet of crisps at The Queen's Head

David used to take me to see the ducks back when Mum was first in the hospital, which I hated, because I didn’t want him to think I was the kind of girl who got excited about ducks. The ducks were babyish, and the bread was boring, and young men with real-life girlfriends and leather jackets definitely didn’t want to take their boss’ 11-year-old daughter to throw stale bread in a stagnant pond, so that three, possibly four, depressed, ageing mallards could gobble it up and then stare up expectantly for more.

‘Daaa-vid,’ I said one day, drawing circles in the gravel with my toes, ‘I think, maybe, I might be a bit old to feed the ducks now.’

He crouched down so that we were at eye level, taking the crinkled bag of stale bread out of my hand.

‘Can I tell you a secret?’ he said, widening his eyes. I nodded enthusiastically.

‘I know you are,’ he said, ‘but the truth is, I’m desperate to see the ducks. So, I’ve got to pretend I’m taking you, okay? Because my friends might make fun of me. So, could you do me a favour, and play along? Pretend it was your idea, okay?’

I paused, scrunching up my eyebrows. Then, I pulled the bread bag back from him and sprinted ahead towards the duck pond, the bag swinging back and forth in my grip. He laughed, jogging along after me.

I loved going after that. I don’t know at what age I worked out it was a ploy to wheedle out a couple more hours of childcare. It didn’t matter. I thought he was just the coolest. I was ecstatic that I could do something that made him happy. It was an honour.

I’m sat in the car in the pub car park, frantically trying to blend out my drawn-on eyebrows. They look like I’ve gone at my face with a whiteboard marker. I’ve been doing my makeup in the sun visor mirror, hurriedly rubbing lipstick over my cheeks like a girl who just got a free gift in a magazine. I moan quietly, slamming shut the visor and slapping the steering wheel. I step out of the car, looking down at the grey slush coating the ground, a sad attempt at holiday cheer. I close my eyes briefly, then push open the door to the pub.

David looks up immediately from the glass he’s been polishing. He furrows his brow, but then the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.

‘You look old,’ is the first thing he says to me. The pub is just as sticky and dusty and dimly lit as the day I left it.

‘Ironic,’ I reply, because it is.

He’s greying, the beard on his chin rough and speckled with silver. His face is ragged, and the bags under his eyes are sunk further into his face. He has the same tea towel slung over his shoulder too, but the whites have turned grey and the red checks are brown.

‘Ffi’s come home!’ he announces to the room at large. I smile, sidling onto a stool at the bar. The woman at the bar raises her glass and cheers in mock celebration. Aside from that, it’s a non-event. The low hum of chatter continues; the customers continue their slow sips. Life around me goes on moving in slow motion.

Not David though.

‘What will it be, then?’ he asks, slamming a glass onto the counter. I shrug.

‘Oh, come on, Ffion. Look at you, big girl job and now you don’t drink?’

‘It’s not that -’

‘We’ve got craft IPA if you’re too good for the rest of it.’

‘Fuck off.’

He pours me a pint of it anyway, and a Stella for himself. The glass is cloudy. I look at him, skin grey and worn and tired, and wonder, for the first time, if he feels a twinge of shame, serving me craft beer in dirty pint glasses in my mother’s pub.

After school, he used to let me sit at the bar and eat packet after packet of Quavers, my legs swinging off the stool and yellow cheese dust coating my lips. After I’d gotten my hands on David’s smartphone, and caught sight of my messy face in the photobooth app, I was mortified. The cool girls who worked at the pub wouldn’t be caught dead with bits of Quaver stuck to their faces.

‘Look at you,’ he continues, ‘little Ffi, all grown up.’

‘I wasn’t that little when I left,’ I say pointedly.

‘Been thinking about you a lot,’ he goes on, taking a sip of his beer and tearing open the side of a packet of crisps. He lays them out flat on the counter, ‘’course, not as much as I used to. Been a long time.’

‘Not been that long. Only graduated uni last year. Came back after that.’

‘Didn’t stop by though, did you?’

‘No. Guess I didn’t. Wasn’t our pub anymore then, was it?’

‘You angry at me? For buying her out?’

‘Nah. If it was gonna be anyone, it should’ve been you. It’s all been yours anyway, really. Past five years. Just a technicality.’

‘All of it?’

I pause.

‘Don’t be mean.’

In Year 10, I decided it was probably about time I started drinking. Everyone knew that my mum owned the pub, so it made sense that this was going to be my big foolproof popularity plan. I strode in, three girls in tow, and sat down at the table at the back.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘the bartender knows me, so, it’s probably best if you all stay here.’

I walked up and leaned my elbows on the bar, letting them stick to the surface while I pushed myself so far onto it, I nearly fell off the other side. David turned to look at me, and snorted, clearly trying his best to contain his laughter. I’d crimped my hair, and lined my eyes with my pound shop kohl eyeliner.

‘Quavers and a lemonade?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows.

‘Could you get me four pints of cider?’

‘You’re having a laugh,’ he replied, walking past me to hand another customer their beer.

‘David, this is very serious,’ I said, following him down the bar, ‘I’m fifteen now.’

‘Your mum’ll kill me.’

‘She won’t know! You literally have to give me four pints of cider and I will never, ever mention this ever again.’

‘You promise?’ he pulled a tray out and placed it on the bar.

‘Promise.’

‘Okay, but you’re paying. Not having theft as well as underage drinking.’

‘It’s my pub!’

‘You don’t pay my wages, ma’am.’

I scowl, but hand him a five-pound note.

‘Ffion, how much do you think alcohol costs?’

I glanced back at the girls at the back table, one of whom is tapping her perfectly manicured nails on the table.

‘If that’s not enough, can you just tell mum to take it out of my pocket money?’

‘I’m obviously not going to do that – Ffion!’

‘You’re a star – love you lots!’ I shouted back.

I was already pacing it back to the table. He followed behind me with the tray and placed it down on the table. The girls beamed. He chuckled to himself as he walked away.

Mum didn’t find out, in the end, because he took it upon himself to hold my hair back as I chucked up purple vomit into the skid-marked toilet. I imagine he felt partially responsible.

David comes back from serving another customer a glass of white wine. She takes it and her eyes widen when she sees me. She rushes over, and plants a sloppy kiss on my cheek before I can say anything.

‘Ffion!’ she says, wrapping her arms around my neck and kissing me again. She’s hammered, David mouths, and I push my lips together, holding in a laugh.

‘I’m so sorry about your mum’ she says, swaying her weight from side to side. She grips onto the bar with one hand.

‘Yeah’, I nod, pushing her wine glass back into the middle of the bar from where it was teetering on the edge.

‘Are you back for good?’

‘Just sorting things out.’

‘Death admin,’ David adds.

I glare at him.

‘Well, it’s lovely to see you, dear. We’ve missed you. This man doesn’t ever do my wine how I like it. Not like you.’

She picks her glass off the counter and totters away. He looks after her quizzically then turns back to me.

‘It’s pouring wine into a glass. What’s there not to get right?’

‘You wouldn’t get it.’

‘Oh, fuck off. Gets a job as an accountant and thinks she’s better than everyone else.’

I don’t respond, looking down at the last few gulps of my drink.

Mum got really ill again in my last year of school. David and I were essentially running the place by the time Summer rolled around. That was our busiest season, as tourists spilled over from the hipster gastropubs and boutique bars. We were a good team; we knew the place inside out, could anticipate each other's movements, knew the regulars who’d complain and those who’d given up. We started staying later, determined as I was to turn the place around. I made him invest in a carpet cleaner, and scrubbed away at the thirty-year layer of grime that sat on top of every surface.

The happy hour on cocktails was my idea too. I had to buy a cocktail shaker, first, to begin with, and invest in more than one type of each liquor. It was one in the morning, and I was trying my hand at cocktail samples instead of going home. He was finishing an espresso martini when I kissed him, a little drunk, and giddy on the knowledge that things were working out. And I’d always thought he was the coolest.

He kissed me back.

Sometimes I think I imagined it all. The summer evenings stretched long ahead of me, and staying behind after close made me feel like a schoolgirl sneaking out of her bedroom window, deathly scared of getting caught. By who, I’m not quite sure.

David and I would kick out the stragglers after last orders. He’d wink at me and I’d swoon.

His wedding ring glowed gold in the light of the fruit machine. I bit down hard on my bottom lip, and looked up at the ceiling instead.

‘I love you,’ I said on a cold, late summer evening, wrapped in his winter coat and sat on a wooden bench in the garden as he cut away at the grass. It sailed over the wind and was lost in the whir of the lawnmower. He continued cutting the grass. My muscles started to ache, and I inexplicably began to cry.

I look at his back intently as he unscrews the beer taps. Nausea rises in my throat.

‘It wasn’t right,’ I say, swishing the dregs around the bottom of the glass, but my throat closes up and the words come out as a rushed croak.

He continues closing up, then looks up from where he’s crouching, stacking glasses on the shelves under the bar. He stands up, towering over me.

I swallow, and try again.

‘It was wrong. I was a kid. And I loved you. It wasn’t fair.’

He sighs, and looks at me pitifully, like I’m a child who’s had to admit she’s wet the bed. He walks around the side of the counter, his hands in his pockets. He’s next to me now. Everyone else is gone and can feel his breath lightly on my shoulder.

‘No,’ he says, ‘I suppose it wasn’t.’ He twists his ring off his finger and lays it on the chipped wooden counter in front of me,

I shake him off me.

‘I was a kid,’ I say again, as if it repeating will make it not true, ‘and I loved you.’

‘Ffion -’

‘You knew it was wrong?’

‘Of course, I did.’

My eyes well up.

‘Do you want me to go?’ he asks.

I nod, silently. He pulls his navy raincoat off of the curled hooks of the stand.

‘Bye, Ffi,’ he says, ‘Welcome home.’

He looks old. Nothing like the man in the leather jacket I idealised as a preteen. I don’t know what I expected to come home to. It wasn’t this.

I came back here, and I’m still not home. The pub is empty, mum is gone, the final customers have left. I think about the ducks, and the quavers, and the four pints of cider. They all feel marred and dirty. I imagine peeling his handprints off my skin.

He shoves his hands into his pockets and heads out into the snow. I pick up the ring and turn it slowly between my fingers. It’s dull. And brass. I push it forcefully onto my thumb, and sob.