After Trev had mugged the mugger in the toilet we moved quickly on to another club. The Double O is frankly a horrible place, but it stays open later than any of the others, and is only a bracing ten-minute walk along the seafront. As was usual on the walk between Mandy’s and the Double O, salt air plus who knows how many house doubles equalled intoxication squared. Halfway there I took off my cashmere and silk charity-shop pullover and gave it to Trev to put on to hide the bloodstains on his shirt. It was several sizes too small for him and he needed my help getting into it. We tried to get his head into an armhole for a long time before realising our mistake. From a distance it must have looked like we were having a set-to. We got his head through the correct opening at last, then I had to stretch the fabric to nearly breaking point to get it over his shoulders and his barrel of a torso.
Trev is on good terms with the doormen at the Double O. In his younger days he used to work on the doors and he has always been proud of that. He has a fund of anecdotes. Their moral is usually that the work of a doorman is basically pacifism tempered by thuggery. Because the Double O stays open later than anywhere else, the people who go there are drunker and more prone to violence than anywhere else we go, and the bouncers bouncier. We like going there very much. Before we go in, Trev always stops and has a fraternal chat with the lads and tells them that if they need a hand at any point to give him a shout.
As we approached the squalid doorway in the parade of shops that is the club’s only entrance, we saw that tonight it was being supervised by three bouncers.
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