Out-and Out Liars, Part 2; Swen Gnillor, Swen Gnikaerb and Other Monsters. Chapter 2, Part 2

                                                                                  2.

NO BLACKS!

NO IRISH!

NO MUDDY BOOTS!

Notice in the window of the Welcome Arms Public House

A cavernous Beer Hall, a windowless bunker, a substitute house where young and old, kept out of sight, slaves to industrious side-show charlatans. “Variously Flavoured Vapours of Ethanol!”

On wooden banquettes the men and women  bowed, too sozzled to realize, in the still, silent penumbra of the County Beer Hall, that the 1824 Vagrancy Act is being re-instated for the Great Olympic Facade to keep them off of the streets, the gravel-voiced toasts of an empire that has long croaked its last, some toasts still veering dangerously toward pre-war and revealing more than the odd Black Shirt among the finger-food.

Bar staff double as benevolent bouncers as the odd regular is ejected through the double-doors, for dozing ‘Come back tomorrow  George!’. Foreigners and strangers are set upon viciously; at this level of evolution, ancient blood-feuds, watered-down cheap booze, the knee-jerk hatred of the ‘wrong kind’  surface in the catacomb-like unloveliness of the Beer Hall shut out from the apparent multi-culturalism outside.

The County Beer Hall  remains the polar opposite of bright; locked in a mist of sunless murk with only the cloven-hoof hops-stained sepia beer from unwashed pumps to strip the lining off the stomach and loosen the bowels, the 'denizens of his shivering realm' are indeed sick in soul and limb; life under the reign of the Weather-Vain King is reduced to this.

The atomized company of young and old, unhappy in their beer instantly clots the life-blood of one who enters the County Beer Hall,  dragged beneath an undertow of  gloom. Devoid of music or any other distractions, above the ossified bloodless wraiths of the crowning-glory of the industrial age, hangs a murderous cloud of resentment.

On a day of a seamless week in a featureless year the shadows of Swen Gnillor and Swen Gnikaerb creep along the walls of every Beer Hall in every county and crouch, like programmed death; begetter of hate, black as the masking tape that restricts all but one Channel in the dumb finality of an Old People’s Home.

Not so long ago Swen  was a welcomed guest into every abode bringing tales of far-flung lands and the chandelier sparkle of Dance Halls, but now- as Swen Gnillor and Swen Knikaerb install themselves permanently and stick fast to the fabric and structure under which the down-beat denizens of the Beer Halls cower -The Weather-Vain King, who has been expensively schooled in the art of setting the proverbial Cain against Abel for hapless cronyism -  bleats erratic hourly edicts, whispered him by his worm-tongued spin-doctors, and casts fear upon the realm with skaldic breath.
 

Prior to the insidious arrival of Swen Gnillor and Swen Gnikaerb it was not unheard  to hear tales of a far-flung  Hall, in time out of mind, in which everyone, in a fit of drunken peak,  had slaughtered each other. England’s first epic Beowulf  records the nightly visitations of the twin monstrous outcasts, the malformed giant Grendel and his vengeful Mother called to the Beer Hall out of a dark slumber, clarion-like from their primeaval marsh-exile tormented and frenzied by the glow-worm of distant merriment and mirth.

The tapestry of allegory is indeed thin to thread-bare and, as it dawns on a nation that, once again the unseen monster had returned; the monster that brought murder, manslaughter, outrage and carnage to the County Beer-Halls in this Age of Reason came, not from the insidious evil of Swen Gnillor and Swen Gnikaerb nor from any allegorical or mythical beast, but from the bankrupt souls within. With the coming of night, as Beerwolf rose in the Halls and the sneers ran, a foaming vicious pack behind a snide hunting horn, the Betting-Shop Frog Kings howled in muted pain; the madness took hold.

As of blasts that save outer walls but leave everything within splintered and shattered, thus was the outrage of the greedily rent limbs of the never-thirst-slaked. The previous night’s table-boasts now turned to national mourning.