I love the sound of the spiel from the Constaflo toilet. A gentle drizzle, it helps with the function, no need to think waterfalls. I never have seen it flush but it must I suppose. In the Malthus, where they need a bigger trough, you can hear it from the bar, like a rain forest erupting in panic. I love to track patterns in the tile grout and smell the sharp tang of processed profit but I don’t hang around. I’ve never had a shit here in the Seagull but I have felt the cool of the porcelain against my cheek.

Thinking it over is okay. It’s what the Worcester does. Let the Worcester do the thinking. Leave it to the Wuss. Once we were five, now we are four. It’s a shame. But four’s all right. Four is still poker if we want to play. And don’t we have our memories of Salv?

You’ve seen us in the Seagull. You have. Think back. We were the ones lording it. You came here for a quiet drink and a chat with - well that’s up to you - but it turns out the Seagull isn’t what you thought and the din is such that you can’t hear yourself speak. You do the sensible thing- you move your chair just a fraction- show your back to the noise. But it doesn’t work does it? Above the laughter, above big Vincent bellowing, above the popping corks and the Match, above Bowie on repeat and Salv singing his peculiar Catalan version of Let’s dance: Less Dance… Above all that, you tut. Just once, nothing else, though you might have raised an eyebrow I suppose. And what happens? It’s noted. Because we’re basically averse to party poopers and tutting is pooping the party, it’s noted. And what’s more you know it’s noted which is why you leave. Which is what we wanted in the first place. Sorry.

We don’t get together so often now; somehow we contrive to meet once a week. We were like bullets in the spinning chamber of a gun. Is it me? Is it my turn now? Where do I go? Blasted into marriage, into jobs none of us wanted to do. Then kids come along and then fuck me more kids. And terminal things too. Somehow we manage to meet, just to splint us back together again.

Shell is considering turning the Seagull into a gay pub.

"Better eighteen gentlemen drink one pint each than you lot drinking eighteen each" Now that struck me as offensive. From your gay perspective I mean.

Shell married Salvadore young. She thought she was teaching him English but the truth is Salv decided to forget everything he knew while he was around her and her care. He taught her double-entry book-keeping and when he was sure she had that pat he taught her how to change a barrel. She’s a woman yes, she stands behind the bar pulling pints but let’s not get into any unpleasantness about barmaids. Most of the people who take our money are blokes – spend all day practicing their shamrock under the Guinness pumps.

Shell doesn’t go in for all that Satin blouse crap. She said to me once

"I can’t wear satin in here - the moment one of you lot leaves the beer garden door open the stair rods come out- I get looks and his lordship doesn’t like it." But I know Shell doesn’t wear satin because it’s not to her taste and his lordship wasn’t like that. She wears linen shirts and soft cotton things. Sometimes a fitted charcoal jacket from Jaeger.

Little Nicky always fancied Shell. I used to try and tell him, try and console him

"You got there second. You were a second too late that’s all. Salvadore had the plimsolls on" Little Nicky boohooed through the wedding and got a right hand off Vincent for his trouble. He nearly ruined it with the face on him. I think Nicky was banking on a nice modern marriage with a short prognosis. Ideally Salv would have left Shell and left the Seagull. Nick hadn’t reckoned on the sickness. Makes life complicated cancer.

Little Nicky and Shell and the Seagull and Trawler? Fucking under new management? It breaks my heart to laugh.

Owen is keeping something locked away. I’ll ask him one day- see what he does. He can put it with all his other final demands.

Unless you’re Owen you don’t expect presents from the dead, so when Shell called me to say that Salv had left us a gift, I felt the tug of something I couldn’t see. Something for all of us, she said. So… we meet up for the second time in the week. The new system at home seems to be one of patient resignation but that will change, my grief bubble will burst.

We lift the case onto our favourite table- the one below the stuffed coelacanth- bar and pisser equidistant. The box weighs a ton. A lot, not a ton- it’s a wine case but Salv always parcelled stuff up in wine cases so we were none of us the wiser. Except Owen who knows for certain it’s bullion. Franco’s war chest or some fucking rubbish and didn’t Salv’s dad live in the hills outside Bartha?

Vincent’s brought his tools and is making a pig’s ear of getting the lid off. He nearly caves in Nicky’s nose with his back swing so I exercise a bit of aplomb and fidget off the lid. We all make to peep inside the box at the same time but the sides of the box collapse and this thing, this monster rolls towards the edge of the table. Vincent gets in its way. It takes all of his bulk and frame but he wrestles it upright.

Now we know.

"God bless you Salvadore Pandereta, you mad Spic" says Nicky.

Owen is rummaging about in the straw at the bottom of the case.

"Fuck sake Salv!"

Turns out Owen was banking on Franco’s bullion to keep someone at a distance for a day or two. Not that Salv didn’t give him enough.

We needed a moment. Vincent had a tear his eye. A splinter he called it. A splinter is what it was.

Salv’s gift: it was celebratory, salutary. A lesson to us all. Then it started, the crying, the ugly gusting grief. It was the kind of grief that unsettled the dust on the skirting boards, the kind of crying that feels like goodness but only adds more dust. The kind of grief that keeps trade away. It’s when I’m looking round the empty pub at these boys I started thinking that people must see us as a sort of composite- the big one, the little one, the bastard who gambled your last quid and the Wuss who gave you your bus fare home. Not forgetting the exotic one, the local colour. The truth is we are the same. We made each other which is why it hurts.

We sometimes bought booze we couldn’t afford. A good night meant all of us surrounded by beacons of champagne bottles upturned in the ice-bucket slush. The mood didn’t darken until the late traipse across the bedroom carpet. Salvadore Pandereta’s gift to his friends- his legacy- is mad. A Nebuchadnezzar of Moet. Now our first thought was that it was a Methusaleh – which if I’m right holds about eight bottles of wine. So that’s the afternoon and the evening sorted and thank you very much. But Owen and Nick fetch the pedal bin that sits under the bar- ten litre capacity it says. We line them up trying to imagine the one in the other. Well, to think about a Methusaleh is pure comedy and it’s not a Salmanazar either. It’s twice the size, no question which means that Salv’s legacy is not even a Balthasar it’s a Neb- twenty bottles . He’s given us a fucking Neb!

According to Shell, Salvadore Pandereta wants us to drink it in one sitting. I’m doing the sums on the tiled pisser wall when the Constaflo kicks in and floods the trough. It is a sight I thought I’d never see, there are some blue blocks breasting the tide, bobbing up the drain end. A little more erodes and dies.

The four of us plus Shell- three litres each. Owen wants to sell it, of course.