Ten – part 21.

The Bearded Man shifts his bulk to sit closer to me. ‘Do you know that this is one of the slowest distilled whiskies in Scotland. Most run off between ten and twenty litres of the stuff a minute. Not here. Five. Eight litres a minute. Everything about the whisky takes longer. They sun dry the cask wood in Portugal, fill it with sherry, leave it for three years, decant and then use the cask for the whisky. Some of the barrels in the store are half a decade old. Elvis was new in the charts when they were first laid down. Everything done slowly. And that’s where I got the idea. They say revenge is a dish best served cold. Time. That’s all I needed.’

He stands up. Bones cracking and a deep, draft of air whistling through his lips as he stretches.  ‘It takes over ten years to make my favourite tipple. Maybe fourteen if you count in the cask. Maybe a hundred if you count the time it took for the tree to grow that the cask comes from. But ten is good. Ten years is time enough. Ten is exactly what I need for payback.’

‘A decade owed to me by a backpacker and then I’ll be happy. But it isn’t going to be you. Maybe it’ll never happen. After all I’m not getting younger. But I’ll keep trying. Ten years in this hole in return for losing me the best job I ever had. Sounds fair.’

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