She Went To The Toilet And Never Came Back

He who cast the first bottle was soon forgotten in the tussle that followed. Knees were introduced to groins. Shaved heads decorated red. Most brawlers thought my ashtray frisbee a tad excessive, but this was the heat of battle.

I lassooed a chair above my head and let fly, missing everyone, save the pinball machine whose lights I knocked out. The landlord cursed. Bodies continue to land before, on and beyond his bar. He repelled all advances on his till with a snarl, an upturned, half-empty bottle of rum and genuine threats of legal action.

No one saw who called the ceasefire, but it was universally observed. Brawlers froze like a Christmas Day in the trenches, perhaps. A casualty cut her way through the crowd, small hand held to small forehead. Blood trickling through slender many-ringed fingers. Men with bruised eyes followed her all the way into the ladies, violence no longer the object of their desire.

The respite was short-lived. The tap shut of the toilet door was the battle cry. Hostilities resumed.

Pool cues were snapped in two over knees and employed as anorexic baseball bats, if you please. A red raw hand paid a pound for a game, but used the triangle as a grenade, the chalk as shrapnel, the balls as cannon fodder.

Flashing blue ended the performance. The law came to restore and order us all to spread ‘em and introduce hands to walls. The landlord surveyed the scene with distaste. There were superficial injuries to pub and punter alike. Thoughts returned to the girl. A WPC was dispatched to the WC but returned empty-handed.

But when cautions had been grudgingly accepted, shards of glass swept from sight and blood wiped from walls, those who were there were scarred and sore but not without satisfaction. Because on that day as we’d tried to kill each other, we’d stopped to smell a rose.