Cloudy still at the bar.

I grabbed my glass and guided them to a table on the main drag. Santa’s little helper and Santa, Lisa and Jane, should have been sitting with the young crowd near the pool table. Faux-leather seats running around the wall, and tables and chairs pushed together to include or exclude mixed company. All eyes followed us as we sat down.

My shoulder brushed against the jukebox which bulged out and narrowed the passage in front of our tables to a slow lane. I was part of a different gang.  The domino players that plonked themselves down here during long days of playing for small change. Chancers, not dancers, who sometimes reached under the table and flicked off the jukebox and back on again if they didn’t like a song being played. If they didn’t like you, they didn’t bother turning it back on again.  

Agent Provocateur was Lisa’s signature scent; she sprayed it on her wrist to show me and rubbed them together like kindling to ignite herself. I glanced at her pal—discreetly, I thought—and   scurried back and forth to the bar, buying more drinks when the conversation flagged, or when Lisa stopped yakking, which was much the same thing. 

A roar from the punters rang out in answer to the peels of last bell, as if we faced choppy waters, cold seas and our common doom. An overfilled ashtray, douts, mainly mine, smouldered.  I coughed into my hand and wiped the gunge on the seat. I’d been listening and not listening to my ‘nieces’. Waiting and weighing what Jane said between fly wee puffs of a cigarette to determine if her voice sounded like Annie’s or it was my imagination. I upended my glass, drank the last of my beer and rattled it down on the table.

Lisa nudged her shoulder against mine and narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re all right? You ur. Not like other…’ she stared short-sightedly at the pool table. ‘Not like men.’

I gathered she meant ‘other men’.

‘I’m fine.

She wasn’t wearing a bra. The folds of her toga were arranged so the material bunched at chest and stomach when she was sitting.  I’d the height advantage and could see the globes of her statuesque white-marble-coloured breasts with a  black hair on the rough pink aureole of her right nipple making her seem less than pefect. It seemed impolite not to look.

‘You sure, you seem a bit…’

‘Whit?’

‘I don’t know. A bit aff.’

‘Cheers.’  I reached across the table and picked up one of Jane’s double-vodka and Cokes and toasted her with the drink, gulping it down.   

Jane’s head tilted forward and she had a tight smile on her lips. Another four doubles were in a half-moon pattern on the edge of the table. Her hands were in her lap and she studied the blackness in the tall glasses, the red lettering on the Coke. She knocked a glass with her elbow as she turned her body to stare are me, bleary-eyed.  She was already sunk.

The glass soaked the top of her bag and bounced unbroken on the tiled floor. Jake, a passing pub regular, picked it up and placed it back on the table. He was about twenty, tallish and sinewy with a thick mop of ginger hair. He blocked the passage in front of us and leaned over the table, seizing his chance to introduce himself.

 He gave Lisa the doggy eyes as he proclaimed, ‘Think I’m in love with yeh.’

Jane body buckled and she spewed from Jake’s quiff to his Adidas Samba.

I slid a hand over mouth and nose. It was minging, but also so he couldn’t see my smile.

Jake dripped with bile and wiped at his forehead and face. Spray droplets from the palm of his hand flew back towards her as he flicked his wrist. ‘Yah, fuckin’ cow.’

‘Sorry,’ Jane tried to stand and apologise, but it was more a bobbed genuflect. 

Jake sucked in his breath and his head fell. ‘So you fuckin’ should be.’

Hoots of laughter came from the stage above us. The boys at the pool table chalked their cues and jeered. Grace gave a dunt of the bell again as a reminder we were out of here and she wasn’t for serving anyone else. The guys at the bar with fivers or tenners in their hand watched her flying past them, into the cloakroom, emerging with a mop and carrying it like a spear, but the bucket in her hand slowed her.

But Grace wasn’t quick enough. Lisa flung her glass of vodka and coke into  Jake’s face. He slapped her cheek. I sprung up, knocking over our table, and glasses smashed, the Tennent lager ashtray rolled like a coin, before settling underneath the bar. I half-tripped when I punched Jake and he fell backwards. I landed near him, scrambling to my feet with a cut hand. I’d still a pint glass in my hand, when I punched him.

I felt someone pulling at my collar and I turned with fists clenched. An old crony from the domino team, had my back.

‘Just leave it, big man.’

‘I didnae fuckin’ start it—but I’ll finish it.’

Jake had roused himself, but was held back by a few of the younger team. He made the usual noises about killing me.  Grace stood between us with her mop and bucket. I waited for him to make a step past the barmaid. I was ready for him.  But he retreated towards the toilets with his pals.  

Lisa had her arm around Jane’s hip. Pulling her into a huddle near the door. They seemed sobered, and I did too.

Grace refereed. She wagged her finger at Lisa and Jane. ‘You two are barred, sin-died.’

The old guy from the domino team nudged me with his elbow and made a show of dabbing the corners of his eyes as if he’d a lace-trimmed handkerchief. ‘Well that’s a fuckin’ shame. You’ll no’ get the likes of that in here again…Wherever they’re barred tae, that’s where I’m fuckin’ goin’.’

I squeezed the heel of my hand, blood dripping through my fingers and falling onto my trousers and shoes.

Grace wasn’t finished. ‘You better go to the hospital wi’ that.’ She sounded mildly concerned about my wellbeing, but her tone changed. ‘I told you they’d be trouble… You’re barred for three months.’

‘You cannae dae that, I’m captain of the dart’s team.’

‘Well, you’ll only be playing away ties, then, won’t yeh?’