Too late to talk to Benny2

Marty and Stan gave up on the lager. They edged forward on their seats and started in on the vodkas. Glass for glass they raced to match each other until Marty’s head began to topple, and then slammed down on his chest. Drunken drool pooled and slid out of the corner of his mouth. Saliva ran down onto his chin and dripped down like a stalactite onto his good purple shirt.

‘Aowow awow way,’ he said, flinging his arms about, in the language that only drunk people could understand. His eyes flickered and threatened to open, but crashed shut one last time like a guillotine.

Stan’s head was also down on his chest, but he wrestled with it and squinted with one eye up into the bright lights of the pool table. His young brother was out cold. It would be up to him to get them up the road. But he still had a few rounds left in him. He raised his head like a periscope, and looked about him, to see if anybody thought otherwise. The pub was crowded, packed tight, but the McCleary brothers had the top tier next to the pool table all to themselves. Even the fag smoke was restricted to the bottom half of the pub. It hesitated and swirled away from the McCleary’s and hid in the dark spaces between the hanging lights and the white Artex of the ceiling. Stan took a deep lungful of air and used the edge of the table for leverage, nearly knocking it and all the empty glasses over, before flinging himself forward; standing and swaying on his feet. He frowned and patted the denim pockets in his shirt, as if that would give him a clue to the thing that he was trying to remember, which was on the tip of his tongue, and then wasn’t. That was it. That was it. He nodded to himself in recognition. He realized that if anybody else put that Country and Western-Kenny Rodgers type- shite on the Jukebox he’d need to stab them. He stumbled down the three stairs to the pool table laughing to himself, because that was funny.

Stan briefly looked up at the guy holding the cue, just out of the lights, clutching a pint. He couldn’t remember his name, then he did: ‘bawbag’. He swung round quickly as the other pool player played a shot; black into the bottom bag, game over. Stan wasn’t sure who he was, but was sure he was a bawbag as well.

The bawbag that potted the ball stood up and caught Stan looking at him.

‘Alright Stan,’ he said, before turning away and looking at the board to see who was on the pool table next.

That’s right. Stevie. That was the bawbags name. The memory caught up with Stan as he stumbled down the last two steps and into the bar area. That’s right. Stevie was alright. They’d been in Young Offenders (YO-YO) together.

Stan turned around and negotiated the tricky two steps that led back up to the lights of the pool table. He swayed a bit, his head moving from side to side like windscreen wipers, as he tried to work out where Stevie disappeared to. Then he saw him, standing in the same place, drinking the same pint, as the last time, as if he hadn’t moved at all. Stan had to admit that was pretty tricky.

‘Stevieeeee,’ Stan shouted, lurching over to him with his arms out and fling them round his shoulders like Boros Karloff’s Frankenstein on steroids. ‘I didn’t know it was you’.

Stevie carefully put his pint down on the beer barrel that acted as table, leaning post and communal ashtray. His mouth pursed up as if to say something then stayed closed. A shake of his head was enough to remind backslapping Stan that yes, it really was himself, but that was the kind of luck he’d been having lately. It would have been better if it were someone else.

‘What you having wee man? What you having? What you having?’ said Stan, pointing generally in the direction over Stevie’s left shoulder.

‘Nothing,’ said Stevie.

He’d picked up his cue and placed it in front of him like a medieval staff, his two hands entwined, holding it upright in a praying position. His eyes scanned beneath the lights of the table at the guy he was playing, an older man who modelled himself on David Taylor, ‘The Silver Fox’.

Not only did the pub ‘Silver Fox’ bring his own two piece Ray Reardon cue, but his own cube of chalk, which was also superior to the blue pub chalk, in that it was green and chalkier. Every shot meant at least three trips around the table, examining every angle, before finally setting first his cue, then angling his lantern jaw which had to rest on it and point with geometric precision to the position where the object ball was going to strike. But he had dancers feet, so that unsettled him. He had to come up out of the fug of the fag smoke and lights and take a sip, just one, no more than that, of lager, before getting back down to the serious business of playing a 2 x 20p game of pool. The pool balls all remained on the same spot, but he had not, so he had to rewind himself like a Betamax tape and whir all the way around the table and start looking at the same shot again. Under the sodium glare of the raised stage smoke caught, like brambles on his waistcoat and matching jacket. He chalked his cue, one last time for luck, stripped of all desire but that of the next shot. His blue-green eyes, the colour of deep-water stones flecked with gold sunlight, danced over the myriad possibilities. He looked up; just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, but was snagged by the cold conduits of Stan’s unflinching gaze. He backed away, his head catching on the lights over the table and his cue nudging one of the balls, then another.

‘Two shots,’ he whispered.

‘The Silver Fox’s face crumbled and grew old standing under the artificial lights. He smelt of old man’s piss and dribbles and held up two fingers of his shaking liver speckled hand in a victory sign, to signal his defeat, and hoped it would be soon, so that he could pack his cue away safely in its towel wrapping and lock it safely in its case.

Stevie unpicked himself from Stan’s company and began to pot one ball, then another and another, a symphony of coordinated movements until the black ball slid down the left hand pocket. Only then did Stevie look up.

‘Whatyouwanting?’ said Stan, forgetting where he was or what he was doing, his mouth and lips turning Italian on him and picking out easy catch that he could play on his tongue.

‘Lager,’ said Stevie.

Stan, a reanimated Frankenstein, pushed off the barrel and wound his way down to the bar. Gerry Poodle-Heid made space for him and the bar maid, whose name he couldn’t remember, but who remembered him shouted over the Jukebox: ‘vodka?’ She leaned in kiss close over the bar so that he could hear, her bright eyes made childlike by looking through the mime her fingers had shaped into the sign for a small one.

‘Aye,’ said Stan confused.

‘I’ll get that,’ said a voice up the bar, someone Stan knew, but couldn’t remember his name.

‘Cheers,’ said Stan, nodding at the curly heided bawbag. ‘And a pint of Lager,’ he shouted, suddenly remembering that he’d left his best mate Stevie up there all alone playing pool.

It was treacherous the crossing between the lower bar and the upper bar. Stan’s hands and feet played their own tune to the music, but he kept going. Even when a chair leg tried to snare him he hardly spilled anything.

‘Here,’ he said to Stevie, banging down a nearly full pint, his fingers drowning with the effort.

He’d two vodkas and coke, but briefly looked up to where his brother was sleeping and knew he wouldn’t be able to make it that far.

‘You goin’ to the dancing?’ he said to Stevie.

Stevie took a mouthful of Lager. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘I’m playing pool’. He held up his cue as an exhibit, as if he was in a court of law, that he was indeed at that time and in that place, playing pool.

Stan nodded and banged himself in the chest. ‘I’m goin’ to the dancing,’ he said. ‘You goin’ to the dancing?’

Stevie drank about half a pint of lager in one go before answering. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘A don’t like the dancing’.

‘You’re fucked then. Fucked,’ said Stan, swaying. ‘Fucked,’ he shouted again louder than the first time, the last of a dying howl. ‘Am going to the dancing. You goin’ to the dancing?’

‘Aye… maybe later,’ said Stevie, taking a quick drink and walking away to play a pool shot.

‘Your wee brother owes us a bit of money, you know,’ his words drowning in the top of his drink.

Stevie played a few shots.

‘You goin’ to the dancing?’ asked Stan as if Stevie had never been away.

‘Aye,’ said Stevie, positioning himself in front of Stan. ‘My wee brother owes you a bit of money?’

‘It’s nothing. Nothing,’ said Stan, flinging his arms about to show how much that was.

‘How much?’ asked Stevie.

‘Nothing,’ said Stan, ‘nothing-at-all,’ but there was something reptilian in his eyes and he seemed to become almost sober. ‘Only two grand.’ He placed the words down, like marker chips.

‘It’s your shot Stevie,’ said his pool opponent, Hamish, a harmless drunk that pulled at his elbow, until he noticed Stan was looking at him.

Stevie waved Hamish away. His eyes remained on Stan. ‘What’s the two grand for? he finally asked.

Stan’s bent index finger pushed one of his nostrils shut and nasally sniffed in air with the other.

‘But he’s only left school. He’s not got a job. And he doesnae even drink.’

Stan shrugged. He was upright, no longer slouching, as if all the talk about cocaine had been enough to give him a hit and sober him up. His massive hands pinched at the half glass and he flung it back in one go. ‘It’s nothing,’ said Stan, shrugging again.

‘But he’s not got any money,’ said Stevie.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Stan, patting him paternally on the back and moving with new confidence down into the bar.

‘How’s he going to pay you?’ shouted Stevie to Stan’s back.

Stan stopped and turned. It was difficult for Stevie to make out what he was saying. It sounded like ‘we’re mates, don’t worry about it’.

Stevie drained his pint. Outside the pub he too felt sober. He’d need to get up the road. He didn’t know what to do. There was only one thing he was certain. He was going to kill his wee brother when he saw him.