Georgie

Georgie was dead but didn’t know it yet. You could see it in his raw, yellow eyes as he glanced around the empty bar. He leant against the jukebox with a tumbler of whisky in one of his bony, pink hands. Each time the song ended he looked at his shoes and rooted in his pockets for a coin, anything to keep out the quiet. Some flash cunt creaked across the linoleum in box-fresh trainers bright as brushed teeth. He had a rolled up cigarette tucked behind his ear and he moved like a wet rat.

‘You sure you want to be here, pal?’ Georgie didn’t blink. ‘Word is you’ve been chalked’.

There was a threat there and it wasn’t hidden. A smarter man would have taken it as a cue to action but Georgie hung on, looking past his interviewer and out into the street. A light dusting of snow had begun to fall and the streetlights painted each flake that drifted through their beams a sickly red. A couple moved away down the hill, huddled against the chill. The rat looked him up and down, passing saliva between his teeth and sucking in his cheeks. Georgie’s eyes were drawn down to his waist, where the outline of a knife pressed against his shirt.

‘Do you want it here or what?’

Georgie looked up and caught the rat in the face. His eyes were thinly divided by a short, blunt nose and his pupils were dark and uncomprehending. Georgie looked at him blankly. The song finished and with his free hand he began to root in his pocket for change. For a moment the only sound was the jangle of metal on metal. The rat panicked, drew his knife and stepped back. In a single arc Georgie smashed the glass across his face, grinding it hard against his cheek. Blood and whisky spilt across the floor. The rat fell to the carpet, whimpering. Georgie fed another coin into the jukebox, turned and left.