Finn
‘Cow.’ Lilith potted her third consecutive yellow ball of the first game. ‘You sure you’ve never done this before?’
‘Never. Honest. But it’s about lines, isn’t it? Lines and angles and logic. I can do that.’
‘No, it’s an art,’ I argued through a mouthful of prawn cocktail crisps: Lilith’s joke. ‘A beautiful, noble art. Played by pissheads.’
‘Oh. Well in that case I can do that as well.’ Lilith leant over the table to line up her next shot. She was so tiny that she had to stand on the very tips of her toes to reach halfway across the baize. She had discarded the sweater of Henry’s she’d been burrowed into, and now I caught a glimpse of shell-pink, lace trimmed bra under her white vest top. Her tongue was caught between her teeth as she concentrated on finding that crucial angle, and a strand of midnight-black hair had broken free of its tie and draped itself across her forehead. She was no longer my fantasy mermaid, but no less beautiful.
‘What are you looking at? Have I grown a bloody tail or something?’ she drawled, upper-class pissed, as yet another ball slammed into a pocket.
‘Yeah. N’whiksers. I mean whiskers,’ I grinned. I suddenly wondered how twisted it made me that I was happier at this moment than I had been in years.
I remembered reading an article in one of Henry’s magazines about ‘Living in the Now’ – seizing the moment, appreciating the power of the present and various other gems of utter psycho-bollocks. I was a world expert.
*****
I won that first game by a particularly pathetic three balls.
‘How long have we got?’ Lilith asked, before I even had time to gloat.
I glanced up at the clock over the bar. After another four pints to follow the two I’d started with, and with attendant chasers, I needed to shut one eye and squint before the numbers would fall into focus. ‘Half n’hour before Henry picks us up.’
‘Good. Time for another game then. See if I can beat you now I know what I’m doing.’
‘In your dreams.’ I sounded more confident than I felt.
I was just about to break when the door to the bar-room shuddered open under the weight of a boot and the night went tits-up for the second time.
Lawson, Philly and Damo were Coyle’s three closest comrades. If he wasn’t with them it meant that he was screwing one of the chambermaids from the holiday village, but it looked as though they’d been drinking at his filthy flat for most of the day as they staggered to the bar.
‘Do you want to leave?’ Lilith asked.
Part of me wanted to vanish like the Cheshire Cat, leaving nothing but a contented smile hovering over the pool table. ‘Do you want to leave? They’re going to be arseholes. Especially Lawson there – likes to think he’s Coyle’s lieutenant.’
Lilith glared at them, then turned to me. ‘To hell with that. I’m not wasting forty pence on those genetically-challenged bastards. Still your break, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I grinned. ‘Still my break.’
*****
It started the second I went to play the first shot. Philly, considered to be the ladies’ man of the three, left his little huddle by the bar and deliberately stepped over the invisible boundary and into our territory.
‘Assumin’ the position already, fag?’
I ignored him and glanced at Lilith, who merely rolled her eyes, and for the next ten minutes we endured a barrage of schoolboy obscenity.
The landlord stood scratching his arse and pretending that nothing untoward was happening, allowing himself an occasional smirk at the more crass comments.
Lawson was next. ‘Hey, gorgeous – I got fifty pence here: you want to fuck Philly for me? He’s right up for a bit of man-love. You can keep the change.’
Lilith kept her head down and played pool as if our tormentors were nothing more than a particularly tedious hallucination, and all the while I wanted to kill the fuckers.
An hour and a half was all I’d wanted – ninety poxy minutes with a woman who was content to share my company without leaving the kind of souvenir that required medical attention, and those three bastards were shitting all over it. I could do nothing, and they knew it. As long as it was just me and not a guest on the receiving end of the abuse I would have to take it in the same way I took every other shafting.
I had just resigned myself to yet another night flushed down the great pan of creation when the unthinkable happened: fate smiled on me.
It began when Lilith staggered off to the toilets. Philly and Lawson continued their sport with me – loudly blowing kisses across the room and howling at their own comedic brilliance – but Damo decided to have a go at Lilith.
‘That your new girlfriend, arse bandit?’ he drawled, once she was out of the room. ‘’Fancied pretendin’ to be a real man for the night, eh?’ His two companions took a step back, and Lawson, the only one with any intelligence to speak of, pulled at Damo to bring him back into their fold. Either he didn’t notice or didn’t care – he was about to have his moment in the spotlight. ‘Mind you, size of her tits, it’d be like screwin’ another bloke anyway – ‘specially if you take her up the arse.’ He mimed the appropriate action in case I didn’t quite get the point.
He was so pleased with his performance that he closed his eyes in mock ecstasy and began to add sound effects, then must have wondered why his mates were no longer laughing, because he froze mid-thrust and opened one eye to see Lilith standing right behind him.
‘Oh dear. Have you just insulted Blaine’s guest, Damo?’ I asked him.
That rattled him. ‘Nah – I mean, I was just havin’ a laugh. Didn’t mean anythin’ by it, know what I mean?’ Damo blustered, as Lilith stood there and stared at him in measured disgust.
‘Has this nasty little scrote just insulted you, Lilith?’ I asked, willing her to give me the answer I craved.
‘Most definitely.’
That was all it needed.