Uneven Table

by Jude Ellery

I swung my cue hard, cracking the metal butt into the greasy pig’s head. The wood splintered where the two halves screwed together, one half remaining in my hands, the other spiralling onto the table, knocking the black ball onto the side cushion and the white up the other end. Ironic, that. All this over a “lucky” positional shot, and now that too had gone awry.

Turning back to examine the real damage, I saw that the aggressor had lost his grip on Damien and had slumped to the floor. His entire body spasmed, like a puppet shaken violently in a dog’s mouth. His eyes were rolled right back, white as the cue ball. They closed though when Damien thudded a boot into the same soft spot at the back of his head where I’d connected. The fit stopped, too.

Damien stood back, massaging his gasping throat. I just stood there, looking at Damien. The skinny spectator was a statue too, only his eyes animated, darting between his motionless mate and us. We all just stood there. It was a regular still life.

I edged forward for a closer look.

Bright red blood was beginning to pool around the prone man’s fat neck. Real bright red, brain blood, that. Face down, he looked like he was sipping from a dribbling fountain.

I met Damien’s frightened eyes. Even he could recognise the gravity of the situation. There was only one thing for it: we legged it.

They’ve told me writing’s a good outlet, a good way of letting my emotions seep out gradually instead of bottling them up. They’ve got me on this anger management course, see, convinced that because I’m in here for a violent crime I must be some kind of Mike Tyson character, fucked in the head, a caged animal, ticking time bomb, any minute capable of lashing out again. Of course, snooker players are renowned for rapes and murders, aren’t they?

I’ve started to get pretty decent at it, anyway. The bloke said to always open with something startling, something peculiar, to get the reader’s interest. I’d say killing a guy with a snooker cue’s pretty unusual. A pool cue maybe a little more common, but not snooker.

So, I may as well tell the whole story — I’ve got a lifetime.

“He’s not coming? We’ll have to both win then, if they’ve got a point head start. Damn. We bussing then?”

“I’ll drive, passed yesterday, Dad’s said I can use his car till I can afford my own.”

Damien and I both knew “afford my own” meant “get one for Christmas”. Still, saved me the fare, and the walk to the bus stop in the cold, coatless.

He drove like a teenager who’d just passed his test, so we arrived early. We parked up in the gravelly area behind the club and went down a few steps to find a frosted-glass door. Blu-Tacked on the other side was a scrap of paper. One fuzzy, faded word was just about legible: ‘Entreance’. We exchanged glances, then I buzzed the bell and, after a moment, the door clicked open.

Our suspicions were confirmed as soon as we stepped inside. No rush of hot air, no welcoming light; just a half-painted radiator, evidently off, and a dark corridor.

“Welcome, good sir, to The Dorchester,” Damien announced, regally. “Tonight our special is the pork scratching butty. To go with this I’d recommend the local scrumpy, that the Landlord has concocted from a crafty combination of his own piss and his punters’ disillusionment.”

He beckoned grandiosely for me to follow, and cackled loudly. The noise echoed down the hallway. Rolling my eyes at him I reluctantly followed, hoping the regulars hadn’t heard.

At the end was a door, identical to the ‘Entreance’, this time marked ‘Bar’. Damien swung it open cavalierly, and I followed, less so.

There was no door stopper on the other side so the door handle thudded into the cream, peeling wallpaper, knocking off another sliver. Several sets of accusing eyes set upon us immediately. One man, middle-aged, red-faced, slicked back greasy grey hair, turned to his mate and whispered something. His mate, a younger, scrawny guy, whispered something back. Most of the others absorbed themselves back into their pints but this pair kept staring: judgemental, unwelcoming looks. Unabashed, Damien strode up to the bar .

“Pint please,” he chirped to the depressing fellow behind the bar, who either gave his young customer a funny look or had a lazy eye, I couldn’t be certain.

“Pint of what, sonny?”

There are two ways of using the word ‘sonny’: the way a granddad uses it as he ruffles a little boy’s hair and gifts him a penny, or the way this chap used it.

“Oh, um…” Damien was oblivious. His long pause revealed his age, but luckily these didn’t look like the types who’d even know where to look on a driving license, or what the law was these days in any case. “Pint of that please,” he said, jabbing a finger at one of the taps. His dark, foamy liquid was yanked into an a glass tankard, the whole while accompanied by the barman’s funny look. Damien took a sip as he received it and gave a funny look of his own.

My order of a Coke further evidenced of our sixth form youth, and the accusing eyes fell my way again. Hoping for a large glass, I settled for a foreign can of Diet for 50p. Now we just had to decipher which pair of these charming gentlemen we’d be facing this evening. I had my suspicions.

Back then I just thought Damien was too confident for his own good, but looking back it’s obvious he must have been on the spectrum somewhere, autistic or Asperger’s, or whatever. Nobody really got diagnosed back then, we all just assumed he didn’t care what everyone thought. Turned out he didn’t have a bloody clue. In the end that’s what cost us — or cost me, anyway.

My dad was always playing this Alan Price song, ‘Justice’: “We all want justice but you got to have the money to buy it / You’d have to be a fool to close your eyes and deny it.” When it came to the court case we were both blinkered fools though, sure they’d rightly judge it manslaughter and be lenient on a good, honest young lad who was doing well at school and just protecting a mate. Truth be told we were both just as worried about Damien for his part in the melee as we were for me.

We needn’t have been. His father knew a good lawyer who spun the story so well that in the end Damien actually got a payout: £500 for his broken nose. The experts ruled my hit with the cue was the telling blow, and that Damien’s boot was negligible.

So, you can probably guess my defence didn’t go quite so well. Apparently a seventeen-year-old who’s never been in a scrape in his life can tell the difference between a strangulation attempt and some rough handling, in the heat of the moment. The stupid thing was, I actually could. That greasy pig was trying to squeeze the life out of my mate. I should be sitting here with a blimin’ medal, but instead I’m in a concrete cell. The only exercise my right arm gets these days is, well, that, and this writing when I can get hold of a stubby pencil and paper that’s so thin I could wipe my arse with it.

It was a routine clearance — all the way up to the last two, anyway. They were the key balls, the whole tie depended on whether Damien could get from pink to black. The black was half an inch off the bottom cushion, nowhere near the pink, which was above its natural position, the wrong side of the blue. It was doable, but the pressure and the distance between the balls made it a tough shot.

As the cheap colours sank in succession the greasy pig went redder and redder. His mate’s calling of the score — “Five… Eight… Twelve…” — was curtailed by a seething glance, but we all knew what the deal was anyway. Clear the balls: win the tie.

I’d breezed past my opponent. Turned out he was just a ringer they’d got in for the night, because what with us one down before we even broke off, all they needed was to win one of the two match-ups to progress to the next round. He’d got a bit uptight but nothing out of the ordinary: slammed his cue down a few times; smashed into the pack instead of breaking off properly in the second frame; called me a tosser under his breath a couple of times when he thought I was out of earshot. All forgotten at the end, though, shook my hand and swapped with the pig, who’d been spotting the balls, and calmed right down again.

That fat old pig was another story though. He must’ve pegged Damien as a chump from the start, so when the chump swerved to escape a snooker and potted a red with his first shot, going on to make thirty, he was well on his way to boiling point already. When Damien ended the break by tucking up behind the green to bag himself another four penalty points, he stupidly raised his arm for a high-five, which I reluctantly answered, keeping one eye on the human kettle. The temperature was rising alright. His beady eyes narrowed and he clenched the chalk hard in his palm, so that when he brushed his hair back it was left with a streak of blue rinse.

Damien won the first frame comfortably, but played a bad safety near the end of the second and lost it by a point, meaning the spot in he semis would come down a decider. Old Fatty Blue Rinse wasn’t a bad player, it was just a question of his temperament. Damien was a natural, but because he’d only been playing a couple of years his shot selection was his weakness. I decided against coaching him through this frame, though, thinking it wouldn’t go down too well.

It started cagily, but as the final frame went on, Damien, like he’d been doing all evening, continued to calmly stroke home the balls, playing every shot dead weight, while his porcine opponent progressively hit his shots harder. I counted four blacks missed off the spot in a row, every one rattling the jaws unnecessarily. The last one I’d thought was in, so, as I was near the pocket, I’d stepped forward to pick it out and save time, only for it to jangle on the precipice and settle near the bottom cushion.

“You put me off, you tramp,” Greasy screamed at me, but I didn’t have time to even laugh inwardly at the irony as his barrage continued. “What the hell are you doing moving when you know you’re in my line of sight? You’ve been doing that all bloody frame.”

We all knew I hadn’t, but he insisted I sit down for the rest of the match and jabbed me into a chair with the butt of his cue. Damien sniggered in the corner and received the cube of chalk in his face for his troubles.

“And you can quit your antics too, you ugly little shrimp.”

I think that’s what did it. Damien wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t pretty. He wore glasses and had weird hair that didn’t get on with a comb, but his mum wouldn’t let him have it short till he got a job and moved out, said it made him look like a thug. Gave him a complex, that’s what it did. Despite what we all mistook for his supreme confidence, one mention of his looks would set him off. He didn’t let it show this time, but I knew he’d just upped his game another ten percent. We were in for a hell of a show now.

When presented with a full-length shot to nothing on the last red, Damien snaffled it up, using a little stun run-through to land in prime position for any one of the baulk colours. A nearby fist smashed into the chalk board so hard that for a second the light, linked up to a meter on the wall, went off. When it came back on it was dimmer than before and Damien was squinting to see the angles properly. That wouldn’t stop him in this form, though.

Yellow followed the red into same pocket, meaning we’d now win by one if he didn’t miss. Yellow again, Green, Brown, thock, thock, thock, all into the heart of the pockets, clean as you like. Without any chalk at his disposal though — his opponent had since dunked it into my empty Coke can after Damien was “being too loud with it” — his connection with the cue ball was dodgy when he played the blue, and he’d left himself dead straight on the pink to the middle pocket, with absolutely no angle to get near the black.

The greasy pig visibly relaxed, glad to get another shot, one last chance to put this young upstart in his place.

Damien winked at me when he bent to play the pink, and I knew what was coming. His opponent wouldn’t get another shot if he pulled this off. We’d always practiced it, the top spin into the jaws of the pocket. Because it had to be played at such pace, and primarily because ninety percent of the time you just followed in off, or even if you caught it right it was a bit of a lottery, I’d never dared to use it in a proper match. That “ugly” comment earlier had pushed Damien to it though. Now he wanted not only to win, but also to humiliate the guy.

He feathered the cue ball ten, twenty times, his ring finger on his left hand twitching as he lined up the shot. With a deep breath, he finally settled, pulled back his right arm and played the shot.

The pink slammed into the middle pocket with such a bang that the skinny fellow flinched, almost dropping the roll-up fag he was crafting in shaky hands. The white leaped up off the baize, fully four inches at least, then landed, at first doing nothing, then springing into life. It skidded forward, making a beeline for the pocket where it had just banished the pink.

His opponents’ eyes lit up. Foul here and the frame, the match, and the tie, was effectively his. His head jutted forward off his fat neck and a bead of sweat dropped to the floor as he eagerly awaited the plop of six points coming his way.

Only it didn’t. The pink smashed into the left jaw of the pocket, cannoning it back toward the bottom cushion at forty-five degrees. It slowed suddenly as it reached the black, as if reined in by the tug of a string, faintly brushing its fellow colour without a sound, nudging off the cushion and finally resting itself perfectly in behind, leaving an easy shot for the win.

The greasy pig erupted. I’d like to remember exactly what he said, but as I testified, all I can recall is a lot of swear words and a lot of “you lucky bastard”. He launched his pint toward Damien, missing by a yard, but because Damien had ducked he was now blind to the arms that swung into his face. It was more of a clubbing than a punch, a whole eighteen stone or so behind it, knocking the poor teenager into the wall and gushing his nose open on impact.

Unlike me though, Damien was no newcomer to contact sport. He recovered quickly, flipping a right hook into an enormous belly, and left into a kidney. As the lump doubled over, an elbow came down on the top of his head, knocking him to the floor with a tremendous thud. Damien, having instantly regained his calm it seemed, fingered his nose briefly, then happy it was still all there, though bleeding profusely, strolled over to his cue case nonchalantly, dabbed at his wound with a beermat with one hand and began packing away with the other.

“I’d call that a win to us, mate,” he said. “I’m not giving them the satisfaction of potting the black. Let’s go home.”

I was about to answer, but my words got caught in my throat as I saw what was about to happen. For a big bastard the guy moved quickly. He pulled himself to his feet with the help of the table and as he did he picked up a small footstool from underneath, that was light enough to raise above his head. Surely he wouldn’t?

He did. He launched the little wooden stool across the room, this shot more accurate than the pint attempt, cracking into the side of his enemy’s head just as he turned. Dazed, Damien dropped his case and did all he could to remain upright. He was soon helped in his cause by a sweaty pink hand, grasped firmly around his throat, lifting him upright and pushing him against a coat peg on the wall. The hand was joined by its twin, and Damien let out this sickly wheezing sound, like a balloon being let down slowly. His face went bright red, then purple, and his eyes began to bulge.

I did what anyone would have done.

I passed the notes through to Vick when she visited. Said she knows a website for blossoming writers who’ll post it for me. Who knows, I could be the next Stephen King. Supports me, does Vick, which is more than I can say for Damien or any of his backstabbing family. Moved up north somewhere straight after the case, “fresh start”, they’d said. Never had one visit or letter out of them.

Took me the best part of two weeks scribbling the whole lot down, some of it was hard to remember. The bloke said it could be my mind’s natural defences, not wanting me to. Maybe. All I know is now it’s done, it’s a weight off my chest, but now my evenings all feel even more empty than usual. Guess I’ll have to kill another overweight bully when I’m out, to get some material for the sequel. My fans will have to wait a few years yet, mind.

So, with nothing to do this evening and a telly all to myself for once, I flick it on. Snooker’s on, The Masters, I think they said. Haven’t watched it in a while but the usual suspects are there, and then this funny looking fellow steps up in the second round. He’s beaten one of the favourites in the first, he’s a wildcard, he’s from Nottingham and it’s his first time in a major tournament. Camera zooms in. He’s not that young. He’s wearing glasses, Dennis Taylor style, which is peculiar. Makes him look like a trainspotter. Thought most of them got laser surgery or wore contacts these days. His hair’s short, a number two I’d estimate. He steps forward to break, his left ring finger twitching uncontrollably as he places it on the table, and as he feathers the cue ball the names pop up in the bottom corners of the screen. J Trump is on the left, and on the right? D Percival.

I switch the telly off.