Stonemouth (16 page)

We’re in the Central Car Park, where the old railway station used to be. She stops, comes right up to me and jabs me in the chest with one finger. ‘Again, no gossiping, yeah? Swore to Dad I’d never do drugs.’ She grins widely. ‘Hilariously hypocritical, eh?’

‘Hilarious,’ I agree.

My phone goes and I let her get into the car while I answer. It’s Mike Mac, telling me he’s busy through to five; see me then? So I’ve got time to kill this afternoon. Another karmic nudge? Maybe I ought to go do a few lines with Grier. She’s watching me through
the glass, tapping her fingers theatrically on the steering wheel. The engine’s already running.

I look through those earlier texts. One from BB suggesting a game of snooker at Regal Tables, just a couple of minutes’ walk away on the High Street. I hold a wait-a-moment finger up to Grier, who raises then drops her shoulders dramatically, and throws herself back in her seat. I call BB.

‘Stu?’

‘You at the Regal?’

‘Aye. Playing with maself here, man; it’s shite. You comin, like?’

‘There in five.’

‘Pint?’

‘Just the auto-e for me.’

‘Shagger Landy it is.’

I open the X5’s passenger door. ‘Stuff to do,’ I tell Grier. ‘Laters?’

‘Funeral, if not before,’ Grier says, looking unimpressed. ‘Call.’

Regal Tables, Stonemouth’s premier snooker and American Pool venue for over thirty years, occupies an old cinema on the High Street. BB – a generously upholstered latter-day Goth with multiple piercings to ears and nose – is cradling a pint and looking pensive by a set-up snooker table when I arrive. We decide a full-size snooker table looks too daunting at this time on a Saturday afternoon and arrange to play pool instead.

‘Sup yersel, then, Stewart?’ BB asks.

I’m sure we went through all the catching-up stuff last night but we go through it again now. I’m doing okay. BB is unemployed after losing his job with the council Parks Department, back living with his parents.

‘No easy bein a Goth in the Parks Department,’ he tells me at one point, sadly.

‘Really?’

‘You’re outside a lot. Hard to avoid a tan.’

‘Aye, I suppose.’

There are about twenty tables in the place, only about a quarter of them lit and occupied: little oases of light in the sea of darkness that is the giant hall. BB and I are just starting our second game when I see a group of four guys come in and stand at the distant
pool of light that is the reception bar, and look towards us. They collect their box of balls and saunter over. Two are big, heavy-set guys, one is kind of normal and the other one’s wee and nervy-looking. I get a bad feeling about them pretty much instantly. They take the table next to ours. Looking around, no other two groups of players are on adjacent tables, or need to be.

‘Best table, eh?’ the wee one says, glancing round. Must have seen me looking.

‘Aye,’ I say.

The four guys alongside us are playing two against two. The first time it’s my turn to play at the same time as the wee guy on the other table, we both want to use the aisle between the tables at once. There should be enough room, but he takes up a lot of space squatting down, sighting over the top of the cushion and closing one eye. He’s thin but hard-looking, and hollow-cheeked enough to be embarking upon, or recovering from, a recreational substance dependency regime. Straggly thin black hair he probably cuts himself – certainly nobody in their right mind would pay good money for that look – and a shell suit that looks like it’s made from white bin liner. Couple of gold sovs on his right hand. Even by Stonemouth standards, this is almost comically old school.

I stand and wait for him to finish, but he’s tsking and tutting and shaking his head and keeps standing up and looking like he’s about to take his shot but then changing his mind and squatting down again, closing one eye and sighing.

I just have this feeling that he’s waiting for me to try to take my shot so that he can claim I’ve got in his way or jostled his elbow or something, so I decide waiting patiently is the wisest course. After about five minutes of this shite I sigh, and pull my phone out to check the time.

‘Aye? What?’ the wee guy says suddenly, all edge and aggression. He’s staring at me.

I look at him. ‘Excuse me?’ I say, with a sort of formal smile. Oh, shit; I already don’t like the way this is going.

‘Whit
the
fuck
?’ the wee guy says shrilly, as though when I said ‘Excuse me?’ he somehow heard, ‘Fuck your junky whore of a mother with a rusty fire extinguisher, you clit-nosed cuntface.’

I spread my hands wide, still holding my cue by the thin end. ‘Sorry, what?’ I say.

He swaggers towards me, wee eyes screwed up. ‘You takin the fuckin piss?’ He sticks his face in mine, making me back off out of head-butt range.

‘Not doin anything, pal,’ I tell him.

Some old set of responses from my teenage years has kicked in. The wee guy obviously wants a fight or at least the threat of one with some ultra-humbling backing down on our part – if we’re very lucky – and BB and I are outnumbered two-to-one. I know BB’s no good in a fight anyway; I’ve seen him still trying to reason with people while he’s lying on the ground with kicks raining in. I haven’t seen a single face I know in the place apart from BB’s since we came in here, the exits are all past Wee Guy and his mates, and the enemy do look kind of rumpus-ready: schemey, and with fight skills not confined to Grand Theft Auto.

‘No wantin any trouble,’ BB says in a sort of muted rumble.

The wee guy shoots him a look. ‘You fuckin stay oot a this, ya big emo cunt.’

‘Aw,’ BB says, frowning. ‘No need fur—’

‘Shut it!’ the wee guy rasps, sounding almost hysterical.

‘Look,’ I begin, trying to sound reasonable. ‘My phone vibrated, that’s all.’ I take it half out of my pocket but the wee guy grabs it away from me before I can stop him. ‘Hi, wait—’ I say.

‘Naw it fuckin didnae!’ he says, and throws it across the pool table towards one of his pals. It clatters, bounces, nearly falls into a middle pocket. The wee guy is gripping his cue near the narrow end now, like he’s ready to use it like a club. His other fist grasps the white ball. He sees me glance towards the reception bar, where nobody seems to be noticing the situation building here. ‘Fuckin look at me when I’m talkin to ye, ya cunt,’ he tells me. He glances
over too, waves at a distant face that is finally looking our way. ‘Okay, Toammie?’ he shouts at the guy, who waves back. ‘Just sortin oot a wee problem here; nae problem, ma man.’ Then he’s in my face again with a tight wee grin, like he’s cut us off from any help.

‘Look,’ I tell him, ‘we’re just here like yourselves, to have a quiet game of pool.’

‘Naw yer naw! Naw yer fuckin naw!’ the wee guy says, getting a bit too close again. He’s got spittle on his lips like he’s working himself into a state here and I think some flecks have already hit my face but I’m not prepared to wipe them off because I’m pretty sure that’ll just give him something else to get even more upset about. He stabs me hard in the chest with one finger. ‘
You
are just here to fuckin try and take the
piss
out me, is
that
whit ye fuckin think?’

‘Oh, don’t be daft,’ I begin, and instantly know this is a serious mistake.

The wee guy’s voice goes up another octave. ‘You fuckin callin me fuckin daft, ya fuckin—’

‘He fuckin called you daft, D-Cup!’ one of his big mates says.

(
D-Cup?
I’m thinking, and even as my guts are going cold and starting to churn and there’s a bad, tight feeling in my chest and my mouth is going dry, I still think, Wouldn’t it be fascinating to know how this particular scrawny wee runt got nicknamed
that
. Unless it was Teacup … But Teacup would be a shit street name. It was definitely D-Cup.)

But his voice has
really
gone up now, and he’s staring, wide-eyed and spitting, as he rants in a way that suddenly has no hint of the synthetic or fake about it, and beneath all the aggression and the flash-hate I can see something hurt and pathetic and raging, and I just know that this poor, fucked-up wee numpty has probably been called daft and stupid and useless and educationally subnormal or whatever by every adult he’s ever known and probably all his mates too.

Good
nerve to hit, Stewart. There probably wasn’t a cool way out of this from the start; there definitely isn’t now.

‘Ya fuckin shitehead dick,’ he’s screaming at me. ‘Ya fuckin cunt, who you fuckin callin—’

‘Aye, callt you daft, so he did,’ the other heavy-set guy says, like the signal’s only just reached whatever he uses for a brain, or he thinks his wee pal might have forgotten in the meantime. No sense in even trying to appeal to them. These guys look like they have one consolation vocational qualification between them but they’re exactly the sort of wit-free stumpies who turn out to have all their brains in their fists and feet and whichever bit of your average ned’s central nervous system that handles fighting in general and kicking the living shit out of much cleverer people in particular.

BB’s useless, I haven’t even been near a fight in nearly ten years, the staff here would appear to be pals of D-Cup and his chums, and I now don’t even have my phone, which has been picked up by Pool Hall Heavy-set Guy Number 2 and is being pawed at like he’s never seen an iPhone before.

‘Look, I talked with Don Murston just yes—’

‘Ah don’t fuckin care who ye fuckin talked to! You fuckin talk to me like—’

‘I’m not—’ I begin.

‘Don’t fuckin interrupt me!’ D-Cup screams.

This time spittle definitely hits me on the cheek. Loud voice for a wee guy. I think I hear an echo. There’s silence in the place for a moment. Not a fucking sound. Then there’s a murmur of distant conversation, and the sound of a ball being hit, all of it almost too casual; the sound of people showing they’re not intimidated by other people being intimidated.

This isn’t supposed to happen, I want to wail. Mr M said it was okay for me to be here. The word’s supposed to have gone out, for fuck’s sake. Except this little shite, this diminutive wannabe-sub-gangsta probably only knows very vaguely that I’ve been on the receiving end of Murston ire and thinks he’ll gain kudos
for vicariously upholding Mr M’s honour and pre-empting the punishment that he’s quite sure is doubtlessly and rightfully coming my way in any case.

Then there’s a hint of movement in the darkness to one side of me and suddenly I’m the wide-eyed one, trying to see from the corner of my eye – without letting my gaze stray a millimetre from D-Cup’s eyes – what’s happening, worrying that one of his mates is trying to outflank me or something, but the three of them are still standing where they were, very still.

‘Problem here, ladies?’

The flicker of movement resolves into Powell Imrie, appearing as though out of a fucking trapdoor, right beside me and D-Cup. Ah: that might have been the real reason the place went so quiet. A slightly hysterical – and, in the current situation, arguably unhelpful – part of me suddenly thinks that being Powell Imrie must be a bit like being the Queen: she thinks everywhere smells of new paint and he thinks the world is mostly composed of a respectful, terrified silence as people wait to hear the sound of bones getting crunched. Powell is dressed like he was yesterday afternoon, in jeans and a padded shirt, earbuds dangling from his breast pocket again.

D-Cup registers who it is, there’s a single nanosecond flicker of probably heavily conditioned panic, then he’s instantly back into well-lookee-boys-what-have-we-here? mode.

‘Aye, Mr Imrie,’ he says, voice a little slower and more controlled, now that the heavy weaponry’s arrived, ‘this cunt is being a cunt, that’s whit the fuckin problem is.’

There’s the briefest pause here, before Powell says smoothly, quite quietly, addressing only D-Cup: ‘That really what you think the problem is here?’

D-Cup freezes, staring from me to Powell and back again.

Powell looks down at his own chest, notices the earbuds hanging from his breast pocket and gently taps them back inside with one finger, until they disappear. It’s delicately done, but it absolutely has
the look of preparing for battle. He looks at me and smiles. ‘Hello again, Stewart,’ he says pleasantly. ‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine, Powell,’ I tell him.

D-Cup reboots himself and looks first at my face and then up to Powell’s. He seems confused for a moment, then he starts to register what the situation actually is. His already rather wan face goes appreciably paler, quite quickly. You rarely see that happen in real life. I was once on a ledge twenty storeys up on a sixty-storey hotel in Dubai with a couple of Pakistani fitters when a piece of staging – three tonnes of metal, free-falling – came whistling down with about half a second’s warning and just snicked one of the fitter’s hands clean off at the wrist as it zipped past. That guy went grey no faster than D-Cup’s whitey overtook him just there.

‘Ah, like, ah, ah, Ah wisnae—’ D-Cup begins, flustered now.

‘That not your moby, Stewart?’ Powell says quietly, nodding at my phone, which has found its way back onto the surface of the table.

‘Yup,’ I say.

Powell nods, and the first heavy-set guy quickly grabs the phone and looks about to chuck it across the table to me, but then suddenly appreciates the wisdom of coming round and presenting it to me himself, with a glance at Powell. I nod, breathe on the screen and polish it on my shirt. Meanwhile Powell’s picked up a red ball from their table and is bouncing it up and down in his big, meaty palm.