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.
Lilith
Finn flashed me a smile of intense gratitude then hit Damo with a perfect haymaker to the chin. He staggered backwards and fell onto a table stacked with empty and half-finished glasses that simply caved in under his bulk, before struggling back to his feet, soaked in stale beer, at which point Finn hit him for a second time – a powerhouse upper cut with his left that sent the man’s eyes rolling back in his head – and then dived on top of him, pummelling him as though he were an overstuffed punch bag. The landlord shouted something unintelligible above the noise of shattering glass and wood, but was loathe to leave the safe zone behind his bar.
For once I was happy to leave someone else to do the fighting, and my drinking partner was thoroughly enjoying himself. Damo managed to land a few stray, desperate punches, and I saw the spray of blood as Finn’s nose took a direct hit, but he fought with an instinctive grace that suggested he’d done this kind of thing more than once before.
Lawson stepped nervously forward, and I thought he was going to do the sensible thing and drag his beaten friend out of the fray, until I saw his hand slide into the pocket of his leather jacket. The soft, solid click warned me, even before he brought out the flick knife intended for Finn’s exposed back.
‘Fucking coward!’ I howled, as Lawson prepared to make his move. He was still laughing at my impotent protest when I broke a pool cue in two across the back of his head. He gave a surprised grunt of protest and sprawled out cold across the pool table, the knife falling from his grip and clattering onto the floor next to Damo.