Then we head to the pub. Dad orders me a Coke with a green and white straw and a Guinness for himself. As promised, we play pool -- he wins, but I put up a good fight, I’m a pretty experienced pool player and sometimes I sneak the odd win here and there.
This one time my father bet a man £20 that I’d beat him in a game of pool and when I did the man was furious and refused to pay us. We never got the money but my Dad likes to tell people that story a lot.
I meet another boy there with blond hair and we play pool too and run around the bar for hours. Someone takes a picture of a baby with a cigarette in her mouth and they all laugh. The blond boy leaves at some point and I’m left with the company of the jukebox. I sit and sing all the Coldplay songs I know and create beer mat towers. Friendly wobbly locals interrupt my self-created serenity asking me to play “golden oldies” instead of this “dreary shite”; they leave me pound coins and I become banker and DJ “in totale”.
My Dad animatedly discusses ancient Irish history with two men at the bar.
An older man looks at me for longer than I like in the bathroom. The hours pass. I drink at least another 10 Cokes and eat too many packets of King crisps.
As the night progresses I approach my Dad a few times to promulgate my boredom. He hands me another packet of crisps and ushers me away. I’ve already listened to every song I know on the jukebox, and created everything I can with the beer mats and there’s no one left to play pool with. I lie down on a bench beside the high window and fall asleep.
— Ÿ –
I wake up staring at the dusty white roof overhead. I don’t know how long has passed but my Dad is in the same place at the corner of the much emptier bar now chatting to a man with a very long grey beard. He notices me staring at him, my weary frame slumped against the pillar. My father tells his new company something about how good I am at speaking Irish or how skilled I am at martial arts; that I can take any man down, or something along those lines.
