The Slave of the Snug

THE SLAVE OF THE SNUG
by K.D. Halpin

It was with great satisfaction that she swallowed the last of her third pint of Guinness. A fourth one awaited only inches from the cardboard coaster in front of her. Things were starting to look glassy to her and her chest burned from the Silk Cuts. Could she have really smoked twenty in the last two hours? A pack of cigarettes, three pints downed and still nowhere near the comfort she desired.

She’d been floating in and out of conversations all night. People would swap seats, move down one, shimmy over, one would go to the toilet, another would take the still-warm seat. The snug in Belfast’s Crown Liquor Saloon could only hold so many; the booth with the door was not designed to provide comfort for more than four people. But the number of occupants beat the odds, squeezing in like midgets in a clown car. At this stage there were ten, maybe more. Her eyes couldn’t focus enough to count. Someone’s expressive elbow would dig into her sides. She didn't flinch, thinking to do so would be rude – an acknowledgement of inflicted pain. She was a slave to the snug as long as she was in it.

This poor slave was currently at the dreaded disadvantage of being in between conversations. It was hard enough integrating while not knowing the party very well – a group that kept growing in numbers. A man would leave, a new man would join in, bring his friend, and his cousin would arrive, and so on. The man to her right who had been talking to her briefly became distracted by another’s loud remark about a football score:

“Who is it who won?”
The question was ignored.
“Hey…here…Man United? Who won?”

She turned to the woman to her left. The woman was talking in hushed tones to another woman – both hunched over their cigarettes like question marks. A private chat in a very public place, but that’s where privacy is guaranteed. The noisier it is, the more likelihood of confidences. She pretended not to hear the whispers fearing that shifting her body to be included in the apparent confessional would be intrusive. And there’s no point in talking to the person across the table because that requires leaning forward into your pint, getting a stray ash caught in your eye by a cigarette flicking from a far reaching arm aiming for the one ashtray that is ever out of reach of whoever is smoking.

The Slave of the Snug was trapped among the bodies and so alone. She was in the dreaded pub purgatory of no banter. There were only fags and swallows of stout and bleary-eyed illness in the tummy.

She wanted to leave and yet this was the supposed craic and she ached to feel herself having fun.

The idea of getting a taxi was daunting. Saturday night, after midnight – impossible. She felt it was hopeless and that she would be in this snug forever. She would just curl up on the leather bench, rest her head on a beer-soaked jacket and fall asleep to the din of the blather. Someone offered her a cigarette. She took it, not wanting to smoke but more as a hopeful “in” to a conversation, a peephole out of the purgatory. The cigarette provider was also distracted, this time by an insult. He couldn’t talk to her; he had to defend his honour with “Fuck you! Yer talkin’ shite…” And so she slipped back into the hole, the hope of engagement was a mere thread to hold onto and only for a scant three seconds. At least she was occupied with a cigarette and her fourth pint that, with each sip, made her want to vomit violently. What made her sick more, the drink or the fags? She wanted to close her eyes, just for a few seconds but she was worried it would raise suspicion. Mustn’t call attention to oneself. Being pissed is for sissies.

Surrounded by wild-paced talk, she took the snug in as she studied the dark mahogany wood of the bar, the stained glass window on the door of the snug that made the pub seem like a Catholic church and the seats like pews. She saw a brass button, looking like a doorbell, under a mirror at the end of the table and stared at it mesmerized. She then remembered someone once told her that decades ago there used to be tableside service. You rang the bell and a bartender would come to your snug and take your order. Days long gone by.

The Slave fantasized that she could reach over and ring the bell and someone would rescue her, scoop her up, fetch her hat which was probably under someone’s foot by now, and find her black wool scarf. She looked down to her right and saw the scarf’s licorice fringe sticking out from under the ass of a brown-eyed boy. No getting to it now.

Laughter seemed to undulate in gales then giggles then uproarious throaty yucks. She closed her eyes anticipating the next crest of amusement. It’s quieter, just conversation … it’s coming, it’s coming now: crazy chortle, a hand is slapped on the table. She opened her eyes. Table-Slapper was holding his face and contorting his torso in what looked like a fit. He was laughing like a maniac. His face was fire red.

“He did it ya know, he did. The fuckin’ cheek of him…”

Table-Slapper was nodding violently, hands still over the eyes with just the forehead, brow and two tiny front teeth exposed. His teeth were small for his head, she thought, as if the rest of him grew but his mouth stayed forever nine years old. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead, probably from the convulsions or the whiskey sitting in front of him. His hair was buzz cut, hiding the looming baldness. She smiled at him and his teasing gang, her eyes darting back and forth from one to the other as if to say “What? What is it? What did he do? Why is Table-Slapper convulsing?” There was no notice of her appeal through their giggles, high-pitched and searing, until one of the lads turned to her in between insults:

“Don’t ever take this wanker to your sister’s wedding!”

She laughed knowingly. But she didn’t know. She had no idea. Why my sister? Who’s sister? Why a wedding? No answers. The snorting continued but at least the convulsing had stopped and Table-Slapper took his hands away to reveal his round ruddy face. She felt angry, slighted, frustrated. I don’t even know these people, she thought, I was invited along, a friend of a friend and that friend has long since buggered off. They are strangers who have no clue to the history she reckons with. She looked down at her hands resting on her lap. They appeared old to her, weathered with tobacco under her fingernails. She craved a hot bath. She stared at the veins at the surface of her hands, hardly recognizing her own anatomy. Sounds rushed past her ears, placing her in a tunnel where she hugged the wall to avoid the speeding train. Still she faintly heard the Whispering Woman to her left, her voice penetrating her brain, sifting through the crevices, the swoops that carry a sick person to white rooms of the past: long lace curtains flapping in breeze, echoes in a hollow tin can. She opened and closed her eyes – blinking was easier an hour ago. Each breath in her lungs carried her further away from the snug and out of the pub, into her own head. To a time, only a month ago, that no one here could possibly know about.

She saw herself looking at a door, a familiar door leading into a bedroom she’d known all her adult life. She was back from her weekend trip; a means of escape from the constant, relentless, unforgiving, contagious depression her husband had been oozing for years. Standing there at the door, she didn’t hear him stir. A policeman stopped her, looking like a homeless old dog dreading a passing kick.

“I have something to tell you. Come sit down,” he said.
“What’s happened?”
“Your husband …”
“He did it, didn’t he?”
“It happened last night. A gun to the head. I’m so sorry.”
Not at all understanding it: “But it’s not that bad, is it? What? To the head?”
Her husband had said he would do it and she hadn’t believed him. Idle threats, she thought. A way to infuse guilt. And yet here she stood at their bedroom door talking to a stranger in uniform, unable to comprehend anything at all.
“Please sit down. I have something to tell you.”

A gun shot. She jolted. What was that? Suddenly pulled away from the tin can voices in her head, she could barely breath. A pint glass had dropped and smashed near the snug door. The Whispering Woman to the left was shrieking now, annoyed that she was taken away from her raunchy girl talk.

The snug door flung open. An angry barman wearing the standard Crown Saloon black waistcoat muscled in. “Steady on, steady on now.” Looking up at him, she was caught by the image of this baby-faced man with enormous ears clearing away pint glasses. The oil lamps from the bar illuminated the back of his translucent ears, making him look like a fat cherub with tiny wings.

The barman looked at her pint glass. “Is this dead?” She didn’t answer; she stared into his eyes, those blue eyes, familiar eyes in strange sockets. Are they begging? I can’t help you. Bang. Was that a gunshot? He reached for her pint glass and looked at her:

“Is this dead?”
“Yes, yes,” she said.

She pushed the pint glass toward him.
He took it in his hand and stacked it on top of the precarious pile of glasses held in the crook of his right arm. He left the snug with one last parting shot to pipe down, leaving the snug door wide open.

At this stage, The Crown was buzzing with people – loads of leather jackets, high-heeled boots, feather boas for the ladies, denim for the men. Everyone indulging one way or another: on drink, on hot bar nuts, on loud conversation. All around her was animation, constant movement blurred by speed. A laughing head was a brushstroke of flesh and a shock of brown hair. Coats and fabric seemed to undulate with turns to interrupt a friend to the right, to the left. Until she saw one figure sitting at the bar. A still figure, a woman alone among the visual jerky din. She had a wine glass in her hand, her back to the bar, her legs crossed, a burgundy coat on her lap. Her eyes were the only part of her that moved. The snug seemed like an island and the Woman Alone at the bar was out to sea, surrounded by bobbing life rafts. The snug was a safe haven by comparison and the Slave looked at the Woman being solitary. The Woman appeared to have no companion, lost in the same no-banter-purgatory as the Slave of the Snug. The Woman’s eyes swam back and forth, back and forth, and then very gently and quietly rested on the Slave. Their eyes locked. “Save me,” the Woman could have cried with her soulful eyes. The Slave looked into her eyes with a recognition she could not bear. The reflection was haunting. The Woman was still looking: “I know you know I’m you.” Rubbish, the Slave thought. Bullocks. Piss off.

Clang, clang, loud bloody clang. “Come on! Drink up! Go home to your beds!”
The barmen were ringing their hand-held brass bells, ushering punters out the door.
“The quicker you go home, the quicker we’re away!”
“Get home with you!” another yelled.

The occupants of her snug were gulping their last swallow. The brown-eyed boy, still sitting on her black licorice scarf, miraculously downed a pint in one go. She looked at him in amazement and found herself giggling at the bits of Guinness foam dribbling down his chin and into the nape of this neck. As she sat smiling, glassy-eyed and slow, she realized that she had lost track of the Woman Alone. She looked over at the bar where she was perched. The Woman was gone but the wine glass remained. It sat empty on the counter, save a mouthful of red at the bottom of the glass. The Slave felt relieved.

“…So are you up for it?” asked the Whispering Woman to her left.
“Sorry?” said the Slave.
“We’re off to the Menagerie Bar for last orders. Are you game?”

The Slave looked at the ashtray, surely by this time filled with 50 or more cigarette butts. The image of the Woman Alone still wouldn’t fade. The Slave turned to the Whispering Woman:
“Sure.”
“We’ll get a black taxi out front, bound to be a few at The Europa Hotel across the street.”

Coats were gathered, hats passed, confusion with scarves and purses and brown paper bags and cigarette packs. People filed out of the snug one by one and headed for the side door of The Crown. She followed behind the pack of strangers, bundling up in her malty scarf and hat and walked into the first hour of the next day. As November offensively spat in her face, rain dropping in fat round unsynchronized globs, she and the party turned onto Great Victoria Street. The Slave and her newly acquired tribe reverently prayed for the black taxi to carry them to a warmer and better place.