tooth soup

photo credit: mysistersabarista

It was a quick

and messy fight. Dave’s incurably diuretic mouth emitted a stream of curses that had periods inserted forcibly into it, and it wasn’t long until even his brave lips refused to soldier on. Dusting off their hands as if at the end of a good day’s work, the men left Dave sagging on top of Charley Mitchell. Charley didn’t like seeing events such as this happen. It wasn’t that he liked Dave; he had heard enough from Dave’s drunken ramblings that he would never willingly apply the label ‘friend’ to the man. It was more that he knew from experience that men such as Dave McGowan weren’t inherently bad people. The really bad people were still out there, revelling in and leveraging their badness to commit badness greater still, not wallowing in the mistakes of the past, crying out for attention with a pint held high. Charley knew this, and he knew that Dave was far past the point where he might care that the only person listening was, in fact, a talking stool. Which is why on this particular night, he broke his silence to offer some comfort to a lonely, mistaken man.

‘Chin up, now, there’s a good man. It’s not all bad is it? Sure, you’ve had a licking and you’ve soiled yourself somewhat, but there’s plenty of mornings after this one. Come on, sit up straight and show yourself some respect.‘

Dave’s eyes rolled in their sockets to hear the deep timbre thumping around his sunken mind. ‘It is all bad!’ he said, ‘My life is over, the pain is too much. I might have burst a kidney fighting off those brutes. They used ‘dusters, you know. Dirty fighters with brass-horned knuckles bruising my belly and snapping my ribs. I’d have had them if they hadn’t cheated like that. Oh no, I’m surely a dead man walking in my condition!’

Charley, having witnessed the fight and knowing full well that the assault hadn’t included brass knuckles or a spontaneously combusted kidney, sighed and tried a different tack to console the inconsolable.

‘Of course you could have! You’re a prize fighter if I’ve ever seen one. What can you lift? Eighty, ninety pounds?‘

‘Huh!’ snorted Dave, a bubble of bloody snot popping on his upper lip, ‘Shows how much you know about me. I am a man of discussion and preponderance, not one of action. I could not have broken the savage fall of those men on my delicate physique if my life depended on it.’

Charley baulked slightly at this. The rambling idiot changes his tune to the beat of his heart, he thought. As Charley was quickly finding out, Dave McGowan was a man who had mastered all the myriad shades of indignation and used them, masterfully it must be said, to manipulate people’s sense of debt towards him. Still, Charley detected a faint possibility of redemption in the man’s clipped, put-on airs, so he tried one last time to get his attention.

‘Shut your trap, boy, for a boy is what you are! Sit up straight, wipe your face! You are not going to wallow in the muck of your failure, you are going to learn and become stronger. Now pick me up and take me back to your place of residence, we have much to do!‘

Charley Mitchell’s words penetrated the fog of drink and pain surrounding Dave’s brain and pushed the buttons long embedded there from his public school education. Immediately a strained ‘Yes, sir!’ leapt from his lips. He hauled the stool up over his shoulder and lumbered out of the bar and into the night. The barman, idly rubbing a greasy cloth over the shot glasses to slick them up with the appropriate amount of grease the customers expected, merely tutted and added a stool to his mental list of things he needed to steal from the bar down the road.

A light drizzle was falling as they made their way back to Dave’s house, or rather, his hovel. A tiny one bedroom apartment sandwiched in between a thousand others on the outskirts of the city. On arrival, Charley was set down and subsequently knocked over as Dave crash-landed heavily onto the stained yellow sheets and fell directly into a dreamless alcohol-fuelled slumber. Charley sighed to himself and wondered what he had gotten himself into. Stuck in a loser house with a loser lush, he did the one thing that bar stools all over the world were the very best at. He started to think.

To be continued next Friday!

No related posts.