Rule of Night Read Free

as a butcher’s dog. A right goer. Like a rattlesnake.’
    â€˜Yeh,’ says Arthur. ‘We heard it.’
    â€˜We heard it,’ says Kenny, swilling beer into his mouth. ‘It’d be like dipping it in a bill-paster’s bucket.’ He doesn’t like making quick decisions, particularly on a Friday night, because once you’ve decided where you’re going it precludes the possibility of going anywhere else. Anyway he’s got Something Lined Up for later on, so why go looking for it? A sudden pain in his left knee – an old footballing momento – makes his face twinge. Arthur is rippingup beermats, his long black oil-rimmed nails tearing absent-mindedly at the fibrous material.
    Skush is the quiet one; he drinks his pint slow and calm and waits for the others to make up their minds. He’s never been out with a girl, never had it (unless you can count his experience as a five-year-old behind the garages with Marlene Hiller, pulling down her fluffy blue knicks), and now and then he wonders if it’s possible to get his end away without involving a female. That’s what he’d like most: getting his end away without the acute pain and torture of having to approach a girl, talk to her, make easy conversation while all the time his lips are numb and his throat squeezed tight and dry. He has a couple of pills in his pocket that he’s saving for later on.
    They clatter down the narrow streets, echoes banging back and forth from wall to wall. A cat sneaks into the shadows. An empty milk bottle stands on a doorstep until Crabby kicks it into the gutter. The owner of the house opens the door and closes it again.
    On Drake Street, merry with drink and laughing like drains, they cram into the Fusilier. The Irish landlord looks askance and pulls three pints without moving his eyes. Near the small platform with piano and drums a hen party is in riotous progress, a dozen girls telling dirty jokes and shrieking into their Cherry Bs and port and lemons. Kenny is attracted and disgusted by this behaviour; he reckons women should keep their gobs shut and not make a display of themselves – yet a gang of birds on the town is always game for a bit of the old how’s-your-father. And if you don’t buy a ticket you can’t win the raffle, he thinks, standing above the circle of bright faces and attempting to make with the repartee.
    â€˜Ooo-ell,’ one of them says, all ringlets and sticky lips, ‘if it isn’t Omar Sharif.’
    Kenny smiles; but he’s holding himself inside. His eyes are like cold black marbles. Round and about people are grinning with their backs turned, but he knows they’re thickheads and can take it.
    He says, ‘Thank you Miss United Kingdom.’
    â€˜Go home and send your dad,’ the eldest in the party, a woman of about twenty-seven, tells him. More shrieks and stricken laughter.
    â€˜You couldn’t afford him on your pension.’ The old boot.
    â€˜Run along, sonny, and drink your Tizer.’
    Arthur is chatting up a girl with a pale round face and startling green eye-shadow, resting his forearms on the back of the chair and chewing gum in her ear. She looks as though she might be tempted, glancing up now and then at Arthur and giving him a small timid smile.
    Crabby turns his back on the table and mutters to Kenny out of the corner of his mouth. ‘There’s bugger-all here. We should have gone to the Pendulum. Least there’s some decent music there.’ He has a fine faint scar on his jawline which shows through the soft adolescent stubble. ‘Come on, let’s piss off.’
    â€˜Hang about,’ Kenny says, watching Arthur and the girl: he wants to see what happens. At the same time he’s trying to think of a remark he can toss over his shoulder at the hen party. Women in a group are all the same, they get cocky and smart and think they’re being dead clever. But