Chasing the Dark
by Glyn Matthews
The quite hour. I sip my early pint while Patrick finger-taps the bar. I watch the minute hand climb towards the hour, moving like a tic below a tired eye.
I gaze at my pint sitting dark and still. A pond deep enough to drown in. I sip and sigh and looking up, find another minute has passed me by, the long hand’s finger pointing to the ear of twelve.
Six o’clock. A piercing whistle from the yards, followed hard by rolling waves of thunder as hobnails spark on cobbled streets, despite the whetstone damp that licks the air. The door swings wide and heaving men fill the bar with gutter voices as they step inside.
“Hello, Michael,” says O’Malley’s eldest child, every bit as ugly as the memory of his father.
“Thanks. Mine’s a pint of Gat.”
“To Hell wid you. What’s that in front of you, Irish mist?”
“Well, a Bushmills then, if you insist.”
“You know Michael, you’re nothing but a scrounging shite.”
“Your oul fella wouldn’t have spoken to me like that. He would’ve seen me right, stood me a drink as I would for him. He was a good man, God rest his soul.”
“My father was a stupid bastard who never had a penny to his name unless he’d robbed me ma.”
“He would still have stood a friend a drink. There was a time…..” I’m about to find my stride but he turns toward the bar and I am ignored as he joins the shoulder-press that’s gathered there.
In the fug, laughter spills in coughing clouds, Patrick rolls his sleeve and bony elbowed, pulls the pints. Creamy heads slop on the bar and Friday doubles chase the dark in time with tuneless anthems sung by angry men. I never sing these days. I let it pass. I’ve sung enough with ghosts, aged before their time and I wonder why I’m still here, marooned and clinging to a glass.
Glyn Matthews is a professional artist and escaped teacher resident in the UK with a passion for shorter written forms. He has won or been placed in various poetry and short story competitions, recently winning the Cheshire Prize for Literature.