The Glass Canoe (24 page)

THE SIGNAL

When it felt like time, we got two guys to stay at both entrances to the car park to give the word to anyone that felt like leaving to keep his mouth shut. And to come in and yell if official interference lobbed. And one by one we folded back the rear glass doors.

Mick and Serge went to talk to the publican in his office. I pulled out the phone plug, wrapped a cigarette paper round each of the prongs, and pushed them back into their female part. I did it twice before I got a dead phone. Anyone could call from outside and get only the sound in their ears of the phone ringing, as if no one was in, but there would be no ring at our end.

After that, we stood around. Waiting for someone to do something. The time wasn't right. Mick and Serge stood talking with the publican, who had his feet on the desk.

We waited.

The pub roar was normal, but there was something about the way the door flew open. Everyone turned. The King stood in the front door, hands on hips, looking slowly round. A sort of relieved silence awaited his first words.

When they came, they were like a bellow. Like an affronted bull.

‘What's all you fucken foreign cunts doin' here?'

Golden words. Every stranger and every Cross drinker swung at the nearest enemy. Several innocent travellers, just in for a drink, ran for their lives. The publican dived for the phone. Mick slammed the door behind him and Serge put three full barrels against it and wedged them with another barrel between the door and the bottle counter and followed Mick into battle.

GET UP. YOU'RE NOT HURT

I didn't have all that much time to lean on the bar and observe my fellow tribesmen, so I'd better tell you how things struck me.

The first thing was a fist that glanced off another shoulder and came to rest on the edge of my left cheekbone, its power gone; I got this glimpse of a big silver ring with a shiny black stone. Rings are abbreviated knuckledusters, the sooner that guy was down the better. I pushed past Eh and got stuck into him. I started quick and let go one of my favourites. It's a navel uppercut; hits the navel and travels up towards the arch of the ribs and in. Got him. He doubled forward. Another favourite: all knuckles together at the side of the head halfway between the eyebrow and the top of the ear.

The great thing about fist fighting is everyone keeps getting up. Gloves spread the impact and rattle
the poor old brain like the milk in a coconut, but fists hit just one point. You bleed, but so what? If you didn't bleed you'd be dead. It's a way of keeping a check that its clotting properties are unimpaired. Cop that.

‘Hey, Meat!' said Eh. ‘He was mine, eh?'

The guy was down. Anything like knuckledusters you deserve to stay down.

‘I don't need help, eh?'

‘Sorry, Eh.'

Then he collected one and fell over and I was busy again. I bored in to another group but the guy that got Eh began hanging punches on me so I turned to pay attention.

He was taller and had a longer reach and drove me back to the one glass door that couldn't be folded back. I stumbled against the doorstop and this guy did the rest. Over I went, backwards, head through the glass. He went away. I shook my head, felt for blood and looked round. One leg rested on the welded barrel. Blood ran down my back.

Alky Jack was up the far end of the bar peacefully watching. The group of older drinkers that never mixed in fights were still sitting at their tables near the windows to the front of the pub. Sharon read the paper, the demand for beer had fallen off sharply. I got up after a bit, and troubled her for a seven. It was pleasant, watching.

Mick was busy and as he worked I saw how well he protected his hands, like a boxer should. When he
worked on the head it was to the parts that gave or would turn with the punch. Sometimes he threw a deliberate glancing blow; I could feel the way he measured it, just to do damage and open the flesh—so his fingers and the bones of his hands would come up whole and ready for the next blow—yet not leave him off balance. Sort of cutting with blunt instruments.

I had a cut head and deeper cuts where I'd rested across the glass bits that stayed in the bottom rail of the broken door.

I got up amidst the surging battle and things weren't too steady. I put out a hand to steady myself on the Great Lover's back, but he was clobbered in that very instant and I ended up under him on my back again. Someone lurched above me, tried to recover balance and trod fair on my knackers.

‘Taking it easy, Meat?' the Great Lover grinned, blood dribbling from his lip. He got up.

I got halfway up, to my knees.

‘Saying a prayer, Meat?' Flash said, ducking a swing and poking up a right as if he pulled it out of his belt.

I rose to a standing position, legs bent, both hands on my only gift to the future. The pain rose on burning wires into my stomach.

While I was in this state, a guy that should have been busy with Danny spared time to uppercut me. Still holding them, I rolled over backwards like a hoop,
came to rest at the barrel, which boomed when I hit it. It didn't do that guy much good, Danny got in several quick punches and flattened him. Danny's face was flushed, eyes bright, teeth flashing.

‘Get up, Meat. You're not hurt.'

I'd said it enough on the field and sure enough it worked. The pain crippled me, but the magic words in that confident tone pulled me up like two strong hands under the armpits. Did I say confident? Any more confidence and it would have been contempt. Maybe that's what did it.

I got my hands away from there and let them swing. Felt like a beer barrel was tied to them. I put my hands up. The guy with his arm in a sling had the sling off and approached me valiantly. I didn't know what to do. He swung, not very hard, with his good hand. At the same time I threw a left. It wasn't very hard either. I wished he'd go away. Fighting with a cripple.

Next thing the cast hit me. It was one of those that enclose the forearm from the elbow down and end in a clenched hand, leaving the thumb and the last two finger joints nearly free. It felt like an iron bar. It was probably fibre-glass, much the same thing.

This guy must have flattened a lot of our tribe with his broken arm. I staggered back towards him, caught it again, this time on the shoulder. He was grinning.

‘I'll give you laugh, you cunt,' I said uncharitably, and got in close, inside the range of the weapon.
I got his nose, with my fist turning over from the wrist, breaking it to one side. I didn't let him go and I didn't pull him down, I worked on that nose. I got it loose one side, then broke it back the other way. You use the lower knuckles: if you use the middle ones there's the risk that the lower ones will be cut to pieces on teeth. Remember they weren't knockdown punches, just jarring and cutting.

Flailing, his armour got me on the ears, the head, cut my lips against the teeth. I spun it out quite a while, propping him up.

In the end he was too groggy to stand—blinded with tears, swallowing his own blood, his nose swinging loose.

Covered in blood, he fell. Fibre-glass knuckles are unmerciful.

He was finished. Believe it. My hands were a mess.

THE WALL GAME

A funny thing was happening up near the clock. They were fighting among the pool tables and manners were slipping. Pool cues whistled, teeth cracked, heads honked, skin split, blood squished. Serge caught two and snapped them, but this made two more weapons. Danny put money into a table and armed himself with coloured balls.

Flash ducked round, bent over safe from fists and whipped shoes off the feet of fallen strangers. He threw the shoes far out the back.

‘The bastards'll cut their feet to pieces,' he rejoiced as I went past headed for the far wall. From the corner of my eye I thought I saw Ronny come in.

At the wall a mass of bodies struggled. Danny was clocking heads with fists half closed round pool balls. He met a cue swinger, the cue caught the knuckles of
his left hand, one ball dropped and he got the guy on the side of the head. Alas, he copped the thick end of a cue over the eyes and retired, blinded, for a while.

Someone was down. Bodies leaned back and bobbed slightly. The kicking had started. I saw the King turn from an engagement in the corner, sensing the new situation. I saw the gleam of Mick's light hair. I into it.

The young clueless kid was in there and his brothers. I bored in and made a path and my rush carried their sort of standing scrum to the back wall. The wall shook, the clock clattered against it. My shoulders were in the ribs of two guys that I had my arms round, but they were two of the visiting brothers. The other one got me with the smooth end of a cue in the small of the back, as near as dammit to the kidney. I staggered, and their counter rush carried me back out of the fray to a sitting position against the bar. I came to rest in a pool of blood, sticky and warm on the palms of my hands, my head smacking the tiles.

When I looked up, the mass had closed again and Mick was still down. The King was ripping bodies away with both hands. Ronny and Serge, side by side, saw the kicking and left their work. They charged. But I had a better idea. I grabbed the twice-welded doorstop and raised it overhead and I charged too.

I met the first body—who was preparing a welcoming right for me from near the floor: I must have looked
a lovely target—and let it go as hard and as high as I could. And dropped my hands like clubs on the head of the welcoming stranger.

The barrel took the four kickers round the head and shoulders and drove them back into the wall just as Serge and Ronny got there. Finding opposition gone, our two tried to stop, but stumbled and fell over Mick, who was crawling back out of it.

When the lot hit the wall, the crack shot right to the roof, opened up and half the wall fell out with a beautiful crash. The strangers fell with it.

The clock stayed up, swaying, half in the pub and half out in darkness with sky behind it. A roof beam with cross members, together with half the roof, fell on Serge and Ronny, pinning them. Ronny didn't move.

The King and I protected Mick, while Flash and others came jumping on the flattened wall to get stuck into Clueless and his family. Serge tried to lift the beam off himself, but without Ronny's help he was RS. The centre of the fight was still where we were, the chance to kick was such a strong temptation once manners had gone. I tried to get over to help, but I was occupied.

Next time I looked Ronny was stirring, and shortly after he and Serge pushed together and got free. They stood up, looked at each other, looked across at the King and down at Mick. The King came over and they lifted Mick behind the bar. He had trouble with his back and was a while getting to his feet. By that time
we were a solid block, working together, mowing down everything. The three of them fanned out and I took care of the rear. We had a reason to be serious.

If they ran, they ran. We didn't follow them out to their cars. Our reverse wedge made a mess. Serge trod on an instep, you could hear the bones go. The King put his right hand into a face and the cheek went in and stayed in. Very depressed-looking, that guy; half his cheekbone in his mouth.

Ronny faced one of the brothers, who let him get too close. He grabbed, lifted, and threw him. The Great Lover, eyes peering through puffy slits, leaned with all his weight on one guy's arm that he'd pulled towards him across a small table, and was hammering the guy with the other hand. The one Ronny threw landed on this stranger, knocked him to the ground, but his arm stayed on the table up to the elbow. Which was broken backwards. The Great Lover peered round for the missing body, then let the arm flop off the table to be near the scream.

The invaders retreated a bit. They saw the empty barrels outside the cellar door. They came back bearing these gifts and tried to press them on us. They made no difference to Serge, Ronny or the King. No parts of their bodies were unpadded. Raised forearms warded off the high ones; they caught some and threw them back; others bounced off chests, hips.

One they threw landed on the clueless kid's hands. He had them spread out on the table in front of him and was gazing, dazed, straight ahead. His jaw hung down, one side more than the other. (It was split dead centre; when they opened his mouth there was a gap in the lower jaw where the two halves no longer joined. His bottom teeth looked funny in two sections and on two levels. They wired his jaw up in the hospital with metal screwed into the jawbone and coming out his cheeks.) The barrel landed on his hands and bounced off on its way. The hands stayed there, but broken, and if you had time to watch you'd have seen them swell as the blood came out of the broken blood vessels and the fluid came running to the damaged parts to help.

He copped it coming and going.

DEATH OF THE CROSS

Things went on much the same for the best part of an hour. There'd be rests when a few got weary, and the rests got longer and more got weary. The really injured stayed out of it.

Mick was on his feet at the bar, drinking. His back hurt a lot and he walked very slowly. Ronny collected a barrel on the head and it ricked his neck; he was recovering at the bar. The King and Serge were still full of fight when the cockatoos raced in to say the police had come.

The few foreign tribesmen still on their feet sized up the situation right away and were drinking at the bar before the police looked in. Two officers on their usual patrol. I guess they couldn't understand why there were no drunks.

They asked the strangers where they were from and got civil answers. There was no disorderly conduct. They could see where it had been, but no one was going to tell tales to two men more foreign to our way of life than any other drinking tribesmen, no matter how far away they came from.

We got the publican out. We watched the decisions chasing each other over his face. But he made no accusations. Police go away, but the boys were from this tribe and would be here forever, and their kids after them. How would he bar the whole pub? He needed
some
of us there, to drink his beer.

Someone started the fight, someone we didn't know and now he'd gone. We were trying to stop it, of course we were. As for the wall, it was due to go any time.

‘That crack was right up to the roof today,' the King reminded him. ‘You saw it.'

Sure, he saw it. He nodded, anyway.

‘The traffic. That did it,' Serge said helpfully.

‘The vibrations,' I said, remembering the bone barrel. ‘All that rain we had settled the foundations further down.'

‘That's a point to remember,' said Mick intelligently, ‘when you come to fill for the new foundations.'

‘Yeah, when's the new building going up?' said Serge.

There was a sort of intermission while the publican thought. Now was his chance if he was going to put us
in. But he
had
been locked away unsighted. He sighed. We'd say it was for his protection. He looked at us. We didn't go away. Finally he said, ‘The plans are approved. The builder might be ready to start.'

‘Might be here Monday if it's fine,' Mick said.

‘Yeah,' said the publican a shade drily.

‘We'll help you patch up over the weekend,' the King said.

‘That's the shot,' said Mick. ‘Stick around and guard the place. If that's all right.'

He looked at the officers, they looked at the publican. That was OK. He knew exactly how much they'd help. He'd have to call his manager in from his day off to guard the place at night and over Sunday.

‘See if you can fix the far door, Mick,' the publican said. ‘It seems to have the bolts twisted or jammed. I couldn't get out either door.'

Mick had the grace to look away as he went to fix it.