...the music in the pub pulses through me, and the low almost inaudible whirring of a glass as it vibrates, catches my ear, a thin sound picking its way out of the cacophony that surrounds. The sad looking flat beer that sits, despondant at the bottom of the glass is scored with ripples and the spectral remnants of froth hang, like tired, faded lace in rings round its middle. The sweet alcoholic smell wafts through the sharpness of drifting cigarette smoke and makes me sneeze, to the soundtrack of a drunken jeers, nearly knocking the glass from where it stands and spoiling this overlooked monument to the fat drinker that sits behind it, moustache peppered with the head of its successor. The messy roll-up hanging limp from his fingers taunts gravity with its perilous column of ash, that threatens to fall, sizzling, into the dregs in the glass.
After a slow, wheezing drag he asserts his little finger, adorned with a tarnished signet ring and, as though he knew what i was thinking, gave a swift staccatto tap of the cigarette on the glass sending the ash to its watery grave and feathering the sides with the tiny grey remnants.
The barmaid snorted at this action, pinching her lips and with all the flamboyance of a melodrama villain clattered an ashtray down on the bar. the alcohol saturated beer flannels atop it absobed its immediate blow, but not that which she intended as the fat drinker, eyebrow raised, ground his cigarette into the ash-whorled bottom of the glass ashtray with his nicotine stained middle finger, each twist exaggerating the subtle crudeness of his response.