The Jaws

Vin could smell The Kid from across the table. Waves of spicy aftershave scent radiated towards him, made his nose twitch. He could feel the sweat in the gap between the waistband of his trousers and his stomach. Sitting perfectly still he tried to project composure, playing his mantras over and over in his head.

Step into the shot. Elbow straight. Eyes on the object ball. Grip hand loose. Deliver the cue.

On the lip of the glass ashtray next to him a cigarette sat, forgotten, burning inexorably towards the butt.

The score was 61-40. A lead of twenty-one. That would be rubbed out in thirty seconds the way The Kid potted. There was silence around the match table, just the odd muffled cough amidst the smoke. Vin’s clubmates and the odd real spectator sat on high chairs in the shadows, their eyes like cats in the dark. He could see the flaring coals of their fags from his seat, the glow of the ember echoing the intake of their breath.

They wanted him to lose, he thought venomously. They’d been waiting for this. Waiting for The Kid. For the six years that he’d been club champion he’d sensed them there, just beyond the pool of light that illuminated the tables, sneering at him in the dark. He’s not the most natural player. He’s not even the best player in the club. Fucking right he wasn’t. But he had bottle. And that was more than could be said for Clive or Mick or Eric or any of the snides that he had battered over the years. He’d dealt out humiliations and ground out narrow wins, shook their hands, refused their insincere invitations to the pub and gone home and rubbed polish into his trophies. But now The Kid was here.

Vin watched him, smirking that straight toothed smirk, and he ran his tongue around the gap at the front of his mouth with predatory languor. Vin had knocked his two front teeth out when he was eight. He’d fallen off a wall outside his parents flat block and landed on his mouth. The claret went everywhere, pints of the stuff on the pavement, on his t-shirt and in the gutters of the road. He’d moaned like a simpleton, lying there writhing as his mates ran to get someone. At the hospital they’d called an emergency dentist who’d cut the stumps of teeth out of his head.

He knew they had unkind names for him at the removals company where he worked now, though they never shared them to his face. Vin’s height and the span of his shoulders usually discouraged piss taking. His build also sometimes attracted the odd stare from women, women who noted the cinch of his waist and the width of his biceps in the fitted polos he wore tucked into smart trousers. Their eyes would drift to the wavy collar length hair, smoothed to a smart parting. They would avert their eyes sharply whenever he opened his mouth.

Offers and suggestions came his way all the time for ways and means to replace his teeth. Whenever someone proffered a solution he would look at them dumbly and. suck saliva through his gap. He’d thought of it before, of course he had, but he had settled for the fact that he was someone who once their teeth had been knocked out, they stayed knocked out.

There was no time or money for that anyway. Vin’s money went on memberships and table fees and getting to and from tournaments. Usually these outlays were wise investments. But the succession of amateur competition victories that had augmented his lugging wage for the last decade had been starting to elude him. Vin refused to accept that this was the natural order of things. He didn’t diligently do the weights in his bedroom and not drink booze and eat eggs every morning to lose. Vin prided himself on being the best of his class. The Davis of the amateur scene. He wasn’t Davis if he lost. Davis didn’t lose.

Vin knew he wasn’t in the same class as Davis, or any of the pros really. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that he could challenge their authority simply with practice – there was an elegance to the top rank of player, a purity of hand-eye coordination that was God given. But Vin could be the best in his domain, in the echelons of high-ranking almost men that drove around the country looking for revelation on the baize.

That’s what made him so good – he knew his place in the natural order, was content to win time and again against his peers, rather than graduating into the bottom rungs of the tour to get hammered week after week by Knowles or Thorburn or even, though it would be an honour, Davis.

Vin had made the pilgrimage east to Romford the year before last, on his own in his ten-year-old Hillman Imp. Davis had just won his third, beating Jimmy White in the final. Vin had punched the air when he’d done so, roared blind nothings into the dead air of his living room. Davis deserved it. Davis was proof that if you work hard, if you don’t succumb to drink and drugs and sex like White had, you could become a Champion.

It wasn’t just Davis’ skill. It was his integrity. Vin was convinced that for shots where Davis was sat in the other players eyeline he would sit even more stock still than usual, so sensitive was he to the idea of underhand tactics. Vin didn’t engage in them in his club matches, where he’d seen it all over the years. Coughs, eyebrow raises, tongues darting with juvenile, reptilian speed from mouths. That was another thing that Davis had given him.

Before he’d gone upstairs to the Matchroom Snooker Club, he’d taken a moment in his car, its neatness perfect despite its age. Breathing deeply he rested his hands on his knees, composing what he wanted to say. He knew this would only happen once. With his eyes closed in reverence, he’d taken his St Christopher from inside the collar of his polo shirt, kissed it for luck and had set off to meet Davis.

The Matchroom was so perfectly itself that he almost giggled on stepping over the threshold. Everything about it signalled, to Vin’s mind, class. The carpet was rich and deep, with the feel of what Vin imagined a high-class airport departure lounge would be like – a between place that would see you off, off into the world of wherever your talent and drive would take you.

Vin had taken his leather jacket off and carefully folded it over his arm, which had given him the air of a waiter. He’d stopped before reaching the bank of bright perfect tables, marvelling at the quiet and neatness. All of the men were tall and gangly and their smiles were brilliant and it was all Vin could do not to cry.

Membership was out of the question, of course. The journey time and the petrol were beyond Vin’s means, and he knew he would have to settle for his Riley’s club on the fringes of the Old Town in North Hertfordshire. With its overflowing ashtrays and its shit-stained toilets and the piles of fingernails left on side tables. The Matchroom was a different world. Here there was order and possibility. Business. Money. Calm. In the corner, genuinely, was Barry Hearn – chuntering into a handheld phone. And there, serene, swanlike and hyper real, on the best table in the club, was Davis.

Vin made a beeline for him and felt the softness of the carpet underneath his feet. Snooker Scene had outlined Davis’ practice routine in a recent article, and had even included a top-down diagram of the club, like a blueprint of a bank vault. The writer had spent a week with Davis, following him to his commercial engagements, of which Vin had noted approvingly there were many, and his diligent practice and his palatial five bed in the Essex countryside. The impeccable style and elegance of Davis’ life had given Vin the urge to tell him how much he meant to him. At the same time Vin respected Davis’ right to and his need for practice. For solitude. So it would be brief.

Standing out of the light Vin waited, taking in the perfect cream of Davis’ trainers, the starchy perfection of his jeans, the pleasing weight of his marl grey-quarter zip over an ice-white polo. With his hands behind his back he watched on, trying not to breathe too loudly. Davis finished the frame, dispatching the last black with a clinical thwack. Vin moved in.

“Mr Davis,” he’d said, as Davis’ friend or assistant or whoever moved around the table resetting it for the next frame, “I just wanted to tell you something”.

There was the ghost of a flinch in Davis’ reaction. It seemed as though he hadn’t even noticed Vin standing there until the moment he’d emerged from the darkness. But he recovered.

“Go on mate,” he smiled, his eyes darting briefly, imperceptibly in warning or plea to his accomplice racking red balls in a dark cherry wood triangle.

Vin had been so focused on his mission he’d not even clocked the unease. “I just wanted to thank you. For how you win. The way you represent yourself. It means a lot.”

Twenty-three words. But Vin hoped they conveyed the meaning, the things he ardently thought about Davis and the hope and clarity he brought, even if, by its very nature, it was a feeling beyond words.

Davis said: “Well, thanks mate. Cheers.” And then – he extended his hand. Vin had started forward jerkily to shake it. Pumped it up and down like a piston. Smiled his broad gappy smile. Davis didn’t even blink. To Vin that was the truest mark of the man.

That had been three weeks ago. But now Vin was here. Back at Rileys, about to get beat by this cunt Kid. This cunt Kid who had been buying up memberships all over the place just so he could come down for one day a year to each of the clubs and knock off their club championship, taking all the other members’ money in the process.

They’d heard about him destroying the competition in Basildon, heard about him winning in Letchworth, heard about him annihilating and decimating and killing everyone, a low slow rumble of death coming from all over the home counties, building like a pressure in the air you couldn’t fucking stand, crackling and thrumming like a summer storm.

The Kid was too good. He barely made a sound, floating around the table smirking. For Vin the act of assessing his next shot was an attritional war as he measured angles, craning his neck to get a side view or squinting one eyed behind the cue ball, chalking, walking, chalking, walking. The Kid strolled along leisurely, predetermined latitudes, following the cue ball to the next spot on the table he had ordained for it, the cue held one handed just under the tip, the butt carelessly grazing the carpet.

It was his carelessness as he killed Vin that hurt most of all. There hadn’t been a frame that he’d looked perturbed. Vin had almost nicked one after fluking a red trying to play a safety, had come close to clearing with obstinate precision from there. But then he’d missed. The Kid didn’t. It was 4-0. Best of nine. Now The Kid would close it out. It would be like Vin had never been there.

Vin steadily picked at his nails. Some of his cuticles were bloody. Then, from across the table as he flowed into his shot, The Kid looked at Vin. Properly looked. Smirked. Not just the wry, hint of a smile that had been stuck below his bum fluffed upper lip for the entire match. This was a provocation, an affront, a fucking piss take.

In the seconds between The Kid pulling back his right hand and delivering the cue Vin made some kind of a decision and almost unbidden tensed his shoulders and drew his elbows inwards towards his midriff like he was bracing for a punch at the exact moment before the tip of The Kid’s cue impacted the white. Just in his eye-line. Just small enough to be deniable. The black missed the pocket by half an inch and the room drew breath.

The Kid half stood up, his bridge hand still resting on the cushion, smirking his cunt smirk and looking towards Vin in steely accusation. It looked for a moment like he might protest. But this thought seemed to pass fleetingly and, with an inviting sweep of his hand, he gestured Vin towards the table, puffing a breath of air through his nose before stalking back to his seat.

Vin fought to keep his breathing under control and arranged his features in a look of mild befuddlement as if he had no more cause than usual to imagine that The Kid would have missed that shot. He wouldn’t win. He knew he couldn’t. But he’d fucking get one. Hitching his trousers up slightly over the jutting of his hip bones he moved slowly around the table.

Step into the shot. Elbow straight. Eyes on the object ball. Grip hand loose. Deliver the cue

Step into the shot. Elbow straight. Eyes on the object ball. Grip hand loose. Deliver the cue

Step into the shot. Elbow straight. Eyes on the object ball. Grip hand loose. Deliver the cue

Step into the shot. Elbow straight. Eyes on the object ball. Grip hand loose. Deliver the cue

Settling over the ball Vin sucked saliva through his teeth, his dark eyes flicking momentarily to look into the pockets jaws.