If he were honest, Fred had never really understood the game the builders played, not intellectually so that he could explain the rules or anything, although he knew emotionally, down in his stomach so to speak, what it entailed. You had four players taking part at once, and each had their own corner pocket, with the idea being to knock all the balls you could in your own hole while trying to make it difficult for your opponents to pot all the ones they wanted to. Part of the thrill of watching it was all the trails the balls would leave behind them as they rolled across the baize or else collided with each other, ricocheting from the table edge in sharply pointed pentagrams of overlapped trajectory. The other, more anxiety-provoking part of the enjoyment was the way each ball had its own aura, so you knew it stood for someone, or something. It would just come to you inside your thoughts, what each ball meant, while you stood watching as they bounced and skittered round the table. Freddy focussed on the game in hand.
Most of the action seemed to be down to the east side of the table which, as luck would have it, was the side that Freddy and his fellow audience members were all standing on. The western builders, standing near the cock and castle pockets didn’t seem like they had much to do just at the moment and were leaning on their cues watching intently as their colleagues at the eastern corners fought it out between them. As Fred watched with permanently bated breath, the builder playing to the southeast pocket, with the cross on, was about to take his shot. Of the four Master Builders that were playing there tonight (and in so far as Freddy knew there were just four in that league anywhere), this one to the southeast was the most popular with all the locals, since the other three apparently came more from out of town and usually weren’t seen much hereabouts. The local favourite was a solid, powerful-looking chap who had white hair, although his face was young. His name was Mighty Mike, or so Fred thought he’d heard the fellow called. He was so famous for the way he played a game of snooker that even the lads below down in the life had heard of him, had even put a statue of him on their Guildhall’s gable roof.
He leaned across the baize now, low above his cue and squinting down its length towards what even Fred could see was a white ball. This white ball represented, Freddy understood, somebody white, somebody that Fred didn’t know who more than likely wasn’t from round here. The white-haired builder known as Mighty Mike now called out “Black into cross corner”, and then punched his cue once, hard, into the white ball, sending it at high velocity across the breadth of the tremendous table with its trail behind it like a tight-packed string of bright white pearls. It hit the west side of the table … Freddy thought that it might represent all them what left here for America after the Civil War with Cromwell … then rebounded into a collision with the black ball that the white-haired artisan had actually been aiming for, a sharp smack ringing round the dimly-lit hall as they hit. The black ball, Freddy understood with sudden clarity, was Charley George, Black Charley, and he felt a great relief that he could not explain when it shot neatly to drop into the south-eastern pocket, where the sloppy, gold-etched cross was carved into the round boss on the table’s edge.
The local hero with the chalk-white hair did that thing all the builders did whenever any of them pulled off a successful shot, throwing both fists up in the air above his head, the cue still clutched in one of them, and shouting an exultant “Yes!” before he let them drop once more down to his sides. Since both arms left their hot white trails as they ascended and descended through the space to either side of him, the end effect was that of burning pinions fanning up to form the shapes of brilliant full-spread wings. The odd thing was that all the builders did this every time one of them pulled off a successful shot, as though the nature of their game did not involve them being in a competition with each other. All of them, at all four corners of the table, threw their hands up and cried “Yes!” in jubilation as the black ball dropped into the southeast corner pocket. Now it was apparently the builder at the northeast pocket’s turn to take his shot, into the corner decorated with a skull.
This builder was a foreigner, and nowhere near so well liked by the home crowd as what Mighty Mike had been. His name was Yuri-something, Fred had heard, and in his face there was a hardness and determination that Fred thought might very well be Russian. He was dark, with shorter hair than the home favourite as he took the long walk round the table’s edge to the most favourable position, bent above his cue and sighted down it at the white ball. As with all the builders’ voices, when he spoke it had that funny echo on it that broke into little bits and shivered into ringing nothing.
“Grey into skull corner” was a fair approximation of what he’d said.
This was getting interesting. Freddy didn’t know quite who the grey ball made him think of. It was someone bald, balder than Freddy, even, and was also someone grey, grey in a moral sense, perhaps even more grey than Freddy was as well. The grim-faced Russian-looking builder took his shot. The white ball streaked with its pale comet-tail across the table to clap loudly up against another ball that Freddy couldn’t tell the colour of. Was it the grey one Yuri-something meant to hit, or something else? Whatever colour it might be, this second ball shot off towards the skull-marked corner.
Oh no, Fred thought suddenly. It came into his head just who the hurtling ball was meant to represent. It was the little brown girl with the lovely legs and the hard face who he’d seen by St. Peter’s Church the other afternoon and then again today, sat watching him and Patsy at their Bath Street assignation. She was going into the skull pocket, and Fred knew that this meant nothing good for the poor child.
A hand’s breadth from the death’s-head drop, the hurtling ball impacted with another. This one, Freddy thought, must be the grey ball that the Russian-looking player had declared to be his target. It was knocked into the pocket Yuri-something had intended, whereupon he and the other Master Builders all threw up their arms into a dazzling spread of feathered rays and shouted out in unison their “Yes!” with all its splintering, diminishing reverberations. Just as suddenly, however, all the uproar died away when everybody noticed that the ball Yuri had used to knock the grey into the hole was now itself perched at the northeast pocket’s rim. This was the ball that Freddy had associated with the brown girl he’d seen earlier. This wasn’t looking good. The grim-faced player who’d just made the shot looked down towards the ball now teetering upon the brink of the skull-pocket that he’d chosen as his own, then looked across the table and at Mighty Mike, the white-haired local champion. The Russian-looking fellow flashed a chilly little smile and then began to pointedly chalk up his cue. Fred hated him. So did the crowd. He was like Mick McManus or a wrestling villain of that nature, someone who the crowd would hiss, except of course they wouldn’t in this case, however they might feel. Nobody hissed at builders.