A series: (2) Pick your poison

Combing back the strand of static hair that consistently fell into her eyes, the blonde barmaid straightened up from the glass racks below the bar. Exhaustion was stealing away her attractiveness. The sparkle that usually shone from her eyes had faded, and her skin was pale and clammy. The balls of her feet had started aching dully a few hours previously, and the ache had escalated into a painful throb. Her hair was pinned back (for the most part) into two pigtails: “bunchies”, her mum had called them when she’d scraped her hair into two identical chunks on the frosty Saturday mornings before ballet. When she was five. Admittedly, it was perhaps too child-like a look to be flaunting around old-man hangouts, although some of them seemed to admire it a little too much to be comfortable. Not that much they did or said was done to make the listener feel particularly at ease. She looked around the room a second time, her dark blue eyes narrowing as she made virtual contact with some of her least favourite characters.

The bar landscape stretched far and wide, or appeared to; the room dimensions were not particularly remarkable. The bar modelled out of a lukewarm brown wood; she knew it wasn’t “mahogany”, but it wasn’t “pine” either: whatever dull colour settled between that. It made up around three-quarters of the width of the room, with the drinking area curved around it in an L-shape. Only two tables were out of sight of the servers; the rest were dotted around freely in front.

Coloured glass bottles of varying cleanliness lined themselves up haphazardly behind her. Despite the small seating capacity of the pub, the alcohol collection was something to behold and certainly said something for the appetites of the clientele. Vodkas of varying strength, taste and flavour were shoved together tightly, making space for a splatter of sherries. They made the top shelf, and realistically, only three were routinely used: Smirnoff Red, Stolichnaya and Absolut, the latter a particular and expensive favourite with the younger crowds, although it smelt, looked and tasted the exact same as the house.

The shelves to their left housed the gin collection: enthusiastically rainbow-coloured, the shiny bottles, engraved with different names of Scottish land and progressively more exotic flavours, brought life to the bar. It was only in the last couple of years, when the gin industry had somehow boomed, that the pub had decided it was worth branching out. Again, the gin selection was used to a varying degree, and there were some core favourites that wouldn’t change no matter how outlandish the flavours became. Gordon’s pink was the go-to for the slightly hefty, faux-blonde, made-up women in their fifties. Bombay Sapphire was for women in this category who wanted to pretend they were classy connoisseurs; Tanqueray and Tanqueray 10 also hit the spot. Slightly younger women, late thirties to mid-forties, striving to appear cosmopolitan and glamorous, threw themselves at the offensively colourful types: Beefeater Orange and Whitley Neill Raspberry often made the cut. Younger girls still, realistically late teens and early twenties, were slightly more adventurous in their choosing, going for sugar-over-alcohol in their Gin Ting and Unicorn Violet selection. There were a vast number of white, ordinary gins that remained perpetually untouched. Rarely a tall, slim, dark-haired professionelle may enter, hair pinned back, made-up but not too drastically, medium-heeled boots and mid- to long-line trench coat with the inevitable animal fur attachment somewhere - how did they all know to dress the same? This in itself was amusement enough - and order a Hendricks with cucumber, or Caorunn - “remember both lime and lemon, please.”

To the left of the gins were the rums and brandies. Big, bubbly, black bottles stood, glaring intimidatingly at the customers. Rum-drinkers tended to be aging young men, starting from their twenties and usually just below forty, they’d order “Cap’n Morgan’s Spiced, please: double, coke, no ice.” A few shots would likely accompany this, progressing rapidly from the 15% stuff, that tasted no different to undiluted diluting juice, up the ranks, to jaegerbombs to sambuca to tequila to vodka - shotting vodka is only, and should surely remain, something fifteen year olds do to act the big man? - and along the way, the trusty rum n’ coke - “eh, yeaaah, make that a double actually, hen” - remained their reliable sidekick, always on hand to wash it all down.

A few wines dotted the uninspiring black industrial fridge that sat obtusely at the end of the row. These were the wines the pink-gin-drinking ladies would a-turn to once they decided they’d outgrown their respectability and were ready to “get ON-it”. They’d usually order the pub favourite: “Ehhh, Pinot; yea, no, a bottle, one glass,” which looked and tasted like acidic urine. Some of the small-time drinkers would bashfully order bottles of the rose, hoping desperately that the sweetness would overpower the too-strong alcoholic bitterness that flowed in gallons from the bottle. They hoped in vain; only slightly better than the shoddy take on Pinot Grigio, the rose, “White Zinfandel”, had nothing white nor zinfandelic about it. It was like blackcurrant juice gone off, and once it touched the back of your throat, you had an acidic burn that haunted your tonsils for the remainder of the night. So bad, in fact, that every successive drink was drunk with the sole purpose of destroying the ghastly, sharply-sweet, Echo Falls-esque taste. These women would resultantly fall over their chairs on the way to the toilets, belligerently stroke the heads of bald men whilst laughing raucously, purse their lips and flick their hair posily, feeling very subtle as they covertly try to make eye contact with the married man on Table 7 - and appearing extremely obvious.

Chardonnay - a poor wine of choice at any level - was yet another option, usually chosen by the mums who took their chubby, greasy, hyperactive kids in to use the toilet and left them there to rush up for a quick glass and packet of crisps before they were due to go. Children weren’t allowed in the pub, technically, but because it served food during the day, and because one of the managers, Mark, let his girlfriend-slash-wife-slash-mistress (who knew?) in with her bewildered little boy, no one really knew what was right or wrong.

Red was served - oddly, given the rationed sélection de blancs, four different types were on offer - but this was usually reserved for the semi-metrosexual men who came in once a week with their younger, slimmer, blonder counterparts. Some women drank red, admittedly, but they tended to be older and wiser and have more experience nursing their drinks than downing them.