They occupied the exact centre of Mick’s car park-sized living room, the tall, heavily-built Johnny just left of centre, while his much smaller partner was just to the right, slightly removed, her greater distance from the room’s epicentre apparently calculated to balance his turning moment in the opposite direction. Before he said a word, it was obvious that Johnny would exude confidence. His hair was greying. From the back he revealed an almost perfect tonsure, his large frame both high and wide, his stance suggesting an inclination to favour the left that, on scrutiny, was ambiguous. Though he did not in fact lean over when he spoke, he gave the impression he would, a hint of pivot at the waist to accompany what surely would be significant, full-voiced words. The effect was startling, in that I immediately imagined those whom he addressed being presented with a barrel chest and immense shoulders bearing down in perceived threat. He thus immediately and silently identified himself as a man unused to contradiction. I offered a hand and a hello predicting that the voice would be deep, voluminous and sonorous, even stentorian. He had as yet uttered no sound to assert dominance, but his presence seemed both to demand and automatically receive servility.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the words, “Pleased to meet you,” came out sounding more like Donald Duck than John Barrimore. I tried not to laugh and succeeded, fearing for the structural integrity of my neck. I shook hands with Mil, who was sixty-ish, wiry and tanned. She was vaguely reptilian in appearance, her skin reminding me of a recently-wrung wash leather. A scrap yard of bangles jangled up and down her forearms as she lifted her hand towards me, their sparkle mirrored in the sheen of the gold lamé top whose proximity to the apparent knot of pipe cleaners it covered remained an aspiration. No kiss was offered or suggested. We were both British, after all.
“Hello, Don. Do excuse him,” she said, nodding towards the now silent but towering figure of Johnny to her right. “He’s got a voice box fitted. He don’t say much, but when he does speak he usually brings the house down.”
I nodded, double-checking the integrity of my surroundings
Her vowels were clearly adopted in London. Her voice, however, was probably made from a block of stone by a man with a chain saw. It rasped out the words, sounds that seemed to grate at the throat and then elasticate her lips. She had the wheeze of a heavy smoker, but broadcast no nasal evidence of still possessing the habit. She was also short-tongued, rhotacistic, no less, but her over-compensation produced a back of the mouth y rather than a front w. It endowed her speech with a strong hint of chewing.
“Johnny’s a business associate,” said Mick, slapping his pal on the back, the thud suggesting solidity.
“Ten years now,” warbled Johnny, after he had placed a finger to the base of the Paisley cravat he wore at the open neck of his plain shirt. Suzie did her best not to laugh. She failed. It sounded like someone trying to sing Jingle Bells through a kazoo.
“See what I mean?” said Mil, offering a wide-eyed, head-shaking, long-suffering expression.
It was at this point that I experienced a sudden revelation of theatrical potential close at hand. In the second level course, T273, Talent Identification And Development In The Neo-Vaudeville Variety Act Genre, I read around the course notes a little to appreciate the potential for absurd contrast in comedy. It is inherently amusing before a word is spoken.
The classics, of course, were Laurel and Hardy, the thin and the portly, the dim and the quick, reversal when it mattered. Morecambe and Wise played the same pitch, Morecambe synonymous with working-class seaside, a town that didn’t need morgues because locally they called them bus queues, a Wise suggesting a middle-class fool, suburban quietude to contrast, role-reversal producing the greater laughs. Abbott and Costello might provide the lie, that’s Russ and Elvis, by the way.
And here we had Johnny and Mil, he built like a super-heavyweight boxer and sounding like a sparrow, and she built like a bird and sounding like a bruiser. All we would need, I thought, is some material, and that would be easy enough to find and we would have a world-beating double-act that could pack them in at The Castle.
“So how long are you here for?” asked Mil, her voice imitating sandpaper being chewed.
“We’ve come to live,” said Suzie, innocently not even allowing the essential corollary to enter her head. In effect, she continued by answering the next question which, though intended for me, was never asked. She is very quick to assert her rights over her oral territory, my Suzie. “We’ve been here for four months”.
“Suzie’s our new manageress at The Castle,” said Mick, gloating, as if he was no less than proud to show her off.
“Oh, so you’re the one... I hear that you have already made quite an impact.”
“I hope I have,” replied Suzie, “but I haven’t really started yet. I’m working on some ideas. When everything’s ready, I need to pass it by Mick to see if we can put something in place. There’s nothing new under the sun, no real changes, just some ways of tightening up what we do. But the pay-back will be immediate.”
“I like that,” said Mick, making an exaggerated grasp with the extended fingers of his left hand. “I like the idea of Suzie passing things by me. All the water in this establishment has been personally passed by the manager. The old ones are always the best.”
Johnny’s hand moved towards his throat and we all paused, the silence pregnant with expectation of a new warbling, but the hand continued its rise, eventually achieving the nose-pick it sought. Suzie was trying not to laugh. I thought I might have heard her cheeping sparrow-like under her breath, attempting to anticipate Johnny’s sound, but it may have been a blackcap tacking its way through the oleanders that bordered the open French windows.
“See what I mean?” asked Mick of Johnny and Mil, his incongruity of comment indicating that a conversation on the subject had been interrupted mid-stream by our arrival. Suzie’s start at the Castle, it seemed, had already been the subject of management analysis. “Suzie’s our lady for The Castle, there’s no doubt about that.”
“So what about you?” asked Suzie, addressing Johnny. “How long have you been here?”
“Oh ages,” replied Mil, copying Suzie’s tactics by becoming her husband’s voice, her three syllables occupying the best part of five seconds. “My memory’s no good these days. How long is it Johnny?” she said, prompting Suzie to splurt a slobbered giggle at the double-entendre. Johnny was, after all, exceptionally tall.
“Fifteen years,” he self-ventriloquised. Suzie muffled another chuckle.
“That’s right”, she continued. “It was just after your operation. We thought it best to take an early retirement. But we’d done very well before that so we were lucky enough to be able to move out here lock, stock, and barrel, so to speak. Johnny was in a line of business that relied upon really good communication skills, so there was no point in trying to soldier on in London. Better to make a clean break and start afresh. There’s no point in fighting the same old battles. And we’ve never looked back, have we, my love?” Mil’s speech, as is common in London, also elided the letter l. It was in L114, Socio-Linguistics As Indicators Of Neo-Geographical Class Formation, that I first analysed the well-known comic phrase “All right?” in its pure London form, where the central labials become an unspoken, unproduced w that collides with the central rhotacism, making the phrase sound more like a stretched “Oi?”
Johnny nodded, his large frame appearing to bend stiffly at the waist to rock forward several times. It was his version of a nod of the head. Unfortunately, it reminded Suzie of those toy ducks that rock back and forth until their beaks touch water and she had to stifle another stuttered giggle.
Johnny’s stiffness was immediately contrasted by Mil’s sudden desire to scratch her back, an action that caused her facial features to bend and squirm like melting plasticine, as her clearly double-jointed arm snaked apparently boneless over a shoulder to al
low a glossy painted red thumbnail to hack at a mole near the halter of her exposing top. She was obviously braless; not that it mattered, since what there was hung very low and hardly oscillated as her elbow gyrated near her left ear. “Christ... Oooh”, she moaned. “That macaronic thing will be the death of me...” It was then that Olga’s jewellery clinked into the room with a tray laden with our drinks.
“It is white wine for Suzie and beer for Mr Don,” she said.
Mick seemed uncharacteristically quiet, electing not to fill the silence that followed. The six of us sipped our drinks for a few moments, and it was only then that the immense dimensions of the room really registered. I was standing next to an antique desk, its green leather top edged with an embossed gold border. There was a computer monitor at one end, and a floor standing computer tower unit at the side. Now when my computer, a laptop, sits on my desk in Rosie’s living room, there is precious little space left for me. And here was a desk in Mick’s living room doing no more than nestling into a corner. I tried to count the thirty centimetre tiles that covered the width of the floor, but lost my way soon after thirty. There were three quite separate seating areas, each with its own colour scheme, three piece suite and low table. But it was the far wall that amazed, because it wasn’t there. They seemed to be French windows, but, on second glance, the entire space was simply open to the terrace outside. More than thirty feet across and nine feet high, the outside world simply entered the room.
Mick was watching me. “They go into the floor, Don,” he said, correctly anticipating my interest. And with that he walked over to the desk, a considerable distance, and flicked several switches set under the top towards the left corner. They were concealed, so I could not read their ergonomics. Motors began to whirr softly and glass panels began to appear from a groove in the floor, rising slowly to cover the open space. Mick again flicked the switches, and the panels descended again into their parking place. “It’s through the keyhole time!” said Mick, at last.
As if responding to a cue, Olga suggested she take us on a tour of the house. Taking Suzie firmly by the wrist, she set off towards the entrance hall. “Come, I show you the house. We start with the kitchen,” she said with an uncharacteristic hint of animation. “Please follow, Mr Don.” I needed no second call to follow that which wiggled and squirmed before me.
We must have been away from the others for a good twenty minutes, while Olga showed us around the entirety of Mick’s inverted palace. The street level where we had entered was in fact the top floor of five. We kept going down and, on each floor there were bedrooms, bathrooms, utility rooms, lounges, games rooms, corridors and more. There was a garage on each of the first four floors - every one except the top one where actually you needed it! - three of which contained cars. Two were quite mundane, a Focus and a Mondeo, whilst in the third I was more than surprised to find Mick’s old Jag, the very one that used to parade himself and Annie through the streets of Kiddington’s council houses. Probably worth a fortune by now, I thought. The Porsche Cayenne did not seem to be at home today.
The lowest garage had been set out as a playroom with a pin-ball machine, table football, a full size snooker table apparently ready to start a frame. There were various bikes and motor bikes and, right in the middle of it all, a brace of quad bikes. I had stopped counting bedrooms and bathrooms after seven of each, but the quads caught my attention.
“Now that’s something I have always wanted,” I said, walking over to admire the machines. Memories of Mick’s slow-throbbing Matchless came to mind.
“So who lives here, Olga? Is it just you and Mick?”
“Yes,” she replied with supreme reticence, but without a hint of irony. Her Russian accent declaimed everything with a falling tone, suggesting to my ear that she thought all questions put to her were quite stupid, or obvious, or both. “But mostly it is just Mick when I am away,” she qualified.
“So do you go away often?” asked Suzie, prompting me to wonder why on earth she wanted to know.
“It is business.” There was that falling dismissive tone again, suggesting that any household on the planet might operate that way.
Eventually, as we retraced our steps along the corridor that led from that last garage, I plucked up the courage to ask the question that had been on my mind. I was about to suggest that Johnny and Mil might make a superb double act for The Castle, that they might bring the house down, but I wanted to float the idea gently.
“Do you see Johnny and Mil often,” I asked.
“Yes, often. Mr Johnny is good man,” said Olga. “He can make things happen. We get problem in Paradise and only one call to Mr Johnny. Problem gone. Never come back.” She finished her speech as we arrived at the base of a short flight of steps.
At the head of the steps was an electronic keypad set into the wall. It caught my attention. We were in the bowels of the house. There was a garage on this level but it didn’t seem to be used. And yet, beside the door at the head of the steps there was an electronic keypad set into the wall. Olga had noticed my interest. She paused, probably unsure of what to say or do. But then she took the step forward. It was clear that she was going to show us what lay beyond, whatever the code might reveal.
As her hand reached towards the pad, I had already created three four-digit codes that I thought Mick might have chosen. Olga’s delicate, long-nailed fingers pressed the most obvious candidate onto the touch-pads and the blank wall at the base of the steps became a door and swung open. Beyond there was a dark abyss.
“Previous owner Dutch,” said Olga, as she used a remote control from her pocket to switch on a light. It revealed what seemed to be an immense black chasm straight ahead. “In eighties they worry about war with Russia so build nuclear shelter. They dig one hundred metres through rock into mountain. Solid rock. Now very useful for storage.”
A second light came on, about ten metres into the void. It illuminated a large padlocked door in what seemed to be an excessively solid frame.
“I used to work in a coal mine,” I said, “just like in Siberia...” - assuming, of course, that she had been there - “I have seen many tunnels like this.”
“Useful for storage”, she repeated. “No coal under mountain.”
“Have you known Johnny a long time?”I asked.
“Yes. From the start. I know Johnny six years. I am with Mick six years. I know Johnny from beginning. Johnny and Mick do business together. He interview me with Mick.”
“Interviewed? You mean for a job?”
“Of course,” said Olga, the falling tone at the end heavily stressed, indicating perhaps that she considered it a question that might have come from a retarded - sorry, educationally-challenged six-year-old. “I come here as administrator in their business,” she continued after a considered pause. “They need to write letters in Russian. They advertise.”
“And then you took up with Mick,” I asked, euphemistically.
“Yes,” said Olga. “Opportunity comes up, so I grasp it.”
“And Mick’s opportunity has a habit of coming up,” I thought.
“I think that Johnny has got used to his voice box very well, but his voice sounds very funny,” said Suzie, a broad smile inviting Olga to agree.
“It is time to go up,” she said, “but please, do not laugh. He is sensitive man.”
“Did he have cancer?”
“No he get shot in neck by business friend,” said Olga with some surprise alongside her standard tone. “This is why he retire. Especially to Spain. A quiet life.”
“By a business friend? Don’t you mean by an enemy?” asked Suzie.
“No,” said Olga calmly. “It was business friend. They have partnership. Have argument. Get shot in neck.”
I had to scratch my head. “Well, if that’s what happens to business friends, I can’t imagine what happens to the enemies.” My smil
e was cut short.
“He kill them,” she said.
And with that Olga turned to retrace her steps along the short corridor. I looked at Suzie, casting a glance that suggested she might resist the temptation to laugh at him in future, and whispered, “And to think I had them down as a double act for The Castle.”
With that the lights went out, returning the three of us to the blackness we had entered. Another door opened and cast a shaft of fluorescent light our way. We went through and came to a narrow passage and there, at the end, was a lift. A lift! And it was big enough for four people. Olga tapped a series of numbers into a keypad before selecting the number zero from the floor indicators. It took just a few silent seconds for us to arrive back at the top, at the opposite end of the entrance hall from where we had been led into the lounge. Looking back to see that we had emerged from what on the outside looked like a wardrobe, I realised that there had been an unopened similar double cupboard on each floor on the way down, so it did really serve all floors, the promise of the sequence of regularly numbered lights of its interior thus proving quite real.
Six more people had arrived. There was Phil Matthews and Karen from The Castle. Our introduction to them was perfunctory, since we had seen a lot of them recently at the pub. George and Elizabeth, however, were new to us, as were, Pedro and Alicia.
George introduced himself. From his manner, you’d think he owned the place. It wasn’t just confidence, or mere self-assurance either; it was a sense of control that he exuded, a claim to mastery of all within his universe, both immediate and otherwise. He barked like a dog, spoke in short declamatory phrases, clipped, self-closing.
“George Jones,” he said, his handshake vice-like, his voice deep, sonorous and loud. “You must be Donald Cottee and, I believe, Suzie Cottee, the new manageress of The Castle.”
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 13