I returned the next day with an old hair net - I’ve not seen Suzie ever wear one of them, but I found it at the bottom of the drawer by her side of the bed - stretched round a piece of stiff wire and tacked with cotton. The two ends of the wire, bent parallel, neatly fit down the central cavity of a runner-bean cane that had to be specially purchased from the garden centre beyond the church because I hadn’t done any bean growing of my own for at least a decade. You can’t get the manure any more. One cane cost me as much as half a kilo of sliced beans out of the supermarket freezer.
With my stick I managed to catch what I was looking for, which was a few water-boatmen, a snail or two and one of those wonderful breast-stroking beetles that seemed to be able to swim faster than Donald Campbell’s Bluebird.
I took my catch home. I inspected the water-boatmen under the special purchase microscope that only cost fifty quid along with the course materials. I drew the bits the assignment demanded. I then did various indicator tests on snail trail mucus and, for my own special project, I dissected a water beetle. My tutor for B101, An Uncompromisingly Environmental Approach To Sustainability Patterns In Semi-Urban Ecosystem Food-Chains, immediately failed me for killing something. I sent back a considered reply, asking whether she might have ever considered a cessation of her own breathing as a means of avoiding the wanton slaughter of relatively higher life-forms, such as bacteria and amoeba. It was a serious point. The university threatened to expel. I dropped the course.
But one serious point I did learn from a video supplied with the textbook was just how bright an octopus can be. I don’t imply, of course, that the eight-arm could win Mastermind, answering specialist questions on the topic of multibrachiality, no doubt. And, it has to be admitted that during an average day in Kiddington, one generally doesn’t meet an octopus, either live or at the fishmonger, not that there’s been a fishmonger in Kiddington for thirty years. They’ll do a piece of wet at the chippy, but it’s generally been frozen for a decade and cooks like damp cotton wool. Elseley’s fish shop, run eponymously by the old man himself, went when the last of the streets were pulled down. The fish, of course soon over-fished, went either to Spain, but not on holiday, or were pulped into tins of pet food, labelled tuna, and offered to environmentally responsible cat lovers at the merest fraction of the cost of the animal’s weekly hairdo. Frankly, I am all for cat-lit. Set ‘em on fire!
The octopus, however, is a rather bright pussy, as was confirmed by the videoed experiment that I watched during one of the course’s early units. Apparatus needed was one fish tank, water, decorative imitation coral, aeration system, one octopus, preferably live, at least at the start, and a brand new, sixty ampere-hour car battery with a pair of prongs. Place the octopus in the tank with the other equipment, apart from the battery and prongs. Earth the black prong. Place the large red prong reasonably close to the octopus, preferably on its head, and then have an assistant make the circuit. The shock is quite significant and you will notice that the fish, mollusc, marine spider, cephalopod or whatever the octactinal term might be for an octopus, will dash to the other end of the tank at the speed of sound, probably bashing its brains out on the glass as it does so.
Now if it survives the first part of the experiment, the second part is really interesting. About half an hour later, introduce the red prong again. Make sure the octopus sees it. Lo and behold, it rushes to the other end of the tank before - before! - it gets the shock. And this proves that your average octopus is quite bright. Not only has it learned in the Pavlovian sense that a red probe is capable of delivering significant pain, it has also concluded that it is part of an experiment leading to a course unit and is willing to go along with the expected outcome. Now that’s intelligence!
You might ask how it is, then, that most of the world’s octopus population finishes up being boiled and then grilled with powdered red pepper or diced into seafood salads in Benidorm tapas bars? But then I suppose that octopuses, octopi, octopussies have not yet formed a trade union. Had they done so, of course, they would now rule the world. They generally take so long to chew that, as a trade union, merely by staying power, they would have been able to negotiate whatever they wanted.
But you would have thought that after studying the intelligence response times of the octopus, then I personally would not have been caught a second time when prodded. I had poked my nose, achieved my goal, and then tried to repeat the experience only to discover the pneumatic but foregoable delight of Maureen the barmaid. Then, like an as yet unprodded cephalopod, I went back and did it again. Yes, I have been back again to the cave under Mick’s Montesinos house.
Honestly - and by now you know how seriously I take that word - I don’t think I set off with the intention of again achieving my goal. I admit that it did come into my mind. A sight like that crossing your consciousness gets all kinds of associations on the rise. Twenty-eight years old, mas o menos, blonde, though perhaps not naturally so, since the roots seem to be a different colour from one day to the next. But she’s small, even petite, slim at the waist, full at the breast, comfortably but not excessively padded behind. She breaks into a smile so easily, and it lights up her whole face, its wide-eyed invitation unspoken but obvious. And what I wish she would not do is wear those tight t-shirts that leave a gap across her middle just above the stretch pants that even hug the crack between her bullocks, two pieces of meat as fine as anything a chef might cherish. I could go into raptures about other parts of that beautiful little creature, but I would be moderated and I would deserve it. She so reminds me of Suzie when she was young, when we had those wonderful Saturday mornings in her parents’ house after they had left for the shop. I cannot begin to explain what happens to a man when he becomes completely obsessed with such a woman. You don’t want to think of her all of the time. You castigate yourself for being such a fool, a dirty old man if you wish, or a pederast or whatever you call a foot fetishist, but whatever you do you just can’t help yourself. The moment she is in sight, your eyes come to rest on parts of her body where your hands cry out to follow. It’s as if there’s nothing else in the world when I see her. She inhabits every corner of me.
Now the thought of again achieving my goal might just have crossed my mind, but I swear that this time it was not at the forefront. So I was genuinely surprised to find the Raptor effectively making its own way up towards Mick’s hill-top palace. I did as before and rode up to the top in low gear with high revs and sounded my horn a couple of times. Nothing stirred so I went down to the bottom garage and let myself in.
At the entrance to the cave I paused. I felt that Maureen feeling come over me and my heart sank along with other things that had been on the rise. You can make a mistake once. Any more and it’s already become a bad habit. No octopus would get stung twice and I berated myself for having come this far. Self-recrimination might have got the better of me, but I pressed on, pressed again that entry code that would open the subterranean vault. “Maureen, no,” I said to myself on each depress of the digit. Olga, my little Pushova, were words that I actually whispered out loud as the concealed door revealed itself. I went inside.
Things were immediately different this time. For a start, the lights were on. A full ten metres down the length of the corridor, lights shone brightly and a couple of the doors, both left and right were slightly ajar. I had been carefully quiet, but the door had opened with an unavoidable thud from the release of its electromagnets and the breaking of its clearly air-tight seal. Exactly why my brain registered this fact on my third time through it I don’t know. It ought to have been obvious from the start. A nuclear shelter that lets in the outside would be unfit for purpose, as we are now wont to say.
But immediately an associated fact fought its way to the forefront of my thought. If the entrance was airtight, then there must be a ventilation system and that could probably be controlled from somewhere inside the house. The shaft could therefore be closed, the fan turned
off. Whoever might use these rooms would be under the complete control and at the mercy of Mick Watson and his beautiful sidekick, the stunning Olga Pushova. As I closed the door behind me to hide the presence of an intruder, I realised that I was entering a prison that, on another’s whim, could be an execution chamber.
For a minute or more I simply stood where I was, listening. There were suggestions of activity nearby. I heard the clink of a glass, a tap run water and then a short, gravelly clearing of the throat. Then the furthest of the doors opened wide. There before me, framed in the backlight of a low power bedside lamp, stood a giant.
She must have stood six feet two in her nylons, but she was wearing platforms that added another four inches to her height. She was black. She wore black, but very little. She had, I surmised, been resting in her undergarments, lying down, probably to sleep off the effects of the three men she had eaten for lunch.
She made a sound. She didn’t speak or sigh, or grunt or growl. She didn’t cough or sneeze. Her stomach didn’t rumble. It wasn’t aggressive, but neither was it friendly. But it was a sound and thus the others heard. Within seconds, another three doors had opened. There, in the confined space of a corridor in Mick Watson’s dungeon, I stood virtually surrounded by four young women, who seemed to be wearing about six items of clothing between them.
I don’t recall how long the five of us stood there in silence, staring at one another. It seemed like an age. From where I was standing, I had no particular desire or interest in bringing the moment to an end. What was clear, however, without a single word needed to suggest or confirm, was that these women were still strangers to one another, despite their sharing adjacent rooms in their private, secret place, their prison perhaps. And none of them, by definition, was at home. Two of them turned to retrace their steps into their rooms. They both reappeared just a moment later, one in a floor-length green lace dressing gown and the other in a bright floral wrapper that she secured with a tuck just beside her left breast. The other two then also retreated to don minimal covering, one reappearing in red pyjamas and the fourth in an almost conical quilted house coat, the kind you might expect your grandmother to choose from the rail in a charity shop. I still had the other three to look at, however.
Still they were silent. They clearly anticipated something from me. I began to realise that they thought I was someone they had been expecting. Relief mixed equally with foreboding as I scanned the scene. At least none of them was Maureen. On the other hand, they were the kind of women who might eat Donkey Cottees for breakfast. As a defence, I adopted an air of authority, stretched up to my full five feet ten - nine and a half, actually, but like all good arithmeticians, I always round it up - and scrutinised each of the four frames before me in turn.
Furthest away was my original black giant. Now clad in that quilted housecoat, she looked like a giant pyramid beneath which there would be sufficient space to inter a pharaoh or two. But of course I already knew that beneath that lust-killer of a garment, there was the most stupendously luscious body with legs long enough to knot. She had very big eyes, which shone white and directly at me, and frizzy Afro hair that made her head about the size of a medicine ball, but an extremely attractive medicine.
Closer to me on the left was an almost exact opposite view. This was the frame of a small, slender Asian girl - I dare not say woman - wrapped in a batik sarong. The image barely interrupted the void of the open door. The legs that emerged shoeless from the knee-length wrapper were so slender you could imagine them snapped by the slap of a dog’s tail. Her hair was cut short, accentuating the delicate elegance of a head that had none of the complicated banded excess of a northern European scalp. She was like a young boy with a perfect bust. Just my type, if you ask me.
Closer on my right was a woman with long black hair. Her red pyjamas shone like a threat, at least a challenge. She had not fastened the front and her vast white bra crossed the revealed space. She was neither tall nor short, neither thin nor plump, she was just ... just right. Most noticeable was a hint of sideburns running down her cheek, a suggestion of significant body hair in other places.
It was the fourth, the second on the right that really did for me, however. And it was not Olga! Now clad in flowing green lace that, in retrospect, was probably polyester, was another tall beauty, blonde, invitingly proportioned, looking for all the world like she had just walked off a fifties film set, Doris Day with lust. It was she who spoke first. It was an eastern European accent that broke the tension.
“You bring papers?” she asked.
“Papers? No,” I replied, initially confused, but putting two and two together in the next split second. The answer came out at four, or perhaps more.
“You are with Mr Jack and Miss Jill?” It was the Asian girl who spoke. She had a voice that pinched at the hearing, like persistently applied digits might pleasantly peck at erogenous zones. I decided immediately that she was Thai, for no other reason than it reminded me of the word ‘untie’, which is what I fancied doing to her sarong.
“No,” I said, “I work for Mr Watson.” I paused, scanned all four faces, scrutinising the reaction, of which there was none, none whatsoever. They thought, presumably, that I was scanning their future earning potential and so tolerated my sustained gaze. “I think you are here to take jobs in Paradise?”
They all laughed. The little Asian gave a birdlike twitter, the giant a deep guffaw. Miss long black hair issued a piercing shriek and madam blonde European silently covered her mouth. It was an unlikely common reaction that immediately gave them something to share. They were immediately more at ease with one another, still completely wary of me. But after that moment, I sensed they presented a more united front to my affront. It was the giant who spoke. She had a beautiful rich contralto, leggy and smooth, like red wine matured in oak. “Paradise? Now there would be a place we would all like to go! That would be just fine, Sir, especially after kind of places we have come from!” She had a variety of American accent, the kind that comes from learning English from recorded language courses.
“I think we are to leave some time on Monday?” Now Miss long black hair was clearly Turkish. The voice was the same as the one that announced the arrival of the doner kebabs in the Sultan’s Armpit by Bromaton market, a place where Suzie and I would go whenever we wanted the greater sophistication offered by a menu that was totally unintelligible. It was the pyjamas that convinced me. They were bright red, edged in white, the colours of the Turkish flag. But then she might be Tunisian, I thought, but then rejected the idea on the basis that I knew nothing about Tunisian food.
I had to take the initiative. I mustered up all the confidence I could use to prop up the dithering edges of my voice. “I think you have all come for work?” Now that had to be somewhere close to some truth or other! They nodded. Relief prodded me to try again. “And you are waiting for information?” They nodded again, this time less convinced of my ability to provide them with something they wanted. They had clearly been expecting someone to call, but my continuing disappointment of their expectation and aspiration had not yet been transformed into either the insecurity of doubt or the anger of frustration. If I had been expected, I was probably early. I could still play for time.
It was the green lace of eastern Europe who spoke. “You have something for us?” They clearly knew much more about what was going on than I did. I yearned to answer in the affirmative, but its sense would not have referred to what she was seeking.
“Papers?” I asked.
They all nodded, looked at one another, looked at me. I was wise enough to realise that it was not the arrival of a selection of the daily press that was anticipated. But exactly what they were expecting was still unclear, unclear, that is, until my mind recalled a cardboard box in Paradise.
“Yes. Passport. Identity.” I can’t place who said what. The words fluttered as if held in common through the space between us. I wa
s clearly barking up the correct tree. I decided to go for broke.
“Ah, yes,” I began, as my creative instinct assembled a suitable scenario at speed. “I work for some of the biggest clubs in the area,” I said, placing visible inverted commas with index and middle fingers of both hands around the words ‘work’ and ‘clubs’. “I am a supervisor.” I placed more commas. “We have to be sure that what we do meets the very highest standards.” A gesture of open hands suggested sincerity. “And whatever we do, we have to get it right...” It was a glance or two towards attentive faces that delivered the ellipsis.
During the pause that I left to assess how my words might be received, my memory flashed back to those wonderful meetings I used to have, both with management at the pit for business and with the Trotskyite sub-branch of Kiddington Labour Party (non-affiliated) for pleasure. How often had I nodded sagely, respectfully at some clairaudient saccade in the former or a factoid grume at the latter who took time from the assemblage to announce, “It’s an important issue,” - cue nods - “whatever we do” - looks of anticipation - “we should get it right!” - considered agreement amidst respectful silence - “and I’d like that minuted.” What did the fizzing farceur think we were trying to do, get it blandiloquently wrong? Authority claimed and occupied by weapon of platitude. And that was what I was doing right now, playing for time and demanding attention by being inconsequential.
And the ladies’ attention was now wholly mine. Trying to relax into the task, I consciously decided not to rush, tried to take my time. “My name ... my name is ... Boris,” I said, flashing a wink at the eastern European, thinking it might just make her feel at home. If only I knew an African name I could have flashed at the giant... “...and I am head of the quality control department.”
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 33