Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  Mrs Boseley was thinking it over. Duffy thought he was almost home and dry.

  ‘And you met Hendrick in a gay club?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you … gay, as you call it?’

  ‘Yes … sometimes.’

  ‘And is Hendrick gay, as you put it?’

  ‘Yes … sometimes.’

  ‘Whatjer mean, sometimes?’ said Gleeson ferociously from behind him. ‘You’re a fucking poof or you aren’t a fucking poof. You can’t be both.’

  Duffy should have said, Yes, sorry, Gleeson, you know about these things much better than me, I made a mistake, I am a fucking poof, that’s the long and the short of it, I’ve always been a fucking poof, I am a fucking poof, a whole poof, and nothing but a poof. Instead, thinking he was home and dry, and so not thinking, he said,

  ‘It’s been scientifically proved that all men are to some degree bisexual.’

  Half his head came off. First his ear came away completely, then half his jawbone, and a litter of teeth, and one eye and most of his nose and a good part of his brain. That was what it felt like. In fact, Gleeson had merely tugged on the pliers with the long clean pull of a gardener starting a motor mower. Duffy put his left hand up to his ear, beyond screaming, and felt the blood drip into his palm. And while his head was very slowly shuffling back into position, he felt the pliers clamp on his right earlobe, the naked one, the only one he had left. Oh my Christ, he thought. Gleeson bent to that ear and whispered,

  ‘Not me, poof. Not fucking me.’

  Duffy slowly looked up at Mrs Boseley. She didn’t look in the least surprised. She didn’t look pleased or displeased. She stared at him as if he were a newscaster on the television. He reached out his left hand, palm upwards, showing the blood; but all she did was pick his handkerchief off the blotter and hand it over to him. He swaddled it over his left ear and feared for his other one. Gleeson was holding it in a firmer grip than was absolutely necessary; but then he would, wouldn’t he?

  Fortunately, Mrs Boseley had made up her mind.

  ‘You’ll be late for work tomorrow, you’ll be given a week’s notice, you’ll clear up Casey within that week, and you’ll stay out of our way. That’s enough, Gleeson, really; I wish you didn’t enjoy it so much.’

  The grip on his ear relaxed, then disappeared. Duffy wanted to say either, Thank you very much indeed, or, I’ll fucking fix you, but wisely stuck to a middle course and stayed silent. He stood up, gathered his things from the blotter and stuffed them into his blouson. He heard the office door being unlocked behind him, but he didn’t look at it, or at either of them. He clasped his handkerchief to his ear, ducked through the door, crossed the shed, pulled open the side door and went out into the evening. He thought that it would be night, that this was the only thing it would decently know how to be, after what he had been through. But it wasn’t. It was still, cheekily, a bright, clear evening, and another fucking jumbo was coming in to land.

  The houseman who stitched his ear at Uxbridge Hospital smelled faintly of lavender water.

  ‘Well, it’s not the best place to stitch, but then again it’s not the worst. I don’t need to tell you what the worst is.’

  Duffy just wanted him to get on with it. He’d waited an hour and a half in casualty already, piqued that his injury was judged so unimportant, and that any old housewife who rolled up with half a television set embedded in her stomach could immediately jump the queue.

  ‘Ow,’ he said, loudly. He’d run out of the day’s stock of courage and didn’t care anymore.

  ‘Yes, well it would,’ said the houseman. ‘You know, it’s odd you coming in with this. I don’t think I’ve ever done an ear before.’ Thanks a lot, just fucking shut up and get on with it. ‘And I did my first nose only a few weeks ago.’

  I don’t want to hear about it, Duffy thought; just tell me about a nice clean aircrash instead, to keep my mind off things. ‘All 246,000 passengers aboard a pedal cycle of Cockroach Airways were killed this afternoon when … ’

  ‘I’d never done a nose before. Very nasty; all sort of sliced through as if someone had cut it with a penknife. Mind you, that was the least of his troubles. He’d been in a terrible car smash, and he was, ooh, in a shocking state, but they patched him up, all except for his nose. I suppose it must have been hidden under the oxygen mask or something. Anyway, I got the hang of it eventually. I dare say I will with this. How did you get it?’

  ‘I got it.’ Duffy had already told the casualty registrar various lies, so that he wouldn’t think it was a criminal injury and feel obliged to ring the police. Something about an ear-ring catching in a fence as he was running along. No, he didn’t have the ring for the registrar to examine. He didn’t have his stud either, for that matter.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’ No, of course I don’t. Duffy felt tired. Still, who gives a stuff one way or the other.

  ‘I wear a stud in it. Some people who don’t like me pulled it out,’ he said.

  ‘Oh God,’ said the houseman, and carried on poking with a needle that felt the size of an oar. ‘Well, I think we should all stick together,’ he added, leaning a bit more heavily on Duffy’s shoulder. The smell of lavender water recurred. Duffy smiled very faintly to himself.

  ‘I think I’m feeling just a bit tired tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Did they do something to the other as well?’ asked the houseman. ‘There’s a bruise coming up.’

  Duffy felt tired, but it wasn’t depressed-tired, so he didn’t let it count. His ear throbbed. The houseman had wrapped the bottom half of it tenderly in cotton wool and gauze and plastered it down. Duffy glanced in the mirror and thought he looked like Van Gogh.

  He drove back to his flat in Acton and turned round in two minutes. All he needed was his key and his notebook. Then he started back towards Heathrow. He normally made a bit on petrol, but he doubted he would on this job: too much town driving, too much stop-and-start, and then full pelt down the motorway. He was usually late getting up in the mornings, and a steady, petrol-hoarding forty-five became out of the question. Tomorrow he could dawdle, though. Tomorrow he could be as late as he fancied. He could cheek Mrs Boseley as well if he wanted. Might as well be sacked for a wolf …

  He reached the shed and let himself in with the key as softly as possible, just in case Gleeson was Black-and-Deckering his way through a few more recalcitrant employees. It was all quiet. He neutered the alarm system and padded across to Mrs Boseley’s eyrie. Inside, he looked for traces of what had happened only hours before. Was that a drop of blood on the carpet, or just an oil stain? It didn’t make any difference. ‘Mrs Boseley, we have reason to believe that there is a spot of blood on your carpet.’ ‘Yes, several of the men keep coming to me with nose bleeds.’ Or whatever. The Highland stag gazed benignly down from the National Trust calendar. Duffy flicked it a V-sign.

  He found the invoice file where it had been last time he looked. He found the file of forthcoming shipments underneath it. He spent some time copying into his notebook. Then he wandered round the shed, occasionally kicking at hessian-wrapped cases, on the principle expounded by Willett. But only cardboard answered him, never metal. He searched out various shipments and peered at the documentation tags on them. Then he went home, and straight to bed. Fuck it, he thought, I don’t like sleeping on my right side.

  7

  DUFFY SLEPT LATE AND got up slowly. His ear didn’t feel too good. He rescued some muesli that had been trying to escape from its triple straightjacket of polythene bags, and chewed his way through it without real enthusiasm. He never trusted muesli to be what it said it was. He couldn’t believe there weren’t jokers in the muesli factories who occasionally slung in a box of sawdust, or a bagful of wood-shavings, or a sack of hedge-clippings, just to see if anyone noticed the difference. They wouldn’t, of course. The worse it tasted, the better it was for you: that’s what everyone believed.

  At ten o’clock he went to the telephone and
dialled Carol. She came sleepily to answer it: she’d been on the old shit shift again, six till two in the morning. Yes, she’d love to come round that evening. Anything special? Were they going out? That was a joke, even though she never said it as one. They never went out. Or rather, to be more precise, he never took her out. What did you do last night, Carol? Oh, Duffy didn’t take me out again, that’s what we did. Her girlfriends smiled, because she looked a bit embarrassed. That Duffy, they thought, a real terror in the sack, we can tell. We know what she means by staying in.

  But of course, it wasn’t like that. They stayed in, and Duffy cooked her dinner while she teased him about how he always scrubbed the vegetables clean enough for a moon shot; about how the food was trying to escape, and how the knife gave a better reflection than her make-up mirror. They pottered around each other like an old couple. And, contrary to what her girlfriends thought, they didn’t go to bed together – also like an old couple. They watched television, and chatted, and sometimes, but not necessarily, Carol would drop her watch in the Tupperware box and cuddle up to him for the night. She’d stopped expecting anything to happen. Well, it happened elsewhere; and it was surprising how, after a while of not expecting it, you really didn’t mind. You even gave up quietly trying to rub yourself against him. You suspected he didn’t like it anyway – brought back too many memories.

  Next, Duffy called Willett and asked if he could drop by after work. He had a questionnaire in response to the one old Willett had given him the other day. There was a chuckle of assent. Then he rang a new number, one from his notebook.

  ‘Could I speak to Mr Dalby?’

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Dalby’s not available at the moment, sir.’ No: probably a bit early. All that late-night pounding up and down Dude’s, making sure the corks and the cocks are popping off regularly: it must take it out of a fellow.

  ‘When would be a good time to ring?’

  ‘Well, you could try about eleven.’

  ‘Fine.’ That would also make him nice and late for Mrs Boseley; help her pretend to work up a fine head of steam. At eleven o’clock he rang again.

  ‘Mr Dalby in?’

  ‘I’ll just see. Who’s calling?’

  ‘Oh, just say it’s Lord Brown’s assistant.’

  ‘Just a moment, sir … Putting you through.’ They always did, Duffy reflected.

  ‘Hallo, Dalby here.’ A precise voice, with neutral intonation, ready to switch to bossy or deferential as the occasion demanded.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Dalby, it’s Jeffrey Marcus here, Lord Brown’s assistant.’ Duffy could do a perfectly unstreet voice if he wanted to. ‘It’s a private matter, actually, not to do with Lord Brown.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve been talking to Christopher, and he tells me you’re doing business again.’

  ‘Christopher …?’ Dalby sounded puzzled, as well he might.

  ‘I know him as Christopher, he’s used that to me for a couple of years, but I daresay he uses another one for you. No flies on Christopher.’

  ‘If you say not …’

  ‘So if you’re doing business again, I’d like to come and see you this evening.’

  ‘Can you be more specific?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be wise, do you? Not on this line …’

  ‘Oh, I suppose not … ’

  ‘Shall we say nine o’clock, Mr Dalby? And I’ll come to the front door, shall I?’ Duffy hoped he’d say, No, not the front door, and give him an alternative, but his confident, almost hectoring tone with Dalby had clearly worked too well.

  ‘Yes, nine o’clock, yes, all right, Mr Marcus, well I’ll expect you then.’

  At least that had gone smoothly. Duffy regarded the success of the call as moral payment for the damage to his ear; that’s to say, the first, extremely small down-payment. As long as the rest of it went as smoothly. As long as he could continue to sweet-talk Dalby in person; as long as Willett came up with the right answers; as long as Mrs Boseley stuck to her agreement and didn’t have a frame-up and a copper waiting at the door for him when he turned up to work; as long as plan A – which involved tidiness, intelligence, acuteness and an enormous amount of luck – worked. And if it didn’t, he’d have to fall back on plan B, which involved being really rather nasty, cutting a few legal corners, and relying on only a fairly enormous amount of luck.

  Duffy ticked off his rosary to himself as he drove slowly to work in the late morning; he felt it wouldn’t be good for the van today to exceed forty-five, and dawdled along the M4, tugged at occasionally by the slipstream of airport buses as they swooshed past. The rosary went: fresh flowers, joss-sticks, tinned lychees, pistachio nuts, fresh clams, miscellaneous. Dalby must own a restaurant somewhere as well. He ticked them off, turned them over in his mind, went through them again, forwards, then backwards. It would have to be ‘miscellaneous’. His morale sank a bit at the thought. But maybe Willett would tell him differently.

  Looking back on the previous evening, Duffy shook his head at himself for the remark about all men having a slice of gay in them. Especially to someone like Gleeson, the inside of whose locker door was a papier mâché of Page Three girls several centimetres thick. And he’d kept his tongue under such good control up till then. It was the sort of remark you might toss at someone offensive you met at a party who was already quite sozzled and had a caliper on his leg, but not at a muscular page-fucker who had your pecker in his pocket, or at least your ear in his pincers. Dumb, Duffy, dumb.

  But at the same time, behind the sensation of having half his head torn away there had been a thought struggling out, and the thought was quite simple. It went: Gotcha. Gotcha. That final impulse of Gleeson’s to pull Duffy’s head off may have been simple queer-bashing; but everything before and after was about something else. The fact that Duffy’s ear was at risk in the first place told him that it wasn’t just about who he was and where he had met Mr Hendrick. The violence came from nerves, from jumpiness, from a willingness if necessary to wipe out the whole freight shed if that’s what it took to get what they wanted; a willingness haunted by a fear that if they did, this might blow it all. Which was why – though Duffy’s tail was in any case fairly well covered – they wanted to believe him. They desperately wanted him to be no more than what he had confessed to being when he cracked.

  And this jumpiness, coupled with their keenness to sack him on the spot, made Duffy convinced something was going to happen pretty soon; that some shipment or other was on its way. That’s why they had been so thrown when the new theft occurred and that’s why they wanted to believe Duffy’s rather thin, hopeful assurance that he’d fix Casey for them before the end of the week. They had no evidence on Casey, or even any knowledge of Duffy’s competence; but their worry made them believe they had both.

  So Duffy wasn’t surprised when Mrs Boseley played her part as arranged. As he was stripping off his jeans top at his locker, Tan was suddenly beside him.

  ‘Missus Bosey see you now soon.’

  ‘Thanks, Tan, I’ll think it over.’

  ‘No, now, soon soon, she say.’

  ‘O.K. Tan, O.K.’ He stretched self-indulgently, putting on an act for Tan. ‘That woman gives me a real pain in the melon, I don’t mind telling you.’

  ‘ …? You cut yourself?’

  ‘Yeah, I cut myself. Ear today, gone tomorrow. Oh, forget it.’

  Tan looked mystified, as well he might, by the different Duffy that had turned up today. This new man slouched across from the lockers to the raised office, pushed open the door and stood just inside it. Both he and Mrs Boseley kept their voices raised so that anyone hanging around could hear.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  ‘Yes. Sit down, Duffy.’

  ‘I’m happy here.’

  ‘You’re late.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Don’t you so me, Duffy, I demand an explanation. Other men have had to do your work until you decided to show up.’

  ‘Well,
that makes a change. Normally I get their shitty jobs to do all day. Now they’re doing their own for a change.’

  ‘If you’re not happy in your work you’d better find another job. I can’t say you’ll be missed here.’ They were shouting at each other quite loudly by now; out of the corner of his eye Duffy could see a baffled Casey, plus one of the drivers, looking up at them.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind it if there weren’t so many cunts around this place.’ That should be enough, he thought; however much they dislike Mrs Boseley, they’ll see that as a sackable offence.

  ‘You’re fired.’

  ‘It can’t be soon enough as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I want you out in a week. Now get back to your work.’

  Duffy kicked at the glass door but found that it was wisely reinforced. As he clattered down the steps he shouted over his shoulder, ‘Needs a cowing union, this place.’

  Though the bravado was fake, it still somehow infected Duffy. He was playing a game with Mrs Boseley, but he still enjoyed bawling her out in front of the shed. He sat in his dunce’s corner feeling quite chipper for most of the morning. And when the dinner whistle went a surprising thing happened. Casey lolloped across to him and punched him on the bicep.

  ‘Canteen,’ he said, clearly and loudly. Duffy felt like an animal experimenter who had finally taught one of his charges to imitate the sound of the human voice. The effort, however, took a lot out of Casey, and over his double spaghetti hoops and chips he slumped back into his normal taciturnity. When he threw his spoon down after his double plum duff and exhaled loudly, Duffy thought he might pick the conversation up.

  ‘What a day,’ he said. ‘Nearly slice me ear off shaving, and then get the boot.’