The Big O (A Screwball Noir)

by Declan Burke

  ‘Last night,’ Karen said, ‘pulling out of your drive? You didn’t happen to notice the guy sitting in the car across the street?’

  ‘I barely noticed the street, Kar. Why? No, hold on – you think it was Ray. This because you’re crazed on hormones. Am I right?’

  Karen trying to spool the memory through her mind, freeze-frame the moment and see the face caught in the headlight flash. ‘No,’ she said, closing her eyes, a nervous tic Karen had when she lied to Madge on the phone.

  ‘Bullshit, Karen. What you’re trying to tell me, except you don’t know it yet, is Ray did you a favour last night.’

  ‘Did me a favour?’ For a split-second Karen wondered what Madge was talking about: she’d had Rossi all sewn up by the time Ray’d arrived, the guy in a state, his dick in a mincer. Then she realised, shit, she hadn’t mentioned Rossi; never had, no point, there was nothing Madge could do about him. The guy was a force of nature, a plague of rats.

  ‘Saving you a trip,’ Madge said, ‘out to see Anna this afternoon. Like, the guy’s already gone, even before he sees Anna. How easy was that? And hey, try this – this time, you get to make the decision, show him the door. Jeez, Kar, counting them up, that’s about four favours he did you.’

  ‘Fuck you, Madge.’

  ‘Karen, if you were the type that could, we wouldn’t be having any conversations about anyone called Ray. But we are.’

  ‘What am I, desperate? I have to take personal shit from a dope who paints cartoons?’

  ‘All I’m saying is, if the guy rings, meet him. Slap him again if you want, get it all out of your system, and then ring me first thing in the morning to tell me you don’t want to hear from him ever again.’

  ‘What’s that, some menopause wisdom shit?’

  ‘Don’t take it out on me, Kar. Either ring the guy or don’t, do whatever you need to do. Call me later, tell me how it’s going. And if it’s going well, see if he’ll do me a good price on a cheer-me-up paint job.’

  ‘Will do. And Madge?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About Anna? Me not wanting Ray to meet her? You’re wrong.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time. ’Bye.’

  Karen blew a kiss down the line, hung up, poured herself a fresh mug of coffee; sat out on her tiny terrace, soaking up the warm morning and the faint scent of rhododendron. Wondering if Madge wasn’t halfway right: Karen had been nicely stoned when she heard Rossi at the door, the guy bawling like a calf on acid. She’d been freaked, no doubt, and Ray had got the worst of it – no way she’d let Rossi know he’d spooked her, not that skinny prick.

  So, yeah, she was feeling guilty about that, the way she’d taken it out on Ray. Then, finding the truffles after he’d left, that was the one that finally tipped her over the edge, started the weeping jag, her hormones dancing a reverse hornpipe….

  But even so, Ray right or wrong didn’t have the right to say what he’d said. End of fucking sto ––

  She cramped and it was like someone yanked a rusty saw through her gut. The weakness left her light-headed, pukey, and she thought she’d faint. When it passed she made for the bathroom, the cabinet, but even as she reached for the little brown bottle of Nervocaine she knew it’d be empty; seeing again the last of the pills disappearing into the greedy maw of one Rossi fucking Callaghan, the halfwit who didn’t know enough to tuck himself in before zipping up.

  She skipped the leathers, just helmet and gloves, rode for town; taking it easy, a motorcycle being no place to start cramping at anything more than thirty kilometres per hour. Thinking about how, okay, they were going different ways about it, but Madge and Ray were saying basically the same thing and for pretty much the same reason.

  Not that Karen’d be telling Ray he had a good point, or anything like. If Ray called back, and called often enough, then maybe Karen’d let him apologise, see if she could work out if he really meant it. Then, afterwards….

  Actually, Karen had no idea of what came afterwards. But she was going to find out pretty damn quick, turning now into the quiet street, the row of neat Georgians, seeing Ray standing there looking up at number 24, the one with the reddish-green ivy and yellow door, the shuttered windows of which were locked tight, Karen knew, because she’d closed them herself the evening before, leaving the surgery and heading for home.

  Rossi

  Rossi woke up thinking, shit, the Germans are coming. A rumbling outside his lock-up like there was a tank on the towpath, a tank that was trying to eat itself.

  He rolled over to see if he could peek through the gap beneath the lock-up’s double doors and – Christ, the pain, like someone’d harpooned his dick and was dragging him up from two miles down.

  Then came a pounding on the double doors. Rossi eased the sleeping bag off his legs and shuffled cautiously, one slow step at a time, to the doors.

  ‘Shut that noise,’ he bawled, ‘or I stab some motherfucker.’

  By the time they got him through ER, stitched him up and pumped the tranks in, it’d already been getting bright outside. Now, after only three hours sleep, he had a hangover like a blowtorch sizzling his brain.

  The rumbling cut off, so Rossi pushed out the double doors. Big mistake. Sunlight lanced in, needles to gouge the back of his eyes. He stumbled back towards the rear of the lock-up, found a dark corner to huddle into, wondering, Christ, how come it’s always me?

  Sleeps strolled in nodding appreciatively at the bare flagstones, the empty shelves, the rising damp on the rear wall.

  ‘I like what you’ve done with the place, Rossi. What they call minimalist.’

  Always, Rossi thought, with the fucking education. Sleeps watched documentaries stoned and thought he was some kind of mastermind. Rossi wished he could spit. ‘Whaddya want?’ he snarled.

  ‘You called me,’ Sleeps pointed out. ‘Last night? Wanting a bike, short term. So I brought a bike.’

  Rossi remembered calling from the waiting room, hallucinating on a combination of pain and revenge fantasy.

  ‘Fifty a day,’ Sleeps went on. ‘Any damage, you fuck up, leave a scratch, it comes out of your end.’

  Rossi, if hadn’t had a dick like Frankenstein’s neck, would’ve kicked Sleeps into the canal. Instead he gulped down three Nervocaine. ‘What’d you get?’ he said.

  Sleeps walked back out into the sunlight, Rossi following, the sun warm on his shoulders and seeping through to his spine, Rossi starting to buzz. Then he saw the bike.

  ‘A Chopper,’ he said. A can-you-fucking-believe-it Chopper, leather strips dangling from the handlebars, orange flames up the side of the tank. ‘What am I,’ he demanded, ‘a hippy? Born to be fucking wild or some shit?’

  ‘It’s fifty a day, Rossi. What’d you expect, a white limo?’

  ‘I was expecting,’ Rossi began, and then had to stop to think about what he’d been expecting. Yesterday he’d been expecting to be riding his Ducati, first time in five years. This before he got his dick mangled. Now the idea of throwing his leg over a kid’s plastic tractor made him want to puke. Thinking, Christ, the leathers, folding up in his groin, catching his dick in the creases….

  A wintry sweat broke out on his back. ‘I’m riding no fucking Chopper,’ he announced, ‘and that’s flat. I’ll ride the bus before I ride any fucking Chopper.’

  Sleeps shrugged, swung aboard the Chopper, kicked it to life. Rossi flinched at the roar, then waved his arms, gesturing to Sleeps, turn it off.

  Sleeps cut the engine. ‘What about you?’ Rossi said.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘What’re you driving these days?’

  ‘Sorry, Rossi, no can do. Last time around I got a suspended sentence, one of the conditions being that I don’t drive for two years. All is changed,’ he added, unnecessarily in Rossi’s opinion, ‘changed utterly.’

  ‘I’ll make it two bills. Two a day.’

  Sleeps considered. ‘For how long?’

  ‘Long as it takes. And when the job’s done, you�
�re in for five large. How’s that?’

  ‘Cash up front?’

  ‘What’d you get, circumcised? You’re gone all fucking kike?’

  ‘It’s a sellers’ market, Rossi. You need the wheels. I can get ’em.’

  ‘I’ll make it eight. Eight big ones.’

  ‘Can’t do it, Rossi.’

  Rossi couldn’t catch a break, was getting screwed from all angles. So he played his ace, pouring it on about FARC, the ex-cons’ co-op. Except, first he needed his sixty grand back. Sleeps was intrigued. ‘I’ll cut you in,’ Rossi promised. ‘Ground-floor rates. You can reinvest your five grand.’

  ‘I thought you said eight.’

  ‘This is a whole different deal.’

  ‘Make it six-five and we’re on.’

  Sleeps left, to return later with wheels. Rossi went back inside, turned on the blackened hot-plate. He put some water on to boil – in a fucking can, for Chrissakes; at least they didn’t brew up in any old baked-bean cans inside – and rolled a fat one, the job awkward with the bandage on his hand.

  He wandered outside and sat on the edge of the canal, bare feet dangling in the cool water. Wiggling his toes, thinking about how he’d have to ask Sleeps, how come your feet always look so white underwater? Wondering too if they had canals in Sicily, Rossi liked canals. You could dump anything in a canal, a shopping trolley, an old car, who’s going to stop you, it’s only a fucking canal….

  Except something was bothering him, an idea buzzing like a wasp at the window.

  He drank the sickly-sweet tomato-sauce coffee, comparing his lock-up to Karen’s place, how it’d been warm, comfortable, stylish. That black leather was one sweet couch; Rossi could see himself stretching out there, getting his head down….

  The idea found a gap, snuck in. Rossi, excited, listened to it buzz – about how, the last he’d heard, Karen’d been working till-jockey in a supermarket. And okay, Karen worked hard, didn’t complain about long hours, had stamina – but who lives in a flash apartment on what a till-jockey makes?

  He could feel it – fucking Sicilian instinct, it was – that Karen had something going on, was bringing home serious scoots. Rossi wondering, sucking on the jay, what were the chances, pretty fucking good he thought, that Karen’s scam needed transport, like say-for-instance a flame-red Ducati that belonged to one Rossi Francis Assisi Callaghan.

  Which meant Rossi, fair’s fair, was due points.

  Ray

  Ray waited while Karen tugged the helmet off, shook out her hair. Looking fresh, just out of the shower, skin still glowing. Staring at Ray now like she was waiting for an apology, some explanation. Except Ray was the one who’d been slapped, bawled out, threatened with cops.

  So he kept it cool, the way Karen was playing it, still straddling the dirt-bike, the high mudguards a fetching pink. Ray’d never seen a motorcycle before had pink mudguards.

  ‘Now you’re following me?’ she said.

  ‘Woah.’ Ray did a mock double-take. ‘You’re the one pulled up on me.’

  ‘Enough, Ray,’ she said quietly. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  Ray fingered the plaster-strip on his cheek. ‘Thought I’d better get a tetanus shot, just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Sorry, we’re not open Saturdays. And even if we were, we don’t do tetanus shots.’

  Ray, not kidding this time, did another double-take. ‘Yeah? This is where you work? For the doc?’

  ‘Frank the Skank, sure. You know him, right? All the pervs hanging out together in back-street bordellos.’

  ‘Jesus, Karen, relax. All I’m looking for is ––’

  ‘I heard. Tetanus. Like I said, we’re closed.’

  Ray struggling to get a handle on things: Karen working for the guy who wants his ex-wife snatched, except the ex-wife’s dropping Karen home late on Friday nights….

  Now, watching Karen haul the dirt-bike up onto its stand, not straining, just using this neat little technique she had, all wrist and forearm, Ray said: ‘You mind if I ask you something?’

  Karen, sullen, not even meeting his eye, said: ‘What?’

  And then she gasped, eyes blossoming wide; folded over, dropping to her knees, right there in the street.

  Frank

  Frank popped a Nervocaine, a vitamin C tablet and an optimistic Viagra, washing them down with a strong Bloody Mary. Then he brushed his teeth, patted down his hair and went back to the bedroom, shed his bathrobe and spooned in behind Genevieve, grinding his nascent erection against the base of her spine.

  ‘Gen?’ he whispered. ‘Hon? You awake?’

  ‘Touch me again, Frank, I’ll put on Simply Red. I mean, full fucking blast.’

  She would too. Frank cursed his throbbing head, his vibrating erection and then Genevieve, who wasn’t so much throbbing or vibrating as snoring gently – faking it, Frank was sure. He eased backwards out of the bed, bitterly disappointed. Christ, Saturday morning was his time….

  Padding downstairs, another Bloody Mary on the agenda, Frank found himself wondering, and not for the first time, what the actual point of having Gen around might be. Okay, so her presence in the Members’ Bar every Friday night meant no one was talking any triple bogeys or fourteen handicaps when Frank’s name came up in conversation. But Frank’d worked it out, he could be getting laid twice a week, with twins, for what it was costing him to keep her around.

  He sloshed some vodka into the glass, dumped tomato juice in on top, stirred viciously. Wondering if he shouldn’t arrange to have Gen snatched instead of Margaret. At least that way he’d never have to hear Simply fucking Red again.

  He sat in the breakfast nook, sunglasses on, bathrobe open, belly hanging down over his dampish silk boxer shorts, the erection bumping his tummy, frisky as a Labrador pup. It was another glorious day, Frank noted gloomily, another idyllic fucking autumn morning, sunbeams angling down through the blinds to sear his brainpan. He stared out at the manicured lawn he’d had mowed to putting-green standard while he sipped his Bloody Mary, wondering how come Madge got a pool in her back yard, a twenty-footer, when all Frank had was a stone bird-bath. In all the years the bath been out there, Frank had yet to see so much as a one-legged wasp fall in.

  He fired up a cigar, hoping to hell Margaret was enjoying her pool, a beautiful morning like that, cabana boys cavorting on the decking, Margaret flashing her pierced belly-button….

  And then Frank realised, with an adrenaline rush, that there was every chance Margaret was under surveillance right now, this very second, the snatch guy scoping the place, checking Margaret out through his binoculars. Margaret still hauling around some nice tits that, okay, could do with some lift but weren’t bad for a woman of fifty-one, had breast-fed twins. Frank could feel his jaw screwing down tight, his scrotum prickling; putting himself in the kidnapper’s place, Margaret blindfolded and tied to a chair with no way of knowing it was who was Frank standing over her….

  His erection began to hum painfully. He gulped down the last of the Bloody Mary and padded back upstairs and along the corridor to the bedroom, hoping Gen had kicked off the covers; she usually did when the mornings were warm. Slept naked, too, or wearing only a thong – Christ, yeah, now Frank remembered, she’d been wearing the little green number last night. And, oh yeah, there she lay, ass cocked at the ceiling, the scrap of green material disappearing between her buttocks just a tease.

  He got himself set, leaning against the door-frame, peeping between door and jamb; breathing faster now as he tugged his bathrobe open, the other hand already snaking across his flabby belly and down into the dampish silk boxers.

  Hell, it was Saturday morning, his time….

  Karen

  ‘And he lets you dip into the Nervocaine,’ Ray said, ‘like it’s a cookie jar.’

  ‘I don’t know if lets is the right word,’ Karen demurred. ‘I mean, I take them. Frank just hasn’t said anything about it yet.’

  ‘And it’s been going on how long now?’

 
; ‘Pretty much since I got here. Couple of years, I’d say.’

  ‘Ever think of going retail?’

  ‘Nope. Don’t shit where you live, Ray.’

  Ray nodded. ‘How’s the cloth?’ he said. ‘Want me to soak it again?’

  ‘No, that’s okay. Seriously, I’m fine. It’s happened before.’

  Karen lying prone on Frank’s over-stuffed couch of shiny green leather with dimples the size of saucers, Ray hunched forward on the chair he’d hauled out from behind Frank’s desk.

  ‘And it’s just the pain,’ he said. ‘Nothing else, y’know, more complicated.’

  ‘No, Ray, it’s just the pain. Just the cramps.’ Karen working for sarcasm but losing it in the high, the pills washing through. Then she conceded, okay, she didn’t have any monopolies on pain, not talking to a guy who’d had his arm broken as a kid, twice in a row. Or was it, shit, three times? She giggled.

  ‘Hey, Ray? You think this is what they mean when they say a girl has the painters in?’

  Ray nodding along, patient, like he’d heard it all before. Relaxing now, sitting back in the chair, the giggle convincing him Karen was fine. He didn’t even protest when she removed the damp cloth from her forehead.

  ‘Ray?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Um, thanks.’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘Usually I keep a bottle at home. But Rossi got the last of them last night.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it. I like it when women keel over in the street. Gives me the chance to act noble.’

  Grabbing the opportunity, Karen’d noticed, with both hands. Like, literally – picking Karen off the pavement, hauling her up the steps, taking her keys and practically carrying her inside. Then getting her the pills, Karen directing him, and coming out of nowhere with a damp cloth, insisting she lie down. Christ, he’d have rubbed her tummy if she’d asked. Karen trying to remember the last time she’d felt that embarrassed – except Karen didn’t do embarrassed.