The Life and Loves of Gringo Greene

by David Carter

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid!’ said father, who almost never swore, but sometimes...

  ‘You are crass!’ butted in Trisha, but for once Glen found Mary’s comment quite funny, and let out a telltale little giggle. What if she had killed him? Sometimes he almost deserved it. What if she had cut up his body and crammed it into her case? It wasn’t impossible. These things happen all the time, you read about it in the newspapers, see it on the TV news, and the truth was, she did once seek out a kitchen knife for protection one night when he came home late, drunk and ultra violent, and what frightened Glen most of all, was that she knew that she was quite capable of plunging that butcher’s blade deep into his American heart, if it ever came to it, and why shouldn’t she, if her own safety was in danger? Why shouldn’t she? Who wouldn’t? Do they have the death penalty in New York… for women… who kill in self defence? Killing someone is not as outrageous as you might think, or as difficult.

  ‘Get in the car,’ said father, ‘Glen in the front.’

  The sisters clicked their tongues and sulked themselves into the back seat.

  ‘Why should she always sit in the front?’ moaned Mary.

  ‘Because Glen is the eldest and she’s just come home,’ said father, and in the way he said it, he made it known there was to be no more discussion on the matter. It had always been that way, Glen is the eldest, a phrase that had been uttered a gazillion times in the previous twenty years, a phrase the younger sisters detested, a phrase that even Glen found uncomfortable at times, though not on this occasion.

  She adored the fact her father made her feel so special, even if it was at the expense of her siblings. Few men, in her experience, had ever been able to accomplish that. Oh true, men were always buying her presents and making her promises, but more often than not, they came with strings attached. The hint of an expensive wristwatch perhaps; so long as you come on holiday for two weeks. No thanks pal. Glenda Martin could never and would never be bought with trifles and trinkets. Fact was, she could happily marry and live with an unemployed road sweeper, if ever she fell head over heels in love with such an imaginary man, and she didn’t think her sisters could do that for a moment, indeed they would laugh derisorily at such a preposterous idea, yet in her eyes, it was their loss. They had only been on the road for half an hour when Mary said: ‘We’ll have to stop, dad, I need a pee.’

  ‘Me too,’ added Trish in a hurry.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ said dad. ‘Why didn’t you go at the airport?’

  ‘Didn’t want to go then,’ said Mary, like a spoilt child.

  ‘Been on the wines, have we?’ asked Glen, unable to keep out of the niggling competition.

  ‘No we have not!’ said Trisha. ‘Mind your own bloody business.’

  ‘Not much!’ said father. ‘They’ve been in the wine bar all day; I warned them this would happen, and there are no services on this stretch, you’ll just have to wait.’

  ‘We’ll have to get off the motorway, dad, or I’m going to piss me knickers,’ said Mary.

  ‘Yep, I can sympathise with that,’ said Trish. ‘Things are getting desperate back here.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake! What’s wrong with you children?’

  Children, thought Glen. The girls were all in their twenties and yet sometimes it was true, they were still like squabbling kids, just as bad now as they were when teenagers and toddlers. Glen couldn’t help but contrast this car journey with the gleeful one she had shared last week with the Greene family, motoring happily home through the Shropshire hills.

  ‘Think you better take the next exit, dad,’ said Glen, often the peacemaker, as she shared a knowing glance with her father, a look between the intelligent, sensible souls in the front of the vehicle, a loving look the other girls might not recognise. Father jerked the car off the motorway and soon found an all-nighter BP garage on the outskirts of some mundane town.

  ‘There!’ Mary said. ‘Stop there!’ peering between the heads in the front seats.

  ‘I don’t think they have public toilets,’ said father.

  ‘They must have a bog!’ screamed Trisha.

  Against his better judgement father pulled onto the deserted forecourt. The girls flew from the car before it had stopped moving, heading for the brightly lit garage. There was no one else about and inside a lone fat guy sat on a stool at the till. He was young and playing some kind of handheld computer game, and looked as if he might fall asleep at any moment. The girls hurried to the counter and smiled their best come on smile. He looked up, missing most of it. What did these scary looking women want? They hadn’t bought any petrol. He thought they looked like a pair of witches, all black hair and dark eye shadow, but not bad looking tarts for all that. He’d give them one, at a push, he fancifully thought. Yeah, why not, perhaps the pair of them at the same time.

  ‘Hello,’ said Trish, adopting her husky voice that she thought killingly attractive to men. ‘Where is the Ladies?’

  The guy looked at her and then at the younger one with the longer hair who was dancing up and down on the spot.

  ‘Sorry, we don’t have public toilets.’

  ‘You must have a Ladies!’ screamed Mary, ‘I’m bursting!’

  ‘Look,’ said Trisha, fixing her black eyes on the dim-witted one behind the counter, all trace of huskiness now abandoned. ‘Either you show us the Ladies loo, or we piss on the floor.’

  ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ the guy said, panicking and getting up from the stool.

  ‘Please, please, can we use the loo?’ said Mary, sticking with the diplomatic approach, unable to stand still for a second.

  The bloke grinned through crooked teeth.

  ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Trish, now seriously considering punching him in the eye.

  ‘Flash your tits!’

  ‘I am not flashing my tits at you, you prick!’ said Mary.

  ‘I need a piss and if I have to flash my tits to get one, then so be it,’ screamed Trisha, and she grabbed her short purple top and yanked it up to her neck. ‘Happy now!’

  The guy’s gob fell open. He’d been stunned into silence. He had never seen tits before, outside of a magazine, or a porno movie, or on a holiday beach somewhere in Spain. He had often used the phrase Flash your tits, but no one had ever taken him up on the offer, till now. Trisha pulled her top down and headed for the room at the back. ‘Through here is it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, trotting behind like a confused flunkey. ‘Here, you’ll need the key.’

  Mary grabbed the key and opened up, but Trisha jumped in before her.

  ‘Cow!’ screamed Mary.

  ‘Slow slug!’ yelled Trish.

  They were in there ages, thought the guy, availing themselves of all the facilities, before reapplying makeup and lipstick, and a good touch up of the hair. Mary’s locks tumbled all the way down to her waist, whereas Trish favoured a modern angular cut that she refreshed whenever the purse allowed. She had dated her hairdresser once, purely to gain regular access to his coiffeuring skills, but that hadn’t lasted long either because Emile possessed secret hankerings that girls could never satisfy.

  ‘Ready?’ said Trish, admiring herself in the scratched mirror.

  Mary nodded, and they returned to the shop, locking the loo door behind them. She made sure the loon was watching as she headed for the engine oils. She selected the biggest container she could find, unscrewed it, as the bloke screamed, ‘Hey! You can’t do that!’ but too late, she dropped the bog key into the oil, where it sank slowly to the bottom, like an overloaded dragonfly in ancient swamps.

  Trish marched past him and out through the door, pausing only to mutter: ‘Don’t get too worked up, kid, you’ll mess your pants!’ and a moment later the sisters both giggled their way back to the car.

  ‘You were ages,’ moaned father, though he wasn’t so upset about it because he’d been chatting with Glen.

  ‘Trisha made a spectacle of herself,’ said Mary, ti
ttering.

  ‘Nothing new in that,’ said Glen, unable to keep out of it.

  Trisha hiccupped and said, ‘Job done. Come on, we’ll never get home at this rate.’

  ‘Why am I so blessed?’ muttered father, starting the car.

  ‘You know you love us,’ said Trish, and for once all three girls laughed in unison.

  Forty-Eight

  The house was deathly quiet without her. Having Glen in his home for two whole weeks brought it home to Gringo how beautiful it was to have someone like her in the building. Perhaps he was just getting old. To have her there preparing his dinner after a fraught day’s work was something special, to have her in his bed was beyond special, the warmth and softness of a pretty girl, of a special pretty girl, to hear her gentle breathing in the darkness, to see her there still asleep in the morning. It was a pleasure in life he couldn’t overdose on.

  He found he even missed some of her weird music. He liked the Leonard Cohen one the best. Somehow it fitted in with his all pervading black outlook on life, but now with her gone, the house was bathed in silence. She had taken her CD’s home and that was enough to send him scuttling down to the record shop in the precinct at lunchtime, where he bought five Leonard Cohen CD’s, and though the songs were the same, it wasn’t the same at all, not having Glen there to share the listening duties.

  It had been four days since she’d gone and she hadn’t rung once. That disappointed him. He wanted to ring her, but he didn’t. He kept replaying her words over and over in his mind: Give it a few days and I’ll give you a ring.

  So Glen? Where the hell are you?

  Against his better judgement he picked up the phone and called Maria.

  ‘Hel-lo,’ she answered in a singsong happy voice.

  ‘And how is Miss Almeida today?’

  ‘I’m fine… look, I can’t speak right now, ring me next week, eh?’

  Before he could say another word she had cut him off. That wasn’t like her at all. Was it her turn to play games? Was she giving him the run around? He thought of ringing her again to clarify matters, but knew that would be a bad move. He sat back in his chair, alone at the kitchen table, a black look set on his face.

  It wasn’t long before his mind turned to Staff Nurse Drayton. There was a card somewhere with his next appointment for the hospital. It took him almost ten minutes to find it, and it was a good job he did, because the appointment was a lot closer than he imagined, a much shorter interlude than the promised month. Perhaps they were bunching up the diary dates hoping the donors wouldn’t notice, another surreptitious effort to boost the total volume of blood extracted from the unwary. The appointment was for next week. He thought about that. He wondered if she would keep her promise, and if she did, he wondered where he might take her. He even pondered on what she might be like, in the bedroom, and as he was doing that, his evening daydreams were shattered by the telephone ringing. He started visibly, and picked it up.

  ‘Hi Gringo.’

  At long last it was Glen. Should he give her a hard time for not ringing sooner? He considered it, but the last thing he wanted was to make an enemy of her.

  ‘I was just thinking about you,’ he said. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Yeah, great, I seem to have slipped back into the old routine as if I’ve never been away.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘Gringo!’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Blouse and jeans, nothing else.’

  ‘Nothing else? No knickers?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘Naughty girl.’

  She giggled in that way he liked.

  ‘So when will I see you?’ he said.

  ‘Not sure, I’m really busy at the moment. Give it a week or so,’ and though she couldn’t see him right there, she could detect the disappointment in his body language. ‘Soon Gringo, soon.’

  ‘Okay, and don’t you dare forget.’

  She told him all about being collected by her father and the sisters, of Trish flashing her tits to gain access to the garage loo, and Mary’s revenge with the keys, all of which the pissed sisters had revealed long before they’d reached home. In the next moment Gringo heard the doorbell ringing in Glen’s house, echoing in the background of the phone call.

  ‘There’s someone at the door,’ said Glen.

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘I’ll have to go, Gringo.’

  ‘Okay, bye.’

  He sat and stared at the phone and pondered on who might be calling at her house. Why was he not calling, ringing on her doorbell, demanding to see her; hassling to take her out? The sad thing was, he didn’t have an adequate answer.

  Well bloody well get on with it!

  His father’s words returned to his mind, yet Gringo only had the same pathetic excuse.

  I’m trying dad, I’m trying.

  There were still no parking spaces at the hospital, though this time he was better prepared, more small change in hand for the meter, and plenty of time to find a space. Inside, he took his place amongst the nervous ones waiting, two men and two women, whom Gringo quickly engaged in conversation. He soon discovered they were all first timers.

  ‘Nothing to it,’ he said, grinning at them, ‘you only feel a slight sting.’

  Yeah, right, they all thought, judging by the looks on their sorry faces.

  Gringo sat down, revelling in his superior knowledge. He closed his eyes and thought of the Staff Nurse. What was it she’d said when he’d asked her out to dinner: You come back next month and I might look more kindly on your proposal.

  Well here I am, girl.

  He suddenly had a premonition that she might not be on duty; that she might be sick. There had been a flu bug going round the city and where were you most likely to pick up a bug? In a torture palace like this of course. That didn’t bear thinking about, but with the way things had been going for him lately, nothing would surprise him.

  As it turned out he need not have worried, for it was Linda herself who came hustling to the waiting room where she smiled encouragingly at the newcomers, and most effusively at Gringo, a little nuance that he couldn’t miss.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ she said, as he followed her along the corridor toward the needle factory.

  ‘I thought you might have been laid low by this flu bug,’ said Gringo.

  Secretly she was happy in the knowledge that he had at least been thinking about her.

  ‘You will feel a slight sting,’ she said, smiling through her light blue eyes.

  ‘You said that last time, and I didn’t believe you then.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly.’

  ‘Are you going to keep your promise?’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘To have dinner with me.’

  ‘I didn’t promise I would have dinner with you, I promised I would consider it.’

  ‘And have you? Considered it.’

  ‘I’m still thinking about it.’

  ‘Then you’d better hurry up.’

  ‘I’ll tell you my answer when you’ve been done.’

  Typical, thought Gringo, she insisted on having her pint of blood first, though he was more confident now. He had seen that welcoming look in the eyes of countless women before, that happy excited look; it was almost as if when they were in that frame of mind it was impossible for them to suppress that glint. She would say yes, he’d wager a hundred quid on it and he wasn’t a gambling man. She would agree to dinner, and with a little luck, before the week was out, she might agree to anything.

  His logic proved accurate. She accepted, at least to the first part. He would call for her at her Bingley flat at eight on Wednesday evening. Now all he had to do was decide where to take her. He’d reserve judgement on that. If she came out in jeans it wo
uld be the local pub, but a stunning evening dress would be duly rewarded, anything in between, and they’d dine in between.

  It all made perfect sense to him.

  Forty-Nine

  He’d never dated a woman from the southern Bingley suburb before, which was something of a surprise because the whole area was crammed with low cost newbuild houses and flats, the typical domain of the upwardly mobile pretty girl. He found Carnforth House with only the one wrong turning, courtesy of the satnav, and went to the doorway and rang the buzzer.

  ‘Hello,’ she said after a moment or two.

  ‘Good evening to you.’

  ‘You’re dead on time.’

  ‘I try,’ he said, surprised at his own punctuality.

  ‘I’ll be down in a sec.’

  ‘I’ll be in the car.’

  ‘Be with you in a mo.’

  He returned to the car and turned it round so that he was facing out. He’d take the opportunity to watch her crossing the small car park toward him, to assess her dress sense, and guess at how much importance she’d attached to the date, to him. She came out a minute later and saw him waiting there, and smiled across and set off toward him.

  She was wearing a smart grey skirt, hem just above the knee, revealing an attractive set of pins. Up top was a knitted purple blouse cum cardigan that looked okay, though in truth it was hardly a head turner. Her legs were clad in black tights, or maybe stockings, and on her feet, good quality mid-heeled shoes. He liked everything he saw from the neck up and the waist down. By the time she was opening the door he’d placed her in the mid to upper range of dining establishments. It could have been better, but by God, it could have been a heck of a lot worse.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m great. You?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You look smart,’ she said, glancing at his dark suit and expensive red tie.

  ‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’