by James Newman
All the problems of alcohol, yet socially acceptable as, for one thing, there is no smell to taking a tablet, or for that matter a shot. Alcohol gets inside you and attacks the body in the most awful ways. My kidneys hurt to the touch, my hands shake.
Last year I lost a son I never knew I had and this year I am looking for one I thought had died. I must get rid of this awful addiction before we meet. Last week I experienced a seizure. Came to on the living room floor, the bottle still in my hand. If this is not a sign of addiction Lord knows what is.
M. Taylor.
PART TWO
HERE SHE COMES NOW
TOOK THE 402 bus to Knockholt and met her in the Three Horseshoes Pub. She looked amazing. Blonde hair, shorter, she had one side shaved with the fringe hanging down almost over her eyes.
Tired rose-printed wall paper and a landlord with a face as red as the dullish pink roses on the wall. Rose was different. Heavy eye make-up. Dark mascara. You ever see a miracle, something against the odds? Luck came in small doses and when she came you had to try and keep her. Obviously this was impossible. For every thousand men and women that got together maybe two ended up happy together and those were the ones having affairs. No bird can be caged without remorse. Birds had a habit of flying and that was the thing. She smiled wide as I approached the table. She had on a pale blue pullover that reminded me of the first time we met. The Rose Garden. Designer perfume wafted as she leaned over and sniff-kissed me. I had made a bit of an effort myself. With the remaining cash I’d bought a shirt, jacket, and a pair of black jeans, along with a new pair of Adidas. We both talked about how dilapidated the pub had become. How it were different when we were kids. We talked about the furniture and the unhappiness of the old punters swigging pints at the bar.
Went to the bar. Old Tony pulled a pint of lager for me and a glass of wine for Rose.
Rested the glasses on the table. “So the old man didn’t suspect anythink?”
“Anything,” she corrected me. “No. He is however very interested in catching up with you, young man,”
Second time in twenty-four hours a girl had called me a young man.
“He told you about it?”
“No. But I found out through a reliable source you owe him. He is not a nice man.”
Now seemed as good a time as any. Said, “How much money does your old man have in cash?”
“I’d say too much. Money never made anyone a better person and my old man’s a bastard.”
“How would you feel about disappearing for a few days and in exchange for going home being considerably richer?”
She let the idea swim for a while. Then said,
“You really are a thieving bastard.”
“Why?”
“You fucking stole my heart and now you want to steal my body and sell it back to my father.”
You ever felt your heart somersault? Well that’s what happened right there and then. My ticker did a triple jump pike dive from a fifty foot diving board. Belly-splashed right there in the pub.
She drained her glass. “You are joking?”
“Why would I joke?”
“I don’t know. It’s a strange idea.”
“He’s a strange man. And well, I don’t actually feel like dying. There may come a time and a place. But this isn’t it. With your help I can get the money and repay your father.”
“With his own money?”
“He’s not stupid.”
“I know.”
“So how are you going to convince him it isn’t you that has kidnapped me?”
“That part I haven’t figured out just yet.”
“There might be one way.” She looked me up and down.
“How?”
“No. Forget it. Plus there’s nothing in this for me.”
“That’s where you are wrong, my sweet little Rose. There’s a big sum in it for you. The ransom is 100k. I take 25k you take 25k, the rest we give back to Byron.”
“You really are a thieving scum bastard.”
“I know,” I said draining the rest of pint.
“The thing is,” she lowered her voice, “I love it.”
LOSER’S BAR
JOE MADE it to the The Bricklayers Arms, a white stone public house that had probably stood there at the T-junction of Badgersmount for the last three hundred years. Walked up to the barman. He had a pint of lager in a pint and a rolled up cigarette in an ashtray.
“I thought they banned those things in pubs now,” Joe said to the landlord looking down at the unlit roll up.
“Banned what?” The landlord said.
“Smoking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that cigarette in the ashtray.”
“Look, sunshine,” the landlord leaned over the bar towards Joe. “I may have a cigarette in my ashtray but I’m not smoking. I’ve got boots on my feet, but I’m not walking neither. You hear what I’m saying?”
“Well how about walking over to them there optics and pouring me a double Vodka, ice, coke. And whatever you’re having yourself.”
“You smell like pork to me.”
“What?”
“Old Bill. Filth. Feckin police don’t get served in here.”
“Look, I’ve done time. Done crime. I aint no copper mate and if you don’t pour me that drink then I show you just how much respect I have for the law. I used to break up bars when I was younger. Still get the urge from time to time.” Joe looked around at the medieval weapons mounted on the walls. The stuffed fox and hare in a glass case. A book case stacked with worthless first editions. “As I say, have one yourself. Else I break the joint.”
That got his boots moving. The landlord poured the drinks and slammed them on the table. “Sorry, mate. Sometimes we get heat.”
“Well, I aint it. Spent some time away if you know what I mean.”
Landlord nodded. But he didn’t know what Joe meant.
“Looking for an old friend. Name’s Noah. Lives out back and drinks here. It’s been a long time. Can’t say I recognize him.”
“Not surprised,” the landlord nodded to an old birdlike man drinking in the corner of the pub. “Old git won’t go to a doctor, doesn’t trust them. He’s got a lump on the side of his face the size of a grapefruit. If that aint throat cancer then I don’t know what is.”
“What’s he drinking?”
“Whatever, whenever, and as often as he can.”
“Give me a pint and a whiskey.” Joe slammed a twenty on the table.
“All together that’s twenty-one pound eighty,” the landlord said.
“Keep the change,” Joe muttered.
Joe moved over to the old man and put the drinks down in front of him. The man gave off a smell like a polecat kept in a poacher’s shed for a week without a sniff of a rabbit. A dank animal smell, a smell you could eat. The smell of a man who hadn’t bathed in weeks and woke up holding onto the bottle and didn’t let go until it was to time to sleep. Drunks and babies were much the same: both relied on the bottle and spoke the truth when it was in their hands.
Out of their hands they screamed.
Joe sat down next to the old man. He was stick thin terminally ill, the cancerous growth on his neck seemed to pulse as he looked into the lines of grain in the wooden table. Each grain, groove of wood a network where a thousand spillages had given it a waxy varnish, layer upon layer of poisoned veneer. The table was the least of his concerns. Joe figured he had days to live, but that’s how one always figured with the old and deathly – they just carry on until a sudden unexpected final curtain call. Joe knew a guy they used to call Jonnie Walker who simply laid his head on one of the bars in Fun City and simply died. It was either the best or the worst way to go.
“Noah?”
He made a sound like a cornered dog, somewhere between a growl and a bark and a yelp. Joe sat down on the chair opposite and put the drinks on the table. Noah looked at them. “These are for you, my old friend.”
“Well,
son,” he took the whiskey first in one and then half the pint. Joe watched his neck budge as he swallowed. The tumor, cancerous, hungry, thirsty for death or glory. “Can’t say I know you. But what do I know? I got, psychosis, cirrhosis, and Saint Vitas dance. I’m syphilitic, alcoholic, and sometimes pathetic. The doctors told me I’d be dead a year ago.” A hint of a smile in the old gypsy’s eyes. “You see, Mush, doctors can often be wrong.” He finished the rest of the pint.
Joe motioned to the barman to order another round.
“Jimmy, Noah, do you remember Jimmy?”
“Leaves fell that day like golden rain, he swam to me and then they took him from me. The only thing is love. Love a disease just like any other, like the lump I carry on my neck. Some cannot see the hump on one’s own back. I can. I can see it well. They took him from me. The Gregos. The boy was gifted. Swans took his mother. She’ll be swimming with them now.”
“And who took him?”
“Them,” he said with a glance toward the pub door as if to say anyone outside the bar were evil. Perhaps they were. Joe didn’t push it.
“Did Jimmy have somewhere he liked to play as a kid, you know a special place?”
Noah studied the grain in the table until the new drinks arrived and he set about them. “What’s it worth?”
“He’s in trouble. And a hundred quid.”
Hands trembling, “Give me something to draw on.”
Noah drank slowly and put together a map. “He had a tree-house there. Built it together. The Birthday Woods, Rushmoore Hill. It was there, the camp or the scrapyard. But he used to like the woods, watched the birds. He grew up with them.”
“He grew up in the canal.”
Noah eyed the stranger suspiciously. “You aren’t police are you, although I get from the look and the smell of you, you aren’t. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Nothing that can’t be fixed. I’m on your side.”
“Aint nobody on my side apart from the bottle.”
“I’m buying,” Joe said.
“I guess that makes you alright. Aint no copper that would pay for a drawing by an old man anyway. Least of an old man like me. Can’t even read or write. Never got the... Here..time...”
Joe picked up the old man’s drawling. Looked like a spider had crawled across the page with ink dipped feet. It would have to do. For now. He left the dying man five twenties on the table.
“Bless you, and beware, the man on the hill.”
“The Hill?”
“Lord Byron. Rom baro - a leader, the big man in our language. If there’s trouble then he’ll be up to his neck in it, that’ll be sure. Travel safe. The man on the hill won’t stay down. Like his roses, the winter won’t kill him.”
Joe Dylan left the pub feeling like he’d left an open casket funereal.
I PREDICT A RIOT
THE PLAN was simple. She had to keep to the plan.
She rang the doorbell to the flat. Waited there looking at the courtyard, the skeletal trees and the panda car. She waited a full five minutes before the door opened. Sergeant Swift stood there breathing alcoholic fumes all over her. He squinted his eyes and said one word. “You?”
“I need one last favor,” Rose said edging her way into
“So do I. The wife’s left me,” Swift said.
She had been blackmailing him for a few months and promised to stop on condition of one last favour. That favour was to let it be known, secretly, through a Mason’s Lodge meeting, of which Byron was high up, that I had been arrested and detained on a football hooligan charge. They hadn’t pinned the bookies on me yet. Putting my name on the police doorstop was a risk considering our little episode in the bookies but I could see no better way of taking me out of the list of suspects for the kidnapping. Plus I had been at the game that day and there was a tear up after the match against Coventry.
Told Rose to meet me at the Knockholt Pound – a stretch of grassland near the pub. I had a place in mind. It was an old hay-barn, in the middle of nowhere. I wrote the note, the old fashioned way – cutting out type-face from a newspaper and sent it second class to the mansion.
“You don’t have a car?” she asked.
Shrugged my shoulders.
“Well how are we going to do this without one?”
She had a point.
“You’re a gyspy – you know how to steal one, right?”
I’d never done it. Told her.
“They used to just tow the motors to the scrappies.”
“We need a car. Wait.”
She walked over to a blue Datsun and tried the door, it was open. Sat down in the driver’s seat and removed the casing below the steering wheel. Clicked two wires together. “Okay, now we have a car,” she said.
“Who’s kidnapping who?” I said,
“I’ve been asking myself that very question for the last twelve hours. I’ll drive.”
The car lurched forward. The roads were empty, I directed her to the barn. “I used to come here as a kid. There’s electricity and light. Running water. But the main advantage is that we can see any cars approaching for miles.”
“We do the exchange here?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet.”
That night we made love. That’s right. I said it. Made. Love. It wasn’t fucking, it was a tender progression of exploration leading to an inevitable climax. We curled around each other like snakes for warmth, protection, comforted by the memories and the innocence of our childhood.
Afterwards she said. “That was nice but I like surprise sex. Does that surprise you?”
“What? You mean like rape?” I said playfully.
“You know I don’t mean that.”
“Then what do you mean? Us geezers, we...”
“Geezers?”
“Men. Lads, boys, well me anyway, when I look at a bird with a fine body walking down the street I wonder stuff.”
“Stuff? Birds?”
“I’m not making myself clear. I was on national radio once.”
“What did you do?”
“I read a poem.”
“Read it to me.”
“No. Anyway, I was on radio and the DJ asked me if I liked the record he was playing. It was the Beach Boys. I said it was shit.”
“What happened?”
“I never read on radio again, but I met the mayor. The school thought I had talent. As a writer.”
“What happened?”
“Well, the teacher said, when you meet the mayor or whoever you have to say ‘yes sir’ ‘no sir.’”
“And?”
“I swore again.”
“Shit, Jimmy. What do you think about people?”
“People. I don’t like them.”
“What do you think about women?”
“Women?”
“Yes, Jimmy. The female of the species, people like me.”
“I think lots of things. Most of it crazy. Yeah, like how she likes it. What position she prefers and whether she screams the bloody rafters down at night.”
“I’m not that loud.”
“Ask Mr. Barn Owl up there.”
“He flew away, they hunt at night, stupid.”
“Of course they do,” I said “they’re bloody owls. Anyway if I see someone, someone like you I think does she scratch her fingernails down men’s backs or does she grip her legs around them and clutch on.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Right. The thing is no two are the same but most, when it comes down to it are very similar.”
“Maybe you’re just not that experienced,” she said. “There’s only two things I think about when I see a man.”
“Yeah?”
“How fast is his car and how big is his wallet.”
“Well you fucked up tonight, honey. There must be a third thing you think about?”
“Yes, but you can tell how big that is by looking at his feet, his fingers, how thin he is, the Adam’s apple. A woman knows.”
�
�But you make mistakes?”
“Not me. But my friend who went with your mate Danny did. Big man like that and hung like a hamster.”
“Danny?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that explains a lot.”
“Explains a lot about what?”
“Believe me, Rose, you do not want to know.”
“Tell me.”
I told her. We all make mistakes.
Morning broke, as they liked to say, how does the beginning of a day break? It rises or falls it rips the heart out of you and leaves you holed up in a barn. The sun rose over the fields. Each day was a new beginning. Not a breakage, more the kiss the promise of something better to come. Unless you were hungover, and I guess the guy that wrote that line about mornings being broken probably was. Drunk and hungover, lived for the night, religious, lost. Blackbird had spoken. Rose rose. She didn’t speak, sat up, that body, man, you wanted to eat off of it, take it places, walks in the park, picnics, beaches, away games in the cup. She took off one of her diamond earrings and placed it carefully in my ear. “I want you to keep this.”
“Why?”
“To remember me by.”
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere...”
“Then why...”
“In case something happens, Jimmy. I want you to have something, personal. Last night was special. I mean it meant more to me than any other...”
“I couldn’t take it from you,” I said. Removed the earing and gave it back to her.
“Shhh....”
We slipped back to sleep as the sun rose a glorious orange outside the barn. The next morning as I stared at her sleeping I noticed that earring. A beautiful diamond earring in each. I took one. Insurance. Pocketed it.
Some shit’s in your blood.
When I awoke again she was gone. She had left a note, with a map. A patch of woodland where the exchange was to take place. The time was to be midnight.
One Daughter.
One hundred grand.
A clearing in the woods I knew well.
UNSOLVED CHILD MURDER
DEAR SIR,