Pot Luck

by Nick Fisher

  These guys, they love swinging their dicks when their pockets are full. Love playing the big man. But when times get tight they turn into spoilt little foot-stamping toddlers. Who get all infuriated that he isn’t prepared to clean up their little potty-mess. Jesus Christ, not like he didn’t have enough of his own mess to wade through, without getting dragged into theirs.

  This place for a start. Three-and-a-half grand a week? Three-and-a-half grand, and she says she doesn’t even get her own room! How the fuck can that be right? You could stay at the Ritz for that money; probably get a suite at the Savoy. OK, maybe not for the whole week. But you sure as hell wouldn’t be sharing your breathing air with a couple of drying out alcoholics and some clucking crack-whore.

  Koi carp were meant to be soothing. Probably that’s why they were here, in the ‘atrium’. He looked up at the ceiling; it was way up above three flights of dark wooden banisters. Right at the top was a glass roof, shaped in a sort of cone shape like the inside of a circus tent. So this is an atrium? He thinks. Receptionist had said, “Would you like to wait in the atrium, please”, all smiling and soft-spoken, a small green badge with her name on it – ‘Lottie’.

  Carp are meant to be soothing because of the way they swim. Holding their body stock-still in the water and just fanning with their big graceful tails. Or else paddling slowly, only using their pectoral fins, like little chubby angel wings. He knew all about Koi carp because of the Discovery Channel. Saw a special documentary all about Koi carp breeders in Japan. He loves Discovery Channel. Never watches any of the other channels any more. Except Sky Sports for the Formula One.

  Some of the top fish can cost upwards of 300,000 dollars. All bought and sold among Japanese collectors. The really big bucks was all to do with the fish’s markings. The white splodges on an orange background, or else white splodges on a black-bodied fish. Collectors only really caring about these markings. Was all to do with achieving the perfect symmetry. Or was it asymmetry? One or the other. It was to do with exactly how and where the splodge of white was positioned upon the orange or black background. And if the base colour showed through the white splodge. Or if the colours bled around the edge of the splodge. Serious Japanese carpists liking the splodge to be pure white. With no bleeding at the edges.

  The fish in this sunken bath atrium pond don’t look like they cost 300 grand a chuck. Although the money they must be making in this place, renting out shared rooms at the price he was paying, would’ve bought a whole shed-load of Koi carp.

  He’d bet no one was still paying 300k for a Koi fish anymore. Certainly not in Japan. Those would have been the good old days. These days, Koi carp, even in Japan, were probably the same as his Maseratis, just big fat arse-ache on the inventory.

  “Mr Rock?” The voice making him jump.

  “Hi, I’m Josephine.” She held out a slim brown hand for him to shake. “Elsa’s counsellor.”

  “Getting clean isn’t the problem,” says Josephine. “It’s staying clean, that’s the really hard part.” They’d moved to a corner of the atrium, to a small stone bench. So he can’t see the Koi any more. Robbie sitting square on the bench, his generous buttocks squashed right up to the arm on one side, he can feel it, cool and clammy through his D&G jeans. Josephine perched like a bird on her end. Only one of her tiny buttocks only just half-perched on the edge of the stone bench. Her legs angled underneath her, toes pointing down, in a pair of heeled sandals, with long string straps that criss-crossed her calves twice before they were knotted in a bow, below her knee.

  Robbie was torn; he didn’t know whether to stare at her little brown ballerina legs in the criss-crossy Roman sandal type things – thinking what is it with the Romans and this place? Or, to stare at her rings. She had a rock on her tiny left hand that was fucking unmissable. A proper rock. Chinking and blinking in the shafts of weak sunlight that fought their way through the atrium roof.

  Robbie knowing a thing or two about jewellery. His first wife had her own antique jewellery pitch in an indoor market complex in Brighton. In The Lanes. It turned out to be a sweet little earner, which took him by surprise at the time. Made him wish he’d paid more attention. She wasn’t no expert, but she made some nice cash out of it, from time to time. And it was real cash too. Most of the time. Folding money. Proper stuff. Stuff the tax man didn’t have to get all involved with.

  “For an addict or an alcoholic to stay clean in a treatment centre, is an achievement,” says Josephine. “But not anywhere near as hard as it is on the outside. Back in their normal environment.”

  Robbie wondering now about Josephine’s home environment, with a rock like that, somebody somewhere sure as hell loved her badly. No wedding band though. Just the big old sparkler. Engagement ring? He wonders. Nuptials pending? She is certainly very well preserved, but the tiny crow’s feet at her eyes and the thin smile lines etched about either side of her mouth – which she did a good job of hiding with an expensive foundation – suggested she was nudging 40. Maybe even 45. Kinda late in the day to be getting engaged, he thinks.

  Robbie was doing a lot of thinking today. Subjects rattling around his head like ball bearings on a pinball table, clacking off the flippers, clang-clanging against the bumpers. Thinking way too much, he thinks. Sure sign of stress.

  “Elsa has shared a bit about her current domestic situation,” says Josephine, her brown eyes searching his face for a response. Robbie could now feel this is where it was all about to get difficult. Meeting her eyes before he opens his mouth.

  “What’d she say?” he asks.

  “Obviously, I don’t want to break any client confidence,” says Josephine tactfully. “And we’ll have a session later, together. All three of us. But I thought you and I might want to explore your perspective on the circumstances, that have led Elsa to where she is today.”

  Robbie swallows hard. This isn’t exactly how he expected this visit to pan out. Didn’t think he was going to have to answer any questions about anything to do with him. Shit, Elsa was the one booked into rehab. He is just the poor guy paying for it! Three-and-a-half grand a week for a shared-room and a sunken bath full of Koi carp, which right at this moment aren’t doing nothing to calm his nerves.

  He could feel a trickle of sweat meander down his lower back and run between his butt cheeks. He shifts his weight, uncomfortable on the stone slab. He might have some meat on his rump, but he can still feel bone on stone, and can really see how these benches could do with a little padding.

  “She said you’ve not been together very long?” says Josephine, her voice all gentle and her perfectly shaped eyebrows lifting together into a tiny concerned frown. Oh shit where is this all going? thinks Robbie. And all he can find to say back, in answer, was “No.”

  That just created a pause. A pause where Josephine smiles at him. Saying nothing. Like she’s waiting for him to fill the silence. Which he isn’t about to do. What was she thinking? That Robbie’s about to tell her and her big sparkly ring all about how he first met Elsa in a lap-dancing club in Westbourne, just a couple of blocks back from Bournemouth Pier?

  How he’d bought her ridiculously over-priced drinks and paid for ‘private dances’ in a little curtained-off booth, where she’d let him feel the sensation of her tight little arse rubbing against his crotch and even let him suck her little sultana-like nipples, but “no touching” she’d say, every time he tried to cup her butt with his hands. Wagging her finger with a playful smile, “Is management rules.”

  He’d paid for private dances, and paid for the stupid cocktails that never had any booze in them, three, maybe four times, over a couple of weeks. She was very cute and very easy to talk to, even though her English had that Polish accent to it, with some crazy-weird sentence constructions.

  “You not work like the hours of the office?” she’d asked once when he came to see her in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. He guessed she was asking if he had a proper job and he just pointed at his own chest proudly and said, “I the
boss of my business.” Like the bad grammar was catching. “I boss,” he said again, a bit louder this time, fighting against the strains of George Michael’s I Want Your Sex pumping out from the dance floor’s crackling speakers. Elsa nodded and smiled, seeming to understand the complex hierarchy of his tiny empire.

  Next time he saw her she wasn’t smiling. Her face was contorted into a tight angry grimace. And she said something fast in Polish to the club bouncer-type guy, which sounded like swearing.

  “Problems?” he’d asked cheerily, trying to turn the moment around. He had enough crap going on in the rest of his life outside, without paying good money in here to experience someone else’s crap.

  “I hate fucking this place,” she said setting her jaw and half closing her eyes. Robbie not sure just then if she meant the club, or Bournemouth, or England.

  “D’you want to dance?” he asked, already feeling like it was about the stupidest thing he could possibly ask.

  “No,” she said. “Give me your phone.” He handed her his mobile without even thinking. She punched in a number and saved it into his contacts and put ‘Elsa’ on the address book list.

  “I do escort service now,” she said, as she walked away towards the Staff Only door at the back of the dimly-lit stage. “You want to see me, call me.”

  It took him a week. He looked at the number in his phone address book a few times before he got round to calling her. The first time, a little nervous, but she sounded nice on the phone again. Friendly. Like she was genuinely pleased he’d called. And so he started seeing her. As a paying client, at first. By the hour. Sometimes 90 minutes. Then, later things evolved. And then they lived together in his flat above the car showroom in Sandbanks.

  Except, now… Now she was staying here, in Cloud’s House, a drug rehab treatment centre, in Wiltshire. Had been for the last ten days, detoxing from her coke and pills habit. And booze too, he guessed. She could get pretty crazy around booze as well, especially when the coke and pills weren’t readily available. And Robbie was footing the bill. Like he footed the bill for some of the coke. Not all of it. But towards the end, most of it. Mainly because he’d rather pay for it than her go and earn the money to pay for it. Because he felt weird about her seeing other men – clients – even though she always had, and was when they first started ‘seeing each other’, or whatever it was you called it when two people did what they did with each other.

  Sure, he was twice her age. She was Polish. He was from Harpenden originally. She was an escort – a hooker – part-time, and she was coke and pills addict pretty much full-time. But that didn’t make her a bad person. And certainly didn’t stop him loving her. Because he did. He couldn’t find any other way of saying it. Deluded or not. Reciprocated or not, he fucking loves her.

  And does skinny Josephine, with the Roman sandals and the big juicy rock of a ring, really expect him to rip open that big old can of worms? Here? Right now. In front of the carp? Because if she does, then it’s her who needs some fucking therapy.

  For the first ten days of rehab treatment, clients aren’t allowed to make contact with the outside world. They could send letters or postcards, but no phone calls, or visitors. None of the clients, no matter how long they’d been in treatment, are allowed to have a mobile phone. And any phone calls, made after the first ten days of the stay, had to be made from the one and only coin-operated box, mounted on the wall in the middle of the corridor that led from the atrium to the client dining room.

  Today was to be the first day Robbie has seen or spoken to Elsa since the morning he drove her to Clouds. That morning she bumped half a gram of coke and a bottle of sparkling Rosé in the passenger seat of his Range Rover as he drove along the M27. She cried a lot too, mascara running into little black deltas beneath her eyes. She looked about as bad as she’d ever looked in all the months he’d known her.

  So, seeing her today, walking into the atrium, in the pink velour Juicy Couture lounge suit he’d bought her in Poole Quay when they went shopping after lunch in a shellfish restaurant one Saturday a few weeks back, made his heart jump.

  Her hair was swept back, her eyes were clean and sparkly, her face, without any trace of make-up, was as beautiful as any face he’d seen in all his 53 years of life. She looked like an angel.

  She put her hand on his shoulder, touched his cheek. But there was no kiss. He stood up, awkwardly, thinking he might try for one, make it look natural, but Elsa sat down in the space that Josephine vacated as she moved off the bench. “I’ll leave you two to catch up for a few minutes,” she says. “Then, we’ll go on through to the Kreitman room, for a ‘family’ session. The three of us.”

  And Josephine then left, pausing to put her hand on Elsa’s shoulder as she went. The two of them exchanging a smile. A smile that feels to Robbie, like a ‘knowing’ smile. Like these two are suddenly all tight. Close. Like they’ve shared something between them, that he isn’t party to. In a heartbeat he feels excluded from Elsa. Was like Josephine already knows more about her, could claim more of Elsa than he could.

  Robbie takes Elsa’s hand in his when she sits down. He’s looking at her fingernails. All wiped clean of nail vanish. Just sweet and pure, clean, unpolished nails. He’s never seen them like this before. Her hand somehow now looks like the hand of a little girl. It looks tiny and alien, inside his chubby brown, wrinkled, liver-spotted hand.

  “So tell me, how is she?” asks Elsa, smiling, eyes wide, excited.

  “What?” Robbie, waking from a day-dream, is confused.

  “Suki? Does she miss me? And you feeding her the tuna, like I said?” Robbie smiling now, glad to have something to share with this beautiful girl who he can already feel is slipping out of his life.

  “She’s fine,” he says. But, yeah… Missing her mummy.”

  What is it about some women and convicted felons? Adrian never understood the phenomenon. There’s a breed of women, usually mothers; single mothers of a certain age, who seem sexually predisposed to prisoners. In terms of the evolution of the human race, it makes no sense at all. Being attracted to successful crooks – ones that are canny, career criminals, men who make good money, provide for their progeny and evade the law – that makes sense. But falling for guys who’ve already been caught and banged up several times on the trot, is just lemming-like in its self-destructiveness.

  Tim’s mother, Carole, now lives with Rich Tovey, a man whose ragged and ink-smudged collection of prison tattoos first started when he was 15, serving a ‘custodial’ at an old fashioned boys’ reform school in Kent. Rich’s array of DIY ink, started simple, with the one word ‘Rich’ worked deep into the flesh of his forearm. It was inked upside down, using a compass needle and a bottle of Quink. And still looks like the early learning scrawl of a remedial six-year-old.

  Carole fell for Rich when he worked on a day-release programme from Portland Prison. He and six other, long-serving, soon-to-be-released, inmates were tasked with painting over bad graffiti at Preston Skate and BMX park, in preparation for new graffiti-style murals, to be created by a ‘street art workshop’ from Portsmouth.

  Carole met Rich, while she was searching for her then ten-year-old, errant and delinquent son, Tim. She hadn’t seen him for 48 hours, which wasn’t that unusual. Rich and the day-release team helped her search. Later they got talking, over a roll-up and a Cup-a-Soup. And the rest is history.

  Rich has been back inside three times since they first got together. Rich pretty much hates Tim, who definitely hates the brief, bitter periods when Rich is out of nick and sharing his mum’s bed. And yet, Rich now stands beside Carole, on the quayside, looking and sounding like a very angry, very bereaved father. While Carole just stands silent, shoulders slumped, eyes dry, as she watches her only son being zipped into a black rubberised body bag, and loaded onto a waiting ambulance.

  Carole is in shock. Rich is stoned. Prison has given him a proper taste for crack and speed, both pharmaceutical and home-made, and as a result, his attention span
is no longer than a gnat’s, while his temper is badly-balanced on a knife edge. Carole might eventually cry, Rich is definitely going to kick off.

  Adrian thought he must be suffering from shock himself. He couldn’t think of any other reason why now, at this precise moment in time, and for the last 40 minutes or more, there has seemed to be two Adrians in his head. One of them was doing normal practical stuff. Stuff, like hosing down the deck with the deck wash, and scrubbing it with the long-handled scrubbing brush, just like any skipper at the end of any normal day.

  Except, what was pouring out the scuppers wasn’t normal day stuff. It wasn’t just bait-jizz and pot slime. It was Tim’s cranial blood. While one Adrian sprayed the big oval patch of blood in the centre of the deck, skooshing the red liquid with the hose, until eventually it ran clear, the other Adrian was watching the first Adrian perform these mechanical tasks, wondering how the fuck he could do it and still look so normal. Because inside he was fucking screaming.

  He saw himself, only 20 minutes ago, pull the tarpaulin off Tim’s body to let the paramedics crouch down beside Tim, to perform their medical checks. To tell everyone standing around what they already knew. That this 15-year-old was dead.

  And he could see himself talking to Kitty’s owner Paulie, who was already sweating bullets about Tim’s illegal, untrained, uncertified presence on a commercial fishing vessel. Adrian even watched himself standing, squeezed into the wheelhouse with the two police detectives. The one he knew from Preston Park Comprehensive, who was just starting in Year Seven back when Adrian was about to finally leave the school after his A Levels.

  And now, the prawny little Year Seven’s grown up to become a detective, who, looking at the size of his shoulders, obviously works out in the gym. And wears a lot of hair gel. To make it sit up all spiky along the middle and fan outwards at the front. Adrian could smell the smell of the schoolboy-turned-detective even over the smell of the pot bait. He didn’t smell like any other man Adrian knew. He smelled of perfumed fruits and herbs and spices.