On Honeymoon With Death
( Oz Blackstone - 5 )
Quintin Jardine
Quintin Jardine
On Honeymoon With Death
1
Ever fancy a quiet life? I did. I was stupid enough, at one time, to reckon that I could just coast it, that I could find a nice lifestyle business and work for as long as I had to, until I’d stuffed my pension full enough to retire to the golf course.
I grew up in the East Neuk of Fife, you see, and while I was switched on enough to realise that I had to broaden my horizons a bit, I never wanted to venture too far from home.
So where did it all go wrong? How the hell did I wind up being chased by seriously nasty people? How the hell did I get involved with a wrestling circus, of all things, and become a (minor) television star in the process? How the hell did I wind up in movies, with my name on posters outside cinemas and multiplexes all over the world? How the hell did I come up with those six lucky numbers that Saturday night, the ones that piled all that extra dough into an already fat bank account?
And after all that how did I manage to come face to face with myself, with the bloke I’ve really been all my life?
Some might say that God alone knows for sure. Not me, though: I have my own theory. I blame it on an occult power, an unseen malevolent hand which shapes the destiny of every one of us on the planet. The way I see it, God is a bit like me. . or like the person I always thought I wanted to be. He created the Heavens and the Earth in six days and six nights, took a rest on Sunday, and reckoned a lot more to that than He did to creating. So, satisfied that His pension fund was fat enough to keep Him flush for the foreseeable eternity, He made one last final adjustment to the celestial plan (the creation of the electric buggy), took unto Himself the name of Arnold Palmer, and pissed off to Augusta, Georgia, USA, to play some serious golf.
The actual running of this place, He left to one of His earlier creations, someone. . or something. . He’d put together in the Void, before He moved upon the surface of the waters — incidentally, I was taught as a child NEVER to do that!
That’s the trouble with architects the world over, and beyond in this instance. They’re great on the drawing board, and most of them see the job through to completion, but invariably they get rat-arsed at the opening ceremony then bugger off for good, leaving someone else to do the troubleshooting, and leaving the poor bloody clients to live with the consequences.
There are no exceptions to this rule: not even God.
In His case, when it came to delegating the after-sales service, His human resources department (sorry, His personnel department; this was, after all, a long time ago) got it badly wrong. Today the mistake would have been spotted at the first interview; or if not, then as soon as they gave the candidate a psychometric test, he, it, would have given the game away. The application form alone should have done it; the fact that his, its, works number was 666 ought to have made someone tumble to it even before they got to the name: surname, ‘Antichrist’; forenames, ‘Satan The’.
But no; the lucky Devil got the job, the middle-management post he had always hankered after, and had always been denied when God was focused and on the ball, as opposed to later, when he was fishing it out of Rae’s Creek. It wasn’t that his Creator had anything against him; One takes responsibility for One’s own mistakes, after all. It wasn’t his appearance that had held him back either: after all, a crimson-clad, twelve-foot-tall, eight-hundred-pound hunchback, with talons instead of fingers, a body temperature which could fire clay pots, and eyes which literally are red-hot coals, all topped off with a pair of horns that would give a fourteen-pointer stag a Bambi complex might look out of place in today’s sanitised, politically correct, beauty-obsessed society, but in the pre-dawn of creation he was just another bloke on the team-sheet. (In fact, I have always suspected that if Mr A could prove to the Scottish Football Association that he had as little as a single Channel Islander grandparent, he would be in our next World Cup squad. And I know for sure that England could have done with him in the centre of their defence in Euro 2000.)
It wasn’t his attitude to Good and Evil that was the problem either. (The notion that God is on the side of the former is completely fanciful anyway, as a quick read through selected parts of the Old Testament will prove beyond doubt.)
No, the thing that held him back was his sexuality. Satan is always represented as a bloke, which biologically he is. However, it’s not quite as simple as that, or as straight, one might say. For the truth is. . he’s gay. Yes, the Devil is a poof. Old Nick is a nine-pound note. Not, I rush to say, that this maketh him a bad perthon. The problem is that with it, he has acquired a quirky, mischievous sense of humour, the sort which in a smaller, less formidable personality is liable to result sooner or later in a good kicking. From the start, God perceived this flaw in His precious work. . the sexual clock wasn’t His work, it was one of the first examples of evolution. . and determined to keep him about the house, as it were.
But He didn’t and as a result, this cosmic Kenneth Williams has been inflicting his notion of fun on mankind since before our species could stand straight. Some of the most momentous events in our history have been his idea of a joke.
The parting of the Red Sea, for example, took place not because he had decided to lead God’s chosen people out of bondage in Egypt. (God has never heard of Moses, and, as He faces that intimidating tee shot across the water at Augusta National, wouldn’t give a bugger about him, even if He had.) No, the fact is that it was all set up because S. T. Antichrist did not approve of the formal dress of the pharaoh’s court. Too butch, he thought. On the other hand he was behind the toga. (The kilt was not his; he never messed with the Highland Scots.)
He had a great time in the Middle Ages too; there is a school of thought that the pan-European epidemic of witch-burning was no more than his revenge on a particularly terrifying primary-school teacher. Those of us who were educated in Scotland in the days of corporal punishment can understand that. The Dracula legend is another of his. A cover story, that’s all, to cover a sexual cult whose practices would attract the attention of even the Turkish police force. Far from being the model for the vampire count, Vlad the Impaler was no more than a convenient fall guy, if appropriately named in the circumstances.
His games are around us, for all to see, his quirks, his foibles, his gay little jests. Appropriately, many of them exist in the world of architecture. The Leaning Tower of Pisa? Sydney Opera House? The City of Birmingham? The Sagrada Familia? The Scottish Parliament Building??
These days he even dabbles in sport and the performing arts. Who else could have invented The Archers? Or synchronised swimming? Or ice dancing? Or rhythmic gymnastics? Or Dennis Rodman? Or Gazza? Or the Sex Pistols? Or Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Or Coronation Street? Look at the Rolling Stones and ask yourself this: did Mick and Keith write ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, or was it dictated?
All of these truths only came to me after many hours of alcohol-assisted meditation upon the many bizarre events which have turned my life upside down over the last few years, and which have come between me and my still-cherished ambition. I’m with God on this one; all I really want to do is play golf. Yet these days I can’t find half an hour to hit fifty balls on the driving range.
Satan has a thing about golf too. You see he really liked God; he looked up to Him as a Father. . which, in a non-biological sense He was. . and he was really hurt when He turned his back on him, created azaleas and went off to roam among them for ever. (Even if STA did land a good job as a result.)
When he found Mary Queen of Scots whacking a ball around on Musselburgh racecourse, she was marked down for a very unfort
unate life thereafter, and a very brutal end, as the accounts of her execution bear out. The old Devil was so pissed off that he even made her wig come loose when the axeman picked up her severed head.
He couldn’t stop the game from taking hold, of course. Not even he can get in the way of a clutch of Scots caddies waiting in slavering ambush for the next busload of Americans or Japanese. But he has twisted it to his own ends, by making it such that it takes normal men and women and, over the course of a three-hour walk, turns them into cursing, spitting, vengeful, violently masochistic beasts. In a final act of vengeance he has also taken from them the ability to resist spending large sums of money which most of them cannot afford on increasingly complicated and expensive equipment which does them no bloody good at all.
I know, I know; occasionally a Jack, or a Gary, or a Seve, or a Nick, or a Tiger bursts from the throng to show that the game can be a thing of unsurpassed beauty, but in fact they simply demonstrate that God in His Paradise is not completely oblivious to the ways of mankind and is still capable of reminding Works Number 666 not to push his luck.
He hasn’t done it with me, though; I still play off thirteen, and rising.
I don’t know what I did to attract Mr A’s attention. I thought I always tried to be as relaxed and laidback as I could, to do a good, sound dependable job, giving no one any bother, any hassle, not never, not no-how. Maybe that was it. Maybe I was too good at it and the master of my destiny decided that he wasn’t having any more of it.
And that’s where I come back to his special sense of humour. A Devil with less imagination would simply have given me piles, or eczema, or male pattern baldness; or if he’d really had it in for me, a crippling cerebral haemorrhage, or testicular cancer, something like that.
But no. What did that capricious bastard do to me?
He gave me Primavera Phillips, that was all!
2
On the face of it, my second wife has always seemed to be a sensible, straightforward, ingenuous woman. On the face of it.
I thought that for years. From the moment of our first meeting, when she walked into her flat and found me there, alone yet not alone, in most unusual circumstances, she struck me as just that solid no-nonsense person, an ultra-capable woman given neither to fear nor panic.
We fell in lust at first sight. Ever since then I’ve barely passed a day which in my old world would have seemed normal. Some might say that sharing a loft in Edinburgh with a green iguana named Wallace is not everyone’s idea of normality, but it suited me at the time.
Not even our courtship was straightforward. We did our thing together, and, our lucky shamrock having made its presence felt at an early stage, went off to Spain with a bag of money and spent some time shagging ourselves insensible. Then Prim fell in love with someone else, at the same time as I realised that I wasn’t a real person without Jan, the girl with whom I had grown up, and whom I had mucked around for several years.
They’re both dead now, Prim’s soul mate and mine. That old Devil had an invisible hand in Jan’s death, that’s for sure. As for the other one, I’m pretty certain now that he and STA were related. I should have guessed it at the time, but I was still an idealist then. I told myself that I believed in the basic goodness of the species. Now I admit publicly what privately I’ve always known, that the Seven Deadly Sins have a hell of a lot more pulling power than the Ten Commandments.
The night my wife Jan died, I was fifteen hundred miles away, in another city. And whom did I meet, right there, for the first time since we had gone our separate ways? Primavera Phillips, that’s who.
In my innocence, I thought it was a kind of serendipitous coincidence. But I’ve seen a lot of evil since then and I don’t believe that any more. I believe in Fate, but not that it has a kindly eye and a long white beard. I don’t believe that Luck is a Lady either. No, I see them for the single demon they are.
Okay, okay, okay. I’ve got my tongue in my cheek. I’m not the happy-go-lucky yuppie I once was, but if I have a saving grace it lies in the fact that I’m still Mac the Dentist’s son, and that’s all that a bloke could ever hope for. When my dad dies. . if he ever does, because he’s strong as an ox and never ill. . then the Architect of the Universe will have a partner at Augusta, one who’ll give him a few tips on those fast greens, at that. Someone once said to me, watching him hole a curly forty-footer on the difficult thirteenth at Elie, ‘Your old man putts like God.’ That was rubbish, of course; I don’t care how long God’s been playing, he can’t be as good a putter as Macintosh Blackstone.
And don’t get me wrong about Prim, either. She’s not Jan and I’m not. . him. . but when I married her it was because I thought I loved her to bits. Sure she’s a trouble magnet, but while she’s been at my side I have also done things I had never even dreamed about, and come into possession of a right few million quid in the process.
So when she proposed that for our honeymoon we took an extended break in Spain, to give it a second shot together in happier and more settled circumstances, I worked out the odds against lightning striking three times and fell into line. (You’d think a guy who’s won the lottery would have been less likely to disregard a long shot.)
There was nowhere else we wanted to go but the Costa Brava. This was not as simple as once it might have been, since we had sold the apartment which we had owned together in the historic village of St Marti d’ Empuries. We had bought it at a knock-down price from a Dutch bloke whose wife had left him, and who flogged it way under value just to spite her. She must have got the message, for after a while she came back, and he asked us if he could buy it back.
He was amazed when we said that he could have it for what we paid him; but the truth was that the place was too full of ghosts for me. . and for Prim, but I’ll get around to that.
So we booked into the finest suite in a country house hotel called Crisaran, a medieval building which has been beautifully restored by its lady owners. We arrived in mid-November, checked in for a month, and barely left the place for the first week, doing mostly what honey-mooners are expected to do — reading and watching television.
When we had had our fill of that, we climbed into our hired Mondeo and set out to visit an old friend. Shirley Gash, the ex-pat queen of L’Escala, isn’t that old, actually. Somewhere in her late forties, one might say, but it would be irrelevant, for she is a woman in her prime. . a lot of woman. About six feet tall, blonde and gorgeous, with a figure that outdoes any screen goddess I’ve met since I made my first movie.
Miles Grayson’s Snatch, co-starring his wife. . Prim’s sister Dawn. . and ‘introducing’ Oz Blackstone, private enquiry agent turned wrestling announcer turned actor, had just opened in New York. Shirley watches CNN and Sky News like some people watch Coronation Street and EastEnders, so after brief congratulations on our marriage, there was only one thing she wanted to talk about.
‘Was it a one-off?’ she asked. ‘Or are you going to do another? They say you’re great in it. . Well, not bad for a newcomer, anyway.’
I had practised self-deprecation in front of the mirror, but I still hadn’t cracked it, so I guess my smile was more self-satisfied than modest. ‘That’s kind of them,’ I responded, ‘but you know what they say about beginner’s luck. As a matter of fact, Miles has offered me a part in his next movie. I’ve said I’ll do it; but that’s as far ahead as I’m thinking.
‘Forward planning’s bullshit anyway.’
I looked around Shirley’s new garden. She had sold the house in which she had lived when first we had met, for reasons similar to our own. . to an Australian beer baron, she told us; now she was settled in a newly built bungalow, ostentatiously named Villa Balearic, and designed in what she described as Ibizan style. It was built on a half-acre plot in a street called Carrer Caterina, not far from the old Greco-Roman city of Empuries, and had a fine view across the Golfo de Rosas.
‘Nice this, Shirl,’ I said.
‘Thanks.’ If she’d had feathers she�
�d have preened herself. ‘I only moved in a month ago. I had a big hand in the design.’
‘That must have been a help to the builder,’ Prim chipped in, so deadpan that not even I could tell whether she was kidding or not.
‘Yes,’ Shirley nodded. ‘Although he never said.’
She looked from Prim, to me, then back again. ‘So,’ she demanded, ‘where you gonna live now you’ve sold your old place in St Marti?’
‘What do you mean?’ we asked in unison. ‘We live in Glasgow,’ I added, ‘with a better view than you’ve got. . If you like buildings and bridges and lots of traffic, as we do.’
‘Sure, but you belong here as well. L’Escala fits you two like a glove. Besides, we need a movie star here. We’ve got all bleeding sorts, Flash Harrys from all over Europe, but we’re a bit low on showbiz. Go on, buy a new place, then we’ll have someone to gossip about.
‘Who knows, Oz, you might even become a tourist attraction. Before you know it the British Catalan Society will be organising bus trips past your house.’
I was flattered, but I had to laugh. ‘One movie does not a celebrity make, Shirley.’
‘Bleeding well does in L’Escala,’ she countered.
‘In that case we’re well out of it,’ said Prim.
‘But you need to invest some of that money in property. Where else you gonna go?’
‘How about Florida?’
‘Too hot, and they’ve got alligators.’
‘Barbados?’
‘Hotter and the sanitation’s lousy.’
‘Rome?’
‘Full of Italians.’
‘Puerto Banus?’
‘Puerto Anus more like. Come on Prim, you love it here, admit it. You too, Oz. You’ve got memories here.’
‘Some of which we’d rather forget,’ I suggested.
‘Sure, but you’ve sold your apartment, just like I’ve sold my house.’
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