by Heide Goody
“My dad used to come shooting out here,” she said, without looking at him.
“Yes. I remember.”
“Set up clay traps and shoot out to sea. Not sure it was legal. I remember cold mornings. The mist.”
Jimmy nodded.
“Is it sorted?” she said.
“Hmmm?” Jimmy had no intention of answering her if she was going to ask half-formed and ambiguous questions.
She faced him. “The access road. Greg Mandyke. Have you confirmed the purchase?”
“He’s not selling.”
Her huge eyes twitched. “Did you up the price?”
“He’s not selling.”
“Did you even try? You do know we need that land?”
“I do know that.” Jimmy didn’t add he’d known it long before she had ever shown an interest in her father’s business.
“The business partners for Shore View will be coming to the Skegness and District Local Business Guild Awards next Friday.”
“I know that.”
“And they’ll expect to see progress.”
“I know. Hey, the first one’s in place.” He banged the side of the container. Flakes of paint came away on his hand.
“You got my text?” she said.
“Yeah. I assumed there was some autocorrect error. It said—”
“Open it.”
Jimmy went to the double doors of the container. It was far from new, probably battered and corroded by decades of sea spray and ocean crossings. The bolts were stiff. Jimmy wiggled the second bolt loose. The door swung open.
“These were meant to be empty,” he said.
“You don’t have to tell me,” said Jacinda. “I’ve got men coming in to fit windows and doors later today.”
The container was filled with cardboard boxes, damp and mildewed. Each was printed with a jaunty cloud-like logo and the name Capitalist Whore. He opened the nearest box. The wet cardboard came away like tissue paper. Cardboard-backed blister packs slid over each other and fell in a heap at his feet.
He picked one up. Pink packaging, the same jolly logo, and behind the plastic a poseable plastic doll in hot pants and a crop top. “Knock-off Barbie dolls.”
“Capitalist Whore,” said Jacinda.
He read the packaging. “Made in China. I guess something got lost in translation. ‘I have the dimensions you desire!’” he read.
“We need Shore View up and running for when the business partners come.”
“This is fixable,” he said, tossing the Capitalist Whore back into the container.
She was unconvinced. “And we can’t put the finance in place for Shore View unless we can finish up the Welton le Marsh development.”
“Jacinda, I—”
She glared at him for using her name, like it was somehow an affront, an attempt at over-familiarity, even though he had called her by no other name in all the years he had known her.
She said nothing. In the silence, he thought of all the things he could have said to her. At the top of the list was the unhelpful comment that they shouldn’t have stuck a spade in the ground at Welton le Marsh until the purchase of the access road land was confirmed. That this was a result of her hastiness. Okay, yes, she had been going through a tough time with the funeral and all, and yes, the deadline for the planning permission had been rapidly approaching and if they’d wanted to avoid months of delay and possible bankruptcy there had been no other choice but to start work, but…
“What did Greg say?” she asked. “What did Greg actually say?”
Jimmy chewed his tongue a second. “He said you should have been there yourself to talk to him.”
“Doesn’t he know I’m busy?”
Busy doing what? Jimmy screamed silently. The order books were empty. Apart from Shore View, Frost and Sons had no jobs lined up. There were men sitting idle, unpaid. They could be doing little jobs: driveways, block paving, loft conversions. There was nothing but the stalled Welton le Marsh development and this Shore View vanity project.
“Let’s fix this.” He went round to the flatbed truck’s open driver’s door. The driver, unshaven, a red bandana tied round his head like he was Axl Rose, was constructing a roll-up.
“It’s, um, Ivan, isn’t it?” said Jimmy.
“Yngve,” said the driver.
“Right, Yngve. That container needs emptying.”
Yngve Odinson licked the edge of his roll-up. “And I told tha woman that’s not me job.”
“But your dad – it is your dad, isn’t it—?”
“Ragnar, aye.”
“He’s got a truck or something. He could shift this lot.”
“Shift?”
“Gather it. Dump it. We don’t need it.”
Yngve regarded the roll-up and stuck it behind his ear, under the edge of his bandana. “I could call ’im. Make it disappear, aye?”
“Excellent. Just…” Jimmy dug around his wallet. “Fifty quid?” he said, knowing it was too low an offer.
Yngve snatched it from his hands, his eyes alight. “Fifty. It’s gone. Fucking vanished.”
“Good.” As the Odinson man took out a phone to call his dubious family, Jimmy went back to Jacinda. “Sorted,” he said.
“Of course, it’s sorted,” she said without a flicker of gratitude. “But what if the next container turns up with something in? Or the next?”
“Did you specify empty containers when you bought them?”
“I think it’s kind of implied, don’t you, Jimmy?” she snarled, then huffed. “It’s just endless. By the way, you will need to be the face of the company tonight.”
He was the face of the company every night. Every day and every night. Jacinda Frost’s name was above the door, on the vans and, mostly gallingly, on the company papers but he, Jimmy, was the face of the company. “What’s tonight?”
“StoreWatch.”
“What?”
“The neighbourhood watch thing for local businesses,” she said. “Meeting’s at Carnage Hall at six.”
He looked at his watch. “Why aren’t you going?”
“Pointless talking shop,” she said, with a derisory snort. “A waste of time.”
“Then why am I going?”
“It’s run by the local business guild. We have to show willing. I intend to claim the Business of the Year Award. Can’t do that if we’re not supporting the business guild’s sterling work in the local area. Carnage Hall has a bar.”
“Pardon?”
She tilted her head. “Have a drink. On expenses. I’m sure that will get you through the evening.” She said it with huge generosity, as though she had offered him everything his heart desired. That she had no idea how little the pathetic gesture meant twisted in his gut.
“And Welton le Marsh?”
“It needs sorting,” she said. “By all and any means.”
“Yes?” he said, because her answer was no answer at all.
She breathed in sharply, impatiently, her little sparrow chest swelling. “The works access track. We make that our road.”
“It’s five metres wide.”
“Have you moved the fencing on the church side?”
“As far as we can before we hit … more permanent barriers. Five metres.”
“It has to be—”
“Five and a half metres. I know.”
She stared at him. He met her gaze. Ten years ago he’d fantasised about sleeping with the woman, marrying her even. Now he was more likely to fantasise about throttling her and burying her under a patio.
“Do I have to come up with all the ideas?” she said. “And it’s one beer.”
“What?”
“One beer. Tonight. And get a receipt.”
Jimmy bit down on any sharp response. “Of course.”
Like verbal contracts and whispered promises, if it wasn’t written down, it hadn’t happened.
9
Jimmy vented his frustrations on Wayne all the way to Carnage Hall. It was like screamin
g into a cushion: momentarily relieving but ultimately unproductive. Wayne had heard it all before anyway. Jacinda’s lack of business skills, her utter failure to manage people or situations, Jimmy’s frustration that he, the disinherited surrogate son, was now nothing more than her gopher.
“Do they train them?” said Wayne, circling the clock tower roundabout and coming onto Grand Parade.
“What?”
“Gophers. Do they train them to do things? Is that why they call people gophers?”
“What are you talking about?”
Doubt clouded Wayne’s expression. “Gophers. Aren’t they…? The little things that pop their heads up and go ‘meep’. Prairie dogs.”
“Jesus.” Jimmy could have wept. “Prairie dogs are prairie dogs. Gophers are gophers.”
“They’re different?”
“Yes,” said Jimmy, then realised he had no idea if they were, or how. “We don’t call people gophers because they’re like gophers. They’re gophers, go-fors. ‘Go for this, go for that’. Gopher.”
“Ah,” Wayne nodded. “It’s more ‘Go do this, go do that’. Should call them go-dos.” He pulled up outside an amusement arcade opposite Carnage Hall.
Jimmy looked at his watch. “This thing won’t last more than a couple of hours,” he said. “Pick me up here at eight.”
“What we doing at eight?” said Wayne, lighting a fag.
Jimmy jumped down from the cab. “Just pick me up at eight.” He slammed the door, muttering, “Fucking go-do.”
He went inside the foyer, pushing through the early ticket holders for ‘Antoine de Winter’s Psychic Extravaganza’ and took the stairs to the Frank Carson memorial banqueting suite.
Jimmy put his name on one of the prepared attendees name badges. The copper at the front waved with a bandaged hand for him to take a seat. Jimmy considered the assortment of minor businesspeople and shopkeepers – butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers – and sat near the back, one seat away from a lone woman who looked as happy as him to be there.
She looked up as he sat, giving him the briefest of smiles. She was dressed in a strappy gold top, like she was going out clubbing later.
“Am I late?” he asked. “Struggled to get through that crowd downstairs. Who knew a psychic could be so popular?”
“The psychic, one hopes.” She slid a sheet of paper over to him. “Agenda.”
“Uh-huh.” He scanned the list of items. Mobility scooters, fly-tipping, the seagull menace, travellers…
“I treat it like bingo,” she said. “When we’ve ticked them all off, we get a prize.”
“We get to leave?” he said.
“Precisely.”
The copper launched into his presentation. Sergeant Cesar Hackett had a red sheen to his face and sweat on his brow, but it didn’t appear to be nerves. He launched into his material with gusto.
Jimmy had suspected the copper was going to give them a doom-and-gloom rundown of the town’s problems, paint Skegness as a town under siege from lawlessness and thuggery, with Cesar as its sheriff and the meeting attendees as his willing deputes. In that, Jimmy was wrong.
Cesar started off with a PowerPoint of photos of Skegness – and did he have photos. A whole narrative of photos. Skegness seafront, calm and peaceful at the beginning of the day. A child with some candyfloss. Pavements bustling with holidaymakers in the sunshine. Convoys of mobility scooters rolling down the promenade. A dog playing on the beach. Happy teenagers munching on donuts. Lager drinkers on park benches in animated conversation. A family gathered around a human-sized fibre-glass ice-cream. Smiles, cheeriness, sunshine. Nothing about crime. Nothing about lawlessness.
Stopping on a final picture of Skegness’s mascot, the skipping Jolly Fisherman, Cesar turned to the audience. “Isn’t it a lovely town, eh?”
There were a couple of nods, slightly more shrugs and an even greater level of complete indifference. When it became apparent Cesar wasn’t going to immediately offer anything more than that, a woman on the front row put up her hand.
“What are you going to do about the mobility scooters?” she demanded.
“Do?” said Cesar.
“There’s too many of them.”
“Skegness is very popular with older people,” Cesar agreed, smiling.
“They block the pavement. They go too slow.”
“Do they go too slow or is everyone else in too much of hurry? People should take the time to enjoy things, look around.”
“You don’t think there’s a problem?” said someone else.
Jimmy, who had experienced Skeg at the height of summer, thought there was a problem. One that could be solved if the young stopped breeding, the disabled stayed at home and everyone found somewhere to go other than Skegness seafront.
Cesar fielded inane questions about pavement usage, including why mobility scooters were allowed on the pavements if bicycles weren’t, whether mobility scooters needed insurance like other motor vehicles, and whether the owner of the fibreglass ice-cream could sue someone if a careless scooter user knocked it over (which apparently someone had).
Bored, Jimmy scanned the room and silently played shag, marry, kill with all the women in the room. The woman in the spangly top next to him came out of the game quite well, not least because she didn’t seem at all inclined to join in the general wasting of their evening by participating in the debate.
“If we’re not going to do something about the problem with mobility scooters on the pavements, why’s it on the agenda?” demanded an angry shopkeeper.
Cesar blinked the sweat away from his eyes. The man seemed positively unwell. “We are doing something, aren’t we? We’re discussing it. We’re recognising our preconceptions and adjusting our perspectives. It’s all fine really, isn’t it?”
An irritated man on the front row stared at his agenda. “Fly-tipping then!”
“Ah.” Cesar progressed his PowerPoint. His swollen bandaged hand seemed to be having trouble with the remote. He flicked through images of dumped rubbish bags, discarded mattresses in lay-bys – even an entire fitted kitchen.
“It’s a bloody eyesore,” said someone.
“And it’s getting worse.”
“No one wants to see rubbish dumped in our lay-bys,” Cesar agreed. “And we don’t know who’s responsible—”
“Ragnar Odinson!” declared a man loudly.
“We don’t know who’s responsible,” Cesar repeated.
“And his sons!” said another man. “The whole bloody family’s at it.”
“When are you going to lock them up?” said a woman.
“That Torsten Odinson is back out again,” said another.
Cesar blinked furiously and gulped at a glass of water standing by the projector.
“Should’ve gone to the hospital,” muttered spangly top.
“Is he all right?” said Jimmy.
“Bitten by a seal,” she replied.
“A seal?”
“Probably got seal finger.”
“You made that up.” He used the momentary conversation to look at her stick-on name badge, trying to make it look like he wasn’t peering at her tits. Sam Applewhite – DefCon4.
“Point is … the point is,” insisted Cesar with some difficulty. “Although the dumped rubbish causes a problem, when I went and looked inside this dumped kitchen unit, look who I found living inside…”
Jimmy’s hopes that he would show them images of a cute squirrel family, or a pair of snuggling hedgehogs, were swiftly dashed. The next picture was of a cupboard full of filthy crud and half a dozen rats peering over the top of it. The phone camera’s flash had given them a powerful case of red-eye, and it looked like the cupboard was home to Satan’s own rat squadron.
“Jesus wept,” gasped a woman.
“Life always finds a way,” said Cesar. “It’s beautiful, really.”
“Dumping rubbish on our roads is not beautiful!”
“Oh, hell,” muttered Sam. “Just remembered. I l
eft a bearded lady on the side of the road.”
Jimmy was about to ask her what the hell that meant when Cesar, trying to take another sip of water, coughed, choked and had enough presence of mind to grab a waste-paper bin before throwing up. He retched for a good thirty seconds.
Sam Applewhite stood up. “You need to go to hospital!”
“No,” said Cesar. “Erin told me not to make a fuss. Really, I’m—” He got no further before vomiting again.
There was the general unhurried chatter of people who’d realised their civic duty to a poorly soul was being called upon, and that the meeting was about to be cut drastically short.
“I think an alcoholic beverage is called for,” said Jimmy.
“Not antibiotics and tetanus shots?” said Sam.
“I meant for me.” He looked her up and down. “You need one too?”
10
Jimmy MacIntyre had no problem with women, and no problem getting women.
All a man had to do was show up at a nightclub or bar – the Tiki Club or Wellies – at a late hour and there’d be any number of drunk girls, come down from the Butlins holiday camp or the caravan parks, happy to get off with a suave-looking local lad. Hen parties and mums on the lash were the easiest of all: the first had come out with something to prove, the others with something to escape from.
Tackling sober women – sober and intelligent women – was trickier; particularly in a calmer, less alcohol-fuelled place like the Jim Bowen bar at Carnage Hall. Women had no idea how tough it was for a modern man, the fine line he had to walk between equality and chivalry. Even offering to buy a drink could be misinterpreted as chauvinism.
“What are you having?” he asked.
Sam drummed her fingers on the edge of the bar. “You sure?”
Well, he’d asked now, so he pressed on. “Absolutely.” Adding, “It’s on expenses anyway,” to reassure her.
Sam twitched her nose. It was a cute expression. “Long Island Iced Tea?”
Jimmy glanced at the cocktail menu. Long Island Iced Tea: a five-shot cocktail.
“Well, I don’t know if the expenses can stretch that far—”