Fish Tale (Cliffhanger Book 2)

by T. J. Middleton

  Her hand went out again. This time the woman grasped it, clasped it hard, like they were sharing something, something big.

  ‘I got in the harness, the boys in charge reassuring me, telling me it would be all right, ‘cause it was scary. I mean the drop was huge, Al, just huge. And then I did it, stood on the platform, my arms outstretched and dived, like I was standing on the top of those cliffs back home, dived into the sea that I’d looked down at all my life. It was wonderful, plunging headlong down, wonderful. And the funny thing was, although you were in the air, it wasn’t like diving in the air at all. It was more like you were in a tunnel, a vast rippling tunnel, going deeper and deeper, like it was…’

  ‘A woman’s private part,’ Michaela pronounced, a bit too loud for my liking. The table next door stopped talking. Phrases like that are not common parlance in prison. Audrey carried on regardless.

  ‘Then I touched the water, touched with my hand Al, touched it, like a feather, like a bird on the wing, then up I went, up and up and up until…’ She gulped again, ‘something went wrong. The elastic went all limp on me. I was hanging there, hundreds of feet in the air, neither up or down, with nothing on, trussed up, ready for Judgement day and…’

  ‘Hang on a moment Audrey. Nothing on?’

  ‘Trust you to pick up on that. It was all about connecting Al. You should try it when you get out. You might learn something about yourself. There I was, dangling over the world like a new born babe, with the umbilical cord still tied, all pretence, all lies and evasions, all self delusions stripped away. That’s when it came to me, what I’d done, what I had to do. This is why we’ve come back. I couldn’t face the lie any more.’

  She sagged, like she’d run dry. I still couldn’t quite believe her.

  ‘So why waste time coming here?’

  ‘Just to say sorry Al. I didn’t mean to kill her. It just happened. Your bastard child, you rubbed my face in it every day. I just couldn’t take it any more.’ She pushed her chair back. ‘Excuse me. I need to pee.’

  She got up and stumbled off to the ladies. I’d never seen that before. The Audrey I knew had a bladder that could raise the Titanic. Michaela pulled her chair up the table.

  ‘She’s very contrite,’ she said, all neat and orderly as if it were all her doing. There was something about her that I couldn’t quite place, but I knew if I could just get past the reserve…

  ‘Forgive me for asking,’ I said, ‘but can you purchase that tan over the counter or do you need a prescription? Only I had a car with walnut veneer that colour.’

  It didn’t phase her at all.

  ‘I tan naturally. It’s the sun worshipper in me. I can do eight solid hours without being turned over.’ I nodded. That seemed about right.

  ‘So, how did you meet my Audrey? Not stretched out on a beach, I’ll be bound. Not many tubs of Hombre Solaire in her handbag.’

  ‘Your Audrey?’ The lump of thistle got lodged again. ‘I don’t think she quite sees herself as your Audrey any more. She’s gay now, Mr Greenwood. Didn’t you know that?’

  I did, as a matter of fact. My next-door neighbour, Mrs Poke Nose, had sent me a postcard to that effect, the very day it happened. On the back of a picture of a donkey in a grass skirt, the words, ‘Audrey sleeps with the misses’ had been written. A live wire old Poke Nose was, sixty-four when she wrote that. Paul McCartney had obviously never met her sort.

  ‘I understand a lot of married women move in that direction, given half the chance. Well it make sense doesn’t it, your own kind to talk to, to understand and appreciate you. I mean you know what you’re doing, while as for us men, it’s all a bit of a mystery. So where was it, a chat room, a gay club?’ She placed the notebook on the table.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. A mutual friend of ours, introduced her to cycling. Audrey took to it with a vengeance. Well she would, with those legs. See this?’

  She opened up the book and handed me a photo slipped the pages. I took a look. There was Audrey and Michaela in full cycling gear and another woman standing in between. They all looked horribly happy. I handed it back. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘That was taken in Sydney two years ago, the Gay Olympics,’ Michaela told me. ‘That’s the Over 50s cycle race. I came first, Audrey came third. That’s how we met. I recognised her right away. She used to go to my old gym, in Wool. Judes it was called. I didn’t know her then, but I used to see her, on the rowing machine. She impressed me even then. But meeting her properly in Australia, we clicked immediately. And when she found out who I was, it was mind blowing. It was like we’d both been waiting for this moment, all our lives. When the time came for to part she refused. She came back with me, just like that. We set up a taxi business together.’

  This was sounding horribly familiar.

  ‘Don’t tell me. You had uniforms made.’

  ‘Grey ones, yes. What of it?’

  ‘Never mind. Go on.’

  ‘We were making a wonderful life, a thriving business, a lovely bungalow, lots of outdoor activities, swimming, riding, golf. She has a very good swing, did you know that?’

  I studied her hard. I’d seen her before, I was sure, but couldn’t for the life of me think where.

  ‘Excuse me, for asking,’ I said,’ but I still don’t have a clue who the fuck you are?’

  ‘No? I’m your other big surprise of the day,’ she said.

  ‘Pleasant or unpleasant?’ I asked. ‘Only it’s nice to know.’ She put her hands to her lips, then opened them up, palms out. It was like she’d rehearsed it.

  ‘That would depend on your point of view, Mr Greenwood. To my husband I’m an unpleasant surprise, a reminder of his many inadequacies, both in terms of his chosen profession and as a member of the human race. To you, knowing what you have said about me in the past, once you know my name, I suspect I am a pleasant one.’

  She put her hand on mine. They’re not allowed to do that, visitors, but I wasn’t going to stop her. It was cold, cold and muscular, but not unpleasant. A tingle ran down my spine.

  ‘Who the fuck am I? I’m Michaela Rump, Mr Greenwood, Adam Rump’s wife, you know the woman you pushed off a cliff?’

  Her lips parted in a smile. She had teeth the size of piano keys.

  ‘And do you know,’ she said, ‘I hardly felt a thing.’

  Her tongue tinkled across the ivory. Those thistles wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  2

  I don’t remember much after that. Audrey returned all puffy eyed.

  ‘I hope the loos are better in Holloway,’ she said, sitting down. ‘Right. I’ve said my piece. Only a few more details. The business doesn’t exist any more, I’m afraid.’ She looked around almost pleased, as if she’d taken that from me too.

  ‘Doesn’t bother me. Strange to say the social graces I once had for taxi driving has somehow evaporated. It’s what being locked up for twenty three hours a day for no good reason does to a man.’ She wasn’t listening.

  ‘There’ll be compensation due. Quite a bit I imagine. Lost earnings, damaged reputation.’ Michaela snorted again, her lip curling up at the edges like a young Elvis ready to pick a fight. She’d look good with her hair swept back, all Brylcreemed, black leather, white teeth, mouth twisted with disgust. Audrey quietened her with a hand. ‘If you’re strapped for immediate cash you could always sell your story to the Daily Mail. I still have the bungalow, I never sold it, though it’s rented out now.

  ‘What bungalow? You told me you tore it down.’

  ‘I exaggerated. The heat of the moment, Al. I repaired it. Anyway who are you to criticise what I did with it. It’s my bungalow.’

  ‘Your bungalow! My childhood? My mother? Your bungalow?’ Audrey held up her ring-less hand, counted it out.

  ‘Your childhood, your mother, my chequebook, my money and my signature. Besides, before all this happened, I didn’t think you’d be coming out, I thought…’

  ‘You’d let me rot there for the next hundred years, y
es we know what sort of person you are, don’t we Michaela?’ Mrs Rump raised a startled eyebrow. ‘We should get together,’ I told her, ‘once she’s safely inside. We could compare notes, what it’s like, trusting your bed with a killer, all those savage juices flowing under the duvet. What do you say? My place or hers?’

  Audrey leant over and cuffed me round the head. I looked across the room. Bernie shrugged his shoulders. Well it’s what marriage is all about, isn’t it, the clash of two souls and three bodies.

  ‘Forget the bungalow,’ she snapped. ‘There’s nothing you can do. They’re three months in to a two year lease. Anyway, I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to live there, not without your fish.’

  ‘I wondered when we’d get to them.’

  ‘I was fond of them too Al. I bought them for you, remember.’

  ‘Yes and you killed them for me too. Killed my daughter, killed my fish. Sometimes I don’t know which was worse. I mean Miranda was something that came over you, but Torvill and Dean. That was cold blooded.’

  ‘So were they. Get some more.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same. That part of my life has gone now, same as they have.’ I didn’t tell her I had Torvill back in the cell, stuffed and mounted on a block of rosewood. I used to have Dean but someone borrowed him for an act of self-gratification. He’d lost his shine after that.

  ‘Well try not to look too cheerful,’ Audrey complained. ‘Anyone would think I was doing you a favour.’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing? I mean, my life is just dandy outside isn’t it.’

  The truth was, I’d got used to it, banged up inside, knowing that I pushed Michaela Rump off the cliff. OK, I was serving time for the wrong crime, but at least I had killed someone. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done nothing. Now everything was topsy-turvy, stood on its head, Audrey doing the decent thing, Michaela Rump springing back to life. Next thing I’d know Torvill would be up on her perch, flapping her lips, asking for a glass of water. I had to get out there.

  Bernie led me back to the recreation room. Randolph Scott was back on his horse, but it didn’t seem to matter any more. Not a lot happens in the nick. One day is very much like the next. You might try to keep your spirits up, learn something useful, sweat a few aimless hours in the gym, have a barney with someone smaller than you, but basically you end up lazy, lazy and out of trim. Your brain no longer turns over like it could, consequently you’re not as quick on your feet as you once were. You don’t have the wire for any of it any more, the spit. Seeing Audrey was like the plug had been pulled on me. I was drained out, nothing left. By the time I got back to my cell, I hardly had the strength to pull the Rizla out the packet.

  Funnily enough it wasn’t Audrey’s confession that had got to me. It was Michaela Rump, coming back from the dead. All the time I’d been inside, I’d been sure that it had been her I’d pushed off that cliff, and yet here she was, crossing her legs under a Formica table, all smart and superior, as if she’d just looked round and found me floating in the toilet. What did she mean, ‘hardly felt a thing’? That she’d been there? That couldn’t be. It was three hundred foot, that drop. Even if she’d survived the fall, she’d have been smashed to pieces on the rocks. And if they didn’t get her, then she’d have had to swim a couple of miles round the cliff head just to get to a beach. And if she had survived all that, why hadn’t she reported me? No woman likes to be pushed off a cliff. No, she was playing with me, that’s what, like she knew something that she knew I didn’t, messing with my head, enjoying it. Bicycles weren’t the only thing Audrey and her had in common.

  Then there was the other question I thought I’d laid to rest. If I hadn’t pushed off Michaela Rump, who had I done the dirty on? Someone from the village? A disgruntled day tripper? One of those hikers? No, my woman wasn’t a hiker. She hadn’t been dressed for three weeks up the Eiger as your average rambler is. I didn’t think she was carrying anything. Perhaps she was going to end it all. No reason then to bring anything. That would make sense, up there in the wind and rain, standing near the edge, crying her eyes out. Perhaps I’d done her a favour. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t cry out, make a bit of protest. I’d expected that, but there’d been nothing. She’d just flapped her arms and was gone. I should have known it wasn’t Audrey right there and then. Audrey would have not gone quietly. Audrey’s screams would have woken those Burghers of Calais what our sculpture teacher, Miss Prosser bangs on about every week. We did a prison version of The Burghers of Calais last month, The Screws of the Scrubs we called it, using a photo of Bernie and three of his mates draped around a papier-mâché rock. I didn’t think much of it myself, but according to Miss Prosser I have a natural talent for form and spatial awareness. I’d have rather done one of Miss Prosser draped over whatever was available, but it wasn’t in her job description. Perhaps I’d ask Michaela Rump to do the honours when I got outside. I could just see her, nothing on but a cloak and boots with a couple of chains around her neck. Perhaps just the chains and boots. Michaela Rump wouldn’t have gone quietly over the cliff either. But she had been there that day, so her husband had told me, that Sunday or the Saturday before. Like Piccadilly Circus it had been up the Beacon that weekend. If I’d known I’d have never have tried it. Never have tried it and Miranda wouldn’t be… wherever she was. But I wasn’t thinking about Miranda now. It was Michaela, Michaela Rump I couldn’t leave alone. When had she been there. Before me, after me, at the same time?

  I lay on the bunk all that night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about it, me hiding behind the gorse bush, that flash of yellow, the oilskin flapping back and forth round those legs, the figure standing with her back to me, bawling her eyes out like her lungs were ready to pop. No, that was wrong. She wasn’t crying. She was shouting rather. That’s what it was. Yes, she was upset, but she was shouting, not crying, shouting something as I ran towards her. What was it? I wasn’t listening at the time, ‘cause I thought it was Audrey standing there and if she’d been shouting anything it would have been my name and how it was all going to hell, but I didn’t want to know. I was concentrating on the moment, on running up there quick and quiet, giving her the push that would change my life forever. If only I could give a shape to the sound she made, put a few vowels against it, if I could just remember. What was it, a name, a word, a phrase which summed it all up for her? What would you say to the world just before you took your own life? Thanks very much? Can I have another go please? My woman had been up there for a reason, the same I’d been up there for a reason. Maybe she had death in her mind, same as me. Maybe she didn’t. But I had to know. Let sleeping dogs lie, isn’t that the motto, but I couldn’t. Old Rodin, he made them Burghers last for ever, what happened to them, the indignity they suffered. Well I couldn’t do that, but I had to give her flesh and blood, put her back where she once stood, say, yes, that what she looked like, that’s who she was. Why I cared I couldn’t say. She meant nothing to me, and yet, because of that, she meant everything.

  Three weeks I had of it, waiting for the day to come, all the while feeling the mystery of it digging into me like a lump in a mattress. Not that I was left alone much, visits from the governor, visits from my solicitor, the chaplain all over me clapping me on the back, telling me to count my blessings and not to be bitter. Bernie’s wife baked me a cake. I didn’t even know he had a wife. In my last art lesson Miss Prosser gave me a bunch of violets and gave me a quick peck on the cheek, told me to keep up the good work.

  ‘Who knows, you might become famous,’ she said, and looked at me the only way a woman laying herself out can.

  ‘I already do come famous, sweetheart. Want a taste of it?’ and crushed the violets back in her hand. Crude I know, but it’s the only language women like that understand.

  And then suddenly, it was over. I wasn’t number one scum in the nick any more, I was Al Greenwood Esq. a wronged man. Suddenly it was Friday morning and I was standing outside, the letter of pardon stuck in my back pocket, mum’s
old green holdall in my hand, my last prison breakfast lying in my belly on a pool of grease. It was ten o’clock, the sun all ready for a day’s work, the air washing over me, telling me to take my clothes off, feel its goodness. Inside, summer is simply horrible, choked with heat and rancid sweat, but here it was like I was standing in a new skin, great to be a man, great to be alive, whole world warm and welcoming. I could almost touch it. A car came down stuttering down the road, one of those old fashioned black Citroëns that General de Gaulle used to get shot at in. It mounted the pavement opposite, wobbled in a circle, and ended up with the front wheel resting against my right foot. Dear old Poke Nose, Alice Blackstock sat behind the wheel, a spangled Jimi Hendrix hat on her head and a pink feather boa wrapped round her neck, her fingers poking out the ends of black lace gloves. She didn’t look a day over eighty-five. She rolled down the window, the fug hitting me in the face. No guesses what she was running on.

  ‘Howdy neighbour,’ she said. ‘Sorry I’m late. Cross town traffic and all that. Did you just jump in front of my car.’ She laughed. I hadn’t heard a laugh like that in years, no side to it. I smiled back. I knew the record too.

  ‘Well Mrs B. This is a surprise.’

  ‘You were probably hoping for someone a bit younger on the eye, being locked up all this time. The best this body can do I’m afraid.’ She straightened her skirt. She had good legs for an old aged pensioner. It was all that yoga she did.

  ‘I wasn’t hoping for anybody at all Mrs Blackstock, leastways not someone as elegant as you.’

  Alan Ladd used that word to Jean Arthur in Shane. Mum had taken me to see it in Bournemouth. I liked it so much we took the bus to see it the next day as well, and the day after that. Fourth time round and they let us in free with a tub of vanilla each. ‘That was a very elegant dinner Mrs Starrett,’ is what Shane had said, and I used it too when mum was alive. ‘That was a very elegant dinner Mrs Greenwood,’ I’d say, and she’d blush, just like Jean Arthur, like it was the nicest thing she’d ever heard come out of a man’s mouth. Of course living with Audrey, the word elegant had become pretty much redundant.