Fish Tale (Cliffhanger Book 2)

by T. J. Middleton

  ‘T.S. Who?’ I said. He looked down at his shoes, a little smirk on his lips. I knew he would.

  ‘T.S. Eliot. One of our most famous poets. What we call a laureate. Well, T.S. Eliot once took a cab in London, and as he got in, the cab driver said, “You’re T.S. Eliot aren’t you?” And T.S. Eliot said “Yes I am. How do you know?” And the cab driver said, “Oh I know all you famous people. I’ve got a memory for photographs. Only the other week I had Bertram Russell, just where you’re sitting. And I said the same to him, “You’re Bertram Russell, the famous philosopher aren’t you,” and he said “Yes, I am.” And I said “Well then Sir Bertram, I’m dying to know, what’s it all about then?” And do you know he couldn’t tell me.’

  And Robin slapped his thigh and started to laugh. Carol smacked his bottom and started to laugh. Audrey punched his arm and started to laugh. There they were, the three of them, all laughing away. I could have killed him there and then, buried him in the pimple with some good old-fashioned spadework.

  ‘Couldn’t tell him what?’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Robin fought back his tears.

  ‘Couldn’t tell him what?’ I repeated. Robin stopped laughing, looked to Carol. Carol stopped laughing, looked to Audrey. Audrey stopped laughing, looked to me.

  ‘What it was all about,’ Robin said.

  ‘What what was all about?’

  ‘It,’ he insisted. ‘Life.’ Suddenly the story wasn’t funny anymore I shook my head.

  ‘Why should he know what life is all about? Just because he thinks about things?’

  ‘Dad. It was a joke.’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t make sense, pet. I mean even if he did know, he couldn’t have told someone from the back of a taxi could he, not just like that. I mean it would be more complicated than that, what life was all about? Wouldn’t it be Robin?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Of course it would. That’s the trouble with jokes like that. Too clever by half. They don’t stand up to, what’s the word, scrutiny. My jokes might be a bit on the crude side, fannies and bishops and college boys who think they know everything, but at least they hold up. How the chops coming along dearest? Boiled long enough?’

  We had dinner. He had lovely table manners Robin, tucked his napkin in his collar, set his knife and fork down every time he wanted to chew, elbows nowhere to be seen. After the casserole we had profiteroles and custard. Carol kept looking at him slyly from under her eyelashes. Not in my house, she wasn’t. Afterwards I took them down to see the fish. As soon as I switched the underwater lights on, the koi started to do the duck and dive, they were that excited that I was there. We stared at them, their colours shimmering in the quivery light.

  ‘That’s Torvill,’ I said, as she flashed past us. ‘Aint’ she a marvel.’

  ‘Very nice, he said. ‘But what does she – they, do?’

  ‘Do? They’re fish Robin. They don’t do anything, apart from making my heart burst for being the most beautiful creatures God ever dreamt up. Excepting Carol here of course.’

  ‘What about me?’ Audrey was standing behind us. I didn’t know she’d come too. ‘Where do I come in your scheme of things? Before or after the fish?’

  ‘That’s a trick question Audrey.’

  ‘Only for you. Coffee Robin?’

  We trooped back into the living room. Audrey had laid out the best coffee set and a plate full of chocolate mints left over from Christmas.

  ‘Well,’ she said, as we all sat down. ‘What shall we do now?’

  Robin leant across, his eyes all shiny.

  ‘I’ve got the very thing,’ he said. He reached into his jacket and brought out this little black box.

  ‘Scrabble,’ he said.

  And that’s how it all began.

  It wasn’t an ordinary travelling set he’d brung. It was a special one, with a folding wooden board inlaid with metal studs, little mahogany shelves and little ivory letters with tiny magnets on the back, to stop them sliding about. Even the pouch he kept them in was some kind of fancy leather. I must admit it looked nice, all crafted, like it was made for some posh sailing ship. He even had a silver propelling pencil too, clipped to the score sheet, and a little pocket dictionary that he pulled out of his rucksack in the hall. Before I could say anything Robin had it all laid out, shelves on the coffee table, board in the middle, Audrey and me stuck on the sofa, him and Carol in the two bamboo chairs she’d brought in from the conservatory.

  ‘It’s probably best if I keep the score,’ he said, giving the bag a little shake, ‘seeing as I know the rules? Shall we?’ And off we went.

  We played two games that night, and on Sunday we played two after lunch and would have had a third had I not had to put them on a train up to London for the evening. When I saw them off, he was setting the board out on the table between them. And you know what? I had a kind of hankering to be playing there too. I should have know then, that it wasn’t right.

  He was back the next weekend and the weekend after that, though whether it was because of the pimple, or Carol, or the scrabble, was hard to tell. In the mornings he went up the pimple to do his measuring. In the afternoons, when we were out, if he’d been half a man, he’d have been up Carol, but most of the time he wrote to his mum, these long biro-sucking letters, describing everything he’d done that week. No wonder Carol used to get a bit antsy every once in a while. She was her father’s daughter after all. In the evenings out it came, rain or shine, the little board, and we’d start. That was it, weekend after weekend. In fact as soon as Robin came on the scene, the weekends never seemed to end. Sunday evening would finish, then suddenly it was seven o’clock Friday again and he’d be walking through the door, setting out the board.

  The thing was, before Robin, I’d never had time for parlour games, games of any sort really, but those weekends, dipping my hand in the bag, it was like being a kid again and going to see Father Christmas, putting your hand in the lucky dip, not knowing what you were going to come up with. It got my heart racing just thinking about my turn, about what I could do, about the opportunities that lay out there, Audrey slapping down words like TEA and PIG, Carol getting in a temper ‘cause she couldn’t think of anything clever, and me, looking at the board, studying my letters, realizing that all right, I might not be the best educated bastard at the board, but I was quick, knew more words than I ever thought I did. Seeing all them letters all strung out on that little shelf weren’t a hindrance at all, in fact it helped, made patterns in my head. I had a brain and what do you know? It worked. Five weekends and I was hooked. I’d never experienced anything like it before. I mean there’d been the booze and the pills and the holiday girls in Weymouth. But this was different. It was like freedom, like it wasn’t me, it was someone else, someone better than me, cleverer, smarter, well up. There was only one trouble with it. Robin.

  He’d always win, see. Always. ‘My game, I think,’ was his little phrase, and he’d rub his hands and scoop up the letters and drop them in his little bag, ready for the next one. If he had a y or a z they always seemed to land on a treble letter score. He knew all those stupid words that no one had used for five hundred years, and he was demon with the Ss. And he didn’t just win. He slaughtered us, me in particular, winning sixty, seventy, sometimes a hundred points ahead. Winning was everything to Robin and he made sure I knew it.

  It didn’t make any sense, the way he carried on. If you were looking to get on the right side of your girlfriend’s dad – important when times got tough and times would get tough, Carol being her mother’s daughter – humouring him would be top of your list. God knows I’d done enough with Audrey’s. Not humiliating him twice on the Saturday and three times on the following Sunday would be another, even if went against the grain. But not Robin. Every weekend he fucked me all over the board. Common decency, would have let me win once or twice. He would know he did it deliberate. I would know he did it deliberate. But we’d both know he was also showing me a bit of respect a
nd I would have appreciated that. But he never did. Me, I started out playing not caring if I lost or won. It was a game, that was all. But after a couple of months it became my life’s ambition to beat to little prick and if I could, set fire to that beard too. Not to put too fine a point upon it, since its appearance, I was having issues with Audrey in the bedroom department too. The visual similarity was putting me off my stroke. I tried to counter it, shutting my eyes, thinking of something else like the fish, but once you’ve got something like that fixed in your head, it’s very hard to dislodge. Even when I did manage it I half expected it to say, ‘My game I think,’ at the end. It wasn’t right.

  Six months in came news I was dreading. Robin and Carol got engaged. Audrey was over the moon. She kissed and hugged him and brought out the champagne I’d been saving for my birthday. That night he worked in MARQUEE and DOWRY onto the board and beat me by fifty-three points. The next week Audrey announced that we were all going to go on holiday together, to get to know each other

  ‘He’s here every weekend,’ I said. ‘I know him already.’

  ‘It’s called bonding. It’s what human beings do when it’s important. This is our daughter’s future happiness we’re talking about. Besides we never go on holiday.’

  She caught my expression.

  ‘We’re going Al. I’ve got it all worked out. The Lake District. According to this brochure it’s where all the poets live. How romantic is that, seeing them wandering about, thinking up rhymes.’

  ‘It’s a bloody long way Audrey, the Lake District. I’d have thought somewhere closer to home would be better suited. By the sea.’

  ‘I’m sick of the sea, looking at the same thing every bloody day.’

  I could relate that. The Lake District it was.

  4

  I’ve never liked holidays. All that packing, all that travelling, all that bucket-slop that you and the other seven hundred suckers are forced to eat, like pigs in a trough. Because that’s what you are on holiday basically, a pig in a trough, to be shouted at, prodded at, shunted here, shunted there, packed off in aeroplanes, crammed in on trains, standing in line for hours on end, stumbling out without a mind of your own at the other end. And for why? To be stacked up in paper-thin pens, herded onto to beaches with sun beds laid out like coffins after an earthquake, bronzed lotharios sauntering past, eyeing up your women, selling crap towels and see-through bangles made in China. All you can do is eat, sleep, drink, and be hauled on top of the misses at regular intervals, ‘cause that’s what a pig does, eat, sleep, drink, and clamber aboard for thirty seconds as and when required. That’s not a holiday. That’s a labour camp. And you’re paying for it.

  I used to do that when I was younger, take myself to that island next to Colonel Gadaffi, Malta, land of leather handbags and lumps of rubble. I cut out the first two ingredients in them days. As much lager my stomach could take and a different Judy every day, often didn’t even bother to ask their names. I’d come back disgusted, disgusted with them, disgusted with me, fed up with how boring it had all been, how dull and pointless, like a routine. Yet I had to do it. There was no choice. I was a pig. I knew a trough when I saw it.

  And then one year I didn’t go. I remembered this place Mum used to talk about, up in the Peak District, where her own mum came from and I went there, did nothing much, just mooched about, drove around, drank the local beer, got talking to people I’d never meet again. No skirt chasing, no four day benders, not even an unfair fight with someone smaller than me, just peace and quiet and nice clean sheets to wake up in. And you know what? I came back feeling good about things, like it didn’t have to be the way it was. I began taking myself off every now and again to quiet places in the UK, the Cotswolds, the New Forest, back up to the Peak District, places with streams and stone bridges and pubs I could sit in a corner, not having to be anyone, nothing on show, nothing on display, not even a face. Never told anyone back home about them. It would have sounded all funny, Al Greenwood going native on his ownsome. Not good for the self-preservation. I tried it with Audrey once when we first got together, but she wanted to pour over brochures and walk everywhere, see everything, plan it all out, and I couldn’t be dealing with that. No, better back to the battery fortnight, rub her back with sun tan lotion, turn her over every now again. But now, this Lake District business. It was like they were worming their way into a private me, one that had been hidden away, that no one knew about. I didn’t like it. Still, what choice did I have? It was my daughter’s future happiness, right?

  I borrowed a camper van from a bloke I knew. It had everything, a kitchenette with a cooker and fridge, a little chemical toilet opposite the main door, a proper bedroom at the back with a double bed and a TV in the ceiling and seating for six in the front, which doubled up as the other double bed at night. Not much privacy behind the curtains there, but that was Mensa-man’s problem, not mine. I got the booze in, and off we set, me, Audrey, Robin and Carol and Monty the dog.

  The thing about a holiday like that, is you need good weather. You need to get out, give each other room. If one couple fancies a tour of the Sydney Opera House, or a decent row, then the other two must be able to tootle off somewhere, go down to the pub, take a hike, develop an unnatural desire to visit the local pencil museum for two and half hours. It’s part of the rules. It had been bad enough, four of us in the bungalow every weekend, but in the camper van, we were asking for trouble.

  It didn’t get off to a good start. Day One– Carol slipped in the mud and sprained her ankle taking Monty for a walk. Day Two– Audrey blew her eyebrows off lighting the calor gas oven. Day Three– it started to rain. It woke us up around five o’clock. By eight there was nothing to see but mist and dark, the green all around us turning to water, the sky low and angry, pressing in around us like there was no escape. It wasn’t the normal rain you get on holiday, more like the heavy biblical variety, the sort Noah knocked up the Ark for. I half expected a couple of giraffes to come wandering round the corner looking for the gangplank. There was nothing for it, but to sit the morning out.

  By that time Robin was getting to me. First off was the daily letter he wrote to his mum, first thing. Mrs Eileen Parker, he’d write on the envelope and in brackets after add the word (MUM!). I mean we all should have done that, shouldn’t we, written to our mums who loved us, thrown her a little life line of hope and remembrance, but none of us ever did, did we? None except Goody-two-shoes-Parker that is, and he’d sit there, in his slippers, sucking on his biro, all puffed up with his own goodness. Those slippers were another thing, horrible blunt-nosed tartan things that played bagpipe music whenever you pulled the pom-pom. Then came the morning stretching exercises he did against the kitchen partition, trying to push the van over while I was still trying to drink my coffee. After that, the humming started. I hadn’t noticed it in the bungalow much, but there, it followed you everywhere. There was no tune to it, none that I could fathom, it was just there, like a fart that wouldn’t go away, that no one could mention. He’d hum reading the paper, he’d hum doing the washing up, and worst of all he’d hum when visiting chemical alley. In a small place like that, you keep quiet about such things. But Robin, he might have left the door open and sold tickets. Pretty soon it began drilling in my head. Pretty soon I could hear it when he wasn’t humming.

  By that afternoon I was getting restless. There was no sign of the rain letting up. I was all for getting out of there, but Robin had a better idea. Audrey had found this little silver-plated cup stuck at the back of the crockery cupboard, the kind that gets handed out on kiddies’ sports days.

  ‘Why don’t we have a proper scrabble tournament,’ Robin said, ‘take the rest of the day doing it. Whoever gets the highest score wins the cup.’

  It was a dumb idea, but banged up in that van, we all jumped at it. We decided to make a thing of it. We got dressed up. I wore my best drinking blazer with brass buttons. Robin pulled out this smoking jacket with tassels. Audrey put on her bow tie and favou
rite green-and-orange check golfing jacket, polished up the cup and fished out a tin of biscuits. Carol had her white flared trousers on and drawstring blouse. I opened a couple of bottles of wine while Carol drew a chart with all the matches writ down; Round One, me v Carol, Audrey v Robin: Round Two, Robin v Carol, Me v Audrey and Round Three, Carol v Audrey and, lastly, Me v Robin. Game on.

  The first games went as expected. I beat Carol, Robin beat Audrey. It was good fun, the four of us sitting rounding the table, munching on chocolate bonbons, having another glass, laughing at Audrey’s spelling. Perhaps, I thought, she’d been right about this bonding lark after all. Next round, Robin beat Carol and I beat Audrey. No surprises there either. That took us to six o’clock. We stopped off for sausages and baked beans, the rain hammering on the roof like it was trying to get in. What did we care? I opened up more vino for the kids and got out the serious stuff for me and Audrey. That done, we sat down to the last set of matches, Audrey v Carol and Me v Robin. The girls were there to enjoy themselves. There was no way either way were going to win that cup. But me and Robin? We were closer in points than expected.

  The first upset came when Audrey beat Carol. It was like a message of what could come, like a preparation, Audrey and me against Carol and Robin; the oldies against the youngsters, the pig-ignorants against the know-alls. Maybe it was nothing to do with that, but as soon as I settled down opposite him, the way he tugged at his beard, like it was a foregone conclusion, I knew I was in with a chance. As I said, I’d done well the first two rounds, scored nearly as highly as him. But that wasn’t it. The thing was, over the weeks, I’d been getting better, I’d been thinking about it, noticing the play. I’d bought this little handbook too, How to Improve Your Scrabble, and had started reading it in the Vanden Plas waiting for my next fare. Now, I felt as if my time had come. I was on the scotch by then, and from the very start, and the first word I put down on the board, TOMBOY, all sassy and confident, it like I was saying I was the tom and he was the boy, the letters seem to sort themselves out for me, on the rack, on the board, it all slotted into place. I was edgy, inspired, calm like a cold fuck in the afternoon, my heart pumping pure quicksilver, my dick too. I was drawing the better racks than Robin, making better use of them. He was rattled, I could tell. I was on a roll and we all knew it. Suddenly this game mattered. Suddenly that little cup on the shelf started to shine just for me. Every time I looked at it seemed to get bigger, brighter, nearer my reach. Don’t get me wrong. He was still good, Robin, still ahead overall, but every round I was getting nearer. Words I didn’t know I knew bobbed into in my head like the ice in my whiskey glass, clear and cut to perfection, OBTUSE, DISMAL, SUCTION. Back and forth we went, every round me edging closer to his overall score, closer to that cup. Even if I didn’t get it, I’d have given him a good run for his money. We was neck and neck.