Fish Tale (Cliffhanger Book 2)

by T. J. Middleton

  ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ I said. ‘A fish answering a call like that.’ Rump put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Uncanny isn’t it. It’s the vibrations I think, rather than the actual sound. It makes me think there may be something more to her than meets the eye.’

  He reached into his pocket and chucked the remains of his cake in. She swallowed the broken bits one by one, looked up. Was that a smile?

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said. He looked round.

  ‘Well, you’re probably going to think me a complete crackpot but…’ he lowered his voice, as if afraid one of his flat-footed neighbours might overhear him. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation Al?’

  ‘Can’t say I have given it much thought.’

  ‘Neither had I, not until Mini Ha Ha here came on the scene. There’s something about her. I can’t quite believe she’s only a fish. Take a good look. She’s too perfect, too good. She has a soul, you know. Did you see the way she took that food. Almost human wasn’t it. Last week I was watching her with the others. Here she was, my prizewinner, the south-west gold medallist of 2009, and yet here in this very pond, she was nudging food pellets to all the others – the smaller ones, the weaker ones, the young ones – waiting until they had all had their fill before she took hers. That was pure goodness Al, goodness and selflessness and yes, perhaps saintliness in fish form. And it came to me, the reason I had named her Mini Ha Ha. Subliminally I had associated her with Indians, she had an aura about her that said to me Indians. Only it was the wrong type of Indian. Or rather not Indian at all, but India. I should have called her Mother.’

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘After Mother Teresa. Take a look at her eyes, Al. She has the body of a young starlet true, but those eyes, they’re Mother Teresa’s to a T. Beatific is the word.’

  ‘Well I…’ He clutched my arm.

  ‘Look! Look at the way she’s hunched over that rock, even her supple tones can’t hide it, her past coming through. Can’t you see the resemblance?’

  ‘Well now that you mention it, I thought that photo you had of her on your mobile, she did look a bit superior…’ I caught his eye, ‘…not superior exactly but different, uncompromising, like she was better.’

  ‘Exactly Al, exactly! It’s not surprising is it? Think of all the good works Mother Teresa did, herding those children into camps and living off a bowl of rice a week. How many of us have devoted our lives in such a way? This is Mother Teresa’s reward for all the good works she did, Al, to come back as a prize winning carp, to be treasured and cared for and hand fed by me, one of her greatest admirers.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened I suppose,’ I said. ‘Have you told anyone else this, Inspector? Your superiors for instance?’

  ‘Adam, Al, Adam. No need to stand on formality now. We’re brothers under the fish skin now. No, they wouldn’t understand. They think I’m a bit odd, keeping koi in the first place.’ He laughed, then stopped, suddenly sober. ‘I never thought you did it, you know, not in a month of Sundays. That’s why I had Torvill and Dean stuffed and sent to you, as a sort of message of solidarity, one fish fancier to another.’

  ‘Ah. I meant to bring that up earlier.’ I put my hand in my pocket, brought out a chequebook. ‘What do I owe you? For the stuffing.’ He waved it away.

  ‘Al, please. It was the least I could do. He did a good job didn’t he?’

  ‘Perfect. I got Torvill back up on the mantelpiece. Dean had a bit of an accident. A pity, but if you had to choose between the two, Torvill was the one.’ He sighed.

  ‘What a pity wives can’t be like fish. Fish look nice, they move beautifully, through your hands, they lay eggs for procreation, are always pleased to see you, and they can communicate with you without ever having to talk. I mean when did you last have a row with a fish?’

  There was no answer to that.

  Back at the bungalow I went into the little hut behind the garage to fetch out the spade. It was time to rescue the pond, get it going again. I was surprised to see that Audrey hadn’t junked the pumps and stuff as I’d thought, she’d just piled them into a couple of old boxes. With a bit of luck, as long as the electrics hadn’t seized up, I’d get it all working in no time. I’d probably have to buy a few new filters and that, reconnect the water supply, but apart from that, no problem.

  Out in the garden, I made a start by digging out the embers of the fire. There was this big lump of driftwood that hadn’t burnt through, dark and smooth with a slight curve to it, a kind of gash at the front and a bit at the end that stuck up. Blow me if the whole thing didn’t look exactly like a shark. You could imagine it thrashing about on a trawler deck, waiting for someone to hammer a spike through its skull. I picked it up, held it out. It was substantial, about four-foot long, quite heavy. I stood him on the wall that someone had built between me and the Stokies’, or Michaela’s as it now was. If I poked the front out a bit, give him a decent set of gnashers, I could stick him near the nymph, like he was going to leap up and give her a good chewing. Bonsai! There was still a lot of work to do, artistically speaking, to the pond and its environs, but it would be a start.

  I went into the kitchen and found the old carving knife that Audrey used to wave about under my nose when she’d had a few, still there at the back of the drawer. She always kept it sharp so she could pick her teeth with it after we’d had a bit of pig. I tested the blade. Perfect, like she’d just put the steel to it. Back in the garden I set to, making the mouth all jagged and sharp, then gouged out two bastard-looking slits where his eyes should be. It only took me about forty minutes. I stood back and looked at him from a distance, like Miss Prosser had taught us. It was uncanny. He looked right through you, like you were dead already. It struck me then, if it was true what Rump had said, here was an opportunity. I could do fish. I knew what they looked like, how they moved. I’d do carp in the main, cause that’s what I liked best, but if it turned out to look more like a shark or a cod who’s to say I hadn’t meant it to look like that in the first place? I didn’t fancy oils or watercolours, (I mean what sort of man is it that ponces about painting water-colours?) but this sculpting lark was a different prospect altogether. Blind Lionel, Wool’s foremost unisex barber, lived in a railway carriage surrounded by old railway sleepers. I could buy them off him, borrow Mickey Travers’ chainsaw and get weaving. Fucking great carp, that’s what I’d do, paint them in all their wonderful colours, blue and green and big splodges of red. I’d do Torvill and Dean first, like a memorial to them, and then start on others, have a gallery of koi, all arranged around the pond, like they was guarding it, with the odd shark thrown in to keep everyone on their toes. And bugger Henry Moore. He might have been a dab hand with a hammer and chisel, but my fish weren’t going to have great lumps knocked through them, formative artist of the twentieth century or not. They’d be proper fish. Wave a magic wand, bring them back to life, and they’d swim. You bring one of Henry Moore’s fancy women to the land of the living and she’d be strapped to a life-support system for the rest of her natural, big bazooms or not.

  I heard a cough. I turned round. Mrs Blackstock was standing right behind me, holding a little brown packet.

  ‘The gate was open. Hope you didn’t mind.’ She put the packet in my hand. ‘Duncan’s driving gloves,’ she said.

  I took them. They fitted perfect, thin black leather, like a second skin.

  ‘Murderer’s gloves he called them,’ she said. ‘They’ve hardly been worn.’

  ‘You’re too good to me Mrs B.’ I bent down gave her a kiss. I loved kissing the old thing. She liked it too. Then she saw the shark. She gave a little scream, like it had already bit her.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? I’m going into the artist business. That’s my first work. I haven’t finished it yet. I’m going to do fish in the main Mrs B. Fish and lobsters.’

  ‘That’s a bit limited isn’t it. You might want to try other things, shapes, figures?
You have an eye for women Al, we all know that.’

  ‘It’s been done to death Alice, the female form. But fish. Do you realise that fish are the last thing left for us artists? No one’s done fish before. And this is a fishing area. That’s why people come here, for the sea, for the fish. I’m cornering the market here.’

  ‘Damien Hirst has.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Damien Hirst. He’s done fish. His shark in a tank. It’s quite famous.’ She walked up to it. ‘What’s this meant to be?’

  ‘A dolphin.’

  ‘Really?’ She walked up close. ‘Porpoises usually smile. They don’t look quite as malicious as that.’

  ‘This one’s angry. His mate’s just got clobbered by a Japanese whaler.’

  ‘It looks more like a shark, Al.’ She stared at me. I don’t know why but I was finding it hard to lie to her.

  ‘Well, tell the truth, it was meant to be a shark, but if this Hirst character has already done them. I don’t want to be accused of copying.’ Mrs B patted me on the back.

  ‘I don’t think you should worry about that too much. Damien Hirst’s shark is not a representation of a shark,’ she explained. ‘It is a shark.’

  ‘A real one?’

  ‘Yes, suspended in formaldehyde.’

  ‘So no skill in making it look like a shark, then.’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘So this is a first.’

  ‘Quite possibly

  ‘That’s all right then. Relentless killer of the deep it is. I was going to call it Hark Hark the Shark. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s outstanding Al.’ She couldn’t have chosen a better word.

  ‘That’s because it’s my first work on the outside. Why don’t we celebrate with a quick snifter. I got some proper drink in now, beer, wine, spirits. I know, what do you say to a drop of sherry and a slice of fruitcake.’ She folded her arms, put her head to one side, like she was amused.

  ‘I’d have never taken you for a sherry drinking man Al.’

  ‘Me? I love a drop when it’s nice and cold. Not that sweet muck that Audrey used to take to bed, but proper Spanish sherry, pale and light, with a kick like a mule. Takes no prisoners, sherry.’

  I went inside, took the Manzilla out the fridge, got two proper glasses and the cake I’d bought in the supermarket and dragged the two little picnic chairs that Audrey had once bought from out the back of the garage. We sat in the noon day air, munching on the cake, drinking the sherry, looking at the shark. We didn’t speak for a bit. There was no need. We were both thinking of it, the future, what it might hold. The sky was clear but there clouds ahead, we both knew it. Then she couldn’t wait any longer.

  ‘So, what are your plans now, Al? You going to stay here?’

  She tried to make light of it, but the way she said it, I could tell. She was dreading me saying no. She liked my company. Could you believe it? What I’d done to her and she liked my company.

  ‘No reason not to,’ I said. ‘I got a bit of cash coming, I start knocking out a few of these, I could sell maybe a fish a week in the tourist season. What do you think I’d get for something the size of that? A couple of hundred?’

  ‘You don’t want to make them too big, Al, not if want holiday makers to take them home with them.’

  ‘Very perspicacious of you Alice. Something they could strap on top of their luggage rack, that’s what I should be aiming for.’

  ‘Or stick on their mantelpiece. And perhaps a little less threatening?’ I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘I’m an artist Mrs B. As my art teacher Miss Prosser always said, compromise is not what the artistic endeavour is about. I can only sculpt what I feel. It’s the spatial awareness in me.’ She nodded.

  ‘She was good was she, this Miss Prosser?’

  ‘Prima. Delicate, you know like a fawn is, pretty like a fawn too, all dappled and dainty. Showed a lot of inner courage though, a young thing like that at the mercy of brutes like us.’

  ‘Al, I do believe you were a little in love with her.’

  ‘Everyone was a little in love with her, Mrs B. We liked her a little too much, and she, she liked us a little too much too.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Dangerous men. She got a thrill off being near them I think. I tried to warn her once. She liked it even more after that.’

  She tapped my on the shoulder.

  ‘But you’re not dangerous, Al. You’re a bit of a tomcat, that’s all.’

  I poured us another glass. How many was that. Two, three? I wasn’t counting. The sun on my face was making my head swim. Alice had her eyes closed. I closed mine, let my brain run free. Was I dangerous? Who was to say? Here was old Poke Nose sipping cold sherry with a man who once had tried to kill her, pushed her down the stairs all because she saw him coming back from the Beacon one naughty Sunday afternoon. Now, now I wouldn’t lay a finger on her, no matter what, and would do for the man that did. It wasn’t Miss Prosser I had feelings for, it was…

  ‘Well, this is very cosy.’ I opened my eyes, squinted into the sun. Michaela Rump was looking over the wall. I raised my glass.

  ‘Alice. See that vision of loveliness over there? That’s our new neighbour, Mrs Adam Rump, Michaela to you and me. She’s taken the Stokies’ place for a few weeks.’

  ‘A few months, actually,’ Michaela corrected. She was wearing a tight pink jacket, with a striped blue and white T-shirt underneath and a dinky pillbox hat the same shade as the jacket. All right for a day at the races, but a bit over the top for the back yard where Kim used to boil up his lobsters.

  Mrs B walked over, took her hand. There was a bit of friction in the air. Don’t ask me how I knew but I could sense it. I’m like a carp that way, sensitive to my surroundings.

  ‘Alice Blackstock,’ she said still holding her hand. ‘I went to your wedding. You probably don’t remember.’ Michaela Rump smiled, showing those teeth again. I didn’t know whose worried me the most. Hers or the shark’s.

  ‘I try not to remember anything about my wedding, Mrs Blackstock. Most of all I try not to remember anything about my husband or his guests. You weren’t the one who gave us the china trout by any chance? I’ve been wanting to meet them for some time.’ Alice freed herself from Michaela’s grip.

  ‘Not me. I gave you a climbing rose, for your garden.’

  ‘We had a garden? I don’t remember that part. Did you stay long, at the wedding?’

  ‘The usual length of time I believe.’

  ‘Then you saw the accident, when he nudged me into the pond while trying to feed the fish our wedding cake?’

  ‘I think we all saw that.’

  ‘It made the papers too. There’s not many brides who appear on the pages of the Dorchester Echo, with their two thousand pound wedding dress transformed into a two thousand pound dish-rag.’ She turned to me. ‘Not wishing to appear rude Mr Greenwood, but we have some business to discuss. One o’clock, I believe you said. It’s now two.’

  Alice waved her hand in apology.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she said. ‘I was helping Al settle in, celebrate the start of his new career.’ She left, Mrs Rump watching her all the while.

  ‘New career?’ she said, when Alice had gone. I pointed to the shark next to her. ‘I hope she’s not referring to the forthcoming kidnapping and extortion.’

  ‘I told you. The sculpting. She thinks I could really make a go of it, fish wise. I got some competition. Apparently there’s some twat who doesn’t even bother trying to do anything himself. He just sticks them in pickle and slaps his name on it. Where’s the craftsmanship in that? Me?’ I held up my hands. ‘It’s all in these.’ I knocked back the last of my sherry. ‘You could have been nicer to the old dear.’

  Michaela brushed a hand down one of her pink lapels. Her nails were painted pink too.

  ‘I could, couldn’t I? But I didn’t want to. The more keeps her nose out of your business for the next couple of weeks, the better.’

>   ‘You don’t have to worry about Alice,’ I told her. ‘She’s stoned out of her box most waking hours, that’s when she’d not standing on her head. Anyway she doesn’t approve of keeping fish as pets. If we told her we were doing a Free Willy on this carp, she’d most likely offer to help. Anyway, forget her. Guess who I saw this morning? Your worse half. Saw his place, his garden and his prize fish. It’s not his mother he’s having in tiles underneath, you know. It’s Mother Teresa. He thinks that fish in some sort of reincarnation of her.’

  She snorted up a noseful of scorn.

  ‘That’s no surprise. There was one he thought looked like Glenn Miller. Used to play ‘In the Mood’ to him over the loudspeakers, every single night. This is good news. All the more reason he’ll pay up without a murmur.’

  I said nothing. ‘In the Mood.’ Audrey used to use that phrase for something quite different. So did I. Across the wall Mrs Rump adjusted her hat. I was beginning to feel a bit in the mood myself.

  ‘It’ll take some doing, getting that fish away,’ I told her. ‘You never told me he lived in a cul de sac in Plodville-by-the-Sea. It’s heaving with coppers.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So they tend not to appreciate people inviting themselves along for a spot of thieving. It gets up their nose, makes them look foolish, makes them want to nail your light-fingered arse to the wall. Also he’s got all this infrared doodah that comes on the moment you put a foot inside, music, lights, Japanese wailers, the lot. I drive down there, waltz into the garden with a fishing net under my arm, and they’ll be all over me before I got my wellies wet. They won’t go easy on me either. They’ll think I’ve got a grudge against him.’

  ‘Well, haven’t you?’ She was aggressive, argumentative, like this was all my idea.

  ‘Not like you have. Look, I’m putting my nose on the line here, part of a bargain, but you’ve yet to tell me a thing about that woman you saw.’ She was unmoved.

  ‘I need some evidence that you are serious about this endeavour, Mr Greenwood. I’m not one of your little conquests you can string along.’