Monkey Wrench

by Liza Cody

  ‘I don’t do nothing like you,’ I told her. ‘I wouldn’t even step on you – you’re dirtier than cat crap.’

  And she swung her handbag at me. I caught her wrist, and her wrist was angry red from when Pete held her down.

  We were nose to nose, only I had to bend double to get in her face.

  I swear I would’ve clumped her but just then a scarlet Honda Prelude pulled up alongside. Maybe the driver was stoned. Maybe he thought Bella was waving to him with her knickers. How should I know what a bog-brush like him thinks?

  He leaned across the passenger seat and said, ‘You girls looking for business?’ And he grinned an evil dirty grin.

  A funny humming started in my ears. My teeth felt like iron spikes. I spun on my toes and lashed out with my boot. I landed a thudding kick on the passenger door and saw it dimple like a belly-button.

  ‘Oy!’ the bog-brush yelled. ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ He opened his door and climbed out.

  Suddenly everything was clear and simple. Just me and the metal. The metal and me. There was an empty space in my head. It was peaceful.

  I vaulted on to the red bonnet. Just me and metal. And I was stronger. The red nose buckled as I jumped up and down on it. Thud-crimp-crump.

  I leaped on the roof and danced on its red head. I made its scarlet skull bend under my weight. Thud-crimp-crump.

  I jumped down. I got my hands under the doorsills. I rocked. I heaved. I wanted to turn the fucking motor over and send it rolling like a dead red dice across the road.

  I could have. I’m strong enough.

  The bog-brush swung and hit me on my back.

  Bella hit the bog-brush with her handbag.

  I straightened. The bog-brush took one look at my face and he started running.

  ‘Yeah!’ Bella screamed, ‘and I hope your cock drops off!’ She was all pink and hopping, like she’d been savaging a motor too.

  Then she said, ‘Shit, Eva, the law!’

  I looked and saw polizei coming my way, trotting along with its pointy blue hat under its arm.

  Bella vanished, whoosh, down the tube station steps.

  I took off running after bog-brush.

  Bog-brush turned and saw me coming. He thought I was coming for him so he put a sprint on.

  I turned and saw polizei galloping after me, so I put a sprint on.

  I caught up with bog-brush. Polizei caught up with me.

  Bog-brush was jibbering. He went, ‘No – don’t – you’re mad …’

  I grabbed him – like I do in the ring. I swung him round so fast his feet left the ground. I let go. I threw him at polizei.

  If we’d been in the ring he’d of twanged off the ropes. We weren’t in the ring. He crashed into polizei. Polizei stumbled and almost swallowed his walkie-talkie. They went down, ker-rash, all arms and legs. Polizei’s helmet rolled into the gutter. Bog-brush landed on his chin.

  It was ace. I felt a laugh rising like a burb in my throat. It exploded.

  ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha,’ I went. Then I got up on my toes and pounded away.

  I ran up the main road, dodging in and out of the crowds.

  ‘Ha-ha-ha,’ I went. And people stopped to look. But I just ran on, turning into side roads, zig-zagging up alleys.

  And then it started to rain, and no one was looking no more. I stopped laughing. I looked round. It was dark. It got dark on me when I was running and laughing.

  Polizei was gone. There was no reason to run anymore.

  Carl and the snake came rushing back into my head, and there was no reason to laugh anymore neither.

  And in my head, Mr Deeds said, ‘You’re through. You’re barred. You’re out!’

  So I stood there, not knowing where I was. I’d run so far I was lost.

  The rain dribbled down the back of my neck – cold, tickling fingers of rain, making me shiver.

  ‘Oh yeah, you too!’ I shouted up at the sky. ‘Come on! Piss on me! Everyone else does.’

  An old woman said, ‘I know what you mean.’ She was selling evening papers on the street corner. She’d put one of her papers over her head like a roof.

  ‘Here, dearie,’ she said, ‘have this on the house.’ And she handed me a paper roof. I stuck it on my head. The rain tit-tatted on to it and ran off over my shoulders.

  ‘Keep yer head dry, dearie,’ the old woman said. ‘That’s the important thing.’

  And I stood there wishing the python had turned on Carl, wound round him like a knot and choked the living shite out of him.

  ‘Cheer up, dearie,’ the old lady said. ‘You’re young. You got plenty of time. When you get to my age and you’re still out in the rain selling papers – that’s the time to worry.’

  ‘Where am I?’ I said.

  ‘You’re in dead trouble, if you got to ask,’ the woman said.

  And she croaked and coughed with laughter. But she told me where I was, and I set off home.

  Chapter 22

  My life was over.

  Everything I ever wanted. Everything I ever worked for. Over. Finished. Kaput. Gone. Lost. Dead.

  In my chest, under my ribs, was a great empty hole. My heart was all alone in there. It went dum-dum-dum, and I wondered why it bothered.

  I let the dogs out. Ramses sneered at the rain. He sneered at me, and then he set off round the perimeter fence. Lineker looked at the rain and tried to get back into his shed. I barred his way.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ I told him. ‘If I’ve got to get wet, and Ramses got to get wet, you got to get wet too.’

  I followed the dogs round the fence. My beam of torchlight joggled along the ground. But I wasn’t seeing things. I was seeing that glare of light. I was seeing the arc-lights bounce off the canvas and hit the red, white and blue ropes. The cage of light. I was hearing ‘Satisfaction’, and a whole hall full of people going, ‘Bucket Nut! Bucket Nut!’ I was seeing all those faces turn towards me. All those craning necks. All those eyes. Watching. Watching for me.

  Only now they could watch till the North Pole melted away. I wasn’t coming no more. None of it was mine no more. It was all gone. There was nothing. Nothing except for my heart going dum-dum-dum in a big empty hole.

  And the rain came down. And my paper roof sagged heavy on my head and fell apart. Like everything else.

  But I kept on walking. And I kept the dogs going too. Every time Lineker tried to skive off under a wreck or a hoist I hauled him out.

  ‘Feel sorry for yerself?’ I shouted at him. ‘I’ll give you something to be sorry for.’ And he gave me a pitiful look like I was the one who fixed the rain.

  Ramses shook himself, and a great rainbow of water flew off of his thick coat and whacked me in the face.

  ‘You did that on purpose!’ I yelled at him. And he bounded off a couple of yards where I couldn’t get at him. He grinned at me. His big yellow teeth gleamed in my torchlight.

  ‘You’ll pay for that, my lad,’ I told him. ‘Just wait and see.’

  But there was no one waiting to see. The crowd shut up. Their faces turned away. The arc lights went out. But my heart dum-dum-dummed, all by itself, in an empty hole.

  And I didn’t have no one to talk to. Not that it mattered. No one would of understood.

  Dum-dum-dum. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. All alone.

  In solitary confinement. Doing time. Behind a socking great wire fence. Again.

  It rained cold sheets of slimy water till about two in the morning. Then it stopped.

  I went in to the Static where it smelled of mould and old stale seaside. I lit the gas cylinder. I made a cup of tea. I towelled my hair till my scalp burned: I put on dry trackies. I opened a can of beans and ate them. I opened a can of corned beef and ate it. I opened a packet of custard creams and ate them too.

  I still felt empty.

  I opened a can of leek and ham soup and drank it cold from the can.

  Nothing filled me up.

  ‘I want,’ I said. But I couldn’t say what I wanted. I wanted
… everything.

  ‘Ro-ro-ro,’ went Ramses from the gate. And I was glad because it took my mind off my stomach.

  I picked up the torch and the tyre iron.

  ‘Yak-yak-yak,’ went Lineker, getting there late as usual.

  I lugged on my trainers and sloshed out through the muddy puddles to the gate.

  ‘Ro-ro-ro,’ went Ramses. And he gave me a look which said, ‘Trust you to go indoors and get comfortable when there’s work to be done.’ He pointed at the gate with his big muzzle.

  ‘Eva. Eva?’ called fat Mandy. ‘Eva, are you there?’

  ‘Where would I be?’ I said. ‘Who do you think looks after this place – the sugar plum fairy?’

  ‘I can’t see in the dark,’ she complained.

  ‘You got any chocolate?’ I said. Fat Mandy was the right person to ask.

  ‘Chocolate?’ she said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just fancied some,’ I said. ‘Got any?’

  ‘I ‘spect so,’ she said. ’Somewhere. But, Eva, why I came is ’cos some of us decided to do the old fish trick, and we thought you’d like to be in on it.’

  ‘In? On it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Bella told us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About the snake,’ Mandy said. ‘About those filthy pervs at your gym. About how they stole her money.’

  ‘And mine,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget mine. And I got tossed. Don’t forget that either.’

  ‘You got fired?’ Mandy said. ‘Bella never told us that.’

  ‘Don’t suppose she cared. She was too busy getting snake-raped.’

  ‘Isn’t that the lowest?’ she said. ‘None of us heard of anything like that before. I had a friend once who made a dirty movie with a donkey. But snakes! That’s revolting.’ Fat Mandy shuddered, and her chins shook.

  She said, ‘We had to do something. But we couldn’t think of anything nasty enough, so we decided to do the old fish thing because it’ll drive them crazy.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The blokes at your gym, of course. Aren’t you listening?’

  ‘The fish thing?’ The penny dropped. ‘At Sam’s Gym?’

  ‘That’s what I’m telling you,’ fat Mandy said. ‘Lynn went to the wet fish stall at closing time and she’s got cod, coley heads, mackerel. She’s got shrimps, prawns, cockles, whelks and even a couple of duff oysters. Pounds of the stuff. And none of it cost us a penny. It was being chucked. Are you in, Eva? Because Kath’s Billy brought his van and we’re all waiting.’

  ‘I’m in,’ I said. I didn’t bother with the padlocks and chains. I climbed over the gate and dropped down beside Mandy.

  Kath was in the front of the van with Billy. I got in the back with Lynn and Mandy.

  ‘Where’s Bella?’ I asked. Not that I wanted to see her.

  ‘She stopped in,’ Kath said. ‘We took her some rum and coke to settle her nerves. She was feeling poorly.’

  ‘She didn’t want to come out,’ Mandy said. ‘We told her about the fish.’

  ‘She said it was pathetic,’ Lynn said.

  ‘Well, it is pathetic,’ Mandy said, ‘considering the provocation.’

  ‘You agreed,’ Lynn said.

  ‘Never said I didn’t,’ Mandy said. ‘You’re in, I’m in. It’s just a pity we couldn’t think of something nastier.’

  ‘In the time,’ Kath said. ‘We didn’t have long to think.’

  ‘Bella said she wouldn’t take a step out of doors unless we were planning to torch the place,’ Lynn told me.

  ‘No fires,’ I said.

  ‘There’s people living nearby,’ Lynn said. ‘Bella wasn’t serious.’

  But I thought Bella was serious. She was just the type to set fires and not care who got hurt. She was also the type to stop indoors with her rum and coke and let everyone else do her dirty work. It’s a good job I was doing dirty work for my own reasons, or I wouldn’t of set foot outside the yard.

  Kath’s Billy brought his tool box and I brought my tyre iron and torch. But I did not have to break the doors down. Kath’s Billy’s tool box was full of interesting stuff. Maybe I should’ve asked myself why he didn’t have a day job when he was so handy. But you don’t get anywhere asking handy blokes why they don’t have day jobs.

  Anyway Kath’s Billy got us in without leaving a mark on the doors. Then he sat in the van with headphones on and left the dirty work to us.

  Let me give you some advice – if handling old fish turns your guts over, the old fish trick is not for you. The trick, you see, is to hide it where it won’t be found. You have to stuff it into small places, into hollow tubes where it will ripen and melt and rot.

  Once, when I was a little kid, a bunch of us put a kipper under the bonnet of the social worker’s motor, right up close to where the fan blew air into the interior cooling system. The social worker was a dab hand at tinkering with people’s lives, but she was hopeless at tinkering with cars. I don’t think she looked under the bonnet from one month to the next. And when, each time she visited, her clothes smelled more and more of fish, and her anxious little mush got more and more anxious, we knew we’d won.

  When you think about it, a gym is an ace place to pull a stunt like that.

  ‘All these tubes is hollow,’ whispered Lynn.

  Well of course they are, silly moo! A lot of gym equipment is made up of hollow steel tubes – like bicycle handle bars. You can stuff pounds of old fish into miles of hollow tubes in a gym. Specially if you thought ahead like Mandy and brought a handful of knitting needles to push it in.

  ‘People have been known to move house when they can’t get rid of a bad smell,’ Mandy said. And for a while I had fun thinking about Mr Deeds, Gruff, Pete and Carl having to leave Sam’s Gym because of the smell. They’d shoved me out. Now it was their turn.

  None of the girls would go in the men’s changing room because of the snake. There was a lot of argy-bargy about the snake. Mandy wanted me to let it out. Kath wanted me to kill it.

  ‘It’s only a snake,’ Lynn said. ‘It wasn’t the snake’s fault.’ But she hated snakes too.

  I wanted to take it home but the girls wouldn’t have it in the van. I quite fancied the idea, but feeding it would be a problem. I mean, think of keeping a pet you had to feed with other pets! Besides, I don’t think Ramses and Lineker would stand for it.

  I went in the men’s changing room and I didn’t touch the snake. It lay sleeping in its heated tank, all muscle, and thick as a big man’s arm. I looked for the mice. I wanted to let the mice go. I found the boxes with Bella, Crystal, Mandy, Kath, Lynn and Stef written on them. But the boxes were empty. The mice were gone, and the snake was asleep. I decided not to tell the girls.

  Instead, I took down the rails the shower curtains hung from, and I stuffed them full with prawns and shrimps. The heat and damp from the showers would make them stink to high heaven in no time at all.

  The shrimps were wet and messy. They were whiffy already and some of their legs were dropping off. So I started thinking about Carl. Well I didn’t actually think about him – I sort of saw him. I saw him and his boiling eyes and the look he had on his face when he had his hand clamped round the snake’s neck and Bella spread out in front of him. And how he’d given me that very same look when he stared at me.

  And I thought, if he could do that to Bella in front of Gruff and Pete, with Mr Deeds right next door, what would he have done to her if he’d caught her somewhere where no one could see him? In an alley for example?

  And I thought – Crystal’s wrong. She’s so wrong. She thought it was Stoat who clobbered Dawn. But she was wrong. It wasn’t Stoat, it was Carl.

  And then I was in a hurry. I wiped the shower rails clean and put them back up where they came from. I ran back to the gym.

  The others were just finishing. They were tidying up the mess and leaving everything spick and span. Because the only way the old fish trick works is if no one knows you’ve done it. They mustn’t know or else they wo
n’t clean the drains or take up the floor boards or bring in the sanitation expert. They’ve got to be ignorant, and go slowly crazy with a horrible smell they can’t find and stop.

  The old fish trick is a very sneaky sort of revenge. If it works you can drive people raving mad. Slowly.

  But Bella was right – it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t strong enough and it wasn’t bad enough.

  I’d been enjoying meself because I wanted to do something – anything. But as soon as I thought about Carl and his ’roid-rage eyes I started to feel empty all over again. There just wasn’t enough you could do to make him suffer.

  I wanted him to suffer. I wanted Mr Deeds and Gruff Gordon and Pete Carver to suffer too. They still had their lives but they’d taken mine away.

  Old fish wasn’t enough.

  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ Mandy said. ‘We got to go.’

  So we went. We piled back in the van and waited while Kath’s Billy locked up the same way he’d unlocked. And then we drove off down the empty wet streets. And I’m surprised all the cats in the neighbourhood didn’t follow us.

  I felt dirty. I sat there listening to Kath, Mandy and Lynn giggling and chat-chat-chatting. But I felt dirty and I dreamed about tearing Mr Deeds’ legs out of their roots and feeding them to Ramses and Lineker. One each. I dreamed about sticking Gruff’s motor, with Gruff and Pete still in it, into the metal crusher at the yard. But I couldn’t dream anything bad enough for Carl except perhaps sucking his boiling eyeballs out of his head – plop, plop, and frying them in deep fat and feeding them to him on a fork.

  ‘There!’ I’d say to him. ‘You’ve gone and eaten your own eyeballs. That’ll teach you to look at me and Bella like you did. You won’t do that again in a hurry.’ And I’d laugh. I would! I’d laugh.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Mandy said. ‘You sound like you’re choking.’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘It’s the smell.’

  ‘You can wash,’ she said. ‘But just think what it’ll be like at the gym next week!’

  They all hooted. They were easily pleased.

  Chapter 23

  I had this idea. And I couldn’t let go.