Loose Head

by Jeff Keithly

  For a moment, the three Hastewicke Gentlemen could only stare in wonder. Then Jester had a brainwave. “I say, Ewan. What’ your room number?”

  Ramsay, his gloomy Calvinistic features twisted into an expression of loathing at the scene below, distractedly fished his key from his pocket. “Ah... 661.” He started to tuck the key away, but it was too late; he had already fallen into the trap. With an underhand slap, Jester sent the key spinning through the air. It landed with a tinkle at the feet of one of the dancers, who retrieved the key and, looking upward for its source, encountered Ramsay’s eyes, bulging in horror. With a fey little wave, he tucked the key into his purse and mouthed the word “Later.”

  Harry couldn’t help but chuckle when he recalled the scene, and its aftermath. Still smiling, he stepped from the shower and began to towel off. Jester, reaching for the toilet-roll, whistled. “Have you seen your back? Lovely set of rake-marks – I think I can see your spine.”

  Harry had felt the sting of them in the shower; toweling off the fogged-up mirror, he examined them critically: four long, raised, angry-looking welts in the skin over the hard muscles of his lower back, inflicted by the cleats of an opposition number 8 when Harry had deliberately been slow rolling away from the ball in a ruck. He paused for a moment to examine his reflection – six feet tall, 17 stone, his once-luxurious hair now but a fringe, his beard full and sternum-length, with just a trace of grey. Still considerable muscle there, particularly in the chest and arms, thanks to his daily work with hammer and chisel.

  “They’re beauties all right,” Harry said at length “– but they’ll heal. Anyway, I’m grateful to have them. It wasn’t long ago that I thought my days on rugby tour were gone forever.”

  II

  Harry Barlowe was the only member of the Hastewicke Gentlemen who wasn’t drinking on this tour. It had been two years since his last drink, two gloriously productive and fulfilling years. It had taken this long to regain enough of his wife’s trust to be allowed to go on rugby tour again. Thinking of all he had lost, and then regained, he didn’t miss the booze.

  It is an indisputable fact that rugby and beer are intimately entwined. For most players it isn’t a serious problem; for those genetically predisposed to alcoholism, however, it can be a dangerous marriage. Both Harry’s father and paternal grandfather had been very committed alcoholics; both had died young and badly, after making catastrophes of their once-promising lives. Harry had never paused to consider that he might follow in their footsteps. By the time that thought occurred, at the age of 43, he found that he already had.

  At first, drink hadn’t been a problem for Harry – he could have a few pints with the lads after a match or training-session, and stagger home none the worse for wear. Harry had always been a bit retiring, socially, always secretly afraid he was going to make an ass of himself. After a few pints, his shyness vanished, and he felt one of the lads.

  He had begun spending more time at the pub with the boys, sometimes reeling home well-after closing-time. And, of course, weekends and tours were complete piss-ups. Before long, he was drinking every night. When his wife Sarah, home all day with their two young sons, became alarmed at his increasingly habitual insobriety, Harry had obligingly stopped drinking at home. At fairly regular intervals, uneasy at the toll the drink was taking on his work, he would stop drinking entirely, for a few weeks, a month, half a year.

  It was easy enough to stop for a time, but he never managed to convince himself it was permanent. One day, he would look down and notice, with some surprise, that he once again had a pint in his hand. An empty pint. Almost before he had realized what was happening, the drinking had begun again.

  One dreary November day, Harry emerged from his fog to discover that he had installed a well-stocked drinks cabinet in his sculpting studio. His drinking then assumed a deadly furtiveness; he experimented with various methods of disguising his intake, and felt a thrill of ignoble triumph whenever Sarah seemed not to notice he was intoxicated. When she did notice, he would ignore the desperation in her eyes and lie as he’d never lied before.

  The end came on the clear, frosty Christmas night of 2009. Knowing that Sarah’s family were coming to dinner, Harry nevertheless managed to consume two bottles of Stolychnia vodka between breakfast and the arrival of their guests. Erroll Flynn had written, in his autobiography, that he preferred vodka because its neutral odor was undetectable on the breath. Flynn was, of course, quite wrong, in this and many things; after all, what can you expect from a man who died at the age of 50 with a liver the size of a rugby ball?

  Christmas dinner was an utter fiasco; even Harry’s four-year-old son could tell he was ripped. Despite Sarah’s mortified attempts to wrest away the cutlery, Harry had stubbornly insisted on carving. He had nearly lopped off a finger and had bled all over the goose she had labored over for half the day. At last he had staggered outside for a breath of air, stopped for a piss, and plunged face-first into his wife’s prize rose-garden.

  There he had lain, near death, until morning’s gentle light, and his own uncontrollable shivering, wakened him. Covered with frost and filth, and scourged by rose-thorns, he had reeled, appalled, into the house. The mess from last night’s dinner was still on the table. Sarah and the boys were gone. She had left him a note on the bed: “You have ruined our life. Words cannot convey what an unutterable bastard you are. I never want to see you again. My solicitor will be in touch.”

  It was only then that he realized the truth: that unless he stopped drinking, for good this time, he would die disgraced, alone, and soon. It was as inevitable as the morning mail, as certain as the fact that a ringing phone in the middle of the night heralded bad news. And so he had dried his tears, gone to his studio, poured every drop of booze down the sink, and binned the empties. Then he had checked himself into a very expensive rehab clinic called The Elms.

  A month of treatment and many gut-wrenching conversations with Sarah later, he had managed to talk her and the boys back into his life. But she had made it very clear that it was either alcohol, or her; if he ever drank again, they were finished. But he no longer felt the urge to drink; it was as if a great weight of anxiety had been lifted from his soul. He knew, deep down inside, having been mostly sober for the first 25 years of his life, that it was possible to find happiness without alcohol. He threw himself into work, into fatherhood, into rebuilding his shattered relationship with his wife, cheerfully and without self-pity. At length, to his eternal gratitude, he had succeeded.

  And yet he knew from past experience, and from treatment, that the threat of relapse was never far away. Indeed, it was at moments like this, when his confidence in his sobriety was greatest, that he actually teetered on the brink of doom.

  Sarah hadn’t been overly keen on the idea of Harry’s joining the Vegas tour. Far from it. For two years she had insisted, with good reason, that he stay away from rugby. But he had seen it as the ultimate test of his sobriety, as well as a way to reinforce his resolve. After all, there are few more pathetic sights than the debauched buffoonery of late Saturday night on rugby tour, viewed through sober eyes.

  III

  Tonight was a good example. Harry sat in a booth at the Venetian, with a few of the lads: Weathersby, Dex Reed, Atkinson, George Waters, Kevin Gleeson, the Hastewicke Gentlemen’s portly inside centre. All except Reed, perhaps, were drunk; Weathersby was giggling, Atkinson was legless, Waters was rat-assed and Gleeson was, in Harry’s expert judgment, twat-faced. Their shouts of laughter, and occasional slurred and scandalous choruses of song, rang from the mirrored walls, and only their increasingly generous gratuities ensured a continued flow of drink. Harry had graduated from non-alcoholic beer to soda with lime.

  Dex edged closer to make himself heard over the din. “How’s it going – the not drinking, I mean?”

  “I’m quite happy to be off the stuff, thanks for asking, Dex,” Harry replied. “I never would have believed it two years ago, but I’m happier without it.”

/>   “Isn’t it hard, though? Watching us neck down pints without a care in the world?”

  Harry considered. “Situations like this aren’t a problem, Dex. I knew there would be drink about on tour, but when you know something’s coming, you can prepare yourself – steel your resolve, if you like. It’s the thing you don’t anticipate that throws you.” He looked thoughtfully into his glass. “Besides, everybody knows I don’t drink anymore. If I suddenly fell off the wagon, what would you all think of me? I’d just be a pathetic alky, wouldn’t I?”

  Dex looked at him seriously; perhaps he was a bit ratted after all. “I do admire you, actually -- I don’t know if I’ve told you that. But surely you don’t care what a bunch of drunken idiots like us think of you, do you?”

  At this moment, Kevin Gleeson staggered back from the bar, where he had been chatting up a lush chestnut-haired beauty in a skin-tight bodysuit of scarlet leather. He fell tipsily into the booth, knocking the table in the process; a full row of glasses went over with a crash, and several pints of ice-cold lager rushed toward Atkinson, seated in a captain’s chair at the end of the table. The lanky number 8 saw the onrushing flood and struggled, Laccoon-like to escape, but was defeated by the arms of the chair, and bellowed with shock and fury as the frosty torrent refreshed his groin.

  “Good one, Kev,” Harry laughed. “How’d you fare with the Michelin Maid?”

  “Swimmingly, mate, swimmingly, as one sperm said to another. I asked her whether she had any Irish in her; when she said no, I asked her if she’d like some.”

  “You didn’t! Did she biff you one?”

  “Nah. She wants me to call her later – look!” Gleeson flourished a bar napkin, emblazoned with a lipsticked telephone number. He downed half his pint at a quaff, gazed in admiration at his quarry at the bar. “Phwoarg! Look at that camel’s hoof! She’s hotter than Angelina in a thong!”

  “Well done!” Dex glanced up. “But look, Kev – you’d better make your move – she’s talking to some bloke the spitting image of Clive Owen!”

  Gleeson turned pale in horror. “Christ, you’re right – time to turn on the old charm. Harry -- you’re sober. Do us a favor –“ he snatched out his mobile and thrust it into Harry’s hands. “Call her for me.”

  “Call her for you? What do you want me to say?”

  “God’s bollocks, I don’t know... tell her I want to take her for a late dinner at Wolfgang’s, then show her the Blarney stones! No, wait! Be subtle! Be suave! Ask her to meet me for dessert!”

  “What, a small helping of Irish trifle?”

  “This is no joking matter, Dex! Please, Harry – I’m begging you!”

  Sighing in amused vexation, Harry flipped open the mobile and punched in the number on the napkin. The things he did for the team. A recorded voice answered on the second ring. “The person you are calling was obviously not interested. For advice on personal hygiene, better grooming, or acceptable ways to approach females, please hold... sorry, all of our operators have better things to do than talk to you.” Harry hit “end,” then “redial,” and wordlessly handed Kevin the phone. The Irishman gave a cry of anguish; when he looked at the bar, both the woman of his dreams and Clive Owen were gone. “Ah, Jaysus,” he groaned. “How could she toy with me affections that way?”

  Harry shook his head, hiding a grin, then turned back to Dex. “To answer your earlier question, Dex, believe it or not, I do crave your respect. Helps keep me sober, you see. What if, some day, one of you lot decide to go on the wagon? I’d hope you’d come to me – I’d like to help.”

  It was a noble thought. But when he and a near-comatose Jester returned to their suite at the Bellagio, Harry encountered the note: “An anonymous benefactor wishes it to be known that Suite 455 has been booked through the weekend for the discreet use of any Hastewicke Gentleman. Time is available in four-hour blocks. Please book in advance with the tour secretary.”

  This was a new wrinkle since last he was on tour. But it was nothing to do with him. He was here for the rugby, the companionship, and to reinforce his resolve never to drink again. He tossed the note aside, and went gratefully to bed. Today had been a good day.

  The next day was Sunday, when the Hastewicke Gentlemen would play the Old B.A.T.S. – the Bay Area Touring Side, from Oakland – in the tournament final. Harry showered, then pulled on his kit, surreptitiously checking his jock-strap for signs of a foreign substance before snugging it into place. It seemed inert; thankfully, Jester had slept like the snoring dead last night.

  Sunday dawned breezily blue, with the smoky scent of Indian summer in the air. The boys arrived at the pitch groaning and shambling; both the three matches they had played on Saturday, and Saturday night in Las Vegas, had taken a grim toll. Still, when the whistle blew, and the kickoff soared skyward from the foot of the B.A.T.S. fly half, they were ready to do business.

  The two sides were evenly matched. Harry did his usual efficient work on the pitch – anchoring the scrum, lifting flawlessly in the line-outs, administering the occasional bone-jarring tackle, ripping the ball in the maul, clearing stray opponents from the ruck, sacrificing his body wherever it was needed. He wasn’t as mobile as Weathersby, the other Hastewicke prop; he made up for his lack of speed with an artist’s eye for the geometry of the game, never wasting a step, always around the ball.

  Toward the end of the match, with Hastewicke leading 25-21, there was a scrum about 10 meters out from the Hastewicke try-line. The B.A.T.S. needed a try to win it; Harry heard the B.A.T.S. number 8 call “Blue 87!” He remembered the play from earlier in the game. The B.A.T.S. number 8, a gigantic Kiwi ex-pat named Karl Hammett, picked up the ball; Harry saw Dex Reed and Jester Atkinson launch themselves at Hammett, who, just before impact, dished the ball inside to his number 7. The flanker’s eyes widened as he saw a clear path to the goal-line.

  But Harry had already torn himself away from the B.A.T.S. loose-head prop; he drove the ball-carrier sideways, into touch, just five meters from the line. The referee consulted his watch, then blew full time. The Hastewicke Gentlemen had won the tournament.

  After the match, most of the boys were keen to start the evening’s celebration with an excursion to O, Cirque de Soleil’s erotic underwater extravaganza. Harry begged off – he was suddenly too knackered. He returned to his suite, called Sarah to tell her how it had gone. Then he curled up on the king-sized bed and cried.

  Two hours later, he let himself into Suite 455 with the keycard Henry Bell had provided. He set the paper sack on the coffee table, fetched a glass from the bar. He turned on the TV, and poured himself a drink. The lads would never know. Sarah would never know. Tomorrow he would return to sobriety. But tonight, the whisky tasted like the immortality-conferring blood of some savage god, gulped directly from the vein.

  That note. It was a thing he hadn’t anticipated.

  Chapter 11

  One thing I like about Brian, as a partner, is the way he complements me in the interview process. I’m a bit of a gabbler, and tend to cover a lot of ground, sometimes too eager to move on to the next question before the previous point has been fully explored. Brian mostly listens, occasionally lending an intimidating physical dimension to the proceeding. But his invaluable contribution comes at the end, in the aftermath of my own searching questions, as we’re all recovering from the intensity of the interrogation.

  I can see him now, leaning on the doorframe of the Hendon lockup, his hand in the air, as if he were attempting to seize the truth before it fluttered, mothlike, out into the high street. “Just one more thing,” he says. “How did you come to...” or “Why did you say...” or “Why did she identify...” and, as often as not, his one small, insightful question would become the keystone of the prosecution’s case.

  He has a rare talent for boiling a thing down to its essence. His abilities were in full flower today, as he laid the case before me. “What do we know so far?” he asked. “We know the deceased was blackmailing at least four of your mates. W
e can surmise that at least two of them had paid up by the time of the murder, because Weathersby paid £200,000 cash for the rifle that killed him. We know your mate Bernie was one of those who paid. In my view, at least, anyone who had already paid would slide down the list of likely suspects a notch – why kill him after you’ve paid, except for revenge?”

  I thought about that. “To get your mates off the hook.” Brian nodded slowly, seeing the logic. “One thing bothers me, though – Bernie said John warned him that if anything happened to him, the disks would be sent out anyway. We have to assume that the others heard the same warning. Of course he’d made copies. Why kill him, and trigger the very disaster you were hoping to avoid?”

  “Why indeed?” Brian had his pencil out, tapping his teeth again. “What else do we know? We know what Seagrave, Harry Barlowe, Leicester and Bernie were up to in Vegas; it’s right there in living colour.” He glared moodily at the stack of DVDs on his desk.”I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to have sex anytime soon – some of it sort of put me off me feed.”

  Brian sighed. “Right. We know that each of them could expect an expensive divorce and, in all likelihood, public humiliation if Weathersby’s material ever saw the light of day – more than ample motive for murder, for some. We know that whoever killed Weathersby has a working knowledge of alarm systems, and had to have a certain measure of physical strength to fire that gun. There aren’t many women who could’ve done it. It would also seem that the murderer took Weathersby’s Powerbook, which presumably contains the master video files. From the violence of the crime, we can surmise that whoever killed Weathersby wanted to make very sure he was dead, although it could be that they just used whatever weapon happened to be to hand.”