The Big O (A Screwball Noir)

by Declan Burke

  But in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, she caught herself staring at her misaligned jaw, the twist in the corner of her mouth, the faint discoloration of the false plate behind her lower lip. She spat and rinsed, leaned in over the sink close to the mirror, whispering: ‘He can’t see what you see.’

  He was sitting on the near side of the bed when she got in from the bathroom. As she turned sideways, edging between the wicker laundry hamper and the bottom of the bed, she said: ‘There’s condoms in the top drawer.’

  ‘Uh, no thanks. That’s fine.’

  From his tone Karen understood he wasn’t turning down the condom, thanks all the same. Which Karen had been expecting, Karen a lucky girl, always meeting these guys who’d had vasectomies.

  No, Ray was turning down a jump. Turning Karen down, and in her own bedroom too. She stood on the other side of the bed staring at the back of his head, feeling foolish. Then, because it was her bedroom, she got mad. Like, what had been expecting, a Tupperware party?

  He twisted around to look up at her across his shoulder. ‘If it’s okay with you, I’d like to see how we fit together in the morning first.’

  ‘Yeah, okay. If that’s alright with you.’

  All of which was so much bullshit. Karen didn’t have a stopwatch handy, but she guessed he went about six minutes that night.

  Which wasn’t bad going, because halfway through Karen decided there’d be a second night. Even though she’d also decided the fit-together routine was probably Ray’s best line.

  Thursday

  Karen

  In the kitchen, Karen showing Ray how she liked her coffee in the morning, she said: ‘What’re you thinking?’

  ‘How come women always want to know what you’re thinking?’

  ‘Don’t get excited. We just want to be sure you’re actually thinking.’

  Karen leaning against the fridge, Ray smoking, tapping ash into the sink. She said: ‘So do I get your number?’

  Karen, maybe she was a sadist, but she loved to watch that one land. Some guys were flattered that Karen wasn’t taking any chances on them not ringing, but most backed off fast, giving Karen the talk of shame.

  Like Karen gave a rat’s ass. One of her favourite lines from the movies was Dietrich in Touch of Evil, Orson face-down in the mud and Dietrich drawling, “Vot does it matter vot you say about a person?”

  ‘Sorry,’ Ray said. ‘I don’t give out my number.’

  ‘Crap. Neither do I.’

  Ray was cute, no doubt about that, but Karen wasn’t changing her game-plan for just cute. Give out your number and you spend three weeks half-expecting some asshole to ring. Or the guy rings alright, two in the fucking morning, wanting to know what colour pants you’re wearing.

  ‘Look, Karen – no games.’ He drank off his coffee, rinsed the mug, swished away the cigarette ash. ‘I’m guaranteeing you now, I’ll ring. You have my word.’

  His word? Karen wouldn’t budge. In the end Ray proposed a date for later that evening.

  ‘Nothing too hectic. Just a few drinks. If you’ve nothing else on.’

  Karen said okay, mainly because the sun streaming through the kitchen window picked up on those tigery glints in his eyes. Plus, he’d rinsed his mug.

  She put the front door on the snib and walked him down the hallway to the glassed-in porch of the main entrance. He turned on the top step and kissed her lightly on the lips, his breath still tasting faintly of mint.

  ‘Maybe we can grab some sushi,’ he murmured. ‘I mean, we won’t need any forks for sushi.’

  Karen closed the apartment door and leaned against it, arms folded, thinking, hmmmmm, okay, maybe. Then saw the clock, shit, twenty after eight. Late again, third time in a week, Frank’d be having square pumpkins.

  Rossi

  When anyone called Rossi ‘Ross’, either for short or because they thought he mispronounced his own name, for Chrissakes, or were taking the piss, like the screw was now, Rossi’d say: ‘It’s Rossi. Like Ross with an e, except it’s an i.’

  The screw, a square-head redneck wearing his hat-brim low, glanced down at the release form. ‘Shame, that. It says Ross Callaghan here.’ He looked up at Rossi again. ‘You want I should stick this in the bin?’

  Rossi squinted, trying for Pacino in Scarface, the way Al freaked the spics with his dead-eyed stare. Rossi liked Al, the guy was a role model, someone a man could look up to – although, even Rossi had to admit, you couldn’t actually look up to Pacino, the guy was a dwarf. Even Rossi clocked in a five-six.

  Still, the way Rossi saw it, all the great Italians had been small men. Mussolini, De Niro, the popes, Napoleon …. midgets to a man.

  ‘That right there,’ Rossi said, ‘the Ross crap, that’s disrespect for my cultural heritage.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘I could have you done for racial hatred.’

  ‘Fine by me, Ross. Want to go back to the cell, fill out a complaint form?’

  Rossi, deflated, fell back on Plan B. ‘Okay, it’s Ross. Ross E Callaghan.’

  While the redneck considered that option, Rossi thought about how he’d like to meet the guy some night, somewhere dark, Rossi packing a chib up his sleeve. How he’d get the fucker down and slice his ankle tendons low, where they’d never stitch them right again. Not because the redneck was a screw, a burglar, but because the bastard actually enjoyed locking people away.

  Eventually the redneck signed off on the release form and nodded at the other turnkey. The gate clanked once, slid open. Rossi stepped through, a free man.

  The redneck followed him all the way to the main gate, just so he could say, as the gate swung closed, ‘See you soon, Ross.’

  Rossi, walking away, decided he liked that. Still pissing them off, even after he was gone.

  Frank

  Frank turned to the property section, wondering if everyone winds up not wanting to look across the breakfast table first thing in the morning. Or if it was just him.

  Lately, Frank’d been turning up a lot of things that seemed to be just him.

  He laid the paper back against the fruit bowl. ‘Any more coffee, hon?’

  Genevieve put down her emery board, picked up her cigarette and inhaled. ‘Loads,’ she said. ‘Try Brazil.’

  Then exhaled, placed the cigarette back on the ashtray, picked up the emery board again. At no point did she lift her eyes from her magazine.

  The smoke billowed across the table to curl in around both sides of Frank’s Times. Frank closed his eyes, trying to sniff at the blue haze without letting Genevieve know. Wondering if it was all something to do with turning fifty. Like, who makes it to a hundred these days?

  He sighed and stood up, crossed to the marble-edged worktop and put the kettle on to boil, then strolled to the patio doors and stepped out into the garden to bask in the crisp chill, sipping the muted sparkle of an early autumn morning.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Frank! Were you born in a stable? Close the fucking door!’

  Yeah, and maybe it wasn’t just Frank.

  He stepped back inside, glancing at Gen as he moved towards the marble worktop. Sap rising, the way it had the first time he’d met her, Frank at a conference for the golf, Gen a junior sales rep for a pharmaceutical company. Frank could still remember the stomach-sucking moment when he first heard Gen’s coarse rasp, the delicate little Cupid’s-bow mouth saying: ‘So who’s a girl have to blow to get a fucking name-tag around here?’

  Frank had done his best. A nip here, a tuck there, elocution lessons all over. No joy. The girl was tramp to the core. Now she lounged back in her chair, the silk kimono riding up her tanned thighs and falling open to reveal the merest hint of the pert breasts she called Pinky ‘n’ Perky. Frank noted the strawberry lip gloss, perfectly applied even at eight-thirty in the morning, the gloss the precise shade of the nail polish. The ashtray a mess of glistening butts.

  Frank shuddered, plunged the coffee and carried it back to the table. There he retreated behin
d the Times and morosely scanned the Take 5 section, a comparative study of property prices from around the world, and was briefly excited by the news that he could, if he sold up and shipped out, afford to buy a small Maldive complete with pool and fully-furnished five-bed villa.

  Then a fresh seeping of smoke curled in around the paper and Frank remembered he couldn’t even scrape together the twenty grand good faith down payment that would get Madge snatched and solve all his problems.

  Frank didn’t want to get too paranoid about it but it was virtually impossible not to come to the conclusion that, when he looked around at his life, the whole fetid mess wasn’t the result of every woman he’d ever met, everywhere, all the time, breaking his balls.

  Gen for one, back smoking again even though she knew how that would torture him, especially first thing in the morning over coffee. His twin daughters, Jeanie and Liz, rapacious as those wolves Frank had read about, the ones who founded Rome, Remus and Rufus, some Latin crap like that.

  Then there was Margaret, on the chisel for more and more alimony even after screwing him for the new house up in Larkhill Mews. Karen at work with her knowing smirk, sneering with Frank’s patients behind his back because they all knew better than Frank, knew their bodies better. Frank, he could see it in their eyes, was just some grey-haired sap who helped the world see the way they really looked under all that flab, the orange-peel asses, the laughter lines. Frank never could work it out, how women spent all their lives laughing and wound up so depressed they came to him to make it right.

  He cleared his throat folding the paper. ‘Anything planned for today, hon?’

  Gen took her time lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old.

  ‘Right now,’ she said, wreathed in a pungent haze that caused Frank to dribble slightly, ‘I’m thinking of invading Cuba. Want me to bring you back a stick of rock?’

  Nettled, Frank said: ‘Y’know, Gen? With the sun streaming in and all, you look about ten years older than you think you do.’

  ‘Which still leaves me about twenty years younger than you. And Frank?’ She reached the little blue plastic container off the table and rattled it, still without lifting her eyes from her magazine. ‘Think you can remember today to bring the sweetener with you? I mean, you’re still on that diet, right?’

  Frank left the kitchen pretty sure it wasn’t just him.

  Rossi

  The bell tinkled sweetly as the door swung closed behind him but Rossi wasn’t fooled. Sweet or not, tinkling or otherwise, the bell was an alarm.

  A white-haired woman, sixty-ish with a tight blue-rinse perm, bustled forth from a door behind the shop’s counter. She had the curves, Rossi thought, of an old ship in a storm, her rigging at full billow.

  ‘Yes?’ she said through a warm smile. ‘Can I help you? I’m Sally, by the way.’

  ‘I need a suit. Something classy.’

  ‘Hmmm. We’re low on suits at the moment.’ She set sail for the rear of the shop, Rossi rolling along in her wake. ‘Do you know your size?’

  ‘I’m expecting to be filling out a bit soon,’ Rossi said, trying to ignore the aroma of stale cat-piss. ‘So size doesn’t matter so much.’

  ‘Super.’ They arrived at a rack of three or four limp-looking suits that gave Rossi the impression their previous owners had been sucked out of them. ‘That’s all we have right now,’ Sally said. ‘If there’s nothing that, ahem, suits you,’ she simpered, ‘you could always come back on Monday. That’s our big day for donations.’

  ‘That’s okay. Lemme see the double-breasted grey.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘Oh, no reason.’

  Rossi tried on the suit, stepped out of the changing room. Sally stood beside him as he checked it out in the mirror. ‘It’s a little on the big side,’ she said dubiously.

  ‘Roomy,’ Rossi agreed, liking it, a double-breasted grey with chalk-line pin-stripes. Okay, someone had fucked up and dyed the chalk-stripes a faint pink, and not yesterday, but Rossi thought the detail gave the suit an Italian edge, stylish but not too flashy. And the way it was about three sizes too big put Rossi in mind of Cagney, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. ‘I’m thinking,’ he said, turning sideways and squinting at the mirror, ‘a shirt and tie might help.’

  ‘They might,’ Sally murmured, scuttling away. Rossi settled on a red shirt and a bottle-green kipper tie.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure that that’s the fashion these days,’ Sally said.

  ‘Never in fashion,’ Rossi said, walking past the mirror to glance sideways at his profile, ‘always in style. Know what’d set this off nicely?’

  ‘Some shoes?’ Sally said hopefully.

  Rossi looked down at his battered hi-top baseball sneakers. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘You do shoes?’

  Sally shook her head. ‘Actually,’ Rossi said, ‘I was thinking more in the way of suspenders.’

  ‘You mean braces.’

  ‘Fat as you can get ’em.’

  The suspenders were also pin-striped, black on white. Rossi strolled around wriggling his shoulders, feeling his way into the cut. Sally watched, chin in hand, a forefinger flattening her lips.

  ‘How about hats?’ Rossi said. ‘You do hats? A fedora, maybe.’

  ‘I think,’ Sally gurgled, ‘there’s some in the back.’

  She was gone ten minutes, coming back red-eyed and empty-handed.

  ‘No worries,’ Rossi said. ‘A hat might be a bit much anyway.’

  ‘So that’ll be,’ Sally said, closing her eyes to tot up, ‘forty-seven in total.’ She opened her eyes again, smiling. ‘We’ll call it forty-five even.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Forty-five. For the suit, shirt and tie. I’m not charging you for the, um, suspenders.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Rossi said. ‘You’re charging me for the gear?’

  Sally blinked. ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you’re a charity.’

  ‘Well, yes, but ––’

  ‘That’s me,’ Rossi said, bouncing a thumb off his chest. ‘I’m a charity case.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but ––’

  ‘You’re selling this stuff and sending the money to Africa, right? They’re homeless, starving, have AIDS, all this. Yeah?’

  Sally nodded cautiously.

  ‘Okay,’ Rossi said. ‘Meanwhile, I’m homeless. Haven’t a bean to my name. I can’t get a job without an address and I can’t get a kip-down without a job. You see what I’m saying.’

  ‘I understand that. I do. But ––’

  ‘No buts, Sally. Charity starts at home. And me, I been away, but now I’m home again.’

  ‘I have a responsibility to Oxfam,’ Sally said, her voice shaking by now, ‘to take payment for any goods sold in this shop.’

  ‘I hear you. But I have a responsibility, right now, to me. All I’m doing is cutting out the middle-man.’ Rossi held up both hands, palms out, in the universal gesture of non-confrontation. ‘It’s nothing personal, Sally. You want me to sign an IOU or some form so you can write the gear off as tax-deductible or some shit like that, no worries, I’ll do it. But I’m walking out of here right now wearing this suit and that’s flat.’ He considered. ‘Actually, if you wouldn’t mind, I’ll take a handkerchief with me before I go.’

  Strolling down the street, catching his reflection in shop windows, Rossi couldn’t help but notice the stir he was causing. One woman, staring, pushed her pram into a lamp-post. Rossi pulled his shoulders back, stuck out his chest. Maybe, he thought, he should look up a decent hat after all.

  Frank

  Frank tried to catch Karen’s eye as he crossed the reception area, but Karen was poring over the file lying open on her desk.

  ‘Morning, Karen,’ he said going by.

  ‘Hi, Frank,’ she said without looking up. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please. Is it fresh?’

  ‘Can be in about twenty minutes.’

  ‘That’ll do
.’ Frank jiggled the key in the lock of his consultation suite, pushed the door open. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but have you done something new with your hair?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, it looks smashing this morning.’

  ‘Thanks, Frank.’

  He closed the door, hung up his overcoat and sat in behind the broad desk, waiting for the buzzer to sound. When it did he picked up, noticing the red light flashing on the phone. ‘Yes, Karen?’

  ‘Couple of messages, Frank.’

  It irritated Frank how Karen always let him get inside his office before she told him he had messages. Ever since she’d blown him that time, Karen had been reluctant to meet Frank’s eye. Which, to Frank, seemed childish and petty. Except whenever she did look him in the eye, Karen seemed on the verge of a gut-busting belly-laugh, and that wasn’t good either.

  Worse, the hummer had cost Frank fourteen hundred to date. The only consolation there was that the extortion would remain at two hundred smackers per month for the foreseeable future, or at least until Karen offered a reprise on the finest goddamn blowjob of Frank’s life – which, Frank had to admit, wasn’t much of a consolation. If Frank was offered a trip to Mars or a proper go at Karen, maybe even on a bed this time, Frank wouldn’t be needing any zero-grav boots.

  ‘Karen, when you’re addressing me regarding appointments, I’d prefer it if you called me “Doctor”.’

  ‘Great, yeah. Okay – Mrs McDonald cancelled her eleven o’clock. I’ve given it to Mrs Lennon, she’s keen to get her new nose returned to, and I quote, the diseased fucking elephant you swiped it off. And that’s your wife on line five.’

  Margaret always asked to be put on hold no matter how long she’d be waiting, so she’d be steaming mad when Frank finally picked up. She made her calls collect, too. Karen always accepted the charges.

  ‘For the last time, Karen, Margaret is my ex-wife.’

  ‘Should I tell her to call back?’