The Life and Loves of Gringo Greene

by David Carter

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ Gringo whispered-shouted, not an easy thing to do, shouting in a whisper, as he grabbed a bottle of Moet from the cupboard beneath the sink, and slipped it into his pretending-to-be -metallic refrigerator.

  She hadn’t been gone long when he heard her calling down the stairs.

  ‘Gringo! Gringo!’

  It wasn’t a welcoming call, more of a big spanner in the works call, and Gringo didn’t like it. He went to the foot of the stairs but already she was shouting again, just the once this time, and yet more stridently.

  ‘Gringo!’

  ‘Yes, honey.’

  ‘Can you come up here please, right away?’

  She sounded like an old woman teacher he once had in the juniors who yelled in that way when she was trying to be fierce.

  ‘What is it honeybunch?’

  He was almost at the top of the stairs, and then he saw her standing there, framed in his bedroom doorway.

  ‘What the hell are these?’

  My God, she looked angry. Christ, she was beautiful.

  He glanced at the little white box she was holding. Ah yes, he’d forgotten all about those. Product Number 2029, courtesy of Sarah Swift, still unused, well… pretty much unused, definitely not run in, still very usable, almost like new.

  The box was open in her hands. The tentacles had awoken; excited by her clammy mitts, static electricity, and you don’t need much. Pink tendrils were wafting in the non-existent breeze. It was as if Gringo and Glenda suddenly had company, alive and dangerous.

  ‘They are not mine,’ he said limply.

  ‘What do you mean, they are not yours? I found them in your bedside table!’

  ‘They were a silly gift. I meant to throw them away.’

  ‘Well you can bloody well do that now!’ and she rushed across the landing and pushed them into his chest.

  His hands came up but not quickly enough. They tumbled to the floor, two pink creatures, a separate top and bottom of the box, tissue paper, instruction notice, disclaimer card warning on inappropriate use, all falling to the floor in a muddled mixed up heap at his feet.

  Gringo bent down.

  Glen retreated to the bedroom door.

  He picked up the pink creatures and gazed at her as if he had never seen her before. She turned and saw his eyes, the craziness there, like some wild beast.

  ‘Oh no you don’t!’

  He ambled toward her and not for the first time his limbs appeared to have a mind of their own.

  She turned and ran into the bedroom and slammed the door shut as if she were the last defender of the Alamo. She placed her foot against the base of the door and listened.

  Gringo was at the door. She knew he was there. She could hear him panting. He tried the handle. It held fast. She was a young and fit woman. She was strong too; he knew that for a fact. One evening when the telly was rubbish through something better to do, he had arm-wrestled her on the kitchen table. In the end he’d won comfortably enough, but was amazed at how strong she was. You would never have guessed it to look at her.

  But Gringo was built like a middleweight.

  He stood on one leg and casually raised the other. He placed the sole of his leather slipper just beneath the door handle. He tensed his leg and thigh. He opened the handle and exerted all his strength through the leg, transmitting up and through the base of his foot. It wasn’t so much a kick, more a stabbing, jerking motion, issued in a split second, but with all the iron will pent up within him, urged on by the guttural sound that hurtled from his throat, a banshee yell that belonged in some far-eastern martial art movie.

  The door burst open. Glen staggered backwards across the bedroom, falling over the end of the bed, legs akimbo, momentarily stunned, her arms outstretched on either side of her head.

  Gringo advanced into the doorframe and glared down like some monster from an old Hollywood movie. His eyes appeared red, like red-eye you see in some photographs. Perhaps it was the little demon rushing to the party, gazing down through Gringo’s wide eyes.

  ‘Gringo! What you are playing at?’

  He wasn’t listening. He didn’t hear her.

  He wouldn’t have heard a sound if he’d been slouching inside one of Metallica’s speakers. He took a step into the bedroom, his bedroom, his domain.

  His arms were extended on either side of his chest, a pink writhing creature in each hand, the tendrils and tentacles now in a frenzy; thrashing about through the heat coming up through his sweating palms.

  ‘Gringo!’ she shrieked. ‘Don’t you dare bring those bloody things near me!’

  He ignored her. He ignored everything that had gone before. He kicked the door shut behind him, and advanced.

  ‘Gringo!’ she yelled. ‘Ooh… Gringo!’

  Seventy

  Fifty years later.

  ‘What do you want for your breakfast?’

  ‘Scrambled eggs, it has to be scrambled eggs, cooked the way my mother used to make them in this very cottage.’

  ‘I know how your mother used to cook eggs, I haven’t forgotten, and seeing as it’s your birthday, scrambled eggs you shall have,’ and she coughed roughly.

  She had taken up smoking again, much to his disapproval. She’d started on her sixty-fifth birthday, citing the fact that as she was now collecting her pension, one little cigarette couldn’t do any harm. To begin with she had retreated to the garden to smoke, then she restricted it to the conservatory, but now she smoked wherever the hell she liked. Gringo hated it, but she was such a stubborn woman, born of donkey stock, he would tease her, always had been. She would do exactly as she pleased, just as she always had.

  Felix the Eighth was playing about Gringo’s feet, seemingly quite unaware that the old man with the white moustache only possessed one leg. The cat began sharpening its claws on his one remaining trouser bottom.

  Glen returned and set the eggs on the table, cigarette butt unattended and glowing in her mouth.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘The ash can go anywhere.’

  ‘No it doesn’t, stop moaning, now come to the table and eat your breakfast, and after that, you can open your present.’

  Gringo buzzed the wheelchair to the table, almost de-legging the cat in the process.

  ‘How are the eggs?’ she said, finally stubbing out the ciggie.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘really special,’ and they were too, though not as special as his mother’s.

  ‘Well,’ she said, pulling herself closer to the table. ‘Aren’t you going to open your present?’

  It was a rectangular box. Perhaps eight by six by six, inches, the Greenes were still thinking in inches, regardless of anything the European Super State might say. He took hold of it and ripped off the paper.

  ‘I had an awful job getting it,’ she said.

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Just what I wanted. Where on earth did you get it?’

  ‘That’s the funny thing. I bought it when we were on holiday back at our old place. A shop called the New Rosefield Antiques at the top of the hill. I don’t know why they bothered calling it New; I don’t think there was ever an antique shop there before.’

  ‘Yes there was.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I remember it clearly,’ and a picture, a large colour image in glorious high definition, swept into his mind of Sarah Swift, erstwhile owner of Rosefield Antiques, and their secret weekends away together at that run down old wooden shack down by the river where they had …

  ‘You always did have a good memory, I’ll give you that, you still seem to be able to pluck things out from years ago that everyone else has long forgotten.’

  …made tender and passionate love, all day and all night. How could he possibly forget that?

  ‘My memory is the only part of me that’s still functioning as it should.’

  ‘Never mind, dear. Do you like the present?’

  ‘Lovely, just wh
at I wanted, and he slipped one of the compact discs from the collection of the full works of Leonard Cohen, and squinted at the tiny print on the back, and beckoned for her to set it in the machine.

  ‘I’ll put it on when I go out,’ she said. ‘No one uses discs any more. They’re like gold dust. I was so lucky to find them; nestling there they were, under a bunch of old sheet music and scratched 45’s. Cost a bomb, they did.’

  ‘Well, it’s my special birthday, I deserve it.’

  ‘What do you mean, your special birthday?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘I’m twenty-one today. Get the key of the door, I’m a fully grown man, an adult, from now on I can do anything I please, quite legally.’

  ‘Get away with you,’ and then she thought a little more about it, and said: ‘You mean today is your twenty-first true birthday?’ and she glanced across at him.

  Crazily there was a tear in the corner of his black eye.

  Gringo nodded.

  ‘Oh, hun,’ she said, coming to him and kissing him on the top of his red head. ‘Happy birthday, darling. What would you like for your supper?’

  ‘Beef, I’d like a steak.’

  ‘Beef’s not politically correct.’

  ‘I don’t give a fig about political correctness.’

  ‘Beef’s expensive.’

  ‘We can afford it.’

  ‘Beef’s bad for you.’

  ‘Bah! I want a steak; it’s too late for anything to be bad for me. Surely a man can have a steak on his twenty-first birthday!’

  There was an almost pleading look on his weathered face. His thinning white moustache was twitching nervously, just as it had all those years ago when she first met him.

  ‘All right, steak it is, though I’m surprised with those teeth of yours you can contemplate taking on such a thing.’

  She had a point there, he could always suck it to death, and if he couldn’t manage all of it, Felix the Eighth would surely help him out.

  She went away and made ready to go out. When she came back she was wearing that cute maroon raincoat he liked, with the big belt around the middle that showed off her waist so well. She had retained her figure, she was still a beautiful woman, older yes, but in a strange way, more beautiful, as Gringo glanced at her, and reminded himself why he loved her so. Fact was; he loved her more now than he had ever done.

  She’d brushed her hair back off her face. She was wearing gold earrings, those same gold earrings he had once bought for the late Sarah Swift, though Glen didn’t need to know that. There was no point in wasting good jewellery. She caught him taking surreptitious peeks at her face.

  ‘What is it?’ Imagining her light makeup to be skew-whiff.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Come on, there’s something on your mind.’

  ‘You’re very beautiful.’

  ‘Hah! And you’re an idiot, talk about myopia.’

  ‘You are! Very beautiful.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right, so long as you don’t notice my hair is thinning and grey, my face is wrinkled and flabby, my tits are sagging and my teeth are falling out.’

  ‘You are very beautiful, Glen, you always have been.’

  ‘Yes, and you need an eye test, Mister Gringo Greene. Is there anything else you want from the shops?’ she asked, picking up her holdall from the old wooden chair.

  ‘You could always steal a shoe from outside the shoe shop.’

  It was a crazy joke they had shared many times before since that awful diabetes had prompted the removal of his leg.

  ‘Hmm, maybe I’ll do that,’ and she giggled like a kid fifty years her junior. ‘See you later. I won’t be long.’

  ‘You take good care of yourself, young lady,’ he said, glancing up into her green eyes that were as bright now as they had ever been.

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not such a young lady any more,’ she said wistfully, as she peered through the window at some non-existent passer-by.

  ‘You will always be a young lady to me,’ he replied, something he said quite often in case she should ever think otherwise.

  She uttered another silly laugh, an almost dismissive girlish giggle.

  ‘You’re crackers, you know that.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but it’s true, you will always be a young lady to me.’

  She laughed ruefully this time and let herself out. He buzzed himself to the window and watched her amble down the path and clamber awkwardly into the car. Then she was gone, trundling down to the town in search of a sirloin steak for his birthday treat. She had forgotten to put on the music, but that didn’t matter. His ears were not what they once were.

  They had never had kids. There was no reason for it, said the medical buffs. They had gone through all the most detailed checks, tests that proved beyond doubt they could and should have produced children. It remained a mystery. Fate, it was, they said, sometimes these things happen, and Gringo believed in fate. He’d seen it in the stars.

  If she harboured deep disappointment she hid it well. In truth she imagined she had failed her husband, not the other way round, though no one would ever know the real reason for the lack of children. Perhaps there was no reason. It certainly hadn’t been through lack of trying. Fact was, he pondered; everyone can’t have everything in life. All you can do is try your best.

  He retreated to the table and opened his wallet. Deep inside, hidden amongst old receipts and notes from years before, was a small, square photograph. It had arrived seven years after he and Glen had set up home together. When it came there was nothing else in the envelope, but the picture. He clasped it in trembling fingers and glanced at the handsome little boy. The kid was dark and aged around four or five. Gringo flipped the photo over and held it to the light. A brief feminine written note stared back at him, fading like everything else through the years.

  I thought you might like a photo of my little paperboy, it said, and then a PS, just in case he hadn’t caught the drift: Seems he was made of paper all along.

  Gringo sighed and returned it to his wallet. He’d never seen the boy for that wouldn’t have been right, not with Richie bringing up the child believing the kid to be his own, and over the years they’d completely lost touch.

  He often thought of the boy and what had become of him. He’d be fifty now, perhaps even a grandfather himself, and how weird was that? Gringo sat back and closed his eyes.

  He’d never told Glen about it for he wouldn’t have wished to pour that angst onto his dear wife. He’d take that sliver of information and bury it away deep inside his black brain where even the little demon couldn’t find it, and more than that, he’d carry that knowledge with him through his ultimate defining day, a day he now knew wasn’t so far away.

  He often thinks of the old days.

  When you’re at the end of your life, that’s all there is.

  He’s sorry for his wrongdoings, for his errors and mistakes, for all the people he used and hurt, for the occasions he often fell to temptation, and for all the times when selfishness got the better of him, yet deep down in the pits of his black heart he knows full well that if he were ever to have his time all over again, he would live his life in precisely the same way. It was Glen who saved him. He knows that well enough. He’s grateful for that too.

  Life can be so strange.

  Death?

  Love laughs in the face of death, and always will, for true love endures forever. Nothing else does.

  You will always be a young lady to me.

  Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will always be a young lady to me.

  Always.

  Author’s Notes

  Thank you for buying and reading my book and I hope that you enjoyed it. When you have a spare few moments I’d really appreciate it if you would place a brief review on the main book sale sites.

  If you have any comments on Gringo Greene, good, bad, or indifferent, you can contact me direct at sup
alife@aol.com

  I would love to hear from you.

  I have been toying with the idea of writing a Gringo Greene sequel, or more likely a prequel, and if that is something that might interest you, then again, do please let me know.

  As always, any and all mistakes in this book are mine and

  mine alone.

  Thank you for supporting independent writers and publishers. Without your help we would all simply vanish.

  Have fun,

  David C.

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