An Autumn Crush

by Milly Johnson

  ‘I’m wrestling tonight,’ he said. It was as if she was in a coma and the only way to reach her was by talking normally, willing her to wake up and respond. She never did. ‘I’m the good guy. The Angel.’

  He sat with her for an hour and talked and she heard nothing. Then he put some money in her hand in the hope that she wouldn’t buy drink with it. But he knew she would.

  Chapter 6

  As Guy, resplendent in swirling villain’s black cape and black satin shorts, cut through the cheering, jeering crowd, arthritic old pensioners sprang up, agile as athletes, pushing to the aisles to batter him with their handbags. He ran the gauntlet, spitting and snarling, then climbed cockily through the ropes into the ring, took off his plastic crown, ripped off his cape and handed them to the assistant’s waiting hands.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, tonight for your entertainment,’ began the dramatic, broad Yorkshire build-up over the PA system, ‘it’s the mad, it’s the bad, it’s the dangerous, the one you love to hate, the one and only CRUSHER KINGSTONE,’ the name being drowned in a fresh crescendo of jeering as the massive, black-haired lad sprang forwards into the centre of the ring. There waiting for him, in white shorts with wings attached to his shoulders, was a silver-blond man standing nose to nose with him at six foot four exactly.

  ‘And D and E Wrestling Entertainment is proud to present his opponent, the magnificent, the angelic, the good, the beautiful, the divine and the heavenly STEEEVE ANGEL.’

  The mood of the crowd turned to one of cheering as the huge muscular angel-man raised his hand and greeted the throng before taking off his wings and handing them to the same ring assistant for safe-keeping.

  The referee, Little Eric, stretched up to his full height of five foot three, and pulled down on the two large men’s shoulders.

  ‘Now, lads, I want a good, fair fight – and remember, Angel, you’re going down in the third from a Boston Crab. Best of luck, lads. Give ’em a good show, for fuck’s sake.’

  Steve nodded and smiled widely at Guy, proffering his hand. Guy snarled and slapped it away, prompting every able-bodied pensioner in the hall to rise to his or her feet in a chaotic Mexican wave of gravelly boos and gnarled old fists.

  ‘There’s plenty of time before that Boston Crab, so you watch yourself,’ whispered Steve, squaring up.

  ‘Do your worst!’ said Guy, reaching over and throttling him with no further warning.

  It was a short but thrilling bout. As the first-aiders carried off a damaged Angel, dramatically howling on a stretcher that his back was broken, Guy strolled around the ring sponging up the jeers before braving the run through the passionately angry throng back to the safety of the changing rooms. Steve hopped off the stretcher just before the bearers turfed him off as they would need to be back at ringside shortly to carry off Tarzan and the Apeman after being walloped by the Pogmoor Brothers.

  ‘Thanks! You nearly broke my spine that time,’ Steve said to Guy, reaching round to rub his aching back. ‘I much prefer it when I’m the Dark Angel and you’re Guido Goodguy. You’re a nasty bugger when you’re the villain – worse than Alberto Masserati.’

  Guy grinned at the mention of the infamously brutal local wrestler. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, as we say in my profession.’

  ‘Your ear’s bleeding,’ said Steve.

  ‘Aye, I thought it was sore,’ said Guy, rubbing it and then checking his finger. ‘One of the old ones lamped me when I ran off. I swear they still put bricks in their handbags.’

  They shipped the OAPs in from all over the place when there was a bout anywhere within reasonable travelling distance, and for a couple of hours they became spring chickens again, before reverting to the knackered old cocks and hens who climbed wearily on the bus back to their residential homes. How they had got away with never having to stop a match for someone to be carted off with a heart attack, was anyone’s guess. Steve liked them, though. He loved that he was partly responsible for awakening that old passion in them, even if it lasted just long enough to boil a soft egg. Most of them remembered the glory days of British wrestling, and these evenings were a hark back to their youthful past.

  Every Christmas Guy and Steve, the Pogmoor Brothers tag team, Big Bad Davy, Klondyke Kevin and some of the other wrestlers took chocolates and a few bottles of beer and wine up to Daffodil House near Penistone and saw these same crazed old buggers from their audiences sitting in their chairs, staring at TV screens and into space as if their spirits had been stored in mothballs until the next outing to the Centennial Rooms Wrestling Nights. No, Steve never minded if they loved him or hated him when he was grappling in character, just that they enjoyed him.

  ‘Seriously, mate, thanks for stepping in,’ said Steve. ‘I know you’re not getting much time off at the moment.’

  ‘Ah, don’t worry.’ Guy waved the thanks away. ‘Couldn’t see you without a partner tonight, could I?’

  Little Derek the promoter was a man down thanks to Flamboyant Fred Zeppelin’s broken wrist. He was lucky to get only that, as he sustained it during a bout with Alberto Masserati, who ignored whatever stage directions Little Eric and Little Derek gave out and always went for the kill. Alberto turned into a borderline sadist once he was in that ring. In fact, no one would get in with him, except big Fred, because he was so fearsome. And yet out of the ring Alberto was a mild-mannered family man who ran a small but jovial pub and loved nothing better than to cook and entertain and watch opera. There might have been a lot of theatre in wrestling, but injuries were common. A large part of it was ‘stage-managed’, but when a thirty-stone Apeman did a body-slam on his contender, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t at the very least crack a rib.

  ‘Pint?’ said Steve, rubbing the towel quickly over his platinum hair after a freezing shower. It looked like it was heavily peroxided, but it was totally natural. His paternal grandfather had been Swedish – though Steve had never met him – and handed the white-blond gene in its entirety to his only grandson. It caught and possessively held any light and illuminated him so much, it made him look as if he was wearing a halo. After a bout once, when his on-stage persona was Thor Svensson, the Viking Warrior, a drunken bird had said to him: ‘Ooooh, you look like an Angel.’ Then she threw up all over his 120-quid brand new trainers.

  All things in consideration, he liked the name and used it from then on.

  ‘Then you can tell me what’s going on in your tiny brain,’ Steve continued.

  Guy stopped momentarily from combing his black waves in the mirror he always had to bend to see in. He had been about to tell Steve about meeting Floz, then thought better of it.

  ‘Nothing’s going on in my brain.’

  Steve huffed. ‘Yeh, and I’m Ronnie Corbett!’ Guy carried on combing. ‘You’ve gone quiet and are doing that Heathcliff glowering thing. You always do that when you’ve got something on your mind.’

  ‘You sound like our Juliet,’ replied Guy, since she had been the first to comment that her twin brother turned into a mean and moody Heathcliff when his thoughts were preoccupied.

  Steve knew he’d probably be able to winkle it out of Guy over a pint and thought he’d change the subject for now.

  ‘So, what’s Ju’s new flat-mate like then?’

  Guy groaned and shook his head.

  ‘That bad eh?’ Steve grimaced.

  ‘Oh boy,’ said Guy, throwing the comb into his holdall. It missed. He muttered an expletive as he bent to pick it up.

  ‘What the hell is up with you?’ prodded Steve.

  They were interrupted by Little Derek, the promoter, who came into the changing rooms waving two brown envelopes.

  ‘Nice work, Steve! Fifty quid and an extra ten for your expenses. Next bout will be back here on Tuesday the thirty-first. I’ll ring you with the details. Good to see you back, Guy. You up for some more, lad?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Guy definitively. ‘This was a favour to Steve. I’m too busy, Derek.’

  Dere
k smiled paternally. He had been involved in the business since he was a teenager and clung to the illusion that it was on the brink of a massive comeback. He would never admit to himself that the wrestling game was dead in this country. Each bout had to be expertly stage-managed to get the punters in, playing on their nostalgia for better days with larger-than-life characters such as Giant Haystacks, Catweazle, Big Daddy, ‘Rollerball’ Rocco, Jim Breaks: the guys everyone loved to love and loved to hate. Derek couldn’t remember how many times he and Guy had had this same conversation: that he was only doing ‘this last one’ to help Steve out, and it would be his last. It never was his last. He knew he’d get a few more fights out of him if Steve was stuck for a partner.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Derek. ‘It’s only a matter of time before we catch up with the Americans, and the home of wrestling returns to Britain. And I’ll be ready when it does. Millionaires, those wrestlers are out there – millionaires and superstars. And when I get rich, you’ll get rich.’ He presumed everyone was as focused on money as he was. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that the lads wrestled for the love of it. ‘I have to keep my little girl in designer gear.’

  ‘Oh yes, your Chianti. How . . . how is she . . . Chianti?’ said Steve, doing a very bad impression of nonchalance as his voice always tended to rise three octaves on her name whilst the rest of the sentence stayed in bass. He sounded like a yodeller who has had too much schnapps.

  ‘Someone mention me?’ Right on cue, glossy Chianti Parkin, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Little Derek, appeared in the doorway with her skinny legs, pneumatic breasts and long tumbles of golden hair extensions, courtesy of some poor woman in Russia trading her locks in for the price of a couple of loaves of bread.

  ‘Oh hi, Chianti, are you well?’ asked Steve, scratching the back of his neck nervously.

  ‘Yeah, I’m great,’ replied Chianti, whilst chewing the life out of her gum. She afforded Steve a second of her attention then flicked her eyes away from him and back to Little Derek.

  ‘Just came to say I’m off, Dad. Wayne’s here to pick me up.’

  ‘Goodbye, love. Have a good night,’ said Little Derek softly and proudly, and he kissed his daughter on her cheek. Steve watched Chianti turn and sashay off in her thigh-length boots and short, swingy skirt. A low animal growl rose in his throat and he swallowed it quickly.

  ‘She’s off to Four Trees tonight. You know, that fancy restaurant out on the Pennines with the long waiting list. Some businessman or other – Wayne. Big flash car he’s got, obviously. She won’t look at anything less than a personalized number-plate. Course he won’t last, they never do. Use and abuse, that’s our Chianti.’ Derek sighed fondly at his daughter’s sadistic tendencies towards men, then snapped back to business. ‘Anyway – got to dash. Tata, lads, and thanks. Good one.’ He gave them a thumbs-up and disappeared back to the front of house to watch the tag teams then the final act, Grim Reaper (whose entrance in a cloud of dry ice always raised the blood pressure of the pensioners by three zillion per cent, submit to twenty-two-stone Jeff Leppard’s stranglehold. The old ones liked to see the Grim Reaper defeated.

  ‘Chianti Parkin.’ Steve’s sigh said it all.

  ‘You can do better than her,’ Guy replied. Chianti Parkin didn’t do much for him. She gave off a very cold vibe – and Steve needed someone soft and warm and a nest-builder to make up for all that he had missed. He couldn’t imagine Chianti in an apron rustling him up a shepherd’s pie and welcoming him home from work each night with open arms.

  ‘How’s your mum?’ was Guy’s next question.

  Steve sighed again – a heavy, sad sigh this time. ‘The same, really. I went up today but she was out of it. Then again last week I took her some fish and chips and she wolfed the lot. It was just nice to see her eat something.’

  Guy knew that Steve would have seen that as a result. Christine Feast sometimes wouldn’t even let her son into the house. It all depended on how paranoid she felt at the time. Christine had been a chronic alcoholic since Steve was a small child. She came from a family of drinkers and didn’t fight the pattern.

  ‘She’s the size of a baby bird,’ Steve went on, wrestling with the tremor in his voice. Then he coughed and batted thoughts of his mum out of his brain for now. ‘Anyway, never mind about me and mine, we’re going for a beer and you’re going to tell me why you’ve been walking around like Adrian frigging Mole all night.’ He bet it was woman trouble. And Steve knew all about woman trouble. Chianti was less attainable than Kylie Minogue.

  Like the whole Miller family, Steve wished that Guy would find a good woman and settle down. He was sure and steady and built for having a family to work for and enjoy. And he really deserved a bit of happiness after all the shit he had been through. Different sort of shit to what he himself had been through, but shit all the same.

  Guy swung his giant holdall over his shoulder. ‘If I tell you, not a word, and I mean not one bloody word to Juliet.’

  ‘You can trust me to be discreet,’ returned Steve, mortally affronted.

  ‘Aye, well I can’t trust her,’ said Guy. In the School of Indiscretion, his twin sister was Headmistress. A horrible memory flashed past of his secret Valentine’s card to Michaela Hall being outed (design courtesy of Blue Peter two nights previously: cornflakes packet, sticky-back plastic, school glue, red poster paint and Trill budgie food). He couldn’t listen to Chrissie Hynde singing ‘Talk of the Town’ without breaking out into a cold sweat.

  ‘So, what have I not to tell Juliet then?’ said Steve, at the end of his patience. He pushed open the door which creaked arthritically and they walked out into the warm mid-August night air.

  ‘It’s this new flat-mate of Juliet’s. I made a right arse of myself last night in front of her.’

  ‘Oh aye, what did you do? Trip over the coffee-table and land at her feet?’ Steve laughed.

  The look that Guy threw him told him he wasn’t far off the truth.

  Steve listened to Guy’s recollection of their first meeting. The way Floz looked small and vulnerable, snuggled up in a spotty dressing-gown, and how, just for a moment, he’d had a panicky flashback to Lacey. And he finished up by telling Steve how he’d made the most unchivalrous and puerile exit imaginable.

  ‘It’s not exactly a big deal, is it?’ said Steve. He knew Guy’s type of woman – long and leggy with golden hair, give or take the unfortunate blip that was tiny, dark Lacey Robinson. ‘Anyway, why are you so bothered what a short bird dressed up like a Dalmatian thinks of you?’

  Guy exhaled a long, heavy breath. ‘Because she was bloody gorgeous.’

  Chapter 7

  Just as Guy was admitting to Steve how blown away he had been by the sight of her even with no make-up and big red eyes, Floz’s mobile rang and she picked it up immediately on seeing the name on the screen.

  ‘I need ten really saucy Valentine’s cards prontissimo,’ said Lee Status, his voice breezing down the line with his usual confidence. ‘At least two blow-job jokes and a few “nice-tits” poems, if you don’t mind.’

  Floz laughed. ‘No worries, Lee. When do you want them for?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Don’t you want any nice, sweet, secret-admirer ones?’ suggested Floz.

  ‘Nope. The youth of today are sexually aggressive and don’t bother with foreplay. They head straight for the genitals.’

  ‘Okay,’ sighed Floz. ‘I’ll have them done for you tonight.’

  ‘Thursday morning’s the deadline really,’ he said, and the phone cut off immediately. Lee Status was a busy man with no time for excess chit-chat.

  Her head didn’t begin whirring into action straight away, as it usually did after a brief was received. Instead Floz wondered how she would feel receiving a card telling her that she had nice tits. She must be getting terribly old because it wouldn’t really have made her melt, even if George Clooney had sent it to her. Surely Valentine’s cards should be romantic, not too slushy, with a soupçon of s
pice – like the one Nick had sent from Canada. A white background with a tiny heart on the front and inside the words: I just want to pick you up, bring you over here and love you. Her own heart flared at the thought of it and she stamped it down again. No point in nudging those thoughts back to life.

  She’d not really understood what had happened there. Why a romance full of such honesty and promise had just ended so abruptly, why he wouldn’t answer his phone or reply to her emails. It had been eighteen months since he cut off all contact but, as she found out, from her thoughts merely brushing against the memory of that card, the hurt lingered still.

  She obviously scared men. She only had to think back to the previous evening and that first encounter with Guy Miller. It had taken mere seconds of being in her presence to have him tearing off at warp speed with such a look of horror on his face that she’d had to check in the mirror to make sure she hadn’t suddenly grown snakes on her head. That scene had haunted her ever since. Had he seen the flash of attraction in her eyes and been revolted by it? Or scared he’d be turned into stone? Well, just in case, the next time she encountered the big twerp, she would show him that his idiotic behaviour hadn’t affected her in the slightest and that she had no designs on him whatsoever. She would be as aloof as an ice-queen.

  She opened up a file on her laptop and named it Val-risqué then let her mind wander down the avenue of smutty jokes. Not for the first time she thought that maybe her destiny was to write about love for other people, and never receive it herself.

  Chapter 8