Pot Luck

by Nick Fisher

  Paulie in turn explaining that accidents happen every day and that people still had to make a living. The Inspector agreeing with him and ensuring him that once the inspection had been completed, the vessel would be free to continue in her line of work. So long as all basic health and safety requirements had been met. Adrian now seeing Paulie struggling to keep his temper. Three days with Kitty K tied against the harbour wall, while all the other Weymouth crabbers were out at sea making money, this eating away at Paulie like a fucking cancer.

  “Sweet,” said Matty, when he heard the news. “Couldn’t be better. Gives me time set up Stage Two.” The brothers sitting in the front seat of Adrian’s Nissan Navara pick-up. The truck smelling as bad as the Kitty K’s deck. Worse even. Least the Kitty got flushed through with fresh sea air most days. The truck, full of ropes, broken pots, tarps and rusty tools, just got the occasional warm-up by the windscreen-demister, making the stink inside it bloom with the heat.

  “I got some people up in Bristol, need to pay a visit,” says Matty. “Talk around the potential, see who might be interested in what. Maybe even see if I can get a little cash up-front.” He smiles at Adrian. “That’d be very cool. If I can pull it off, right?”

  In the gap between throwing up in front of the Chinese cop and seeing Paulie have a hernia over the MCA Inspector’s imposed three-day tie-up, Adrian had been trying to work out what to say to Matty when they next spoke. He’d tried to work out how to put into words the bubbling cauldron of anger, fear, hatred, disbelief and just naked fucking shock that he now felt. It was impossible. So Adrian didn’t put it into words. Just as Matty was telling Adrian how he might be able to rustle up a little ‘seed capital’ from one of the ‘high end money-men’ he’d be able to ‘access’ in Bristol, through a Sikh guy named Max, Adrian lost it.

  He threw himself sideways across the centre console and the gear stick and landed on top of Matty, punching, gouging, shouting, biting. He grabbed Matty’s face in both hands, his stubby fingernails digging into his flesh while he mashed the back of Matty’s head against the door pillar and the passenger’s window. He hoofed his knee up trying to drill it into Matty’s chest. He roared himself hoarse as he tried to crush Matty’s stupid head between his hands. No actual words came out of Adrian’s mouth, just the animal sounds of rage and frustration.

  Matty brought his elbows up high to shield his face. He managed to raise a knee to fend off Adrian’s blows, but otherwise Matty didn’t fight back. He did his best to protect his head until the fit of blind big brother rage eventually died away and Adrian was left hanging over him, panting, sweating, spent.

  Adrian slumping back across the console into the driver’s seat and looking blindly at the now steamed up windscreen. His hands shaking violently in his lap. He opens the electric window to let the damp cold night air suck away the fog of his fury.

  Matty says nothing. Just folds down the sun visor and checks his face in the vanity mirror. A ragged flap of skin hangs open and bleeding, below his left eye. He wipes the blood away with the cuff of his sleeve. And he says, “We do this right, everything changes. I get the fuck out of here, for good. You get a new boat, new business, whatever.”

  “Right?” asks Adrian, incredulous.

  “Do it right,” explains Matty. “Make us some cash. Invest it. Move on up.”

  “When you smashed Tim’s skull, you didn’t think – about me? Or Helen? Or my boys?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You make me part of this. And you make them part of it too. If I go along with this, I–”

  “Stand a reasonable chance of giving them a life.”

  Adrian balling his fists. “Jesus, you really think I want my boys to have–”

  “Something?” asks Matty. “Yes. Otherwise they going to have nothing. Because that’s all you’ll ever have to give them. Because you got shit,” he says. “Until today.”

  “I wasn’t an accessory in a murder.”

  “Well now you are. Nothing you can say’ll change that. And what you going to do? Walk away from 50 grand? Shop me to the law?”

  Adrian stares out into the Quay car park, all lit up by the orange fizz of street lights. The clanging of cables against aluminium yacht masts beating a rhythm all across the marina. A hundred thoughts clanging, in his brain, turning it to mush.

  Matty saying, “Face it, bro. I took an executive decision. Bought you and your boys a future.”

  The pick-up is parked in the shadow of the huge Victorian house where Matty rents a bedsit. Half a dozen wheelie bins clustered outside, all daubed with the number 17 in white, drooling gloss paint. One lay on its side, around it a scattering of bin bags ripped open by dogs or cats or foxes or seagulls. A tin take-away tray glinting in the headlights, picked clean of its scraps.

  A small fridge with its door open is propped against the rotten wood gate leading through to the back garden. Not one of the lit windows appears to have proper curtains. Blankets, clothes on hangers and even an upside down American stars-and-stripes flag are in use to protect the residents’ privacy. Adrian has no idea which window is Matty’s, if any. And didn’t want to know. He only knew this is where Matty lives because he’d given him a lift to the same shadowy spot with a second-hand fridge stuffed in the flat-bed of the truck. A fridge that Matty had been given or sold by someone he met in The Sailors. It might even be the same fridge that blocked the back gate. Adrian couldn’t care less.

  “We can’t touch the boat for three days. Police and MCA,” he says.

  “Good. Gives me time to go and see Max the Sikh.”

  “We should do nothing.”

  “You do nothing,” says Matty. “You always bitching about how you doing everything. So you do nothing for a change. I’ll go do some business.”

  “No,” says Adrian. “We both do nothing. Let things settle down.”

  “Strike while the iron is hot.”

  “No.” Adrian feeling his anger fermenting again.

  “Longer that gear’s around, more chance us getting in trouble. Am I right?”

  “Not when it’s under the sea.”

  “In one of our pots?” says Matty, like its incriminating.

  Adrian shrugs. “It’s the safest option. Let it lie.”

  “I’m going to Bristol. Tickle up some interest.”

  “Why? Just wait a few days.”

  “You wait. I’m moving on up.”

  “Think about it. What you going to do? Talk about the dope?” says Adrian. “Tell them what it’s like. Ask them to take your word. Come on. Even I know they’re going to need a sample.”

  “Fuck yeah,” says Matty.

  “And all the dope is in the pot,” says Adrian, spelling it out. “Out on the Kidney Bank. And we can’t go anywhere near the Kitty for three days.”

  “Don’t need to.”

  Adrian looks confused. Matty winks at him, now with his swelling left eye. Matty enjoying the moment.

  “You really think I’d put all that dope back in the sea?” he says.

  Matty slides his hand down the waistband of his trousers, into his pants, down into his crotch. When his hand reappears, it’s holding a lump of black dope half the size of a matchbox between his fingers.

  “Come on, big bruv. You know me better than that,” he says, as he slams the truck door and walks away past the wheelie bins.

  Robbie opens the lid of the small Neff chest-freezer that stands in the larder off his kitchenette. “Was my girlfriend’s, really,” he says. The two plain clothes police officers squeezing into the tight space beside him. A light going on as he lifts the lid, illuminating the pitifully empty wire baskets that hang inside the top-of-the-range little freezer. Domestication has never come naturally to Robbie. He was always more of a restaurant/bistro type diner than a cook.

  That didn’t stop him yearning for a little home cooking. Didn’t stop him having mini fantasies about preparing dinners to be consumed at the kitchen table, or even out on the patio furniture, with o
r without the warm red glow of the patio heater. The one that he’d bought on the same love-flushed shopping trip with Elsa, at the John Lewis Home store on the outskirts of Poole old town.

  Together they had burned another big hole in one of his many maxed-out credit cards in a Cava-and-coke fuelled spree, intended to turn his flat above the car showroom into a home.

  “You put it in the freezer?” asks the cop with the hair gel.

  “Didn’t really know what else…” Robbie trailed off. His voice sounding weird in his own head. “Just thought it’d give me some thinking time.”

  “Thinking time?” says the cop.

  “To think what to do with it.”

  Sara Chin picks up one corner of the pristine-looking Ziploc bag and holds it up. The freezer light shining through the plastic, profiling the frozen outline of a stiff Persian cat, with something brown and papery where the head should be. She looks at Robbie, with a question.

  “Filter paper from the coffee maker,” he says, as if reading her mind. “To soak up the blood.” He shrugs. “Didn’t know what you’re supposed to do.”

  “Most people bury dead pets,” says Tug.

  “Not much of a garden,” Robbie says in explanation.

  “But, freezing it?” Chin asks.

  “I don’t know. I thought she might want to see it. Say goodbye.”

  “Without its head!?” says Tug. Put like that it sounded stupid. What was he thinking? Freezing it? Fuck. He could’ve put it in a bin bag. Chucked it into the harbour, maybe. Left it out for the urban foxes to chew on. But instead, he put it in a Ziploc and put it in the freezer! Now Robbie knows he’s losing the plot.

  The really stupid thing is he’d actually felt quite pleased with himself when he’d first thought of freezing the dead cat. At least he’d be using the freezer for something. So many times he’d heard it humming away at night, knowing all that was inside it was half a tub of Chunky Monkey and a freezer gel pack that he likes to use on his lower back when he got one of his sciatica attacks. With the shooting pains down one leg. At least, for once, all that humming and electricity was being used for freezing something.

  Even though the freezer lid is open and freezing cold air is tumbling out, and even though Robbie’s only dressed in his bathrobe and slippers, he can feel two trickles of sweat leach their way down his sides, from both arm pits. As he shifts his weight from one foot to another, he catches a whiff of his body odour billowing up from under the robe. He stinks. He stinks like he’s never stinked before. A new kind of body smell. Not like his own. Like some other man. Another species even.

  Robbie hadn’t been able to sleep all night, his legs all twitchy, kicking, aching. His armpits leaking. Now he could feel the sweat glands all up and pumping again, as he stood in the kitchenette, discussing Elsa’s headless Suki, and the broken glass door downstairs.

  “No one?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t think of anyone who might have done this?”

  “No,” says Robbie “Local teenagers?” he suggests, just to make it look like he’s trying.

  When he says this, the police officers take their eyes away from the cat in the bag and look at each other. They say nothing. They don’t move either. God, Robbie just wants them to go. To leave the kitchen. To close the downstairs door with the 24 hour emergency boarding repair tacked across it and leave him to think. To think about what the fuck he should do next. Like he’d been doing all night long, staring up at the shade on the central ceiling lamp. The one with the squiggly design that Elsa said reminded her of a lampshade her mother had bought when she was a little girl in Warsaw. That too coming from John Lewis. The Lighting Department. Stick it on the Mastercard.

  Oh, Jesus he so just wants the cops to leave. Give him space. Let him try to get his brain back to work.

  “Thing is,” says Tug. “It doesn’t seem very random. Seems like very specific.”

  “Targeted,” says Chin.

  “Like you were targeted by someone, to be the victim of a very specific criminal act.”

  “Cat mutilation.”

  “Committed on your desk.”

  “Inside your office.”

  “Like,” Tug says, his face very close now, the mixed aromas of after shave and hair gel hanging around his head like a thick cloud. “Like someone is sending you a message.”

  “Someone you know maybe?” says Chin.

  “No. No one I know. Least no one I can think of,” says Robbie. Making a ‘serious’ face like he’s just wracking his brains to come up with a likely candidate. But failing. “No. Uh-unh. No one.”

  “Because if someone is trying to send you a message. Trying to make you aware of something,” says Tug. “Doesn’t seem like it’s a very kind sort of message.”

  “More of a threat,” said Chin.

  “That what this is, Mr Rock?” asks Tug, “A threat?”

  There’s something about pushing a buggy and watching Josh skip along beside it that makes him feel worse. When he offered to take Josh to nursery and push Jack along for the ride, he thought it would help. Help him flush away some of the clinging sickness he felt about what had happened on the Kitty. To be with his two boys, full of innocence and fun, should rub off a little. Make him feel more innocent and fun. Of course, it didn’t. It made it worse. He felt dirty and wrong and like a fucking fraud of a father; pretending to listen to Josh’s prattle about why he loved hot school lunches, but one day wanted to have a packed lunch, so he could sit in the playground on the bench with Aaron and Liam, who always had packed lunches, in boxes. Liam’s was a Transformers box and Aaron’s was Spiderman. And if Josh got one, for his one day of packed lunch, he wanted a Cars 2 one, that looks like a mechanic’s tool box.

  Adrian’s Helen sometimes joked about how small and banal her life has become; working part-time, two days a week, as a teaching assistant, for no money. Just a way of clocking up her ‘classroom-time credits’. Spending every single day of her week deeply embedded in the lives of the under-sevens. She said she found it hard sometimes being in adult company after so much time with the children. She was scared she had nothing to say, because all her points of reference had been boiled down to words of no more than two syllables.

  Just now, Adrian felt jealous of Helen. He’d love nothing more than to lose himself in a world of sticky-fingered innocence. But he couldn’t. Even with Josh, skipping and chatting, Adrian could still feel the crunch of bat against bone and taste the diesel and the bile in the back of his throat. Adrian dreaded his phone ringing. It would either be Paulie, the police or Matty. Was hard to say which he dreaded most.

  “Sunseeker 52-footer,” says Tug, pointing to a large white motor yacht, moored up against a pontoon. “That’s about one-point-eight million. The one with the teak deck on the back and the dining table, that’s a Moody. More old school. Still set you back just over a mil-and-a-half.”

  They’re sitting in the Windjammer Brasserie at Blue Haven, the next bay west along Poole Harbour shore, after Salter’s Quay. The view looks back across the harbour towards Sandbanks, except they can’t really see Sandbanks, because of all the big yachts moored alongside the decking in front of their table.

  They’re waiting for coffees to be delivered. Chin had asked for a cappuccino and Tug ordered an Americano, waving her hand away when she tried to give him some pound coins for her drink.

  “Nah. My shout,” he said, trying to sound all ‘hey-we’re-partners, aren’t we?’ While, also trying to remember which one an Americano was. Did it have the frothy milk or the flat milk? Normally, he would have just ordered a Diet Coke and a bacon sandwich. That’s if they’d gone to Wimpy, like he would’ve done normally, if he was on this job with any of the boys from the squad.

  Way he saw it, he was doing her a professional favour. Chin didn’t know the area. Didn’t know the lie of the land. Didn’t have the full picture of the socio-economic rollercoaster ride that occurs in the 30 as-the-crow-flies miles, from the stinking
whelk pots of Weymouth quay, to the blinding-white multi-million pound gin palaces of Poole Harbour.

  Should he actually call her ‘Chin’? Tug runs the idea through his brain. Sounds kinda cool. But then it might be insulting. Or sexist. Or racist. Maybe Chinese don’t like using just surnames, like it’s an insult to their family name, or something.

  Anyway, so Tug thinks, this is like providing part of her professional education about her new manor. Helping her to grasp a geographical and social awareness of her new surroundings. He certainly wasn’t just showing off. Or trying to impress her, by bringing her somewhere that had real teaspoons instead of plastic stirrers, and where they served your coffee with a little shard of hand-made chocolate on the saucer.

  He didn’t even realise what it was at first and left it by the cup too long, so it got all melty and then stuck to his finger when he picked it up, which meant he ended up sucking his finger, like a child. He tried to wipe it on the napkin but then the napkin looked sort of disgusting, and he had to ball it up, wanting to hide it somewhere, when Chin says, “So, what do we do, then? Just wait until it’s his head that gets chopped off?”

  Tug shrugs. “What can we do? He don’t want to tell us who’s scaring the living shit out of him, we can’t make him.”

  “He turns up, floating face down in the harbour,” says Chin. “You not going to feel like you should’ve done a bit more?”

  “He’s a grown up. We gave him plenty of chances.”

  “You see the sweat running off him?”

  “Fuck yeah,” says Tug. “But if he don’t want our help, can’t force it on him.”