Magnificent Joe

by James Wheatley

  ‘No, I mean, how could…me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I used you.’

  She steps out, quickly, looks up and down the street. ‘Get inside. Now.’

  I do as I’m told. She closes the door behind me, shoves me against the wall. ‘Is that what you think? Is that what you’ve thought, all this time?’

  ‘That’s what it is, really. That’s what it always is when you—’

  ‘Go with a whore?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I’m your victim? A punchbag? A fuck-toy?’

  I can’t answer that. I just shrug.

  She grabs the front of my jacket in her fist, pushes her forearm across my chest, and looks up into my face. ‘Yes, I was young, and yes, I was stupid. I was too young and too stupid to know that what I thought I wanted was all just shit, but that’s the same thing as wanting it anyway, so don’t tell me you used me.’

  ‘But it was horrible. That house. Those people.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t see it like that at the time, and once I did, I got away.’

  ‘Jesus. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No. You don’t understand. I left that bastard, but I didn’t stop escorting – not then. I kept going and I did it for myself and I used the money for something good. So I’m not sorry, and you shouldn’t be either.’

  She lets go of my jacket. I watch her eyes and they are full on me. ‘It was Barry,’ I say. ‘He made me visit you that day. I didn’t do it for my own sake.’

  She smiles at me. ‘I know. He told me that part himself. He wanted to make it clear to me who was the boss.’

  ‘The bastard.’

  ‘Are you still glad you kept the secret?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then we stand there together in her hall, saying nothing. Whatever force drove me to her door is all gone and everything I expected to hear is not quite the truth after all. ‘So what now?’ I say.

  She pushes open the door to the living room. ‘Come in?’

  I find it difficult to move, but then her hand slips into mine and I go with her. She takes me to the couch and we sit down together. She puts one hand in my hair and rests her forehead against the side of my head. Her breath smells like milk. I hear her tongue move behind her teeth and she says, ‘Do we understand each other now?’

  I don’t know what the question means, but I say, ‘Yes.’ Then with a steady pressure from her hand she turns my face to hers. We kiss. She tastes of milk too. And I don’t think about whether this is wrong anymore, because she is very soft and warm, and I just want to go further into her. What else have I got?

  —

  Much later, I walk home and I can still smell her perfume. It seems to be all over my face. I feel idiotic and empty, but I know we’ll do it again. Why shouldn’t we? I come round the corner of my street and think I see movement in front of my house. I stop, look. Nothing. Maybe another bloody cat.

  I get to the door and struggle with my keys for a moment. It opens, but I feel something behind me and turn. Too late. I tumble backwards into the house, and a heavy weight thumps down on me. I try to shout, but my mouth and nose are muffled by stale-smelling fabric. I kick out, but hit thin air. Someone is actually lying on me. Then he’s up on all fours and his face is in mine, showering me with spit.

  ‘They’re after me!’ Joe hisses. ‘They’re after me!’

  ‌34

  I put him in the armchair and manage to piece together his story. It goes like this:

  Joe doesn’t like Lydia, the new director, because she never gives him anything to do. Tonight was no different, and Joe sat at the back while the others practised their singing. It wasn’t too bad, because Joe enjoyed listening, and when they confused the words or stumbled over the tune, it made him laugh. One of the Ugly Sisters called Joe a ‘knob’, but Lydia said, ‘Just concentrate on learning the song, for God’s sake,’ which Joe felt to be the most sensible thing Lydia has ever said.

  After a while, the plastic seat made Joe’s bum go numb, and he started to need a wee. Joe put up his hand. Nobody looked. Joe’s shoulder started to ache. Still nobody looked. Joe drummed his heels on the floor. Eventually, Lydia asked him if something was wrong. Joe said, ‘I need a wee,’ and the rude Ugly Sister said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ but Lydia said, ‘Then why don’t you go to the toilet, Joe.’ Joe said, ‘Thank you,’ and went.

  ‘Joe, is all this relevant?’ I ask now.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Just tell us the part where you get into trouble, man.’

  ‘All right, keep your hair on.’

  On his way back from the loo, Joe heard a strange noise from behind a half-open door. It opened into the carpeted room that is used as a crèche during the weekly mothers’ coffee morning. There were two young children in there – a girl and a boy – and when Joe walked in, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  ‘It was one of them blocks what stick together,’ he tells me.

  ‘Lego?’

  ‘No, the spiky ones.’

  ‘A Stickle Brick?’

  ‘Aye, them.’

  ‘He was poking her cunt with a Stickle Brick?’

  Joe turns red and nods, mutely.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Joseph.’ A moment of silence. ‘You know, there’s people on the Internet would pay good money to see that sort of thing. Did you get any pictures?’

  He shoots out of his chair. ‘You’re disgusting!’

  ‘Settle down, man. I’m joking. What did you do?’

  ‘I picked him up and I said, “Stop it,” but he started to scream and then his mam ran in and called me a “fucking pervert”!’

  ‘Fuck. And then what?’

  ‘I ran away.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I legged it.’

  ‘With him still under your arm?’

  ‘No. I dropped him.’

  ‘Oh, Joe, you total knobsack. Why didn’t you just explain?’

  He collapses back into the chair and shrugs, distraught. He knows he’s fucked up.

  I go and look out of the front window, but the street is quiet. It’s only a matter of time until the police come to find him. I decide not to mention that fact and say, ‘Well, no point worrying about it now. Do you want to watch some telly?’

  —

  Joe stays over, of course. In the morning, I get up and call Lee. ‘I’ve got some personal problems to deal with. I can’t come in today.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘We’ll cover for you.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  I wake Joe and we eat some Coco Pops together, neither of us saying much. I expect a knock at the door at any moment, but for the time being nothing happens, so we just slob out in front of GMTV. Joe pays close attention to a segment about a rat that’s been trained to type the Lord’s Prayer. Through careful conditioning by its handlers, the rat has learned not only the relative positions of the keys it needs to press, but the actual form of the letters stamped on them, so that even if you give it a differently shaped keyboard, it can still perform the feat. Apparently, it did all this for chocolate. Thy kingdom come.

  I close my eyes and try to think of Laura, but I just keep seeing Stickle Bricks.

  At 10.58 a.m., they arrive.

  Joe sits bolt upright.

  ‘Relax,’ I say. ‘It’s probably just the milkman or the window cleaner.’ I know that’s not true, but the only hope of averting total disaster is to keep him calm for long enough for the police to establish that he’s innocent. I go into the hall and open the door. There are four officers and two squad cars outside.

  One of them says my name, more as a statement than a question. I nod. ‘That’s me. Look, I’ve heard what happened, and he didn’t—’

  ‘We’re looking for a man called Joe.’

  ‘Here’s here, but—’

  I sense movement behind me and I turn, but the police officers barge past me into the house. I recover myself just in time to see Joe disappearing up the stairs, wi
th the cops in pursuit. I hear the bathroom door slam and a policeman swear loudly. I follow them up. One of them is slapping on the door with the palm of his hand. ‘Come out. We need to talk to you.’ Then he sees me. ‘He’s locked himself in!’

  ‘Stop hammering. That’s not going to work.’

  ‘Fuck off, you bastards!’ Joe, from inside the bathroom.

  ‘You’re scaring him. He’s not going to come quietly if you scare him.’

  ‘Can you get him out?’

  ‘He’s innocent, you know.’

  ‘Well, if you get him out, we can sort that, can’t we?’

  ‘Move,’ I say. The filth look surprised to be given an order by a civilian, but they step back anyway. I go to the bathroom door. ‘Joe?’

  ‘Get them away! I’m not going to prison! No, no, no, no, no!’

  ‘You’re damn right you’re not going to prison – you’ve done nowt wrong.’

  ‘We’ll be the judges of that,’ says a policewoman.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ I tell her.

  Next thing, my face is in the wall and my arm is up my back.

  ‘Stop! You don’t understand him!’ I gurgle through the pain, but it’s way too late for talking, and out of the corner of my eye I see a cop aim an almighty kick at the door. His foot goes right through it and he falls on his arse, but his colleague comes, reaches through the hole, and unlocks it from the inside.

  ‘Fuck,’ I hear him say. ‘He’s gone through the fucking window.’

  —

  Joe was sedated and taken to hospital under police guard. They didn’t arrest me in the end, but asked me to help. They realized once they saw him there – lying on the ground, gibbering, and crying – that they were going to need me in order to get any sense out of him. So we followed along in the squad car, and now I’m sitting in a corridor with a grim-faced copper on either side of me, waiting for information on the extent of his injuries.

  As we sit there, one of them asks me questions. I tell him the story Joe told me and watch his face, but it doesn’t betray a thing. He just writes in his little book. He doesn’t trust me, because he knows about my record. As far as the police are concerned, I’ll always be a marked man.

  ‘The real world’s scary to him,’ I try to explain. ‘He lived with his mother all his life and she protected him from everything. It’s not surprising that he ran away. It doesn’t mean he’s guilty, just scared.’

  ‘So you admit that he’s a bit strange?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but…’ I’m not doing any good. I shut up. Anyway, the policeman seems to have asked everything he wants to ask for now, so we go back to sullen silence.

  Time ticks by very slowly in a hospital.

  Eventually, a doctor turns up and talks to the police.

  ‘He’s a lucky man. Just a twisted ankle and a badly bruised knee. I’ve treated people who broke their necks in shorter falls than that.’

  ‘Can we talk to him yet?’ asks the policeman who questioned me earlier.

  ‘Yes. I’ll take you to him.’

  The cop turns to me. ‘You’d better come too.’

  I follow them through the ward, and then the policeman’s mobile phone rings.

  ‘That should be turned off,’ says the doctor.

  The policeman holds his hand up to the doctor’s face and turns to the wall. After a muttered conversation, he sighs, switches off the phone, and slips it back into the pouch on the front of his stab jacket. ‘You’re in luck. The little lass corroborates your story – says it was the boy that fiddled her.’

  Relief. ‘Thank fuck for that.’

  ‘Aye, well, we’ll be seeing you.’

  And with that, the two policemen just turn and walk away.

  ‘Hey,’ I call after them, ‘what about my bathroom door?’

  They don’t even stop.

  ‌35

  When I call Laura from the hospital phone box, she laughs. ‘For fuck’s sake. You and hospitals. What are you doing there this time?’ I explain the situation and she stops laughing and agrees to come and get us.

  Joe gets a crutch, but he just can’t co-ordinate his body with it, so he leans on me all the way to the exit. When we get outside, I sit him on a bench and we wait. He’s a bit buzzy from the painkillers, and watches a crisp packet in the wind with all the concentration of a snooker player lining up a shot on black.

  ‘You’re a lucky cunt, you,’ I tell him.

  He just shrugs. He’s not lucky anyway, but he may as well be told it. It might help.

  It’s dark outside now, but there’s a streetlamp above us and Joe looks pretty old in its light. I begin to panic at what I find myself saddled with – this ageing idiot I have to care for – so I go and sit next to him and put my head between my knees. I’ll ask Mr Green about Social Services again; maybe this latest fuck-up will persuade someone into action.

  ‘I don’t want to be in the panto anymore,’ Joe announces.

  ‘Probably a good idea, mate.’ At least he sees sense. I sit up straight, about to offer him some sort of sympathy, but as I open my mouth, Laura pulls up next to us. With some difficulty I help Joe into the back seat.

  ‘You’ll not get much in the way of conversation out of him,’ I say as I get in. ‘He’s full of pills, aren’t you, Joe?’

  No response.

  ‘Well, let’s get you home, then,’ she says, and we drive off. I hope I’ve seen the last of that hospital for a good, long while.

  By the time we get to the dual carriageway, Joe is asleep. His big, wet snores fill the car.

  ‘It’s good what you’re doing for him, y’know,’ Laura says.

  ‘I don’t know that I’m doing any good, but it’s a right pain in the arse.’

  She reaches over and puts her hand on my thigh. ‘Don’t worry. You’re doing the right thing.’ She stops and takes a breath, glances at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ She sighs, and we drive the rest of the way back to the village in silence.

  We pull up outside my house and I turn in my seat and shake Joe’s uninjured leg. ‘Wakey, wakey. We’re back.’

  He opens one eye, then the other and looks around. I watch the expression on his face firm into one of full consciousness and then he says, ‘No.’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  It hadn’t even crossed my mind that we should take him back to his place; I’ve almost become used to him snoring on my couch.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like it there.’

  ‘It’s my house.’ He shrugs.

  ‘But you’ll need some dinner – you must be starving.’

  ‘I’ll cook some beans, then.’ He looks me right in the eyes.

  ‘All right, then, we’ll take you there.’ I turn to Laura.

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ she says, and starts the car again.

  As we drive, I keep glancing back at Joe, but he’s just looking out of the window, expressionless. Did he hear what I said, when I called him a pain in the arse? No. He was definitely asleep.

  When we reach his house, I help him out of the car. ‘Have you got your key?’ I ask.

  He pats his pocket. ‘Safe and sound.’ Then he starts to hobble off without me. I pick up the crutch and follow him.

  ‘You should keep your weight off that ankle,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t fuss,’ he mutters, and unlocks the door.

  ‘You’re going to be all right, then?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘All right. Well, see you.’

  ‘See you.’

  And with that he goes in and leaves me standing in the yard. I walk back to the car.

  ‘Well, he doesn’t seem that dependent on you right now,’ says Laura when I get in.

  ‘That was weird.’

  ‘Maybe what happened made him realize he needs to take care of himself.’

  ‘I thought I’d be wiping his backside before long.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope he k
eeps it up, eh?’

  ‘Aye. Let’s hope.’

  ‘Come on, don’t be so miserable. He’ll be all right. He doesn’t seem as daft as you make him out to be.’

  ‘He’s not. I suppose it’s good that he at least wants to try.’

  ‘Course it is. Come back to mine?’

  ‘Yeah. I’d like that.’

  —

  When we get back to her place, Laura tells me I look hungry and makes me a sandwich. I wolf it down; I was starving. She sits on the other side of the table and watches me eat with a slight smile on her face, saying nothing. I carry my plate into the kitchen and wash it, and when I come back, she is still sitting there. She looks up at me. I feel like something important is unsaid.

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

  She bites her lip. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Not yet?’

  ‘Come upstairs.’

  In the bedroom, there are two cardboard cartons on the floor, sealed with parcel tape. She nods at them. ‘Geoff’s clothes – the ones he didn’t take. I packed them up this morning. I was going to carry them down to the garage.’ She shrugs.

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘They’re not heavy.’

  ‘I’d like to anyway.’

  ‘Leave them for now.’ She pauses. ‘Look, he’s not coming back. And if he does, we’ll just tell him to fuck off, all right?’

  ‘All right, then.’

  ‘His stuff doesn’t matter; you can burn it all if you want. Right now, I want you to concentrate on me.’

  She undresses and I watch her. My body hums with the sound of an orchestra warming up, the growing excitement of having something so beautiful all to myself. For now, at least.

  This time I go down on her. I don’t have much experience of that, but she kneels over my face and tells me what to do. As she comes, I find myself moving in time with her and every movement seems just right. Then she rolls away from me and lies on her back, shuddering. After a time, she opens her eyes and reaches out to me, pulls me onto her.

  Later, we lie together cuddled up under the duvet, and she says to me, ‘I was your first, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Well, yeah. I’d never had a girlfriend before I went inside, and you don’t get many opportunities in prison. None you’d want, anyway. I suppose it’s part of the punishment.’