Body Blow

by Peter Cocks

  Juana turned up a bit later and shared the rest of the paella with them. Eating here was different. You didn’t just order your own nosh and neck it; Spanish people shared, like the food was just something that happened while you chatted with friends and loved ones.

  And Juana was a lovely girl. Loved.

  “Hola, Vic,” she’d said when she’d turned up. “Qué tal?”

  He had felt himself blush as she’d kissed him on both cheeks, and only managed a shy “Good. Yeah. You look lovely.”

  She had her mother’s smooth brown skin and curves – and something else that Donnie had to admit must have come from her waster father’s Gypsy genes: sharp cheekbones, glossy black hair, full lips and a length of limb that Valerie had missed out on. She drew all the male eyes in the restaurant and he felt proud, like a real stepfather.

  Around midnight they were on to brandies (on the house, courtesy of Barry) and Donnie, sozzled and wired, had not noticed the white Porsche Cayenne that pulled silently into the square. Donnie didn’t see the man who came up behind him and put his hand on his shoulder five minutes later. But he saw from the look on Valerie’s face that the interruption wasn’t a welcome one.

  “Donnie?” The voice was loud but whispery; harsh as sandpaper, roughened by the bullet that had once gone clean through its voicebox.

  Donnie twisted round in his chair, trying to see the man. “Got the wrong guy,” he said. “Name’s Vic.”

  “Have it your way, Vic,” the voice rasped. Donnie used his bulk to shrug the hand off and turn around. He recognized Terry Gadd straight away by the mullet, as he had done on the beach weeks before. Closer to, he could see the broken Roman nose, the scarred fighter’s eyebrows, the thin lips. He didn’t know the two heavies – the black guy or the punter with the muscles – who loitered in the background and both stiffened as Donnie stood up.

  “We need a chat … Vic,” Terry Gadd said. He looked at Valerie, whose face had hardened into a fearful scowl, a hand placed protectively in front of her daughter.

  “What is this, Vic?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” Donnie said. “Mistaken identity. I’ll sort it out.”

  “Don’t fancy yours much, Vic,” Terry Gadd wheezed. “Bit too much meat on it for my taste. I’d give the daughter one, though. Very nice.”

  Donnie felt his fists tighten and his knees go. He wanted to unleash a punch that would take Terry Gadd’s head off, but he knew there would be a knife in his ribs or a bullet in his skull before his fist even reached Gadd’s horrible face.

  “Everything all right, gentlemen?” Barry hovered, nervous, anticipating a scene at best, Armageddon at worst. “How about you all have a nice drink, on the house, talk things over…”

  “You’re all right, Barry,” Terry Gadd said. “We’re not stopping.”

  Donnie leant over to Valerie. “I’ll just go and see what all this is about,” he whispered. “Don’t worry. See you later.” Then added under his breath, “Luv ya.”

  “You soppy git,” Gadd croaked as they walked across the square towards the waiting car. “Not like Donnie Mulvaney to go soft over a bird. Even a big old boiler with plenty of breakfast on it like that. Eh, Don?”

  Donnie’s fists twitched again at his sides, but he didn’t fancy himself against Terry Gadd, whose explosive violence, inhumanity and speed with a cut-throat razor was legendary. Rumour had it that he’d once crept up on a rival in a restaurant urinal, grabbed his knob, sliced it off and flushed it down the toilet before the bloke even knew it was missing.

  Terror worked at every level.

  “What’s all this about, Terry?” Donnie asked. Gadd was silent. “Tel?”

  “Shut up and get in the car, Don,” Gadd said finally. The rear door of Patsy Kelly’s Porsche Cayenne swung open and Donnie got in. “Patsy wants to see you.”

  EIGHT

  Gav Taylor was shit-hot at snooker.

  I guess he should have been, as whenever he was not downing pints of lager, smoking or sleeping, he was playing it. I went to his flat in Hanley to meet him a few days after our therapy session. There was no way either of us was going back and we had kind of decided that we might, rightly or wrongly, be the best kind of therapy for each other.

  Gav wasn’t the sort of bloke I would normally have made friends with, not that I made friends easily. He was pretty coarse and blunt, but he always managed to see the funny side of things.

  He said it as it was.

  In his sing-song Stoke accent, he made everything sound like a joke or a laugh, and a lot of the time it was. Gav didn’t take anything seriously, even his metal leg. Sitting in a pub, he’d say he was a crippled ex-soldier and ask someone to tie his shoelace – but he’d have unscrewed the leg so the foot would come off in their hand. Or he’d jam it in the toilet door and as someone came to help him, his leg would drop off. He thought it was a killer watching their faces.

  I began to realize that our joint therapy was basically meeting up on a more and more frequent basis, playing snooker, then going to the pub. My snooker game was improving, but I was getting pissed more than I should.

  The old girl had become a bit concerned about the amount of time I spent down there. I’d come home late afternoon and fall asleep on the sofa, mostly because I’d had a few at lunchtime. She was glad that I’d found a mate, but was worried about what I was getting up to with an ex-soldier.

  Gav’s flat was a tip; it smelt of socks, fags, bacon and unwashed beds. “Girlfriend pissed off about a year ago,” Gav said glumly.

  “What after you’d…?” I searched for the word but looked at his leg instead.

  “I lost me leg, Danny.” He laughed. “Not the crown fookin’ jewels.”

  I flustered excuses, but he knew what I meant.

  “Nah, we weren’t getting on before,” he said. “And months out in the Gulf or Afghanistan doesn’t help a relationship that’s not all that anyway.”

  I saw a look of hurt pass across his face for the first time. I could see that a rough, boozy, snooker-playing bloke wasn’t the best deal to begin with, but with a lump out of his head and a metal leg, well, it wasn’t going to be a fairy-tale romance.

  I thought back to how six months before I’d had the fittest girl you could imagine, money, clothes and a lifestyle to match – and, even when she wasn’t around, another girl who’d look after me when things got shitty. More than anything I regretted losing Sophie; regretted that in doing my duty and nailing her old man, I’d put paid to ever seeing her again. But compared with Gav, my time undercover had been like a pig rolling in shit.

  We were sitting in Gav’s flat, drinking beer. The big flat-screen and Xbox lay dormant. He said he couldn’t play World of Warcraft any more.

  “Too much like the real thing,” he said. “Without the blood, guts and fear. Still gives me flashbacks.” He couldn’t even watch TV.

  “Snooker?” he asked. So we wandered down to the snooker club again: the dark, twilight world, focussed by the clack of balls and the contemplation of making subtle angles work; the slow pacing around the table, chalking a cue and taking time over a shot. It was as close to meditation as we got.

  But I had begun to get antsy; the daily routine was beginning to stifle me. Something needed to change, and on this particular day my game wasn’t at the forefront of my mind.

  My Aunt Cath was.

  Something had happened the night before that was weighing heavily on my conscience. We’d sat up late after Mum had turned in.

  “Don’t get stuck here, kidder,” Cath had said. We were drinking red wine and Cath had spliffed up a couple of times out in the garden earlier, so she was in the mood for one of her pep talks. “You’re too big for a town like this. You should see the world.”

  I’d rambled on, like you do as the second bottle empties. Banged on about how I fancied Thailand or a roadtrip across America. Stuff you think you’d like to do, but have no real idea what it would entail. Half-remembered ideas of other peop
le’s adventures and posh kids’ gap-year photos on Facebook.

  “Maybe, like, run a beach bar in Goa,” I said drunkenly, with only a vague idea of where Goa was. All I had in my head was a picture of me in shorts and a straw hat, mixing cocktails for girls with henna tats and loose bikini tops.

  “Do it,” Cath said. “I’ll come with you,” she added, giggling. Then she massaged my shoulders, corded by anxiety and three days on the bounce hunched over a snooker table. It felt good.

  “You’re really tense,” she said.

  I relaxed as her hard fingers kneaded the tight tendons in my shoulders. Closed my eyes as a delicious wave ran down the muscles either side of my spine. I heard her exhale as she pressed into my shoulders and rotated her thumbs into my shoulder blades. My muscles began to loosen and I became aware of her warm, red-wine breath on the back of my neck. I rolled my head to the right and found her mouth there, waiting. Shit.

  I kissed her.

  It was nice.

  The memory brought me out in a hot sweat of shame as the snooker table came back into sharp focus. I tried hard to concentrate on my shot. I had potted an easy red over the pocket and found myself in a position to go for the eight ball. I fluffed it, concentration gone.

  “Roobish,” Gav whispered. “You blew it.”

  Cath had been all right about it. Just a bit embarrassed in the cold light of day. But I’d been mortified. A mark had been overstepped. I avoided eye contact over breakfast.

  I had snogged my aunt; she, her nephew. At that moment I felt we both realized that we needed to move on. I needed to get on top of these random urges that seemed to take hold of me.

  There was a big wide world out there. Fish in the sea.

  “I’ve got a mate who does up yachts,” Gav said, sizing up his next colour. “Easy pink or difficult brown?” he asked, using a tired old snooker joke. He potted the pink. “Y’know, gets them out the water, scrapes the barnacles off, paints the hulls, scrubs the decks an’ that. He’s got more work than he can handle.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  He took another red and then the black, another red and the blue, putting up a break of twenty-two and racing a good thirty points ahead.

  “Good life,” he added. “In the sun. Service boats for rich fookers in the day. Nightime, world’s your lobster.”

  “Lobster?” I said. “You mean oyster?”

  “Prawn, whatever…” He shrugged. “Spain.”

  I managed to let the cue ball go down off an easy red. Lost four points. Game over.

  “I’ve got a flight from Manchester to Málaga,” Gav told me. “Next Friday. Thirty-nine quid. Fancy it?”

  Leave grey Stoke-on-Trent and head for the sun? Fancy it? You bet.

  “Why not?” I said.

  NINE

  The flight got in to Málaga about ten. As the cabin doors opened, a gust of hot air hit my face and the odour of spent aircraft fuel filled my nostrils. It was the heat and the smell of foreign places, and it was exciting. By the time we had cleared immigration and customs and got on a bus down to the coast, we were starving. The tea and bacon butty at Manchester airport at six-thirty seemed like a lifetime before, and the kind of flight we were on didn’t do grub. They’d even charged us to stow our backpacks.

  Benalmádena, our small-town destination on the sea, looked pretty run-down. The bus rumbled through the outskirts, where cats played on rubbish tips next to unfinished building projects.

  I hauled our bags off and helped Gav down on to the hot street. Steps were still a challenge to him, and getting off a bus or climbing a ladder was the only time you ever saw him look crippled.

  “Y Viva España!” Gav shouted in Stoke-accented Spanish. It turned out to be the only Spanish he knew. His tactic was to shout everything else in loud English. “Harbour. Which way?” he called out to a passer-by with arm gestures to represent boats and waves. The passer-by looked disdainfully at Gav in his Stoke City football shirt, and walked on.

  “Down here,” I said, pointing to a street off to the left. My GCSE Spanish was minimal, but I saw a sign that read “Puerto” and a shop further down selling outboard motors. I was picking up clues. I began to wonder how useful Gav had been as a soldier.

  Moments later the harbour opened out in front of us on the other side of a car park.

  “Burger King!” Gav shouted, spotting one across the street. “Nice one.”

  “You can’t come all this way and have a Burger King, Gav,” I protested. I had been looking at a bar opposite, where a couple of Spanish men were sipping cold beers.

  “Why not?” he asked. He really didn’t see my objection. “Proper food, mate. I could eat a scabby dog.”

  “Tell you what,” I said, “you get a burger, and while you’re doing that I’ll get us a couple of beers in.” I nodded at the bar.

  As Gav hobbled across to the Burger King, tired on his dodgy leg, I suddenly realized that I knew next to nothing about my travelling companion other than his experiences of warfare and his waster’s ability at snooker. All we had in common was beer and a brush with post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “Dos cervezas,” I said to the waiter. I knew enough Spanish to order a couple of beers. The waiter nodded. If he was grateful for my attempt at Spanish, it didn’t show.

  I looked round the corner into the covered yard near the kitchen. An old man in an apron speared a dead octopus on a long fork. It was the size of a large cat. He dunked it into an oil drum full of boiling liquid heated by a gas burner, then pulled it out after a few seconds and the limp, purple body had contracted to half its size, tight and pink, its tentacles curled up like a chandelier. I watched, fascinated, as he repeated the process three times before dropping it completely into the bubbling drum. The beers arrived.

  “Que es esto?” I asked the waiter, pointing at the oil drum.

  “Pulpo a feira,” he said. “Galician octopus.” He pointed at a sign in the window advertising it as their speciality. €8.

  “Uno for me,” I said, pointing at myself. “Por favor.”

  The man at the barrel hoiked out a steaming octopus and cut the tentacles into rings with big scissors. In a bowl he mixed it with yellow chunks of potato, seasoned it with salt, paprika and olive oil, and served it up on a wooden platter. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.

  “What the fook’s that?” Gav asked. He plonked his empty Burger King bag in a bin.

  “Octopus,” I said. “Want to try it?”

  Gav wrinkled his nose in disgust and looked across at the man cooking them in the oil drum. “Don’t be daft,” he said. “It’s like eating summat off Star Wars.”

  I looked at the suckers and tentacles on my plate and laughed out loud. I supposed he had a point.

  With the hot sun on our faces and our bellies happy with food, we wandered across to the harbour. It was relatively small, surrounded by a strange, Arabic-looking development of apartments and a couple of bars. It looked as if it had seen better days. Gav surveyed the lines of wooden pontoons and took a scrap of paper from his pocket.

  “Pontoon F,” he said. “Fifth berth, on the end.”

  The pontoons bounced underfoot as Gav and I walked along, checking the boats. After the shallow white fishing boats, they were mostly small yachts. They didn’t look like the billionaire-owned craft I’d seen in the Tommy Kelly days, but more like well-loved shabby boats owned by fairly prosperous private individuals and retired couples. They came from all over: there were a lot of German flags, Dutch and Spanish, and a few English ones. Finally we reached a boat marked Sea Dog of Ramsgate.

  A dark-brown, well-muscled bloke with long, dark hair and wearing nothing but denim shorts was hosing the deck. He looked up at us and smiled with white teeth.

  “Gavster!” he shouted. His accent was harsher than Gav’s. Manchester, I guessed. He dropped the hose and jumped over the taffrail onto the pontoon. He and Gav hugged and gave each other a homeboy handshake.

  “Adie,” Gav said.
“This is my man, Danny.”

  “Ey up, dood,” Adie said. He clasped my hand in the same thumb-to-thumb shake. “Welcome aboard.”

  We helped Gav up over the gangplank and onto the deck. Adie spread his arms wide, revealing pale, untanned patches around the tufts of hair in his armpits.

  “This is the life, gentlemen,” he said. “Beer?”

  “What you waiting for?” Gav laughed. “I feel like me throat’s been cut.”

  TEN

  Donnie was sweating like a pig.

  His shirt was glued to his back with perspiration and he was fighting for breath as he hauled his ninety-eight kilos uphill towards Casa Pampas in the midday sun. The taxi had dropped him half a kilometre down the road, as Donnie didn’t want the driver to see where he was going. Donnie had been told not to let the driver know where he was going. But he hadn’t been offered one of the firm’s drivers to pick him up either.

  He knew what they were doing: trying to put him on the back foot. And it was working.

  The night before, having picked him up from Jubarry’s, Terry Gadd had taken him in the Cayenne up into the hills above Benalmádena. They had climbed up through the pueblo and out onto a road above the inland village.

  Flanagan’s Bar was not welcoming to passers-by.

  With steel doors and barred windows, Flanagan’s was not welcoming to anyone. Only the carefully selected guests on its list felt any degree of comfort there, and even then the atmosphere was always tense. Terry Gadd had buzzed the door open and ushered Donnie inside, pushing aside a rattling, beaded curtain. Donnie was already feeling edgy now the cocaine had worn off a little and his teeth began to ache. Inside the bar he felt the cold snap of full-blast air conditioning hit his nostrils. He could make out a few figures sitting on banquettes on either side of the room, but the light was low and he couldn’t see their faces. He looked down at his feet. Even for a big, fearless gorilla like Donnie, staring was never a good idea. Eye contact could always be a cue for a drawn gun or a flashing knife.