A Risk Worth Taking

by Robin Pilcher

  Dan made his way over to the building, located the wheelchair, and brought it back. Once more Patrick refused his help as he shifted around on his sticks and thumped himself down into the chair.

  “Right!” he said. “I’ll start the explanation here. The lorries pull in right where we are now and the prawns are off-loaded in twenty-kilogram boxes, and usually they go straight into the factory.” He pointed to the row of containers. “If, however, we get a backlog to process, we use those for chilling. That’s more likely to happen in the high season, which is about May to September, but it mostly depends on how much is coming in from the boats. There’s a monitor in the office that gives a readout of the temperature in each container. You’ll understand from the story I told you about the sand in the fuel tank that it’s vital that they’re kept at exactly the right temperature.” He glanced up at Dan. “Any questions yet?”

  “No. Brilliantly explained so far.”

  Patrick pointed to the open bay at the end of the shed. “Okay, then. Wagons roll!”

  Dan pushed the wheelchair across the car park and entered the building.

  “Stop!” Patrick ordered, holding up his hand. “Get yourself a white coat and a hat from the hook over there, and stick a pair of wellies on your feet. You’d better get the same for me.” As Dan walked over to the line of hooks, Patrick added, “Minus the wellies, of course.”

  Over the next hour, Dan was once more fully indoctrinated into yet another thriving Trenchard business. He walked beside Patrick as he guided his wheelchair slowly through the prawn washing area, the packing room, and on into the bay where the prawns, packed neatly into polystyrene boxes, were cryogenically frozen in a vast, stainless steel chamber. They stood for barely a minute in the dispatch freezer, where the temperature was kept controlled at –25 degrees Centigrade, as they watched the well-muffled storeman scoot back and forth on his forklift, shifting around shrink-wrapped pallets loaded with the polystyrene boxes. As they went, Patrick talked with incessant enthusiasm about the business, while Dan broke in with questions that he hoped would not show himself up as a complete ignoramus.

  “How many people do you have working here?”

  “Fifty-five maximum, but that goes down to about forty in the low season.”

  “And what’s the output of the place?”

  “Again, it depends on the time of year, and what the weather’s like. After a storm, for instance, it can take three days for the seabed to settle, so it can be feast or famine quite often. But generally speaking, in the winter months we can process about six tonnes per day, but that can go up to ten tonnes a day, no problem, in the high season.”

  “So summer is when you put in the hours, then?”

  “Do we not! We start at seven o’clock every morning regardless, and sometimes we don’t get away until about two o’clock the following morning. That’s why most of our workforce comes from abroad—Spain, Russia, those kinds of places. For most of the year, we work pretty antisocial hours, and the locals aren’t too keen on that.”

  “And your principal markets are France, Spain, and Italy?”

  “That’s right. We pack the prawns according to the requirement of each country. For France, it’s one-kilo boxes for the frozen market and three-kilo boxes for fresh. The latter get sent down to Glasgow and are being sold in the market next morning in Paris. For Italy, it’s eight hundred grams frozen, and Spain, one and a half kilograms frozen. The quality specifications differ as well. The French and the Italians, for instance, love greensacks, but the Spanish won’t touch them.”

  “What’s a greensack?”

  “A prawn that is carrying its eggs. They show up on the neck and give a sort of greeny tinge to the overall colouring of the prawn. Greensacks are only caught in June and July, though.”

  “So, which harbours are you buying from now?”

  “Campbeltown, Oban, Mull, Mallaig, Peterhead, Buckie, Fraserburgh. All over the north and west of Scotland, really. However, it’s only from Campbeltown and Mull that we buy for the fresh market. Campbeltown is renowned for landing the best prawns. Clonkers, we call them.”

  “Surely you can’t get around to all these places yourself?”

  “No way. I use agents now. They call the office in the morning and tell us what the catches are. There are a couple of small boats that come into Mallaig with whom we deal direct, but that’s only because I’ve built up a good relationship with them over the years. We still buy on the stone weight for everything, even though everything goes out of here on metric weight. Fishermen aren’t too keen on change, if you know what I mean.”

  • • •

  The questions and answers went on into the evening as they sat together in a pub in Fort William, drinking beer and eating wholesome plates of homemade steak pie and chips. At seven-fifteen, Pete Jackson, Patrick’s production manager, was dropped off to drive him home.

  “We’ll give you a lift to the station,” Patrick said.

  “No need to bother,” replied Dan, getting up from the table and picking up his holdall. “I’ll just walk along there. It’s not far, and I need a bit of fresh air.”

  Patrick held out a hand. “It’s been good meeting you, Dan.”

  “I’ve enjoyed it too, Patrick.” He shook his hand. “Thanks for showing me around the plant. You really have built up a pretty good business here.”

  “Yes, I know it.” He gripped his two sticks in one hand and brandished them at Dan. “Let’s just hope I can keep it going.”

  Dan smiled at him. “I have no doubt in my mind that you will. Give my regards to Katie, won’t you? Oh, hang on!” He put the holdall on the table, unzipped it, and took out Nina’s exercise book. “I told her that I’d give you my telephone number in London.” He wrote down the number, ripped the page out of the book, and gave it to Patrick.

  “Anytime you feel like a chat, give me a call.”

  Patrick folded up the piece of paper and put it in the top pocket of his shirt. “I will do. I’d like that very much.”

  Dan zipped up the holdall once more and slid it off the table. “Best of luck, Patrick, with everything.”

  Patrick nodded slowly. “Thanks. I’ll be needing plenty of that.”

  14

  As Jackie opened the door of the house, the dogs burst past her, nearly taking her legs from underneath her, and disappeared at speed along the passage into the kitchen. She threw the leads onto the hall table and glanced at her watch. It was nearly ten past nine. She felt a tremor of panic run through her as she hurried after the dogs.

  “Millie! Nina!” she yelled as she walked past the bottom of the stairs. “For goodness’ sakes, get your acts together! You’re ten minutes late for school already.”

  Millie appeared at the kitchen door with a half-eaten piece of toast in her hand. “We’re just having our breakfast.”

  “Well, eat it on the way to school,” Jackie snapped as she pushed past her into the kitchen. Her eyes fixed on Nina who was hunched over a bowl of cereal, her eyes glued to the television. “Nina! What the hell are you doing?” She picked up the remote from the table and zapped the television. “Would you two stop moving like dead turtles and get out of this house?”

  Millie pulled a face at her sister. “Chill out, Mum,” she murmured.

  Jackie turned and glared at her. “What do you mean, ‘chill out’? I was meant to be in the office at eight o’clock this morning, and I’m still here at ten past nine because I’ve had to walk the damned dogs and try to get you two off to school.”

  “Wasn’t our fault,” Nina grumbled. “You didn’t wake us up in time.”

  “That is not true, Nina. I woke you both at seven-thirty. If you’d have got up then, you could have taken the dogs for a walk and we wouldn’t be running round in circles now.”

  “Dad always wakes us twice,” Millie said.

  “Yes,” Nina agreed. “First with a knock and then, half an hour later, with a text.”

  Jackie unplugged her mobil
e phone from the charger and put it in her handbag. “I really do not feel like speaking about your father right now. I don’t know where the hell he is, but he should be here. He knows that this is probably my busiest time of the year.” She picked up her coat from the back of a chair and put it over her arm. She took in a deep, settling breath. “Right. I’m off. Make sure you double-lock the door, okay?”

  She looked curiously at Nina who had turned slowly in her chair, her nose wrinkled and a sneer of disgust on her face.

  “What’s that smell?” Nina said, getting to her feet and walking around the work island. “Eeeugh! Biggles has done a poo.”

  “You cannot be seri . . .” Jackie came over and witnessed the mess on the floor. “Oh, you bloody dogs,” she whimpered. “What’s the point in my taking you for a walk? That’s what you’re supposed to do then!” She skirted gingerly around the affected area and threw open the French door. “Get out! Get out, you revolting animals!” she screamed at the dogs. Biggles, who had pressed himself into the farthest corner of the room, moved like lightning out into the garden as if expecting a boot to help him on his way, while Cruise trotted nonchalantly after him.

  Both Millie and Nina hurriedly picked up their schoolbags and made a break for the door. “We’d better get off to school, Mum,” Millie said, a sudden urgency in her manner.

  “You can’t go yet!” Jackie howled. “What am I going to do with this?”

  “You could always leave it for Josh,” Nina suggested as she pushed her sister out of the door in front of her. “He doesn’t mind smelly things.” She giggled. “He is one himself.”

  As Jackie stared with abhorrance at the task that faced her, she heard the girls laugh their way along the passageway and slam the front door on their departure from the house. Letting out a choking sob, she dumped her handbag on the work island, threw her coat back over the chair, and went to retrieve the pink rubber gloves, last used by Battersea Gran for a much more pleasant task than the one that faced her.

  She was standing with a dumbstruck expression on her face, a cloth held between thumb and forefinger over a bucket filled with dirty brown water, when Dan walked into the kitchen.

  “Hi,” he said airily, as he dropped his holdall to the ground. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  He walked towards her with the intention of giving her a kiss, but Jackie backed away from him.

  “Don’t you come near me,” she croaked in anger.

  Dan stopped in his tracks. “Why? Have you got the flu or something? Come to think of it, you don’t look too good. You’re as white as a sheet.”

  Jackie was speechless with rage.

  “Look, why not have a seat while I make you a cup of coffee? You shouldn’t be doing housework if you’re not feeling well.”

  “Where have you been?” Jackie asked quietly, her teeth clenched.

  “Me?” Dan said brightly, filling the kettle up with water. “I’ve been up to Scotland for a couple of days.”

  “I know,” Jackie replied in the same tone of voice.

  “Oh?” Dan turned, a perplexed expression on his face. “Why ask, then?”

  “Because I want to know what the hell you’ve been doing up there?” Her voice crescendoed to a scream.

  “All right, all right. What’s all the aggro about?”

  Jackie dropped the cloth into the bucket with a splosh and started tugging the rubber gloves off her hand. “Aggro? I’ll tell you what the aggro’s about. I come back here yesterday from Paris, having had an appallingly hard weekend’s worth of business to deal with, only to find your mother looking after the place because you’ve decided on a whim to swan off to Scotland.”

  “It wasn’t on a wh—”

  Jackie held up a hand. “Let me finish, please. Despite an inordinate amount of pleading on my part, your mother then puts on her wretched pink raincoat and leaves, saying that I can look after the place, the children, and the dogs.” She moved slowly towards Dan, swinging the plastic gloves from side to side. “But the one itsy-bitsy problem with that, Dan, is that I can’t. Why, you might ask yourself? Because I have a job, an extremely important job both to me and to this family, and right at this wonderful moment in time, it just happens to be the busiest time of the year for the company for which I work. You, on the other hand, do not work, therefore your input to this family at the best of times is fairly useless. So I think it not wholly unreasonable for me to ask what the hell you were doing in Scotland!”

  Dan handed her a mug of coffee, but she never broke her anger-filled eyes away from him. He placed it on the work island beside her and walked over to the table and sat down on a chair. “I went up there to have a look at a company.”

  Jackie was silent for a moment. She began drumming her red-painted fingernails on the top of the island. “What kind of company?” she asked, her voice now sounding more controlled.

  “A clothing mail order company.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was for sale.”

  Jackie frowned. “And you were looking to buy it?”

  “Well, I certainly wanted to have a look at it before making up my mind one way or the other.”

  “And?”

  “It had been sold two weeks ago.”

  “Hah!” Jackie scoffed loudly, placing clenched fists on hips. “You went all the way up to Scotland to look at a business that had been sold two weeks ago?”

  “It happened to be quite an understandable mistake.”

  “Oh, I’m sure. Pray tell me, Dan, how were you supposing to fund this purchase?”

  “Well, my thoughts were that if I felt that the company was a goer, then we could maybe have remortgaged the house—”

  “Wait a minute,” Jackie cut in. “What do you mean ‘we’?”

  Dan let out a sigh. “I wanted to talk to you properly about all this.”

  “We are talking properly about it. What do you mean ‘we’?”

  Dan slid his coffee cup across the table. “Okay. I thought that if this company looked good, then, with your skills in the fashion business and mine on the financial side, we could grow it into a worldwide business on the Internet.” He paused. “I just thought that it would be good for both our . . . relationships if we did something together, you know, jointly, and made a bit of money at the same time.”

  Jackie rolled her eyes. “And you took it upon yourself to presume that I would give up my job as managing director of Rebecca Talworth to come and help you run some poxy little mail order company that you’d just happened to unearth somewhere up in Scotland?”

  “Actually, it happens not to be a poxy little company, and anyway, I didn’t presume anything of the kind. I just thought that you could have helped sort of part-time.”

  “Part-time! Dan, I don’t have time for part-time! I work all hours of the day as it is. You could not find a job that is more demanding than mine right now.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe this. I really can’t believe what you’re telling me.” She looked around and, for lack of something better to do, took a large gulp of coffee that was still far too hot to consume in that fashion. She rushed over to the sink, threw away the remainder of the coffee, filled up the mug with cold water from the tap, and drank copiously.

  “For God’s sakes, Jackie, it was only an idea.”

  Jackie took in a few deep breaths before replying. “Really? And I suppose that if it had been for sale and you liked what you saw, you would have asked me to give up my work, sell up my house—remember that, Dan—my house, and move lock, stock, and barrel up to some heathen part of Scotland.”

  “That was not what I thought. The business could quite easily have been run from here.”

  “Oh, Dan, get a grip on your bloody senses!”

  “Oh, piss off! Just because you think you’re so bloody wonderful.”

  The door was pushed open and slammed against the wall. Josh stood in the doorway like a gunslinger entering a saloon bar. He was wearing nothing except a pai
r of boxer shorts. “What—the—hell—is—going—on— here?” he drawled out.

  “Keep out of this, Josh,” Jackie snapped at him.

  “I’m sorry?” he said, entering the room slowly. “I thought by the volume of your voices that you were intending for the whole street to be involved in your little discussion. What the hell has got into you two? You seem to have become incapable of saying one civil word to each other.”

  “Your father—” “Your mother—” Dan and Jackie started in unison, then both stopped abruptly and stared at one another with foolish embarrassment.

  Jackie spoke first, her voice deliberate. “We were just discussing your father’s trip up to Scotland. It seems that he went up there to look at a small mail order company with the intention of buying it.”

  Josh’s face brightened. He turned to Dan. “Oh, yeah! How did you get on?”

  Dan looked daggers at him.

  “Wait a minute,” Jackie said, looking from one to the other. “You knew about this?”

  “Yes. I thought it was a great idea. Vagabonds is a terrific company. They make brilliant clothes.” He smiled excitedly at his father. “What’s the story, then?”

  “The company has already been sold,” Dan replied quietly.

  Josh sighed. “Oh, what a bummer.”

  Jackie spluttered in disbelief. “You two are as bad as each other. You’re just two bloody wasters, ruining your lives and ruining everybody else’s at the same time.”

  Josh held up his hands defensively. “Wait on, now! That’s a bit heavy. I don’t like being called a waster, and I certainly am not involved with anybody else’s life other than my own.”

  The tension in the room was broken by the sound of the telephone ringing. Jackie walked over and picked it up. She turned and held the receiver out to Dan. “It’s for you,” she said curtly.

  “Hullo . . . Who? . . . Oh, hullo, Patrick, how are you?” Dan held up his hand to stop either Jackie or Josh from leaving the room. “Yes, thanks, it was a good journey. I managed to get a compartment to myself, thanks to Katie’s advice. . . . Sure, go ahead.” He held up his hand once more to reaffirm his request for them to stay put, and then turned and stared out into the garden as he listened.