Tattoo

by J G Alva

  Jessica smiled without humour.

  “He told everyone within earshot who I was, what I did for a living. I doubt, at the end of it, whether there was anyone in the entire pub who was ignorant of who I really was.”

  Jessica took a deep breath.

  “I have never felt so mortified in my entire life. To this day, I can’t think about it without cringing. But what did I expect? Really? When I threw my drink over him he hit me. A really tough, open handed blow, right across my face. David stepped between us, stopped it. By this time my client had hot footed it out the door; he didn’t want to get into a fight with anyone, especially not over a whore. He had a wife, after all. But David did get involved. A stranger. My knight in shining armour. No matter how terrible that night was, no matter how awful it still makes me feel, I thank God it happened, because it brought me to him. I’ve never met a man so kind, so considerate, so good. And I know I never will. He insisted on driving me home, and came round the next day to check up on me – even bought me flowers. Suddenly I didn’t want to torture him. It didn’t seem like fun any more. And the way he looked at me…No one had ever looked at me like that before. I can’t describe it. It was like…he couldn’t get enough of me with his eyes. There’s a line from that book, the French Lieutenant’s Woman, I don’t know if you’ve read it? But it goes something like this: such looks we have all once or twice in our lives received and shared; they are those in which worlds melt, pasts dissolve, moments when we know, in the resolution of profoundest need, that the rock of ages can never be anything else but love, here, now, in these two hands’ joining, in this blind silence in which one head comes to rest beneath the other...” Jessica sighed. “It was that look. Do you know what I mean? Am I making any sense?”

  Robin was smiling.

  “I know that book,” she said.

  Jessica smiled as well, and it seemed to Sutton that the two women were suddenly friends.

  “We went out a few times. It was different. He knew what I was. And the more I saw him, the more ashamed I felt. I tried to break up with him. I didn’t feel as if I was good enough for him. But he wouldn’t be dissuaded.” She spread her hands. “We’ve been married now for six years.”

  Jessica paused, an amused look on her face; amused at herself, Sutton thought.

  “Listen to me ramble on. You are both very good listeners. But what I wanted to say was this: there was no cut and fast rule. Sometimes we set ourselves up with dates. Sometimes Ellie did. Guy was one of Ellie’s. I don’t know where she knew him from, I never asked. I needed her too much if I was going to carry on doing what I was doing. Most of the time it was fun, and I didn’t want to be on the outside of it. She promised me I would never see him again. And I never did.”

  Sutton felt as if he had been hit in the stomach. Robin looked equally surprised.

  “Ellie set you up with him?” He said.

  He did not think Jessica was lying; which could only mean…

  Jessica inclined her head.

  “She didn’t tell you? That is interesting. He must be a very important client then.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police this?” Robin asked, and her face had gone very pale.

  “For the reasons I just told you. And because we never told the police anything, if we could help it. She didn’t want me to tell. And I needed her if I was going to carry on doing what I was doing. And I wanted to carry on. I was addicted to it, or something.” Jessica looked inside herself, not liking too much what she saw there. “I couldn’t tell you who I was, what I was doing. I don’t know that person anymore. That person could never have been a faithful wife, a devoted mother. It’s hard to believe the two are even connected.”

  Robin was bent over, one hand to her head, another clutching her stomach.

  “Are you alright?” Jessica asked, concerned.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us about him?” Sutton asked. “Absolutely anything?”

  Jessica thought about it, and then said, “only that the reason he attacked me in the way he did was because he couldn’t get it up. No matter what we did, it wouldn’t happen. I remember what he said, as he was rooting around in his bag for the scissor thing, and to this day it still chills me to the bone to think about it. He said, “it’s alright. I know what can fix it. I’ve got it right here.” And then he brought out that thing…” Jessica shook herself, like a dog shaking off water. “It was like…it was like he knew that the only way anything was going to happen, for him I mean, was if I was dead.” She looked at Sutton with wide eyes. “That the only way he was going to be able to perform was on a dead girl.”

  *

  CHAPTER 7

  When he was little, Mike Ruffall had collected bottle caps.

  These were metal bottle caps, mind, not the plastic ones you get nowadays; tough, sharp little circles of metal, pressed into metallic flowers by whatever process moulded the circles of aluminium to the top of the bottle. Now it was only ever possible to find them on bottles of beer (or the occasional classic Coca-Cola), but back when Mike was young, all the bottles had them: Tizer, Corona, Cherryade.

  Bedminster Angel Primary was no place for a kid to get any kind of education. Even Mike, no serious academic, could see that now. His best friend had been Pete Thomas. His father knew Mike’s father; they had worked together at some point in the unspecified past, had formed a bond. Pete was prone to fits of temper, but it was never directed toward Mike. In fact, Mike himself had been known to clout a fellow student himself more than once, if the urge came upon him. There was nothing like a bloody nose and scraped knees to bring a couple of friends together.

  The truth was the only thing they ever argued about was bottle caps. It had become something of an obsession. They couldn’t help themselves. It divided the two boys in ways they had never conceived possible before.

  Mike still dreamt about bottle caps, from time to time; or specifically, about one incident in particular involving bottle caps. There was to be a showdown, finally, between the two boys, on the first Monday back at school after the summer holidays: whoever had the most bottle caps would be king. It was a challenge neither of them could resist, and in preparation for such a prestigious event, they had agreed not to see each other over the weekend before school was due to begin, to gather as many as they could in preparation for the big event. They fell to the task with that peculiar adolescent intensity that is as fleeting as it is fickle.

  Mike wondered now just what they were supposed to be king of. King of bottle caps? King of the playground? Mike was never sure, but if the position was fictional, then the prestige was not.

  At the first break of the first day of their new school year, the two boys met in the playground, their pockets full of bottle caps. They laid them on the concrete. Glittering in the sun, there was hardly anything between their two collections.

  Then Tommy Hollinger had offered Pete his collection. He was moving away soon, and his mother didn’t want him bringing them with him…did Pete want them?

  Mike would never forget Pete’s triumphant expression…and knew that none of the others would forget his look of absolute betrayal.

  Pete was King of the bottle caps.

  *

  After the pig and his friend had left, Mike started on the Jim Beam in earnest.

  Fuck it.

  A terrible thirst had come over him, almost as soon as that tall fuck had started pouring the alcohol all over the floor. He knew the feeling well: it was like an itch in the back of his throat, a dry, scratched feeling he could never drink away. Free booze. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea to ring in about the abduction after all.

  Maybe he should have told them all of it. Maybe there would have been more in it for him.

  But almost in the same moment, his temper flared suddenly, like a brushfire caught by hurricane winds, his mind burning at the humiliation he had gone through to get it. No. He hadn’t told them shit, and he was glad of that fact. That pig treating him like
a rabid dog, while the tall one poured the shit all over his fucking floor…

  He couldn’t handle two of them; he wasn’t stupid, they’d have stamped all over him.

  But if it had been only one…

  He smoked and drank and thought how it might have been, had either one of them come alone. He didn’t know who they thought they were; that they thought they had the right to mess with him, that they thought they could get away with it, was more than his inebriated brain could handle. He had a mean right hook, everybody said so; just one punch was usually all it ever took for him to get on top of someone. He especially liked going for the ears – a little trick he had picked up from some scousers he had met at the Witch and Tap a couple of years ago now. You hit hard enough, you perforated their ear drum; that put them out of action. He liked to think of it as his signature move. The danger with it, of course, was that if you were caught, it carried some weight in the courts, and he had no interest in going back inside again; there was already too much shit in his life, he couldn’t add to it, it would bury him. It was almost as if everyone couldn’t see Mike Ruffall happy, that they had to knock him down as soon as he started to pick himself back up. Assholes. They were all assholes. He couldn’t care less if they all died horribly of something, either a car crash or cancer; either way would be fine with him.

  It was in the middle of these maudlin thoughts that Mike passed out.

  *

  When he woke, he was surprised to find that he had fallen asleep in the armchair.

  His back was stiff and his neck hurt and his head was pounding. He could barely see straight. He had managed to down all of the Jim Beam and a quarter of the Jack Daniels. Impressive shit. But his head felt like it was full of broken glass, and his stomach was doing somersaults, and his hands had the shakes. Lighting a cigarette was like watching a couple of frightened cockerels dance.

  It was as he sat and smoked that he realised he had forgotten something quite important.

  It was Monday morning.

  He had to go to work.

  Fuck.

  Jason would go ballistic.

  He rushed from the living room to the stairs, bouncing unsteadily up them to the bedroom where he quickly undressed and, pulling clean clothes from the chest of drawers by his bed, he exchanged yesterday’s dirty clothes for fresh ones.

  As he rushed out of the house to his car he banged his knee on the front door. Jesus. For a moment he was sure he was going to throw up – part of it the pain from his knee, part of it the fact that he might still be drunk, or at the very least in the throes of one of the worst hangovers of his drinking career – but it quickly passed.

  He crossed the road to his van, his knee locking up and making him run like the fucking tin man. His van was a piece of shit, a Vauxhall Caddy 1.9 TDI; it had a hundred and ten thousand miles on the clock, worn shocks, balding tires and rust eating away at all of the wheel arches. It was probably the most reliable piece of shit he had ever owned however, and it had not once failed to start in the three years since he had bought it from old Baldy Hayden. He felt a fondness for it, a camaraderie; they had both had something of a rough life. Of course Jason wanted him to get rid of it. It doesn’t create a good impression, he always said. But it wasn’t as if money was falling out of Mike’s asshole, and Jason never offered anything toward a new one. He sometimes thought his brother-in-law was as tight as a fourteen year old virgin’s twat.

  He was already incumbent enough upon him to feel nothing but a festering resentment toward the man. The offer of a job had been good, as Mike had been scratching around trying to survive ever since he’d gotten out of Dartmoor, but almost as soon as he had started at Pioneer Pixels, Jason had been riding on his back. The guy was fucking unbelievable. What did he want from him? Didn’t he deliver on time? Weren’t the packages always in good condition when he got them to where they were going? If it wasn’t for his sister, Mike would have started to see if he couldn’t ‘lose’ a few deliveries in transit, to make a little extra on the side. But his little sister had made him promise. A promise that felt like he was on a leash that was slowly strangling him.

  He got into the van and started the engine; it turned over easily. He wouldn’t sell it, Mike decided. It was too much like an old friend.

  And they were fucking hard to come by these days.

  *

  For want of something better to do, he had begun training as a plumber. And to everyone’s surprise, including his own, he had stuck to it, getting his City and Guilds 6129-2 Level 2 Technical Certificate and then an apprenticeship with a small company working in the Kingswood area. Things had been going well.

  Until the fire.

  Sable Rows had burned to the ground in the September of that year, eight months after he started there…and the insurance investigation revealed that it had been arson.

  Everybody had looked at him because they knew about him, knew about his juvenile record, but Mike wouldn’t have been surprised if the owner hadn’t done it himself. Fuck knows, he was old, maybe he wanted to retire. He knew of a few guys who had done something similar, with cars and such like.

  Six months of a handful of jobs lasting from a month to three hours found him on the far side of destitute. There were a few cash-in-hand jobs – the thing about being a plumber was there was always the odd job that needed doing – but there had never really been enough to see him through. Every month was a scramble to pay the bills. It was a sweaty unpleasant time he’d like to forget.

  And then he had gotten involved in the job that would eventually send him to prison for three years.

  What a fucking mess.

  But when he got out, the situation hadn’t changed, had in fact grown worse: nobody wanted to hire anybody with a criminal record.

  When Jason and Becky had offered him the job delivering for her husband’s business, it had seemed like a gift from heaven.

  But after a year and a half, he was starting to think of it as a long slow descent into hell.

  He had done nothing in his life but swap the confines of a jail cell for the chains of a career that saw him treated no better than a dogsbody…or a dog.

  The money was pathetic. For tax purposes, Jason had insisted he go self employed. It had seemed like an attractive idea, being your own boss, but it quickly became clear that Jason had only been looking after his own interests: being self employed meant that the upkeep of the van was Mike’s responsibility, and he didn’t get any holiday or sick pay. It was a good arrangement for Pioneer Pixels…but Mike suspected he been fucked up the ass.

  And the worst thing was, Mike could do absolutely nothing about it.

  He was trapped.

  Or at least, he was until a glimmer of an idea came to him that Monday morning.

  *

  “You’re late. Jesus, Mike.”

  “Yeah, traffic was-“

  “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “I said, don’t. It’s insulting.”

  “You don’t believe I?”

  “About as much as I believe in the tooth fairy, Mike.”

  “Jesus Christ, the traffic was fucked up, what do you want I to do, fuckin’ fly over it-“

  “You smell like an off license. You look like you just got up and ran out the door in the clothes you slept in. What am I supposed to think? Huh? What am I honestly supposed to think?”

  His brother-in-law was a tall, beefy guy with a rugby player’s body and a thinking man’s face; gold framed glasses and sandy hair that was receding fast gave him the look of a scholar, but his arms and shoulders were thick and tough looking, even collared by the white shirt and red spotted tie.

  Mike shook his head, bristling with anger; it didn’t occur to him that the anger came from being found out.

  “As my fuckin’ brother-in-law, you’re supposed to give I the benefit of the fuckin’ doubt-“

  “If it was a one-off, Mike, I would, you know I would. But there were three days last week that were
the same. And most of the week before that. It’s getting beyond a joke.”

  Mike couldn’t think what to say – his head still hurt – so in the end didn’t say anything. Instead, he thought about how good it would feel to knock those stupid gold framed glasses off that smug face.

  Jason stared at him a moment and then sighed, shaking his head ruefully.

  “If you weren’t my wife’s brother, I’d fire you, you know that, don’t you.”

  “Yus tell I offen enuff,” Mike said. “It’s like fuckin’ blackmail, or sumfin.”

  Jason scoffed.

  “I’m blackmailing you? Oh, wow. Jesus Christ. That takes the biscuit. Has it occurred to you that it might actually be the other way around? That you might be blackmailing me every time you come in here late, or don’t deliver on time, or don’t show up at all. This is my business. My livelihood. You’re letting all of us down every time you fuck something up. I’m blackmailing you? That’s a fucking laugh.” Jason turned to look down the alley behind Pioneer Pixels, a narrow alley busy with skips and access routes to the other shops that resided in this part of Clifton; the alley was just barely wide enough to get Mike’s van down. Jason turned back. “Go to work, Mike. Jeff’s got your deliveries. Go and get on with them, before I say something I’ll regret.”

  Jason went back into the shop. Mike didn’t move for a moment, was too angry to move, his mind log-jammed with what he would liked to have said, if he wasn’t tied to this fucking family – of course, the painful thudding wasn’t particularly conducive to his thinking either – until he realised that there was nothing he could say or do that would change anything.

  So he went back out to the loading bay where Jeff was sorting through the boxes for that day’s delivery, and started to load up his van.