175 Years Later.
The Dirty Lemon, Paignton.
The last time I saw my ex-wife, Alouette, she was living in a static caravan with her uncle, Charles. She was a mess, but so was I. Based on our shared history, not crossing paths is definitely a good sign.
I’m on my third pint before I even recognise her. The Dirty Lemon used to be a family pub, but now there’s chicken-wire across the window and sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood. It’s definitely not the kind of pub you want to find your ex-wife doing a strip-show in on Christmas Eve.
I wait for the end of the tape and weave through the lunchtime crowd. Her dark, lank hair looks ragged – like she has cut it herself – and her eyes are the colour of dirty bath water. Her nose looks like it has been recently broken and she has two black eyes.
“Alouette?”
Her haunted expression collapses and she wraps herself in a stolen Excelsior Hotel bathrobe. We spent our honeymoon in that hotel, and I remember her taking it as a souvenir.
“Hey, Joe.”
I reach out, but she flinches.
“Jesus, Alouette. Has someone been knocking you around?”
She gestures at her face.
“What, this? No, my Sugar Daddy bought me a new nose. Early Christmas present…”
She laughs sourly.
“Who hit you?”
“It’s my mess and I’m cleaning it up. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of C-Unit.”
She brushes past me, conversation over.
C-Unit?
Christened Colin Crandall by his long-dead mother, C-Unit is a local debt-collector/loan shark/crack dealer/entrepreneur. Among his various business interests, he owns a 51% stake in a vape shop. Two-thirds of a tattoo parlour. A minority stake in a massage parlour. There was even a rumour that he owns part of a racehorse in Newton Abbot. All seized in lieu of payments owed.
We have never crossed paths, and I have always dismissed him as a fantasist. I mean, the guy has a sleeve full of unintelligible tattoos copied off a Serbian warlord and carries a bejewelled set of brass knuckles. Maybe it’s time to pay him a visit?
I finish my pint and leave Alouette shivering in her tattered bathrobe as she tries to cadge a free drink off Spacey Tracey.
***
One Hour Later.
The Black Dog, Paignton Harbour.
I always find that my best sources are those nursing a festering grudge.
Charles’s sunken, shrunken face reminds me of a partially deflated football. His thinning, sandy hair has been pulled back into a ponytail. He used to be a big man, but now he’s skinny and sickly looking, his skin waxy and yellow. His fingers have been broken so many times he can’t even grip his glass properly anymore.
I place two pints on the beer-slick table and drop a plastic straw in his drink, so he doesn’t slosh it everywhere.
“Season’s greetings, Charles.”
He looks up warily.
“A free pint? Is it happy hour?”
A couple of his ribs got caved in last year, and now he speaks with a rotten wheeze.
“In this town it’s always happy hour somewhere, Charles.”
“Did Alouette send you to see me, son?”
I shake my head.
“Alouette wouldn’t talk to me.”
He grunts.
“That figures.”
“You’re in hock to Crandall, so your niece has to strip in pubs?”
He stares into his pint, tears rolling down his face. A bubble of snot emerges from his left nostril and he wipes it on his sleeve.
“I only borrowed £350 off him, but he charges Double Bubble rates. Most of the ruddy money went on taxis to the damned hospital.”
I look him in the eye.
“I’m not a well man, Rey. I’m dying, son. Three months to live. When I’m gone Crandall has made it clear that my debt passes to Alouette. Last week he took my watch and my wedding ring. I heard a story about one guy in Roselands who couldn’t pay up: Crandall took his tracheotomy cannula. Just because he could.”
A throaty chuckle, followed by a tubercular cough.
“He even took the cock-rings, Rey.”
I splutter on my pint.
“Come again?”
“As the actress said to the bishop… never mind. It’s none of your ruddy business.”
“Of course it is – I used to be married to the fucking girl.”
Charles scoffs and attempts to stand up.
“Leave it out, Rey. I’ve had bowel movements that lasted longer than your marriage!”
“It looks like you’re having one now, mate.”
He slumps sadly against the tatty upholstery.
“Cock-rings,” I state, bluntly.
“Not without mistletoe, Rey.”
His eyes twinkle, briefly, and then his gaze goes dull again.
“Alouette used to have a little cleaning job. Offices. Shops. Pubs.”
“I remember.”
“The Polsham. Noah’s Ark. The Dirty Lemon.”
“All my old favourites.”
He grunts.
“And this place.”
I stare at Charles, waiting for him to continue.
“You might not remember, but I’m something of a local history buff.”
I shrug. With a history as blood-stained as mine, I like the past to remain where it is.
“Well, for years there have been whispers about this place.”
He gestures around the interior of the pub.
“The building used to be a fish cellar. Dates back to the 16th century.”
Charles beams at me proudly.
“By the time the harbour officially opened in 1839 it was a public house.”
“Yeah, and it looks like no one has bothered to redecorate since.”
“It’s called rustic charm, Rey, you savage. Anyway, one morning, when Alouette was cleaning I went down in the cellar and had a poke around. Shifted a few barrels and found the crawlspace, where the landlord supposedly used to stash his stolen goods, out of the way of the Preventative Water Guard.”
“The what?”
“19th century customs officials. Their headquarters was the public toilet block.”
“Sounds about right.”
“The whole cellar reeked of rotten fish, cabbages and cider, but the crawlspace was even worse. It smelled revolting.”
“Like someone had died down there?”
Charles clicks his fingers.
“Got it in one. The mouldy skeleton – which I believe belonged to a Mr Thomas Thresher, on account of its size – was folded inside the crawlspace, bones at awkward angles. In its midst were five solid-gold, ruby-encrusted cock-rings. Those cock-rings were our financial future, right there.”
“And now Crandall has them?”
He nods sadly.
“Him and his boys ripped my caravan apart – took them and everything else of value.”
“Shit.”
He nods.
“What are they worth? Thousands?”
“And the rest. As far as I can ascertain, they were liberated from a diplomat in Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies and smuggled to Europe on a Dutch East India Company vessel in the early 19th century. Similar items have been valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
I drain my pint.
“I’ll sort this, Charles.”
“How?”
He looks withered and used-up.
I shrug.
“The same way I sort all of my problems.”
***
Every time I go to Foxhole, I come away with scars. Crandall lives in the flat allocated to his dead mother. It’s in a supported housing project, where there are potential victims across every landing, down every hallway. As I make my way down the street grime-streaked widows peer out from behind grime-streaked windows.
On the drive outside, an ancient white BMW is propped up on breezeblocks as an obese guy with a Santa hat tinkers with the engine. I look around for a stray tool to grab, but see nothing.
The men who collect Crandall’s debts are big-boned bastards in bomber jackets. Men he has been friends with since the first week of secondary school. Men he trusts with his life – precisely because he could ruin theirs in a heartbeat.
“Is Crandall around?”
He glances briefly at me.
“Around here, you refer to him as C-Unit, or you jog on.”
Nearby, a posse of feral kids are playing catch with a house-brick. Scrawny scrotes in padded coats. I step forward and catch the brick, swivelling and slamming the masonry into lard lad’s cranium.
“Who the hell are you?”
As I turn around, a diamond-encrusted knuckle-duster slams into my frontal lobe and my world goes black.
***
Crandall – C-Unit – is the first thing I see when I regain consciousness. He has a crew cut, a goatee beard and piggy, bloodshot eyes. He’s wearing a voluminous Santa suit with an incongruous Stone Island patch sewn onto the left sleeve.
Alouette is the next thing I see – sitting opposite me – manacled at the other end of a wooden dining table.
Judging by the oil-stains on the concrete floor, it looks like we have been locked in someone’s fucking garage.
Only when I try to back away from the table do I realise that I have also been handcuffed to the table legs either side of me, my arms stretched taut.
The next thing that snags my attention is C-Unit’s knuckle-duster. The fucking weapon looks obscene – encrusted with jewels – it’s definitely going to leave a mark. Then again, if the fat bastard hits me again, he’ll probably give me brain damage.
He sees me eyeing the knuckle-duster.
“They’re real diamonds, mate. I had them ripped off local girls’ wedding rings! Nice touch, right? That old soak Charles said that you two used to be married! How fucking sweet. He warned me that you were on your way over here, Rey, and asked me to cancel his vig in exchange for the heads-up. Fat fucking chance!”
C-Unit circles the table like a benevolent degenerate, spooning microwaveable cauliflower cheese onto the untouched KFC meals in front of us.
“Eat up, boys and girls. Don’t let your food go cold,” he cackles.
I wriggle my wrists against the handcuffs, but I couldn’t feed myself even if I wanted to.
C-Unit looms over Alouette.
“Do you like my serviette holders? They’re solid gold cock-rings, apparently! I snatched them off some dopey slag or other.”
Alouette squirms as C-Unit rubs his crotch against her shoulder.
“Joe!” she screams. “Do something!”
Fuck this nonsense.
I kick away the right table leg with my boot heel, and it gives way, causing the table to lurch forwards like a drunk at an office party.
C-Unit swivels, confused, but the table leg is already in my hands.
The first blow gets snagged by his Stone Island patch. The second thuds against his skull.
He rolls across the garage floor and hauls himself to his feet. His diamond-encrusted knuckle-duster glints under the queasy strip-lighting.
When he sneers at me, his carefully sculpted facial hair makes his mouth look like a manky fanny.
“How about I even the odds, Crandall?”
He nods.
I let the table leg clatter to the ground and retrieve the cock-rings from the table, sliding them over the knuckles on my right fist. The rings are far bigger than my fingers – whoever they were made for was hung like a fucking horse.
“Wait… what?”
“Come on, big man. Take your best shot.”
C-Unit edges towards me. I think he’s shadow boxing, but he may well be having a fit.
When he’s within striking range, he throws a painfully slow right in my direction, his knuckles juddering off the old garage wall.
I slam my fist into the side of his head, pulverising his right cheekbone with the cock-rings, the fat rubies shredding his sunbed tan. He claws at his face, whimpering and vomits all over his Santa suit.
I raise my boot and stomp him into the concrete.
I drop the blood-slick cock-rings into the pocket of Alouette’s Excelsior Hotel bathrobe, before using one of the serviettes to dab at the blood oozing from my own cratered forehead.
“Merry Christmas, Alouette.”
She looks up at me, tears in her eyes.
“Merry Christmas, Joe.”
Then I pick up the broken table leg and open the garage door.
C-Unit’s posse are clustered around his BMW, their podgy faces contorted with concern.
I grip the table leg with both hands and assume the position.
It’s time to spread some Christmas cheer.
The End
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