Oddjobs Read online

  “Ectoplasm?” said Nina. “Milt?”

  His nose twitched. “Oh, how I wish it was ectoplasm.”

  In the centre of the chair cushion, drowned in goo, something pink and fleshy, no larger than a sausage, flopped and pulsated in fitful bursts. Rod, who had seen things to drive men mad, had seen nothing like it.

  Nina’s foot nudged one of the wet, screwed up tissues on the sodden carpet.

  “I’ve got a theory about this,” she said.

  “I don’t want to know your theory about this,” said Rod firmly.

  “Yes, you do. You’re just too prudish to ask.”

  “This,” he said, pointing at the sad, pathetic remains of something on the chair. “This is why you shouldn’t play with yourself.”

  “Porn overload,” said Nina. “I thought he was just the distributor.”

  “Testing out the wares, I guess.”

  Rod reached out to the central screen. Recursive layer after layer after layer of sordid sexual activity and – just off to the side – a fragment of screen in which Rod saw himself. A hand, a face, an eye, leaning into the infinite depths of writhing flesh…

  The screens went black.

  “What the…?” The lights came on. Nina’s hand was on the light switch. The hand other held a plug.

  “Enough of that I think.”

  Rod nodded tiredly. “Aye.” He looked at the pink thing on the chair. He wanted to kill it, put it out of its misery. He wondered if there were any flammable liquids under the kitchen sink.

  “I didn’t have to leave the SAS, you know,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You want to go get them chips now?” he asked.

  “Not hungry,” said Nina.

  “Me neither,” he replied.

  “Was that the door?”

  “Huh?” said Drew, under the covers.

  There it was again, a knock at her flat door. “What time is?” she said, in drunken disbelief.

  “Are you seriously going to get it?” said Drew and made his feelings known.

  She ran her hands over his shoulders. “Didn’t say that.”

  She tilted her head. According to the bedside radio alarm clock, it was ten o’clock precisely.

  The knocking came again, louder.

  “Give me two minutes, three at most,” said Drew, “and you can yell ‘I’m coming’ to comic effect.”

  “Two minutes? Pfff. You overestimate your abilities, sir, and seriously underestimate how pissed I am.”

  “Is that a challenge?”

  In the end, Drew won the bet, not that Morag was complaining at all.

  They slept but, at some point, Morag surfaced, untwined her legs from his and went to find the toilet and a glass of water. Drew rolled over as she left the room but did not wake. It was only just past eleven p.m. The day was not yet done.

  She paused by the front door. For a second, she thought the Venislarn had sent bloody wedge-shaped slugs to kill her. Then she realised that someone had attempted to feed slices of pizza under her door and through the letterbox.

  Pizza. Ten o’clock. Ah, yes.

  “Sorry, Richard,” she whispered.

  In the kitchen, Morag poured herself a glass of water, downed it, poured another and took it and the largest sharpest knife in the house into the living room. She sat in a chair that gave her a view of both the door and the window and waited.

  “Ready for you, bitch,” she muttered to herself.

  Sometime later, the sound of a closing door woke her. The knife fell from her hand and landed on its point in a gap in the laminate flooring.

  “Muda!” she said and stood up, naked and confused.

  She went to the bedroom. Drew was gone, leaving only violently ruffled sheets and a damp patch. She went back to the living room and looked out onto the street. There was no sign of Drew. It was windy out. Black shapes that might have been the tops of trees or maybe weren’t moved along the rooftops opposite. It was five past midnight and Morag had not died.

  “Bloody liars,” she said. “Talking a load of pish.”

  She cleaned her teeth. As she mulled over the events of the day – seen in the light of the fact that she was not dead, considering the fact that she had blown all her spending cash on cocktails, gambling, hoverboards and a tobacco pipe, and had had reckless unprotected sex with a fellow ginger – a thought occurred to her. Something Professor Sheikh Omar had said. She found her phone and sent a text to Rod.

  Seconds later, her phone rang. “Are you still up?” said Rod.

  Morag regarded herself in the mirror, undressed, with a mouth of toothpaste foam.

  “I guess.”

  “Good. Grab your coat and get over to Sparkbrook. We’re going for a curry.”

  Thursday

  Morag looked at herself in the mirror on the first floor landing.

  A quick wash and fresh clothes and she was ready to go out for curry. She was indeed hungry. Sex and alcohol tended to make one hungry. She patted her cheeks and peered closer. Did she look like she’d just had sex? Would Rod notice?

  There was a noise overhead. A scraping of something heavy over the floorboards. She looked up the stairs. There was a faint musical sound too, a stringed instrument – a banjo? A ukulele? It wasn’t a nice sound. Three days and she hadn’t met her upstairs neighbour, the supposedly crazy old cat lady.

  Morag walked to the foot of the stairs. The lower half of the door to flat three was covered in thin scratches. A fat black cat sat halfway up the stairs. It looked at Morag lazily and then, almost as if it could barely be bothered, bared its teeth and hissed.

  Morag’s phone dinged. Her uCab awaited.

  “If you were nicer, the other cats would play with you,” she told the cat and went downstairs.

  The taxi was parked in the middle of the road, engine idling. Morag slipped into the back seat. “Karakoram Balti House in Sparkbrook,” she said. “It’s a restaurant. You know it?”

  The taxi driver met her gaze in the rear view mirror and then pulled away.

  It was a silent fifteen-minute journey across the south of the city, through high streets that might have once been Victorian villages and the leafy suburban streets that had welded those villages into the growing city.

  The taxi stopped on a high street lined with gaily lit shop frontages. The only businesses that were open were the restaurants. Morag counted half a dozen without even looking. She paid the driver and hopped out.

  He swung away and into a car park beside a discount supermarket where a line of cabs waited, lights on.

  “Yeah, I bet you talk to them,” she muttered. “It’s cos I’m ginger, isn’t it?”

  The name Karakoram was spelled out in loops of pink neon lighting. Inside, a waiter in a waistcoat and bow tie approached.

  “I’m here to meet my friend,” she said. “Ah.”

  Rod and Nina sat at a circular table beneath a wall-length photographic print of the Himalayas at sunset. There was a scattering of other diners in the restaurant, clusters of men dining in trios or pairs.

  “Hungry?” said Rod.

  “Surprisingly,” said Morag, sitting down. “He drag you out of bed too?” she said to Nina.

  “It’s nowhere near my bedtime,” said Nina. “And I skipped dinner, so when I heard there was food in the offing…”

  The restaurant menu was a single piece of paper pinned underneath the glass table top.

  “So, why are we here, exactly?” said Morag.

  “You said you were hungry,” said Rod.

  “Yes, but…”

  “It’s as you said.” Rod turned to Nina. “Our new colleague’s a smart un. We went to visit Professor Sheikh Omar today.”

  “How is he?” said Nina.

  “As camp as Christmas and as dodgy as a late night kebab.”

  “The usual then.”

  “Aye. And he was blathering on about how his mate Maurice had read the future in Omar’s Balti lamb special. And what do we know about
Omar’s dietary habits?”

  “He’s a vegetarian,” said Nina.

  “So, he lied,” said Morag. “What has that got to do with this? Did the mention of Balti just make you hungry?”

  “No. You see the only reason he would order a Balti lamb –” He stopped. The waiter had materialised at his elbow. “Right. Drinks?” said Rod. “A pint of what?”

  “Cheap and nasty lager,” said Nina.

  Rod looked at Morag.

  “I think a half,” she said. “It’s late.”

  “You’ll want a pint. Trust me. Three pints of your best lager,” he told the waiter. “And we would like to order the Balti special for all three of us.”

  “The special?” said the waiter. “Which special?”

  “The special,” said Rod. The waiter looked at him. He looked at the waiter. “You do serve the Balti special, don’t you?” said Rod.

  “It is very hot,” said the waiter.

  “We like hot food.” Rod simply maintained eye contact.

  “Yes. But it is very, very hot.”

  “Good,” said Rod with finality. “And make sure you don’t forget the chef’s special sauce.”

  The waiter backed away reluctantly.

  “Um,” said Morag, “does ‘chef’s special sauce’ mean the same thing here as it does in… well, everywhere else?”

  “That’s your first question?” said Nina. “Not, why is the man ordering for everyone like he’s some super alpha dude who’s come back to the cave with a dead T-rex?”

  “I was going to come to that. If a guy on a date did that, I’d walk straight out.”

  “Nah,” said Nina. “I’d eat it and then walk out.”

  “Hey, I’m not that kind of bloke,” said Rod.

  “I know you’re not,” said Nina. “You’re one of the good guys.”

  “Ta.”

  “One of those good, polite, kind, boring guys who… how did you ever get in the SAS?”

  “You can be an alpha male and a gentleman,” said Rod nobly. “By the way, a caveman wouldn’t have brought a dead T-rex back to the cave.”

  “Not by himself, maybe,” said Nina. “Him and his mates.”

  “No, I meant it wouldn’t have been possible.”

  “With that kind of attitude it’s no wonder that the caveman went extinct.”

  “No. Wait. What?” said Rod. “Cavemen didn’t go extinct.”

  “Really?” said Nina. “Well, where are they all now?”

  Rod, befuddled, made a general round table gesture. “They’re us.”

  “I don’t live in a cave and I’ve seen your metrosexual manpad.”

  “Manpad? Listen, humankind and dinosaurs were sixty-five million years apart.”

  “No, I saw this thing on YouTube.”

  “Must be true then,” said Morag, smiling.

  Rod’s jaw ground to a halt under the onslaught of stupid and only started working again once the waiter had brought the beers and poppadoms.

  “The special…” said the waiter, his voice full of servile regret.

  “Had better be coming soon,” said Rod firmly.

  The waiter shuffled off unhappily.

  “Back to the chef’s special sauce,” said Morag.

  “Aye,” said Rod. “You ever eaten a Balti, Morag?”

  “I think so,” she said honestly. “I tend to wander all over the Indian menu. Not sure what I’m ordering half the time.”

  “Balti’s the one fried in the little pot,” said Nina.”

  “Right. Yes.”

  “‘Pot’ or ‘bucket’. That’s what the word ‘Balti’ means,” said Rod. “And where do you think the Balti comes from?”

  Morag looked at the photographed mountains on the wall and thought of Northern India, maybe Pakistan, Tibet even… “You’re going to tell it was invented here, aren’t you?” she said.

  “It was,” said Rod. “Literally around the corner. Back in the seventies. The first Baltis were cooked here and the best Baltis still are.”

  “In the Balti Triangle,” said Nina in a deep and spooky voice.

  “Seriously?” said Morag.

  “It’s the wedge between the Stratford Road and the Alcester Road,” said Rod, drawing a triangle in the air.

  “Like I know where that is,” said Morag.

  “Main arterial roads out of the city.”

  “Is it like the Bermuda triangle?”

  “No. It’s something stranger.”

  “Uh-huh.” Morag broke off a shard of poppadom and paused in the act of dipping it in the chutney tray. “Is there chef’s special sauce in this?”

  Rod shook his head.

  “The Balti triangle predates the Balti and the first Pakistani immigrants, even possibly the first human settlers of any sort. It’s the story of Kaxeos.”

  “I like it when Rod tells a story,” said Nina. “Although, I always think it should feature trouble down t’pit or whippets.”

  “What bit of Yorkshire do you think I come from?” said Rod.

  “Eck ‘e thump.”

  “That’s not a place. Now, shut up and listen. There was a Venislarn called Kaxeos, a god of fire.”

  “The Winds of Kaxeos,” said Morag, remembering the surreal session with Chad and Leandra the day before.

  “They’re his servants. Possibly his children. They’re still alive and free and roaming… somewhere. Kaxeos was worshipped by the locals.”

  “I thought you said this was before people came to Britain.”

  “Exactly. His worshippers, whatever they were, weren’t stupid. They worshipped Kaxeos but they were afraid of him. So they bound him in chains and buried him, ‘and the fires of his body baked the earth into stone’. But that was not enough. To ensure he would never be freed, they dug out the major organs and reburied them in three separate chambers (or ‘pots’) arranged around his body. ‘They bound him in a triangle powered by his own magic.’”

  “So there’s a god buried beneath us, providing underfloor heating for the local borough?”

  “And more besides. Kaxeos is a powerful being, psychic or something of that ilk and practically omniscient.”

  “So, if anyone knows anything about possible incursions in the next forty-odd hours, he will.”

  “And that’s why we must eat the Balti special,” said Rod.

  “I’m just here for the free food,” said Nina. She smashed the pile of poppadoms and grabbed a handful of fragments. “Chef’s special sauce or not, free food is free food.” She fed them into her mouth like crisps. “I’ve swallowed worse stuff in my time.”

  Rod looked at his hand as he reached for what remained of the poppadoms.

  “I’m sure I have, but I can’t remember washing my hands since that last job in Dudley.” He stood. “Back in a minute.”

  “Dudley?” said Morag to Nina.

  “Long story,” said Nina. “Long… sticky… messy… dirty story.”

  Going to the toilets in a curry house is rarely fraught with danger.

  Rod had long accepted the mysterious shittiness of men’s toilets. Restaurant, bar, café, pub… It didn’t matter what establishment or how plush and well-maintained the general premises, the men’s toilets were always filthy, poorly repaired and generally awash with a good half inch of piss on the floor. It was part of the natural rhythm of the universe. Women’s toilets (he was given to understand) might well be as fragrant and as inviting as a country health spa but there was no such thing as a clean gents. It was as though trained apes came in every half hour to piss over every surface and, if they were feeling particularly dutiful, smear crap on cubicle walls.

  Therefore, the only danger Rod anticipated facing was getting his shoe laces soaked in another man’s piss or, worse, after washing and drying his hands, finding the door handle slick with something wet and unknowable.

  He did not expect to be about to enter the gents and be distracted by the sound of voices conversing in Venislarn along the corridor. He did not e
xpect that, upon opening a door to take a look, he would see two men, deep in conversation over a parchment covered in Venislarn astrological charts. He certainly didn’t expect one of the men to shout and then something hard and heavy to connect with the back of his head and clout him into unconsciousness.

  Rod woke and, before opening his eyes, took an automatic audit of his senses.

  Touch: he was lying on a hard surface. Not metal or wood. Smooth under his fingertips. Tiles or stone. There was a tightness across his chest and across his thighs. He was tied or strapped down, and firmly too.

  Sound: He heard three people talking. Men. Rod was a poor linguist but he was fairly certain they were speaking a creole of Venislarn and some other language. Urdu? Bengali? Rod really didn’t have a clue. It could have been Swahili or Serbo-Croat for all he knew. But the echo of the voices told him that the room he was in was small and sparsely furnished. A kitchen store room? A cellar? The echo had an additional dimension to it, a distinct hollowness, as though there were a chimney or a corridor close by.

  Smell: Rod did not like the smell. Musty. Organic. It was not directly offensive, and yet it spoke of things that had not been cleaned in a very, very long time.

  Someone pulled open his jacket and reached for his pistol. Rod opened his eyes. The man had a round face and an ugly, oiled handlebar moustache like a cartoon villain. And now he had Rod’s pistol.

  “That’s mine,” Rod said.

  Ugly ‘tache grinned. A younger man — wielding a meat cleaver, Rod could not help but notice — double-checked and tightened the leather straps binding Rod’s legs to the counter. The third man in the room was the waiter who had taken their order. He looked at Rod with a terribly sad expression on his face.

  That’s nice, thought Rod. That’s nice that he at least feels sad that he’s tied up one of his customers in a dank room with a bloke with an ugly ‘tache and a bloke with a shiny cleaver.

  The room was dank. The floor, walls and the boxy shelf Rod was tied to were covered in tiles that might have once been white but, like meth addicts’ teeth, had darkened to an uneven tortoiseshell colour. In the floor beside Rod’s head there was a square sunken shaft and the tiles around its rim were a diseased fungal brown.