Pay-Off

The Pay-off

by Mick Stringer

As kids we'd thought that Mad Benny was pretty prehistoric, with his
smooth, bald head, corrugated cheeks and his way of pressing his lips
together with an inverted whistle when he'd forgotten to put in his
dentures.
But now, twenty or more years later, he still looked much the same,
sitting in his old Windsor chair, wearing a blue, threadbare cardigan
and loose moleskin trousers. I stood in the doorway, uncertain as to
where best to put myself to hear the 'important news' that Askie, who'd
been summoned the day before, had said he wanted to share with
me.
"Now sit yourself down, young James, and listen awhile," he growled in
his throaty way. "There's things have got to be said, one way or
another."
I pulled one of the black dining chairs from under the battered old
table and sat facing him. A faint but unmistakable smell of urine hung
in the air.
"Right," I said, "I'm listening."
He leaned towards me and sucked his teeth. "There was three of us in
the old rowing boat," he began, holding me with a stare which would
have done credit to the Ancient Mariner. "Myself, old Wally Jenkins and
young Peter."
"My dad," I interrupted, just to be sure.
"Young Peter," he continued, tapping restless old fingers on the arm
of the chair. "We'd tied up in the little backwater, down from the
mill. Sam's Reach, we called it, though I never did know why. The
fishing was good there; in fact, Wally always claimed he'd just missed
a pike once - long as your arm and thick as a wrestler's thigh - but he
was always one with a tale, was Wally."
As he paused, partly to draw noisy breath and partly to cast an inward
eye back onto the memory, I looked around the room, with its simple
wooden furniture, linoleum floor and reluctant coal fire spluttering in
the small, tiled hearth. Benny was rumoured to have made a fortune, but
there was little evidence of it in his gloomy little parlour.
"Go on," I urged him, wondering what strange pictures were floating
across his time-wrinkled mind.
He shook his head, slowly and deliberately. "We never heard the
sluices open. Usually, you got wind of it, you know. You heard the
handle banged home, the cogs grinding and the plates creaking like the
rowlocks on our old boat. Not that day, though. Never heard a
thing."
There was a clock ticking somewhere in the room. I located it, tucked
away in a dark corner, on top of a small bookcase -a simple dial, in a
rounded wooden case. Twenty minutes slow, I noticed.
Benny dropped his voice, dramatically. "Hit us like a tidal wave," he
whispered. "Whoosh!" He sliced the air with his hand, wheezing with the
effort. "And there we were. Wet, knocked around, not knowing if we were
up or down, water rushing in our ears, everything swirling, mud in our
throats and eyes." He leaned even further forward, so that I could feel
his breath in my face. "If it hadn't been for your dad ... there'd have
been an end to me. But it cost him." He sat back, staring at the
ceiling. "Aye, it cost him."
Dropping his head again, he rummaged in the pockets of his grubby
trousers and pulled out a thick bundle of notes. As he thrust them at
me, it took all my self-control not to pull a face at the stench of
senility that clung to them
"So there you are, young James. It's a long time gone, but there you
are. In memory of young Pete, my life-saver."
***
Outside the brightness was painful and the air smelt as if it had been
newly scrubbed. Askie opened the gate for me.
"Well?" he asked.
I showed him the bundle. "Must be at least a grand there," I
guessed.
"For your father's life-saving heroics?"
"For those." I slipped the notes into my jacket pocket. "I'll
intercept his health visitor tomorrow and get her to put them
back."
Askie laughed, after I'd recounted the details of the tale. "Weird,"
he mused, "how he plays around with the names. Yesterday it was Will
Jackson with Benny and my dad in the boat. Same story, though."
"And same thousand quid," I smiled. "Funny how a guilty conscience can
catch up with you in your twilight years. I wonder how much he really
screwed out of our dads in those poker games of his?"
"More than a couple of grand, I'll bet," said Askie, as we left the
little cottage behind. "I wonder what he's going to tell Smegger
tomorrow."
(c) Mick Stringer 2001