New Directions (38)

The idea of going up North to stay at Karen’s temped me. I figured at least I’d get to sleep with her when she got home. Then I remembered the last time I stayed when she was on call I spent half the night with her getting smeared with shit, slime and blood while I helped her wrestle out a breached calf. Despite saving it’s soggy young life the fucking farm manager — who just stood there in a spotless ©Barbour watching us struggle — didn’t even thank us. All he wanted to do was argue the toss about how many hours the company would be billed. It was all I could do to stop myself pinning him against the wall and jamming a handful of cow shit in his cakehole. 

When I told Karen how I felt she said it’s often like that with large corporate farms. ‘They’re only interested in the bottom line. He was probably pissed off ‘cos the bill was going to be more than he’d get from the insurance if the animal died. I expect his policy also covers vet costs. The only reason he called us out was to cover his arse with the Min of Ag.’ 

Needless to say after we arrived home totally wrecked and cleaned ourselves of the smell of birth fluid, faeces and sweat, sex was low on our to do list. With that in mind I sent a message asking her to call me whenever she had time.

 Plugging Erik’s second memory stick in my PC, I got on reading his stuff to see how much it could add to the info I’d gleaned from Mercer’s WhatsApp © messages which, once filtered, showed up a potential bombshell. 

For the first month his messages were all the usual bollocks to his mates; football; silly jokes, and emoji hearted drivel to and from Alice who seemed to be girlfriend/fiancé. Then I found: 

Hi Al (kiss icon) Mum wants to know if you knew some bloke called Dev Mull something when you worked for that letting firm. 

I couldn’t believe what I saw. I let out a loud, ‘FUCKING HELL!’ Causing Erik to look up from his PC and give me a s.t.f.u. look. I read it several times and, in a bit of a sweat, searched through a whole bunch of crap until I found his reply three days later, it calmed my concern to some extent.

Hey Ally (kiss icon) yes Dev Mullur was one of the bastards on the board of Daniels who shut down our office. I always thought he was alright but he was as bad as the rest in the end. How come your mum knows him? The message continued with making a date for a meal out. Alice replied immediately.

Yeah Friday is ok. Mum don’t know the bloke, it was Aunty Francis who was asking. She wants to talk to you about something. She says it’s important, something to do with her husband; you know the one who’s in jail what Mum says is all wrong. The whole message was just a string of low case letters, I had to add punctuation so I could make sense of it. . . Alice didn’t seem too bright.

After another day of bollocks I found his answer: Don’t unstnd Ally why would she want talk to me. Igot things todo.

Again an immediate reply: I dono Mum sez aunty will pay you too, do her a faver. 

Mercer replied directly: Whts it about anyway how much is she gonna pay?

After more annoyingly misspelled crap it seemed if there was money in it Mercer was interested and he told Alice her aunt could text him on WA (his spelling).

Aunty Francis did better (for me) than text. After another bunch of garbage covering a couple of days  I found a long voice message spelling out in relative detail about what the favour she needed was about. . . . Apparently being not too bright runs in the family.