Jackdaw Fool

My work requires that I spend much of my time alone.

Henry Rollins

I’m a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog, and alone.

Rutherford McLeod, Lone Dog

“The Lovefish?” Coakes guffawed, thinking it a bulls vagina, a filthy fisherman’s ruse.
“Indeed the Mediterranean Lovefish. Chef will cook it as his caprice takes him. As do all who cook the Lovefish and hope to retain its flavour”.
Coakes merely nodded, numbed by the obvious tripe. The waiter walked a few steps then looked round.
“Mr Iago, you must know that whoever eats the Lovefish will fall in love, forever, within a year”. But then he smiled, and clapped Coakes on the back, and wandered off into the kitchen yelling in Greek. Coakes was shaken by the blow to his ever-vulnerable shoulder blades, and almost without realising it, lifted the poesy from the table and sniffed deeply at the scent which had filled him with panic and nausea earlier.

The fish arrived with the with the dying of the day. Butter with fresh smashed garlic was drizzled on the back, with lemon segments forming a guard of honour, a pithy little 300. The fish looked unremarkable. The waiter returned with a pair of heavily carved wooden skewers. He, desperately slowly, slid them under the fish and then carefully flipped it over, spraying butter and white garlic onto the table. The underside of the fish looked stained, blue, black to purple and orange and green, slick like spilt crude oil. Just as slowly and just as carefully the waiter pulled a knife from a sheath at his side and slid the pale blade under the skin, peeling it back. White flesh shocked under the dark scales, and then, half way along, the waiter stopped.

He stood back a little and breathed deep. As Coakes reached a fork to the aquine meat the waiter stopped him. “All is not yet clear”, and smiled again. He slipped the knife back between flesh and skin and started to peel once more, then with a sudden jerk it was all gone, a black pile in one corner of the plate. There in the centre of the fishes white was a bright tiny piece of flesh, in the shape of a strawberry, or perhaps a heart, of the old comic book style. Iago laughed out loud, delighted, clapping his flippers together.

The meal tasted of nothing, the heart more so, with a tougher texture. Coakes ate slowly and stared out to sea. The last rays of the sun played gently on the tops of the mountains behind. The sounds of the town faded. The sea grew louder. Somewhere a seagull squalled, then dived into the foam. A fishing boat putt-putted into the harbour, the men laughing and shouting on board. A truck barked into life and they loaded the catch, then wandered away into the dying evening. The truck trundled up the hill, toward one of the fish yards.

When Coakes had put down his fork, and had wiped the remnants of the butter and garlic with the sour bread, the waiter came down with a bottle. It was clear glass, with no markings and a fat cork holding the amber liquid. In his other hand he held a pair of fine crystal goblets, with a thin border of gold, horrible chinzy things for dull brained tourists. He filled the glasses, then took his seat next to Coakes. The waiter lifted his glass in salute to the sea and sipped a little. Coakes did likewise, self-consciously copying. The liquor was think and tasted almost like some childhood medicine, but the fumes swelled in his nose and burnt the back of his throat, stripping the lining. Coakes wanted to cough, but instead stared out to sea. They sat like that for the longest time, neither looking at the other, just sipping and staring, with tiny movements coming closer together. Coakes lit an Ambassador Menthol, his after dinner smoke, and offered the pack to the waiter, who gave so sign of noticing the gesture. Coakes returned to watching the ocean, staring at its hugeness, as if all the good and horror of the world were way at the other side, and perhaps here, on this veranda, they were safe.

Coakes felt a hand rest on his thigh. He stared at it, the dark hairy claw, then looked to the waiter, in a deliberate motion. The waiter smiled at his defensiveness, “Iago, we should do something”.
“What?” he could hardly breathe.
“Tomorrow, the café is closed, we will take my brothers boat. I will show off the cave of St. Felix”.
Coakes stared back out to sea and let out a long breath. He longed to fart, he had a capital quake building, but felt it might ruin the moment, in the same way it would improve so many others, and for the same reasons. A heart, someone’s, lumped against Coakes’ rigid chest, thick blood trundling like rail carts in his ears, drowning the sea.
“Oh, no, no, thanks. I mean honestly you’ve been really kind but..”
The waiter shook his head kindly, the great moustache cooling Coakes face with the breeze of its passage.
“No. It’s no problem. It’s my pleasure. I come bring you early.”
“No, no, really. I mean, I don’t think I should because..”
“You afraid. You afraid that I wan’ make fuck with you.”
“What?” Coakes gulped and looked at the waiter, admiring the way the evening light caught that great native chin. He was afraid. Afraid to hope.
“Of course I wan’ make fuck with you, you are beautiful Coakes. Man would be crazy not want to make fuck with you. But I don’t ask you to fuck. I ask you to come on brothers boat. Different thing. Boat is boat. Fuck is fuck. So I come tomorrow morning nine o’clock? I bring food, I bring wine, and we go. Tomorrow, I just make you happy? No need to be sad. And no need to be afraid, I give word of honour. I don’t try to make fuck with you. Okay?”
Coakes was silent for a long moment. “Okay. See you in the morning.”
After a moment, the waiter stood and walked back to the kitchen carrying the plates. Coakes left a stack of monopoly money on the table and walked slowly up the hill. Christ he wished there were a taxi. He was out of breath before he started.

The cliffs were high and at the very top nestled a ruined and overgrown temple of Zeus. White-faced birds with bulbous black bodies that seemed to defy logic flitted in and out of the cave. White stains and tiny stacks of twigs punctuated the black volcanic rock of the cliffs. For a while a Greek saint, St Felix, had lived in the cave, escaping the Turkish heathens. He’s subsisted on a diet of rain water and the seaweed stinking meat of the birds, until one day a fisherman had spotted the glow of a fire in the cave at dusk, and Felix became St Felix. The waves had washed against the cliff face for long enough to have made a little beach of grey sand, famous for stranding people - only approachable on foot during the lowest tide. Perhaps one day someone would die there.

A long blue fishing boat motored into the cove. On deck were two men. One wore a dark shirt, blue jeans and a cap. He wore the complexion of bark and a great moustache. The other was a thin, bemuscled man in a yellow shell suit, with shoulder length yellow hair. He stood at the prow, staring up at the cliffs. He called something over his shoulder to the one in blue, who joined him, wresting a hand on his lower back, then broke off and walked to the small wheel at the back, cutting the engine. He moved to the side and threw the anchor over. The slack was soon taken up and the boat stopped, turning gradually so that its prow faced the incoming tide. The dark man never heard the other come up behind him, walking on the balls of his feet. He moved suddenly, pushing the dark man hard so fell over the side. The one on deck doubled up laughing at the splashing and swearing. He bent, offering a hand, to help the other man back onto the boat. The dark, wet man grasped it, then yank! Yellow flashes in the air then splutters and splashes as he joined his comrade in the water, all laughs and horseplay. Wet sex happened, a hard-core montage.

Coakes sat on the wooden bench on the veranda of the cottage. A cushion nestled under his fleshy arse. He had not dared put on his white writers suit today, in the same way a woman will not wear white when expecting menstruation. He sipped the icy lemonade and gin and placed it back on the table. A large map of America was spread out in front of him and his laptop lay untouched. He couldn’t write today, he didn’t want to think at all.
He stood, in need of a piss, and the pain of straightening caught his breath. He ducked into the cottage and walked slowly to the bathroom. As he pissed the long and deep yellow of dehydration, he stared at his face in the mirror. He hadn’t looked at himself since the Waiter had traced the scars and stretch marks of his belly with his tongue, “A map of your beauty”…

His eyes were deep set, seeming to have fled into his skull. Black rings languished under them. The cheeks beneath were callow and although the skin was tanned, appeared pale and bloodless. His lips were a violent red, as if painted. He looked closer, leaning toward the mirror. They were painted, with lipstick. That rat bastard Greek must have done it, as he lay sleeping and sun-burning on deck. But he remembered the truth too, lying there, his head resting on the waiters lap, as the man fingered his locks, calling him a pretty girl, remembered running below, eager to please, grabbing a lipstick from the sideboard where it lay, expectant, spreading it on roughly. He’d wrapped himself in a towel, emerged coyly from the bowls of the ship, and done everything asked of him, leaving bright red smears on that oaken Hellenic trowel.

Coakes snapped back. He was stood still at the john, staring at his lips, his dick hard. He stared down at the penile organ. There was a hard, but with none of the usual complications. His hand felt for his anus - no faecal matter clung there.
“By Christ, I’ve won!”
But alas, dear reader, as our hero revelled in his liberation, the illness welled up. Images of hacksaws and showers, meat, piss, sand thick in his mouth, hands fat and strong, a swan thin neck, Gore’s face laughing, the smell of the fire. Coakes’ knees buckled and he fell, near miss head-butting the ceramic toilet bowl, vomit flummoxing in great chunks down his front, into his drooping fringe.

“Are you OK?” A twanged midwestern accent. Coakes jerked his head round, tummy juice smeared on his chin and shirt. A fat girl sat in a wheel chair, Brittany Spears T shirt stretched to monstrous proportions on her frame. Her legs ended in unceremonious stumps just below the knees. She was plump and young and Coakes couldn’t remember where he’d seen her before.
“Get the fuck out.” He stumbled to his feet and wiped his face with a paper towel, meant for smearing shit away, leaving little white balls of the stuff on his chin. Coakes splashed a little tap water around his chops, then wiped clean with a towel, smearing the red lipstick across it. He laboured to make sure it was all gone. He put he dick away and tried to get the sick out of his hair, lost patience and slicked it back behind his ears.
Who the hell was the fuck was the girl? Coakes couldn’t be sure, but felt that he’d remember if his daughter was a cripple, so that counted out Melody. She didn’t look like his usual paid company. Bile rose up again. Coakes collected himself and marched boldly into the sitting room, long bouncy steps, unconsciously mocking her disability with his very gait.

The girl was waiting on the veranda, a little in the shade. She was tracing a plump digit across the various interstate highways that crisscrossed America, smiling beatifically. In the sunlight Iago could see that she was not American, or at least not a true American. Her skin was a cold coffee brown, hair a shock of black, barely controlled by elasticated ties and reaching nearly to her waist. A fine downy fluff hovered just above her top lip and her eyebrows embraced in the middle of her forehead.

“The fuck are you?”
She looked up, “Mr Coakes?”
“Yeah”, he let out a real bleater. The illness had passed and was nearly forgotten.
“I’m Maria,” she smiled as if he gave a fuck. The girl caught his dead eyed stare, added “The housekeeper? My dad set it up? I’ve come all the way from Rhodes…”

Coakes continued to stare. She looked as if she might cry, scrubbed a chubby palm through her hair, pushing errant strands back. His eyes rested on her stumps for a few seconds then took in her surprisingly flat chest. Usually girls that size had breasts you could flop over their shoulders. Coakes scratched his balls, killing a sweat itch. He recalled some conversation with her father. “Yeah, sure.” He let out another long flappy fart, immediately reverting to the vicious arrogance he employed with all such menials. “Right, I want you to tidy this shit hole up, and then fuck off down to the village and get some groceries, I’ll make a list….” He snapped out orders automatically, with none of the half hearted flirtation he employed with even the ugliest women. Domestics didn’t really count as people, fucking them was like a less energetic wank, and almost pointless.

“Sir, might I ask, how am I to get the groceries up here. Its a steep hill, and I find it hard on my own.”
Coakes guffawed good naturedly. “Listen, I’m an equal opportunities employer. You’ll do same as anyone else. It’ll do you good, you chubby bitch, now fuck off inside and set to work. I have a novel to finish.”

Coakes took a sip from his Vente Coffee Base Frappachino iced drink, and nodded confidently. Christ he was good. This latest chapter would set the coon amongst the virgins. He’d show them. Hemmingway, Hemmingwho? Hemmingfuck.

Paul Oakely was known universally by his pen name Oakley. He was ruggedly handsome. His hair blonde and spiked, had caused an international incident at Bruges the year before, when an African queen, wanted for the worst of war crimes: simony, fell in love with it. She’d offered Oakley any sum of money in return for it, and when he’d turned her down, she’d ordered a Zulu jihad upon it. Oakley, in response had promised NATO a base in his hair if they’d protect it. They’d installed a small radar station as part of the deal that Oakley passed off as a trendy hat.

Quietly recognised as one of the most brilliant journalists of his day; Oakley had covered every massacre in Africa, the Balkans, and the South America in the last ten years. He was so highly thought of that a squadron of British SAS paratroopers were embedded with him rather than the other way round. He’d been in the Torra Borra caves when Bin Ladin, an old school acquaintance, had ordered 9/11, and in the Pentagon when the Americans had planned how to make it work.

Despite this, Oakley was afflicted. The public misunderstood his fervour and brilliance for hard handed brutality. As Camus wrote, ‘No man is an island, except a really fat man swimming in the sea. He is an Island.’ Oakley had exema on his shins, and as a child had taken the appearance of a broiled ham, all raw and dry and chewy. In adulthood, only his legs were spoiled. Periodically they bled, lending him the appearance of a tampon thighed raggydoll.

Yesterday, after his big toe clicked, again, too loudly, Oakley had become sure he had some obscure bone wasting disease. He daren’t climb his stairs, lest he fall and land in a heap of bone and wasted talent. He’d called his whore of an ex-wife, a swollen sow who’d chosen prostitution - despite generous alimony checks - out of sheer oily lust. A leach, a monstrous skank, a woman who’d pulled more cock into her stinky, half rotted pissmouth, than Oakley had video casettes. And Oakley loved his video casettes.
He’d told her of his disease, that it was degenerative, that he’d die of it.. She’d told him to go whine to the Samaratins. He’d asked politely, rolling on the floor in a brave tolerance of the mighty agonies inflicted on his shins, if he could hold off taking care of his beloved daughter, Melanie, till this latest attack abated. Quick snap the bitch was in with, “Melanie is staying with you prag. I’ve plans cock sucker, I’m off to NY for a party at Le Trapeze, and you are going to pen the princess till I return.”
Oakley was incredibly cool, and handled the situation like a man.
“Listen, if you want some sixteen stone black to pound you in the ass with his forearm that’s fine, but if you think you’re going to bring up our angel, my sweet tiramasu, whom I love, who you’ve taken away from me, just so you can get your unmentionable holes filled with the septic semen of over sexed negros, you woke up on the wrong side of real, sister.”
At this, his ex wife burst into tears.
“Oh Oakley, you’re right. I’m so sorry. I was wrong to leave. Selfish. I’m a whore and a slut. Why don’t we both look after Melanie this weekend. I can tend to your legs. We can snuggle up and act like this horrible mess, this temple to shit, of which I’m the sole architect, never happened. God I love you Oakley, you magnificent beautiful man.”
“No babe, that boat sailed long ago. Just take care of Melanie. And wear a rubber.”

So Oakley found himself reluctantly alone, one that he thought might have been spent in fancy museums and sunny ballparks teaching things to his adoring protégée. Instead he called his agent to ask if there were any stories worth chasing. Oakley was in such demand that his agent employed his own agent to filter all the chaff away, and a team of writers to researcher and file stories that would have merely distracted the great man.

Oakley’s be-freckled little freak of an agent piped up, voice high and effeminate, “Oakley, sir, there’s an offer from the Chinese government to take part in an involuntary abortion. They’ve tracked down the future mother of the Dali Lama’s reincarnation, and want the foetus killed live on national television for separatist decadence. Thailand have elected you prime minister in absentia and then seem to have overthrown you in a bloodless coup d’etat, and now want you to do a documentary about it, and then put you trial for corruption. The Swiss Peoples Party have offered you a permanent position as minister of sublime truth, after the success of those election adverts you did.”

Oakey smiled and shook his head, the NATO radar beeping alarmingly. The Swiss had the right idea, but he could never serve any country other than the homeland. He looked out to the star spangled banner that screamed America to the breeze beyond the window of his white Colonial-style mansion.
“Enough of this politics bullshit, anything else or do you want to fire yourself?”
“There’s another plea from you ex-wife to take her back, and…”
“Already?”
“Yes, and well, there’s some passes from a small but controversial rock group for their LA tour.” The agent coughed, “Maybe you should think about the China story. People eat that gook shit up. You’re almost guaranteed another Pulitzer”
“Fuck off”.

Oakley ran a hand through his hair, carefully avoiding the tiny dish; and decided on the rock band. It was here in LA. If they weren’t outrageous enough then fuck them, they would be by the time Oakley had finished. Thalidomide Orgy sounded banal enough on their MySpace, pretentious cunts. Well he had a weekend to kill, so long as his crumbling bones lasted the gig.

Hours later Oakley strode manfully into his home. There was a story here. He sat down on his custom Eames chair, and rested his feet on the Ottoman that accompanied it. His black t-shirt, a signed original crew tee from Dire Straits ninteen eight five Brothers in Arms tour, he’d bought at Sotheby’s a few years back, so encrusted with sweat, his own and others, that in places dry white salt crystals had formed. Over it, his khaki vest, his trade mark apparel, full of used photographic film, scraps of paper and ladies undergarments; as many of which had been cast in his direction as at the band. He always wore his reporters vest. It held vital things, like emergency flares, notebooks, pens, a pocket PC, his camera, an air canister for inflating it as a life vest, a Zyklon B gas canister for clearing crowds, and a small smint dispenser. It was bullet proof, flame proof and a fucking chick magnet. It was everything he needed to be at the centre of the action. The John Rocha designed khaki and paisley palette brought out the blue of his eyes and the blonde of his hair.

The gig had been held in one of those enclosed pockets of green which city people imagine resemble nature. Maybe twelve thousand people were there, crowded hard against the pitch black stage. As a cliché, Hells Angles provided the security. Burly hairy losers on dirty fat motorcycles kept the crowd pushed up. The music was loud if unoriginal. The band looked like generic freaks, all leather and animal skins. They played as if they hated the crowd, all crowing and swearing, their lyrics dull attempts at controversy.

It had got interesting for Oakley’s about half way through when the angels had attacked on mass, not the hells angels, but the actual angels of our lord Jesus Christ, outraged by the blasphemy. They rode their brutal black motorcycles directly into the crowd, chains and bats and machetes swinging. They were drugged out of their minds, all bloodshot like the Viking berserkers they resembled.

Instead of stopping the gig or begging the Angels to desist their savagery, ‘Orgy’ had played louder and faster, yelling encouragement, before finally the lead singer, half fellating a skull mike, ordered them to dismount and back off. The angels obeyed immediately, and moved back to encircle the crowd, now bloodied and terrified. Oakley had seen that look before; on the faces of eight thousand men and boys at Srebrenica just before the shooting started. They knew what was coming. They surged toward the stage to flee in the only direction possible. The tall blonde singer reached out a hand to help a pregnant lady. Then laughing, cut her down. The angels stampeded in on foot. Oakley, safe in his press box, considered it the best gig he’d ever seen. He’d even bought the CD.