Jack Horner

“Why’d you want to know about yourself?”  As I’d hoped, the kid wasn’t thinking fast enough to spot that I’d been asking for own name a minute ago.

“I’m that paranoid,” I said.  It was the truth as well.  In my line of work it doesn’t take you very long to start feeling like there isn’t anywhere that isn’t under surveillance.  It doesn’t help that Mad Frankie and his Anger Management has paid-for access to all of the police CCTV cameras either; between that and his network of informers a man can’t piss up against a doorway without Mad Frankie knowing and sending you the bill for having it cleaned again.  I know; I have six from him.  One of which complains that I managed to give the door dutch elm disease, which I’d contest if there was a court that would hear the case.

“Hah, that’s just healthy in this town,” said the kid sounding twenty years older again.  “Well mister, I can tell you that you come in here every Thursday looking right different to how you look now, and you order a plum pie from us, with six plums.  Fancy one now?”

I shook my head, and waited for him to continue.  He didn’t, so I had to speak again.  “What else?  What’s my name?  How do I pay?  When was the last time I stiffed you?  How often do I sleep with your aunt?”

He looked a little taken-aback by the staccato questions rattled at him like machine-gun fire, and indeed he even took a step backwards.  Over in the corner the aunt knocked over a tub of ketchup which started to very slowly ooze from captivity.  She righted it before it got within an inch of the lip and wiped the table anyway.

“You’re Jack Horner,” he said.  “You sit in the corner eating your pie, and you mostly do it by sticking your thumb in, pulling out a plum, and making a song and dance about being a good boy.  Frankly mister, you’re weird, but you always pay up front so it kind of makes it hard to throw you out.  And if you’ve slept with my aunt mister, then it’s a bit weirder still that you keep trying it on with me.”  He was a little red-faced by the end, but a long way away from anything I’d call attractive.

“How many thumbs have I got?” I said.  It was a strange question but the vague description of Jack Horner was ringing bells in my head; tiny little silver bells like a carillon in a morose major key.

“Count ‘em for yourself, mister,” said the boy.  “Do you reckon you’ll come up surprised?”

“I think you might,” I said.  “I’ve got three, haven’t I?”

He looked at the counter, and his gaze didn’t move for a moment.  I wondered what he was thinking, and then, too late, realised that my hands were both resting on the counter.

“Not at the moment,” he said.  “Which is another weird thing mister.  I don’t think you’re who you’re claiming to be, so either you buy a pie and eat it, or you get out.”

“I’ll take the plum pie,” I said.  “Six plums.”

I sat down at an empty table, though they were all empty so it gave me an unaccustomed choice.  I sat as far away from the aunt as I could get and twiddled my thumbs.  The only man I know who’s got three thumbs and is so proud of it that he won’t shut up about it is Jack Crown.  He had a girlfriend for a while, a girl called Jill Hill, and then he lost his job after an accident he won’t talk about and needed alternative work.  He found it, but he’s secretive about it, and he’s a hard man to track down if he owes you anything.  He owes me a bucket and some brown paper, so maybe that’s why I’d not seen him in an age and a half.  But then there were the rumours that he’d found work for Natasha Monkeybutt, so maybe I wasn’t seeing him because he didn’t want me to.  Monkeybutt wouldn’t be above setting a tail on me and thinking she could get away with it.

“There you go mister not-Jack,” said the boy slamming a small pie down on the table.  The crust jumped slightly from the force, and when it settled back I could see the first plum glistening between the crust and the side of the dish.  I slipped my thumb in and pulled it out.

“What type of plum?” I asked.  “Victoria?”

The kid gave me an old stare and, turning away, said, “I think you mean Whose plum, mister.”

I was starving.  I ate it anyway.  I even paid him afterwards.

The Corner Pie House

“Do they know him in there?” I asked, thinking that a plum pie wasn’t all that much to go on.

“Yes,” she said, her lips twisting thinly in an approximation of a smile that only a physicist could accept.  “He’s the guy who buys their plum pies.”

I left Mother Hubbard to her heeling, which neither Damned Simon or the little ferrety man looked much enthusiastic about, and walked back into the main bar of the Cow and Spoon.  Tom was still waving his pint glass of slops at me like he thought I’d come to heel if he tried it for long enough, so I walked over to the bar and just stood there.  About fifteen seconds later he recoiled, dropping the pint glass on the black rubber mats that covered the floor behind the bar.

“Jesus Mac!  What have you been rolling around in this time?”  He was coughing and tears were running from his eyes.  I watched his enviously for a moment – Mad Frankie had my tear ducts cauterised a few years back as the easiest way to not have to see a grown man cry – and then I told him.

“Holy….  They’re still running the Blue Swan?  I thought that got closed down after it got flooded.”

“Nah,” I said, remembering the first couple of days after the flood when you had to wade through waist-deep water to get to the bar and push the occasional dying swimmer out of the way.  “It’s still going.  It’s a bit drier than it was of course.  And I bumped into Jackie outside, though she’s calling herself something else now.”

“Mad Jackie?  Jackie “they’ll steal your prayers” Jackie?  I heard she was a bit of a looker in her day.”

“Depends on where you were looking, I guess,” I said.  I could remember Jackie back when she started, a chubby girl with a big smile, frightened eyes and rat-tailed hair.  The smile disappeared with her first scar, a beauty that ran from her collar-bone to her hip that she eventually got covered up with a tattoo of a shopping trolley.  The weight just disappeared; it’s hard not to be hungry in her line of work, whether it’s aspirational hunger or just plain starvation.  The hair was now hidden under her tin-foil rollers I supposed, but I doubted that it had changed all that much.

“I’d have done her,” said Tom, going a little dreamy-eyed on me.  I snorted, and he blinked, took a step backward, trod on the fallen pint-glass and went arse-over-tit onto the floor.  He groaned, the patrons took a moment out from beating up the poor wretch now curled up foetally on the pool-table to laugh, and I left with someone else’s bottle of WKD.

The drink tasted like bubble-gum but I knocked it back anyway for the sugar.  It seemed like a long time since I’d last eaten as well, and the memory of Miss Sapphire’s pasta was starting to seem more edible by the minute.  I spat the dregs out into the gutter and abandoned the bottle, and then strolled down the street towards the Corner Pie House.  Mother Hubbard had nothing against me at the moment – nothing more than the general animosity I generate from everyone – so I was only watching the street like a paranoiac, checking the shadows, anything that moved, most things that didn’t.  Nothing seemed too unusual, and when I stopped at the Pie House it seemed like the kind of place I wouldn’t get kicked straight out of.  There was no doorman, and the shop was in a building that looked like it had been a chemicals warehouse once.  I racked my brains, trying to remember what this part of the city had looked like fifteen years ago but all that came to mind was a nightclub that had its own abortionist on the premises.

Inside it smelled like an abattoir and I had another flashback to the nightclub abortionist.  There were lots of scrubbed wooden tables with four chairs arranged at each as you’d expect.  They were laid out in a rectangular pattern like a child-labour sweat shop, and against the left-hand side of the shop was the counter where you ordered your pies and got served.  A blackboard on the wall behind it listed the pies and sides that were available and their prices, all of which struck me as rather more reasonable than I was expecting.  A woman wearing a maternity dress and an ivory apron was stood at the counter watching me with little piggy eyes and a nose so smashed it might well have been a snout.

“Yers?” she said, her words slurred and only one side of her mouth working.

“Plum Pie,” I said.  There were no customers in here yet, so I’d have to ask about Jack Horner and find out when he was likely to be in.

“Yers,” she said.  “‘Ow many plumsh der yet want?”

“No,” I said getting close enough to the counter for my stench to repel her.  She stayed put, and didn’t even look like she’d smelled me.  “No, you’ve got a customer who buys your plum pies.  I want to meet him.”

“‘Ow many plumsh der yet want?”

“I want to know who buys your plum pies.”

“I’ll give yer six.”

“I’m not paying.”  That was enough to break her chain of thought (a very small, circular chain that clearly went round and round a lot without ever stopping) and her eyes lit up like little furnaces and she huffed and snorted through her mashed-up nose.

“Rowghghghghg!”

For a moment I thought she was going to charge at me like an enraged wild boar, and I instinctively checked her for tusks, hooves, sharp teeth and anything else that might cause injury.  But she didn’t move, and my body stepped down from Defcon I and went back to aching painfully.  I watched her still, wondering what she’d do next, but then a young boy appeared through a curtained doorway behind her, took in the scene, and walked steadily over to us.

“Are you upsetting my aunt, Mister?” he said.  He couldn’t have been older than twelve, and given how thin he was he clearly wasn’t eating any of the pies.  His eyes were grey and slightly misty, and I suspected he had the onset of cataracts.

“She’s upsetting me,” I said.  “I thought she was going to try and eat me a moment ago.”

“What do you want?”  He sounded like a man twenty years older.

“I want to know who buys your plum pies.”

“Customers, Mister.  We don’t do wholesale.”  His aunt growled to herself again and lumbered off along the counter to pick up a dirty cloth and start rubbing the tables down with it.

“You’ve got a man who comes in on Thursdays just for the plum pies.  I want to know who he is.”

“Sounds like nothing I’d know about, Mister.  That’s gotta be covered by the Data Protection Act.”

I eyed him up again, noticing that it took him a couple of seconds to realise what I was doing and start eyeballing me back.

“I come in on Thursdays and order a plum pie,” I said.  “I’d like to see the data you keep on me.”

Mother Hubbard

She was no-one’s mother.  She said that she’d never had the maternal instinct, that when she was a little girl she’d preferred to drown her dolls than look after them.  She said that her sisters would find their dolls all wrapped up tight in swaddling cloths, heavy fabric pressed down heavily over china noses and mouths.  She said that she was allergic to child-spit, that the sound of childish laughter made her skin crawl and that even the sight of a child was enough to make her break out in hives.

Mad Frankie had let it be known that she was nobody’s mother because she’d tried stiffing him some of the take when she was one of his girls and he’d had her spayed as a punishment.  There were people who’d claimed to have seen the scars as well.

There was a place where, if you knew where to go, what the right time was, and who to ask, a man with a glass eye and breath like a gasworks would tell you that she was nobody’s mother because she’d had a lover who’d left her to do a job and had never returned.  He would tell you that she’d sworn never to sleep with another man again so that she couldn’t be hurt any more.  Then you’d probably pass out from his breath, and when you woke up you’d find your pockets lighter by the wallet-load and your clothes sold to the charity shops where charity was something definitely only practised at home.  Which is not to say a determined man couldn’t get them back, but you had to be willing to threaten elderly women with artificial limbs.  And no, I won’t explain how you’re intended to parse that sentence.

And then there were the hospital records that most everyone thought had been incinerated in a fire twenty years ago.  They made for some very interesting reading indeed.

But no matter what you chose to believe, everyone called her Mother Hubbard, and no-one ever asked her either to go to her cupboard or if her poor doggie had a bone.  Her poor doggie was actually a pack of seventeen armoured chihuahuas, and while that may not sound very scary you’ve not been pursued by them late at night, knowing that they get through gaps much smaller than any you can, and that they’re effectively bullet-proof and psychotic.  To my credit, I did manage to get away, but I was a whole lot younger then, and Mother Hubbard’s been teaching them new tricks ever since.

I pushed open the door of the Cow and Spoon, and leaned cautiously round it.  The pub’s interior was dark and damp and smelled like a tramp’s armpit.  There were people stood around the bar, and someone was getting beaten up over the pool-table.  I heard the mutter of odds being called, the scrunch of money changing hands, and the pitiful wail of the victim as a pool-cue was jabbed somewhere painful.  The man behind the bar, Tom, looked at me with disdain and wrung the barmat into a pint-glass.

“The usual, Mac?” he called, setting the glass on the counter.  I shrugged, and stumbled inside.  They’d cleaned the floor and my shoes weren’t sticking as much as usual; I kept overcompensating for how hard I had to pull my feet up, and it meant I was walking like a clown.

“Mother Hubbard?” I said.  Tom pointed to the Saloon.

“Holding court,” he said.  She’s been there since eleven, so she’s gonna be packing up soon.  Not drinking, Mac?”  He waved the pint-glass of slops at me.

“Not right now,” I said, ignoring the growl of my stomach reminding me that I’d not been able to eat Miss Sapphire’s pasta either.  “I need to see a woman about a dog.”

“Har, har, har,” said Tom.  “You should tell her you said that.”  Somewhere beyond the Saloon door I heard an angry yip, the kind of bark a small dog makes to let you know that you’re making far too much of the size issue.

“Yeah, I will,” I said.  “Just as soon as she tells me who Jack Horner is.”

*

I opened the door to the Saloon and walked inside; there’s no point peering in at Mother Hubbard.  She’ll only send someone out to bring you back.  She was sat in the middle of a horseshoe of chairs, her back ramrod straight, wearing a hat covered with mouldy fruit.  Only two of the horseshoe of chairs were occupied.  I recognised Damned Simon, who was nursing a dislocated shoulder, and I didn’t recognise a little ferrety man who was clutching a miniature traffic cone to his chest like a nipple protector.  Mother Hubbard turned and looked at me as I came in.

“Don’t sit down, MacArthur,” she said.  “I’ll have to get them to wash the chairs then.  What do you want?”

I gestured to her audience.  “Looks like I’m not first,” I said.  “I can wait.”

“Yeah, sure you can.  Well both of these are calling for a personal touch,” she said, cracking her knuckles on the word personal.  “So I think I’ll get your little complaint dealt with first, and then I can start heeling.”  There was a lot of emphasis on that last word, and neither Damned Simon nor the ferrety man looked happy.

“Jack Horner,” I said.  She didn’t react.  “Jack Horner had hired me to do a little watching,” I said.  “Only there’s no cash up front, and you know how I feel about that.”

“You worried you might end up doing a good deed and get kicked out of Hell, Mac?”  She giggled like the little girl she hadn’t been for over fifty years.  “I reckon the inmates down there won’t let that happen to a nice guy like you!“

“I like to watch whoever’s promising me the cash,” I said.  “Call it paranoia if you must.”

“I call it business sense,” said Mother Hubbard, the mirth dying away.  “Doesn’t explain what you’re doing here interrupting my little judgements though.”

“I need to know where to find Mr. Horner,” I said.  “And his real name might be nice, too.”

“Names I ain’t got,” said Mother Hubbard.  Her voice was pitched slightly higher, slightly snappier.  She sounded a little bit aggrieved.  “All I’ve got for you is that he likes the Corner Pie House, especially on a  Thursday.”

“What’s so special about Thursday?”

“They serve plum pie.”

White-knuckled

I’ve gone through life white-knuckled and knock-kneed, and running away from the Blue Swan was no different.  Thankfully Jackie was still playing doggo and staying where I’d told her to, so I wasn’t pursued.  As I veered left at the T-junction I heaved a huge breath into my aching lungs and wondered when I be able to stop running away.  I didn’t think there was a whole lot of hope unless I’d finally broken my legs.  I took the next left, a quick right, and then fell against the first lighted doorway that I saw and only sobbed a little when it didn’t open for me.

No-one had followed me, it seemed.  I wheezed heavily, getting my breath back and feeling the aches and pains molest me like an eighties television presenter, but there were no running feet, no cries for people to stop me, and best of all, no sounds of gunshot or angry people hitting defenceless street furniture with heavy tools.  Eventually I pulled my legs in, listened to the cartilage in my knees crunch, and wondered what I was going to do next.  I was still looking for Boy Blue, if only to let him know that Natasha Monkeybutt was looking for him too, and I was kind of curious about whoever had redecorated his room with sheep’s blood.  I knew there were better things to do than get involved with any part of a case more than treating it as just a job: like Miss Sapphire had said, people tend to die around me and it’s better that I don’t let myself get attached.  I’ve watched kids get orphaned while I was on their case, and I’ve watched relationships fizzle and die just because I’ve been sat at a nearby table.  My record is emptying an entire restaurant on Valentine’s day, with all the men going one way and the women another.  It’s not a proud moment, but I ever write up a CV it’s going on there.

Then there was the Jack Horner angle.  There was a name I’d not come across before, and I thought I knew all the low-life in this city.  From what Miss Sapphire had been saying it sounded like it might be a pseudonym, which is a long word for a small-time crook.  And he had to be small time, or Mad Frankie would be putting me on his case in the hopes that he’d be the next victim of the MacArthur curse.  Or blessing, depending on who you asked.

The gentle patter of rain started, soot-laden droplets splashing down on the filthy, pot-holed streets and making me glad I was sat in a doorway.  I looked out across the street into the fading light of late-afternoon, and the door I was leaning against pushed out squashing me against the wall.

“Move it, you piece of crap,” snarled a woman with a red face like she’d been washing it in the floor-scrubbing bucket.  She was wearing a heavy woollen coat and carrying a handbag like a mattock.  She swung it at me to make her point, and I ducked, to avoid it.  “Get out of my bloody doorway,” she continued.  “It’s scum like you that make an honest woman like me afraid to walk the streets at night.  You disgust me, you tramp.”  Her handbag struck the wall with the clatter of cutlery and she didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.  I wriggled out from behind the door as she put her weight against it, and I just got out of the way in time.  The door struck the wall and the glass in the top quivered with the impact.

“Now look what you’ve made me do, wretch,” she said.  Little flecks of white spittle flew out of her mouth, and I flinched away.  I have a mild germophobia about other people, which my doctor says he can’t understand given where I seem to spend most of my time.  Then he orders me out of his office before he autoclaves me, which is a threat I know he’d like to make good on.

“Harridan,” I said, racking my brains as to why she looked familiar.

“Hah!  Big words.  What a shame your wallet can’t match your mouth.”  Her words dripped with sarcasm the way a cobra’s fangs drip with venom and suddenly I knew who she was; the last time I’d seen her was a few years ago when she was still a stripper at Lucy Locket’s.  She’d been hanging upside down from a sequined pole wearing a g-string, high-heels and an ill-fitting wig that didn’t really hide either her dandruff or her cradle cap, glaring at me while I crawled under the seating pursuing the Legless Wonder.  She’d spat at me then too, and I’d thrown a handful of change at her.

“Belle Peep,” I said, my cough hacking its way through her surname and dragging it out for a whole six seconds.  She didn’t look happy that I knew it.

“The next show’s at nine,” she said.  “Pay on the door.”

I looked up: the doorway I was in was the side-door of the Municipal Library.  I don’t know if she saw my quizzical face (it’s a lot like my orgasm face, I’ve been told, which fact I ascribe to the infrequency of my orgasms) but she swung her bag at me again.  I dodged once more to the sound of crashing cutlery, and then she was past me, stalking off down the street like an old whore with too much pride to pick her breasts up off the floor and retire.

“Jack Horner,” I muttered under my breath, hoping it wouldn’t start my cough off again.  My doctor’s written on my records that he’s hoping its consumption and refusing to test me for it so as not to jinx things.  “I know how to find you.”