Read by Ray Newe
To reach me in my drunken slumber, Chisel’s cries for help had to cut their way through a beautiful dream I’d been having.
A dream, funnily enough, about Chisel in trouble.
He might have been drowning. Or dangling from a cliff-edge over croc-infested waters. Or dragged by his Chelsea scarf into the jaws of an industrial wood-chipper. Whatever the details, I had a hard time convincing myself to wake up and help him.
I sat upright in my pyjamas, my mind grabbing at wisps of the evaporating dream. There was a bowl of fruit on the console table, a gift from our Airbnb hostess. The sight of those asphyxiating bananas turned my stomach even more. I threw my boxers to cover them up.
“Heeelp! Eaaaargh! Heeeelp!”
“Chisel?”
“Get me out!
“Out of where?”
“I don’t know!”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Aaaaaaaaah! Awwww, fuck!”
“Keep screaming!” I called. “I’ll find you!”
The last time I remembered seeing him was around 3am, when the four of us, minus Magnet, had piled in from the nightclub, hammered to fuckery and beyond. Muesli had stormed off to his room, Queequeg in hot pursuit to try and calm him down. Chisel made a beeline for his booze stash. He lobbed a can at me, a little harder than was necessary, and plonked himself down in a chair with a hiss of the fingers.
I nodded towards Muesli’s room.
“That wasn’t very nice.”
“Fuck him,” Chisel spat between gulps. “This is our Gentlemen’s Retreat! Our yearly ritual. A sacred tradition.He knows it’s sacrilege to quiche out like that. You don’t fuck with tradition, right? You don’t fuck with friendship.”
I thought about what he’d done to Muesli in the pub, and knew I ought to say something meaningful about fucking with friendship.
Instead, I just sipped my beer and shrugged.
“Shakespeare! I’m in here!”
“All right, hang on!”
There weren’t that many places to look. In the corner of our room, beneath a high, quaint Georgian window, was a pile of suitcases: rigid, vintage-style trunks with reinforced corners and impregnable locks, some small, some medium-sized and some ruddy humungous, probably bought as a job-lot at a bric-a-brac store. Our hostess had made them into a feature, piling them high in a rough pyramid like something you’d see on a platform in the Golden Age of Steam. I rather liked it.
“Shakespeare? Shakespeeeeeeeeeare!”
“Yep! Think I’ve found you! Hang on.”
There was no doubt about it. He was somewhere in that pile, maybe even in one of the cases. I started flinging the smaller ones aside. Even empty, they were heavy. I could hear movement in the adjacent room, Muesli or Queequeg staggering about, scraping chairs and slamming doors. I heaved aside larger cases, wondering how any could be big enough to hold the hulking bastard. I hadn’t even begun to ask how he’d got himself in there in the first place. All the while, Chisel’s cries got louder. Soon, the carpet behind me was a jumble of weather-stressed luggage. At the bottom of the heap I finally found it: a case the size of a small chest of drawers, its hickory-hard exterior glossy with age, a pennant-shaped sticker for the 1906 St Louis World’s Fair plastered across the top. The case seemed to pulse and shake, as if something inside were panicking. It was massive, yes, but Chisel would still be folded like a parachute, with barely room to draw breath, let alone scratch those hard-to-reach bits. I pictured his big bald head, his fleshy features, curled and helpless like a forty-year-old foetus that had never breached.
“Chiz! Chiz, are you in there?”
The case began, ever so slightly, to jump.
“Fuck! Fuuuck! GET ME OUT GET ME OUT GET ME OUT!”
“How’d you get in there?”
He started bellowing louder. The suitcase shuffled a full half-centimetre towards me. I tried flipping the catches, but neither would budge. Not rusted. Locked.
“Okay mate, I’m on it! Er…”
“Jesus mate, what the fuck…?” Queequeg was standing in the doorway, light from the hall bouncing off his tattoo-riddled torso.
“Are you responsible for this?” I demanded.
“Responsible for what?”
“Someone locked Chisel in a fucking suitcase!”
“Who did?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Locked?” shrieked Chisel through the leather. “What do you mean, locked?”
Queequeg and I shared a look.
Muesli.
But… No.
We shook our heads in unison.
“Where’s Magnet?” asked Queequeg.
“Pulled last night, didn’t he?”
“Jesus, what a twat,” said Queequeg. His eyes narrowed. “So… when did this happen?”
“I don’t know. Sometime in the night, I suppose.”
“What? In here, without you noticing a thing?
“That’s right, Fuckstick. Without me noticing a thing. I was shitfaced, remember? We all were.”
“Okay. Sorry.” He sighed. “How are we going to get him out?”
“Dunno. Can’t find a key. That leather’s like rhino hide.”
Wait for it.
Wait for it…
“Don’t worry,” said Queequeg. “I’ll get my multi-tool,”
“Yeh, you get your multi-tool.”
He ran off like a happy pup. I put on my trousers and went in search of Muesli, wondering whether Chisel might actually have locked himself inside the suitcase, just to give Queequeg an excuse to use his precious multi-tool.
Like he’s that good a mate.
In the kitchen, Muesli was already dressed, sitting Pilates-straight at the kitchen table, tucking into his namesake. He has this way of pivoting the spoon, slender wrists gliding the silver towards his mouth like a shuttle docking at a space-station. He’s the only one of us with a full head of hair. Not one of them is grey.
“You’ve got to see this,” I said.
When we got to the bedroom Queequeg had already harpooned himself several times in the hand, each with a different blade, and Chisel was still in his case. The look on Muesli’s face suggested total surprise. Was he even even physically capable of stitching up a deadweight Chisel? Possibly, if he was angry enough. And he had been. But it’s hardly how primary school teachers are supposed to behave.
Queequeg held up a blood-smeared spike of metal. “I made him a breathing hole.”
From inside the case came a noise like seawater being sucked through a cave. We looked at each other with puffy eyes, heads fuzzed with booze and genuine confusion. The evening had escaped from me shortly after sitting down with Chisel. I couldn’t remember going to bed. Queequeg and Muesli had probably carried on drinking, side-by-side in their twin cots, before passing out.
Surely none of us were capable of this?
And yet any one of us could have done it.
The only one in the clear was Magnet.
“Listen,” I whispered to them, “don’t take this the wrong way, but why don’t we just… check our trousers? You know, to be on the safe side?”
Neither protested. We each turned our pockets out and left them hanging there like elephants' ears, as limp proof of our innocence.
The front door opened and Magnet breezed in, smiling like he’d just had a spa treatment.
“Morning chaps!”
“Hello Magnet. Spoken to Lucy this morning?”
He looked at me as if I’d slapped him. “Hey, what happens in Leamington Spa stays in Leamington Spa, right?”
“You’re a twat,” I told him.
He looked away and nodded, with genuine remorse.
To cheer him up, Muesli told him about Chiz.
“So what now, Shakespeare?” said Queequeg.
“Get a locksmith pronto. Maybe the fire brigade.”
“We’ll miss our train.”
“Yeh,” said Magnet, “and the thing is, Lucy will rather hurt if I’m late for this do at her parents’.”
From inside the case came a high-pitched cackle.
We dragged it out onto the landing and down a few stairs. Every jolt made Chisel shriek. In the end we stood aside and Muesli rode the case to the bottom in a single, smooth run. Outside it took me, Magnet and the cab-driver to lift Chisel into the boot. At the station we learned our train was delayed by thirty-nine minutes, so we found a nearby pub for some hair of the dog.
“What do you want, Chiz?” Queequeg asked the case.
His answer was a throttled gargle.
“Think he said a Pina Colada,” said Muesli.
Queequeg returned with four beers and a Pina Colada, which he poured straight into Chiz’s breathing hole.
We stared out of the window at the world going by.
“I like Leamington Spa,” said Magnet.
I thought of the text Chisel had sent me when I’d confirmed the deal on Travelzoo.
U r a fuckwit. Lem Spa a shitehole. No nitelife. Spaz.
I thought of Magnet’s stag-do five years before. It’d been old-school, taking place just a few days before the wedding. I remembered Chisel’s insistence that Magnet bandage his head and put both arms in plaster to visit Lucy afterwards, and how Magnet really didn’t want to. Chiz had shouted and hectored till he caved in and let Chiz truss him up in gauze and smear him in ketchup. Lucy had taken one look, then gone and slashed her wedding dress to ribbons.
But last night, when Muesli’d refused to drink that seventh pint all Chiz’s endless, familiar bullying had proved fruitless. So he'd skulked off to the bar, getting deep in conversation with a group of unpleasant-looking guys. Some time later, he'd reappeared at the head of this band of mercenaries, who pinned Muesli down so that Chisel could straddle his chest and force a pint of something toxic down his throat. Meanwhile Magnet, Queequeg and I had stood remonstrating weakly like the pussies we were.
On the train back to London we parked the case in the aisle, bought some cans from the buffet and treated Chisel to several more drinks through his air-hole. The bottom of the case looked darker now, and softer. None of us wanted to touch it. Occasionally I caught new, urinous whiffs from the leather. I even thought I heard Chisel singing, though I couldn’t really be sure.
Getting out at Marylebone, the trunk felt twice as heavy. We could barely budge it between us.
“Who’s going to take him home?” asked Queequeg.
Magnet tapped his watch. “I’m already late.”
“Me too,” said Muesli.
“I really don’t fancy explaining this to Ronnie,” said Queequeg.
I thought of Veronica, Chisel’s girlfriend of eighteen months: beautiful, strong, no-nonsense and inexplicably crazy about him. I thought how much we all secretly fancied her, and wondered what she saw in the guy.
I pictured my wife and son, waiting for me at home.
“Well,” I said, “there’s always Left Luggage.”
The lady at the counter flared her nostrils at the sagging, festering trunk we’d brought and summoned a guy to take it away on a barrow.
I handed the ticket to Magnet.
“It’s on your way home. If you won’t lug him, at least drop this off with Ronnie. Probably best he doesn’t spend another night in there…”
“What will I tell her?”
“You’re the one who knows how to talk to women. Bloody think of something.”
He gulped and nodded.
I knew exactly what he’d do. Wrap it in a note, post it, ring the bell and run away. Like a child. Which is what we all were.
“Thanks for a cracking weekend, chaps,” said Queequeg as we parted on the pavement.
“Who’s organising next year’s?”
“Chisel’s turn, I reckon.”
“I second that.”
“I’ll drop him an email,” I said.
We shook hands and went our separate ways.
(c) Jim Cogan, 2015
As a freelance copywriter and corporate filmmaker, Jim Cogan grapples on a daily basis with the big themes: global skincare trends, potato cultivation in Essex, mailroom technology and risk mitigation policy in local government. He is also the go-to guy for making asset management software sound sexy.
Ray Newe (left) appeared at the National Theatre in The Enchantment, directed by Paul Miller. Other work includes Breezeblock Park at the Liverpool Playhouse and Blackmusicab at the Lyric, Hammersmith. TV
includes Murphy's Law, Eyes Down & Brookside. He appeared in Here Come The Rattling Trees, a musical about Peckham, at Tristan Bates Theatre in 2014.
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