Joe Coffin Season One by Ken Preston

Author:Ken Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

the cat's whiskers

Coffin woke up with hot spikes drilling into his brain, his mouth sticky, his tongue thick and covered with fur. His face and chest still throbbed from where Shaddock had closed up his open wounds last night. He considered sitting up, but the hot spikes drilled deeper, and into his eyeballs, at the thought of even trying. The room decor didn’t help with his hangover one bit, all reds and purples, hanging drapes and expansive, tastefully pornographic prints decorating the walls.

And then there was the bed.

Oh God, the bed.

Coffin lay on a massive water bed. Every movement he made, no matter how small, set the bed’s surface undulating. Coffin had never been to sea, never even set foot on a boat moored in a harbour, but now he knew what seasickness felt like.

Water, that was all he wanted right now. A cool, clear glass of water.

Twisting his head, very slowly and carefully, Coffin spotted a glass and a pitcher of water on the bedside table. Somebody was looking after him. But it all seemed an impossible distance away. Even with his long arms, Coffin couldn’t see how he could possibly reach the glass, and the pitcher of water. And the thought of twisting onto his side, with all the rolling and heaving that that would set off in the mattress, started a sickening churning in the pit of his stomach.

Coffin closed his eyes.

How much whisky had he drunk last night?

He seemed to recollect Craggs opening another one of his aged whiskies, whilst Shaddock sutured Coffin’s wounds, which had opened up when Tom almost ran him over. When the repair job was finished, the three men had sat in Craggs’ office, talking, bullshitting each other, the two older men reminiscing over shared history. How Shaddock had been part of the Slaughterhouse Mob from the beginning.

Coffin had doubled up with laughter when he found out that Shaddock wasn’t a real doctor.

“Not a single fucking qualification to my name,” he gasped, between fits of laughter, and wreathed in cigarette smoke.

“It’s fucking true!” Craggs shouted, tears rolling down his face.

“And you let him sew me up?” Coffin said and cracked up again.

“And that Clevon kid,” Shaddock said. “He told me to wash my fucking hands, and so I asked him where his medical qualification was.” He paused, steeling himself to deliver the punchline. “I’m just fucking glad he didn’t ask me for mine!”

And they all collapsed into laughter again, Coffin gripping the sides of his chair.

Coffin vaguely remembered trying to go home, back to the flat over the Blockade, in the early hours of the morning. But Craggs wouldn’t let Coffin leave the club, said the police were looking for him, said the fucking rozzers had most likely staked his flat out, and that he should stay here the night.

“Besides,” he said, “look at the fucking state of you. You’re pissed.”

And so Coffin had wound up staying the night at Angels, in one of the Fuck Rooms, as Craggs liked to call them.

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