Every Wednesday Fortnight

By Dave Jeanes

Every Wednesday Fortnight is a story of love, lust and love; in that order.
It is a story about business. About what happens when supply outstrips demand. And vice-versa.
A story of the importance we place on valued things in a day and age when everything should be obvious. And explainable…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326816216

Book preview

Every Wednesday Fortnight

EVERY WEDNESDAY FORTNIGHT

Written by DAVE JEANES

Bristol, England. 2016

1. BEFOREHAND

2. WEDNESDAY

3. MY DAD’S BIGGER THAN YOUR DAD

4. ONWARDS

5. THURSDAY

6. FRIDAY

7. SATURDAY

8. SUNDAY

9. MONDAY

10. TUESDAY

11. WEDNESDAY

12. THURSDAY

13.UPWARDS

14. FRIDAY

15. SATURDAY

16. SUNDAY

17. MONDAY

18. TUESDAY

19. WEDNESDAY FORTNIGHT

20. AFTERWARDS

1.BEFOREHAND

The house stood at the centre of a long, sweeping Georgian crescent. Originally built by the grateful merchants of the city for the officers returning from the Napoleonic wars, the architects of the day had spared no expense: Endless blocks of sandstone had been hewn and hauled from the quarries to the south and west until the new buildings dominated the skyline; a new face on the horizon. The building work; a craft back then, carried out by skilled artisans, was hailed as a triumph. Finally completed, the crescent was reputed to be the longest of its kind in the whole of Europe. From wrought iron railings to French-shuttered windows that looked out over the city to the distant Mendip hills, the whole place spoke of an age long since passed.

Now, a hundred years later, in the early afternoon of a late autumn day, the peeling paintwork and crumbling facades told their own stories of property speculation, negative equity and eventual neglect. Back in the nineteen-eighties, when greed had been good, the faded frontages had been cheered slightly by the portfolios of shrewd yuppies. In the nineties, as the economy boomed and then bust, the houses had been mostly divided up into flats.

Roger Sweetman studied the piece of paper in his hand and checked the number. He looked up at the house. It differed from all the others in one important aspect; there was a motorbike on the balcony.

Maurice opened the door to the kitchen and waved Roger through.

'Now you're here there's four of us again so every three days it'll be your turn to cook the evening meal. Nothing too grand, - bangers and mash, egg and chips, whatever you like. My own specialty is, Spaghetti a la Maurice.' He tapped the side of his nose with a finger. 'Secret sauce recipe, handed down from my Grandmother. One clue? There's a hell of a lot of red wine in it.'

He was a huge, enjoyable man; confident and happy. Relaxed in a pin-striped waistcoat and trousers, his shoes polished civil-servant clean, he gave off an air of achievement; of success.

The kitchen was large; the engine room of the house. Plain, whitewashed walls above a dado of Regency striped, washable wallpaper; alternately a thick maroon, a fat Prussian blue and a thin gold. The shelving and woodwork picked out in a sunburst orange which matched the hanging saucepans. The back door was wide open and gave on to a walkway leading to metal stairs down to the garden.

Squarely against the centre of the far wall sat an Aga cooker, ancient yet immaculately clean in gleaming black and stainless steel. It dominated the room, giving off constant heat, - hence the open door. It also powered the house's central heating system.

'Washing machine for washing, combined fridge-freezer for keeping things cold and freezing. Cooker, for cooking on, speaks for itself. Sink, in front of the window so you can look out while you're washing up. Um, what else is there? Table for eating off, chairs for sitting on. Vincent...'  

Vincent sat at the table reading a newspaper. He was in his mid-twenties and some years younger than Maurice. A big, muscular man. He was dressed casually in jeans and a, Friends of the Earth T-shirt. Lions and tigers, badgers and bears competed for attention on his chest in a jungle riot of primary colours. He contrived a slightly scruffy appearance, incongruous against the brightly polished utensils and brilliantly-coloured pots and pans ranged carefully and neatly behind him. His hair was just longer than average and untidy; as though he combed it with his fingers. He looked up at Roger and met his gaze with brown, friendly eyes. Maurice introduced them properly.

'Vincent, this is Roger. Roger, Vincent. Roger's the one who 'phoned about the room this morning.'

Vincent nodded. 'Welcome.' he said.

From the end of the hall came the sound of the front door slamming. A muttered curse at the weather as a coat was removed and hung on a peg. A glad-to-be-home sigh. Footsteps approached, echoing down the hallway.

'Ah! What perfect timing,' said Maurice. 'Roger, allow me to introduce the final member of the household.'

Roger turned around and fell deeply in love.

Frank Pledge stood at the window of his second-floor office and looked down at the city below.

'The arrogant youths with their designer-defiance, the old people at sixties and seventies. The rain washing the flotsam and jetsam of urban life from the pavement to the gutter as though from the cradle to the grave...'

He stopped the Dictaphone. Wait a minute though... Pavements? That wasn't right. Mickey Spillane would never say, Pavements. What was it that Americans called them? He thought for a moment.

Sidewalks. That was it.

'The rain washing the flotsam and jetsam from the sidewalks to the gutter...'

He paused again. Hadn't his daughter got a book about Flotsam and Jetsam? Two fluffy bunnies? Flotsam and Jetsam go to the seaside. He seemed to remember something like that. He looked at his clock and put the machine away in his desk. It would have to wait.

His intercom buzzed.

'Your eleven o'clock, Mr. Pledge.'

'Thank you, Mrs. Fisher. Send them in please.'

He always said, Them. He didn't know why. Probably part of his training, he supposed. It was the way he had been programmed to behave. Like everything else in his life, he truly believed he'd had no say in the matter. The pattern of his life had been mapped out for him long before he'd been old enough to have any opinions on it for himself. From an inauspicious 2.2 at Reading University, he'd walked straight into a job at the bank; his mother's influence, he had no doubt, although she had always denied it.

He'd got his feet under the table, learned the ropes, climbed the company ladder. He was married by the time he was twenty-eight and had a daughter the following year.

Time flies.

He spent the next five years generally keeping out of the way and falling over pushchairs and prams while his wife conducted the secretive and complicated process of bringing up a child. Only lately had she let him become involved. The last twelve months he'd spent a lifetime of evenings listening to his daughter wrestling in vain with recorder, violin and flute in an attempt to get a tune out of one or the other. She was not a musical child. Frank’s own formative years had been spent diligently listening to all manners and forms of classical music. Enough to know one tune from another. Enough to know too, that if you don’t have an aptitude for musical endeavours, you may as well do something else instead. His daughter wandered away.

And that was that. His life seemed to be over. Suddenly he was thirty-five. Thirty-five! With the chasm of eternity yawning beneath him. What had he done with his life? Where had it all gone? How much of it was left?

Then, right on cue, as if sent by Providence, one hot July morning, into his office had walked Andrea Reinbeau. Young. Sexy. Beautiful. She said she had a proposition for him.

'It's quite simple. I want you to transfer six thousand pounds into my account every month.'

'I see,' he said, although he didn't. 'From where?'

She shrugged. 'I don't care.'

Frank was confused. 'I don't quite understand, er...'

She shook her head. 'I haven't explained it very well, have I?' She stood up. 'It's Frank, isn't it?'

'That's right. How did you...'

'It doesn't matter. Look at me, Frank.' He already was. She was wearing a mid-length cotton dress of cornflower blue, her hair tied back with a matching ribbon. She put her hands on his desk, her wrists turned towards him, and leaned forward, causing the thin right strap of the dress to slip down over her shoulder. 'If you do this for me, then every Wednesday fortnight, at about this time, I will come into your office and take off all my clothes for you. How about that? Can you imagine what I look like naked, Frank? You don't have to. Every Wednesday fortnight, you can look all you want. Is it a deal?'

He gulped like a fish on a hook. 'You're crazy,' he said. 'Six thousand pounds every month? Where would I get that kind of money?'

She looked around her. 'This is a bank, isn't it? You'll think of something... Or I could look for another bank manager?'

He shook his head. 'No, no. I'll think of something. But, you'll have to give me some time.'

'I'll see you in a fortnight.'

As it turned out, it hadn't been too difficult. Using the bank's customer database, he identified two hundred larger Companies and added a monthly administration charge of thirty pounds to their accounts. Most of them were unlikely to spot the amount until the end of their financial year anyway and even then, he could simply say it had been a computer error, - business people hated computers. Mention of a C drive had them rushing to their cars with ideas about trips to the beach. And even at Head Office, most of the staff couldn't tell the difference between email and air miles.

He transferred the six thousand pounds into Andrea's account, again by computer. He doubted it was even embezzlement. They would have a job proving anything. He would just say that he must have misunderstood the program or pressed the wrong key. Ignorance of the internal workings of computers was not a crime...

Many, many times he had asked himself just what the hell he thought he was doing but the thought of her, naked in his office, kept coming back to him. He told himself that he deserved this, - it was the only break he'd ever had in his life. And who knew where it would lead? He was excited for the first time in years and he liked the feeling.

Two weeks later she made an eleven o'clock appointment with his secretary. He was at his desk at nine. To while away the time, he keyed in her account number and pressed [Enter]. The hard disk whirred quietly in muted protest at this treachery towards its owner. He looked up her recent transactions. She had already taken two hundred pounds from a nearby ATM that morning; at five minutes past midnight. Just checking. Well, he'd done his bit...

The rest of the morning he sat at his desk, unable to concentrate, one eye on the clock, willing the second hand on as it made its way lazily around the face.

At eleven o'clock his intercom buzzed.

'Your eleven o'clock, Mr. Pledge.'

'Thank you, Mrs. Fisher. Send them in please.'

And there she was.

She closed the door and locked it behind her.

'I thought maybe you weren't coming.'

She smiled and shook her head. 'A deal is a deal.'

She had dressed herself carefully. Not for her the fur-coat flash of the Kissogram girls of his experience. She took her time. For five glorious minutes he sat and watched as she slowly undressed herself until she was stood at the side of his desk, naked but for her high-heeled shoes; she knew that some men liked those. Her clothes littered the grey carpet in small heaps, like islands of silk, satin and lace.

He looked at her awkwardly, avoiding her eyes. Time stood still. She was perfect. He reached out to her but she turned from him easily and shook her head.

'You can look but you can't touch.'

That had been three months ago.

As the weeks had gone by he had grown more desperate. Last fortnight he had knelt before her and begged, whispering, 'Oh, please, let me touch you, let me kiss you, let me make love to you!'

She had shaken her head. 'You can't make love, Frank. It's either there or it isn't; it’s as simple as that.'

You can look but you can't touch, eh? Well... One of these days...

The door opened.

2.WEDNESDAY

'Morning Vince.'

'Morning.'

She always called him, Vince. Nobody else was allowed to. Not even his mother. She crossed the room to the bay window and stood there looking out.

'Anything in the paper?'

'Oh, the usual. Univers 55 and 65. Times New Roman. And I see that Antique Olive has made the sports pages.'

'How did we get on last night?'

'Drew. Nil nil.'

'Typical. Where does that leave us?'

'Uh... let's see. Ninth.'

She ran her finger across the top of the lower window frame, absent-mindedly checking for dust.

'Close enough, then. Still in touch?'

He nodded, though she couldn't see him: Wednesday fortnight; getting to be a habit.

He sneaked a glance at her over the top of the newspaper. She was fabulous; breathtaking in a figure-hugging emerald-green dress, off the shoulder and cut just below the knee. Like an early Christmas present, he thought. All wrapped up ready. His eyes drooled down her bare legs to the back straps of her colour-co-ordinated, stiletto shoes.

Maurice breezed into the room.

'Morning all.'

'Morning.'

'Morning.'

He stood before the mirror and adjusted his bow-tie. 'What are you up to, Vincent?'

'The horoscopes.'

Maurice nodded. 'Yes, very good. But what I actually meant, as you well know, was, what are you up to today, workwise?'

Vincent folded the newspaper down and looked at his friend. 'Workwise?' he said, incredulously. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

Maurice gave him a withering look. 'You in one of your moods today, are you?'

'No, no. Not at all. I'm just amazed at the way that you are continually tearing the English language apart and then sticking it back together willy-nilly and hoping for the best. I doubt even the least self-conscious American could get away with a phrase like, Workwise.’

'Well of course, I know nothing of phraseology, being just a simple lad but I wouldn't have thought that two words joined together constituted a phrase, or even a saying. Maybe not even a sentence.'

‘Jesus wept?' said Vincent.

Maurice nodded. 'I knew you were going to say that.' he said. 'And, while we're on the subject, I doubt very much that, willy-nilly is considered to be the height of articulation.'

'Perfectly acceptable term, Maurice. If you care to peruse your Oxford English Dictionary, you'll find it amongst the double-yews. You might like to look up 'peruse' as well while you're there.'

'That'll be in the South American section, no doubt? Anyway, I don't have time to argue semantics with the likes of you this morning, Vincent. You were going to paint the bathroom, weren't you? Remember? We discussed it at the last house meeting?'

'Fine. What colour?'

'I think we decided on blue, didn't we?'

'Which blue? What hue?' said Vincent.

'What difference does it make what blue? Use your imagination.'

'Well, it could be anything, couldn't it? Light blue, dark blue, sky blue, Royal blue. Peacock blue. Azure, Cyan, Ultramarine, Oxford blue, Cambridge blue. Over the hill and she blew...'

'Alright, alright.' Maurice flapped his hand for silence. 'As you're doing it, Azure it is,' he said winningly. He grinned at Andrea. She gave him a distant smile. A frown tried to cross his face. 'Roger going with you today?' he asked conversationally.

'Part of the way, yes.'

'Ah,' said Maurice. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then, 'Well,' he said brightly. 'I'm off to work. Vincent, don't forget it's your turn to cook tonight.'

'Yeah, yeah.'

'And not just beans again. Try and jazz it up a bit. Use your creativity. Ginger’s all the stuff these days I’m told. Put some of that sort of stuff in.’

‘You mean herbs?’

‘Of course I mean herbs. What else could I mean? You know, the trouble with you, Vincent, is that you’re too hasty making a pasty. Take your time.’

‘Thyme?’

‘The one thing we have no need for. Anyway, see what you can do. I'll see you all later.' He left the room and set off down the hall, whistling cheerfully. The front door slammed.

Vincent looked at Andrea, concerned. 'You O.K.?'

She gazed out of the window. 'Rain's stopped,' she said. 'Looks like it's going to be a nice day.'

They walked through the city streets to the park. The autumn sun shone bravely, turning everything to rich and delicate shades of green and gold.

At the gates they bought chestnuts from the old man and then sat on a bench and watched the sparrows scrapping for worms. He racked his brain for things to say.

She pointed. 'Look. A squirrel.'

It was a red one, - rare these days. Gathering nuts and sniffing suspiciously at emptied Beech husks. It frightened the birds away up into the plane trees where they disturbed the nesting rooks. The air was suddenly filled with the sound of a hundred petty arguments, the birds' shrill voices raised in anger. Eventually, the sparrows returned to the ground where they belonged and the matronly rooks settled back in their nests. Peace was restored.

'Soon be time for them to leave,' said Roger.

'The birds? Yes, I suppose so.'

He listened for a while. 'Strange.'

'What is?'

'This place. Sort of unreal.'

'Really? I think it's peaceful.'

'With all that noise?' he said. 'Listen to it.'

Cars, Lorries and buses honked and revved their way through the adjoining streets. Two-wheeled couriers biked messages from solicitors' offices to insurance companies and back again. A jackhammer pecked a hole in the road somewhere close by. And from the docks, tugboats whistled low tones to each other and the seagulls that had followed them up the channel barked and cried as they circled overhead. Just another day in the big city.

'Oh, that,' she said. 'You get used to it. You don't notice it after a while.'

'I don't think I'll ever get used to it.'

'Is it very different? Where you come from?'

He nodded. 'I've been spoilt, probably. But that's the first thing I noticed. At night, back home, you don't hear a thing. Maybe a bat or two, or an owl hunting, but that's about it.'

'Sounds kind of spooky.'

'Well, as you say, you get used to it. It's pitch black at night as well. This place never even seems to get dark.'

'You'll have to close your shutters,' she suggested.

'I sleep with the window open. I'm used to the fresh air,' he said. 'It's just different I guess, that's what's unnerving about it.' 

'So, what are you going to do now you're here? Anything special?'

He sat back against the bench and folded his arms. 'Not sure. I haven't made up my mind what I want to do, really.' He looked across the park to the docks in the distance. 'Maybe I'll just wait a few weeks and see what comes up.' He turned. 'And how about you? What do you do with your days?'

She pulled her coat around her, warm and brown; matching the chestnuts, and pushed her hands deep into the pockets. 'Long story.' she said.

'I've got plenty of time.'

'It's a bit complicated. Basically, we all sort of work together.'

'You mean, you and Maurice and Vincent? Sounds interesting.'

'Oh, not really. It's just work. A means to live, you know. To pay the bills.'

'What's their story?' he said, frowning. 'Are they a couple or something?'

She laughed for the first time. 'Maurice and Vince?' She shook her head. 'God, no. They're just friends, that's all. Known each other for years.'

'You can tell. They bicker like a married couple.'

'I wouldn't know about that.' She stood up. 'Come on, time we were going.'

They walked back towards the city centre

'Did you ever hear of a band, a while back, called, Whispering Aggression?' she asked.

Roger thought. 'Yes, rings a bell. Sort of a new-age rock band, weren't they? Not very good? Inappropriate behaviour in hotel rooms, that sort of thing, wasn't it?'

She nodded. 'That's them. They only had one hit...'

He stopped her. 'Hang on! Don't tell me! I'm good at these.'

He racked his brain again.

He shook his head.

'No, it's gone.'

'My Dad's Bigger Than Your Dad.'

'That's it! I remember now. What about it?'

'Vincent wrote it.'

'Vincent did?'

'Yes. He was at school with the rest of the band and they knew that he did a bit of songwriting and one day they asked him if he would write them a song, so he did. A couple of years later they got a recording contract and they decided to release it as a single. It was a big hit, - number one in several countries. Vincent woke up one morning to find a cheque on the mat for fifty thousand pounds.'

Roger whistled. 'Can't be bad. So, is it his house then?'

'Not exactly, no. We're all partners.' She looked sideways at him as they walked. 'You know,