W eenie was partway through making himself a cup of tea and contemplating the state of his bedsheets when there came a knock at the caravan door. He opened the door to find a young woman with long straight hair and a rainbow cat T-shirt stood on the grass. She was a full grown woman but still wore the smooth skin and innocent features of a younger girl. Her age might have been anywhere between late teens and mid-twenties. Nothing about her gave better clues than that.
“Yes?” he said.
“Can I come in?” she said.
“What is it?”
She held up the yellow carrier bag she was carrying. “I’ve bought supplies.”
“I don’t understand.”
She swayed her hips. Was she trying to be coy? Sexy? He looked at the curve of her breasts beneath her T-shirt. They weren’t amazing, but they were there and the girl was smiling and he liked her smooth skin, and spending a short amount of time being distracted by this creature was surely better than taking his bedsheets over to the laundry.
“I’m Candelina,” she told him.
“I really don’t understand,” he said and stood back to let her in.
He shuffled down the caravan and squeezed the teabag in his cup.
“I’m just making myself a cup of tea,” he said.
She put the bag on the table surface and looked at the dangling marionettes and hand puppets.
“Tea?” he asked.
She looked at him, as though just remembering he was there. Her eyes were wide, full of innocent surprise. It was an attractive look. Weenie felt the unfamiliar stir of arousal but also a much more familiar seething anger. If a sexy young thing was going to come into his caravan and think she could just flutter her eyelashes at him then she had another think coming. Lust and anger were not so very different. Both were attracting forces and calls to action.
She had taken a can of aerosol hairspray, a kitchen knife and a roll of heavy duty tape out of the carrier bag.
“You selling something?” he said.
“Rudi says, ‘Always work with the canvas you have. You will find the picture that fits it .’”
“Who?”
She raised the hairspray and sprayed it directly into his face. He sniffed, coughed and recoiled. Eyes shut, he could hear her feet approaching on the carpeted floor. He spluttered, backed away, tried simultaneously to tell her to stop and to bat her away and succeeded at neither. She came at him fully and grabbed him, and the two of them pivoted. He was bigger than she was. He knew he should just hold his breath, close his eyes, and grab this stupid prankster by her stupid T-shirt but then he tripped over her thin legs and he was going down. He clipped the table, bounced off the cushioned banquette seating and was on the floor on his back.
He felt something cold pressed against the bottom of his eye socket.
He coughed and risked opening his eyes.
“Move and I will put this knife through your eye and into your brain,” she said.
There was a blurry sheen of polished steel in the lower portion of his vision.
“Okay,” he said, simply acknowledging the current situation.
The woman half sat on, half knelt beside his lower torso. Even in this vulnerable position, he couldn’t help thinking he hadn’t been this close to a woman in years. Her hair hung around her face and there was a nervous uncertainty in her eyes. She didn’t know what she was doing.
Seeming to read his mind, she said, “I didn’t expect this to work either.”
Blindly, she grabbed for the roll of tape on the table. Without removing the knife from his eye socket, she pulled at the tape end with her teeth. She struggled and Weenie feared that, in her agitation, she was going to accidentally pop his eyeball.
“Should… should I?” he said.
“What?”
He slowly raised his hands to take the tape from her. She gave it to him. He peeled back the tape edge.
“You tying me up?” he asked.
“To the table leg,” she said and nodded at the single table leg supporting the folding table.
“Okay,” he said and wrapped the tape around his wrist twice, made a loop of the whole thing around the table leg and then wrapped it a couple of times around his other wrist.
“Is this a robbery?” he said.
He didn’t care why she was here. If it was a robbery, he had very little that common thieves would be interested in. If this was revenge, then for what? The woman was possibly in the right age bracket to be the sprog Janine had claimed was his, but she looked nothing like the girl whose photos he’d once kept in his wallet. He didn’t care at all apart from the fact that this evil little tease had broken into his home, nearly blinded him with cloying hairspray and was now sat on top of him and thinking she had the better of him.
The woman, Candelina, did the tape twice more round his wrist and then seemed satisfied. Daft cow. She rolled back and stood. She looked out of the window over the little kitchen sink and nodded.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“It’s very simple,” she said and produced a piece of folded paper from the satchel at her side. She opened it.
“Mr Punch,” she said.
“The Bartholomew Punch,” said Weenie, recognising the brown and damaged hand puppet in the picture. “I see.”
“Good. You have it?”
Weenie sighed and then coughed again. His mouth was filled with a sweet floral layer of hairspray. He needed to spit.
“You don’t look much like a Punch aficionado. And you’re no professor. Did Michaels send you? Glen Ragwort?”
“You stole it from Mr Jørgensen,” she said.
“Rolf Jørgensen?” he said. Jørgensen was a collector over in Sweden or Denmark or somewhere. That might explain this woman’s precise and unplaceable accent. Jørgensen was a collector rather than an enthusiast or a performer. He was just some rich foreign bloke who had decided to collect puppets, wasn’t he? Weenie knew the man had amassed a large selection of Kasperle puppets and, allegedly, many of Mourguet’s original Guignol characters. Hundreds of hand puppets locked away in the weird Scandinavian’s private collection.
“Stole?” said Weenie, honestly. “No. I bought it.”
“From James Brown.”
“The guy in Edinburgh.”
“Correct.”
“I bought it from him. I didn’t know it was stolen.”
She laughed. “Really?”
“I paid him seven hundred for it.”
She frowned deeply. “No.”
“I did. I mean it’s a lot, but —”
“Seven hundred… pounds? No. It has to be worth more than that. I wouldn’t…”
Weenie might have savoured her confusion if he hadn’t been on the floor bound to a table leg with her standing over him.
“It’s a beautiful piece. It really is,” he said. “I’ve kept it safe. But the market for puppets is really very flat. Public interest is low. I mean I think it’s worth more. It’s lovely workmanship. I mean, if you want to refund me and take it back, I understand because I’ve got absolutely no beef with Jørgensen.”
He watched the shifting landscape of her child-like face. She was thinking about it, seriously considering his suggestion.
“Maybe throw in a couple of hundred for my current inconvenience,” he said. “Call it a thousand.”
She looked in her satchel. Maybe she had the money in there.
“Where is Mr Punch?” she asked.
“We have a deal?”
She gave a grunt that wasn’t exactly a no.
“It’s in the Joey Pockets toy,” he said, jerking his head back to indicate the seating behind and above his head. “I re-wrapped it. It’s well protected.”
“The what toy?”
“Joey Pockets,” he said. “The wallaby kangaroo thing. Looks like a fat mouse.”
She moved round the table.
“I can’t see it.”
“It’s just there. A big bloody kangaroo thing.”
“No. No…”
Looking up, he could only see her lower half below the edge of the table. From this angle he could see several inches up her long shorts. She had thin legs. He wondered how easily they would break.
Above him, the single leg of the fold-up table connected to its underside with a hinge. The table could be lifted, the leg angled away and the whole thing all but disappeared. Weenie had taped his hands twelve inches apart with only a band of tape looped around that table leg to keep him in place. Move the table and he was free.
He looked back to check the tape hadn’t got stuck to the table leg and then threw himself upwards. The leg shifted, the table jolted. Arms free, he sat up, grabbed the woman around the thighs and with the power of the anger that had been bubbling inside him, forced her back and down. She fell like a hollow tree in a storm, bending and twisting as she came down. She shouted in pain as she hit the kitchen counter on the way down.
Weenie didn’t hesitate. He pushed forward and pressed his bulk onto her. The knife had gone flying in her fall. She was face down on the floor and trying to get up but he was sat astride her now.
Anger coursed through him, anger and a sheer indignant disbelief. And with that disbelief came laughter and a strange drawn-out thrill of pleasure. The woman tried to push herself up, to reach round and grab him, but his weight pinned her torso to the ground and there was no leverage she could gain.
He looked round, saw the knife on the floor and leaned the small distance to reach it. He had dextrous hands and turned the blade inward to pierce and then split the tape binding them together.
She was still bucking beneath him. He would have enjoyed the experience more but he was afraid of what might happen if he got off. He half-remembered a Chinese quote about the dangers of riding tigers.
“Keep still, you silly bitch,” he said and bit at the roll of tape still hanging from his left wrist. He tore it clear and then grabbed her flailing arm to begin taping her up. She made a desperate squeak when she realised what he was doing. He liked that sound. It was an animal sound, but not that of a tiger. Something smaller and less dangerous. A vole, perhaps.
He was not in an ideal position to tape her hands closely together, but he was able to tape them at a distance across the small of her back. That done (and done properly), he could lean back and grab one of her ankles and tape that too.
She was panting, “No, no, don’t…”
“Should have thought about that before you broke in and attacked me,” he said, with the simple clear tones of the thoroughly righteous.
She continued to complain, but he didn’t stop until he was done. Arms and legs tied. He rolled her over. Her clothes twisted and creased about her. He did nothing to straighten them,
He rolled back onto his feet and stood to get his breath back. A little bit of rough and tumble on the floor had brought colour to his cheeks, enjoyable in its own way.
The woman’s hair hung in disarray around her face. She glared absolute daggers at him.
“I’m glad you brought the tape with you,” he said and waggled the roll at her.
She bared her teeth in anger. “I could scream.”
“And what would happen?” he said. “Most of the caravans on this row are empty. They’re putting in the new ones only twenty yards that way. Everyone else is either old and deaf or out having fun.”
He bent to look in the satchel at her side. She squirmed and tried to stop him. He shoved her away, a flat hand on her midriff. There were a number of things in the satchel. An old battered book about painting caught his attention momentarily. The short-haired woman artist on the cover seemed passingly familiar. He set it aside and took out the woman’s purse. There were bank cards and a driving licence with ‘Norge’ in the corner.
“Norway?” he said. The driving licence was pink, like UK ones, and this was an unexpected curiosity. “What did you say your name was? It doesn’t look like this name.” He tried to wrap his mouth around the name on the card.
“Take the money and give me Mr Punch,” she said.
He opened the money pocket. It was bulging with banknotes.
“There must be thousands here,” he said.
“I will pay you for the puppet…” She visibly restrained her fury. “… and for the inconvenience.”
He laughed, the round and fruity laughter of a truly happy man. She had broken in and still expected to get the Bartholomew Punch when he had all this money in his hand and the puppet was still on the side…
He looked up. The woman — who had said her name was Candelina but who had clearly been lying — had said she couldn’t find the Joey Pockets. He looked at the banquette sofa. He couldn’t see Joey Pockets.
There were some toys on the floor, dislodged in the struggle, but the kangaroo didn’t seem to be among them. He stepped over her and searched hurriedly through them even though it was a big fat kangaroo and it wasn’t going to be hidden behind a Beanie Baby or a Raggedy Ann.
“Fuck. Fuck no,” he muttered.
“It was really in the kangaroo?” said Candelina.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said, panic rising.
The Bartholomew Punch was gone. A piece of history, a true gem in the story of Mr Punch. It was gone. An image flashed in his mind, of that young cleaner, Bradley, holding Joey Pockets.
“Fuck, no.”
He had his hand on the door before he realised he had a woman tied up on the floor of his caravan. Her arms and ankles were bound tightly but he could hardly leave her alone. His brave quip about empty caravans and deaf residents was true, but she could probably shout loud enough for someone to hear, eventually. He found the tape, cut a six inch section off and taped it over her lips. He had to hold her jaw shut to do it. She had a small jaw and soft skin. She was warm to the touch.
She struggled and gave muffled screams through the tape as he hauled her by her armpits into the smaller bedroom. At the back of his mind, a voice was screaming that no good would come of keeping a young woman tied up in his caravan but he had been wronged and he was filled with a roaring energy that might yet come out in any number of ways.
He shut her in, wedging his suitcase between the bedroom door and the floor level cupboards opposite. No way she could get out of there.
He went out the door, locked it and ran to the holiday park admin block.