Bumping Uglies

Chapter Thirty

"Satchmo, how kind of you to join us. You look shagged out..." Ty called jovially as I emerged blinking into the morning light of the farmyard.

"Fuck off," I responded, yawning prodigiously and absently scratching my crotch through my boxers.

Suddenly, a bolt of realisation dawned on me; it was a glorious bright sunny day.

The fact that it was light at all meant that we were late. We were supposed to have gone to find and purchase a small boat first thing in the morning. This sun-drenched scene suggested that I had slept in to mid-morning. Why hadn't Ty woken me earlier?

"Why didn't you wake me earlier?" I asked.

Ty smiled and looked at his wristwatch.

"You will need to be well-rested for what we are going to do later. Also, we can't go anywhere until Stevie gets here," Ty replied.

Of course, Stevie. "Who's Stevie?" I asked.

"Stevie is the guy with the boat. He's doing me a solid and bringing it all the way up from Poole so please be polite when he arrives," Ty said.

"Polite? I'm always fucking polite," I snapped, impolitely.

"Yes, all that money your parents spent on the Swiss finishing school really shows," Ty waved a hand in my general direction. I was in a pretty dishevelled state. Unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, undressed.

"Stevie is a little idiosyncratic, but we need his gear so play nicely," Ty warned me.

I knew precisely what Ty meant when the VW camper van drove into the farmyard at just under the speed of sound and skidded to a halt in a spray of stones and mud and a squeal of brakes.

I'd never seen anything quite like the vehicle itself, it was one of the old models from the late 1960s with the white roof, white-walled tires and coloured lower bodywork panels. Except in this case those lower panels had been painted in a distinctive camouflage pattern in various shades of blue. The large chrome VW symbol gleamed on the hood, and it was circled with huge block letters that read BY STRENGTH AND GUILE.

The driver leaned on the horn, despite the fact that Ty and I were standing in plain sight less than ten metres away. The noise emitted from the van sounded like a foghorn, clearly not the van's original unit, and it reverberated around the farmyard for several seconds.

"Stevie!" Ty shouted, waving in greeting.

The driver hopped out of the van and immediately scanned the courtyard, sizing it all up in seconds. He was slightly below average height and of a wiry build. A shock of orange hair jutted this way and that from his head and the majority of his face was hidden behind a bushy ginger beard that looked as if it could be used to scrape clean a BBQ grill.

"Ghost!" Stevie yelled. Oh, here we go, I thought. I should have known that Ty would know this character from his days of training the military. Though this guy, and his mode of transport, did not convey a typical stiff military bearing.

Stevie walked across the farmyard towards us with an unusual rolling gait, his knees out-turned at an odd angle and his head bobbing slightly, up and down, side-to-side. He looked like an inquisitive parrot scuttling in the direction of a possible source of peanuts.

Ty and Stevie hugged, though Ty had to bend low to do so.

"You got all the gear?" Ty asked. Stevie nodded, grinning. "And the boys in Z won't mind me using it for a couple of days?"

"Not at all!" Stevie replied in an accent from parts unknown in the Thames Valley area. "Because they won't even notice. I pinched it all from those cunts in M!" Stevie's beard split wide open to reveal a beaming smile and the two men laughed heartily. I contemplated joining in but didn't know why.