"Oh yeah," he mumbled, looking at the prophylactic packages. "Kate was here."
Kate Crawford was nineteen years old, raven-haired, pale-skinned (like many Christchurch area natives), and solidly built, but not lacking in feminine curves. She had a full bosom capped with large, extremely sensitive nipples. She was also a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, functional alcoholic who was a fixture in most of the waterfront bars down by the docks.
Kate worked in her widowed thirty-eight year old mother's seafood shop down in Lyttelton. She, like the fabled Molly Malone, was a fishmonger, and that really was no wonder, because so was her mother and her mother before. Or so Jake was told anyway. He had never met the mother before before (as it were), since she'd been dead these past ten years, but he had met the mother — Elizabeth Crawford. She was nothing more or less than an older version of Kate herself — the same curvy body, large breasts, foul mouth, and love of ethyl alcohol ingestion. Jake had, in fact, slept with the mother ten or twelve times before finally giving into lust one night and getting it on with the daughter instead. Not that Elizabeth minded all that much. True, she had been a bit peeved when she found out, but as long as Jake still bought her drinks down at the Lazy Eye Tavern and gave her a good pounding once a week or so, she kept her peace. And she always reserved for Jake the choicest selections of fish, crabs, and squid that passed through her hands from the fishing fleet that called Lyttelton Harbor home.
So last night it had been Kate who had come calling. He remembered the early part of the evening. She'd arrived about seven-thirty, thirty minutes after the shop was closed for the night, and he'd prepared her a meal of stuffed pork loin, homemade horseradish applesauce, and steamed asparagus. Both of the Crawford females absolutely despised seafood at this point in their evolution. After dinner they'd had a few more drinks while watching one of the new release videotapes that Jake had shipped to his house from the United States — tapes that would not become available in New Zealand for at least another five months. This particular movie had been none other than The Northern Jungle, Greg Oldfellow's atrocity on film. Somehow it had been included in the latest package and Kate had been dying to see it. And so he'd put it in and they'd sat there, drinking mixed drinks and wine and beer while Jake continually badmouthed the flick and Kate continually hushed him because she was actually interested in what was going to happen.
Jake didn't remember anything past the first major battle scene. He didn't know if they'd even finished the movie. Although the condom wrappers on his nightstand and the heavy smell of musk in the air suggested that he and Kate had engaged in a lengthy session of sexual activity in this bed, Jake did not remember even leaving the couch to come upstairs.
"I have got to stop drinking so much," he muttered, not for the first time or the last. The hangovers were bad enough but the blackouts — the periods of negative memory storage — were downright frightening.
Kate was no longer in the bed. He could tell by the rumpled covers and make-up stains on the pillow that she had spent most of the night here cuddled up with him, probably drooling on his neck. But at some point, around sunrise more than likely, she had gotten up, dressed herself, and let herself out the front door. She was, after all, a working girl and the seafood shop opened every weekday morning at eight o'clock sharp. Alcoholic barflies though they might be, the Crawford fishmongers were good at their profession and possessed a typical New Zealand work ethic.
Jake rolled out of bed and put his feet on the floor. Slowly he stood up, having to take a few deep breaths as a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over him, as the pounding in his head increased to the point he could almost hear it. Gradually, the pain and dizziness eased up a little, enough to make him realize that his bladder was uncomfortably full. He opened his eyes and looked around the room for a moment, seeing the untidy heap of yesterday's clothes on the floor, as if they'd been frantically tossed there. He looked in the mirror over his nightstand, catching a glimpse of his reflection from the hips up. He was naked and what he saw was enough to make him look away in shame and embarrassment. His stomach was no longer the flat, firm, attractive anatomical feature it had been for the past twelve or thirteen years. It was now showing the definite beginnings of a beer belly.
"I need to start hitting the gym," Jake muttered, again, not for the first time or the last. This conviction, however, he was a little more serious about. If he didn't start some sort of an exercise program soon, his weight would push past the dreaded two hundred pound mark within a month.
He put this thought aside for the moment and turned toward the master bathroom. As he entered this room he found himself looking at another mirror under significantly better lighting conditions. This time, however, he could only see himself from the nipples up. This view was not so bad, except for the tattoo on his upper right arm. It was a tattoo that was only five days old now and still had the scabbing on it. It was a tattoo that Jake had absolutely no recollection of being put there.
Jake had never been all that into tattoos, although most professional musicians viewed them with damn near religious adoration. Matt, for instance, had both arms and most of his chest covered with a variety of tats, most music related, some so obscure that even he himself could not explain their meaning. Coop had full sleeves on both arms and the Intemperance logo across his upper back. Darren had had a quarter-sleeve on his left arm and a few random tats on his right arm. Even Nerdly had had some work done. On his left shoulder he sported the E=MC2 equation made famous by the intro to The Twilight Zone, and on his right shoulder he had a pair of musical notes intertwined and superimposed over a heart with the date of his marriage inscribed below it (Sharon had the exact same tat on her right shoulder, although she had to make sure it was never seen by her staunchly religious parents). Only Charlie was tattoo free among the former Intemperance members — his fear of germs too great to allow someone with a tattoo gun to touch his skin.
Until five days ago, Jake had only had one tattoo on his body. He had had it put there back in 1983, shortly after becoming fully cognizant of the fact that music was actually his life's career. It was a design he'd come up that was deeply symbolic of how he felt about the contrast between his love of music and the gladiator/indentured servant-like system of bringing it to the public. The tat was six inches long and stretched from his left shoulder to mid-way down his bicep. It showed the neck and headstock of a guitar. Gripping the neck and holding a G-chord, was a hand and wrist. A prominent gold wedding band was on the ring finger of the hand. Attached to the wrist was a handcuff, clenched brutally tight. The other cuff was attached further down the guitar neck.
Jake had always loved his tattoo and displayed it proudly (although he never explained its meaning to anyone — they either got it at first glance and didn't have to ask, or they were never going to get it even if it were explained). But this new tattoo, well... while it did represent something he'd come to love (and would probably require little explanation), it was not really something his sober mind would have chosen to have as a life-long decoration to his right arm.
He vaguely remembered the conversation that had led up to the tattoo. He had been down in The Lazy Eye on the waterfront, drinking shots of Jack Daniels and chasing them with pints of Steinlager with Kate, Elizabeth, and a group of five or six bar regulars who were always Jake's best friends when he was buying (which was whenever he was in the bar). Several of his companions — South Island natives, all of them — had balked when Jake had drunkenly proclaimed how much he loved New Zealand in general and South Island in particular. It simply was not possible, they insisted, to love a geographic locale as much as a native of said locale, especially not when one had spent less than six months of one's life living there.