Mr Cotter

Mr Cotter by Ian J Phillips

MARTA SOBOLEWSKA was buying her weekly bread from her local Polish bakery when she spotted the lines of police cars and crowds of onlookers gathered outside the opposite apartment block. She managed to pass through the crowd and reach the point of the police tape.

      ‘Jumper,’ said a large-chinned elderly lady. ‘When I saw him hit the sidewalk, I nearly dropped my groceries.’

      ‘They know why?’

      ‘No! I just got talking with his super. Crapping money and living like a wino.’

      ‘That’s not a reason, not to —’

      ‘Not to what?’ asked the old lady, too fixated with the body getting zipped up.

      Marta caught the dead eyes of the man she remembered from the local writers’ group she attended several years ago. He was a tense, skinny guy who worked his ass off while living on beans and hope. She tried to recall his name. Bill? Chuck? Steve?

      ‘Super said he’d graffitied a load of looney-house stuff about payment all across his apartment walls. Hell of a shame,’ said the old lady.

      The pool of blood, where the man had hit the sidewalk, formed a sharp nose and poured down a drain. Looking down at her open-toed sandals, Marta noticed she was standing near a couple of knocked-out teeth.

      ‘Say, you know him?’ asked the old lady.

      ‘No,’ said Marta, ‘I thought I did.’

Back at her apartment, two blocks away, she recited the ‘Eternal rest’ prayer she’d learnt at her Catholic school and drank a shot of vodka. She scooped up the letters on the doormat, opened them, and screwed her nose up at the numbers on her utility bills.

      In the shower, she wished the bills would wash away down the plughole. Whilst drying herself, she noted that her dark, matted hair needed a trip to the salon. A flash of her coffee-stained teeth in the mirror signaled she needed a better brand of toothpaste.

      ‘Prosperity,’ she murmured to her reflection in the mirror.

      Her mother’s opinion pecked away at Marta’s dream. ‘Whatever makes you happy, just such a shame that a woman of your age still needs handouts.’

      Tyler, her last boyfriend, was supportive. With Tyler, Marta’s shaved, shapely legs presented themselves in a party dress. With Tyler, she was dined by candlelight, with fawning, handsome waiters at her beck and call. She felt loved, cared for, never feeling empty.

      But Tyler neither understood the time nor the effort that went into writing. After finishing her first draft, Tyler would ask when Marta would be sending it to the publishers. Marta laughed too hard, pointing out that there would be several proof readings and redrafts before that stage would even occur; patient as he was, they lasted five months - her longest relationship, ever.

      Her father had understood - far more than any other man had in her life. He knew her need, a need more powerful than the need for sex or food. He nurtured and respected it. She loved him for that, realizing, early in life, that no man could fill tato’s giant shoes.

      She met ‘Sweaty’ Steve Haycrock of Gatehouse Publishing at a book signing of her favorite thriller writer, Vic Broadside. She never knew if it was curiosity or her tight dress that made him approach her. His body odor hit Marta hard in the nose, accompanied by a handshake that felt like a dead frog. Sweaty Steve’s publishing house had been doing well.