John Graham Jones - Writer -

Novels

Horseplay

Chapter 1: HOTELS.

"Cost of damage to toilets: £280," Reg Watkins said.
"Ph!" Haydn Evans mouthed a puffing, spluttering sound.
"Cost of damage to bedrooms: £570."
"Ph!" again.
"Cost of damage to doors: £530; cost of damage to carpets...."
"A bit of horseplay. Reg. that was all," Haydn said.
"Carpets," Reg went on, slightly louder, more insistently. "£320."
"Damage? What damage?"
"Selwyn Price rolled one up and threw it out the window into the swimming pool. Paul Dando pissed on one - one of those shaggy, expensive ones. And Mervyn Watkins was seen tearing at one with his teeth."
"Maybe he was hungry," Haydn quipped, smiling until he saw the thundery look on Reg Watkins's pale, lean face.
Reg eyed the overfat, short Chairman of Blackhill Rugby Club with something approaching venom.
"Listen here now," Haydn said, doing up the central button on the jacket of his brown (chairman's) suit - the only one he could do up - and raising himself to a majestic five feet two inches (with thick soled shoes) and thrusting out his chin (chins) and pushing out his chest so that the one button that was done up was in threat of being shot bullet-like across the room, "Reg, now listen here to me a minute won't you: the manager of that hotel is trying it on with us. I never liked the look of him: sly bugger; mean eyes; English...."
"No Haydn," Reg said. "You listen to me. You can't deny that damage was done, can you?"
Haydn stood on one foot then on the other like a naughty schoolboy. He would have liked to deny everything that had happened that night after the game but the facts stared him in the face as they were presented to him by the club secretary whose expression was stern and, he felt, almost inhuman.
"Well, can you?" persisted Reg.
"No I suppose not."
"Then there's the matter of the toilet," Reg went on.
"What toilet?"
"At the hotel of course."
"That manager...."
Haydn was puffing himself up like a bantam cock.
"Never mind the manager; this letter with the list of damages comes from a solicitor,"Reg lied, waving the sheet of paper so close to Haydn's face he wouldn't be able to read it.
"Christ!" said Haydn who always, at the mention of solicitors or accountants, panicked. "Solicitors!"
Reg turned the knife in the wound: "And accopuntants," he said.
"Christ!" was all Haydn could say as he wiped his sweaty brow with the sleeve of his jacket. "OK Reg, we'll have to do something. But first let's have a drink."
"I haven't finished," Reg said.
"I've heard enough for one night...."
"You haven't heard about Willy Norris yet and the toilet."
"With all due respect Reg, you've got it in for poor Willy just because he goes a bit wild sometimes."
They were in the committee room of Llangwrwr Rugby Club, a room that was without character, a plain, dull room with sticks of furniture here and there, a pile of plastic chairs in three mini tower-blocks against a wall and a table with a wooden hammer on it which Haydn swung and banged down to keep order at meetings. Reg sat on the edge of this long brown, smooth table; he needed to sit down somewhere before he fell down from exhaustion and frustration in the teeth of his chairman's pig-ignorant response to the complaints of the manager of the hotel the rugby team had stayed at and trashed.
"Willy Norris," Reg said, adding as if to define him, "front row forward...."
"You can't hold that against him," Haydn said. "I used to be front-rower myself remember."
Undeterred by that irrelevant remark Reg went on: "Willy Norris, who should donate his brain to medical research to determine how a brain so small could function well enough for him to play rugby at all...."
"Unfair, unkind, uncharitable."
"Do you know what he did at that hotel? He removed from its fittings a china toilet and took it up to his room...."
"Where there was no toilet," Haydn put it, pointing a finger for emphasis.
"Haydn, for God's sake!"
"Where there was no toilet," Haydn insisted. "As Willy himself said: the boys had been told their rooms were going to be 'on sweet'."
Reg got up and almost agressively lowered his head about a foot and thrust his pale face close to Haydn's. Haydn took a pace back in alarm, though he knew Reg too well to be really afraid - Reg was not the violent type, never had been (even years before on the field of play when an opponent deserved physical retaliation).
"Five doors damaged," Reg said. "Wrenched off their hinges, one thrown from a balcony into the swimming pool."
Now Reg's face was so close to Haydn'e that it was, to his eyes, just a blur, a pale blur.
"What do you think we should do?" Haydn asked tamely.
"Do?" Reg almost yelled. "Pay up of course."
He took a few steps away from Haydn in order to calm down.
"Pay?" said Haydn. "Now hold on Reg, a bit of horseplay from the boys..."
Reg spoke clearly like a politician making a speech of resignation, itemising thopse matters he had found offensive.
"At two o'clock in the morning Trevor Mason, second row forward..."
"I know where he plays Reg."
"He runs along the corridor of the top floor of the hotel - naked..."
"Bit of harmless streaking," Haydn said jocularly.
"He then wrenches off a door, which probably seemed to him in the circumstances the most natural thing to do, seeing as how three others had already been wrenched off their hinges, and bursts uninvited into the bedroom of a newly married couple..." Reg inspected the sheets of paper on the table. "A Mr and Mrs Reynolds..."