The Punch Bowl Job

I moved to the island in October for a film shoot, which sounds more glamorous than it is. Stunt coordinators spend most of their lives in warehouses and car parks arguing about crash mats, and the Isle of Wight version of that involves a ferry and a lot of damp. The shoot was six weeks long, so I rented a cottage near Ryde that smelled faintly of previous tenants' cats and settled in to learn the local geography, which is mostly hills and the sea and more hills.

The estate sale was in week one. A former bed-and-breakfast up the coast from my cottage, some relation of the dead owner had hired a company to clear the place out, and half the island turned up on the Saturday because there is nothing an island enjoys more than other people's furniture. I went mostly out of boredom. I stayed because of a punch bowl.

It was silver, or silver-plated, and enormous, sitting on a folding table under a marquee on the lawn with a price tag of fifteen pounds and a view of the English Channel behind it like an advert. I picked it up to look at the hallmark and immediately regretted it. You get a feel for weight doing my job. This thing was a weapon. It was the kind of object that exists only because a dead woman a hundred years ago needed to prove something to her neighbours.

"Fifteen quid and it weighs more than the table," I said, to nobody in particular.

"More than the table and most of the stock," said a voice to my left.

The man holding the clipboard was somewhere around twenty-eight, dark hair, a jumper that suggested his friend had dressed him for the outdoors, and the easy shoulders of somebody who lifts boxes for a living. He was doing inventory on a laptop balanced on a stack of tea trays, which told me he was probably not family. Nobody related to the dead does inventory voluntarily.

"Sorry," I said. "I wasn't going to buy it. I was just marvelling at it."

"You should buy it. Everyone who picks it up puts it down and then stands there explaining why. You're the first one to criticise it out loud."

"I'm direct," I said. "Occupational hazard."

"What's the occupation, then?"

"Stunt coordinator. I hit people for a living, in a very organised way."

He laughed properly at that, head back, and I remember thinking that laugh was doing more for the sale's atmosphere than the marquee was. He said his name was Manuel, that he worked warehouse inventory in Newport, and that the dead woman's grandson was his mate and had begged him to spend two weekends pricing china because Manuel was the only person he knew who could tell a gravy boat from a sauce boat.

"Can you?"

"No," he admitted. "I look everything up. I've become weirdly knowledgeable about commemorative coronation mugs this week."

I bought a brass bell and a set of drinking glasses I didn't need, and then, after a minute of arguing with myself, the punch bowl, fifteen pounds in cash. On the way out he offered to carry it to the car, and I told him I'd already mentally assigned it to a life of crime but had nowhere to put it, so could he hold it with the sold lots until I had room. He said of course. He wrote his number on the back of a receipt anyway and said if I ever needed anything lugged, hauled, or inventoried, he was the man. I said the island was full of things needing lugging, and he said that was true, it was basically the island's whole economy.

* * *

The texts started innocently, in the way that texts always claim to. He asked how the shoot was going. I sent him a photo of a crash mat with a dent in it shaped like our second unit director. He sent back a photo of nine coronation mugs arranged in a smiley face. It was easy, which should have been my first clue, because nothing in my life is ever easy without a reason.

By Tuesday it had stopped being innocent. I'd asked him what he did when he wasn't pricing dead women's china, and he'd gone quiet for a few hours, which at that stage of a text conversation is a loud thing to do. Then, at half nine at night, sitting on my cottage sofa with a cup of tea going cold beside me, I got the message.

Can I ask you something a bit forward. You seem like someone who knows what she wants and says so. Is that just work or is it everything?

I looked at that message for a while. Longer than a message deserves, honestly. I put the phone down, picked it up, put it down again. The sensible answer was everything, but the sensible answer isn't the honest one, and I'd learned years ago, in a relationship with a rigger that burned bright and fast and ended three years back, that honest is cheaper in the long run.

It's everything, I typed. Why do you ask.

Another pause. Then: because I've spent two years in an arrangement like that, online, and it ended when she moved abroad, and I've been rubbish at meeting anyone since. And you said occupational hazard in a way that made me think you might know what I mean.

Well. That was a new one. Usually I have to do the asking, or the fishing, or the elaborately casual probing. Here was a warehouse man with a laptop full of coronation mugs handing me the conversation on a plate.

I asked if he meant what I thought he meant, and he said he meant dominance and submission, a dynamic, the whole structure, and that he'd been on the submitting end of it and missed it the way you miss a limb. I sat there thinking about how to answer, and decided the only way I know how, which is straight down the middle.

Here's what I gave him, more or less in this order.

One. I like control. Off set as well as on. I like giving instructions and I like it when they're followed, and I want a man who wants to follow them, not one I have to drag. If that sounds like a job advert, good, because it is one.

Two. Nothing happens without negotiation first. Every scene gets talked through before it happens, what's in it, what's out of it, what we each want from it. No surprises, no improvising into someone's limits because it felt right in the moment.

Three. Safeword is red. Not "stop" lightly, not "wait" meaning wait, red means everything halts immediately and we talk. If I say check in, he answers honestly, even if the honest answer is embarrassing. Especially then.

Four. Outside of agreed sessions, we're just two people. Jeri and Manuel, equals, no assumptions, no orders, no expectations carried over from a scene into a Tuesday. The dynamic lives where we put it and nowhere else.

Five. New territory gets a condom and a conversation about testing before anything else, and that conversation happens before the scene, not during.

He replied within a couple of minutes, which either meant he'd been staring at his phone the whole time or he typed fast, and I suspect both.

That all sounds exactly right, he wrote. Red. Negotiation first. Nothing assumed. I agree to all of it, and I mean that. Can I ask what you'd want from a first scene?

I told him the truth, which was that I didn't know yet, that I wanted to meet him properly first, in daylight, sober, and talk. He said there was a pub in Cowes he liked and I said fine, Saturday, and he said he'd book a table by the window because I seemed like someone who liked to see the door.

He was right about that, which was slightly annoying.

All that week the texts kept up, but the tone changed. Less banter, more inventory, which is the only word I can think of for it. He asked what I liked and I told him, plainly, because rule five applies to conversations too in my book. He told me about the woman abroad, how they'd never met in person, how it had been real anyway and ended well and he still got a Christmas card from Frankfurt. I told him about the rigger, briefly, how I'd learned the hard way that trust is a thing you build a scaffold for before you climb, not after. He said he liked scaffolding. He was an inventory man. Of course he did.

By Friday night I was lying in bed reading his last message, which was just a list of things he hoped I'd ask him about someday, and thinking that the punch bowl was waiting for me in a back room with my name on a sticky label, fifteen quid, weighing a ton. Some objects you buy because you want them. Some you buy because the story hasn't finished with them yet. I decided I'd know which kind it was by Sunday.

He booked the window table like he said he would, and when I walked in he was already there, sitting with his back to the window because he'd rather watch the door himself than have me watch him. I noted that. Inventory men and stunt coordinators, we think along the same lines about exits.

Coffee, not drinks, by mutual agreement. Negotiation with a pint in you is negotiation with a hole in the bucket, and neither of us had anything to hide but plenty to say. So we sat with two flat whites and a plate of chips between us like the most boring couple on the island, and talked.

He'd brought a notebook. An actual notebook, with a pen, and when I raised an eyebrow at it he said, "I do lists for a living. You'll thank me."

He was right, which was annoying twice in one week.

We went through it properly. Soft limits, hard limits, things tried and things only read about and things he'd been thinking about at two in the morning with a guilty conscience. He was thorough and he blushed exactly twice, which I counted, and both times he kept talking through the blush, which told me more about him than the list did. A man who keeps going when his ears go red is a man you can build something on.

Then I told him about the punch bowl.

"To be honest, the reason I bought it, or half the reason, is that I keep looking at it and thinking it's the right weight for something other