‘Section 60,’ says Lupus. ‘Stop and search.’
‘Empty your pockets, lad.’
The young ones gather round to help him along and shield passers-by from the mugging. He hands over his phone and £11. Little Marky finds an iPod in an inside pocket. ‘Nice one. Look, the prick’s brought an iPod to the shops. Imagine that.’
‘Taxed that, lad, purely,’ replies Clegsy.
Clegsy sees what’s on it, one headphone in and scrolling, while Nogger proceeds with the search.
Clegsy: ‘Talking Heads, lad. Boss.’
Nogger, dread darkening his face, says, ‘Punter music, innit?’
Clegsy talks louder as he listens and bobs his head to the tunes. ‘Bit of Floyd here as well.’
‘Just another customer if you listen to that, aren’t you, though?’ says Nogger, searching through the deeper crevices of the punter’s pockets with renewed interest. Triumphant, he finds what he’s looking for. The proof. ‘Told you, lad,’ he says, holding up the little wrap of heroin. ‘Told you that was punter’s music, didn’t I, lad?’
‘Baghead, aren’t you, lad? Fucking degenerate fucking wretch, aren’t you? Left your kids at home covered in shit in the cot while you’ve come out to the shops to score.’
‘And not even from us,’ Clegsy points out.
‘Baby P’s auld feller, you, mate,’ Marky chips in.
Nogger flashbacks to babysitting his younger brothers and sisters. He continues with his sermon, getting foamy and frothy at the mouth. No one knows whether it’s the pus or the Corsodyl or if he’s just losing it over the Class As, like usual.
‘You’re out spending their money on gear and chips while you should be putting the kids to bed, you fucking shitbag. Knew you were a customer straight off – Talking Heads, Floyd.’ Nogger shakes his head in disgust.
Bloot’s on the iPod now, humming along, nodding, sledging ‘Comfortably Numb’-style. Then singing along and speaking loudly cos of the headphones, Bloot says, ‘Final Cut, la. Know it’s punter music, but they’ll always be there, won’t they, Floyd?’ Nogger recalls the lyrics from his childhood: his ma chasing on the couch, the smell of her vinyl records on the floor, the bittersweet taste of her heroin fumes catching on the back of his throat.
‘But no fucking nigger music, though,’ says Bloot. ‘All pure headz tunes: J.J. Cale, Genesis, Jimi. Country Joe and the Fish? Who the fuck are they?’
‘But no fucking Tupac or Biggie?’ asks Whizzer. ‘Indecent, lad.’
Nogger’s still thinking of his own tooth-rotted baghead ma and da. Monster Munch for breakfast for him and his sisters, half-frozen ice pops for tea. Flapping the crack fumes away while watching CBeebies. ‘Don’t know why you’re doing that, lad,’ he says, pointing at the brown, telling the smackhead off. ‘Destroying our community. Spitting out crack babies, all fucking twisted up like a fucking biff, little claws rattling away.’ Nogger mimics a deformed baby. ‘You fucking victim.’
The lad’s crying by now. ‘Please don’t throw that gear away. It’s not even mine. It’s me bird’s for Sunday morning, so she won’t be rattling.’
Whizzer throws a coin at the baghead’s head at close range.
‘Misuse of Drugs Act,’ Nogger tells him. ‘Strip search. Take your clothes off.’
The pack of hyenas wade in, ragging off his top, shredding his jeans. He’s left naked in the foetal position, bathed in the golden light from the broad chippy window. Iggo writes ‘Dirty Smack Head’ on his back in permanent marker. Nogger writes ‘Punter’ on his thighs, ‘Sneak Thief’ and ‘Mugger’ on his arms. Clone draws a sign on the back of a cardboard box lid – ‘Auld Ones And Bingoites Beware. Dirty Man Will Have Your Winnings Off’ – and hangs it round his neck with a length of cord ripped out of the lad’s jacket.
As he’s getting off, Nogger cranes his neck around and says, ‘Just doing our bit for community, aren’t we, lad?’
‘Is right. Vigilantes, us, aren’t we?’
* * *
Dylan wanders past the alley on his way home from Elizabeth’s.
‘Where you been?’ Nogger shouts to him. ‘Look mad, lad,’ he says, eyeing Dylan’s Lacoste and jeans, bewildered. ‘What’s going on, lad?’
‘In town last night. Just some bird and that.’
Nogger’s devo’d, jealous. ‘For fuck’s sake, lad. Bloot’s been shot. All kinds of Nogzy being terrored. And you’re out behaving with a bird. Wearing all mad clothes.’
‘Yeah, I was out with a bird. Is that a crime?’ asks Dylan, remembering what Bunter had told him, wanting to slaughter Nogger for his birds – his very young birds.
‘You need to get your head together. You need to represent lad. We need to get down to Crocky and let off some buck.’
‘I know, yeah,’ says Dylan, taken aback. He takes the insult, the humiliation in front of the lads. Now is not the time for emotion. There’s no way he wants to get involved in full-scale contact now. Not even in revenge for Bleeker’s death, nor even to avenge the latest attack on Bloot. Beef just interferes with graft. Leads to serious jail. A distraction is needed again, but the excuses are wearing thin now.
‘Just send a few of the younger ones round with the long feller,’ he says, knowing they can’t do much damage with an unwieldy side-by-side. Most of the young lads always aim high. Ride round there at two in the morning, three kids on a robbed bike. Dylan knows no one will get hurt.
Nogger moans about the long shotgun and how bad their weapons are. ‘Need to get some decent squirts, lad.’
This is the distraction Dylan’s looking for. ‘How much have we got in the kitty?’
A grand. It won’t buy them much.
* * *
The gun shop is an old yellow Transit van. It trawls the estates renting out and selling guns to the gangs. It’s run by a couple of out-of-towners, biker types from Leigh in Lancashire or somewhere. The lads call them ‘the gypos’. But, for a couple of sheepshaggers, they get loads of respect from the lads, because they open the gateway to power. The pieces are shit – old rusty blunderbusses – but cheap and rentable. HP, terms, whatever.
The van’s parked up on The Boot. Nogger jumps in the back. It’s lit by a car mechanic’s light wired up to a battery. He buys an old American-made First World War .455 Colt revolver for £200. It’s been officially adapted on import to fit the slightly different-sized British bullets.
He tells the gypos, ‘I want a Mac-10.’
‘Nothing like that, Nogger. It’s too high-class kit for us.’
Later, the other gun librarian is doing his rounds. He’s a sharper feller. Has a big fuck-off house and stables in the countryside. He’s parked in a nice saloon on a play area behind a burned down pavilion. He looks like a lecturer: steel-framed glasses, blue chinos and a golf jacket.
‘What about a Mac-10?’ asks Nogger. ‘Got a Mac-10, have you?’
‘You’re talking two to ten thousand.’
‘Better squirt, though, isn’t it, though?’
‘The best. It’s a very compact, blowback operated, selective fire submachine gun, technically a machine pistol. Weighs less than three bags of sugar, measures less than a foot long but fires 1,000 rounds per minute.’
New Loon butts in: ‘I know they’re decent hardware, like, but why so much dough?’
‘Because they’ve got prestige. They’re an icon. If you type “Mac 10” into Google, you get 372,000,000 results. Type in “Jesus” and you only get 185,000,000. They’re twice as big as Jesus. That’s why everyone wants one.’
He’s spieling out his well-used pitch. The penniless peasants have come to buy a second-hand Ford Fiesta. Now he’s upselling them a top of the range Merc.
‘They’re all over the telly. See that one on The Bill? Pulp Fiction, The A-Team, Predator 2, RoboCop, Die Another Day . . .’
Nogger loves the gun librarian’s Mac-10 porn. He only plays video games where the Mac-10’s a selectable option for the gun. If not, he downloads a skin to replace the im
age of the stock machine gun with that of a customised Mac-10. ‘Good Mac-10 games on the PlayStation,’ he tells the dealer. ‘Counter Strike, The World Is Not Enough, Operation Flashpoint, Enter the Matrix.’
The librarian fires back: ‘Black, Max Payne, Rainbow Six, The Specialist, Metal Gear Solid . . .’
Nogger and New Loon get the point. ‘Fairsensabough, kidder. You don’t have to sell it to us. We want one already. But we haven’t got ten quid for one weapon. There’s 40 of us in our little team. We’re saving up so that every one of us has got a thing if need be, so we just haven’t got that kind of dough to spend on one piece of rearmament.’
The gun librarian’s leading up to his proposition now. ‘The bottom line is this: most Mac-10s you buy on the street now aren’t the original ones that were made in America. It stands for Military Armament Corporation Model 10. It was developed by Gordon B. Ingram in Georgia, USA, in 1964. The company went bankrupt in 1975.’
‘So what?’ asks Nogger, although he’s secretly loving all this talk.
‘The point is – rather, the beauty of it is – that the Mac-10 is a simple, low-cost design with few moving parts. That results in two things. First, the economy of its black, menacing shape, the ultimate in “form follows function”. Second, it’s easy to manufacture and maintain.’ He’s moving in for the pay-off. ‘This is the most important bit. Most new Mac-10s are made by amateur engineers in little secret factories, like cottage industries, all over the country.’
‘What?’ Nogger says. ‘Are you fucking jesting? There’s places that make them over here in England that just have them lying around? Why can’t we have the fucking things off?’
‘Yes, that’s it. But it’s not that simple. The underworld armourers who make them cover their tracks well to protect themselves from the police and people like you who want to steal their merchandise. They make all the separate parts at secret locations because they can’t be nicked for having individual pieces. Then, on a certain day, they bring them all together for a short production run before quickly shipping them out to punters all over the country.’
‘Well, do you know where one of these places is?’
‘I know one on the South Coast that sells to all the niggers in London.’
Nogger smiles. ‘Do you know when the graft’ll be there?’
The gun librarian returns the sneer. ‘Imminently.’
* * *
Later, Nogger relays the story of the Mac-10 factories to Dylan. Low hanging fruit and ripe for the robbing.
‘Sick graft that, lad,’ says Dylan. He’s secretly made up about the Mac-10 adventure because it’ll get Nogger out of town for a few days, distract him from getting revenge on Crocky. Meanwhile, he can sit off with Elizabeth, go and see Paul to get some proper graft. Dylan needs some real money. He’s planning to get off. Elizabeth has mentioned that part of her course involves studying and working abroad, and he’s half thinking of going with her.
Back at the flat, Dylan loves it. She makes him his first-ever home-cooked meal: tandoori mushrooms with yogurt, salad and pitta bread. They eat it on the bed, then she runs a bath. The bathroom’s Victorian, cold, slightly dilapidated, with a big roll-top bath. She puts the heater on, lights candles, pours a few glugs of thick lavender oil into the steaming water.
Afterwards, Dylan carries her, soaking and cold, into the bedroom. Makes love to her while she’s still shivering on the bed.
Elizabeth asks him, ‘Where do you want to come?’ Dylan’s never been asked that question before. He smiles. She takes the condom off, running with vanguard semen. She sucks wildly, swallows every bit and smiles.
‘That’s nice,’ Dylan tells her.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just filming you, girl.’
‘Why exactly?’ For a moment, she sounds tough, disapproving. ‘I’m not a porno star, Dylan. What are you going to do? Show it to your mates? That’s weird.’
‘Just normal, innit?’
But she isn’t having it. She just looks at him, fierce. He blows up crimson, pure cherry on. The moment’s wrecked. It takes an hour to warm her back onside again.
Then she tells him, ‘When I found you asleep at work, I thought you were a drug addict, crashed out. We get them now and again.’
Dylan freezes with shame and anger. ‘What me? On the gear? No fucking way, girl. Must have got another lad.’ He’s going off on one. ‘You can ask anyone in Nogzy and they will tell you straight. Never fucking touched the brown in my life, girl. Bit of weed now and again but not any Class As. Never in a million fucking years. For fucking meffs that, girl.’ He turns away, disgusted. This time it’s his turn to be indignant.
She’s a bit freaked by his prickliness, by his overreaction. She touches him on the arm. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that . . . that it happens, doesn’t it? Anyway, when I got close to you, I knew you weren’t anything like that, because your clothes were too nice. And you smelled clean, lovely.’
Suddenly, Dylan feels strangely proud, almost elated, remembering his green Lacoste shirt.
‘I liked the colour of your top,’ she says, half to make him feel better.
CHAPTER 15
EASYDRUGS
Dylan gets Bulb Head on the phone. He’s at the match, watching Everton in Belgrade.
‘Go on.’
‘I wanted to speak to the other feller,’ says Dylan.
‘Militai, lad,’ he says, meaning that he’s doing drug deals abroad.
‘OK. I just wanted to have a word with him.’
‘Well, we’ll see you by the swings, lad.’
Everyone loves talking in code. That means ‘go and see Stan’, who’s a dogger and a swinger, but one of the lads, sound.
Dylan meets him in a bar and Stan tells him that the Imperator is in Lebanon but that a message has been got to him to call. Then Stan tells a story about banging someone’s wife on a velvet chaise longue at a sex club in Cardiff. Just then his phone goes off and he passes it to Dylan.
‘Hello, mate,’ says Paul. ‘Are you all right, my mate?’
‘Sorry to trouble you, mate. I know you’re on campaign.’
‘No, I’m sorry, mate, that I’m not there to see you.’
‘Know you mentioned some wages? The Flat Place and that?’
‘Course, mate. I’ll come and see you, mate.’
Two days later, Dylan meets the Imperator in a supermarket café.
‘We’ll get you on the EasyJet flights going to Schiphol, Malaga, Portugal,’ Paul tells him. ‘All’s you’ve got to do is see the lads over there and tell them one thing and another. Just running messages backwards and forwards.’ He says that no one talks over the phone any more. Not by satellite phone, not by Skype, nothing. All messages from him into the hubs are delivered in person by an army of foot-soldier messengers going back and forth on cheap flights, delivering instructions to lads in the cafés and on the terraces.
Dylan gets on the plane at John Lennon Airport. ‘Above us only sky’ on the billboard. He’s wearing his green Peter Storm kagoul, brown cords, Rohan suedies. No hand luggage. As he moves along, in aisle after aisle, he sees similar lads, familiar faces. The cream of the city’s teenage outlaws moving up a rung. They’re all doing all right, grafting for one of the big firms.
Little half let-ons here and there. All of them have been en route – capable, industrious lads. All of the major cartels in the city must have a runner here.
‘All right, lad,’ Dylan whispers to a lad he knows. Most of them are wearing normal clothes. Near the back, though, he sees two Crocky mongrels, both wearing their Lowies, trapper hats, balaclavas. Way on top. They’re looking smug cos they’re on the executive ladder, ordering drinks already. They’ve got bags of Marksies scran like they’re going the match. They’re showing off to the mangy hostesses, with big mad voices and loud, rooting-tooting gestures.
On the sly, Dylan cocks his fingers at them like a gun. He leans in to the one in the aisle
seat, as though he’s asking what seat number it is, for a bit of gentle chiding. ‘You’re roasting, you, lad. Sitting there behaving. Pair of fucking scruffs.’
He scopes the cabin. No one else is wearing their normal street clothes. No one wants to fuck the job up. All hands are on their best behaviour.
In Amsterdam, it’s a bleak northern European day. Dylan sits outside a café, gets picked up by a Manc lad in a Porsche Cayenne. No one says a word. Boston are on the CD player. They drive for two hours along tree-lined N roads to a nondescript commuter town on the outskirts of the capital. They stop at a pale-yellow, smooth-walled mansion with a long barn next door.
Inside he meets Dean. No other name needed. He’s a living legend, a top act. A 35-year-old former ramraider now worth £400 million. He’s one of the wealthiest criminals in British history. Dylan’s read every line about him in the papers. There are whole estates full of kids named after him.
‘All right, lad?’ he says to Dylan. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘Got a little message off the other feller there.’
‘Oh yeah. That’s nice, isn’t it? Come ’ead, let’s go fishing.’
They park up near a frozen lake, nothing else but flat scrubland for miles around.
Dylan feels it’s safe enough to pass on his message: ‘He said it would be there in two days’ time. Said it would be lined up on the dock like a row of new cars. D’you get me?’
‘That all he said?’
‘That’s it.’
‘OK.’
And that was it. Another international transaction completed. The final words in a complex operation to smuggle 500 kilos of contraband from one continent to another.
Dylan gets the last flight of the day back. He’s back in Nogzy by two. There’s no one about, so he goes home. He gets a text off Nogger saying that they’re out of town, sitting off on a farm outside Brighton, waiting to have off some Mac-10s.
CHAPTER 16
THE RAPE
Gang War Page 10