He looked at me, ‘not trying to run out on me are you?’
‘Do I look that fucking stupid?’
As soon as Finney left me, I rang Laura. Her mobile trilled for what seemed like an age. Where was she? It was normally stapled to her ear.
While I waited for her to answer I ran the whole saga of the hotel back through my mind. Laura had offered to make the booking, ‘I’ll do it David, you’ve already sorted out the flights, found all the nice restaurants and changed the currency, so I’ll do this.’ I’d been touched that she appreciated my efforts and was looking to lend a hand, not taking me for granted.
Of course, when weeks then dragged by and, guess what, the booking had not been made, I was starting to feel very differently about her offer. All I heard was ‘I’ll do it later, I’m tired,’ as if I wasn’t, or ‘work has been a bastard this week’, as if I spent my days auditioning teenaged porn stars.
I could have picked up the phone or gone on the web and sorted it in minutes but no, she wouldn’t let me do that either, even though I offered to take the task back off her hands. It eventually became a cause of real friction between us. Every night I would bring up the subject and every night I would chose a different way to raise it; jocular, teasing, impatient, pissed-off, very pissed-off, then finally up to Def Con Two. It was only then, when I was literally screaming at her, ‘why can’t you just make the fucking booking?’ that she finally snapped.
‘Alright, alright, stop bloody going on and on about it! Jesus!’
‘I would stop going on about it if you would just bloody do it. You’re like a teenager who won’t tidy her room!’
She stormed off and did the job on the internet in all of about twenty minutes. It was a lot longer than twenty minutes before she spoke to me again.
Trouble was, when Laura had first said, ‘I’ll book the hotel,’ I distinctly told her to make the booking in both our names.
When Laura finally answered her mobile I asked, ‘It’s me, when you booked the hotel, did you book the rooms in both our names like I asked?’
‘Eh? Er, I don’t know, yes, I think so, why?’ ‘You think so or you did so? This is important.’
‘I can’t remember,’ she wailed, ‘you’d been shouting at me. I don’t know and I’m very tired. Where are you?’
I ignored her question, ‘you don’t know?’
‘No, I don’t know, which bit of that last sentence did you not understand?’
‘I could have been killed tonight because you didn’t do what I asked. Bobby was trying to find me and when he phoned the hotel they had no record of me staying there. He didn’t think to ask if they had a Laura Collins in their hotel because he probably can’t even remember your surname. Jesus, I don’t understand you sometimes. It was the only thing I asked you to do!’
‘Oh shut up David,’ she shouted, ‘stop exaggerating. Your boss is not going to kill you.’
My God, was she deliberately trying to wind me up? ‘Have you forgotten who I work for?!’
‘No! I haven’t!’ she shouted, ‘in fact I am sick of hearing about it!’ That was a bit rich, since I had to listen to every banal detail of her working day the minute she walked through my door each evening.
‘You stupid bitch!’ I screamed at her. My answer was the dead sound of her mobile being switched off, ‘Laura? Laura!?’ I didn’t know why I was still shouting at her. She had already gone.
I’d had a shit evening. By now we were well into the early hours and getting nowhere. Finney and I had spoken to everyone and come up with zilch. My eyes were burning with tiredness. I was just starting to contemplate getting home for a few hours shut-eye to shake off the jet lag and start afresh in the morning, when the mobile began to vibrate in my jacket pocket. It was Vincent phoning from Privado.
‘I’m sorry to bother you so late man,’ he said.
‘I’m not sleeping.’ I told him, ‘what is it?’
‘Well… I’m afraid… ’ he seemed reluctant to come to the point.
‘Go on.’ I prompted him.
‘… it’s your brother like.’
This was the last thing I needed. I persuaded Finney to drop me at Privado and leave me to it. I could always borrow Vincent’s car or get a cab if I needed one and I didn’t want Finney to see Danny in one of his states. Vincent was waiting by the door for me when I arrived, which I appreciated. He was either a very good bloke or he hadn’t heard about my fall in prestige now that I was the man who’d cost Bobby Mahoney a small fortune. He led me into the place.
Privado was a low-rate, lap dancing bar just off the Quayside that Bobby controlled. It was pretty busy. It looked like the credit crunch wasn’t stopping men from coming in here and parting with large amounts of cash for a quick flash of a girl’s tits. The blue lighting was so subdued you would have had to squint to see anything though, even when the lass pressed herself right up against you, but they still turned up. There were half a dozen girls in the room, dressed in, or slowly removing, their bra and pants. The men looked drunk, sitting on their own around the leather seating that lined the bar’s walls. The girls made them sit on their hands so they didn’t get tempted to touch what they were supposed to just be looking at but that clearly hadn’t stopped Our-young-’un from disgracing himself. They straddled the men, perched on their knees and gyrated while they draped their long hair in the guy’s faces or rubbed their breasts together a couple of millimetres from their slavering mouths. The routines were all pretty similar but the men didn’t seem too bothered by the lack of variety.
I saw one girl I recognised. Michelle had just climbed off a guy’s lap then bent down in front of him so he could stare at her arse. She gave her bum a half-hearted smack, but her eyes told me how bored she was. Who was she trying to kid, I thought, but then I saw the look on his face. His mouth was open wider then a guppy’s and his eyes looked like they were about to roll right up into their sockets. Clearly he thought this whole spectacle was an unrestrained display of raw, female sexuality, not the student-loan-busting source of revenue that Michelle viewed it as.
It took a while to cross the floor while the girls were doing their thing. I had to virtually step over one of them as she writhed on the ground. The music ended as I passed Michelle, just as she whipped her bra off so she could do the second of the fish-faced bloke’s two dances topless. That was the deal; two dances for twenty notes, twenty quid spunked in around six minutes. At that rate he would be a couple of hundred quid down in around an hour, excluding tips. For the same amount he could have had full sex with one of Bobby’s escorts, which made more sense to me, but I guessed he was too shy for that.
The second song was Khia’s ‘My Neck My Back’ and Michelle bent down again to show him everything Khia was singing about. He stared at her arse once more as she peeled her knickers off. She looked up as I walked by, smiled, blew me a little kiss and gave me a wave, which he didn’t spot. He didn’t seem to notice Michelle wasn’t giving him her undivided attention but then he wasn’t looking at her face.
Michelle was a nice girl and certainly a looker. She was around twenty with long, dark hair and a cracking figure, but I couldn’t understand the appeal of all this myself. I’m no prude but this didn’t seem to be one thing or the other. If you needed sex and were prepared to pay for it, then have sex. Don’t piss about in a lap dancing club. I didn’t sleep with Bobby’s escort girls and I didn’t need to pay for it either, even before Laura, but I didn’t have an issue with people who did. It seemed to me that all the guys in here were cowards. They wanted it but they weren’t prepared to properly go for it. This was safe, it was sanitised, it was a tease but that’s all it was. They’d still leave here frustrated. Like I said, I just didn’t get it.
Vincent took me through an unmarked, metal door into a dimly lit corridor. The door swung shut behind us and the music was immediately muffled to a low drone in the background. We were headed for a back room and before he opened that door he spoke to me in a low whisper.<
br />
‘We had to put him in here. I hope that’s alright with you. He was a bit worse for wear when he came in, noisy like, disturbing the other punters. I sent a girl over to give him a couple of dances on the house, on account of him being your brother and it calmed him down for a while but when she took her top off he just grabbed her tits and she screamed blue murder.’
‘Oh Christ.’
‘The bouncer came right over and your bro got a bit aggressive but our doorman didn’t hurt him. I made sure of that but we couldn’t let him stay in there. I hope you understand.’
‘Of course Vince,’ I told him.
‘We gave him a bit of a talking to, made him a strong cup of coffee and locked him in there to cool off then I called you. Nobody else knows anything about it and I’ve told the doorman to keep his trap shut. Of course there were a lot of punters in there so… ’ he shrugged, meaning that word could still get back to Bobby if I was unlucky and my luck seemed to be in short supply tonight.
‘Thanks Vincent, I appreciate you handling it like you did and I’m sorry for the trouble he caused you.’ I took out my wallet and peeled off ten twenty pound notes and handed them to him, ‘give this to the lass.’ I knew Vincent would give her whatever he thought she’d accept to keep quiet about having her tits groped in public and he would keep the rest and that was fine by me.
‘Hey, no problem,’ he said pocketing the cash, ‘he’s your brother. You don’t have to apologise for him. He’s still a bloody hero an’ all. I haven’t forgotten that. I know he’s had his problems.’
I patted Vincent on the back and he unlocked the door and left me to it. Danny was sitting on the kind of cheap, red plastic chair they use in school dinner halls. He was still very drunk and swaying a bit, his coffee cup was full to the brim on the table in front of him. His lank hair hung down over his eyes because his head was bowed but I couldn’t tell if it was shame or if he had fallen asleep in his seat. He heard me come through the door and his head shot up.
‘Oh I’m sorry bro’. I’m a fucking wreck, I’m really sorry.’ He was slurring but at least he wasn’t violent drunk and he knew he’d done wrong. I was relieved. I didn’t want to end up scrapping with my older brother. Even in this state he could still kick me all round the room.
‘That’s alright Danny,’ I told him, ‘though I doubt that lass’ll be going on a date with you any time soon.’
He grinned like a schoolboy then. ‘She had a cracking pair of top bollocks,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t resist. You should have seen them man.’
‘What makes you think I haven’t seen ‘em?’
His smile went broader then, ‘aye, you probably have an’ all you dirty bastard. Bet you get to shag all of Bobby’s birds. Does Posh Spice know?’ and he laughed, as he always did when using his nickname for Laura. I don’t think he’d ever used her real name. It was always Posh Spice or Posh Knickers and occasionally Tara Palmer Topbollockson, which was his favourite name for her but he was far too drunk to attempt that just now.
The door opened then. It was Michelle, back in her bra and pants, giving me an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry,’ she told me, ‘I was just checking to see if you were alright like,’ and she went a bit red in the face, which was strange for someone who could take all her clothes off in a room full of strangers without blushing.
‘We’re good thanks,’ I told her.
‘Smashing,’ she said, ‘sure you don’t want a cup of tea or anything?’
‘He’s got a brew, thanks. I’m fine.’
‘Right,’ she said, ‘okay.’ And she hung on for a second. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ and she gently closed the door behind her.
‘Fuckin’ hell young’un, you could have been in there man. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t tell Poshy.’
‘Come on,’ I told him firmly, ‘let’s get you home before that other lass sues you for groping her.’
‘She wouldn’t get much,’ he said calmly, ‘I’ve got nowt.’
‘I know Danny,’ I said, ‘I know.’
I decided Our-young-’un was sober enough to bundle into a cab. I’d always called him Our-young-’un even though he was years older than me. I couldn’t remember why. I got him back to his flat; a rented shit hole in a high rise, which he wouldn’t let me buy him out of. He hadn’t got an income except his giro and the few bob he got each month from some sort of invalidity payment from the army. I helped him out when I could, slipped him a few quid every time I saw him and I really didn’t mind because he’d had ya bad time of it. He wouldn’t let me do more than that though, and I reckoned he spent virtually every penny of it on booze and the horses he backed that won nowt for themselves, except a short trip to the glue factory.
His crack-head neighbours left him alone because I made sure they knew whose brother he was but if I tried to do more, he just laughed and said, ‘you’re my younger brother, you’re not supposed to look after me. It’s s’posed to be the other way round!’
I helped him in through the doorway and got him to lie down on the couch then I made more coffee but not before giving the two mugs on his draining board a proper wash. He was out of milk again, so I made the coffee black.
‘You should get yourself a bird,’ I told him, ‘you need a woman to clean up this shit tip. She can put some milk in the fridge while she’s at it.’
He laughed again, ‘Nae bugger’d have us,’ and I’m afraid he had a point there, ‘I don’t have a fancy job working for Bobby Mahoney, yer knaa.’
I brought the coffees into the tiny lounge and set them down on his rickety, little coffee table. He had an old TV in there with a battered PlayStation rigged up to it. He was always playing those war games where you have to shoot robots that look a bit like the Terminator, which I found strange, considering that the war he’d been in had clearly messed with his mind. Last time I was round, I gave him a few cartons of fags, some games for his play station and an iPod.
‘How are you getting on with that iPod?’ I asked him.
‘It’s great man,’ he told me, ‘thanks.’
‘So have you actually downloaded some tracks then?’
‘Downloaded?’ he asked me doubtfully. He clearly didn’t realise you had to do that.
I laughed, ‘You’ve not taken it out of the box have you?’
He looked hurt. ‘Aye, I have and like I said it looks great. I just haven’t had the chance to do the downloading thing yet. Jimmy will help us like. He knaas everything there is to knaa about computers.’
‘Jimmy? I’m sure he does. He probably has a Dragon 32.’ He didn’t have a clue what I meant and I knew he’d never get round to using that iPod.
He didn’t have much of anything if the truth be told, except a couple of photos from his days in the Paras; one with him in uniform, with a blacked up face from the camouflage paint, holding an SLR, standing next to three other mates he had lost touch with over the years. He was smiling like he might have been fairly happy back then but I doubted it because I knew when it was taken, some years after he got the Campaign medal that he kept in his drawer. It was the South Atlantic medal and it proved my brother did a minimum of thirty days of continuous or accumulated service, between seven degrees and sixty degrees south latitude, between the 2nd April and the 14th June 1982. In other words he fought in the Falklands War. I refuse to call it the Falklands Conflict, people got killed, his friends got killed, so it was a war.
I’d seen my brother’s medal many times, held it reverently in my hand when I was a tiny wee lad. Even today, I can still recall the chest-bursting pride I felt, knowing my brother was an elite member of the 2nd battalion of The Parachute Regiment that took Goose Green. It was undoubtedly his finest hour. Trouble is, the rest of his life has been an absolutely unrelenting torrent of shit. He’s had every bit of trouble going; a shite marriage and a worse divorce, runins with the police, fights, drinking, drugs for a while but, thank Christ, we got him out of that world before it took a hold. When he left the Paras he worked a bit
, casual stuff, labouring mostly but even that seemed to just tail away after a while. He went from being one of the most reliable men in the whole British army to a fellah you couldn’t trust to turn up at a building site two days running. He doesn’t talk about his war but something bloody awful must have happened to him there because he has never been the same since. I don’t ask him about it. I just try and keep him out of trouble.
I was a bit pissed-off with Danny because he had gone wandering into one of Bobby’s places and groped a lass when he should have known a lot better than that, even when he was completely off his face. And his timing was impeccable. I needed that kind of hassle on top of my troubles with Bobby, Geordie Cartwright and the Drop like I needed a frontal lobotomy. But he’s my brother and he is, and always will be, a fucking hero. Nothing can change that.
It had been a long night. I contemplated phoning Laura but to be honest, right then, I didn’t need the grief I’d get from her. She’d have fallen asleep in front of the television by now, blissfully unaware of the fact that her boyfriend was already a dead man walking.
FIVE
...................................................
When he woke up in the morning, Danny wandered in and found me still lying on his couch and said, ‘eeh young’un,’ like it was all suddenly coming back to him, ‘I’m sorry. I was off me tits.’ Then he scratched his crotch, offered me a cup of tea, which I declined because he still hadn’t got any milk, or teabags for that matter, and then he thought for a while and said, ‘do you think I should send that lass some flowers? To say sorry like?’
‘No Danny,’ I told him firmly, ‘I don’t.’
Laura went a bit nuts when I finally called her in the morning and I got a lengthy version of the time-honoured where-the-fuck-have–you-been speech that lasses have been delivering to their men folk since Moses first went out on the lash.
I felt a bit bad, particularly after I’d called her a stupid bitch for forgetting to put my name on the booking. She had clearly not grasped the seriousness of the situation she’d put me in but then how could she?
The Drop Page 3