Cracking Up

by Harry Crooks

  Criminally low wages played their part, as contraband was covertly smuggled into the concrete cunt by the screws. Lard Arse had no particular reason not to co-operate: He knew that fellow officers were bent, taking back-handers from the likes of Dog Sick arranging drops and flooding the prison system with drugs because the big bunch of cellies inside wanted to get off their faces coz it felt so fucking good and, fuck me, prison’s boring.

  As I stepped into the visitor’s centre, clips from my own time in this very same nick flickered through my mind and I froze on the spot questioning the sanity of returning to a scene of such institutionalised bollocks. The petty rules and regulations were evident from posters and procedures, specially designed to get right on visitors and sitting tenants tits alike, constantly reminding you that you were merely shit on the sole of the prison systems big fuck-off boot. Trudging slowly inside that hate factory was like licking shit off a nettle, a sense of foreboding preceded a bout of involuntary dry heaves, then I remembered the mission; to see my mate Spermy, let him know the nasty was on its way, sell the contraband at inflated prices and amass enough readies to sort out his crippling cash shortage, because it’s crap being skint in the harsh confines of the concrete cunt. Now where was the harm in that?

  I was sitting on a chair when Spermy slow-slouch ambled up, limping from his leg wound but, at the same time, with appropriate gangster swagger, cocky and buckshee, wearing a smart black Sunspel Loopback hoodie and trackie bottoms, boss trainers - Android Homme Runners, black of course - and a Tag Heuer Formula One wrist watch which was, yes, you’ve guessed it - black. He didn’t look too happy but, in truth, he didn’t really have a lot to smile about stuck in that fucking arsehole and counting the days. “Looking smart, lad,” I said, trying to big him up. “Cool as fuck. Killer-style.”

  “Got to have have the proper gear on, lar,” he beamed. “Even in here.”

  “How you getting on in here, then?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding me?” he said, making out like he had a cob-on, then burst out laughing, as if I’d just asked a daft question. “It’s a piece of piss, lad. Fucking holiday camp in here.”

  We spent the next hour locked in deep, carefully coded conversation discussing various business opportunities; he wanted to set up a deal with a rising star from the Stoke section who had just been released on license. He apparently had an interest in purchasing contraband that we could supply easily; namely the devil dust and bangers.

  The screws had transferred this feller from HMP Hewell near the end of his sentence, fucking bastards, and Spermy had gotten to know him and had taking a liking to the lad. He reckoned he was a top geez, fed-up with the diluted bash on offer on his doorstep and after untold bricks of proper gear. Spermy was dead serious about getting a deal sorted out. As long as it benefited all of us, as well as Dog Sick, I was all for it; it’d be a real drug thug stunt that would piss on any roguish scams we’d pulled in the past. “I’m getting excited now,” I said. “Sounds like a nice little earner. We’ll be minted like footie players.”

  “I’ll sort it my end! You have a word with Sicko.”

  The conversation flowed easily. I told him about the shoot-out. “Got to get on it, Ow-wee, lad! Green light every one of the fuckers. I mean it, Ow-wee: It’s time to go to fucking war. Feed the faith, starve the doubt. Coz there’s no fucking doubt about it - them mugs want to take YOU the fuck out. Get in there first, lad. Telling you! Annihilate them. Keep this fucking shit under control, son.”

  Apart from that one rant, he seemed in good spirits, mainly because he was plotting an escape while scheming about being a smack baron inside. He had it in his head that he was going to make a break for it while he was being escorted in a prison van to a hearing at Crown Court. He’d need assistance, of course. That’s where me and the boys came in. “Are you mad?” I said.

  He offered the opinion that there would be little resistance if we were tooled up to the eyeballs and pumped up on adrenalin. “They’ll shit themselves. Bunch of pussies Group 4, lar.”

  Towards the end of the visit I had to tell him something that was hard to say. I was trying to go about it in the right way, but he brought the subject up himself. “Lee ain’t been to visit. Fucking bitch ain’t even wrote me a letter.”

  “She got evicted,” I told him. “She’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “She’s got herself off to London. Gone to live with her sister.”

  “She’ll be back!” He looked fucking gutted but didn’t seem to take her move seriously, assuming she’d be back at some point. She wouldn’t be, she’d assured me. She was going straight to London and staying there. She’d said all her pleading with Spermy to change his ways had fallen on deaf ears; she’d said he was in love with himself, always looking at himself in the mirror and, at times, she had wondered why he didn’t just get a hotel room and go fuck himself. He was, she declared, insensitive to her needs and the sexual assault and his incarceration hadn’t helped things in the slightest. She’d left this cesspit of a city and there was no coming back.

  I didn’t want to get caught up in their messy relationship and, changing the subject, announced we were getting off to The Dam for the weekend. by the look on his face, I could see he was dead jealous to say the least, but he tried to joke about it. “Fucking bastards! Can’t you wait til I break out?”

  But I imagined it really did his head in, being stuck there in that boring shithole with no bird and nothing but the SKY and PSP2 to liven up the day. Pure fucking mental torture! Anyway, I didn’t know why I was feeling bad about it, because I had done him the favour of a cheerful and profitable visit, and mission completed, I made the excuse that I had to get off as Caspar was waiting for me outside. “Stick with it, lad. Be out of this shit-pit soon enough,” I whispered, and we tapped knuckles.

  “Have a good one in the Dam,” he said, putting a brave face on it. “Give the birds one for us, eh?”

  “You know it!”

  I was glad to step outside the prison walls where Spermy was rotting on remand and breath some fresh free air. Prison was a human refuse dump, no two ways about it; a dire place that made my head rotate at the thought of long spells of incarceration, dreaded deprivations and the mind-numbing boredom of prison existence that all the lads in there were suffering.

  I made a bee-line for our motor in a handicapped space of the car park, which was chocker-blocker. Caspar was slouched in the driver’s seat with the music on - Young Spray’s Amen. As soon as I sat in the passengers seat he turned and told us that he had clocked a sworn enemy park up. I couldn’t believe our luck: We weren’t even on the hunt. It was Narkie, Bola’s cousin, who had declared war when he’d smashed me over the head with a bottle that night in the G-Spot nightclub.

  As soon as he was out of the visitor’s centre we were going to grab him. It wasn’t too long before he emerged from the prison and walked towards his Ford Mondeo, distracted by a phone call. As soon as we spotted him we sprung from the motor and headed over across the car park. Caspar had the nine milli in his waistband and I felt for the knife in my pocket. It was a butterfly knife, and it had a sharp edge, vicious and keen.

  We moved double quick. Up behind him in no time, as he chatted on the mobie. I called out his name by way of a friendly greeting. “All right there, Narkie, mate!”

  He had his guard down, wasn’t expecting an ambush and spun around to find the two of us in black hoodies with scarfs pulled up over our faces. Immediately he sensed danger and threw up his hands to protect himself, but had hesitated just enough so that the blade stuck into his neck. Blood, bright red spurted out of the wound, in the jugular vein. The tiny hole sprayed like a punctured hosepipe. He staggered a few steps back before his legs gave out, collapsing against his car door. The Mondeo was white and blood smeared the bodywork, as he slumped down.

  Narkie was gurgling, bleeding to death on the tarmac floor and now nothing could save his shit because the blood was a half-inch thick. A
nd although the car park had CCTV, the grainy images of our faces would be obscured by the scarfs, making positive identification near-on impossible. It was crowded, as well, but no one came forward to say they saw anything, because he was a piece of shit who got what was coming to him. It was just another random piece of shit stab-up in grimey gangland UK, with no piece of shit suspects and, definitely, no piece of shit witnesses.

  When it was over, I wiped the knife and pocketed it. We shot back into our motor and got off, speeding toward the south end of the city, stopping at the home of Giselle first, stuffing our blood splattered clothes into a black plastic bin liner and washing the knife off, changing into some clean clobber and grabbing a couple of holdalls. We drove towards the airport, stopping at a petrol station along the way, and while Caspar filled the tank up I went into the shop and bought a cup of coffee from a vending machine, tossed the contents as I walked back towards the pump and filled it up with petrol. We drove a little way to the car park near the roundabout on Blackthorne Street. We got out and walked down to the Speke shore. It was a broad river estuary, its banks thick with foliage and we walked down near the water. We carried the clothes we had worn at Altcourse and dumped them in a pile, doused them with petrol and set them ablaze. Then I tossed the knife in the river. The clothes torched, the knife sank. There would be no weapon for the police to recover or any other evidence to tie us to the murder and even the Mersey would keep quiet like an intimidated witness.

  Afterwards, Caspar was all excited, because we were leaving in a couple of hours for Amsterdam. We were going away for a weekend break and I was pretty fucking excited about it myself and, before we knew it, we were in John Lennon airport, handing over the car keys to the gurl at the car hire counter, her company would valet any remaining trace evidence in the motor. Then we were sat in the bar having a cheeky pint and waiting to board an Easyjet flight. “He had it coming, that fucker Narkie,” Caspar said.

  “You still going on about him?” I said. “Forget about him! Fuck’s sake, lad! We’re off on a jolly.”

  “Forget who? The only thing I’m thinking about now is The Dam. I can’t fucking wait,” Caspar said, buzzing. “It’s going to be the dog’s bollocks.”

  28.

  The tattoo artist drew the design that Caspar described, then sat him down, to ink it in the place he had requested. He started to outline the tatt on the back of his savage-looking skinhead - two red-veined, madman eyes. The location seemed odd, but Caspar explained it would allow him to see his back-stabbers and haters at all times. The needle-gun buzzed and hurt in a sensitive spot on the back of the head because Caspar howled. It must have been painful because Caspar had to have a high tolerance of pain considering the amount of ketamine he’d consumed since we’d arrived in Amsterdam. The artist finished and Caspar looked in the mirror, making sure the piercing pair of fuck-off manic, staring peepers were screwing God knows who out good and proper. He shook hands with the inkman, who was covered from head to foot in tattoos himself. “Nice one!”

  I looked at the back of his head and the fresh wounds. A question was written in cursive letters above and below the eyeballs: WOT YOU LOOKIN AT?

  It was half-ten Friday night and, at last, we were ready to go out on the town in search of some sleazy bitches. Our newly found scar sketching mate phoned a taxi and we did a cheeky line of Colombia’s finest with him as a parting gesture. We got into the back of the cab and, man, those Dam taxis, they stink of skunk and the cabbie turned on the radio and a Snoop Dogg song was on, Lay Low. Matey boy at the wheel informed us where to find the best tarts in town and we were off. We pulled up outside The Stairway To Heaven after a short yet shockingly expensive ride. The rip-off merchant had told us that this was the place to find affordable brass’ and we were buzzing with excitement over the probabilities of getting our ends away.

  It was a strip club, really a brass house tucked away in the seedy back streets of the red-light district. We stepped out the taxi and were greeted by the sight of two big muscley, juiced up meathead bouncers sending a couple of pissheads on their way with a slap. We coughed up the entrance fee and stood in the doorway with our jaws grazing the ground, hardly believing the scene that was going on before our eyes. There were tarts everywhere, accosting men in every corner.

  A tasty stripper with long sexy legs and wearing about an ounce of bikini fabric was up on the stage, seriously strutting her stuff to a David Guetta tune, Little Bad Girl. She was shimmying and shaking her arse like she was the sexiest twerker on two legs, stripping off and working that arse under the spotlight. Bumping and grinding, doing the splits on the floor, then wrapping her legs around an aluminium pole, rubbing her crotch against it. Puckering her lips and the punters were loving every fucking horny bit of it.

  “Cor! Fuck me, man!” I said to Caspar. “Fucking sound this place, lad.”

  We looked around in wonderment at all the beautiful hotties up on offer and were double enthusiastic about copping for some proper mucky sex.

  “Fucking marvellous!” Caspar replied.

  This was defo our kind of gaff; we thought we’d died and gone to heaven with the banging bass of the dance music, the throbbing sex vibe. We were gleaming and getting into the set-up coz most important of all, we had guaranteed odds of copping for a shag. This last thought occupied our minds as we marched up to the bar and ordered two bottles of Heineken, which were promptly put in front of us before the no-nonsense barman demanded twenty euros. “You what, mate?” Caspar said, hardly believing his ears. “You’re having a fucking laugh, ain’t you? A fucking score?”

  Despite Caspar’s reluctance to part with the readies, I decided to follow through on the purchase because of my enthusiasm for this particular club. “Fuck it!” I said. “Good vibes here, lad.”

  I handed over the crispies and we quenched our thirst at the rip-off bar. We turned around and leaned against the bar, backs to the barman and beer in hand, facing the room and on the lookout for available sluts. There was a team of thick-necked heavies in one corner, closely watching over the proceedings, obviously over-protective of the female staff judging by their bruised knuckles.

  The place was packed out, heaving everywhere. There was a coach load of loud and leery Essex boys drawing attention to themselves. They were on a stag night, clustered around a few tables in front of us, shouting in a good few rounds and trying to stick together so that none of them went on the missing list or got overly ripped off by the seven or eight prozzies pestering them, giving it the hard sell in their lust for cash. It was like a relay as batches of Essex boys kept disappearing upstairs to the private rooms with rotating prozzies.

  Within five minutes, we ended up copping for a couple of Eastern European stunners without even trying. In fact, they’d taken a shine to us after a bit of flirty banter. “Ain’t you cold in that outfit,” I’d joked with my piece of fanny.

  “I’m fucking HOT!” she’d replied with a cheeky smile, showing beautiful teeth, pearly white.

  She was baby-faced and dinky, peroxide blonde hair pulled tight back off her skull, dark glossy ruby lipstick and bright blue eyes rimmed with heavy black eyeliner. She was wearing a frilly red crop top with a plunging V-neck, a baby pink plaid miniskirt which made her look a bit like Britney Spears in the Baby One More Time video. Like a Catholic schoolgirl, but clad in slut shoes - pink high heels with straps wrapped around her tiny ankles.

  After the pair of raving things approached us and rubbed us up, fondling our bollocks in an over familiar way, we decided to do the vice and negotiated a price. We weren’t put off by the seventy euro price tag for each of the come bags and they happily agreed to the sexual suggestions in hand. We vanished up the stairway to heaven, hard, foaming at the mouth because they’d told us they had a bottle of baby oil on the go, as well. We sleazily slipped into one of the private rooms and began a rampant mess about.

  Half-an-hour of pre-paid fun passed quickly, as we sweated and panted, switching positions: First, mission
ary, then doggy-style. My slut got on top, bouncing up and down, lustily faking an orgasm. Her high-pitched groans making no secret of the fact that we were fucking each other’s brains out. Then I got on top, kept going at it like a horny, out-of-breath stray dog and blew a torrent of goo into the rubber johnny on the end of my cock, while Caspar back-scuttled his piece of pussy over the sink where they’d insisted we washed our dicks before stripping off and engaging in the full-on orgy of pleasure seeking.

  Dirty deeds done, we bailed out the room, buttoning our flies and scooting downstairs. We were on our way towards the front door, intent on swerving another rip-off round at the bar because the brass’ had left us virtually potless. We spotted a line of bouncers wielding baseball bats, all of them heading past us and in the direction of the Essex boys. They were eagerly steaming in and beating the living shit out of them.

  Turned out that the plastic cockneys had copped the hump at the tricky antics of some of the snide prozzies, up to no good and, literally, pulling their pants down left, right and centre. The green gravy eaters had turned really nasty, calling them all sorts of absolute dirty pieces of shit cunts. One of them had even grabbed a tarts belly button ring and ripped it right out, which, if you ask me, was a bit over the top. Now the lads were getting some serious stick for it, as the bouncers swung the baseball bats hell bent on inflicting serious harm and injuries. The lads thought they were going to get their heads caved-in and were battling back, launching chairs over heads. It was a scene of pure havoc and bedlam; it was going off like the WWF. There were come bags screaming the place down all over the gaff; fuck this, I told Caspar, we’re leaving before the bizzies get here. We’d seen enough, things were getting well out of hand and fast approaching a police intervention and hospital situation. We were getting a little nervous about getting roped in and it becoming a stretch in a Dutch police cell. We didn’t want to miss our flight back on Sunday morning; so we quickly scurried off down the fucking road, stopping at a coffee bar to settle down and indulge in the novelty of being able to buy the sweetest top-class Dutch weed with a couple of frothy cappuccinos, before retreating to the relatively safe confines of our skanky, two-star doss house with some space cakes.