by Iain Parke
Wibble looked around the room and then back at us, taking in the bats, the air of pervading menace. He’d never been in the meeting room before. It was strictly for full members and like Dazza, invited guests only with the membership’s permission, and by tradition, strikers were never invited. This was the members’ holy of holies, this was where we had prayers, so only the faithful were allowed in.
‘What’s up?’ asked Tiny in a dangerously low and controlled voice.
‘Like I said, he’s jerking off with a mag when he’s supposed to be watching the screens.’
‘Is that what you are now Wibble?’ joined in Gut, ‘Just a little wanker?’
‘Hey fuck off,’ he pushed back, ‘screens are clear, everything’s secure.’
‘There’s serious shit going on here Wibble, you know that don’cha?’ Tiny continued quietly, ‘So you know we can’t have any weak links in the chain.’
Watching him, he was loosening himself up for a fight. It was subtle but you could just see it in his body language, they way he was moving so as to give himself some space. Here we were, four guys with baseball bats with the rest of the club downstairs, giving him a bollocking serious enough to have him drag his sorry arse up into the meeting room, and he was starting to square up for a fight? Mind you he might just be thinking that it’s what was coming anyway.
‘What are you saying?’
Butcher pushed a chair behind him and barked, ‘Sit!’
He didn’t like that. I could understand that, if I was facing a potential rat fucking I’d want to be standing too.
‘I’ll stand.’
‘Did you hear what I just said?’ demanded Butcher menacingly.
‘Yeah, what d’ya think I am, deaf? And I said I’ll stand. Now say what you’ve got to say to me.’
‘Striker, just shut the fuck up and listen to me,’ said Tiny, ‘We’ve got serious shit to do now, a serious decision to make and we can’t afford to have anyone around who’s not serious…
That was as far as Wibble let him get before erupting in anger, ‘Hey fuck, if you don’t think I’m serious then you’re out of your fucking minds.’
‘When you’re wearing our flash you know you’re repping the club right?’ Tiny overrode him in turn, ‘From the moment you first tagalong, to being a striker or even god help us if you ever make it to real member, it don’t matter. If you’ve got a Legion tab you’ve gotta hold the rep up.’
‘Hell yeah! You don’t think I know that? You don’t think I carry the rep for you? I’m the best fucking striker you’ve had for years, and you fucking well know it!’
Tiny and Gut just exchanged looks.
‘You want me gone? Is that what this is?’ Wibble was really rising to it now, ‘Well I ain’t walking out for this crap! If you want me out, you’re just going to have to fucking throw me out. So come on then, who’s going to try it?’
‘Well then,’ Tiny said slowly, rising to his feet and picking up his baseball bat. I pulled mine up beside me as I rose too and walked round the table. ‘Guys, it looks like we don’t really have a choice then do we?’
‘Guess not,’ Gut said, as we closed in towards where Wibble was standing his ground by the door, our eyes never leaving his face. With a few steps the four of us stood round him in a semicircle, about a bat swing’s wide.
There was a moment’s silence.
And then Tiny said, ‘We’re gonna have to get you a tattoo organised pretty pronto kiddo aren’t we?’ as, reaching into the inside pocket of his cut off, he produced a fresh Legion top rocker and rolled up centre patch and letting his bat slip to the floor, he grabbed the astonished Wibble in a huge bone crushing bear hug that just about lifted the smaller guy off the floor, before pressing them into his hands.
‘Congratulations mate,’ he roared, ‘welcome to The Legion.’
‘You complete and absolute bunch of fuckers!’ Wibble was almost crying with joy and disbelief as we all joined in the celebration.
‘Love you too mate!’ I said laughing like I was fit to bust, ‘Christ mate, you should have seen your face!’
That was one of the great things about The Legion, we knew how to have a bit of a laugh.
Of course he was in. There was never any real doubt. It had been a unanimous vote. He would be the last of The Legion. And he could hold his mud.
There was an enormous cheer from everybody as the grinning Wibble emerged into the bar downstairs a few moments later with us following him, and a path opened towards it for him.
His piss-up went on until about three or so. I crashed in the bunkroom I got so hammered. Cost him a fortune.
Tiny took him to our inkman the next day.
*
The following week’s High Church was it. Tiny, flanked by us officers standing beside him, addressed the room.
‘We are a club. We decide things as a club and we do things as a club. That’s what we’ve always done, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.’
‘And if anyone has a problem with that, then they’d better say so now.’
No one in the room moved a muscle.
‘Right then,’ he continued, looking slowly around the room, ‘Tonight we’ve got a very difficult decision to make. But we’re going to make it the way we do everything as a club, and that’s as a club, together.’
He turned to me.
‘OK then, so I guess we had better get on and do it. Damage?’
I sat the bucket I was holding on the table in front of me.
With the freshly tattooed and still grinning Wibble who was possibly facing the shortest ever career as a full patch member of a club, we had thirty-nine members now. So I had printed out forty ballots and destroyed one. Just so that there was no mistake I had typed the question twice across the top and middle of an A4 sheet and then guillotined these down into two A5 ballot papers, ‘Should the club accept The Brethren’s offer of membership – Yes or No?’
Queuing in an orderly and quietly serious line, each member filed past the table and picked up a single ballot paper out of the bucket. Tiny picked out four, one for himself and one each for the guys who were down or inside, whom he had consulted and for whom he would be casting votes.
‘OK, has everybody got one?’
There was a mumble.
‘Anyone not got one?’
Another mumble but no objections.
‘Right then, you all know the drill. The bucket stays here under guard and we count at ten.’
Some guys voted immediately, swapping pens to write out their answers before folding them and dropping them in the bucket. Either they were very certain or they didn’t want the hassle of being lobbied any more. Others wandered off to the bar for a beer and a think. They had time, there was an hour left.
Butcher ran a tight ship down on Wearside, almost, some had always said, like a club within the club. There was no question about which way he would go given his longstanding relationship with Dazza and he would be making sure that his boys followed him.
Popeye by contrast was clearly very anti. He’d no business dealings with The Brethren, he worked full time on his fishing business and valued our independence. But he ran his cohort much more consensually and openly than Butcher, so while he would argue and try and persuade, and while many of his guys would undoubtedly follow his lead, Northumberland would not vote in a block the way Wearside was likely to.
I, like everyone else, had a lot to think about as I sat with my ballot paper in front of me.
From a club perspective, we all had a strong pride in our independence, the way we ran our own show. In subsuming ourselves into The Brethren not only would we be losing some of that autonomy, we would also be the new kids on the block. And however big we were in our own little pond, in The Brethren world we would be small fry in the bigger sea.
But the reward for making the change would be the worldwide respect of a Brethren patch and a move up into the outlaw elite with membership of one of the six senior clubs in th
e world. As The Brethren always used to say, ‘There’s two types of biker in the world, Brethren and people who wish they were Brethren,’ and there was something to that.
Being the other side of the Pennines, Gut’s guys in Westmorland tended to have much less to do with The Brethren than the rest of us and so generally less business interests and relationships to be concerned about, so some were strongly swayed towards the independence option. But as a group they were split, since the guys in the south who were running up against The Hangmen regularly could see what would happen if The Rebels took them over and were keen to patch over to The Brethren in order to maintain parity. Meanwhile the guys in the north, with much less exposure to border problems, tended to have much more of a ‘Why should we get involved in The Brethren’s beef with The Rebels?’ attitude.
Here in our borders cohort I knew guys who held any number of opinions.
I could see that for personal reasons Tiny was obviously conflicted. At the moment he was president of the club, but there wouldn’t be room for two presidents in the new order and Dazza clearly had that spot. So in voting for a merger he was in fact voting himself out of office. But I knew Tiny as well as anyone by now, I knew that whatever his personal feelings, he would do the right thing by the club.
As far as I could tell I think that while he valued our independence, had no pressing business reasons to want to make the tie up and would obviously lose out personally in terms of his position, he had decided in the end it was the right move for the club. Dazza had been right, the independents were being absorbed as the senior clubs made it clear to the junior ones that it was a case of with us or against us. So it was only a matter of time before we would have had to choose between The Brethren and The Rebels anyway, and between those two there was no doubt which way we would jump in the end.
And I think it was following that line of thought that in the end led me to write ‘Yes’ on my piece of paper, before folding it and slipping it into the bucket.
Popeye and Gut brought us up beers as Tiny, Butcher and I as returning officer, stood guard on the bucket, while over the next hour guys appeared in dribs and drabs to put in their papers. A small flurry of half a dozen or so announced that the ten o’clock deadline was on us and Gut and Popeye headed downstairs to round up the troops.
When everybody was back Butcher shut the door again, and then under the watchful eyes of the whole club the count began.
I stirred the papers in the bucket so that they were well mixed and then pushed it along the table to directly in front of Tiny. As he stood there, ready to start, the tension in the air was palpable.
Reaching into the bucket, Tiny pulled out the first sheet, which had been doubled over into quarters. He unfolded it and in a strong measured voice he read out a ‘Yes,’ and then held it out to show the crowd, before putting it down on the table to the right of the bucket.
The next dip produced a ‘No,’ which went onto the table on the left of the bucket.
And so we waited and worked through to a result.
It was tight right up to the last moment.
At twenty-one for and eighteen against we had as a club decided to accept Dazza’s offer and patch over to join The Brethren.
The only question was, were we still a club?
*
The answer, it soon turned out, was no.
As I’d suspected, Gut and Popeye were the ring leaders. They took their members out that night.
*
It was a still warm evening as Tiny and I pulled off the road and onto the worn out tarmac of the car park. We allowed our bikes to roll to beside Gut and Popeye’s machines which were already sat by the low wall at the edge. It was late May and the evenings were growing ever lighter, and we could see miles across the peaceful rolling patchwork of fields in the valley below, with the blue grey masses of the Lake District’s mountains rising like jagged teeth in the background.
Edgeside was our traditional neutral ground, so that was where Tiny and I had arranged to meet up with them the following evening. We had come cautiously but alone, it hadn’t got to the stage of war yet. Given how everyone knew how Butcher felt, we had decided it would be counterproductive to have him along. As far as possible, we needed to keep channels of communication open with the dissenters if we were to try to influence them. And having Butcher in the room wasn’t going to help that process.
We were still hoping that we could persuade them. Tempers had been running high last night. People had said things in the heat of the moment that perhaps on reflection they might have wished they had left unsaid. So we thought it was worth meeting up once things had cooled down a little. We knew that some of the guys in our Borders cohort had voted against but as far as we knew, everyone in our lot would go with the majority view now we had decided. So it was worth seeing if we could talk them round.
They were already waiting when we arrived. We embraced and sat facing each other over a table and three coffees. Popeye had his usual NATO standard tea.
‘Shall I kick off?’ said Tiny.
‘Might as well,’ shrugged Gut. Popeye by contrast looked grim, his hard eyed stare glowering out from a face sea-hardened by wind and rain below a fierce buzzcut.
Of the two, Popeye was the more dangerous, I decided. Bike clubs have a lot of ex-forces guys, people who find it difficult to settle back into civvie life, who miss the comradeship of being tight with their mates. A club like ours gave that same identification, the same sense of a home. Popeye was one of these with firstly The Devil’s Henchmen and now The Legion. He’d been a sniper in the marines and fought in the Falklands. He’d found it hard to adjust to coming back to peacetime soldiering after the heat of battle and had ended up in trouble for fighting in the barracks. Instinctively unwilling to be told what to do by anyone, it was inevitable that he was eventually demoted and then discharged.
Merging his club into The Legion had been a big step for him away from the feeling of being part of a tight knit group of guys who all knew and would die for each other. He had come into The Legion cautiously at first, a hard ass, one of those determined to make other guys prove themselves as worthy of trust, but blindly loyal in return.
And now you could see he felt betrayed. The prospect of merging again into The Brethren was a step too far, a worldwide network of people who by and large would never meet each other wasn’t the blood brother relationship that Popeye believed we stood for. And for others in the club to decide it was, was as good as treason to the club’s ideals as far as he was concerned, majority or no majority. Popeye was a visceral ultra anti, driven by very deep personal demons in what made him a biker in the first place. He had rebelled against the Marines. He wasn’t going to be marched by anyone into taking orders in any other organisation, ever. There was going to be no persuading Popeye.
Gut was calmer, less angry, but in his own way, equally determined. He had the same feelings about being absorbed into something bigger, but it was more about what it meant for him in terms of loss of freedom. He didn’t feel betrayed that others might want to join the bigger league, it was just that he didn’t want to and just like Popeye, no one was going to make him, and his boys who were with him, do so against their will.
‘Hell, we don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to,’ I protested, ‘You guys must know that. We’ve been brothers now for five years and we’ve known each other for a whole lot longer than that. But at the same time we want to keep the club together, and the fact remains the club has voted.’
‘Well, you can’t have both,’ said Gut.
‘What about loyalty?’ Tiny butted in.
‘Loyalty to what?’ Popeye snapped back.
‘To us, your brothers, the club.’
‘We are the ones who are being loyal, to the club and what it stands for.’
I could see that had made Tiny angry. Making a choice last night had been difficult for me, it had been difficult for all of us, but I knew it had been an almost impossible choic
e for Tiny. And part of what we had all had in mind in choosing wasn’t just what was best for us as individuals, but what was best for the club. Whichever way the vote would have gone, to go in or stay out, I would have gone with it because that’s what we did. And now I could see Tiny thinking these fuckers are saying they were going to go against the vote that the club had had? That their interests were above the club’s?
‘By refusing to abide by the club’s decisions?’ he growled, ‘Like I said last night, what the club stands for is the guys in it, and what we decide to do as a club.’
‘Whoa Tiny,’ I cautioned, trying to break this up before it went too far, ‘now calm down you two. We’re not here to get into that again. We had enough of that sort of talk last night. It didn’t do any good then and it won’t do any good now.’
‘But what good do you think talk is going to do now?’ asked Gut.
‘Well we decided to join The Brethren,’ Tiny insisted.
‘Some guys decided to,’ Gut said, ‘Me, I’m staying put.’
‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ I asked wearily.
‘It means what it says.’
‘Has it come to that?’
‘Guess it has.’
‘Are you sure?’
We sat in silence for a moment and then Gut and Popeye both pushed back their chairs and stood up.
‘You join The Brethren if you want,’ spat Popeye, ‘The Legion’s real members are staying out.’
‘You fucking…’ Tiny started to get to his feet but I put a restraining hand on his shoulder.
‘Hold it,’ I urged, ‘Let it go.’
‘The Legion’s real members are doing what The Legion has decided to do…’ Tiny sneered, as I physically pulled him back down onto his chair.
‘Tiny! Let it go I said!’
He slumped back onto his chair as they turned their backs on us.
We waited while they walked out, their patches disappearing through the door. From inside a minute or so later I heard the unmistakable Harley roar of two bikes bursting into life, followed shortly thereafter by the sounds of them accelerating away in different directions. We sat and listened as the noise disappeared into the distance, Gut west, down into the valley, Popeye east and away across the moors.