And the sight that greets me ain’t exactly edifying. The old man’s sitting bolt upright in his rocking chair and rocking back and forth, staring bug-eyed into an empty birdcage. Then, as if on cue, he throws back his head, looks at the ceiling and starts laughing like a lovesick loon. What with the cold and clamminess of the house, this whole scenario is starting to remind me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
After steeling myself with a quick charlie hit and checking over my shoulder for Leatherface, I take in the rest of the scene. Shine on Harvey fucking Moon! This gaff ain’t seen a duster for donkey’s. There’s stacks of years old newspapers piled all over the place, turning from yellow to brown with age. The carpet’s as threadbare as the old man’s head, and all the furniture surfaces are littered with budgie shit and feathers, although I can’t see any sign of a budgie. To top off the whole depressing picture, standing on a table beside the old man is a filthy, mildewed dinner plate boasting a half-eaten sausage, lying three quarters buried in a lake of congealed cooking fat.
Needing more fortification to see the sortie through I sniff up a charlie hit, then step quickly over to the old man and bend down to lift him up out of his chair in one fell swoop. Surprisingly, he feels warm to the touch, but he’s more like a bag of bones than a human being. Plus, he’s so far out of the fucking game he don’t even know he’s being moved. He laughs out loud once more and coughs, and a large parcel of congested grolley erupts from somewhere deep in the hollow of his chest, before bursting from his mouth and spattering the front of his already badly-stained granddad shirt. I wince and make hurriedly for the front door, only to feel a trickle of fluid soaking my right hand. Jesus Christ, the poor old sod’s leaking at both ends!
‘Sweet, mate,’ shouts Danny, jumping out of the car, as he sees me coming down the garden path. ‘Now I’ll keep the rest of the family away from him while you sort out the paperwork for me.’
‘I’ll go straight round and see a brief tomorrow,’ I tell him, laying the old man across the back seat of the motor as carefully as I can before climbing into the front. Without another word we slip away into the night and with the old man still giving it the Charlie Chuckles all the way back to Danny’s.
We’ve got a few bent briefs on the firm and all of them are my connections, but the best one’s a Chinaman. Not only is he an expert forger but he’s as crooked as a packet of prawn crackers. He used to run stolen passports for us for ten grand a throw to the Hong Kong Chinese that were having it on their toes from the communists. We weigh him off in either readies or skanky brasses with cunts that chuck up like fish and chip shops. I’ve done a lot of business with the Soho Chinese over the years. Mostly renting out basements to local gangs for use as unlicensed mah-jong houses. Or slum tenements, where they fill every room with clapboard, pint-sized bunk beds and rent them out in rotating eight hour shifts to the multitudes of Chinatown’s illegal restaurant workers.
PAPERWORK’S SORTED AND readies have been handed over, and the old man’s signed away what’s left of his life. To keep him sweet Danny hands him a holdall containing fifty grand. It’s his half of the bit of dough we copped from topping Maltese Tony. So the gaff is now Danny’s and everyone should be happy. Not quite. Stands to reason don’t it that the old man’s never had a pot to piss in all his life. So now he’s got the bag of dough under his sheets and thinks that everyone’s out to nick it off him. Won’t let anyone near him, and not only that, he’s calling everyone in Danny’s house everything from a pig to a dog. Danny tells me he wants to smother him. I persuade him to get a nurse instead. Two days later and Danny calls me and tells me to come over, as he’s got a nurse for the old man just like I told him to. But as soon as I get round there I suss out straight away that something’s moody. It’s done up like a Streatham streetwalker. High heels, tight skirt hitched right up round its arse, and not much change out of forty hard years by the look of it, even under the kindest light. Turns out its old man’s banged up on a lagging and it’s looking for a bit of pin money. And Danny being the gentlemen he is, is only too pleased to contribute to its old man’s prison fund. So picture this one for the family album. Tina and the kids downstairs in the front room watching a rerun of Pets Win Prizes. The old man, prostate and dentureless and smashed out of his skull, and gawping away into the ceiling, while me and Danny have got the night nurse stretched across the bottom of the bed, spit-roasting it like a stuck fucking pig. It don’t come no better.
Unfortunately the old man only lasts for three more weeks before snuffing it. And don’t you just know that while the poor cunt’s still warm, Danny creeps into the bedroom and prises the fifty grand back out of his hands.
And so, having fucked his old man out of his house, Danny buries him. Funeral arrangements were made on the quick but still word got out, and the streets of Canning Town are lined with the not very nice and the downright fucking nasty. If there’s one thing London gangsters love more than weddings, it’s funerals. Gives them the chance to put on their long black coats and sunglasses and make out they’re in the Mafia.
It’s a grey, grimy, typically overcast English morning. An ideal day in fact, for burying the fathers of bad men. Our firm and immediate family members are travelling in a cortège of five black Mercedes, and wending our way past lines of heads respectfully bowed and faces appropriately grim, following four black horses drawing the carriage and its coffin. To add insult to injury for Tina and the kids, the night nurse is also in the cavalcade, bandy-legged, but bearing up well after the spit-roasting. But Danny’s got the right fucking zig. Not because his old man’s pegged it, but because there was five grand short out of the dough he snatched back off him. Seems the old man was tipping the night nurse well for services rendered to him. Maybe he had the last laugh after all.
As our procession grinds slowly to a halt outside the chapel of grace, we’re pleased to see that representatives of crime families from all four corners of the capital have seen fit to make the trip to pay their respects. But a couple of mooeys we don’t expect have also turned up. Ronnie Olive and Smoothound are standing there as bold as brass with another couple of heavy looking bods we’re not too sure about.
‘What’re them cunts doing here?’ I say to Danny, as we stop to get out of the car with Stevie and Frankie and a few close family members.
‘Ignore them,’ says Danny. ‘They ain’t got the arsehole to say anything. They’re only here to make themselves fucking look good.’ But I ain’t so sure. As my firm and the families move ahead I stop to shake the hand of a pigeon racing pal of my uncle Deaffy. As I do so, Smoothound, looking every inch the reformed junkie, takes the opportunity to sidle up beside me.
‘We just came to pay our respects,’ he says, offering me a hand of friendship.
‘Sweet, Smoothie,’ I reply, returning his handshake limply, which in criminal circles is a complete sign of disrespect. A slur he nevertheless chooses to ignore.
‘Ronnie wants to have a word,’ he then says, lowering his voice down to a whisper. ‘It’s the brothers up north. They’re screaming their fucking heads off.’
‘Not now, Smoothie,’ I tell him, making to walk away. ‘Not at a fucking funeral. It’s a bad transgression, mate.’
Smoothound shuffles uneasily while taking sideways glances at Ronnie Olive, who’s watching the pair of us like a hungry hawk.
‘To be truthful, Billy,’ says Smoothound, his top lip now quivering in time with his shuffle, ‘Ronnie reckons you and Danny have fucked us over, and he wants to set the record straight.’ My stomach churns as a bolt of murderous anger shoots through me, stopping me dead in my tracks. Turning back to face Smoothound, the anger works its way in tight, knotted coils up through my body, causing a surge of power to twist my head to one side until a loud cracking of my neck bones can he heard. In the time it takes to shake a fair-sized knob dry, I’m sizing up the situation and severely having to stop myself drawing my pistol and whipping this jumped-up, coffee-coloured little cunt into a Grande
Latte right there on the spot. He knows full well you don’t turn up at gangster funerals and carry on about getting fucked over by other gangsters. Especially when they’re burying kin. But right now, I’m torn between the required gangster protocol of instant retribution, and respect for Danny’s old man. After all, this is his day. And so, as much as it kills me to, I clench down hard on my back teeth and smile like a simpleton, then turn my back on Smoothound once more and make my way back to my people.
‘What did that mongrel-eyed cunt want?’ says Danny, and already I can sense the tension starting to build.
‘Fucking liberty,’ I say. ‘The stinking little half-chat cunt pulled me about that bit of graft up north. Reckons him and Ronnie Olive’s been fucked.’
‘Course they’ve been fucked. But it’s a fucking liberty bringing it up at my old man’s funeral, God rest his soul. Fucking hell, mate, you should have just done him there and then on the spot. You’re carrying ain’t you?’
‘Course I am, I just didn’t wanna show disrespect, that’s all.’
‘It’ll be disrespect if you do nothing, mate. You gotta put it right.’
So that seals it, I’ve got Danny’s blessing. Never liked that little prick from the day I sat behind him on the trip to Blackpool. So without saying another word I turn and make my way back over to Smoothound and Ronnie Olive, smiling like a politician out pressing flesh and kissing babies.
‘Smoothie!’ I say, tilting my head back and gently motioning him forward. Giving it plenty of south London chewitude, he bowls back towards me, his confidence obviously bolstered by my apparent about-turn, and I know that he’s thinking he’s cracked the nut. And I’m thinking this is one flash cunt. So I crack his nut with a powerful overhand sweep of my semi-automatic Beretta, that strikes him right between his greedy, half-chat eyes. Pistol-whipping is the way to go I reckon, more so than a right-hander. Not only does it save on knuckles, but if you get a tough cunt and they don’t go down, you can always shoot them afterwards. But Smoothound does goes down, pumping satisfying spurts of the red stuff out of a lightning bolt of a slice that’s cut him right down to the nose bone. As he slumps forward under a muffled scream, his over-gelled head strikes the solid ground with a dull thud, opening up another head wound, this time on his slightly balding crown.
Then he just lays there, eyes agog and with the insides of his head spilling out all over the pavement. Moving in for the kill sees me stamping down heavily onto his face with my right heel, smashing his right cheekbone to smithereens. A sickening crunch of splintered bone fills the sombre air, as the three hundred-strong crowd growls and moves forward as one, on my behalf. Taking a step backward to survey my handiwork I glance up and break into a satisfied smile, because Ronnie Olive and what’s left of his firm are melting like cheese under a hot grill. Top south London gangsters they may be. But right here, right now, they’re surrounded by three hundred or so east London heavy-duty lunatics, all pals of ours, and all willing to kill for the cause.
Ronnie Olive knows that him and his firm only walk away from this if we allow them to, and I watch with sadistic pleasure as the blood drains from the three of them and they back themselves tight up against a nearby wall, looking like three skittles ready to be rolled over at will.
The rest of my firm reaches my shoulder through the crowd, and between the three of us proceed to kick Smoothound half to death, while his pals, his good pals do nothing but watch on like wankers. In less than a minute of kicking and cunting, the beating winds down, and all that’s left on the pavement is a pile of half-cooked mincemeat dressed in its Sunday best.
‘You want a fucking war?!’ screams Danny, turning to face Ronnie Olive. ‘We’ll give you a fucking war!’ But Ronnie Olive ain’t no Winston Churchill and he says nothing and does nothing. Just looks down forlornly at his shoes, hoping that they’ll sprout wings and fly him the fuck back to the Elephant and Castle. His two pals meanwhile are shitting enough bricks to build the Great Wall of China, and Smoothound’s cluttering up the pavement and not looking so smooth anymore. But Danny’s on full throttle, his head having turned into a giant prick, all purple and pulsing. Spitting large bubbles of angry foam he turns and points down at Smoothound, then screams at a nearby pal of ours, Nicky Sabini, ‘Pick up what’s left of this sack of shit and get it to the hospital. One funeral’s enough for today!’
Nicky, a cousin of the infamous Sabini Brothers racetrack gang, and a man who commands a lot of local respect, takes over the duties, ordering a few of his firm to scrape Smoothound off the pavement and get him to Newham General, sharpish. Job done, our firm gathers itself together and the hovering crowd parts like the Red Sea, allowing us through, so as to make our way back to the chapel of grace, where we’re cleaned up and consoled by an assortment of wives and molls. They’re wetting our faces clean, while getting wet between their legs. They live for their men dishing out vengeance. Round here the wages of violence is respect, and the best looking birds on the plot. Back at the wall meanwhile, Ronnie Olive and his two pals take the resumption of the funeral as an opportunity to slink into their motor and head back to south London with their tails between curled firmly between their legs. But what I need now is silence. I like to digest a beating or a murder I’ve been involved in, just to weigh up the pros and cons and get my head straight, so I’ll be able to get my night’s shut-eye.
I’m just about to slip off into a quiet corner to meditate when Danny calls me back into the fold with a smile on his face and a pat on my back for a job well done. So the meditation goes flying straight out of one of the chapel’s stained glass window. Now I’m stuck in a death-smell church on an arse-angering wooden bench having to listen to some local vicar with a nonce’s scrape-over spout pious drivel, while I mouth along to hymns that no cunt in the congregation knows the words to anyway. And I mean let’s face it, if there is a God, now would be his chance to wipe out a shitload of evil with one fell swoop. I mean there’s over three hundred top notch sinners sitting in one of his shops right now. All he’s got to do is send down a couple of lightning bolts and fry the fucking lot of us. After what seems like an eternity of pontification by the vicar we finally leave the sanctimonious sanctity of the church, and faking solemnity, file past vandalised graves to the old man’s designated plot, the dignity of the already soiled service further marred by the arrival of an Old Bill chopper overhead.
TONIGHT AIN’T A good night to be driving coastwards on the M25. It’s pitch black and pissing down, plus, this rice-burning piece of Jap crap I’m in keeps arsing every time I touch the brakes. It’s a Mazda something or other, fucked if I know. But I don’t care what the manufacturers call it, the point is, I ain’t happy to be in a motor made by a company that knocks out fucking light bulbs. I only borrowed it from Stevie and Frankie’s car front because my Porsche is having the brakes done. Normally I wouldn’t go near one of their motors with a bargepole. But they assured me that this one ain’t one of their specialities, their specialities being cut and shuts. Cutting and shutting motors is a short cut to reasonably big bucks. It’s semi-legit with no real bird, and a great way to launder crooked cash. Here’s how it works. You keep your eyes open for two of the same type of motor, one which has been written off at the front, the other, rear-ended. You buy the pair of them for crabs then cut each one in half and re-weld both the good bits together. After which you respray them, tonce up the interiors then re-register them. Then you get one of your Saturday boys to spick and span them inside and out, before knocking them on at full price to a mug punter, waving him off with a smile as he drives away happy as a sandboy in a potential deathtrap, his readies in your pocket. And you don’t even get your hands dirty.
I get pals come up to me all the time, asking, ‘‘Ere, Billy, what’s the best way to spot a cut and shut?’ I always tell them the same thing.
‘You’re going round a country bend, when all of a sudden you lose control of the steering wheel and find yourself smashed to pieces against an oak tree
by the side of the road. Then, after you’ve come round and tried to dislodge the bits of shattered windscreen from out of your face, you look round, and luckily, your wife and kids are still strapped in safely in the back of the car. Only thing is, the back of the car is now 55 feet away on the other side of the fucking road. That’s how you spot a cut and shut.’
The rain’s now coming down heavier than ever, pounding incessantly against the car windscreen. And although the wipers are screaming at full pelt, their rubbers are worn and useless and are smearing the water across the screen, turning the road ahead into a confusing blur of winking tail lights and cat’s eyes, and reducing visibility to nil. To cap things off there’s some joker right up my bottle, flashing his lights and trying to overtake me on the outside lane. After cursing the heavens and the slant-eyed bastards that knocked up the piece of shit I’m driving, I swear to God I’m going to give this boy racer prick a mouthful of choice Cockney cunting when he goes past.
As he draws nearer the full beam of his headlights strike me in my rear-view mirror, dazzling me momentarily and shooting a searing pain into the back of my eyes. It causes me to swerve the car almost onto the inside lane. After quickly regaining my composure I pull the motor back to the middle lane, just in time to catch him drawing level. Contorting my face into a well-practised growl I turn to spit blood and fire, when all of a sudden a hooded figure sitting in the passenger seat levels a revolver at me out of the car’s open window and lets off a single shot. The bullet obliterates my side window with a loud crunch, sucking in heaving gusts of cold and rain in its wake, before grazing the front of my head, ricocheting off the top of the dash and embedding itself in the passenger side front door. Instinctively I slam down on the brakes, causing the motor to arse sideways left before skidding to the right and then ending up crashing with a loud bang into the motor that has just shot at me, knocking it into the metal guard that splits the motorway. There’s a teeth-scraping howl of metal scrunching against metal that sends showers of jagged sparks shooting into the black night sky, and now I’m thanking heaven for this piece of shit because it’s probably just saved my life. Unfortunately the rear wheels lock and it goes into a Formula One skid, filling the car with a sickening stench of burning rubber. After shuddering to a halt for a split second the motor catapults forward into a hundred and eighty degree spin with the G-force pinning me back into my seat, and me screaming like some teenage tart on a fairground whip, before launching me forward like a rocket, crushing my chest into the steering wheel and winding me badly, whilst at the same time plunging my forehead into the windscreen, smashing a hole in it the size of a tennis ball and shattering the remainder of the window into a thousand jigsaw pieces.
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