Back in the good old days Southend was still a khazi but at least it rocked. You could slip across to the Gold Mine on Canvey Island, drop a couple of blueys and dance the night away at a soul all-nighter. Or if you liked your music hard-edged, you could get down and bop to The Kursal Fliers or the Feelgoods. Lee Brilleaux and the boys, blowing out barrel-loads of shit-kickin’ British R’n’B. Getting down with the Doctors would make you feel good all night! The ponced-up local civic dignitaries have tried to take it upmarket, but it’s still got about as much class as a boot sale. Now at weekends it’s infested with flash-cunt cockney cowboys with melted brains, walking arm in arm with over-baked tarts dripping in horrible tom. You’ve got to feel pity for people who wheel in from their poxy provincial piss-hole towns behind the wheels of shitty little souped-up soup cans, and who cruise up and down the seafront thinking they’re in Las Vegas.
The Rite brothers’ car showroom hovers into sight and we pull up onto the pavement directly outside its highly polished windows. Climbing from the motor, all of us to a man catch our reflections in the windows and self-consciously preen ourselves before following Danny into the premises. And I’m thinking to myself, what a menacing sight it must be to see four sharply-dressed men with don’t-fuck-with-me mooeys climb out of a top of the range Kraut motor. But the second we stroll into the showroom we’re all taken aback at the flash on offer. Gleaming beneath a row of tungsten arc lights is a breathtaking array of prestige motors, simply begging for a good home. Behind a large teak desk at the far end of the showroom under a signed photograph of Jack Dempsey, The Manassa Mauler, and resplendent in a navy blue blazer bearing his family’s crest, sits Jacko, the youngest of the Rite brothers, whose face drops when he sees us bearing down on him. On reaching his desk Danny refuses his offer of a handshake, which upsets me because I genuinely like young Jacko, and had hoped this could be dealt with in a civil matter as befitting men of our status. I also know that a cigar and a brandy and a cosy fireside chat is Jacko’s normal style of doing business. But Danny’s in charge here and he’s in no mood for smoking jacket diplomacy. Without as much as a please or thank you, he gives Jacko fifteen minutes to get his stuff together and get out, telling him that, what with the two hundred grand’s worth of cars in the showroom plus the value of the property, that’s our debt covered and that him and his brothers can go shovel shit for a living.
‘These cars ain’t all ours,’ protests Jacko, doing his best to appear optimistic under a hangdog expression.
‘You’re right,’ says Stevie. ‘They’re all ours.’
‘Give us a squeeze, boys. This is our livelihood.’
‘What about our fucking livelihood?’ screams Danny, gob spitting out of his mouth, as he moves close to Jacko’s desk.
‘Sorry, Jacko,’ I say, also moving forward in an attempt to calm the situation. `All we’re doing is making sure we get what’s ours before The Bug gets his. I mean you can’t expect us to line up like we’re in a fucking bus queue.’
‘How the fuck am I gonna make a living, Billy, if I ain’t got no tackle wrapped round me?’ says Jacko.
‘I hear Southend council’s looking for someone to chew bread for the seagulls with no teeth,’ says Frankie, breaking into a shit-eating grin and starting to lap up the proceedings.
‘Look,’ says Danny, half-sitting himself down on the front of Jacko’s desk. ‘We’ve been patient but enough’s enough. This gaff stays closed and everything in here is ours. I’ll tell you what to do if you wanna stay in business. You go speak to The Bug again and let him know your situation. Tell him we’re good people and that all we wanna do is buy on with him fair and square on his next big load. You do that and you can have the showroom back and we’ll ride with you on the debt for a while.’
‘He ain’t over here at the moment,’ says Jacko, eyeing Danny nervously, as he leans in close to pick up a letter opener.
‘When will he be over here then?’ says Danny, using the knife to pick at the underneath of his fingernails.
‘He, er, er, normally just turns up out of the blue. But I’ve heard he’ll he here sometime soon.’
‘Well as soon as he gets here, you make a meet and then you phone me. I’ll tell you what to do from there. It’s fucking easy. We have a trade, and you get to keep your car front.’
So Jacko’s sitting there sweating like a junkie going cold turkey and his head nodding up and down like one of them toy dogs on the back seat of a car, leaving me to tip my hat to Danny. He’s grafted a grown man like a naughty schoolboy and The Bug’s fate is now in our hands. But we’ve still got to do what we came to do. So, after taking the showroom keys off of Jacko, we order him to leave, then arrange with a pal of ours to come down with a couple of transporters to take the cars out of the place, just in case they go walkies. After watching Jacko crawl off pig-sick we then have to kick our heels for a couple of hours until the transporters arrive, after which, we oversee the showroom being emptied of most of its stock, lock it up and then head back to London, well pleased with how the day has gone and knowing that the trap’s been set and all we have to do now is sit tight and wait.
But there’s one thing we all agree on, and that is that no one can know about the kidnapping. You see on our level, kidnapping a fellow criminal is a complete dog’s stroke, and if rumbled, will result in a well-deserved bullet in the back of the head. So, after chewing over the implications of taking and tying up one of our own, the four of us fall into contemplation for about twenty minutes, until Stevie breaks the silence.
‘Here, answer me this one, boys,’ he says. ‘What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s mind when it hits your car windscreen at seventy miles an hour?’ We rack our brains, but none of us can come up with the answer.
‘Its fucking arsehole!’ he says, causing us all to crack up, because that’s some funny shit.
JUST HAD TO slip over with Delroy in his motor to pacify Mutton-eye about the Spud Murphy coup. Not only was the man not looking a picture of health, but he tried to play up the old wounded soldier angle and put the bite on me for his full fifty grand share of the fuck upfront. I told him straight.
‘No fucking dice, Mutton-eye, we ain’t playing fucking Monopoly. This is real dough.’ But what I did do was weigh him off with a ten grand sweetener instead. I then reassured him that he’d get the other forty once the graft had gone down sweet. I also told him that if he’s out to fuck with us and this coup don’t turn out to be kosher, then I’ll personally take the ten grand back out of the one good eye he’s got left. Bowel cancer or no fucking bowel cancer. So, after squeezing one annoying pimple, there’s another spot of babysitting to be done. To that end we’re heading over to south London to the Pepys estate, Deptford, one of the worst piss-hole housing projects in the whole country. Colditz, but without the humour or hope of escape. They don’t hang light bulbs from the flexes in their front rooms here, they hang themselves.
Delroy’s got his hands full at the minute trying to keep an eye on one of his cousins, Shakesy. The kid’s old man’s in and out the nick every five fucking minutes, but never nothing big, always crabs. At this very moment he’s holding down a lagging for flying moody kites down the local high street. He ain’t exactly a genius. He got hold of some hot plastic from a ‘reliable source’ and off he went to have a spend-up. He’d hit about two shops and was thinking, sweet. When all of a sudden Old Bill appeared from nowhere, felt his collar and carted him off to the processing shop. Turns out the name on the plastic was Seamus Fitzpatrick O’Donnell, which didn’t quite fit with the fact that Shakesy’s old man is as black as the ace of spades and speaks with an almost indecipherable Jamaican accent. Honestly, brains of a fucking rocking horse! And the kid’s out all hours and up to all sorts. And his mother can’t control him. Well not from the back of the local bingo hall anyway. As we pull round into the flats where Shakesy lives, my heart sinks like a meat-filled turd, as I soak up the depressing scene that greets us. A drab, featureless gulag o
f prefabricated grey concrete blocks, plonked on top of each other to form a horrid vista of rabbit-hutch housing. Dotted about their fronts is a depressing acne of broken or wonky satellite dishes. Numerous windows are boarded up with graffitied chipboard, and those that ain’t have been smashed and left open to the elements and roosting pigeons. To add to the despondency there’s a binman strike, which means that the rubbish chutes are overflowing with stinking piles of half-eaten dinners and rotting waste. Living in a gaff like this must be like being stuck in the bottom of a toilet bowl and being continually shat on by someone with amoebic dysentery. I got into crime to get away from khazis like this but there’s always some prick manages to drag me back. And I fucking hate being reminded that I come from this stock. Mind you, it’s the coffin-dodgers stuck here I feel most sorry for. Some of those poor fuckers fought for freedom in the last great war and came home with their shirtsleeves flapping in the wind, only to get fucked over by a succession of ungrateful and patronising governments.
As that Kraut cocksucker Queen Mary succinctly remarked when she made her one and only foray into the ghettos of the East End to rally support from the working-classes: ‘My God, what an awful place! Why on earth do these people live here?’
‘‘Cos they got no dough to get out, you stupid Kraut shitcunt!’ would’ve been my answer to her. It’s got to be a crying shame when eighty-year-olds are too terrified to open their front doors because they’d get raped or robbed. Granted, the council has made a bit of an effort to rid the place of scumbags by hiring wardens and equipping them with walkie-talkies. They’d have been better off giving them fucking flamethrowers. Fifty feet away we spot Shakesy hanging loose with a ragtag bundle of sore-looking herberts, propping up a wall as they shoot the shit and occasionally grolley onto the cracked pavement in attempts to make themselves look hard. Delroy winds down his window and sticks out his head as we come to a stop some twenty feet away.
‘Oi!’ he shouts at Shakesy, causing the kid and his firm to look up suspiciously, like they’ve just been rumbled shoplifting. After dropping a lit fag onto the floor and stubbing it out under the sole of his trainer, Shakesy stuffs his hands deep into the back pockets of his jeans, scrunches up his shoulders and starts walking towards us with an exaggerated John Wayne swagger, his face split in two by an ear to ear grin.
‘Fucking hell,’ I say to Delroy. ‘He needs some fucking fruit for that bowl, don’t he?’
‘Rebel without a fucking clue,’ says Delroy.
‘I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s pencil.’
‘I fucking hate playing happy families, Billy,’ Delroy then says, quietly out of the side of his mouth, as the kid reaches the car door, slides onto the back seat and sits there looking like a sack of shit while staring up at the both of us.
‘You doing fucking gear?’ growls Delroy.
‘Nah!’ says the kid defensively, dropping his head to stare down at the floor.
‘Fucking little liar. I just saw you throw a reefer away.’
‘It was a fag.’
‘It’s skunk, I can smell it all over you.’ The kid looks up at me and I can’t help but smile, at which, he smiles back and just shrugs.
‘And what’s those fucking strides you got on?’ says Delroy. ‘They’re hanging right the way down your arse. Looks like you fucking shit yourself.’
‘It’s the fashion.’
‘What fashion’s that then?’ says Delroy.
‘Ragamuffin.’ I say, adding. ‘Not to be confused with a blueberry muffin.’ The kid simply shakes his head and gives the pair of us an Elvis lip.
‘For fuck’s sake, Billy,’ moans Delroy. ‘I’m trying to be serious here.’
‘So am I,’ I say. ‘Look at the little firm the kid’s with. Shoulders like fucking milk bottles, the lot of ‘em. Now listen to me, Shakesy. If you want to look like a proper firm, take my advice and tell your pals to keep their coat hangers inside their jackets when they put them on.’
‘Bollocks,’ snorts Shakesy derisively.
‘Butt out, Billy, for fuck’s sake!’ says Delroy. ‘Now listen here, Shakesy, I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you, son. It ain’t easy for your mum, what with your old man in and out of the nick every five fucking minutes.’
‘Shouldn’t keep getting fucking caught then, should he?’ snaps Shakesy, quick as a flash. The kid has a valid point.
‘Anyways, how’s me dog?’ says Delroy, expertly changing the subject and by dint, shirking his family responsibilities.
‘All right,’ says Shakesy.
‘You feeding him proper?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Walking him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good boy.’ And with that, Delroy reaches into his jacket, pulls out a large wad of cash and counts out a wodge of crisp notes. ‘Here’s a gorilla for your mum and a monkey for your dad,’ he says, stuffing the lot into the kid’s open hand. ‘And a pony for yourself. And if you’re gonna get up to mischief, don’t shit on your own fucking doorstep.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Bollocks!’
‘Got two of ‘em.’
‘Yeah, well when they drop come and see me and I’ll sort you out some proper graft.’
‘OK.’ I myself also shove a pony into the kid’s hand, and after a shy thank you, he climbs out of the car and makes his way back to his firm, a little bit older, a little bit richer, but certainly none the wiser. After watching him for thirty seconds, Delroy clicks the car into reverse and we pull out of the estate.
‘Whadd’ya reckon?’ he says, as we make our way towards Creek Bridge, Blackwall Tunnel-bound.
‘He’s fucked,’ I say. ‘But it’s OK, ‘cos he don’t know it yet.’
JUST GOT A message from two sweet-as-a-nut brothers who’ve got a bit of graft that’s been hanging in the air for a while. I’m slipping over to see them at a muscle-head gym in South London, owned by a bloke named Bitch-tit, so-called because that’s what he’s got from banging up too many steroids. Bitch-tit’s good stuff, aside from the fact that he wears too-tight, see-through Lycra tops and thinks he looks the bollocks. In reality, he looks like a johnny bag stuffed with pickled eggs. But he ain’t no prick, even though he looks like a cunt. As well as running his gym, Bitch-tit promotes bare-knuckle prizefights, and is also the main man for punting out jack-up-juice to bodybuilders the length and breadth of the country.
Sunbed Terry and his brother, Heart-attack Jack, are already there when I arrive. Over a cup of stewed tea in a quiet corner we get down to chewing the fat. The two brothers control the charlie runnings pretty big on the southside, and until now it’s been smuggled in from California inside the engines of classic American sports cars, which is the brothers’ other obsession. And although their gear’s ream tackle, to be honest it does sniff up a bit petrolly. Plus, they’ve been getting striped up on the price, and it just so happens I’ve got a Cuban down in Miami who can deliver premium grade rock at well under the odds. All I have to do is make the introduction and I get ten grand every trip they make without even getting my hands dirty. It’s a proposition that only a mug would turn his nose up at, which is why I’m sitting here with my lugholes pinned back against the side of my head.
‘When d’ya wanna get started?’ I ask them.
‘Whenever you fancy, Billy,’ says Heart-attack.
‘I can go anytime,’ I say.
‘How about this weekend?’ says Sunbed. ‘We’ve got everything in place.’
‘Sweet,’ I tell them.
And it’s as easy as that. We shake on the deal and I excuse myself, slipping out to the changing rooms to have a much-needed piss. And lo and behold, as I stroll in with my right hand already on my zipper, not looking where I’m going, I almost charge straight into the prizefighter Lennie McClean, who’s prowling the changing rooms stark bollock naked and with a face as red as a gang-raped arsehole. It ain’t a sight for sore eyes, for as well as being a terrifying looking man, what with his bulldog he
ad plonked on top of an albino ape body, he’s also got, dangling out of the left cheek of his cottage cheese arse, a spiteful looking syringe, half-filled with some dubious liquid, tinged with his own blood, and that’s dripping onto the tiled floor of the changing room. His back, which is as large as a side of prime beef, is smothered in its entirety with red-raw, pus-filled steroid spots, and it gets worse because when he bends down to pick up a roll-up that’s just dropped out of the corner of his mouth, I get an unwanted flash of a horrible, yellowy ginger, yawning furry canyon of arse, peppered with weeping buckshot holes.
‘Hello, son,’ he says to me, wiping some blood off his roll-up and sticking it in his mouth, slightly taken aback to see me. After which he holds out a gigantic shovel of a hand for me to shake, before adding, ‘Ain’t seen you for ages. Fuck me, you got a lovely colour. Been away?’
‘West Indies, Len,’ I say, tentatively shaking hands before surreptitiously wiping myself clean on the back of my suit trousers.
‘Smashing,’ says Lennie, who then, through a succession of grunts and growls, which in Lennie-land passes for amiable conversation, sends his regards to my people. And I sort of feel sorry for him. Yeah, we all know he’s a Bully Beef, but with us sort of people he minds his Ps and Qs. I mean he’ll have a tear-up with anyone on the cobbles, and I don’t know many men that could have it toe-to-toe with him in a straightener. But he knows we work wicked and he don’t want none of that. To prove the point, since Denny Dalston filled his arsehole full of buckshot he keeps a very low profile over east London, and that’s why he’s now training over southside.
‘I’m off again the weekend, Len,’ I shout to him from the pisser.
‘Where to?’ he shouts back.
‘Miami.’
‘You’re joking!’
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