JUDAS PIG

by Horace Silver

  Now if this was the movies, the band would carry on playing and a barroom brawl would erupt with tables and chairs flying everywhere. But this ain’t no John Wayne shit. This is for fucking real, baby. The band’s bottle has gone and they’ve legged it behind the stage curtain, while at the ringside tables, no one moves a muscle to help or hinder.

  Not wanting to put it on Greek Nicky or fuck up his business by having bloodied and battered bodies clogging up the shop, we drag what’s left of the three ice-creams through the club’s kitchen, still stomping and kicking and battering as we do so, before leaving them for dead, or whatever, in a nearby alleyway. And that’s what happens when you cross over into our world. For even the minorest transgression, we will turn you from a cunt into a cripple in the blink of an eye without battering an eyelid and no quarter given, especially when begged for. In the extremely slim chance of a grass or nose-ointment getting on the blower to Old Bill, we slip the cleaner a couple of hundred quid to erase our presence and the ice-creams’ blood from the club, after which our firm quickly divides into two separate parties, the three wives into one motor with Frankie and Stevie, while Danny jumps in with me. And although I feel nothing about the ice-creams we’ve just turned over, my heart does go out to the wives, who are visibly distraught about the violence they’ve just seen meted out by the fathers of their children, but nevertheless remain shut-mouthed and stoic in finest gangster wife tradition. Using backstreets and rat runs we then make our way back to Danny’s house in Canning Town.

  ‘I’ve cut me hand open because of those fucking mugs, Billy,’ says Danny, switching on the car’s interior map light to inspect his wound, a minute or so after we pull away from the club. ‘Have a butcher’s. What a fucking liberty, eh! No one, and I mean fucking no one, touches my missus, except me. We’ll put the feelers out and find out who those cunts are, and if they’re anyone, or think they’re anyone, we’ll slip round and put a couple in their legs.’

  ‘Fucking right,’ I say, still well fired up and my body tingling with sadistic pleasure. ‘But to be honest, I reckon they were just three mugs out on the Joe Brown and stumbled into the wrong gaff.’

  ‘Reckon they got a good enough hiding though?’

  ‘We nearly fucking mullered ‘em, Danny. Raspberried ‘em right up.’

  ‘Smashing! The thing is, Billy, I know Tina’s as thick as shit, and she does drive me fucking nuts a lot of the time. But, she is the mother of me kids. And more important than that, there ain’t ever been no other man on the planet who can say he’s ever fucked her. You see, Billy, the trouble with most birds today is they don’t know when to keep their mouths or their legs shut. And after they’ve been fucked up hill and down dale by every scumbag on the manor, they then have the fucking audacity to wanna go strolling down the aisle togged up like fucking virgins. I mean I don’t need to tell you that a good woman’s hard to find.’

  ‘Rare as rocking horse shit in our game.’

  ‘Yeah, well what you gotta do is find one outside the circle and train them. Put the fear of fucking Christ into them, because once they fear you, they’ll respect you.’

  ‘That’s all very well, Danny,’ I say. ‘But how do you know when you meet a bird, that she’s going to be of made of the right material?’

  ‘Fucking easy. First time you get them in the sack, you tell them to bend over and let you fuck them from behind, and if they say yes, you know they’re a shitcunt. So you spunk all over them and tell them to fuck them off.’

  And there you have it, the gospel according to a man that never made it past Chicken Licken. We pull up outside Danny’s house and without saying another word he climbs out of the car, almost slamming the door off of its hinges, like he always does, before starting up his front path without even so much as a goodnight or go fuck yourself. But I tell a lie, because halfway towards his front door, he does the unexpected and stops. He then walks back to the motor just as I’m getting ready to pull away. So I’m thinking this is nice, he’s come back to thank me for helping to protect Tina’s honour back in the club.

  ‘Fuck, something I had to tell you, Billy,’ he half-shouts, tapping on the window for me to wind it down, which I do. ‘I didn’t wanna say anything in front of Stevie and Frankie, but I’ve just had a trade for Pomfritter’s gaff.’

  ‘What, his mansion?’ I say, my jaw dropping as if someone has just hit me in the face with a stale wet kipper.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Fuck, mate, you look shocked.’

  ‘Bit of a bolt out of the blue that’s all, Danny.’

  ‘Not really. It’s been on the boil for some time now. I’m moving in next week. Come over for dinner, but keep it under your hat, mate. I don’t want the world and his fucking friend to know.’ And while that bit of breaking news rivets me to my car seat, without any further ado, Danny turns casually as you like and disappears into his house, leaving me to drive off dumbstruck, but thinking. Why all the secrets, what’s going on between him and Perry Pomfritter? And why does a man that can’t even read and write suddenly want to make himself the lord of the manor? But I get no further in my internal inquires, because my mobile buzzes angrily, interrupting my train of thought and informing me there’s a message left earlier by Delroy on my voicemail, saying he needs to see me. And so, after parking up the Pomfritter scenario in a mental lay-by, I decide to track Delroy down to see what the problem is. Two fat hairy lines and a couple of pills later, I’m gunning my motor and heading back down towards the heartbeat of the city.

  BRICK LANE, WHITECHAPEL. Another piss-hole part of my home town, and one that sits merely a spit away under the corpulent shadow of the city’s stockbroking skyscrapers and investment banks, yet still aches with post-World War II poverty, with many of its inhabitants barely hovering above subsistence level and forced to live in depressing tenement blocks, and where National Health hospitals are so underfunded that personally I would rather die on the pavement like a run-over mongrel, than be dragged down one of their cockroach-infested corridors on a trolley with squealing wheels, only to be hacked to bits by an underpaid and overworked junior doctor, in one of its distressing, Orwellian operating theatres. This area is a top-fucking-notch, Dr Jekyll and Mr Snide neighbourhood. Everything round here is either two-bob tat or discount cack, and it serves as another prescient reminder to me that I’m suffering badly from those inner-city blues. In fact, the only half decent thing around here is the twenty-four hour bagel shop at the top end of the lane. Hit them at the right time and they’ll serve you up a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel to rival anything you can get in the West End. After parking up my motor behind a plot of wasteland shielded by a corrugated iron fence, I neck another couple of pills, and with my head already spinning, start to make my way gingerly along a rat run of unlit narrow side streets that lead to Bugsy’s Blues, a basement shebeen run by Bugsy, a Somalian ex-pro fighter and armed robber, and all round proper gentleman.

  Bugsy’s Blues is a rat trap, a fire trap, and a deathtrap, all rolled into one. But it’s open all night, every night, which makes it an ideal place for a wastrel like me to spunk yet more of his crazy criminal life and dough away. Just as I’m negotiating the last unlit alleyway that leads to Bugsy’s, a rasping methylated voice from somewhere in the dark up ahead causes me to stop dead and my heart to trampoline into my mouth.

  ‘Got any spare change, guv?’ it says, and instinctively I pull out my gun from its holster and click off the safety catch, thinking that some scumbag mugger is just about to bite off more than he can chew. Only trouble being, I can’t see fuck all in front of me due to the absence of any street lighting.

  ‘Just a couple of quid for a man down on his luck,’ rasps the voice again as my eyes, gradually accustoming themselves to the dark, begin to focus on a what appears to be no more than a cabbage-patch head peeking out from the open end of a filthy dirty and half-rotted cardboard box, perched on the top of a set of steps at the entrance to a derelict building. Dropping my gun arm down by m
y side and relaxing a tad, I step forward, rifling around in my trouser pocket with my other hand as I do so, and pulling out the first note I come to which happens to be a tenner. No, I ain’t no member of the Sally Army, I always give to tramps if they ask. But only to the proper ones like this raggedy old bundle of a bad-luck story in front of me. I don’t give nothing but a sneer to those dreadlocked dirtbags that sit in gentrified high streets, shamefaced, and with emaciated mongrels on bits of string, because they’re normally middle-class dropout ponces who think the world owes them a living, and who’ll one day will get fed up with life on the streets and skulk back to mummy and daddy to ponce a top job in the family business. Old-school tramps are different class. Like me, they’re all fully paid up members of the shirking class. They know what they are and don’t try to dress up their scrounging in the pretext of political statements. I look at this way. They’ve got pitiful lives with nothing to live for except the bottle, so the more times you stop and hand them over a bit of dough, the more booze they buy, and consequently the quicker they drink themselves to death. They’re happy, and by turns so should society be. It certainly clears up the streets a lot quicker than if we give them nothing but hugs and kisses, because then they’d live to be a hundred, which means that London would be even more be choc-a-block with parasites on the ponce than it is now. I see my charitable endeavours as a form of benevolent euthanasia.

  But as I stretch forward proffering my tenner gift, I can’t help but think that there’s something awfully familiar about the owner of the gnarled up old claw that’s making its way towards the note that I’m holding out, so I move in to take a closer look.

  ‘I fucking know you,’ I say. ‘I’d recognise you anywhere, you Gonzo-faced cunt. You’re the toffee apple man from round my flats when I was a chavvie.’ The toffee apple man used to turn up like clockwork every Saturday morning on his old baker’s bike, with its front wicker basket chock-full of candy-glazed toffee apples. He’d pull up in front of our flats and ring his bell, and wherever we kids were we’d stop what we were doing and leggit towards him as fast as we could. First up, he’d always roll up the sleeve on his right arm and flash us his tattoo of a beehived fifties broad in a bathing suit. Then he’d ball his hand into a fist and knead his fingers together which would cause the broad to belly dance. Normally we never had any dough to buy what he was selling, so we had a special deal going on with him. For free toffee apples, we’d get our mate Alan Duffy’s younger sister Alice to do a handstand against the wall, so that her dress would fall over her head. The toffee apple man would then treat us to free toffee apples while treating himself to a game of pocket billiards as he nonced over Alice’s bald little banana split, as it sucked a tiny groove out of her navy blue knickers. After stuffing the offered note angrily back into my pocket, I grab the toffee apple man by the few willowy tufts of hair he’s got left on his head and shove my gun in his mooey, crunching out his front teeth as I do so. Then ignoring his pathetic protestations, I drag him roughly out of his cardboard nest and pistol whip him half-unconscious, noting while I do so that he don’t weigh no more than a bag of shopping and stinks of stale piss and booze.

  A quick shufti up and down the alley tells me the place is still deserted, although I can just about make out the bass of Bugsy’s sound system blasting its way up through the pavement. It’s at that moment I decide to rid the earth of this bit of filth at my feet. One less piece of pestilence littering the planet, the better in my mind. And because I’m standing deep in the heart of Jack the Ripper territory, I reckon it’s only right I enter into the spirit of things by skinning the tattoo off of the slag’s arm before I put a bullet in his skull. A sort of keepsake for old times’ sake if you like. Shit, I’ve got the wrong man! A quick inspection of both forearms reveals no ink work whatsoever. What the fuck’s happening to me? My memory recall is warping by the minute. I could have sworn this was my man. But then if I think of it rationally he’d have to be over a hundred years old by now, sucking stewed prunes and being pushed along in a wheelchair. And this old cunt in front of me, despite being as rotten as a pear, don’t seem a day over sixty. Shaking my head I stash my gun and fold up my skinning knife, before giving the tramp a gentle tap with the inside of my shoe, just to make sure he ain’t kicked the bucket. Because if he has, I’ll set him alight, just so it looks like he’s got pissed and immolated himself. But in the event my worry is unfounded, for the second I make contact with him he rolls his eyes, moans something I can’t understand then gives out a little cough. It makes me feel a whole heap better, as I don’t want the death of an innocent man weighing down on my already overburdened conscience. So by way of recompense I pull out a couple of hundred quid and stuff it in his top pocket then walk quickly away. It ain’t a fortune, but it’s fair play for what I’ve put him through, plus it’ll get him a few more bottles nearer the almighty. And come tomorrow morning he won’t remember a thing anyway.

  ‘Come back here you little cunt!’ I hear him shout, just as I disappear round a nearby corner. ‘I ain’t afraid of you, I used to go to Saturday morning pictures with the Kray twins.’

  Two more corners and thank fuck I’m out of earshot, and after squeezing behind some loosened slats in a wooden fence and then jumping down a flight of concrete steps, the steel doors of Bugsy’s Blues loom large in front of me. After knocking loudly twice they ease slowly open to reveal the doormen, two fuck-off big Jamaican brothers, Alfie and Tony Banbury from south London, who I call the Brothers Grim. Although not to their faces.

  ‘What’s up, Dreads?’ I say, stepping inside the doors to bask in the warm glow of their West Indian welcome.

  ‘Yes, Iah,’ says Alfie, grinning and crushing my hand in one of his pitch-black shovels.

  ‘Long time we na see you, Rudie,’ beams Tony, stepping forward to trap me in a bear hug that nearly crushes me, before lifting me at least a foot of the floor, and all the while I’m thinking, these are two big fucking devil dogs. After lowering me back gently to the ground, Tony releases me and takes a step back to admire the cut of my cloth. ‘Awoah, slick, sah! D’man always crisp.’

  ‘As a cracker,’ says Alfie, as I nod self-deprecatingly and give the brothers much respect in return for their appreciation of my couture, because they themselves know more than a little bit about dressing to kill.

  ‘Heard you two fell out with Tommy Jitterbug?’ I say, straightening my clothes back up and breathing awkwardly through my winded chest.

  ‘Pussy-claat stixman,’ says Tony, kissing his teeth. ‘‘Im a deal wid pure fock’ries, so I and I place ‘im under som ‘eavy, ‘eavy discipline.’

  ‘Seen bredder,’ says Alfie. ‘‘Im t’ink we’s comedian, so we lef’ ‘im in stitches. T’ree ‘ondred and t’irty-six to be precise, Rudie.’

  ‘Good fucking job!’ I tell them. ‘That cunt was never no fucking good to anyone, not even his mum.’

  And that’s it, down to a little bit of decorum combined with a small measure of détente, it’s open sesame. The Brothers Grim part happily to one side and in I bowl in like the cock of the walk, although to be truthful it don’t take too much hard work to butter up these two Neanderthals. Definitely not the cleverest two pairs of legs walking the planet. But it don’t matter, they’re good people to keep sweet. Well handy for certain bits of graft. So much fucking arsehole it’s frightening. No brains you see. Means they’ll walk straight in where any sensible man would fear to tread. Jesus fucking Christ, I forgot how dark this hole is. Can’t see shit for sugar in front of me. Like a blind man I start the slow laborious process of negotiating my descent down a precarious set of kamikaze-steep steps, putting one foot slowly in front of the other and with my left hand outstretched using the wall as a guide. The stairs drop so abruptly and unevenly, that if I didn’t know better I’d have my life on it I was descending straight to hell. After a few stop-starts and near stumbles, I eventually reach the basement and once again have to feel my way along, this time through a small dark
passage before emerging into the unlicensed belly of the beast.

  The joint is jumping and bass bins pumping. Against a backdrop of a single blue neon light, silhouetted brothers and sisters of the night, dripping in hoisted gold, are entwined as one, writhing like hungry pythons squeezing the last breath from their prey, as they grind each other sensually, lost in the scattergun percussion of primeval drumbeats and thunderous basslines that threaten to rip my stomach from its lining and burst open my eardrums. I stand for a moment to soak up the ambience and find myself almost knocked sideways by the overpowering mix of sweat, sex, pure-breed Jamaican Sensi and red-stripe. The smell of not belonging. Continuing on my journey I then have to hold my hands to my ears as I pass one the bins responsible for pumping out the murderous bass, when all of a sudden some joker from the depths of the blackness lobs an ice cube at the back of my head. The ice cold of the cube causes me to shiver as it falls down between the collar of my shirt and my neck, and for the second time in ten minutes I pull out my gun, then spin round ready to blow off a liberty-taking kneecap, only to find Delroy standing a couple of feet in front of me grinning like a catamite with a ten-inch cock up his arse.

  ‘Good job I recognised those fucking teeth,’ I growl at him, ‘or you’d be hopping home, you silly cunt.’

  ‘Told you they were practical, didn’t I?’ he says laughing. ‘Anyway, how the fuck did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘‘Cos it’s a fucking piss-hole and full of drugs and lowlifes.’