‘This Spud Murphy coup coming up, Billy. Reckon it’ll be sweet?’ he then says to me as the opening credits of Bambi start scrolling down the screen of his giant-sized TV.
‘Double sweet, why?’ I say, pissed off about not being able to have a smoke.
‘Need all the dough I can get, mate, to pay off this fucking gaff.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s in the bag.’
‘That little schwartzer, your pal who set this all up?’
‘Delroy?’
‘Yeah, do we have to pay him?’
‘I’m fucking his sister, Danny. I can’t fuck him as well.’
‘Fair enough, but I don’t know why you fuck black birds. There’s plenty of good white sorts out there. Plus, I’ve heard they right chuck up in the cunt department as well.’
Not even bothering to dignify Danny’s ridiculous fucking remark, I just sit there watching Bambi while rolling my unlit cigar around in my mouth. When out of the corner of my eye I can see Danny beginning to fume, and all because I’ve told him he can’t fuck Delroy out his share of the Spud Murphy coup.
‘There’s dust on that fucking chandelier,’ he growls, turning to Tina and causing the poor, downtrodden kick-donkey’s mooey to turn ashen white. She jumps up from her chair and makes her way quickly to the underneath of a stupidly large and ornate chandelier, nicked a week ago from a storage unit at the American embassy in London, and that now claims pride of place in the centre of the drawing room’s ceiling.
‘I can’t see anything, love,’ she says, inspecting the multitudes of shimmering glass tassels.
‘There, look you fucking mong!’ screams Danny, pointing up at the chandelier with the forefinger of his right hand, the same hand that has beaten Tina senseless on many occasions.
‘It’s a tiny little bit, love. It’s hard to get the duster in between those tassels.’
‘Well go and get a fucking toothbrush out of the bathroom and use that, you fucking div. On my life, you ain’t half a fucking div. I mean how do you expect to me to watch me favourite film, when all I can see out the corner of me eyes is fucking dust?’
Poor Tina and the kids, I’m thinking. Right at this moment, I bet she’d rather be married to a man with his arse hanging out of his strides, than be living in the lap of luxury with this monster. But of course, she does as she’s told and scuttles off to the bathroom, only to return red-faced and embarrassed and carrying her own personal toothbrush. After pulling a chair up to the chandelier, she then sets about getting rid of a few tiny particles of dust, almost invisible the naked eye.
‘That cunt’s ruined the fucking mood,’ says Danny, after Tina goes back into the kitchen to wash up. ‘I can’t even watch my favourite fucking film. Fuck it, come outside with me, Billy. We’ll go up to my pigeon loft, I’ve got to do some nutting.’
So off we trod up to his pigeon loft, with Danny Junior in tow, and with Danny’s mooey glowing as red as Tinky Winky’s handbag. Danny spends a fortune on his pigeons. He’s determined to be the best flyer in the south of England, but really he’s a fucking cheat. My old uncle, Deaffy, hatched all his own birds, bred them himself, trained them and watched them home. Danny never won a fucking race in his life until he started to earn a few quid. Then he brought in a crack flyer called Ronnie Bigwood, who got his loft into shape, weeded out his weak birds, bought in good stock, got them into shape, and then most importantly of all, trained them to come straight back into the loft, instead of getting lost on the way home, as Danny’s birds always used to do.
Finally Danny started to win some races for the first time in his life. Unfortunately for him the pigeon racing world is a very insular society, full of gossipmongers and back-stabbers. Word went round the gummy old cunts that Danny’s loft was actually being run by Ronnie Bigwood, so he was thrown out of the Canning Town pigeon club and had to decamp somewhere else. He’s just had a new loft built, and you best believe, his birds live better than families struggling on the minimum wage. But like everything in Danny’s life, if his birds don’t bring home the bacon, they’re totally expendable. We reach the loft and I start to shallow breathe, just so as I don’t have to smell the stink of these dumb fucking animals. Give them a heated loft with their own little beds and what do they do? Shit and piss where they eat and sleep.
‘Nut, nut, nut, nut,’ says Danny, after entering the loft to point out particular birds, and then bringing the first selected one out.
‘See, son,’ he says to Danny Junior. ‘This ‘ere bird ain’t no fucking good. Got itself lost on the last three races, took a week to come home, so it’s got to be nutted. Understand?’
Danny Junior nods solemnly, as Danny twists the unfortunate pigeon’s head off in one swift movement, and then throws it up in the air with a loud laugh. The headless bird flies straight up, its wings flapping furiously and with an abundance of blood-stained feathers already starting to rain slowly down. After reaching a height of about thirty feet, the wings suddenly stop fluttering and the dead bird drops like a stone, coming to a lifeless heap on the manicured lawn. His eyes aflame with passion and with a smile spread across his face, Danny re-enters the loft and grabs another of the selected birds.
‘OK, son, your turn,’ he says, handing the next victim to Danny Junior.
‘I don’t want to, Dad, I don’t like it,’ says Danny Junior, a slight well of tears in his eyes.
‘You little fucking queer!’ screams Danny, before adding in a mincing, mocking voice, ‘I don’t want to, Dad. I don’t like it.’ Taking a step in closer to intimidate the kid, Danny carries on the verbal. ‘You want Billy to tell everyone you’re a little queer? The kid shakes his head, looks at me and I’m cursing my cowardice, because instead of backing him up I just stand there like a cunt and simply give him a half-smile.
‘Nut it, you little cunt, nut it!’ says Danny once more. And with that Danny Junior clumsily pulls the bird’s head off, while it struggles in his grip. After managing eventually to rip the head off, he half-heartedly throws it, but instead of flying upward, the bird falls to the ground and simply flaps headless around us, as if performing some strange voodoo dance.
‘You little wanker!’ screams Danny, stepping forward to kick the bird dead with a well-aimed boot.
ANOTHER LITTLE EARNER has just dropped out of the clear blue sky. Denny Dalston, who we last saw when Danny put a gun in his mouth for trying to put the heavy on his brother Colin’s scaffolding firm, has told us that some pals of his in the IRA have confiscated five hundred kilos of puff from a little firm of dealers down in county Cork, and that they want to move it out of the country to avoid getting their own hands dirty. Dalston’s creaming himself at the thought of a sweet little tickle, but he’s come up against a brick wall because he can’t move that size of parcel. However, he knows we can and that’s why he’s approached us. After having slipped over to a boozer in Canning Town to word him, me and Danny let him know we’re interested, but after doing so, agree in private to tread very carefully, because Dalston’s an out-and-out div, and we can’t afford to trust his judgement carte blanch. It goes without saying the last thing we need right now is grief with the IRA. Those lunatics have got tentacles that stretch the entire globe. One wrong move with those boyos and you’ll end up hooded and bound on a country road deep in bandit country, with a bullet in the back of your skull and your trousers and pants pulled round your ankles, leaving you bare-arsed and shamefaced for all the world to see.
Having spoken to Frankie and Stevie they’ve climbed aboard, after which our firm then makes a few discreet enquires through one of our own contacts in Belfast. A very proper man called Nesner Hayes, who has excellent standing in the republican movement. Nesner, who I spent some time with banged-up in the seg unit in Brixton a few years back, was the top man in the Provos’ nutting squad. The nutting squad was the IRA’s very own internal security unit. It was their job to root out moles and grasses. And once you got taken by Nesner and his goons, you’d be interrogated and to
rtured for weeks until you’re nothing but a bumbling wreck of a human being, who’d sell his own mother down the river for a free pardon and a last shot at life. By which time Nesner, who’s a sick cunt in his own way, would whisper quietly in your ear that this time you’re lucky and your life is going to be spared. After which, he’d walk you, bashed, bruised and still hooded, along a hallway in some desolate country farm on the border of the Republic, until you reached a door. He’d then tell you to put one of your hands on its handle, informing you it leads directly to the street outside. He’d then go on to tell you that on his orders you’re to turn the handle, open the door and walk out, take the hood off and then keep on walking and never look back.
Spitting grateful thanks through broken teeth, you’d put your hand on the door handle as told, while all the time pissing yourself with fear and excitement that you’d got your life back. And right at that very moment when you think you were taking your first step back to your family and friends, Nesner would put a gun to the back of your head and blow your fucking nut off, with that last thought of freedom still ringing in your brain. But Nesner ain’t only just about nutting. He also runs the black taxi racket up on the Falls Road. No one drives a taxi in west Belfast without paying off the Provos. After a brief run-through about the coup he tells us that the deal’s kosher, after which we have to wait a few days for it to be OK’d by a former OC of the Belfast Brigade. In the event it comes back sweet, and so, with our involvement officially sanctioned, we decide to call the deal on. It’s a good move, for a favour done is a favour owed. And whilst the average man in the street may not agree with the IRA’s war, a clever gangster knows that when it comes to losing bodies, it don’t come any better than the Irish mob.
In the meantime, a very good pal of ours and professional hitman par excellence, Porky Edwards, is running a charity prizefight tonight on a disused spice barge that sits stranded in the stinking mud of the Thames at Shadwell Basin. Top of the bill is Gypsy John Johnny from East Malling in Kent, not long recovered from his mauling by Big Mac, now the top man out of the Pikeys, and who our firm striped up over Perry Pomfritter’s prize greyhound. John Johnny’s up against a fighting man from south Woolwich, Larry Tarbuck. Tarbuck’s favourite to win, but my dough’s on the gypsy. Normally our firm steers clear of unlicensed fights. For top league criminals like us they’re a pony night out, normally being full to the rafters with testosterone and booze-fuelled, chest-beating meatheads. And most contests themselves are a fucking embarrassment to the sweet science of pugilism, the art of hitting and not getting hit, with most degenerating into untidy brawls and most contestants being a sad bunch of over the hill palookas, intent on nothing more than grabbing a quick buck, and with only the occasional diamond sparkling amidst the shit. But in the event, we’ve decided to put in an appearance in order to give the nod to Denny Dalston about the IRA puff deal. For Dalston’s actually fighting on the bill for a purse of five hundred poxy quid. Which is just further affirmation of a theory I have, that you can’t put brains inside a coconut.
After negotiating our way along one of the badly wobbling gangplanks, specially knocked up for the occasion, our firm jumps down one by one onto the deck of the barge, after which, we clamber down a steep set of steps and disappear inside its rusting hulk, to find ourselves standing in a dank and sweaty cargo hold still lingering with an array of exotic smells from its previous usage. All about us, various factions of moody-looking mushes, each following their favourite fighters, are grouped in small gangs around a makeshift ring in the hold’s centre, and where the only illumination in the gaff is provided by a set of blinding white halogen lights suspended on a steel chain that swings unsteadily over the top of the ring. In and out of the shadowy half-light, slippery looking scallies with unshaven faces hover suspiciously, and the air is full of fighting talk, burping and farting, and bets being laid. The seediness of the whole set-up already makes me feel like I want to go straight home to shower. For this turnout is a top night for society’s dregs, and what with the different lairy little firms prowling and growling, the whole place also reeks of violence and menace. None of which matters a fuck to us, because anyone who’s anyone here knows who our firm is, and besides, we’re all tooled up to the eyeballs.
With the first bout starting soon our firm takes its place at ringside, seating only for the cream of the crop, the rest of the rabble has to stand and cheer on their feet, from the back. And as I glance around it feels like I’ve been transported back to a bygone era. When working men paid, then bayed for blood. The days when the lowest of the low hurried with undisguised glee to devour public executions, until the authorities banned them, so then they went cockfighting, dogfighting, any kind of fighting. Anywhere that saw flesh pitted against flesh, and where a man of the lower orders could sate his instincts vicariously by watching blood spurt and terrible screams fill the smoke-filed air. And still they come, only now it’s unlicensed prizefighting, to watch grown men of dubious mental perception gather in secret, so as to beat the shit out of each other for peanuts and local glory. Through the throbbing throng of the gathering crowd I look up and spot Lennie McClean sitting opposite with the film star Derry O’Dourke, fresh over from Miami, to his right. McLean’s retired now, but back in the seventies when he fought under the name of Daddy Cool, he had a series of terrific grudge matches with, pound-for-pound, the hardest street-fighting man ever to haunt the streets of Britain, Roy ‘Pretty Boy’ Shaw. Terrific fights they were, the real deal, full of poetic violence and retribution, what with both men being as hard as nails and thick as two short planks.
After catching my eye, McClean rises slowly from his seat and draws himself up to his full six foot three and sixty-inch chest, to soak up the hushed admiration of the crowd. It parts like the Red Sea as he strolls over and with O’Dourke lapping it all up in his wake. On reaching our firm, O’Dourke steps forward and greets me like a long lost pal, but he was so fucked up when I kicked his false teeth into the gutter in the States, I’m sure he don’t even recognise me. After prising myself from his clammy embrace, McClean pulls me to one side to thank me for dropping off his film script. He also asks me if our firm can smooth over the outstanding and ongoing shotgun problem he has with Denny Dalston. I tell him it won’t be a problem, and by way of return receive his humble thanks before he bowls back to his seat. The lights above the ring suddenly go out engulfing the cargo hold in darkness and quiet, save for the occasional lighted cigarette, the slurping of booze and a battery of self-conscious whispers, as an expectant buzz filters through the crowd. But just as narrowed eyes grow accustomed to the dark, the lights start to flicker on and off wildly as the first two fighters, silhouetted and moving in fast jerky movements under the flickering strobe lights, like bit players in a silent black and white movie, climb into the ring to take their places in their respective corners, each accompanied by towel-waving and bucket-carrying seconds. A loud whoosh is then heard as the lights flick full on, swathing the ring and the fighters in a blinding light, as Porky Edwards steps up, microphone in hand to announce the commencement of the first fight.
In the far corner, standing stiff as a post and with his face fixed in the rictus grin of the Grim Reaper, is shaven-headed sociopath ‘Mad’ Mickey Peterson. Peterson’s a failed part-time armed robber and full-time life loser, who for some reason known best to himself, changed his name by deed poll to that of Hollywood tough-guy actor Charles Bronson. He definitely ain’t all there in the nut. One of those mugs who seems to be happier in the boob than out on the street. It’s a well-known fact that he’s seen the inside of more cages than the Birdman of Alcatraz. Bronson’s up against a young kid from the same stable that Danny used to fight out of. But even before the time-bell rings, it’s totally obvious that this is a bad mismatch. Looking at the kid in the near corner, it’s written all over his daisy-fresh and fuzzy bum-fluffed face that he’s suffering first night nerves, as well as weighing in at about two stone lighter than Bronson. But this ain’t
the pro game, and if you’re big enough to step into the ring, you’re big enough to take a beating.
The time-bell rings and no sooner do the seconds climb out than Bronson tears out from his corner, like a rat from a trap, and starts piledriving mercilessly into the kid who, give him due, uses his newly-acquired boxing skills to bob and weave like a seasoned pro. But Bronson’s far too strong and hungry for him, and in less than thirty seconds has pinned the kid down in a corner, where he starts working him under the heart, with a series of sickening rib shots that causes the kid to drop his guard, leaving his head exposed. Bronson, sensing an early victory lets out an almighty howl, then starts to pay the kid dearly for his callow youth by landing a succession of spiteful chopping hooks to his head. The crowd erupts into a frenzy of rebel yells and hollers, screaming for Bronson to go for the kill, only to see the kid saved by the bell and leaving Bronson to stomp angrily back to his corner, like a schoolboy who’s just dropped his ice-cream cone.
Now, I don’t know Bronson personally, but I do hear say that he reckons he’s been the toughest man in every nick he’s ever been in. Maybe he has, maybe he ain’t; I personally couldn’t give two fucks. I know a lot of tough men in prison, and they’re all mugs living in a mug’s paradise. Any prick can give it the large strolling the yard in a prison issue fucking donkey jacket. It’s out here in the real world where it really matters.
A quick glance at Danny tells me he’s got the right fucking zig, because it’s obvious that Bronson’s going to tear the kid to pieces in the next round, and I can also see by his contorted features that Danny fancies a piece of Bronson himself. Without saying a word to any of us he jumps up from his seat, grabs hold of the top ring rope and cops hold of Porky Edwards, yelling at him above the still baying crowd that Bronson’s ‘a fucking liberty taker’ and he wants to have it with him bare-knuckle in the ring, right there and then. Sensing a kick-off, me, Stevie and Frankie move in close to where Danny’s standing, with our hands in our pockets ready to pull out our tools if things go boss-eyed. Finding himself surrounded on all sides by our firm causes Porky’s arsehole to drop through the floor, because he knows that both him and Bronson are in a no-win situation. If Bronson beats Danny, which would be a close call anyway, he’ll spend his dying breath staring up at the barge’s ceiling riddled with bullet holes. But you know what, considering the way he’s been banged-up like an animal ever since, he might even have thanked us for it. However, Porky does the sensible thing and stops the fight before the second round to save the kid from further damage, much to the anger and dismay of the crowd, who start to litter the ring with empty beer cans and catcalls. Bronson, on hearing the news, runs to the centre of the ring and lifts his hands up high and then starts to struts his stuff as though he’s just won a world championship, rather than bashed the cunt out of a spotty teenager who still lives with his mum.
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