This is Deptford. Deptford’s always been a poverty-stricken pox-hole. Even us who were poor would come over the river to Deptford just to take the piss out of the people round here, ‘cos they were even more destitute than us. That boozer over there, the one that looks derelict, is The Harp of Erin. Back in the day we had it off in there with the Tullets, a real tough south London crime family. We done them, but only after a ferocious fight that saw buckets of blood being spilt over all the nearby backstreets. Unfortunately in the fray one of our pals, Stevie Stutter, got hit with an axe across his turnip and we had to cart him to hospital with it still embedded in his skull. Thankfully he made a full recovery, apart from the speech impediment. And that noodle bar over there, that’s now all polished wooden floors and plastic chopsticks, that used to be a grease-encrusted chippy when I was a kid. Me and my mates used to come over this side when we bunked school and go there to eat lunch. If we were flush we’d have pie and chips, but mostly we were skint, so we’d buy an uncut loaf of bread between us from the bakers, hollow out the middle, ponce a portion of crackling for nishmans off of the bubble who ran the chippy, then ram the stuff inside the loaf and share that.
A stinky old paraffin lived in the doorway of the closed-down curtain shop next door. We called him Smokey Joe, ‘cos he was always trawling the streets for discarded dog-ends. First thing every morning he’d raid the rubbish bins outside the chippy and help himself to a cold fish and chip breakfast. Tormented the life out of the poor bastard we did. Sometimes he’d chase us all the way back to the Greenwich foot tunnel. I also remember that the chippy had this old black cat that was always akip on the counter. One day Smokey Joe lost the plot completely, went berserk, run into the chippy screaming his nut off and pushed the thing into the deep fat fryer. Next day, the men in white coats came and took him away. We never saw him again. Over to the left used to be the old coal yards. It’s a dockside housing development now. We’d break in there as kids, nick sackfuls of coal and go round the local houses flogging them. As we hit the one way system of newly gentrified east Greenwich, a welcome break in the back-to-back housing allows me to gaze out across a shimmering expanse of the Thames, to see a tiny tug pulling its heart out, towing a heavily laden barge upstream. Beyond, on the far side of the river looms Poplar, on the Isle of Dogs. Diverting my attention from the river sees me running my eyes across to the flats where I was born, sitting dark and foreboding, and sandwiched between a giant gas meter to their left, and a disused Victorian grain mill to their right. It’s only two minutes as the crow flies from them to the luxury apartment I just left behind, but it’s a long ladder to climb in the scheme of things. And thinking about it now, it seems like a lifetime ago I was a just snotty-nosed little oik in short trousers and knobbly knees, blowing like an uncontrollable whirlwind through my wild and woolly neighbourhood.
They used to say that the test of a true cockney was that you had to be born within the sound of the Bow Bells, and I was. But when I was born, not only could you hear them loud and clear throughout the East End proper, but most days you could also hear them peal out all the way across the river to here in Greenwich. But what with the terrible din of today’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, you’re lucky if you can hear them halfway down the Bow Road. When all’s said and done you can’t stop the march of progress, and I reckon that most of the buildings along this skyline have had their day, and that they should bulldoze them down and start again. Take the flats where I was born as an example. They still resemble the turn of the century poorhouses they once were, but the estate agents round here are offloading them to the unsuspecting and overpaid for scandalous amounts. Fucked if I’d buy one, no matter how much they try and tonce up the manor. This is where I grew up, it ain’t where I wanna grow old. And not only that, even with all my new found wealth I’ll never shake off the inferiority complex I acquired by dint of having spent my formative years in local authority concentration camp housing. I’d slit my throat first before having to move back into council accommodation. It always made me feel like a stranger in my own land. My family ain’t there no more, neither. They got the right to buy, bought, sold and then moved out to Essex. Funny thing is that my old man was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist all his life, but he turned capitalist overnight and started voting Tory as soon as his house came on the market. Sometimes I get to wondering if they’re still alive, although there ain’t much I can do about it if they ain’t. And if they ain’t, and I ever get to hear about it, I ain’t planning on making any visits to no gravestones, anyhow. And no point in visiting people when they’re dead, if you never visited them when they were alive.
This hill we’re climbing now leads up from the filth and despondency of Deptford to a pristine area of open grassland known as Blackheath. It’s an area that always brought a welcoming breath of fresh air from the bad memories and pollution below. Although even this place is tarnished by the fact that it acquired its name during the bubonic plague, or the Black Death as it was more commonly known, that killed thousands of Londoners back in the Middle Ages. Pressed for somewhere to bury the dead and to try and stifle the contagion that was carried by fleas riding shotgun on the backs of black rats, the authorities piled the dead high on carts and ferried them out to this neck of the woods, before tossing them wholesale into mass, unmarked graves. Not that any of that mattered to us kids. We’d come up here just to see how the rich lived. They hated us, and we envied them. We’d also work the fairground whenever it came to town, or sometimes shovel up shit behind Lennie Thorn’s donkeys while they were giving rides to the kids whose mums and dads could afford it. He was a tight old cunt who even looked like a donkey, and who used to pay us fuck all, so we’d thieve dough out of his pouch when he weren’t looking.
We’re nearing the site of the pick-up for the dough from the Spud Murphy coup now. It’s a family-run undertaking business that operates out of a former builders’ yard right behind Blackheath railway station, and is owned by a pal of ours, Happy Fred, who’s as miserable as sin. As well as ferrying stiffs, Fred also ferries drugs. Driving on down into the vale of Blackheath village, it pleases me to see here’s one gaff that ain’t changed hardly at all since I was a kid. And even though some stuck-up cunts disparage it as a poor man’s Hampstead, I still reckon Blackheath village to be different class. Because as far as I can remember there’s only ever been one proper bit of grief out this far, and that’s when Ronnie Olive’s best pal Polish Mick got his nut blown off as he put his keys in his front door in a little mews just behind the church. Lovely man, Polish Mick. And as it was Happy Fred that buried him, he never even had far to travel to his final resting place. After negotiating a tiny roundabout near the top of the village we hang a right, then drive slowly along a quiet leafy lane that leads to Fred’s funeral business. On approaching the entrance to the yard, Danny eases off the gas, and as our motor slows to a stop, the loud crackling of loose chippings under the tyres diminishes to a quiet hush, only to broken by a teeth-grating crunch as he then pulls the car’s handbrake full on.
‘Who’s holding the folding?’ I say, unable to stand the enforced silence any longer.
‘Manchester Vinnie,’ snaps back Danny, without looking round.
‘Proper man, him,’ says Stevie. ‘Used to be in the SAS.’
‘Who told you that?’ I say.
‘He did,’ says Stevie.
‘Fucking liar,’ I say. ‘He used to have a transport cafe down by the Blackwall Tunnel. SAS! Snacks and fucking sandwiches, that dopey cunt.’
Quickly volunteering to get out and pick up the dough just to escape the stifling environment of the car, I also instruct Delroy to accompany me, in order to bottle me off and keep dog-eye. Not only does it suit me to get out and stretch my legs and to get away from these dry-lunch-cunts for a few minutes, but I desperately need some time to think my situation over. So, after climbing from the motor and closing the door behind me, I hand-iron out my car-creased clothes and then walk through the yard’s entrance
to start off down an uneven drive made up of oil-stained loose stone chippings, and head directly towards a run-down Portakabin sitting all on its ownsome about fifty yards or so up ahead.
‘What is it with those cunts?’ I say to Delroy, out of the corner of my mouth, just as he catches up to me twenty feet or so away from the car. ‘We’re picking up fucking lottery winnings, but by the way they’re carrying on you’d think we’re going to a fucking funeral, and even you ain’t said fuck all to me. Nothing wrong is there?’
‘Nah, not at all, Billy,’ he says to me, trying to catch his breath, and all the while eyeing me nervously, as we both then begin to march in time. ‘I mean I don’t know about them, but I’m just a bit nervous, that’s all.’
‘What you got to be nervous about?’
‘Er, well, you know, all this dough.’
‘This is the fucking easy part. The hardest part is worrying about what you’re gonna fucking spend it on.’
‘Yeah,’ he says to me, grinning weakly through a forced smile, as the pair of us then have to move sharply to the right in order to pass an absolute fucking monster of a Neapolitan Mastiff guard dog, tethered to a metal post by means of a heavy-duty rusted chain, and that goes garrity at everyone that walks past, us being no exception.
On seeing us approach it goes into its usual frenzy, and starts lunging at us frantically, growling and snarling through a shit-scary set of razor-sharp fangs dripping with sea-white foam, and almost tearing itself in two trying to break free from its bonds, longing to rip us limb from limb.
‘Fucking wrong, that is,’ I say to Delroy. ‘They keep that poor thing out in all weathers. No wonder it’s gone fucking nutrock.’
‘What do they need a fucking guard dog here for, anyway?’ says Delroy. ‘Fuck all here to steal.’
‘Fucking vandals, ain’t it?’ I say. ‘They started climbing over the fence and causing murder. Look at some of those headstones, been graffitied all over. Little fuckers. I caught one red-handed once when I was out jogging. Only a little prick he was, still in school uniform and spraying a bus stop down near where I live. So I stopped and made him give me the can. Then I sprayed the little cunt from head to foot, gave him a kick up the arse and told him to fuck off.’
‘Nice one, Billy. ‘Ere, how come Happy Fred’s got two ambulances parked up with his hearses over there?’
‘Deregulated the fucking industry, ain’t they? Anyone can own a private ambulance now. And you know what Fred’s like round a pound note. He has his boys hovering over the short-wave like fucking vultures, tuning in to the emergency services’ radio frequencies. As soon as they hear there’s a road accident or someone has a heart attack or something, off they rush to the scene like Batman and fucking Robin. And what with all the cutbacks and stuff, chances are they beat the proper ambulance mob there and claim the job. And Fred wins both ways, ‘cos if the punter mullers on the way to the hospital he gets to bury them as well. Wouldn’t fill you with much confidence if you was at death’s door and you knew that the ambulance you were being ferried to the hospital in was owned by a fucking undertakers, would it?’
‘Nah, suppose not.’
‘And take a butcher’s over there,’ I then say, pointing to a large open-fronted outhouse stacked from floor to ceiling with varying shapes and sizes of coffins. ‘You got the paupers’ ones made out of plywood on one side, right up to the solid oak ones for rich cunts on the other. And what’s the betting that after you’ve shelled out untold shekels to give a loved one a proper send off in one of the oak caskets, Fred snatches their body out and throws it straight into a plywood one instead?’
‘You reckon?’
‘Reckon? I fucking know. Anyway, fuck all that. Now keep schtummo and just follow me.’
Prising open the small single door of the cabin we step inside to be greeted by a dank wooden hallway before making our way along a narrow passage towards a back office. For peace of mind I pull my gun out of my jock strap, stash it in my right-side jacket pocket, and on reaching Happy Fred’s office take a quick gander through its perspex window. Once satisfied that all’s sweet, I open the door and we stroll in.
‘Hello, Vinnie,’ I say to Manchester Vinnie, who’s lounging back on a leather recliner and slurping loudly from a large mug of coffee, while listening to a radio talk show on a nearby ghetto blaster.
‘Hello, Billy,’ says Vinnie, looking up at me and Delroy and dropping forward in the chair, dumping his mug on the table before reaching across it for me and him to exchange the briefest of handshakes.
‘Everything sweet?’ I say, staring deep into his eyes, just to keep him unsettled.
‘Yeah,’ he says, his Adam’s apple jumping nervously, a reaction that warms the cockles of my heart. ‘And I must say, Billy. It was a blinding bit of tackle. Went out straight away. We still got one lot left though, and that’s that bit of Paddy gear. Fuck-all wrong with it, of course. But Fred left a message to say that he wants to renegotiate on the price. Reckons it’s a little bit lumpy, what you’re asking.’
‘Lumpy?’ I say, pulling the edges of my mouth down into one of my well-practised grimaces. ‘Custard’s lumpy, Vinnie. You tell that tight cunt when he gets here, that I said fuck him and the hearse he rode in on.’
‘I don’t want to get involved, Billy,’ says Vinnie, almost falling off his chair. ‘Anyway, the necessary from the first deal is in the two holdalls down there on the floor. Afraid I can’t pick them up for you, mate, I’ve got a bad back.’
‘Old war wound, eh Vinnie?’ I say to him, straight-faced.
‘Er… er… er yeah, that’s right, Billy.’
Motioning for Delroy to pick up the two holdalls we exit the office, with only a silent nod to Vinnie, before turning the opposite way in the Portakabin and starting towards a door down the other end.
‘You’re going the wrong way, Billy,’ says Delroy, struggling to keep up with me under the weight of the two holdalls.
‘Told you to stay fucking schtummo.’ Slipping through the back door with Delroy in tow, it’s about twenty steps to a large hedgerow through which a large gap leads to the station car park. Climbing through first I tell Delroy to push the bags through, after which he follows me, fear now gagging his throat and preventing him from breaking his silence. On reaching a small rental car I pull out my keys, use the remote to open the boot, and then stuff in the holdalls before climbing in the front, clicking down the central locking and starting the car. In a mounting panic, Delroy raps loudly on the passenger side window with one of his gold rings.
‘What you doing, Billy?’ he croaks, having now found his voice. ‘You can’t just fucking leave… Billy!’
In low gear the car moves slowly along, as I wind down the window about six inches, with Delroy walking briskly alongside, his face now half-pushed through its open gape, and his stinky breath fear reflected in his sick-faced mooey.
‘You set me up, you Judas Pig cunt?’ I spit angrily at him.
‘No… I… I… It was Danny. He said if I didn’t, he’d kill me.’
‘And what do you think he’s going to do to you now, when you walk back to him empty-handed?’ And with that I put toe to metal and pull smartly away, leaving Delroy two inches tall in my rear-view mirror.
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