by John King
Harry was walking across a moor following the sun. He saw a farmhouse in the distance. He was tired and the weather was turning. He saw smoke from the chimney of the house and knew somebody must be at home. The inhabitants could be friends or enemies, he had no way of really knowing. He hurried towards the house prepared to take a chance. It wasn’t as far as he’d thought and when he knocked on the heavy oak door he was surprised to find it answered by Mango. They shook hands and Harry was invited inside. Pete sat in a big chair in front of a roaring fire. Mango told Harry to sit down. He’d bring some brandy to warm him up. Harry sat down and looked at Pete. The missing brother smiled. He said he’d heard the news about Will. Things were working out. Carter was top of the league, Balti was working and Harry was safe from the elements. Everyone was happy.
Harry jolted awake. He was on the floor and pulling himself upright. There was a sack on his back. He was covered in soot from head to toe, and there was a fire in the next bed. He could see charcoal figures in the flames. There was no sound. It was a terrible sight, but Harry was in charge. He was inside the dream. He was lucid. He knew it was only a dream.
Harry jolted awake. Jo had disappeared. The house was silent. He needed a piss. He fumbled around on the floor looking for his pants and jeans. Where had Jo gone? Obviously not impressed by his fine love-making skills. A shame really. He felt movement under the sheets. He’d missed her somehow. He pulled his pants on and stepped into his jeans, moving slowly through the room. The landing was lit by a street light. He went into the bathroom and stood over the bowl. The room stunk. Someone had thrown up in the sink. You expected that when you were a teenager. Some people never grew up. He flushed the toilet and headed back towards the bedroom. His throat was dry and he stopped. He went downstairs looking for a drink. There were sleeping bodies in the living room. He trod quietly. He didn’t want to wake anyone. In the kitchen Harry went to the fridge and found some orange juice. He washed a glass and poured the juice. It tasted alright, a bit sharp.
The kitchen opened on to a small room, which in turn led to the garden. Harry could hear something or someone moving around. He went to look. Balti was hitching up his jeans. Six open handbags were lined up on the floor. It took Harry a moment to understand the deeper significance.
The dirty bastard. He couldn’t believe what his old mate had done. Harry was filled with disgust. Shit splattered the handbags. Despite himself, Harry was totting up the points. Six times ten points. Fuck, that was an extra sixty points and with the five he already had Balti was on a grand total of sixty-five. He’d roared past Carter. The sick fucking cunt. Balti was put of order, and Harry was just about to give him a bit of stick when the reality kicked in. It was a result for Harry as well as for Balti. The old magic hadn’t let him down. Harry was in the clear. The dream of last night fell into place. He was a one-hundred-percent Anglo-Saxon heterosexual. He was also a Protestant, but he wasn’t bothered about that right now. He was holding his head up high, part of the majority. There would be no bushy tashes and greased fists, no amyl nitrate and Vaseline standing orders. He was saved. Tomorrow he’d be on his way.
Harry was happy. Everything was in its place. Everything was as it should be. There were no corners in need of lighting, no hidden secrets. There was logic and understanding. He was a simple man with simple needs. And Jo was still upstairs.
Balti turned and saw his best mate standing in the doorway. His thoughts were racing and he couldn’t slow down. Carter had pissed off with one of the posers and he’d been blown out, the unstoppable shag machine giving it the big one as he hurried outside to a taxi. Balti wasn’t taking it laying down, even though he’d found a place on the floor and a smelly old blanket. It was a laugh, collecting the handbags, lining them up, and letting nature take its course, coming from behind to clinch the championship. Now with Harry standing there like a plum Balti felt a twinge of embarrassment, even regret, but fuck all that.
Balti told Harry that he was the witness. The Sex Division champion was going home and he’d see him later, Harry nodding and going back upstairs. He stopped by the window at the end of the landing and saw Balti walking down the street. A chill passed through him. He thought he should call out, but didn’t know why. Everything had been sorted out. There were no loose ends. The sun was coming up and a warm orange glow dusted the rooftops. Harry saw his best mate getting smaller, turning the corner, out of sight now as he walked through the empty streets, Balti’s head racing knowing it was going to be hard sleeping once he was back at the flat. But bollocks, he’d put a video on or something, and he had a bit of blow left. Everything came rushing towards him in one big wave, all those days and weeks and months signing on, rotting away, getting older and heading for the grave, it was all there in your genes, everything you said and did was programmed from an early age, and if you had a helping hand maybe you’d go another way, but the thing was, the people supposed to give you a hand hadn’t grown up themselves.
Balti wanted to go round and see Will and Karen and have a bit of a smoke, enjoy their company, but he was together enough to know they’d be asleep. He thought of his fortune and a four-poster bed packed with Lottery supermodels. He turned into his street and slowed down. He was almost home. Safe and sound. Maybe he shouldn’t have done the handbags, but it was a laugh. It didn’t matter. Not really. He hoped Denise’s handbag hadn’t been in there though. Slaughter wouldn’t like that. No, he remembered them leaving. His legs were aching. Maybe he’d have a bath with some salts and wash it all away. Scrub away his sins and start all over again. It was a new beginning and everyone was happy. Balti was back. He’d learnt his lessons. You came out of the hard times stronger. Sex Division champion and a job painting houses with his best mate. Life was there to be lived and experienced. He was the happiest he’d been for years.
Balti heard the car door and turned his head. McDonald stood behind him with a shotgun wedged into his shoulder. Pulled the trigger.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John King is the author of eight novels to date. His first, The Football Factory, was an immediate word-of-mouth success and was subsequently turned into a high-profile film. Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, White Trash, Skinheads, The Prison House, and The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler followed. His stories reflect his cultural interests—particularly music, pubs and youth cultures—while challenging a range of stereotypes that are often accepted by the established political factions. Common themes are powerlessness and enemy-creation, the contradictions found in every walk of life. Before becoming an author King worked at a variety of jobs and spent two years travelling around the world in the late 1980s. He has long been associated with fanzines, writing for various titles over the years and running Two Sevens in the early 1990s. He publishes and edits Verbal, a fiction-based publication. He is working on an animal-rights story, Slaughterhouse Prayer. He lives in London.
ABOUT PM PRESS
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The Football Factory
John King
ISBN: 978-1-62963-116-5
296 pages
The Football Factory is driven by its two main characters—late-twenties warehouseman Tommy Johnson and retired ex-soldier Bill Farrell. Tommy is angry at his situation in life and those running the country. Outside of work, he is a lively, outspoken character, living for his time with a gang of football hooligans, the excitement of their fights and the comradeship he finds with his friends. He is a violent man, at the same time moral and intelligent.
Bill, meanwhile, is a former Second World War hero who helped liberate a concentration camp and married a survivor. He is a strong, principled character who sees the self-serving political and media classes for what they are. Tommy and Bill have shared feelings, but express their views in different ways. Born at another time, they could have been the other. As the book unfolds both come to their own crossroads and have important decisions to make.
The Football Factory is a book about modern-day pariahs, people reduced to the level of statistics by years of hypocritical, self-serving party politics. It is about the insulted, marginalised, unseen. Graphic and disturbing, at times very funny, The Football Factory is a rush of literary adrenalin.
“Only a phenomenally talented and empathetic writer working from within his own culture can achieve the power and authenticity this book pulses with. Buy, steal or borrow a copy now, because in a short time anyone who hasn’t read it won’t be worth talking to.”
—Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
“King’s novel is not only an outstanding read, but also an important social document… This book should be compulsory reading for all those who believe in the existence, or even the attainability, of a classless society.”
—Paul Howard, Sunday Tribune
“Bleak, thought-provoking and brutal, The Football Factory has all the hallmarks of a cult novel.”
—Dominic Bradbury, The Literary Review
Human Punk
John King
ISBN: 978-1-62963-115-8
368 pages
For fifteen-year-old Joe Martin, growing up on the outskirts of West London, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, busy pubs, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cutthroat Teddy Boys and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet—until he is attacked by a gang of youths and thrown into the Grand Union Canal with his best friend Smiles.
Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian Express after three years away, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with tragedy. Fast forward to 2000, and life is sweet once more. Joe is earning a living selling records and fight tickets, playing his favourite 45s as a punk DJ, but when a face from the past steps out of the mist he is forced to relive that night in 1977 and deal with the fallout.
Human Punk is the story of punk, a story of friendship, a story of common bonds and a shared cultured—sticking the boot in, sticking together.
“In its ambition and exuberance, Human Punk is a league ahead of much contemporary English fiction.”
—New Statesman
“The long sentences and paragraphs build up cumulatively, with the sequences describing an end-of-term punch-up and the final canal visit just two virtuoso examples. These passages come close to matching the coiled energy of Hubert Selby’s prose, one of King’s keynote influences…. In the resolution of the novel’s central, devastating act, there is an almost Shakespearean sense of a brief restoration of balance after the necessary bloodletting.”
—Gareth Evans, The Independent
“King’s eye for detail is as sharp as his characters’ tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and fucked up the next. Like real people, then.”
—The Face
White Trash
John King
ISBN: 978-1-62963-227-8
304 pages
Ruby James lives life to the full, the state-run hospital where she works as a nurse a microcosm of the community in which she was born and bred. While some outsiders might label the people of this town “white trash,” she knows different, reveling in a vibrant society that values people over money, actions above words.
For Ruby, every person is unique and has a story to tell, whether it is skinhead taxi driver Steve, retired teacher and rocker Pearl, magic-mushroom expert Danny Wax Cap, or former merchant seaman Ron Dawes. She encourages people to tell their tales, thrilled by the images created. Outside of work she drinks, dances, and has fun with her friends, at the same time dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s and a vision from the past, aware that physical and mental health are precious and easily lost. The epitome of positive thinking, Ruby sees the best in everyone—until the day true evil comes to call.
A mystery figure roams the corridors of Ruby’s state-run hospital. He carries special medicine and a very different set of values. He tells himself that he wants to help, increase efficiency, but cost-cutting leads to social cleansing as humans are judged according to that white-trash agenda. Excuses and justifications flow as notions of heaven and hell are distorted. Set against a background of pirate radio stations, pink Cadillacs, and freeway dreams, White Trash insists there is no such thing as white trash.
“Complete and unique, all stitched up and marvellous, the two sides of the equation brought together, realistic yet philosophical.”
—Alan Sillitoe, author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
“King is a writer who adeptly avoids cliche and caricature and is one of the most accomplished chroniclers of contemporary life. White Trash is very much a state of the nation book.”
—Big Issue North
The Colonel Pyat Quartet
Michael Moorcock
with introductions by Alan Wall
Byzantium Endures
>
ISBN: 978-1-60486-491-5
400 pages
The Laughter of Carthage
ISBN: 978-1-60486-492-2
552 pages
Jerusalem Commands
ISBN: 978-1-60486-493-9
496 pages
The Vengeance of Rome
ISBN: 978-1-60486-494-6
608 pages
Moorcock’s Pyat Quartet has been described as an authentic masterpiece of the 20th and 21st centuries. It’s the story of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, a cocaine addict, sexual adventurer, and obsessive anti-Semite whose epic journey from Leningrad to London connects him with scoundrels and heroes from Trotsky to Makhno, and whose career echoes that of the 20th century’s descent into Fascism and total war.
It is Michael Moorcock’s extraordinary achievement to convert the life of Maxim Pyatnitski into epic and often hilariously comic adventure. Sustained by his dreams and profligate inventions, his determination to turn his back on the realities of his own origins, Pyat runs from crisis to crisis, every ruse a further link in a vast chain of deceit, suppression, betrayal. Yet, in his deranged self-deception, his monumentally distorted vision, this thoroughly unreliable narrator becomes a lens for focusing, through the dimensions of wild farce and chilling terror, on an uneasy brand of truth.