by Alan Keslian
For a while he indulged in a life of one-night stands. One of his pick-ups took him home to an enormous room packed with all sorts of goods: cameras, laptop computers, portable phones, records and stereo equipment. The property was stuffed into bags and suitcases, piled up on the floor and poking out from under the furniture. The explanation given, that all these goods had been bought cheap from car boot sales and charity shops for resale at a profit, was not convincing and Tom rightly assumed they were stolen. He saw the man again by chance; this time was with friends, in a gay pub in the West End. They were guarded in what they said initially, but more alcohol made them incautious and they soon revealed that they were all living outside the law – thieving, buying and selling stolen property, or supplying drugs.
Through them Tom met a car thief who was heterosexual but who used the group to help dispose of property he had stolen from cars. Tom told him about his schoolboy activities, was impressed by the man’s tales of stealing cars to order for wealthy villains, and fascinated to hear about new gadgets for overcoming the latest locks and alarms. He learned about falsifying documents, and of a garage workshop under a railway arch where number plates were changed, chassis numbers removed, and vehicles re-sprayed. Wiring houses seemed dull in comparison, and when the man invited him to go along one night to see him in action Tom could not resist. New cars might come with better locks and security devices than before, but inventive thieves quickly developed ways to overcome them.
‘But you didn’t go only the once?’
‘You get sucked into these things. Eventually I gave in my notice at work. That little crowd of thieves thought doing a regular job was pathetic, that slaving away day after day made you a loser. They were full of excuses for themselves. The truth was most of them didn’t have the mentality to hold down a job. Looking back the thing that attracted me was not that they lived by thieving, but that they were fun to go out with. If I’d stuck to having a drink and a laugh with them, no harm would have come out of it.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ I asked softly.
‘If you’ve developed a knack of some kind you like to make use of it, especially if you get a thrill out of doing it. There was one day we went out looking for a particular motor, and we found one in this pub car park, no surveillance, no one about. My mate asked me to try to open it, first one I’d tried since I was a kid. I was into it and driving away in about two minutes. The alarm went off, but the music in the pub was so loud they wouldn’t have heard it. The adrenaline was pumping, the old excitement was back. It was as though that motor wanted me to have it.’
A bragging edge had come into his voice, but hindsight reminded him of reality. ‘After I was nicked, the police talked about reducing the charges against me to “being an accessory” if I told them who we’d been supplying the cars to, but I couldn’t turn in people who’d trusted me. Anyway, my share from that first motor was more than I could earn in a month at work, even with maximum overtime. Things went on from there. What happens is once you start thieving you want to save all your energy and concentration for the next time you go out after a motor. A straight job gets in the way. How much more do you want to hear?’
‘I’m not sure. Was there anything particularly important? Any highlights?’
‘Highlights! Low lights and low life, more like. There was one that stood out, since you ask. Once we were looking for a Jaguar and spotted the right model being driven into a large car park near a shopping centre. Two attendants in a hut were collecting parking fees and raising and lowering the barriers as cars came in and out. I jumped out of the van, followed the driver of the Jaguar on foot into the shopping centre, and saw him join up with a group of people at a pub for lunch.
Meanwhile my mate parked the van in a street about half a mile away, found an old car nearby that was easy to steal and drove it into the car park, collecting a timed ticket on his way in. He joined me in the shopping centre, we checked that the owner of the Jaguar had sat down to his meal, and made sure there were no police or other security to worry about. We returned to the car park and my mate gave me the ticket he had collected when he parked the old car. Next, as a diversion, we set off two car alarms on the other side of the attendants’ hut to where the Jaguar was. My mate walked out of the car park and back to the van. While the attendants were still busy on the other side of the car park, I cracked the electronic code for the Jaguar’s locking system and got the car started. A few minutes later when one of the attendants returned to the hut I drove up to the barrier, showed the parking ticket, paid the fee and drove out.’
The exhilaration of exploits like this came to an end when he was caught with stolen property. When the demand from the garage for cars dried up, as it did from time to time, Tom and his partner resorted to taking goods from vehicles. They once raided a beauty spot in the Yorkshire Dales where ramblers parked before setting off on a popular country walk. Twenty or thirty cars stood on a wide grass verge, and left behind in them absent-mindedly or because the walkers decided they had too much to carry, were items of clothing, camping equipment, tools, maps, books, and in the boot of one car, a holdall full of erotic women’s underwear.
They sold off this loot to people who ran car boot stalls, friends of friends, anyone they thought they could trust, usually for about a tenth of what the items would have cost to buy new. Despite shifting all they could through their contacts and giving away or dumping unsaleable items, the volume of goods grew and grew until two lock-up garages they rented were cluttered with male and female clothing in all sizes, with luggage, stereos, records, a comprehensive collection of road atlases, and all sorts of junk.
His associate was caught in a BMW he stole from outside an empty office block in Ealing, unaware that it had been stolen four days earlier by another thief who abandoned it when he realised it was running out of petrol. Searching the flat where Tom’s associate lived, the police found an old receipt for rent for the two lock-up garages and decided to have a look at them. They found Tom packing a video camera, a dozen Ordnance Survey maps and several items of clothing into a holdall. They took him to the police station, questioned him and charged him.
‘You could have said you didn’t know where the stuff came from, that all you did was help to sell it second-hand.’
‘Who knows what he might have told them about me? The best thing you can do at the police station is to keep quiet. Looking back on it, lifting all that gear was a mistake. If they hadn’t found the lock-ups all they could have done him for was taking and driving away one motor. They wouldn’t have had nothing on me. The money we got for all that stuff was hardly anything, and finding buyers for it was a lot of hassle. Our real money came from the cars. All that bloody junk made it obvious how much thieving we’d been doing. They made it sound as bad as they could at the trial, said we were habitual criminals, had refused to co-operate with the police, made us out to be a couple of real villains. Basically that is the job of the prosecution isn’t it, to paint you as black as they can? We were guilty after all. We both got sent down. He came off worse because of previous convictions.’
‘Is he out yet?’
‘He must be out by now. He wrote to me once from prison. I wrote back, said I was working again and was going completely straight… permanently. Wished him all the best obviously. The one good thing to come out of the whole bloody mess was that the police brought Andrew to the station to see if he’d recognise either of us. His car had been stolen a couple of days earlier and he’d seen someone hanging around at Biddulph Mansions. We weren’t responsible, but Andrew did recognise me, we’d met a couple of times in the Beckford Arms. He asked the police about my trial and wrote to me in prison suggesting I got in touch with him when I came out if I needed any help. After all he did for me I wouldn’t ever do anything bent again. It would be like throwing it all back in his face. I wouldn’t want to anyway, it’s not part of my life that I’m proud of.’ He stopped and sat back in his chair.
‘Is there any
more?’ I asked.
‘Details, if you want if you want to hear them. That friend of mine from school I told you about has been in loads of trouble since. I’ve told you how it was. You’re shocked, aren’t you?’
‘A bit. By how much and how long… No, that isn’t what I wanted to say. I’m glad you’ve told me. Thanks for making yourself go over it all again. What matters is that you’re here. I missed you, you know, really missed you.’ I went over to his side of the table, leant over him, stroked his head and kissed him, reassuring him that my feelings for him had not weakened.
Chapter 15
Telling Andrew of my reconciliation with Tom when he next rang was so great a pleasure that, after putting down the ’phone, I was a little saddened by the thought that such intense feelings of happiness could not be sustained for ever. Not wanting to detract from the good news I said nothing about the mugging. A comment he made, that the spell in prison had completely demoralised Tom, did not affect my elation at the time, but remembering it later made me aware there was still one corner of Tom’s life he had kept from me. Eager still for complete disclosure of everything, I raised it the next time we were alone together. At first he tried to laugh the subject off by saying the trouble with Wormwood Scrubs was that it was full of villains, but I persisted: ‘Would you simply rather not talk about it?’
‘You might have something there. Prisons are places where all sorts of horrible things go on, Mark. You don’t want to hear about all that.’
‘Not if you find it too difficult to talk about.’
He looked at my expectant face and shook his head. ‘All right, if you must know, I was banged up on this wing with hundreds of men, two to a cell, with a lot more experience of being inside than I had. There’s all sorts in there, but not many you’d choose as friends. Don’t know why but for some reason this screw decided to give me a job mopping a landing and staircase. If you’re lucky you get rewarded with a little bit of money you can spend in the prison shop, extra underwear and socks, and a chance to take a shower when the bathroom’s not crowded. Little things, like being able to use the pay ’phone and buy tobacco, are really important in there, when all you’ve got day after day is the same faces, the same walls, the same horrible cheap food, your limited little routines week after week. A lot of the other cons don’t like it though, they think you’re collaborating with the screws doing a job like that, demeaning yourself, becoming part of the system, so you get snide little remarks from them as you pass by.
You have to put up with that, but there was a lot of drug dealing going on in the jail. I kept clear of it, but there was an evil bastard called Stomper. Stomper was his nickname, he had a reputation for using his boots on anyone who crossed him. To him ordinary cons like me were there to be used. First of all he tried to pressure me into having stuff brought in by a visitor, threatened to put me in the hospital wing otherwise. I faced him out. He threatened all sorts of things, planting stuff on me and tipping off the screws, having me beaten up, having someone with AIDS stab me with a hypodermic. He was determined to get something out of me, one way or another, probably more to show his own importance than anything else.
One day he cornered me in this quiet little area in front of the bedding store where there was no surveillance. He had one of his gang with him holding a broom handle sharpened at the end. They looked like a couple of overgrown school kids, pair of fucking twats. People like him are evil, they could do any sort of damage to you and walk away happy, whistling to themselves. He gave me three choices, have my eyes and god knows what gouged out with the fucking sawn-off broom handle, get him some drugs, or suck him off.
To some extent I felt it didn’t matter what happened to me any more, and part of me was shit scared. So I sucked him off. Three times he cornered me, the fucking cunt. Anything else you want to know?’
The intensity of his voice told how bitter these memories were. I gently patted his lips with two of my fingers, and lightly kissed the corners of his mouth. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have… ’
‘Maybe I should have taken the beating. Humiliating myself like that.’
‘Whatever you did it would have been awful. At least you still have two eyes to see the world with. Did he know you were gay?’
‘It’s hard to keep secrets when you’re with other cons who are watching you twenty-four hours a day. They notice how you react when a big pair of boobs turns up on the TV. There’s such a close atmosphere in there. Everyone is looking for some way of scoring little advantages over everyone else, sometimes you get the impression people are talking about you, but maybe they’re not. They probably all thought of me as another small time con doing his bird, another loser. Trouble is if you cross someone like Stomper, you’re the one who’s going to end up worse off. He’s got too many people who owe him favours or are scared of him. If you want full remission you have to keep yourself away from trouble and put up with being treated like dirt.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t want to make you relive the worst moments of your life.’
‘You’re the only person I’ve ever told about Stomper. For a while I used to dream about tracking him down and causing him serious injury, but something like that will take over your life and ruin you if you let it. In the end the best thing to do is to force yourself to forget about it.’
His experience of the criminal ‘justice’ system appalled me. What right had a judge or magistrate at his trial to inflict punishment of that kind on him? Was being forced to have sex with a man like Stomper regarded as fair redress for the crime of stealing cars? If I had known him then, been to visit him in jail, and he had told me what was going on perhaps I could have done something to stop it, or more likely like Tom himself would have been powerless against a system governed by rules and customs that were strange to me.
What purpose had been served by delving into that awful time in his life? What we needed to do was to forget old miseries and think about future happiness. The hotel would soon have been open for business for a full year, and a party to celebrate would give us a positive event to plan for and look forward to.
When the boisterous Newcastle group who had come down to London last May rang to make another booking, the Saturday night of their stay seemed a good time to hold it. Their last visit might have ended awkwardly, but they had intended no harm, and with the six of them present a party would never be dull. Andrew, having at last decided he had spent enough time looking up family members in New Zealand, was due back. He would probably not want to stay to the end of the kind of party I had in mind, but was certain to enjoy getting together with all his friends for the first hour or so. His return journey was to begin with a flight to Thailand, not so much because of the country’s sexual enticements, but with the intention of visiting some of the famous temples.
The sort of party I wanted was one that would fill the house with clamour, a huge mêlée of people all talking energetically, drinking, dancing, attacking the food like a flock of starlings, flirting, acting the fool, and being found in dark corners in the embrace of someone they had met only half an hour before; the sort of gathering at which people forget who was drinking from which glass, mislay items of clothing, and when they want to leave have difficulty locating whoever they came with; the sort of Saturday night party from which it takes most of Sunday to recover.
Tom and Darren were keen, and we compiled an invitation list, including everyone working at Ferns and Foliage, friends from the Beckford Arms, and a few of Darren and Cheung’s friends from the club. Assuming that some of those invited would not come, but that others would bring a partner or a friend, we planned to cater for around fifty people. Coping with a hotel full of guests at the same time would have been difficult and I turned down further requests for bookings for that weekend.
Darren suggested making the Far East a theme for the evening, and Cheung offered to borrow Chinese lanterns and other decorations from his family and friends. A week before the party, he and Tom went off to the West End t
ogether and returned with a van full of coloured paper lanterns, decorative banners and film posters depicting martial arts stars flying through the air. Cheung also knew of a wholesaler where we could buy South-East Asian food and drink, and with his help we stocked the hotel freezers with satay, pancake rolls and stir-fries to enable us to provide everyone with hot food from the hotel kitchen. He took all three of us to a shop in Soho where we bought richly coloured silk shirts and trousers of lightweight cotton in a style that was fashionable in Hong Kong at the time.
On the Thursday we began to prepare the ground floor and basement, which would provide ample space for fifty or so guests to mix freely without being cramped. To avoid trouble developing behind locked doors and the risk of damage to the hotel rooms Tom constructed a temporary barrier at the top of the stairs to the first floor with an improvised chipboard door allowing only those with a key to reach the rooms above.
Unwanted chairs, tables and breakables were carried up to safety beyond this barrier, and the hotel lounge was cleared for dancing; a sound system for the evening was put together by combining some of Darren’s stereo equipment with some of mine, enabling him to switch seamlessly from one music track to another. An eight-foot long banner depicting a monstrous serpent-like dragon hung down into the hall from the bannisters at the top of the stairs. Four enormous waist-high pots with lids, decorated with an elaborate floral pattern in soft pink on a white background, stood in the hall, looking alarmingly fragile but actually fakes made of tough plastic, so light they could be picked up in one hand. Cheung took the lid off one, lifted it up to reveal that it had no bottom, put it over his head and pretended it was stuck. Darren, of course, had to follow his example, and the two of them staggered around calling, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’