by Will Self
Tembe regarded him with quizzical contempt. ‘Y’ know I mean it,’ he said, putting on his most managerial of tones for this troublesome employee. ‘I want you doin’ those City drops like now, man. Those boys want their shit nice an’ early. If you’re done by one, you can pick up another ’teenth – do the bitches at the Learmont. I’ll sling you some brown in all –’
‘How much?’ Danny snapped, he was still holding down the hit of crack.
‘A bag – whatever.’
‘In that case,’ he spoke through the gust of exhalation, ‘you do the fuckin’ portioning – and I’ll’ – he snatched up a roll of clingfilm from the work surface – ‘do the fuckin’ wrapping.’
Two hours later Danny was limping down Aldergate. It was raining and he was soaked through. About the driest things he had about his person, Danny reflected bitterly, were the rocks of crack housed in his cheeks, each one snugly wrapped and heat-sealed in plastic.
‘Do the City,’ Tembe impatiently ordered and off Danny had to go, clanking down the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus, and then clanking on along the Central Line until he reached Bank. On the fucking tube, the tube, not even a cab to ease his lot. And when he got to Bank it was the fucking foot slog. Up to Citibank, the stupid plastic jacket he had to wear flapping in the wind and rain, the defunct radio attached to its lapel banging against his collar bone. Then get the fucking Jiffy-bag out in the vestibule. Spit a couple of rocks into it. Seal it. Up to fucking reception: ‘Delivery for Mistah Fuckin’ Crack-Head Banker.’
‘Fine, if you leave it right here I can sign for it –’
‘Sorry, it’s a special whatsit thingy – he’s gotta sign himself, yeah?’
‘Oh right – sure, I’ll ring his extension.’ She looks through Danny at a Monet reproduction while he waits, finger-drummingly bored. And then here he comes, Mistah Fuckin’ High Wire Act, tripping across the quarter-acre of carpet tiling without a care in the world, on his own little personal conveyor belt, which is carrying him straight to a seventy-quid Nirvana.
‘Is that for me? Thank you. Where can I sign – there?’
You can sign wherever you fucking please, asshole, because this biro doesn’t work and this bit of paper is just that.
‘Thanks again – and do give my regards to Mr Tembe.’ He rolls away again.
Fucking pin-stripe suit, fucking old school tie. He won’t be looking so fucking dignified in five minutes’ time, Danny internally sneers as he slops his way back to the lift, sitting in a fucking toilet stall, pretending to do a shit while he sucks on a pipe made from a crushed Coke can. Silly cunt.
In Aldergate Danny paused to envy a dosser. The young white guy sat in the doorway of a travel agent’s, surfing to nowhere on a piece of old packing case. His blue nylon sleeping bag was pulled up to his armpits, leaving his arms free for entreaty. He looked, Danny thought, like some enormous maggot that had crawled into this niche in order to metamorphose, possibly into a crack-head banker. Danny gave the dosser a fifty-pence piece, and savoured the shock on the young man’s face when he realised he had successfully begged from a black guy not much better off than himself.
Good karma, Danny thought to himself as he slopped on down the road. Give to those worse off than yourself and the Fates will look kindly on you. Nowadays Danny was increasingly drawn to consider the attitude of the Fates to almost anything he did. The Fates had to be consulted as to which sock he should put on first when he got up; which boot he should tuck his stem into before leaving the house; and which side of Leopold Road he should walk down on his way to the tube.
Danny appreciated – with a deep, almost celestial clarity – the fact that the Fates were very much a product of the ten or so rocks of crack he was smoking every day. For one thing the Fates often appeared in his mind’s eye as tall, wispy, indeterminate figures, their forms actually composed by gossamer wreaths of crack smoke. However, if Danny honed in on them, their miasmic covering fell away to reveal truly terrifying, djinn-like figures – the towel-heads from hell. Bearded, turbaned, wearing long grey-and-black robes, and carrying mutant, nine-foot-long Kalashnikovs.
The Fates kept him company – they were the bears that would savage him if he stepped on the crack. But if he maintained those good high stimulant levels, the Fates would keep counsel with him, warn him of the filth round this corner, or some Yardie cunt Danny had stolen from round the next. Of course, Danny didn’t really believe in any of this, it was simply a magical soundtrack to his life; but then the Fates were very similar in their manifestation to Danny’s crack habit itself – both were paradoxical addictions to something intrinsically frightening and unpleasant. He shifted the wads of plastic in either cheek, with a motion akin to rinsing with mouthwash; then he delicately palped each one with the tip of his tongue.
Danny conducted this internal stock-taking at least a thousand times a day. In his left cheek was his own stash – in his right was the merchandise. Usually, when Danny set off from the house in the morning, the right-hand cheek would have around twenty-five rocks in it, and the left five. Five rocks to take him through five hours of tube rides and walking around the City pretending to be courier, a cowboy without a horse. Ducking into a khazi, or an alley, or a fucking hole in the wall, every quarter-hour on the quarter-hour to smoke the poisoned flour. Out with the stem; out with the lighter; crumble finicky crumble as the Fates gather at the periphery; crowding in, a press of dirty beards and muttering; the recitation of arcane fundamentalist texts, decrying the existence of Danny; dirty grey nails reaching out to rend him – then blown away, extinguished, blanketed by the first rich gush of smoke from his nozzled mouth.
Five rocks equalled twenty pipes – one every fifteen minutes. Enough time while the gear was still doing its thing for him to slop to another financial institution, make his drop, slop on. Enough time – if he eked it out righteously – for Danny to avoid a clanking comedown on the Central Line, seated sweating in a strip-lit cattle truck, along with the rest of his hetacomb. All too often, however, Danny’s lop-sided chipmunk visage began to balance itself a little early in the day, the right-hand cheek getting delved into a little more than it should. And on those occasions Tembe would withhold the bag of brown at the end of the shift; or even – if he was feeling particularly managerial – even a measly taste. And Danny would have to accept this – accept the rack of shit his life had become.
How had it come to this? Danny bit down on the cyanide capsule of the past as he turned into London Wall, heading for London Bridge and the offices of Barclays De Zoete Wedd. How had he ended up being a runner for his dumb little brother Tembe – or ‘Mr Tembe’ as he was apparently known to the denizens of the Citibank futures department? Dragging his drenched carcass around these terrifying caverns of commerce, feeling his life blood, his manhood drain away, and with only the Fates to keep him company. Danny knew, of course, the answer: he had touched the product.
Whether this had occurred before or after the exhaustion of the seam of crack Danny had discovered in the basement of Leopold Road, he did not wish to acknowledge. The mother lode of crack had certainly been too good to be true – and now it no longer was. Whether Danny’s estimates with plumbers’ rods had been inaccurate at the outset, or the bulk of the crack had simply been washed away, corrupted by drainage and seepage, was besides the point. All that mattered was that after a couple of years of very high living the seam was gone, and at around the same time Danny, feeling wrung out by the experience, had taken his first pipe of crack and discovered what he had always suspected; that, in this most unnatural of pursuits, he turned out to be a natural.
Corresponding mysteriously to an episode in their childhood, the two brothers now found themselves on a seesaw, Tembe coming down to the ground, while his older brother shot up into a psychotic sky. For, as Danny cranked up the go-go candy, doing first three, then five, then sixty pipes a day, so Tembe decided that enough was enough and stepped on the shit once and for all.
In fairnes
s to Tembe, contrary to the expertise of a thousand counsellors, psychiatrists, politicians, churchmen, and the parents of teenagers who had died from ecstasy overdoses, he found it astonishingly easy to step back through the door of non-perception. ‘Never did like the shit anyways,’ he explained to members of the posse, hanging out on the traffic island by Harlesden tube, drinking Dunn’s River and riding the dossers. ‘I jus’ did it cos it was like there. Gimme a spliff anna beer any day; I can do up a ton of sensi a day an’ all it do to me is to make me more righteous, more irie an’ that.’
Being more righteous and more irie for Tembe largely consisted in a switch from unbridled crack consumption to quite remarkably efficient production and distribution. As Danny gibbered his way through the peaks and troughs of the crack storm, no longer the master puppeteer – merely a puppet on a pipe, so Tembe took up the strings that fell from his numb fingers. Little brother grabbed the clientele and set big brother – once so fucking arrogant, so high and mighty – to work.
Whereas Danny the non-user had always felt at worst indifferent, and at best friendly towards the munificent mannequins, Tembe the former user felt nothing but contempt for them – especially if they were white. ‘They have every opportunity, every fuckin’ break an’ all they do is smoke this shit. They have no respect for themselves – I tell you, they actually deserve to be crack-heads, they should give me their money an’ that, because they’re really donatin’ it, donatin’ it to a righteous cause.’
The righteous cause was Tembe’s black Saab 9000, with full skirts, fairing, personalised number plate etc., etc.; and feeling irie for Tembe was equivalent to feeling silk shirts between his shoulder blades, and the weight of an entire wardrobe of American, gangsta rap-style suits hanging from them. Tembe brought a fervour to his materialism that was almost messianic, as if, having pissed thousands of pounds up the wall, he was determined to wring out bricks and mortar until he got it all back again.
‘You’re too fuckin’ fly, boy,’ Danny had admonished him, as they sat, Tembe beering and spliffing, Danny piping and cracking, in front of the Saturday-afternoon racing. With Darcus long gone – all that was left of him was a hair-oil stain on the ancient antimacassar of his armchair – Danny, preposterously, was adopting some of the old man’s avuncular manner ‘You go strutting roun’ the fuckin’ town, making out like you’re some big mutha-fuckin’ dude. Thass the way you bring the heat down, man; all the fuckin’ heat – an’ not just the filth, the Yardies, the Turks, the Essex boys, the Chinese … even the fuckin’ Maltese. You need to maintain a low fuckin’ profile, look respectable an’ that –’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, t’chew!’ Tembe sucked his cheek disdainfully. ‘You taken a decco at your fuckin’ profile recently. It ain’t just low, big brother – it’s in the fuckin’ gutter.’
Danny had had to admit that his terminally stringy vest, caked dungarees, and flip-flop footwear that wasn’t flip-flops was hardly the acme of respectability. He shut up and applied himself to the business of acquiring more blow-torch burns on his hands. And now, replaying the conversation in his echoing inner ear as he slopped through the oppressive, grooved runnel of Lothbury EC2, it occurred to Danny that the Fates were undoubtedly responsible for this bizarre vice versa, and that even these intimations of doom and destruction – which were nothing if not routine – were, on this particular day, awfully germane portents.
Poor Danny – as he crouched in a service entrance of the Bank of England, servicing his own entrance – he couldn’t possibly have known which, precise, words had been portents (they were, as it happens, ‘Maltese’ and ‘low profile’). And although the Fates were temporarily routed in the direction of Aldgate – stashing their AKs, pocketing their false Korans, gathering their ghostly robes about them as they went – at the precise moment, some five minutes later, when Danny flotched into the lobby of Barclays De Zoete Wedd, his head uncluttered by magical thinking, his nemesis was touching down at Heathrow.
Skank, who for the purposes of this business trip had sensibly adopted the work name ‘Joseph Andrews’, had certain inflexible views about air travel: it was against the law of God, and it terrified him. ‘You tek de bird,’ he would lecture his fear-hobbled audience, ‘de bird have feathers, it have light bones. Pick a bird up – feel it weight in your hand. Feel how sui-ta-ble it is for flyin’ – because God made it that way. But you tek de plane. De plane is made of metal, it shaped like a bullet. It may go up high in the sky, but one day it falls back to eart’.’
Skank dealt with his fear of flying by coshing himself insensible for the duration with a Rohypnol; but as the wheels bumped and then glued themselves to tarmac, he was wide awake, and clutching the hands of the two small children who were sitting either side of him so tightly that they did his screaming for him.
The children came courtesy of one of Skank’s employees, as did their mother, who was, purely recreationally, the wife of the real Joseph Andrews, a Pentecostalist minister who had absolutely no idea that she was in so deep with crack, that she was in still deeper with the Yardies; and that it followed they’d pay her to take a little holiday to her sister’s in London. After Dorelia had gone, Joseph had no idea where his passport was either.
Joseph Andrews, a.k.a. Skank, entered the immigration hall with his two pseudo kids still tightly clasped. His ‘wife’ walked demurely a few paces behind him carrying the hand luggage. When he reached the counter he put the two green Jamaican passports directly into the officer’s hand. The officer scanned the face in the photograph – same celluloid dog collar, same v-neck pullover, same serviceable black jacket – then scanned the face in front of him once more. Skank bore an expression of bleak sanctimoniousness, utterly befitting a man who believed in the full weight of the Lord’s Providence.
‘Is this the address you’ll be staying at during your stay, Reverend Andrews?’ asked the officer.
‘Thass right, my sister-in-law’s in Stockwell.’
‘And the purpose of your visit, Reverend?’
‘Y’know, catching up with the family, friends –’
‘But you won’t be doing any work?’
Skank fixed the officer with an inquisitorial eye. ‘I don’t consider the Lord’s work to be work as such, but since you ax’ I will be preaching at the Stockwell Temple –’
‘Of course, of course, that’s quite all right, Reverend.’ And with a cursory glance at the children and their mother, and then at their passport photographs, he waved the party on. The next entrant in line came to the desk and proffered his passport.
A young man had been circling the arrivals’ pick-up zone for some time in a Mercedes saloon, when Skank and the Andrews emerged from the terminal. He pulled up to the kerb and they got in. As the car sped down the exit ramp Skank yanked off the stiff dog collar, and in one fluid motion removed the Glock which was stashed in the glove compartment. He checked the magazine and put the automatic in his jacket pocket, then turning to the driver said, ‘So, what de word, Blutie?’
‘The word is good, Skank,’ the young man replied, flashing a gold ’n gap grin.
‘Then drive blud claat.’
Skank dropped the Andrews in Stockwell and went on, heading for the East End. As the big merc. splashed through the low-rise high density of South London, the big dread carefully removed what remained of his hairy finery from beneath a wig and a flesh-coloured bathing cap. Turning to Blutie, Skank said, ‘De blud claat gone done make me shed me locks, y’know. It’s not enough for him to steal – he have to mek a man shed ’im locks. And for why? Jus’ to pay some fucker – jus’ to pay him!’
‘It’s the way here, Skank. The Chinaman said he’d happily farm the contract for you – but you gotta come in person to hand over the dosh – shows good faith an’ that.’
‘T’chew! I call it rank stu-pid-ity, boy. If de chink knew we was settlin’ a hundred thousand-dollar score mebbe he’d want more for hisself.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Blutie – who liked th
e sound of the word.
‘As is, wa’ he charge for us to rub out dis piece of shit?’
‘Two hundred quid.’
‘Two hundred pounds! Sheeit! Life is cheaper than fuckin’ Trenchtown in this place.’
‘You ain’t tellin’ no word of a lie, Skank, but see here.’ Blutie shifted in his seat and spread his hands wide on the steering wheel. ‘You’ve got to ’preciate that the Chinaman isn’t taking out a contract on London for us, it’s more like he’s selling on the debt. The enforcer we’re going to meet wants the contract. He thinks he can extract a fair wadge out of Danny – thass London’s moniker now – before he does the how’s your father –’
‘But he gua-ran-tee to kill ’im, right? He gua-ran-tee to shoot the little fucker, yeah?’
‘He’s solid – the Chinaman says so.’
It was unfortunate for Skank that he didn’t know as much about the Chinaman as he did about revenge. Skank’s revenge on Danny wasn’t a dish eaten cold – it was well nigh frozen. It had been five years since the three keys had gone missing in Philly, and all that time Skank had bided, waited. He picked up bits of information here and there and husbanded them; he put irons in the fire and sended them. Eventually the poisonous tree bore fruit, the Chinaman, a long-time associate of Skank’s, told him that a black crack-head from Harlesden, who smoked regularly in his house, had told him in turn, about a crew on his manor who were outing much better than average product.
The Chinaman found this interesting enough in itself – it was always wise to keep abreast of the competition. But more interesting still was the thumbnail c.v. the crack-head supplied of the two brothers who ran the operation. Apparently, the older brother, who went by the name of Danny, had been in the army. But more than that, he had gone into the army after a trip to Jamaica. A trip to Jamaica in the late eighties.