Queen of Green (Queen of Green Trilogy Book 1)

by V E Rooney

  “Come on, let’s do it,” she urged. I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t taken some already, her mouth spraying out words like a machine gun and her eyes blazing with an optimism of how joyous the world could really be if we just forgot all the everyday bullshit and just let go, just gave in and succumbed to the greater power and unspoken happiness contained in this little white pill. We looked at each other, placed the pills on each other’s tongues and swallowed, with all the certainty and solemnity of a priest doling out a communion wafer to a trusting parishioner.

  Around 15 minutes passed. Fuck all happened. But then I began to come alive. My senses twitched with the first chemical explosions popping in my blood, surging into my head and my heart. Saliva. Metal on tongue. Tingling teeth.

  I’m coming up.

  Fuck me. I’m really coming up.

  It’s remarkable, incredible, the promise contained in this one little pill. No matter how many years you’ve notched up on this planet, no matter how insignificant you are, no matter how many heartbreaks you’ve suffered, the burning memories of embarrassment which still make you cringe, the stabbing pains of rejection, the dull aches of disappointment, the wasted chances and opportunities, the total fucking accumulation of a lifetime unfulfilled… When this pill kicks in, when it lifts you up, when it straps you to an invisible rocket to the outer galaxies and the edge of the universe, before you get a chance to say no, I’m scared, I’m not sure, what if something goes wrong, you find yourself hooked into a soundwave, a bass line, a drum beat, a transcendental chord, a pure moment of nothing and everything, and there is no past and no present and no future, no pain, no regrets, and you know that this is it, this is what you have wanted to feel your whole life, you are forgiven, and you are loved, you submit to it, and you never want it to stop. You are a child again, you are innocent, you are filling the whole universe and exploring space and time beyond, all that has passed and all that will be. One moment. One shining, glimmering, eternal moment.

  Or some bollocks like that, that’s what it felt like to me. You know what newbies are like when they neck an E for the first time.

  The emergence of E was a watershed moment for me, if you like. It was the new thing and everyone was doing it. I could definitely see the appeal and I knew that it could generate serious cash if you could get hold of it. But I was content with my little one-woman cannabis empire and I couldn’t envisage how I could expand into it. Getting hold of a few pills from some scally in the pub or club was one thing, sourcing a few hundred and distributing them across Liverpool’s clubs was a different league altogether.

  And the people who dealt with E were serious fuck-off big-time gangsters, I mean guns and smuggling and all that racket. These were the people who controlled the nightclub doors, ensuring trouble-free distribution inside the clubs. Even my own adolescent dealer-radar could pick out who was dealing it in every club I went to. There would be one or two lads trying their best to look inconspicuous, making the rounds of the club, engaged in furtive handovers by the bar or in some dark corner, all under the watchful eye of the bouncers who were supervising it all because they had their own stake in the game.

  Try and undercut those lads on their own turf? It was suicide. The bouncers would haul you into the toilets or out the back and kick the shit out of you. Rival dealers were getting stabbed and shot when they were caught trying to sell on restricted territory. I had no interest in E as a business line. Just way too fucking risky. I was happy to just go to the clubs like everyone else and neck a couple every now and then and get lost in the music. Selling it myself? No thanks. My brass neck doesn’t extend that far.

  13. OPERATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

  With my piles of cash multiplying, the question was what to do with some of it? I had diligently been saving most of it or reinvesting in supplies, but I had quite a bit spare that I could afford to play with. Now that my operation had expanded, the issue of transport was the most pressing one for me. My sub-team of John and David already had their heap-of-shit cars that they tooled around in, and I guess the next logical step was for me to get my own. But that meant learning to drive.

  Like every 17-year-old in the country, I got myself a provisional licence but I had been so busy with the business that I hadn’t bothered learning to drive. I didn’t have a burning need for a car – Mum’s place was two minutes away on the bus or a 15-minute stroll. Whenever I needed to go further afield, I would either get a taxi or one of the boys would give me a lift. But I could see the sense in having my own car, so I duly trudged to the Post Office, filled in my provisional licence application and sent it off.

  In the meantime, I began thinking about what kind of car I wanted. The important thing was that it shouldn’t be too flashy. A teenage doley tooling round in a BMW or a Merc was just asking to be pulled over by the busies and I didn’t want to take that risk. I never understood other dealers who, the minute they had the cash to spare, rushed to the nearest car showroom, plonked down a bundle and drove off in some super-charged turbo dick substitute. I mean, that’s just asking for attention of the unwanted kind. No, I needed something a bit more sedate – something with a bit of oomph but ordinary enough to whizz around unnoticed. On this occasion, it was the boys I turned to for advice. And they were buzzing.

  “You want a Honda Legend,” said Ste excitedly, “’because those fuckers can outrun any busy car.”

  “Nah, fuck that, that’s not a bird’s car,” said Brian. “You want a Golf. They can give it some welly but they’re not flashy either.”

  “I reckon you should get a nice little Fiesta. Nice little bird’s car,” proffered John. Patronising sod. With all the choices on offer, my head was wrecked. I opted to go for a Seat Ibiza. Smallish but with a decent engine. When my licence came through in the post, Ste and I went to the nearest showroom on Edge Lane, on the way into Liverpool city centre.

  Of course, the greasy wet-gelled salesman made a beeline straight for Ste because apparently, having a vagina renders me incapable of understanding automotive engineering or engine power and the like. Greasy salesman with the name PHIL on his badge started giving Ste all the specs while I stood behind Phil with a look of ‘what the fuck’ on my face. Automatic this and that, fuel-injected system, blah blah. Ste, the fucker, nodded along, asked all these techie questions and pretended not to notice the steam coming out my ears as I stood behind Phil.

  Once Phil had done his spiel, he said to Ste: “So, what do you reckon? Does it meet all your requirements?”

  Ste nodded at me and said to Phil: “Ask her, lad, she’s the one buying it.”

  Phil looked at me like he’d only just noticed I was there and raised his eyebrows. I just nodded. So then Phil turned to me, flashed me his cheesiest grin and said: “And what colour would the lady like?”

  Ste’s shoulders were shaking up and down at this and I could see he was about to bust his gut laughing, so I shot him down with my best killer glare.

  When it came to sign the paperwork, cheesy Phil tried to do the usual car salesman bollocks.

  “We have a very competitive finance deal available at the moment. For just £500 deposit, you…”

  I cut him off in mid-flow by reaching into my coat and pulling out an envelope containing £6,000 in used notes and lashed it onto his desk. No, I don’t need your fucking low-interest finance plan, sunshine. Point made, thank you very much.

  Ste drove us home in my new car with the plan for him to give me some driving lessons the next day, in the car park behind the townie. Let’s just say the lessons didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. I stalled the fucker, I crunched the gears, I pressed on the accelerator instead of the brake. You get the picture. Ste winced every time I fucked something up, like I was actually hurting the car.

  “No, no, just ease your foot off the clutch sloooowly,” he said, before I stalled it once again. We sat there in silence. “Don’t you fucking dare make some joke about women drivers, just fucking don’t,” I fumed. Ste threw his hands
up and feigned innocence. Of course, when the other boys came round later to have a look at the car, they were pissing themselves at me, in between taking it in turns to do handbrake turns and spins to test the motor out. Fair does, I suppose. The driving lessons were never mentioned again, but Ste did get my new car and some extra dosh to be my ad-hoc driver as and when needed.

  14. PRODUCT TESTING

  Summer 1990. Festival season. A fresh batch from 12 of my plants had been harvested and packaged into various weights. In total I had around £1,500 wholesale worth of prime weed to be distributed at a few festivals that summer. I’d been diligently scanning various music magazines over a few weeks to sort out my selling areas. Glastonbury was the big one of course, I was guaranteed to sell a shitload there, but there were other smaller festivals where we could do some serious business if we wanted to.

  I called together the boys at my flat and outlined the plan. As soon as the tickets went on sale for Glastonbury, we would all hit the phones and not stop until we all had tickets, even if it meant sitting round for hours with the handsets glued to the sides of our faces. A few balked at this. “Why don’t you just sneak over the fence like everyone else does?” whimpered John, who didn’t want to waste money on the tickets, even though it was my money he was spending.

  “No, we need to be careful. If we get caught sneaking in then we get busted with a shitload of weed on us as well. I don’t need that. We don’t need to behave like a bunch of fucking cheapo scallies,” I said. The others nodded in agreement.

  “How about you lot get tickets and go in normally and I go over the fence and meet you inside?” John replied. Fucking cheap bastard. I put the block on that as well. I will give John his due, he’s always looking to knock the price off something. Not with me though, he knows better than that.

  The plan was this. Me, Ste, David, John and Brian would go to Glastonbury – that was the big one so I needed my all my salespeople there. Some of our regular customers had told us they were going to be attending, so once of word of mouth got around via them we would get fresh customers there as well.

  So, when it was time for the tickets to go on sale, each of us in our respective abodes manned the phones and hit the ticket hotlines. We scored all five tickets for Glastonbury at £38 each. Result. None of us had ever been before, but we all knew of mates who had gone down there, climbed over the fence and spent the whole weekend fucking bombed off their faces. If you wanted to listen to live music while enjoying a spliff or a bit of whizz without any bother from the busies, it was the perfect place because about 60,000 fellow festivalgoers all had the same idea.

  But I wouldn’t say any of us were really the crunchy camping type. I had gone on some school trip to Snowdonia in north Wales but that was in some crappy chalet, and truth be told, I wasn’t looking forward to sharing a tent in some farmer’s field strewn with cowshit, especially as it had been raining down there all week. We had to go out and get tents, cooking pans, sleeping bags and all that crap. It would take us about six hours to drive down there as it was a fucking nightmare to get to from the northwest. Would’ve been quicker just to swim around Wales, but still, needs must and all that.

  We’d be going in two cars, Ste’s (mine) and David’s old Renault. I packed some of the clingfilmed dope right at the bottom of this big rucksack and some more under the back seat of Ste’s car. Same again in John’s car. Both of them had been told that under no circumstances were they to break the speed limit at any time on the way there, nor engage in any fucking stupid races against each other on the motorway. Slow and steady would win this particular dealing race.

  So on the morning of Thursday, 21st of June, 1990 there was me, Ste and John in Ste’s car in front, and David and Brian in David’s car following. We were all in good spirits despite the early start time of 6am (I wanted to get to Glastonbury before all the rush hour traffic and the hordes of students and jobbers who would be making their way en-masse in the afternoon from all over the country) and even had a few singsongs to keep us occupied. When we’d had enough of that, we’d put some tunes on or listen to the radio.

  We looked just like any other bunch of ravers/students on their annual summer pilgrimage. As the sun came up I knew it was going to be a nice warm day – vest-top weather – and I felt that as long as we stuck to the plan (i.e. if everyone listened to me) we could have a very profitable few days. I was happy.

  We snaked our way down the M57, then onto the M62 and then onto the M6 for the long journey south, before turning off onto the M5 heading towards Wiltshire. With Ste driving, John sprawled on the back seat and me on map-reading duty in the passenger seat, I would look out of the window and watch the other cars on the motorway pass us by.

  Normal people in their normal cars, going about their ordinary lives. Salesmen on their way to their next meeting, lorry drivers making their next supermarket delivery, minibuses full of schoolkids on the way to some museum. I remember this car trip to Glastonbury particularly well because I was looking at these people on the motorway and wondering what kind of lives they led. And I distinctly remember having something of a pang of envy. I felt it in my chest.

  Despite what you may think about people like me, I don’t hold the view that “civilians” – non-criminals like you – are to be looked down upon or sneered at in some way as being inferior to the likes of me. I didn’t feel it then and I don’t feel it now. You’ll have heard some knuckle-dragging criminal moron laugh at the civilians, laughing at the people – people like you, maybe? - who do the 9 to 5, slaving away in crap jobs for a pittance and having to pay tax out of it, and at the end of your 30 years as you are pushed unceremoniously into retirement, all you have to show for it is some cheap carriage clock given to you by the company boss who doesn’t even know who you were or what your job was.

  OK, I’ll be honest and say that I wouldn’t want to live that life. I don’t want to have to get up at the same time every day and battle through the traffic to sit in some bland, grey claustrophobic office with people I barely know, just for the ability to pay the rent or mortgage on some dingy semi on an estate. But I envy those people their ability to do that every day because that takes resilience and stamina. The selflessness, to put aside personal desire, to do the hard graft necessary just to get by in this life.

  Most of all, I envy the anonymity and invisibility. I didn’t realise it at the time, but writing this all down now brings back those pangs of envy I felt back then. Just to be able to walk to the shop and buy a pint of milk, or take a stroll through the park and feed the ducks, or sit in a café and have a fry-up, without constantly worrying about whether someone is following me, whether they’ll try and shoot me in broad daylight, whether the café has a seat that will let me face the door so I can keep an eye out for a sawn-off shotgun coming in and pointing at me. It’s the really insignificant and tiny things like that. That’s what I miss.

  But hey, that’s the choice I made and that’s how it is. I’ll just have to try and muddle on with my millions in the many secret offshore bank accounts I have scattered around the world, and my varied business interests which help to keep even more money away from prying eyes. If I need to be on guard for the rest of my life then I’ll consider it an occupational risk that inevitably comes with the mind-blowing rewards you can get in this industry.

  Anyway, Glastonbury was celebrating its 20th anniversary that year and had a decent line-up, given all the Madchester and rave scenes that were kicking off. I was looking forward to seeing The Pogues, Happy Mondays and Sinead O’Connor while the others had no discernible plans other than to dip in and out of different tents to spot viable sales opportunities. We had discussed the various acts appearing and what kind of crowds they would draw. It was a company sales meeting.

  “Hawkwind – we need to be at Hawkwind because that’s gonna be fucking hippy and weed heaven,” said Ste enthusiastically.

  “De La Soul,” said John. “There’ll be people wanting ganja there, mate.”
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br />   “Oh yeah, don’t forget Aswad,” I added. “Ganja people there too.”

  On one thing we were all agreed. None of us would be going to the Deacon Blue set because they were a pile of wank. Deacon Blue make music for the kind of people who buy their clothes in Top Shop.

  M6 – THE SOUTH. As each mile passed and Birmingham disappeared in the rear view mirror, we saw the first sign for the M5. Not long now, then after the M5 it was onto the A39 and A361 and towards Worthy Farm. We had made good time and arrived a bit earlier than we thought we would, which was alright considering how jammed the motorways would be in just a few hours. We got to the festival site before noon, had our tickets checked without any hassle, both cars slowed to a crawl and we edged and bumped our way into the car parking field.

  Unpacking all our crap and lugging it to the camping field would be the real bastard but I suppose it was all part of the festival experience after all. Because the weather hadn’t been great, it was fairly muddy and I realised that my new trainers would be wrecked before we’d even got the tents up. John, David and Brian were having a macho competition to see who could carry the most crates of lager in addition to their rucksacks, while Ste and I hauled the tents and sleeping bags alongside.

  There were a few hundred other tents already pitched up by people who’d had the same idea as us but by this evening there would not be a spare scrap of space anywhere in this field. For now, we were all happy to be here without any hassle and with the afternoon stretching out ahead of us I figured there was no harm in my crew relaxing a little before getting down to business.

  Once the tents were set up, sleeping bags installed, dope bundles stashed under our pillows and foldaway stools erected outside so that we were all sat in a circle, it was around 2pm. The sky was a bit overcast but we were too busy having a laugh to really care. Ste and John rolled up a couple of spliffs while the rest of us sipped from warm cider (orange juice for me) bottles and played some 70s funk on John’s old ghettoblaster. We talked about music, about what it must like to live in the countryside, whether the busies would be here undercover, whether cow hearts were stronger than human hearts, and we even had a game of spin-the-bottle (which I of course declined to join in with), but which involved David and John having a full-on snog, and Ste, yet again, trying to persuade me to give him a hand job.