Layer Cake

by J. J. Connolly

‘He’s snide?’

  ‘How can you call him snide in this game? Everyone’s snide in this game. He loves a fuckin mind game, loves to let people know where the fuckin power lies, who’s fuckin boss. If somebody’s got a weakness, Jimmy can smell it out like those sniffer dogs the customs have got.’

  ‘And then he’s on it.’

  ‘Fuckin dead right he’s on it. This is a geezer who’s bent old bill. Cute’s a better word than snide. But if he don’t like ya he’ll put it right on ya.’

  ‘So you know where you are with him.’

  Morty laughed. ‘Did I say that? You ain’t been listening, brov. No, you never know where you are with a slippery cunt like Jimmy.’

  ‘Thanks for warning me.’

  ‘You’ll be okay, cos you’re a talent and talent’s in short supply. Jimmy don’t sit down to eat with any muggy-cunts, you know. What’s the very worst that can happen? He can have you killed.’ Morty laughs at his little joke.

  ‘How very reassuring you are at times, Mister Mortimer.’

  ‘Killed very slowly.’ Morty really liked his little joke. ‘As the song says, don’t you worry about a thing, Mama. You can take yourself too fuckin seriously, you know.’

  ‘I’m paid to worry, remember.’

  We’re in Hackney High Street.

  ‘Is this the way to Epping, Mort?’

  ‘It’s the only way I know so it’s got to be the right way.’

  It’s Saturday afternoon so the whole gaff is fuckin smashed out with shoppers.

  ‘You see that building? The carpet warehouse? The big one over there?’ Morty’s pointing up and across the street at a grimy pile, a cross between a prison and a church, the whole front splattered with gaudy posters in lime greens and oranges, promising sale prices, never to be repeated offers and wholesale prices direct to the public.

  ‘Yeah. What about it?’

  ‘It was once the parish workhouse.’

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘And after that it was like a hostel for people who got fucked up in the war, the First World War not the last one, people who got fucked up in the head, not maimed or wounded but, you know, shot away inside the head. My great-grandad had a dose of that.’

  ‘What, he fought in the war?’

  ‘Yeah, fuckin right he did. He signed up in the West Indies, lied about his age. Dead keen, he was, but I don’t suppose they give a fuck.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Fifteen and a half he was but he did look older.’

  ‘He’d fuckin wanna.’

  ‘He ended up at this gaff called Ypres – Wipers, the troops called it – getting the complete shit pummelled outta them by the German guns, but they ain’t like what we call a gun, a shooter, these guns were on fuckin railway trains, with about twenty geezers loading the fuckin thing with one-ton shells. Heavy artillery, heavy gravy. The top kiddies, the officers, won’t go up to the front cos they don’t want to get their fuckin uniforms muddy.’

  ‘That wouldn’t do at all.’

  ‘Anyway, a fuckin huge shell has landed on this dug-out that the great-grandad’s in. A direct hit. The little outfit he was with are buried and he’s buried alive. It turns out later that he’s in there for twenty-four hours before they dug him out and he’s wide awake for the first part in among all his pals who have been blown to fuckin bits, one guy’s arm’s over there and his legs are over here, there’s body parts all over the fuckin trench and he’s covered in bits of their blood and brains and fuck-knows-what.’

  ‘And he’s in amongst all that shit.’

  ‘Well, he had no fuckin choice, did he,’ says Mort.

  ‘And conscious for the first part?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s woken up about two weeks later in the Brighton Pavilion. Have you ever seen the Brighton Pavilion?’

  ‘I can’t remember if I have.’

  ‘You’d know it if you’d seen it cos it’s like the fuckin Taj Mahal in fuckin downtown Brighton. It’s all spindly towers and nutty arches. It’s a total fuckin crack-up on the outside and inside it’s all mad gold and felt-flock wallpaper like a curry house but to him it’s like a palace cos he’s from the sticks on one of the little islands. Then he thinks, hang on, maybe I’m dead already and this is fuckin heaven, and he’s panicking but it turns out that the gaff is being used for a hospital for an Indian outfit. In the confusion and mayhem they’ve got him booked as an Indian and shipped him over to Brighton.’

  ‘What was the matter with him?’

  ‘He’s got a couple of broken legs and a fuckin huge bandage round the canister but they said nothing was broken, but from then on in he became a right fuckin headbanger, a complete fuckin head-the-ball, he’s gone completely the other way from all that King and country bullshit, it’s turned him inside out, it has, he’s never the same again but you wouldn’t be, would ya.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you would, not after you’ve been covered with your spar’s blood and brains and that.’

  ‘He’s caused fuckin havoc everywhere he’s gone for the next sixty years. He used to wake up screaming, thinking he’s been buried alive again, fuckin shit ya right up to hear it, cos it was a fuckin insane scream and he’d be gulping for breath like he was suffocating all over again, poor old cunt.’

  ‘They’d call that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder these days. They’d give him fuckin therapy from arsehole to breakfast time, he could sue ’em for a fuckin lump sum or a bittova war pension.’

  ‘Too true. And they’d sort him out a medal as well, but this was back in the days when people thought they were being really fuckin polite calling a black geezer a coon or a nig-nog.’

  I’m laughing.

  ‘I know, you can fuckin laugh,’ says Mort, ‘but it’s true, fuckin mad ain’t it, but what I’m saying is that all these good people thought that black people lacked a bit of the old moral fibre. See, the whole fuckin gaff was streaming with soldiers who had been fucked up by the war, call it shell-shock or post-traumatic stress whatever, and it was put down to either cowardice or character weakness or both and the old boy was just another crazy and a Johnny Darky into the bargain.’

  ‘In the grief stakes I reckon he musta got double bubble.’

  ‘Sure. So he ended up in that gaff back there. He used to bring me over this side to show me all the places he’d lived in, done a bunk outta, boozers he’s had the tear-up in, he’d bring me over to see the sights.’

  A lot of the people on the pavement look shell-shocked from plain old ordinary everyday living. They’ve got a look of deep fatigue from years of attrition. Their faces are weary, young and old alike. It’s the look of poverty and scraping by week after week, year in year out, stretching out the Monte Cairo till next pay day, living on subs and Christmas clubs and it’s at times like this I’m glad I’m in the business I’m in. Most people are simply fucked, fried and lied to.

  ‘You know what he used to say to me? I was just a kid but he used to say it over and over again and I just used to fuckin nod my head and think what the fuck’s he on about the old cunt but years later it all makes the most perfect sense.’

  We’re sitting at the traffic lights. Mort’s looking out the window, out into the shop windows, no doubt thinking about the trips over to the Eastside with his crazy old trooper of a great-grandad. He’s got his faraway look in his eyes. I suppose this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for him.

  ‘Well?’ I says.

  ‘Well what?’ says Morty, coming to.

  ‘What did he used to say?’

  ‘Oh right, fuck me, I was gone then. He used to say that your intelligence, your imagination and your integrity are yours and yours alone and no cunt can make you give them up unless you want to. You can give them away, you can sell them to the highest bidder, you can let people think that they’ve got you where they want you, but you know you got a different deal going on in your head, and all the time you’re letting them believe what they fuckin wanna believe, but you, and you alone, k
now different. He used to go on about the “three eyes, remember the three eyes,” and I thought as a chawie that he was on about some fuckin big old three-eyed monster, I was well spooked. See, a lot of people just saw him as a crazy old black geezer, screaming and shouting in the street, getting nicked for fighting or getting a good hiding for wrecking some old spieler cos he’s flipped out or for just fuckin growling at people he shouldn’t have done, but he was a fuckin deep thinker in spite of all that shit.’

  ‘I like that, though, about your intelligence, your imagination and your integrity, it’s good gear.’

  ‘It’s good simple home cookin, ain’t it. When I got sent down that time for that Kilburn Jerry business, that was the moment, the exact fuckin moment–’ he clicked his fingers ‘– that I knew what he was on about. See, eight years ain’t a long time and it ain’t a fuckin short time either. It used to go round and around in my nut. It kinda kept me sane and drove me fuckin mad at the same time if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘See, in the boob ninety per cent of the cons are complete fuckin gobshites, as they say up in County Kilburn, mug ‘emselves off the whole time, fuckin idiots who ain’t got a clue. My uncle, Winston, and my grandad used to talk about knowing your own history. They were both always readin every fuckin history book that they could get hold of, Winston still does. See, it’s important that I know about their struggle, although I didn’t get on with the old man when I was younger, but if I know all the shit that’s gone down over the years, with him, the grandad and the great-grandad, to get me here in this motor, sat talkin to you, then I ain’t gonna be givin up so fuckin easily. You understand?’

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘If you know your history, the struggle, your lineage, you know who you fuckin are.’

  ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘You know who had it, had it in lorryloads, ferocious they had it and it was very fuckin impressive, those IRA geezers down on the Island. The Parkhurst Brigade of the Provisional IRA. If you can forget about what they’ve done to get in there, forget that they’re always banging on that they’re POWs, we’re all fuckin POWs I used to tell them, but if you took the time and you actually sat down and talked to them they had that knowledge in shitloads.’

  ‘I can imagine, as it goes, cos they believe they’re soldiers.’

  ‘And they are. They didn’t blow anyone up for fun or cos it was a good earner or anything like that, they did it cos they believe they’re at war. See, if you associate too much with those guys it goes down on your record and it affects your parole. The authorities see it as another way of punishing them, keeping them isolated and some of the muggy-cunt, lowlife, petty criminal, half-a-sex-case rubbish play the game cos they wanna earn a little squeeze from the kangas. They give the Provo geezers a hard time, but they don’t see that they’re being used as mugs and anyway those Irish boys can look after themselves, they can give as good as they fuckin get, they stick together.’

  ‘I can fuckin imagine that somehow. They come across as headcases.’

  ‘In a very cool, calculated way they are, but like you say, they’re soldiers. But, and this is the point I’m making, if they ain’t got their head in a book on Irish history going back about ten thousand years, about that fuckin fat–’ he holds his thumb and forefinger about four inches apart ‘– then they were discussing it and some of them were writing poetry about it, but they knew where they were comin from. You see what I mean. A sense of where you come from gives you a sense of where you’re going. Understand?’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘I read all that Irish history and every other fuckin history book I could get hold of as well because, first up, I liked the stories cos fact is always stranger than fiction, it’s the fuckin truth, and so while all my pals were off doing nightclasses trying to suss out how people’s minds work so they could be more effective crims, you know, psychology, sociology, theology and every fuckin other sort of fuckology, I’d be away in my cell readin my history books. To be honest, most nights I was glad when bang-up come so I could be on my jack with a puff and me books.’

  We hit a bitta dual carriageway heading north. Morty’s in full flow.

  ‘See, people reckon that studying history teaches us not to make the same mistakes over again, but we do again and again as if we as a species like to fuck up, prefer it maybe.’

  He weighs it up in his head. He pulls his quizzical face but continues.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. See, huge empires or countries live in fear of the other guy upping them before they can do it to the other guy, so it keeps on kickin off over and over again. So while my pals are learnin about “this is how the old canister works, bish, bash, bosh,” and I guess that there is a lot of truth in that old voodoo, I worked out that you can never really know what anyone’s thinkin cos as soon as you write the formbook on them they’ll go and do something that totally fucks up your theory about their motives, whys and wherefores. I could give you examples, Hitler or Alexander the Great, whoever, you never know what they’re going to do next.’

  ‘Too fuckin true.’

  I’m wondering if this is some kinda word of warning for my meet with Jimmy Price or it’s just Morty shooting the breeze.

  ‘You do love your history, don’t you, Mort.’

  ‘I fuckin do, which is funny cos I fuckin hated it when I was in school. I could go on that quiz show on the telly, you know, specialist subjects and that. But remember that about your intelligence, your imagination and your integrity cos that’s been handed down and now I’m handing it down to you.’

  ‘Cheers, Mort.’

  We pull off the carriageway and into some small lanes with heavy woods on either side. Mort’s following the directions he’s got written down on the back of a fag packet. After about ten minutes’ driving we stop at a crossroads.

  ‘Very good directions. There should be a sign here somewhere.’

  I spot it. ‘Over there.’

  A tiny wooden sign saying ‘Pepi’s Barn’ pointed down another smaller lane between two of the branches of the crossroads. There’s no way you would have spotted it without knowing it was there already. Looking at my watch, it’s exactly one-thirty. We drive down the lane for a couple of hundred yards, through an avenue of trees that meet at the top and block out the light. It really is quite beautiful and a touch eerie at the same time, like something outta a kids’ fairytale. When we emerge at the other end it’s a mighty fuckin contrast. We turn a sharp corner at the end of a tree-lined avenue and suddenly we’re on a gravel forecourt in front of a massive country house as far away from a barn as it’s possible to get. It’s on two floors, about three hundred years old. In the front there’s a beautifully manicured lawn with Roman statues dotted about, David and the armless one, Venus de Milo, and clipped privet hedges about three feet high. They probably called this a villa when it was built, it’s moody classical with large columns on either side of the double doors. A guy in bottle-green and gold livery opens the door of the Audi. Morty gives him the keys and he drives the motor off to park it out of sight.

  ‘Remember, he’ll be checking you out, maybe pushing a bit, keep calm, don’t bite, remember the three eyes,’ says Morty as we stroll into the gaff.

  A Spot of Luncheon with Mister Price

  Pepi’s Barn inside is something else. It looks brand spanking new and really old at the very same time. The floors are laid in white marble. On the walls are mosaics of what look like Roman gods and goddesses doing battle with the forces of nature in an almighty big frieze. The oak supporting beams have been exposed back to the original wood. The reception area is on an upper level. Down three steps is the main floor of the restaurant and down another three steps a conservatory has been added on. Beyond that again is a garden that has been laid out around a water fountain. Huge plants, almost two floors tall, are in each corner of the room. The vibe is of pure luxury and, sure enough, on the lawn peacocks and white doves roam aimlessly about. I
realise that the original villa had been built on a slight hill cos you are higher at the front door than on the main floor. There’s a fountain inside as well, up against the far wall. It’s a slow, gently cascading number to add to the ambience of calm. In the bottom sit fish, valuable koyi carp, motionless in the clear, crisp water, not for frying in batter.

  Half an hour ago we were sitting in the motor in two-egg-and-chips-guv Hackney and now we are waiting to be seated in a gaff that simply oozes affluence. Thirty tables, every one of them full, and you had to be a boy scout to find the place. All the waiters look like male models with chiselled cheekbones. They’re all wearing long aprons down to their ankles and they move across the marble decks noiselessly. Lorryloads of flowers are everywhere, arranged by experts, you can tell, sitting in crystal vases that I know cost two or three hundred quid a pop. Ceiling fans spin gently at half speed. Nothing gets too frantic here.

  We leave our jackets and phones with the cloakroom girl. I see everybody’s wearing that off-duty look that the rich kids, the genuinely caked, seem to get without even trying. It’s all Ralph, cords, Timberland deck-shoes, Burberry and Mulberry. The men and the women are dressed the same except some of the gals have Gucci, Hermès or Chanel silk squares around the neck. The atmosphere’s very relaxed and laid-back. Morty tells the Major Dee that we are with the Price party and he leads the way through the main room and out to a little side conservatory with one big table for about six or seven on its own in the middle. The spring sun’s shining through the glass and I can see cherry blossom on the trees outside.

  Jimmy Price is sitting with his back to the far wall, looking out so he can see all the comings and goings around him. He’s relaxed, off-duty, with a large vodka and tonic in his hand and a leather cigar box on the table in front of him and a fat live one in his hand, a Cuban Montecristo for sure. He’s wearing an argyle cashmere golf sweater that’s cost about three or four hundred quid. His ginger-grey hair’s swept across his nut trying to cover up his baldness but some of the sun from behind him still glistens on his shiny head. He looks older than I remember him from our previous two meetings. Jimmy’s had a shave about an hour ago and his face is still glowing red-raw. He’s got red cheeks and broken veins around his nose. He’s wearing too much of that expensive aftershave that smells too sickly sweet and it mixes with the cigar smoke to tell me that he’s got the money of the folks next door, he’s got it in spades, shitloads, but not necessarily with the easy class and style of those people. He never will.