Layer Cake

by J. J. Connolly

  Clarkie times traffic lights, holding back or speeding up, so that we get over exactly on the amber light, then turning sharp to the left or the right, nothing illegal, but anyone following would have to do the same and show out. As we sail over, Clarkie’s checking the rear-view mirror to see if anyone’s jumping red lights. He drives round the same roundabouts three and four times with his eyes glued to the rear-view. We cut into Regent’s Park and round the inner circle. It’s bright, fresh and there’s cherry blossom on the trees, the world is coming alive all over again. We stop for petrol in Hendon. Clarkie’s checking the tyre pressure, the oil, the water, but most of all he’s checking the other cars parked up on the quiet street. He goes inside, pays, and comes back with bottles of water and packets of snout and we head for the dearly beloved Motorway One.

  I fuckin hate leaving London. I love it for different reasons to the cor-blind-me-gov, we-woz-at-our-best-in-the-blitz, ain’t-it-a-bloody-shame-they’ve-done-away-wiv-rationin gang. I love it cos it is so brand-new, vibrant and nicely anonymous. People are too busy to be curtain-twitchers. Looking out the back window of the Rover, looking at the signs on the other carriageway, watching the miles to London increasing, I always get a feeling of sadness. Clarkie keeps the motor at a constant hundred all the way. I’m just looking out the window and dreaming, plotting, going over the business with the Yahoos last night. Certain things don’t really add up, like what they’re doing with all those pills, when they’ve got no idea what they’re worth. If they had come to us a couple of months ago and said they were going to manufacture a huge batch and would we be up for helping shift them, that would make sense. It’s like in any business, you always have your distribution in place before you go calling on your stock. I always know where the oats is going before I call it on. I wouldn’t ask Gene to send round seventy kilos and then try and riddle out what to do with it.

  Suddenly Morty puts on a drum and bass tape, cranks it up and starts to tell me and Mister Clark that our youth is wasted on us. Clarkie tells him that a man of forty-five should be at home listening to a nice bitta Nat King Cole and smoking a lickle draw instead of tooting powders, listening to jungle and chasing young Richards.

  Around Birmingham, Clarkie’s telling us a story about these four Turkish guys who’ve chipped in to fuck this brass, score for half an hour, up on Green Lanes. She’s doing the biz in a flat upstairs from one of those social clubs they shift the brown outta. They all pile upstairs and it turns out it’s one of the guys’ sister.

  ‘So did he still fuck her?’

  ‘Well, would you?’ says Clarkie.

  ‘I don’t know what his sister looks like. Did he? I bet his mates all fucked her,’ says Morty.

  ‘That’d freak ya right out,’ says Clarkie.

  ‘He’s probably already fucked her,’ says Morty. Another hour, off the motorway, into the outskirts of Manch, beautiful leafy suburbs at first then through the lively Asian part of town. I can smell the spices from the car. There’s signposts on the roundabouts and buses saying ‘To the city centre’, always a bad omen that for the Cockney abroad. I look at my watch. It’s twelve-fifteen. Alex is late in ringing. Soon we’re off the main drag, down into terraced, two-up, two-down houses. He slows the motor cos the streets are tiny and the dwellings packed close together. It starts to get grim. Every third house is bolted up with steel shutters on the windows like the former occupants have simply snapped and shipped out in the middle of the night. Satellite television dishes are secured at the very tops of chimney stacks on the ends of long extension poles, and DIY, install-it-yourself alarm systems seem to have been a popular Christmas present. A couple of houses on the corner have been burnt out. Parked up, side by side outside these gaffs are rust-buckets, held together with spit and gum, and some real lemon, double-flash gangsta rides. Morty’s surveying the scene from the front seat, taking it in, noting the slightest detail, like a five-star general driving through a defeated land.

  He spots a papershop and tells Clarkie to pull over cos he wants some chewing gum but really he just wants a mooch about. Morty calls me into the loppy-pop to show me all the choccie bars and sweeties, under glass like jewels on Old Bond Street. The Asian shopkeepers look scared. Their eyes follow us everywhere, double-edgy, thinking we’re gonna rob them. Maybe we do look sinister in our raincoats and shades. Morty senses this and talks to them very slow, trying to be gentle and reassuring, saying please and thank you, but it only sounds more spooky and threatening.

  We go outside. In the short time we were in the shop, a gaggle of kids have gathered round the motor checking it out. These kids are fearless on their own turf. Black kids, white kids who look Irish with red Barnets, mixed-race kids with dreads, white-on-white kids who look apple-white, going on luminous. Kids of ten and twelve, smoking salmon and spitting non-stop, with faces like hardened old geezers. Clarkie’s leaning against the motor watching them drag their grubby mitts down the brand-spanking-new paintwork leaving sticky marks, deliberately trying to provoke him, but Mister Clark don’t bite. The sad thing is that in a few short years these kids will be real live grown-ups and some may escape, like our man Ronnie, but most will end up fucked-up one way or another, spitting at the world, the girls with more chavvies than they can handle or love and the geezers doing hard time, inside or outside the shovel. One kid, a good-looking mixed-raced kid, is screwing me, with hate and envy in his eyes, like I ain’t never been where he is now. I feel like saying, ‘You look at me like I put you there and now you look at me like I give a shit.’

  One kid asks Clarkie for a fag.

  ‘You shouldn’t be smokin son.’

  ‘Fook off. You fookin Cockneys?’

  ‘Might be,’ says Clarkie.

  ‘Fookin watch yaselfs round ‘ere,’ says his pal in his nasal voice, miming a handgun and shooting Clarkie with it. Morty laughs hysterically. I laugh at Morty laughing.

  ‘Charmin, the hostile natives, Mister Clark.’

  ‘You know something, Mister Mortimer, I think we’ve been ambushed by Apaches. I think they’re gangsters,’ moodying he’s scared.

  Morty gets a twenty outta his pocket and shows it to the kids. He rolls it into a ball and throws it into the middle of them and immediately they start fighting amongst themselves, except for a couple on the outside who know they don’t stand a chance. One kid emerges victorious and he dances away from the rest of the crowd. In the meantime Morty has pulled another note and slung it, but this time it catches on the slight breeze and flies off down the street with the kids in hot pursuit.

  Morty thinks this is splendid entertainment but points at us to get back in the Rover, to saddle-up while all the commotion’s going on. As we pull away I spot the handsome kid standing on the pavement outside the papershop, uninvolved in the mêlée. As we go round the corner he makes a pistol shape with his hand, takes aim and shoots. I pretend to duck but his face remains stony hard.

  Ronnie could never bear to drag himself away from this area cos he knows everything and everybody there is to know. We’ve done business with Ronnie and guys he works with on and off for the last five years. If something good comes our way, we give them a shout and vice-versa. Morty had arranged on the phone last night to come up and see the chaps. The jellied eels, pie-and-mash fraternity totally underestimate the intelligence and cunning of the northern boys. They make the mistake of believing that they have no class but if you do the biz with the right guys they just want the same as your very good self: lotta dollar, peace and quiet. If you judge all northerners by the hordes of football supporters tumbling outta King’s Cross and Euston on match days, hooting and pissing everywhere, you will only draw a negative conclusion.

  These guys, Trevor, Ronnie, Shanks and Victor, are big-time, big hitters, bigger than our little team. They control a large chuck of the wholesale business in north-west England, which is very impressive. A lotta people think they’re buying straight off the boat, but in fact it comes through these guys. Dudes who hate them
with a vengeance, cos of envy or fear, who wouldn’t give ’em the steam of their piss, buy pills and powders from them through third parties. These are the kinda guys who could buy the two million pills, hold them up, sit on them, and not have to worry about cash flow.

  As we pull up, Ronnie’s out with his coat on, ready to go. He jumps in the back and it’s handshakes all round. He’s relaxed and in no hurry, scrubbed and groomed, a class act. Ronnie’s telling me that he’s got three houses knocked into one and they each weigh him in at about twelve gee each, so for thirty-six kay you got yourself a palace. In a war-zone, I’m thinking. The hounds round here ain’t dressed right if they ain’t carrying metal, and are reckless with the firepower, shooting each other up, kidnapping one other. They treat shooters as a fashion accessory. Ronnie’s got the creamy wife, three chavvies, an Italian designer anorak addiction, keeps a low profile and a box at Maine Road. I myself would be very much of the ‘born in the north, laughed in the north, cried in the north, love the north but now I gotta great big chunk of readies I’m fuckin straight outta the north to go live in London’ school.

  We’re driving back outta Manchester, following the signs for Liverpool. I always thought they had grown together at some point, into one huge city, but Ronnie thinks that this is blasphemy. There is still a drop of grass between the two and the character of the Manks and the Mickey Mousers is vastly different. The Manks are droll, dry, think every cunt’s soft, whereas the Mickeys are the gobby, have-the-crack-at-all-costs, jokers in the pack. Scousers are very similar to true Londoners, flash, up-front and knowing. They both have a natural talent to inspire irritation in plums and logs world-wide.

  Mister Clark has done his homework and don’t need any directions. After about twenty minutes we pull off the motorway, up the slip, round a mini-roundabout and down a dual carriageway for about three hundred yards before Clarkie rolls the Rover into the car park of a nondescript roadside hotel, the kind businessmen use schlepping round the country. It’s a very convenient rendezvous for any kind of business meet, legal or otherwise, being plonked down right between the two cities. We’ve decided to stay overnight and have booked a suite of rooms. This sounds grander than it actually is. What it is in reality is like renting a three-bedroom flat with a large front room so you can entertain business clients, Brazilian hookers or whoever you want to meet. All the walls are concrete with vinyl wallpaper, all the wood and brass is plastic and everything’s got a floral design on it. If you bump into any of the staff in the corridor they grin at you and say, ‘Good afternoon, Sir’ like they’re taking the piss.

  Just as we’re booking in, Clarkie putting it on the moody card, my phone rings. It’s Sir Alex ringing from a call box in Brick Lane. First he’s profusely sorry that he’s ringing late, it’s one twenty-five. I walk back outside to get better reception.

  ‘Hiya,’ says Alex.

  ‘How ya doin?’

  ‘Good, mate, good.’

  ‘Those whatsits?’

  ‘Good, very good.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, really good.’

  ‘Scale of one to ten?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Really?’ Alex takes a bit of impressing.

  ‘You know what you said the other geezer said and I said . . .’

  They were like the old days.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I say.

  ‘Well, he was right.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yeah. Dead right,’ says Alex laughing.

  ‘That’s all right then.’ I can hear pips going. ‘Thanks for that.’

  ‘No, thank you, ma–’

  He’s gone. Well, that’s good news. If Alex says they’re good they must be excellent. Any kiddie shunter’s gonna think that they’re the best ever. Everything’s coming together just beautiful. I can see the end of my career, my final curtain, another quarter of a million quid in the pot, a big, wet goodbye kiss.

  Trevor and Shanks from Liverpool, as well as Ronnie’s pal Victor, who lives Cheshire way and has made his own way over, are all sitting in the bar already. We ask the lads to give us five minutes and then follow us over. These guys are very heavy and shrewd, very sound, very professional. Between them they’ve formed an alliance that by rights shouldn’t really work, rivalries should turn it ugly. It’s mostly down to the force of personality of Trevor that it does work. Trevor is the top kiddie and, strange in a business where everybody is onto the slightest sniff of weakness or kindness, he manages to be a real gentleman. Trevor has gotta be about six-and-a-half foot tall with a really intelligent-looking face for such a big geezer.

  The chaps arrive and Shanks brings out his little gadget for detecting listening devices and goes all through the rooms with it. Ronnie and Victor smile thinly, like it’s a bit of a private joke between them, Shanks and his toys. He also unplugs the telephone cos they can be used to earwig conversations by clever-dick cozzers.

  ‘You never know,’ says Shanks, sitting down in an easy chair.

  ‘Is it warm up this way, Trevor?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s all action, everyone wants a slice.’

  ‘People get envious,’ says Ronnie. ‘Think they’re owed a living, start shooting up the place and then the law do get busy.’

  ‘The filth want it quiet as much as anyone, stands to reason,’ says Shanks.

  ‘But some cunts are never satisfied,’ says Trevor.

  ‘Same problem wherever you go, greedy cunts,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t ya,’ says Shanks.

  ‘What’s that, bro?’ I say, offended.

  ‘Well, not you personally, but that outfit who do your runnins.’

  ‘Who are we talkin about?’ says Morty, looking as confused as me.

  ‘That fuckin team from down your end, like you don’t know,’ says Shanks, getting a bit twitchy.

  ‘But who, Shanks? Fuckin talk to me.’ My voice getting higher. Shanks leans forward.

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘Shanks, until you tell me, how the fuck do I know if I know or not?’ I say in a strop. I can smell something nasty on the wind.

  ‘Listen, pal, you ain’t talkin to one of yer fuckin Cockney bitches now, okay?’ says Shanks, screwing me.

  ‘Shanks, I ain’t got a Danny La Rue what it is you’re on about. You know something we don’t?’

  ‘Right, okay.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘Your outfit, the Cowboys, the Yahoos, the fuckin Here-we-gos, what the fuck do you call ’em?’

  ‘They ain’t our outfit but I know who yer mean.’

  ‘You do, okay? I can’t believe you don’t know.’

  ‘Fuckin ‘ell. How the fuck am I meant to know what you won’t tell me?’

  ‘Watch yourself now,’ says Shanks with a pointy finger.

  ‘Fuckin cool it, brother, you gotta chill,’ says Victor to me, talking for the first time. ‘Shanks here is tryin to help you if you let him.’

  ‘Shanks,’ says Trevor, ‘stop fuckin about and explain.’

  I’m double-uneasy. I can feel in my gut something slipping away.

  ‘Right,’ says Shanks, taking his time. ‘We had someone come into us for some acid, but like a real lot, but none of this lot could be bothered so I sorted it out myself, an earner for myself. I nip over to Amsterdam and while I’m over the Dam the gaff is alight with chat about that team from down your end turnin over an ecstasy factory.’

  This is very bad news, especially as it’s common knowledge up here.

  ‘Like how? I’m sorry, Shanks, but it’s important.’

  Shanks looks towards Trevor, who gives him a tiny nod.

  ‘They get over there and get busy. They let the right people know that they’re in the market for a lotta gear, they put the word out but nobody’ll entertain them. They don’t trust ’em, too fuckin loud. Eventually they find this German outfit, more like a little army really, who are into the whole Nazi thing, like neo-Nazis.’

  ‘Skinh
eads?’

  ‘No. They ain’t a loada poufs with big boots and braces. They’re all suited-up, into the ideology thing but they’re into all sorts of shit to raise funds. I know for a fact that the top kiddie’s got the big old townhouse on one of the pukka canals worth about one mill sterling. He’s out and about town in the black Porsche with a different bird every night, blonds, naturally, so not all the money gets in the fightin fund.’

  ‘Ain’t it a weird thing for neo-Nazis to be into, dealin and makin tablets?’

  ‘Well, not if you think about it. If you wanted to justify it you could say that you’re supplyin decadent youth their own poison, letting it corrode their souls, weeding out the weak. To be honest I don’t think the top boys give a fuck. Look at the Provos, the IRA, they’ve got the political firm, the armed wing and the lot who just see it as a money spinner. We sorted this guy out one time, he was UDA or IRA or some fuckin tribe from over there. Trying to talk to him about anything that wasn’t gee-gees, didn’t wanna know.’

  ‘He was on a bandwagon.’

  ‘Now you got it. See, this right-wing lot in the Dam have got a few shady things going on and if it comes on top they’ll be screamin that they’re political prisoners and all that shite. A little bird told me that this lot have got websites soliciting contributions for the final armed struggle and they’re gettin sent loot from all over the place, but mostly from the States cos they’re all gun-crazy loonies over there, ain’t they.’

  ‘That’s a good idea, to skank money, very sweet and simple,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe we should start one,’ Morty says to Victor, who’s also black.

  ‘The top boys don’t want no fuckin race war, no way, they’re havin too good a time, it’s the last thing they want. The Northern European White Alliance,’ declares Shanks, ‘they’ve spotted a gap in the market. Anyway, this firm from down your manor order up a loada stuff. They tell these guys that they only want the pukka gear and they don’t mind payin for it. The Germans – I say Germans but this firm’s from all over, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium but mostly Germans – they want a deposit and some people you talk to say they got one and others say they didn’t. See, nobody’s got the full SP. Next thing, the two outfits are out and about, on the piss, all over Amsterdam which is unusual cos mostly they’re dead unfriendly, really ignorant, very loud, very rude.’