Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self)

by Will Self

Danny had been changed by the army. He went in a fucked-up, angry, potentially violent, coloured youth; and he came out a frustrated, efficient, angry black man. He looked different too. Gone were the fashion accessories, the chunky gold rings (finger and ear) and the bracelets. Gone too was the extravagant barnet. Instead there were a neat, sculpted flat-top and casual clothes that suggested ‘military’. Danny had always been slight, but he had filled out in the army. Darker than Tembe, his features were also sharper, leaner. He now looked altogether squared-off and compact, as if someone had planed away all the excess of him.

  ‘Whadjergonna do then?’ asked Tembe, as the two brothers sat spliffing and beering in front of Saturday afternoon racing. Darcus nodded in the corner. On screen a man with mutton-chop whiskers made sheepish forecasts.

  ‘Dunno. Nuffin’ criminal tha's for sure. I'm legit from here on in. I seen enough killing now to last me, man.’

  ‘Yeah. Killing.’ Tembe pulled himself up by the vinyl arms of the chair, animated. ‘Tell me ‘bout it, Bantu. Tell me ‘bout the killing an’ stuff. Woss combat really like?’

  ‘Danny. The name's Danny. Don’ forget it, dipstick. Bantu is dead. And another fing, stop axin’ me about combat. You wouldn't want to know. If I told you the half, you would shit your whack. So leave it out.’

  ‘But . . . But . . . If you aren't gonna deal, whadjergonna do?’

  ‘Fucking do-it-yourself. That's what I'm gonna do, little brother. Look at the state of this place. If you want to stay here much longer with that fat bint of yours, you better do some yersel’ as well. Help me get the place sorted.’

  The ‘fat hint’ was Brenda, a girlfriend Tembe had moved in a week after his brother went overseas. Together they slept in a disordered pile upstairs, usually sweating off the effects of drink, or rock, or both.

  Danny started in the cellar. ‘Damp-coursing, is it?’ said Darcus, surfacing from his haze and remembering building work from four decades ago: tote that bale, nigger; Irish laughter; mixing porridge cement; wrist ache. ‘Yeah. Thass right, Uncle. I'll rip out that rotten back wall and repoint it.’

  ‘Party wall isn't it?’

  ‘No, no, thass the other side.’

  He hired the Kango. Bought gloves, goggles, overall and mask. He sent Tembe down to the builders’ merchants to order 2,000 stock bricks, 50 kilo bags of ballast, sand and cement. While he was gone Danny headed down the eroding stairs, snapped on the yellow bulb and made a start.

  The drill head bit into the mortar. Danny worked it up and around, so that he could prise out a section of the retaining wall. The dust was fierce, and the noise. Danny kept at it, imagining that the wall was someone he wanted done with, some towel-head in the desert or Skank, his persecutor. He shot the heavy drill head from the hip, like an action man in a boys’ comic, and felt the mortar judder, then disintegrate.

  A chunk of the wall fell out. Even in the murky light of the cellar Danny could see that there wasn't earth – which he had expected – lying behind it. Instead some kind of milky-white substance. There were fragments of this stuff on the bit of the drill, and twists like coconut swarf on the uneven floor.

  Danny pushed up his goggles and pulled down his mask. He squatted and brought a gloveful of the matter up to his face. It was yellowy-white, with a consistency somewhere between wax and chalk. Danny took off his glove and scrunged some of it between his nails. It flaked and crumbled. He dabbed a little bit on his bottom lip and tasted it. It tasted chemical. He looked wonderingly at the four-foot-square patch that he had exposed. The swinging bulb sent streaks of odd luminescence glissading across its uneven surface. It was crack cocaine. Danny had struck crack.

  Tembe was put out when he got back and found that Danny had no use for the stock bricks. No use for the ballast, the cement and the sand either. But he did have a use for Tembe.

  ‘You like this shit, that right?’ Danny was sitting at the kitchen table. He held up a rock of crack the size of a pigeon's egg between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Shee-it!’ Tembe sat down heavily. ‘Thass a lotta griff, man. Where you get that?’

  ‘You don’ need to know. You don’ need to know. You leave that to me. I found us a connection. We going into business.’ He gestured at the table where a stub of pencil lay on top of a bit of paper covered with calculations. ‘I'll handle the gettin’, you can do the outin’. Here –’ he tossed the crack egg to Tembe ‘– this is almost an eightf. Do it out in twenties – I want a oncer back. You should clear forty – and maybe a smoke for you.’

  Tembe was looking bemusedly at the egg that nestled in his palm. ‘Is it OK, this? OK, is it?’

  ‘Top-hole! Live an’ direct. Jus’ cooked up. It the biz. Go give the hint a pipe, see how she like it. Then go out an’ sell some.’

  Tembe quit the kitchen. He didn't even clock the brand-new padlock that clamped shut the door to the cellar. He was intent on a pipe. Danny went back to totting up columns of figures.

  Danny resumed his career in the crack trade with great circumspection. To begin with he tried to assess the size of his stock. He borrowed a set of plumber's rods and shoved them hard into the exposed crack-face down in the cellar. But however many rods he added and shoved in, he couldn't find an end to the crack in any direction. He hacked away more of the brickwork and even dug up the floor. Every place he excavated there was more crack. Danny concluded that the entire house must be underpinned by an enormous rock of crack.

  ‘This house is built on a rock,’ he mused aloud, ‘but it ain't no hard place, that the troof.’

  Even if the giant rock was only fractionally larger than the rods indicated, it was still big enough to flood the market for crack in London, perhaps even the whole of Europe. Danny was no fool. Release too much of the rock on to the streets and he would soon receive the attentions of Skank or Skankalikes. And those Yardies had no respect. They were like monkeys just down from the fucking trees – so Danny admonished Tembe – they didn't care about any law, white or black, criminal or straight.

  No. And if Danny tried to make some deal with them, somehow imply that he had the wherewithal . . . No. That wouldn't work either. They'd track him down, find him out. Danny had seen what men looked like when they were awakened at dawn. Roused from drugged sleep on thin mattresses, roused with mean little Glocks tucked behind their crushed ears. Roused so that grey patches spread out from underneath brown haunches. No. Not that.

  Danny added another hefty padlock to the cellar door and an alarm triggered by an infra-red beam. Through a bent quartermaster at Aldershot who owed him a favour he obtained an antipersonnel mine in exchange for an ounce of the cellar wall. This he buried in the impacted earth of the cellar floor.

  At night Danny sat in the yellow wash of light from the streetlamp outside his bedroom. He sucked meditatively on his spliff and calculated his moves. Do it gradual, that was the way. Use Tembe as a runner and build up a client list nice and slow. Move on up from hustling to the black youth in Harlesden, and find some nice rich clients, pukkah clients.

  The good thing about rock – which Danny knew only too well – was that demand soon began to outstrip supply. Pick up on some white gourmets who had just developed a taste for the chemical truffles, and then you could depend on their own greed to turn them into gluttons, troughing white pigs. As long as their money held out, that is.

  So it was. Tembe hustled around Harlesden with the crack Danny gave him. Soon he was up to outing a quarter, or even a half, a day. Danny took the float back off Tembe with religous zeal. It wouldn't do for little brother to get too screwed up on his profit margin. He also bought Tembe a pager and a mobile. The pager for messages in, the mobile for calls out. Safer that way.

  While Tembe bussed and mooched around his manor, from Kensal Green in the south to Willesden Green in the north, Danny headed into town to cultivate a new clientele. He started using some of the cash Tembe generated to rent time in recording studios. He hired session musicians to record covers of the ska numbe
rs he loved as a child. But the covers were percussive rather than melodic, full of the attacking, hard-grinding rhythms of Ragga.

  Through recording engineers and musicians Danny met whites with a taste for rock. He nurtured these contacts, sweetening them with bargains, until they introduced him to wealthier whites with a taste for rock, who introduced him to still wealthier whites with a taste for rock. Pulling himself along these sticky filaments of drug-lust, like some crack-dispensing spider, Danny soon found himself in the darkest and tackiest regions of decadence.

  But, like the regal operator he was, Danny never made the mistake of carrying the product himself or smoking it. This he left to Tembe. Danny would be sipping a mai tai or a whiskey sour in some louche West End club, swapping badinage with epicene sub-aristos or superannuated models, while his little brother made the rounds, fortified by crack and the wanting of crack.

  It didn't take longer than a couple of months – such is the alacrity with which drug cultures rise and fall – for Danny to hit human gold: a clique of true high-lowlife. Centred on an Iranian called Masud, who apparently had limitless funds, was a gaggle of rich kids whose inverse ratio of money-to-sense was simply staggering. They rained cash down on Danny. A hundred, two hundred, five hundred quid a day. Danny was able to withdraw from Harlesden altogether. He started doling out brown as well as rock; it kept his clients from the heebie-jeebies.

  Tembe was allowed to take the occasional cab. Darcus opened an account at the betting shop.

  The Iranian was playing with his wing-wang when Tembe arrived. Or at any rate it looked as if he had been playing with it. He was in his bathrobe, cross-legged on the bed, with one hand hidden in the towelling folds. The smell of sex – or something even more sexual than sex – penetrated the room. The Iranian looked at Tembe with his almond eyes from under a narrow, intelligent brow on which the thick, curled hair grew unnaturally low.

  Tembe couldn't even begin to think how the Iranian was getting it up – given the amount of rock he was doing. Five, six, seven times a day the pager peeped on Tembe's hip. And when Tembe dialled the number programmed into his mobile, on the other end would be the Iranian, his voice clenched with want, but his accent still that very, very posh kind of foreign.

  Supporting the sex explanation there was the girl hanging around. Tembe didn't know her name, but she was always there when he came, smarming her little body around the suite. Her arrival, a month or so ago, had coincided with a massive boost in consumption at the suite. Before, the Iranian had level-pegged at a couple of forties a day and half a gram of brown, but now he was picking up an eighth of each as soon after Tembe picked up himself as he could engineer it.

  After that the Iranian would keep on paging and paging for what was left of the day. Now, at least three nights a week, Tembe would be called at one a.m. – although it was strictly against the rules – and have to go and give the two of them a get-down hit, to stop the bother.

  Tembe hated coming to the hotel. He would stop at some pub and use the khazi to freshen up before taking a cab up Piccadilly. He didn't imagine that the smarmed-down hair and chauffeured arrival fooled the hotel staff for a second. There weren't that many black youths wearing dungarees, Timberland boots and soiled windcheaters in residence. But they never gave him any hassle, no matter how late or how often he trod across the wastes of red carpet to the concierge and got them to call up to the Iranian's suite.

  ‘My dear Tembe,’ Masud, the Iranian, had said to him, ‘one purchases discretion along with privacy when one lives in an establishment such as this. Why, if they attempted to restrict the sumptuary or sensual proclivities of their guests, they would soon have vacant possession rather than no vacancies.’ Tembe caught the drift below the Iranian's patronising gush. And he didn't mind the dissing anyway – the Iranian had sort of paid for it.

  The girl let Tembe in this time. She was in a terry-towelling robe matching the Iranian's. The dun blond hair scraped back off her pale face suggested a recent shower, suggested sex.

  How could the Iranian get it up? Tembe didn't doubt that he got the horn. Tembe got the horn himself. Got it bad. But the stiffie was hardly there, just an ice-cream, melting before there was any chance of it getting gobbled. Not that Tembe didn't try it on, far gone as he was. If he had a pipe at Leopold Road he'd make his moves on Brenda – until she shoved him away with lazy contempt. If he was dropping off for one of the brasses who worked out of the house on Sixth Avenue – who he still served without Danny's knowledge – or even the classier ones at the Learmont, either they would ask, or he would offer: rock for fuck.

  It was ridiculous how little they'd do it for. The bitch at the Learmont – who, Tembe knew for a fact, regularly turned three-ton tricks – would put out for a single stone. She stepped out of her skirt the way any other woman took off her coat and handed him the rubber from the dispenser in the kitchenette drawer like it was a piece of cutlery.

  Usually, by the time they'd piped up together Tembe was almost past the urge. Almost into that realm where all was lust, and lust itself was a grim fulfilment. He'd try and push his dick into the rubber rim, but it would shrink back. And then he'd just get her to un-pop the gusset of her sateen body. Get her to stand there in the kitchenette, one stilettoed foot up on a stool, while he frigged her and she scratched at his limpness with carmine nails.

  Tembe tried not to think about this as the Iranian's girl moved about the bedroom, picking up a lacy bra from the radiator, jeans with knickers nesting in them from the floor. The Iranian was taking a smoke of brown from a piece of heavily stained foil a foot square. Tembe watched the stuff bubble, black as tar dripping from a grader. The girl slid between him and the door jamb. Wouldn't have been able to do that a month ago, thass the troof, thought Tembe. She's that fucking gone on it. Posh white girls don't eat any, and when they're on the pipe and the brown they eat even less. Despite that, skinny as she was, and with those plasticky features like a Gerry Andersen puppet, Tembe still wanted to fuck her.

  The Iranian finished off his chase by waving the lighter around hammily, and said, ‘Let's go into the other room.’ And Tembe said, ‘Sweet,’ keen to get out of the bedroom with its useless smell of other people's sex. The Iranian moved on the bed, hitching up his knees, and for a second Tembe saw his brown dick, linked to the sheet by a pool of shadow or maybe a stain.

  The main room of the suite featured matching Empire escritoires that had seldom been written on, an assemblage of Empire armchairs and a divan that had seldom been sat on. In front of the divan there was a large, glass-topped coffee-table, poised on gold claw feet. On top of this were a crack pipe, a blowtorch, a mirror with some smears of rock on it, cigarettes, a lighter, keys, a video remote, a couple of wine-smeared glasses and, incongruously, a silver-framed photograph of a handsome middle-aged woman. The woman smiled at Tembe forthrightly over the assembly of crack-smoking tools.

  The room also featured heavy bookcases, lined with remaindered hardbacks, which the hotel manager had bought from the publishers by the yard. The carpet was mauve, the walls flock-papered purple with a bird-and- shrubbery motif worked into them. On the far side of the coffee-table from the divan stood an imposing armoire, the doors of which were open, revealing shelves supporting TV, video and music centre. Scattered around the base of the armoire were videos in and out of their cases, CDs the same.

  Somewhere inside the armoire Seal was singing faintly: ‘For we're never going to sur-vive/Un-less we go a little cra-azy . . .’ ‘Ain't it the troof?’ said Tembe, and the Iranian replied, ‘Sorry?’ but not as if he meant it.

  ‘For we're never going to sur-vive/Un-less we go a little cra-azy . . . ‘ Tembe warbled the words, more falsetto than Seal, but with a fair approximation of the singer's rhythm and phrasing. As he neared the end of the second line he did a little jig, like a boxer's warm-up, and wiggled his outstretched fingers either side of his face, his head chicken-nodding. ‘. . . You know, man, like cra-azee.’

  ‘Oh, I s
ee. I get you. Yeah, of course, of course . . .’

  The Iranian's voice trailed away. He'd put himself down in the centre of the divan and was using the flap of a matchbook to scrape up the crack crumbs on the mirror, sweeping them into a little vee-shaped pile, then going over the same surface again, creating a regular series of crack smears.

  Tembe looked at the pipe and saw the thick honey sheen inside it. There was plenty of return there, enough for five or six more hits. Tembe wondered why the Iranian had called him back so soon. Surely the return alone would have lasted the pair of them another couple of hours? But now Tembe saw that the Iranian had got down on his hands and knees behind the coffee-table and was methodically combing the strip of carpet between the table and the divan with a clawed hand. The Iranian's starting eyes, hovering six inches above the carpet, were locked on in the hand's wake, crack-seeking radar.

  Thass it, Tembe realised. The fucker's so fucking far gone he's carpet-cruising. Tembe had seen it enough times – and done it himself as well. It began when you reached that point – some time after the tenth pipe – where your brain gets sort of fused with crack. Where your brain is crack. Then you start to see the stuff everywhere. Every crumb of bread on the carpet or grain of sugar on the kitchen lino looks like a fragment of ecstatic potential. You pick one up after the other, checking them with a touch of wavering flame, never quite believing that it isn't crack until the smell of toast assaults your nose.

  The Iranian had turned in his little trench of desperation and was crawling back along it, head down, the knobbles of his spine poking up from behind the silvery rim of the coffee-table. He was like some mutant guard patrolling a perverse check-point. His world had shrunk to this: tiny presences and gaping, yawning absences. Like all crackheads, Masud moved slowly and silently, with a quivering precision that was painful to watch, as if he were Gulliver, called upon to perform surgery on a Lilliputian.

  The girl wandered back in, tucking the bottom of a cardigan into the top of her jeans. She fastened the fly buttons and then hugged herself, palms going to clutch opposing elbows. Her little tits bulged out.