‘Yes. It’s a nice little problem. What are we going to do about it? You got your running shoes with you?’
I knew Laurence well enough by now to know that he was enjoying himself. He thrived on such danger and discomfort. The fact that he would probably get his head kicked in for his efforts didn’t seem to matter to him. I had to admire his nerve.
‘Look,’ I said, trying to be practical, ‘some of them are bound to go to the loo sooner of later. I suggest when at least one of them goes, we make a quick exit, belt it to the end of the street and then spilt up and make our own way home. You go left and I’ll go right.’
‘And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye. All right, Einstein. You are in charge of Operation Scarper. I’ll abide by your decision.’
‘That’ll be a first.’
We waited and waited but our bruising trio seemed to have infinitely expandable bladders. I was getting really worried as closing time neared and then eventually two of the lads went off ‘to the bog for a slash’ as one of them announced loudly. That left just one of the bruisers still standing by the one armed bandit.
‘Let’s make our move now,’ I whispered. ‘You go to the bar as though you’re ordering another round and I’ll make for the door. Once I’m out, you follow quickly.’
Laurence grinned and hummed the theme music from The Great Escape.
‘Ready,’ I said.
He nodded, still humming.
Operation Scarper was all systems go. As planned Laurence went up to the bar and then I walked as casually as I could to the exit and slipped outside. I waited in the freezing night air for him. He didn’t come. For what seemed ages, he didn’t come.
And then all of a sudden the pub door slammed open and Laurence emerged at full pelt. ‘Run!’ he roared. ‘Run!’ On seeing the three cavemen close behind him, I needed no further telling.
But it was futile.
We hadn’t gone twenty yards when two of the brutes brought Laurence down to the ground in a rough tackle while another had grabbed me by my coat collar and I had the cartoon experience of my legs swinging backwards and forwards furiously and yet I wasn’t going anywhere. This comic sensation was superseded by a sharp pain in the gut from the delivery of a heavy blow. I crumpled to the frosted pavement and curled up knees into my chest, hands around my head in an attempt to protect myself from further harm.
On the periphery of my dazed, wild and whirling sensations, I was conscious of the muted cries of pain from Laurence who was being roughly manhandled by two of the cowardly brutes.
And then suddenly another voice was added to the melee. It was clear and strong. ‘Leave them alone,’ it cried. ‘Leave them alone, you morons.’
For a moment the three stooges froze puzzled, as I was, by this intervention. Painfully, I lifted myself on my elbow and saw that it was the youth from the pub, the one who had been reading Private Eye. He was a tall stringy kind of lad – but now he was wielding a stout piece of wood about the size of a cricket bat.
‘It’s the bloody Lone Ranger,’ groaned Laurence, scrabbling to his feet. As he did so, the lad swung the piece of wood wildly, catching one of our assailants around the side of the head, knocking him clear off his feet. With a sharp cry he fell backwards and I saw blood gush down the side of his face. The two remaining attackers now turned their attention on our ally. But he was nimble and side stepped quickly, easily avoiding their drunken advance. Again he clouted one of them around the head. The brute staggered, his knees buckling, but he managed to remain upright. Clamping his hand to his wounded head with a moan, he turned on his heel and ran off. Laurence and I now rose to our feet and launched ourselves on the remaining musketeer. I pulled his legs from under him, while Laurence kicked him in the balls and the Lone Ranger bashed him on the head with his weapon. The street was alive with the sound of music.
Laurence gazed down at our victim. It was old currant eyes. ‘And a good evening to you, sir,’ he smirked, kicking him in the balls again.
‘Time to head for hills, partner,’ I cried, grabbing Laurence’s sleeve. ‘And I think you’d better join us,’ I added with a nod to our new friend.
He needed no encouragement and so without any further words, the three of us ran off at speed in the direction of the centre of town.
Fifteen minutes later we were sitting in a scruffy little café which stayed open late, it seemed, to provide sobering black coffee to the wandering drunks who had missed their last bus home and had no money for taxi fare or had forgotten where they lived. It was fairly full of bleary-eyed silent types slumped in the squeaky plastic seats waiting for death or the thin coffee to cool down, whichever came first. In the far corner a young couple were having a muted argument. She was pulling at his jacket and crying and both were mouthing unintelligible insults at each other.
We sat down at a small table by the door and Laurence bought us three coffees from the smiling Greek owner.
‘Here you go,’ he grinned placing the tray down on the table. He raised his coffee in a toast. ‘Here’s to the Lone Ranger.’
‘Hear, hear,’ I responded clinking my cup against his. ‘What’s your name? Who are you? And why did you do it?’
‘Those are just a few questions to be getting on with,’ smirked Laurence. ‘We’ll come to your inside leg measurement and your choice of the five best movies of all time a little later.’
Our friend looked apprehensive for a moment, not sure whether we were joking or not and then he too began to smile.
‘I’m Alex. Good to meet you.’
We nodded in agreement.
‘I’ve seen those fuckers before. They haven’t got a brain cell to rub between them and they are notorious queer-bashers in the area. There’s nothing I hate worse.’
Laurence raised an eyebrow and cast me a glance. ‘Because…?’
‘Why do you think?’
Laurence pursed his lips and shrugged his shoulder. ‘We’ve no problem with that, have we?’
I was not so sure but I wasn’t about to upset the Lone Ranger. Without him we might be in a casualty ward rather than sitting in this greasy spoon supping watery coffee which I suspect had never seen a coffee bean in its life. I shook my head and uttered a fairly indistinct ‘Nah’.
Alex looked confused. ‘Why the fuck should you… I thought you…?’
Laurence laughed. ‘Ah you mean my queen-like performance in the pub.’ He laughed again. ‘What a compliment. I didn’t know it was so convincing.’
‘It was convincing enough for Grendel and his two ugly brothers to want to kick the shit out of us,’ I observed.
‘You mean you two are… straight then?’ Alex seemed surprised.
‘Well not so much straight as rather curved. I would never regard myself as straight. Straight is boring, predicable… safe. Don’t worry we have no prejudices against gay people – unless they are stupid and irritating and get in our way. But that applies to the rest of mankind. I’m Laurence, by the way, and this shifty individual here is my best friend Russell.’
With a strange kind of mechanical formality, we shook hands.
‘What on earth prompted you to come to our rescue tonight?’ I asked.
‘Hi ho, Silver,’ Laurence brayed.
A ghost of a smile touched Alex’s lips. He was, I had to admit, a good looking chap: fluffy blonde hair, dark brown expressive eyes and finely chiselled features. He was not feminine or girlish like some queers are but one could see that he was a gentle creature – except when wielding a piece of wood in anger. ‘If the truth be known, I’ve been waiting for an excuse to have a go at that lot. Some time ago they beat up a friend of mine – well, ex-friend now.’
‘Why ex-friend? I asked.
‘They scared him off, didn’t they? They’d scare you off, too, if you’d ended up in the infirmary with several broken ribs and a fractured wrist. They pride themselves in having inbuilt gay-sensors. They really must have thought their luck was in tonight when you sashayed in the pub, camping it up.’
‘So they never sussed you out then. They ignored you in the pub tonight’, I said.
‘Nah, they just think I’m Billy No Mates. I go in there and just read.’
‘So you are Billy No Mates,’ observed Laurence.
‘Not exactly…’
‘Certainly not now, anyway. Laurence and me’ll be your Tonto,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ agreed Laurence. ‘We’ll take it in turns to wear the headdress and the buckskin jerkin.’
‘Ooh, get you ducky,’ exclaimed Alex in an outrageously camp voice.
We all laughed and that was the beginning of our enduring friendship.
SIX
JOURNAL OF RUSSELL BLAKE 1968-1970
‘You realise that time is running out. We haven’t got long before we depart these grubby shores for the groves of academe and we must have one final adventure before we go. One that is planned and will warm the cockles of our hearts when the winter winds start to blow.’
Laurence was in an expansive mood. He sprawled back on the leatherette seat in Alf’s, puffing wildly on a little cigar, a new affectation of his which he had taken up on his eighteenth birthday. It was late May and all our exams were over and we had loads of time on our hands until the results came out in August.
‘Do you have anything in mind?’
Laurence screwed up his face dramatically and pointed the tip of the cigar in my direction. ‘I think it’s your call this time, Russ. Old Mother Black was my party. Now it’s your turn. Time to get the old brain box ticking over. Come up with something juicy and surprising.’
‘I’ll give it some thought… but there’s one thing… are we going to let Alex in on it?’
‘You know, I think we should. He’s part of the team now. In a way. I mean he’ll never be a close as you and I, the founder members of this grand and glorious association, but he’s a good guy and I reckon he’ll run with us.’
I agreed. In many ways Alex had very quickly become ‘part of the team’. I had thought that Laurence and I were unique in our ways but Alex seemed to share the same ideas and views, ‘our nihilist philosophy’ as Laurence called it. He detested the dullness of mankind, the acceptance of routine and the reluctance to look beyond the norm.
We didn’t see him as often as the two of us saw each other. Well, we were at college every day and Alex was working. It turned out that he was a couple of years older than us, his fey angelic looks belying his maturity, and he worked as a designer for a printing company. He seemed to like his work but disliked the people he worked with.
We would meet up one night a week and on Saturdays and talk and drink and slag off humanity. Sometime we’d go to the flicks or take a trip to Leeds to visit the theatre, but generally we’d just talk and drink and slag off humanity. However, we hadn’t yet told him about the Old Mother Black incident. We would, when the time was right – and that time was fast approaching.
‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re throwing down the gauntlet. You challenge me to come up with a little fun adventure before we leave for university.’
‘You have hit the nail on the head, mon ami.’ Laurence waved the cigar around dramatically as a sign of approbation.
‘Very well, your wish is my command,’ I replied, grinning. The prospect filled me with glee.
In the end inspiration came by way of the local paper, the Huddersfield Examiner. This is not the kind of literature that I read normally, but I’d gone to the barbers – they were still called barbers then, hairdressers came later – and while I was waiting to be shorn by Brian the Barber there was nothing else to read but an old edition of the News of the World and the local paper. As I skimmed it, full of boring accounts of dog shows, retiring teachers, reviews of crappy amateur dramatics, traffic accidents and tales of woe concerning the council’s mismanagement, a picture caught my eye. It was of a convicted drug addict who had just been released from prison after serving a term of two years. Apparently local boy Darren Rhodes (aged 32) had robbed an old lady of two hundred pounds to pay for his habit and she had suffered a heart attack and died the following day. This had happened a couple of years ago and now, incredibly, he was out of the clink after having served only half his sentence. To add insult to injury, he had just won five thousand pounds on the football pools. This fat bellied nauseous creature was beaming out of the photograph giving two fingers to the camera and, indirectly, to the rest of us. It seemed to me that here was an ideal candidate for the brotherhood’s next adventure.
I was determined to work out a scenario all by myself and present it to Laurence as a fait accompli and see what he said. I had a sneaking feeling he thought I wasn’t quite up to the careful planning of such a caper. I intended to prove him wrong. I set to it with joyful determination. Using the basic facts I’d gleaned from the paper, after a little investigation I soon discovered where this tosser lived. Darren had a terrace house in Sheepton, one of the run down districts on the outskirts of town.
The next Sunday I cycled to the area to find out exactly where he lived. It wasn’t very difficult. Terrace houses were few in this part of town, the bulk of the properties were dilapidated semis built by the local authority after the war. They were still known as ‘corporation houses’, a dreadful epithet for dreadful dwellings. Most of them had now been bought by the current occupants, who in a desperate attempt to individualise their little squat boxes had carried out all kinds of horrendous cosmetic alterations to them. Either that or they’d ignored the fact that they were supposed to be respectable homes altogether and allowed them to degenerate into slum properties. Along one road you would see neat frontages filled with gnomes and plastic windmills, houses painted in vivid, eye-searing colours rubbing shoulders with properties displaying boarded up windows and gardens that replicated overgrown wildernesses, often filled with rubbish and/or old sofas or rusting prams. Darren, however, lived in the older part of Sheepton in a short row of blackened stone-built terrace houses erected sometime in the nineteenth century. His was the end house: a grim pile with a warped, paint-peeling door and a garden that Tarzan would have felt at home in. I visited the spot several times and always the curtains were drawn across the dirt ingrained windows so no one could see inside. In a way I was rather glad of this. I really didn’t want to see inside. I wasn’t sure my stomach would stand it. Two hundred yards away from his house stood the equally doubtful and inappropriately named public house, The Royal George. It was a shabby, disreputable looking boozer where Darren did his drinking and no doubt purchased his drugs.
You’d think that a scumbag like Darren, a drug addict and a murderer of an old woman, would be treated like a pariah once he had returned home from the nick, but it appeared that the opposite was the case in this neck of the woods. He was regarded as a tarnished hero, the local Jack the Lad returning in triumph.
On my second visit to the area I ventured into The Royal George and saw for myself. It was a gloomy establishment, pungent with an unpleasant but unidentifiable odour. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and chatter. At one end of the bar was the man himself, local celebrity, Darren Rhodes, a bulky individual with a beer gut straining at his black T-shirt. He was surrounded by a motley group, mainly men of a similar appearance with a few heavily made up women in possession of lurid peroxide hair, loud uncouth voices and smoke-aged faces. He was holding court and expounding on some subject or other which required him to use the words ‘fucking’ and ‘cunt’ at regular intervals.
The barman served me a half a bitter without a glance in my direction. His attention seemed to be fixed on his star punter. I took a seat opposite Rhodes and his fan club so that I could observe the man at close quarters. He was an ugly, unshaven fellow with two very small shifty eyes, receding black wiry hair which sprang from his large head in an unkempt fashion and was already turning grey at the temples. He had a large mouth with flabby lips which he moistened with his tongue constantly. Rhodes was recounting an anecdote from his prison days. It concerned some incident where he had got one o
ver on ‘the screws’. It was clear to me, but not to his enraptured audience, that it was a made up piece, a lie to make him look good, to make him look tough, to make him look sharp. He was not merely embellishing the truth, he was manufacturing it.
‘And then I held his head down the fucking toilet until he pissed himself,’ he announced with a rasping declaration, bringing the story to a close. There was general laughter and patting on the back.
The psychology of this reaction puzzled and fascinated me. It would seem the onlookers, damaged by poverty and a poor education, felt so alienated by society and authority figures that their main source of entertainment was to revel in stories of anarchy related by an unrepentant drug addict/murderer. As someone once said, ‘How different from the home life of our dear Queen.’
I became determined to damage this errant star, this jumped up piece of human garbage. With the help of Laurence and Alex we would delete his arrogant leer forever. As he began another tale of prison life, I drank up quickly and left. Now, I thought, was the time to take a closer look at Rhodes’ house. He would be rattling on with his concocted tales of self glory and basking in the sunshine of the mob’s approval for some time. Long enough for me to have a shufty at his gaff.
It was dusk when I walked up the garden path. Well, not so much a garden path as a short track through the long grass and rampant weeds leading to the front door. The curtains, as usual, were drawn across. I went around to the back. There was a yard here with the remnants of what had been an outside lavatory and a motorbike covered by a tarpaulin.
I pulled back the cover to reveal a shiny new mean machine. It was an impressive piece, purchased no doubt with part of his pools win. Unlike the house and the tiny garden it was obviously cared for with meticulous devotion. It gleamed and shimmered in the fading light. As I gazed at it, bells started ringing in my head.
I’ve never been attracted to motorbikes, they are too vulnerable on the road for my liking, but I had to admit that this piece of machinery looked very cool. I noted down the make and model which meant nothing to me – a Kawasaki 750 – a plan already forming in my mind.
Brothers in Blood Page 4
