Police officers looked on from the safety of their vans, uninterested in spoiling the bikers’ fun. Beat coppers were conspicuous by their absence, preferring to police the town centre’s shoppers instead.
“All right, darling,” an overweight biker in filthy jeans and a black leather jacket covered in patches said to Mandy when she crossed his path. “You want to sit on my cock?”
Trog tensed up and let go of Mandy’s hand, readying himself for a fight. Mandy grabbed his hand and pulled him away across the road. “No thanks,” she said over her shoulder with a wry smile.
The other bikers jeered at her and made obscene gestures with their beer bottles. “Fuck you later then,” one of them called out. “And that pet midget of yours too, of course.”
This generated a good deal of laughter from the bikers, and a low murmur of agreement. “Too fucking right,” one of them agreed.
“Fucking yeti bastards,” Trog growled under his breath.
“Fuck ’em,” Mandy said. She clenched Trog’s hand tighter so he couldn’t break away and steam into them.
Another group of bikers were sitting on benches outside a pub. Their parked bikes took up most of the pavement area in front of the pub, forcing pedestrians to veer into the road to pass them. More and more bikers were arriving all the time, a steady stream of small convoys of motorcycles circling around the roundabout and riding down onto the main seafront road.
“This doesn’t look good,” Trog said. “You think they’re here because of yesterday?”
Mandy shook her head. “I doubt it, they would’ve done something by now if they were. It’s probably just a coincidence.”
“I hope you’re right, there’s some right fucking bruisers among them.”
Trog and Mandy headed into the town centre, away from where the motorcycles were congregating, and found a chip shop sandwiched between an amusement arcade and a large gift shop. Inside were three skinheads sitting at a solitary table picking over the remains of their meal. Trog told them about the bikers, but they didn’t seem interested. He bought fish and chips for him and Mandy, and they took them across the road to a small public garden with park benches. They sat near another group of skinheads sitting on one of the benches, and between mouthfuls of food Trog repeated his tale about the bikers on the sea front.
A long procession of motorcycles rode past. Their loud engines drowned out Trog’s words, and he had to repeat himself after the noise had died down. “They’re all down by the beach, fucking hundreds of the cunts.”
“Yeah, so?” a skinhead girl piped up. She flicked a cigarette end into a nearby flowerbed.
“Didn’t you hear what happened yesterday? A bunch of yetis got twatted, they might be here for revenge.”
The girl shrugged. “Nothing to do with us. Anyway there’s coppers everywhere today for some reason. I can’t see anything happening, the police wouldn’t let it. Just stay away from them if you’re worried.”
Trog raised his eyes and shook his head.
Mandy threw a chip at a seagull perched on a wall surrounding one of the flowerbeds. The seagull squawked at her and scooped the chip up in its beak, then swallowed it down in one gulp. The seagull squawked again and padded closer. Mandy smiled and threw it another chip. Soon the air was thick with hovering seagulls, all demanding to be fed. One came so close she could have reached out and hand-fed it. But then another motorcycle roared past and the seagulls all scattered away in fright.
After they finished eating, Mandy scattered their leftover chips on the ground for the seagulls and tossed the screwed up papers in a nearby bin. Trog licked the roof of his mouth, savouring the thick coating of lard that had congealed there. He stretched his arm around Mandy’s shoulder and pulled her close. Her lips were smeared in grease and had a vinegar tang to them that he relished.
After a few minutes, Mandy pulled away and stood up. “Come on,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “The festival will be starting again soon.”
Trog sighed and turned to the group of skinheads on the next bench. “Are you lot coming?”
The girl shrugged and flicked her head back to clear a long purple fringe away from her eyes. A skinhead to the right of her glanced at his watch and shook his head.
“Nah, no point. They always put the crappy bands on first, the best ones won’t be on until tonight.”
“Fair enough,” Trog said. He stood up and stretched out his braces. “See you then.”
10
Trog and Mandy joined a large crowd that had gathered outside the Winter Gardens, and waited with them for the doors to open. Mandy leaned against the wall and scraped the toe of one boot idly through a small pile of sand that had blown in from the beach. Trog stared across the road at three bored-looking police officers glaring back with their arms folded, and spat in contempt. They didn’t look so threatening now they didn’t have the strength of numbers and dogs to back them up. He wondered if one of them might be that dirty bastard from the previous day who had felt Mandy up, but they were too far away to check their numbers and they all looked the same to Trog in their stupid piggy helmets.
Trog heard a low rumble in the distance, the harsh tones of a motorcycle engine being revved. It was soon joined by the splutter of more bikes being kick-started, forming a continuous, cacophonous wall of sound. Trog stepped into the road and glanced in the direction the noise was coming from. Near the pier, dozens of motorcycles filled the road, three or four abreast, reaching back as far as Trog could see. Their riders were just sitting there revving their engines, as if waiting for some signal.
“What is it?” Mandy asked. She stepped into the road and cupped her hand over her eyes to see for herself.
The roar of the engines was joined by a loud blaring of horns that increased in intensity as more and more joined in. Then the motorcycles rolled forward as one.
“This doesn’t look fucking good,” Trog said. He pulled Mandy back into the crowd.
Skinheads around them surged into the road to see what the commotion was about for themselves. Trog used the opportunity to inch him and Mandy toward the Winter Gardens doorway. He rapped his knuckles on the glass door to get the attention of one of the three bouncers inside. The bouncer shook his head, then pointed at his wristwatch and held up five fingers. Trog slapped the window with the palm of his hand in frustration. He needed to get Mandy off the street, right now. In another five minutes it might be too late.
The roar of the bikes’ engines, and the blaring of their horns, became more and more deafening the closer they got. The police glanced nervously at each other and stepped back away from the roadside as the motorcycles approached.
The first wave of bikes roared past inches away from the crowd of skinheads, who had to jump back onto the pavement to avoid being run down by them. Some of the motorcycles had pillion passengers, and Trog watched as they thundered past and came to a halt further down the road. They dismounted their bikes, leaving them parked haphazardly across the entire width of the road, and stood by them. Trog looked in the opposite direction and saw they had done the same thing there too, effectively blocking off both sides of the road leading to the Winter Gardens.
The skinheads looked at each other in silence. Everyone knew what was coming and psyched themselves up for battle. Some of the younger ones edged away toward the entrance door, hoping to escape into the venue before it was too late. But the bouncers must have seen what was happening outside, and were pulling down the metal shutters. The police were on their radios, frantically calling for assistance. The bikers standing either side of the Winter Gardens waited in silence.
After a minute of this, one of the bikers straddled his bike and kick-started it. Another biker climbed on the back, pulling something from inside his leather jacket that glistened in the sunlight.
A horn blared again, three short bursts in rapid succession, and the motorcycle pulled away from the others. As it approached, Trog’s eyes widened when he saw the pillion rid
er swinging a thick chain with a heavy duty padlock on the end.
Trog pulled Mandy back against the wall, sheltering her with his body as the biker flicked the chain out into the crowd by the roadside. Trog twisted his head just in time to see the padlock smash into a skinhead’s jaw with a crack loud enough to be heard over the deafening sound of the motorcycle’s engine. Broken teeth flew from the youth’s mouth as he fell to his knees, screaming. Everyone around him scattered in panic, desperate not to suffer the same fate as the chain slashed through them once more.
An overweight skinhead in his early twenties directly in the motorcycle’s path ducked low and shouted a warning to those around him. The chain whistled over his head into a young girl standing nearby. The chain coiled around her neck and pulled her off her feet. She stumbled toward the motorcycle. The bike hit her side on and she was sent spinning in the opposite direction, back into the crowd. She collided with other skinheads and knocked them off their feet like dominos before she went down herself.
A roar came from the bikers on either side of the Winter Gardens and they rushed into battle wielding chains and spanners. The skinheads ran to meet them, shouting abuse.
Trog looked at Mandy, unsure what to do. Every instinct told him to fight, to get in there and stick the boot into as many of the hairy bastards as he could before they overwhelmed him by sheer weight of numbers. But at the same time he felt an overwhelming desire to protect Mandy. He knew she could handle herself, but there was no telling what might happen to her if he left her unguarded. He glanced across the road at the police, who were just standing there nervously watching the battle. No help from that quarter, not that Trog had really been expecting any.
Mandy lurched toward the road, seemingly eager to join the fray when the two groups clashed in a flurry of fists and boots, chains and spanners. Trog grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
“Don’t go out there,” he said. “We need to protect the little kids.”
Mandy struggled in his grip for a few seconds. She stared into his eyes, her own eyes blazing in anger, her fists clenched. Trog shook his head slowly and repeated his statement about needing to protect the children. Mandy frowned, then nodded and returned to the Winter Gardens entrance. Trog stood before them all while he watched the battle unfold around him.
A lucky boot to a biker’s groin from a heavily built skinhead had the older man bent double, grasping his bollocks in gloved hands. Three skinheads were on him immediately, and pulled him to the ground by the long hair hanging out of the back of his helmet. One skinhead wrestled with the helmet, triying to pull it off so he could do the man’s face some damage, while the others kicked out at his prone body. The helmet was fastened tight, and even when he put his feet on the biker’s shoulders to get better leverage to tug harder, it refused to come off. Giving up on that idea he ripped the visor from the front of the helmet and used its hard plastic edge to slash down at the biker’s face. The biker screamed, his hands shooting up to protect his face. The skinhead slashed down on the back of his hands instead.
A girl bent down to help a fallen skinhead back to his feet. A chain-wielding biker grinned wildly out of an open-face helmet decorated with a spray-painted swastika and slashed out at her back. She screamed and fell to the ground.
A few of the bikers returned to their motorcycles and kick-started them. They rode into the battle like jousters on horseback, swinging chains in their left hands. A skinhead, his face covered in blood, ran headlong into the side of one of the motorcycles as it passed him by and pushed out at its startled rider with both hands. The bike careened wildly off course into another motorcyclist riding close beside it. Both bikes went down as their handlebars clashed and their riders lost control. A pillion rider on one of the bikes was thrown clear, and rolled to one side as the bikes continued their journey in a shower of sparks. The riders themselves weren’t so lucky, and went down with their bikes. The rough tarmac made short work of their worn denim jeans, ripping skin from their arms and legs like a grindstone.
Trog heard police sirens in the distance, and for the first time ever in his life he was glad to hear them. He knew they would all be arrested, and probably extremely brutally at that, but those hairy bastards weren’t taking any prisoners. They were out for blood. Bodies on both sides of the conflict littered the road. Some rolled around groaning, some sat nursing broken limbs. Others were out for the count, blood pooling around them.
When the police sirens drew closer, the bikers split and ran back to their motorcycles. A few surviving skinheads ran up side streets to get away. The riot vans approached from the pier side and screeched to a halt behind the parked motorcycles blocking off the road. Dozens of police jumped from the vans brandishing truncheons and lashed out at the bikers as they tried to make their getaway. The bikers fought back, swinging chains and spanners at them, and managed to bring a few officers down before they were overwhelmed.
Trog backed Mandy into a corner as the bikers ran past, shielding her from any possible attack. The youngsters huddled together close by, pressing themselves against the Winter Gardens door. Most of the bikers ran straight past without noticing them, desperate to get away before the police figured out they should have approached from both sides of the road instead of just one.
Two bikers stopped in their tracks and looked directly at Trog. “Well, look what we have here,” one of them said, grinning. “A bunch of fucking cowards.”
The other biker laughed and pulled out a knife with a vicious-looking serrated blade. He tossed it from hand to hand, like a stereotype hoodlum from a 1960s biker movie. Trog raised his fists, his eyes following the knife.
The first biker took off his helmet, revealing a long jagged scar down his cheek. He held the helmet in his hand by the strap and bared his teeth in a grimace.
“Look at you without a fucking scratch on you,” he said to Trog. “Too scared to fight, so you thought you’d hide out here with all the little babies?”
“Fuck off,” Trog growled.
The biker with the knife laughed. “You going to stand for that, Tom? Little fucking midget baby telling you to fuck off like that?”
Trog saw red. Head down, he charged at the biker with the knife. The biker’s eyes bugged in surprise. Trog barrelled into him and the biker went down heavily, his head snapping back on the pavement with a loud crack that would have split it open if it wasn’t for the open-face helmet he wore. Trog went for the knife hand, grabbing it by the wrist and twisting. The biker held onto the knife, refusing to let go. Trog knelt on the biker’s chest and pulled up the hand, then slammed it back down onto the pavement.
The biker twisted his body and Trog felt a sharp burning pain in his ear when a gloved fist struck him. His ears rang. Trog gripped both the biker’s wrists, put his full weight on them, and lifted his knees off the man’s chest. He shuffled his feet backwards and brought both knees crashing down on the biker’s stomach.
Winded, the biker’s fingers uncurled from the knife’s handle and Trog jerked the hand upwards away from it. It came away from the ground easily, instinct causing the man to want to clutch his stomach with both hands. Trog twisted the biker’s hand up into the man’s face. It struck him on the helmet’s peak, and the biker cried out in pain. Trog drove his fist into the biker’s nose and felt something crack within it. Blood spurted, coating his fists, but he didn’t stop punching until the man lay still.
Trog stood, panting, and kicked the unconscious biker in the bollocks by way of a farewell gesture, before turning his attention to the remaining biker. He had been expecting the other man to join in the fight at any minute and drag him off so the two bikers could both give him a kicking together. But when he turned, he realised why that hadn’t happened. Mandy straddled the biker, the man’s helmet in her hand. She lifted it over her head, then slammed it down into his face.
“Mandy, we need to get fucked off!” Trog yelled.
Mandy didn’t seem to hear him. The helmet crashed down once mor
e into the biker’s bloody face. The youngsters had all gone, no doubt having scarpered during the fight.
“Mandy!” Trog shouted. He stepped toward her and grabbed her wrist when the helmet swung up for another blow.
Mandy’s head swivelled toward him, a look of fury on her face. Her nose was bleeding, and a fresh wave of anger flowed through Trog. Mandy’s expression softened and she stood up and hugged Trog. The helmet dropped from her hand and bounced on the pavement by her feet.
“He hit me,” Mandy said with a sob. “The fucking cunt hit me!”
Trog held her tight. A solitary tear rolled down his cheek. Over his shoulder he could see the police had fought their way through the remaining bikers and were now spread out across the road, lashing out at both skinheads and bikers who lay injured in their path.
“Mandy, we really need to go right now,” he said.
Mandy pulled away and looked into Trog’s eyes. She smiled, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and nodded. Trog saw Mandy’s camera lying on the ground near the doorway and bent down to pick it up. He pushed it into his front pocket.
“Oi, you two,” a voice called out. “Stay there, you’re under arrest.”
Without bothering to look, Trog took Mandy by the hand and dragged her in the opposite direction, away from the police. They ran down the first side street they came to, and then another, and another, until they came to a residential area made up of dilapidated-looking terraced houses with an occasional arched passageway between them giving access to the rear of the properties.
Trog vaulted over a wall into the garden of one of the houses. Mandy followed him, out of breath, and climbed over gingerly. Trog held out his hand to help her jump down into the garden, then pulled her into the passageway.
Punk and Skinhead Novels Box Set Page 16
