You snake! You dog! You dirty snitch. My brother’s got 15 years in prison because of you
Do not call me Satan. I am a man with a simple desire, a passion if you will: to maintain and then better my own standard of living. I have certain vices, as does every other walking soul on this planet. I have a code of ethics that wouldn’t have been out of place at the first sitting of the Round Table. I am not a thug or a psychopath. Don’t listen to what the scumbags say. They’re just ignorant animals.
Jeeeeesus when gossip gets out of hand, eh? Mad times. Like this, for example.
So, I’m at the bar drinking rum and coke, whistling quietly, checking out the lovely boys and pretty girls having their joys.
So, some bloke walks up to me. Big bloke. Posh it turned out. Very posh. We nod at each, as you do, as is correct etiquette between two big, ugly lads.
So, instead of getting a beer and a seat, he puts his face to mine and screams, “You snake! You dog! You dirty snitch. My brother’s got 15 years in prison because of you.”
So, I shrugged. It was an open prison. It wasn’t as if the little twat was going to get shivved by Bubba. Far more likely that he’d meet old pals from school. He was an idiot, a useful one though. He wanted to rebel against his family, his clan, his good old family tree. It worked for me.
So, he hits me. Coked out his head. I’m sure it started as a punch. That must have been his intention. I’m sure that was his intention, but the punch sort of got half-arsed on its way over and became a weak slap.
So, I parried with my huge forearms. Then I hit him back. Full-on, heel of the hand under the nose.
So, he falls over. As you do when you know that there’s not going to be any follow-up to a matter, you relax. I don’t. I didn’t. Never under-estimate the powerful stupidity of an over-educated, upper-under-class middle child who wants to show his family exactly what is what, before he accepts his lordom or sirship or whatever these things are called.
So, he says while staunching the blood coming from his nose, “Just you wait. Just you fucking wait!” He tries to get up but his legs crumple beneath him. Ugly. He swings at me from his crumpled-up prone position.
So, I was going to kick him. Instead I decided to be a bit classier than that. I’m maturing, everyone says so.
So, I picked him up, wagged a finger at his broken nose in a hardman manner. I called the barstaff to clean him down and get him home. I headed off out and down the street.
Geezer should have really viewed this one experience through a survival lens, turning the experience into a learning event rather than a painful interlude in an otherwise gilded life.
The fact that he wouldn’t talk to me much more after this, until Christmas Eve at least (and this was two months away), meant that the loss was all his.
It’s a smashing street really where I live. It’s leafy, but it has an underpass beneath the motorway down to the river-front. Between these two points were two miles of shops and pubs all of which have residential flatlets above them. Lovely.
I ran a shop at the motorway end, or as the older inhabitants called it “the Meadow Lane End” – cute isn’t it? It’s not. It’s one of those names given to pits of debt by local authorities. Not a meadow in sight. Not even a tree.
My shop sells electronic equipment, secondhand records and computer games, televisions, you know the rigmarole. It’s dowdy, smelly and does not encourage browsing. I don’t encourage browsing, I don’t even encourage spending that much. However I do make my money from the shop. I pass people through it – the new gadgets. Everybody wants one sooner or later and for a variety of reasons.
I like to think of myself as an amoral kind of gent. Well suited to the modern age. Capable of coping with emotional and unemotional situations. Able to empathise, sympathise and distance. I don’t do drugs, I do drink a lot. I gave up smoking last year. I like to think of myself as literate. I do a lot of my own research into important matters. I pay tax. I am heterosexual.
My name is Wayne and I’m 29 years old. I am a depressive – bi-polar but I don’t take Prozac, Lithium or any of the others. I exercise and keep busy, when I get suicidal and steer clear of the drink and watch black and white movies – mostly “Bringing Up Baby” which bears no resemblance to my life or that of anybody I know. I like the way that Cary and Katherine really want to find reasons to avoid the obvious happiness that awaits them. I often cry for no reason. I am not a likeable fellow and have destroyed at least two dead cert relationships with malice a-during-thought.
Self-pity is huge with me. I seek out biographies of self-pitying folk. I avoid actual self-pitying people though. My self-pity is fuelled by mediocrity. I never wanted to be mediocre. It’s not my fault.
Anyway, back to Bryyyannn. He is one of the chaps who comes into my shop to try to sell me things. Brian has no chance whatsoever of anything. Brian will never even win the lottery. Brian is a deadman walking but no thoughts of suicide ever mug him mid-beer. He’s too thick, he’s a moron with more yelping sprogs than braincells.
He’s a big lad with a t-shirt, a Ford Escort, a CD-player and a colour television. He depresses me more than any of my own internal, bad chemistry ever could. Because Brian just keeps on surviving and I have no idea how. All that’s reasonable, holy and rational dictates that the 16-stone, wannabe American, shit-shoveling, shit-eating, shit-looking, shithead should have turned up his toes years ago.
But then again, I have trouble working out how he learnt to drive let alone how he makes it through a month without starving to death, walking into a glass door or simply exploding with the inward pressure of so much thick-as-shittery.
Now, it’s fairly apparent to me that the reason I don’t kill Brian is that I need someone worse than I am hanging around my life. Well, yes. But it also has a great deal to do with the fact that I’m a coward and I’d probably get it wrong. I fantasise about it though; machetes, machine guns, knives, poison, drowning, car accident, drug overdose. But I don’t do it. I give him work instead, and he lets me down. So I insult him in the pub, behind his back at all times.
Tonight though, I hit him and he tumbles. It doesn’t make me feel any better. There’s only one thing that ever makes me feel better, and that’s money.
I worry about money all the time. I never have money although I spend it. I scrounge with no compunction. It’s the only way.
Once, when I was younger, before the relationship problems, I asked the deity to let me have love not money. I was standing at a bus-stop opposite Bow Church in the City of London having just walked out of another interview for another job. I’d smiled and talked the talk and thought to myself that this was too much mammon for a young man and knew that I hadn’t got this job.
I tossed up my options and tried self-pity with God. This was during a period when I searching for my own soul. The speech was along the lines of: “I don’t want the money. I want love. I can live without money but not love”, kind of thing.
That prayer has always stuck with me because when I did get a soulmate, all we ever did was argue about money until the sense was screwed out of it all.
I was so young. Innocent. Dumb.
The deity obviously meant: “Look, you’re no good with relationships, go with the money”. I talk to God a great deal, without of course, having any belief in him.
I simply like to hedge my bets and he’s about the only one who is anywhere near me in terms of ability. You can’t second guess him. He’ll fuck you. Or if he doesn’t then fate will. And if that doesn’t get you, well Karma will, and if that’s not the case then pre-ordination will. Or there’s the class-system. There’s always a reason and there’s always something to go wrong.
I’m concerned at this time with making a lot of money. I mean £100,000 or more if the thing plays out as well as the planner thinks it should. Then I can get some good therapy that will enable me to spend some time talking about this condition to someone else. That will then enable me to make some more money until eventually I will be able to kill the condition and get on with having a relationship, travelling the world and killing Brian.
The planner is a Mr Hughes who does come from Wales, from Swansea I think. He’s like the rest of us but with more front and a 15-year old Jaguar just like you’d expect. His quirk is magic. Mr Hughes believes in the power of timeless and eternal external forces. Go figure. Mr Hughes wears a green suit with brown brogues and never carries jewellery. That surprised me because he just looks like the kind of 50-year old who loves baubles. But Mr Hughes’ Jaguar is under-stated. He sees himself as a planner, and planners never are more concerned with the life of the mind than the trappings that come with a successful plan.
I’ve worked with Mr Hughes before on a small con in Winchester. What a cutie of a county town that one is. We put up in one of the outlying villages, a small hotel on the riverbank, quiet and alive with the local pool competitions, barmaid chats and under-18s on the run from sobriety.
The con was a simple one that revolved around charitable contributions to an overseas fund for poor children. I was the aid worker who’d seen it all in Senegal or Cambudidiliia or wherever. I’d come to Mr Hughe’s attention via a mutual friend called Paul Gorse who smoked too much hashish and saw the delivery of beans on toast as some sort of sacred event. Lovely bloke. Such a shame what happened to him.
Mr Hughes is a tall, tall man and skinny. This means that he’s always cold and forever shivering. It also doesn’t help that he’s smooth skinned like a down-hill bike racer or a girl. He’s got olivey skin with a brown birthmark or mole on his left cheek. He likes to plan cons and he likes to watch them happen.
He also likes to take heroin. He tried to get me to have a bash when we moved to our second job – he claimed that it would lead to a greater mutual understanding and also provide me with much needed motivation to make the cash that we both loved. I thought he was trying to fuck me and then control the supply. I told him. He cried. We moved on.
The Winchester con involved shagging a liberal but cash-wealthy company out of cash that they would have thrown away on charity anyway. Simple con; all you need is a video, Mr Hughes’ London contacts for a decent piece of letterhead, some suitably heart-rending letters, and the right time. Mr Hughes knows this kind of thing. He’s aware of the moment.
