What’s wrong with this novel that means it’s dead in its crib? Tenses are all over the place for a start. Tenses can get away with a lot, so you’ve got to keep an eye on them. I didn’t.
Too many characters are all vying for centrality. It’s lovely creating characters. Deploying them so they don’t all distract the reader is much, much harder.
Anyway, I hope you can extract some joy from the gangster who has a big problem. He’s a poet. He can’t help himself. And that’s just soft. Unmanly, a problem for him and the woman he loves. A problem for the town if Jim ever gets found out.
Jimmy Prudom married Jenny, née Rose, in July 1977. Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee was their final wedding day because the street party was all about them. They were a powerful partnership in a small seaside town on the south coast the England. The only people they really loved was each other.
Just two days before the wedding, 25 year old hardmand Jimmy had emerged from HM Prison Kingston after serving two years of a five year term for aggravated assault and a bit of the old breaking and entering. While he was banged up, Jenny had waited for him, keeping a weather eye on The Dojo Club. She handled matters in a way that surprised the hardmen and wannabe hardmen.
Dave – The Money – Bartlett was Best Man. Dave, an old mate from school, good with figures, and with a firm understanding of how to move cash about so that it blossomed and gave rich fruit, made a funny speech and ensured the venue got paid. The venue was, of course, the Dojo Club.
After the rest of the guests had gone home, merrily, Jimmy, Jenny and Dave Money sat at a small, heavy round table in the upstairs bar with a view out over the city, its lights popping off as the run rose wanly.
Jimmy, even with the soft dawn light on him, had an ugly character. He was ugly inside and out. He was a broken biscuit sucked clean of all sweetness. He was famous for what other people called bad, selfish, stupid decisions. He called them ‘necessary evils’.
What he had going for him was the fact that Jimmy was lucky. Really lucky. Jenny was a prime example of this fortuitousness. She was his soulmate in every way imaginable. She was mean in every way. Imaginably mean.
Everything about Jenny Prudom – from her dark, dyed red feather-cut down to her ability to remember every debt no matter how small – was down to her. No man interferes with Jenny. No woman would dare.
Jimmy and Jenny are filled and fuelled by begrudging the whole world, clever and stupid, pretty and talented, frozen and fiery, all ways and aspects, all people and animals; all of it, all of them.
This was how she was and there’s no changing her. She knows what she knows. Facts are inevitably facts and winners make facts. Jimmy loves this so much his heart broke, mended again in prison at the thought of her. He loves that Jenny has no subtly, that’s her charm. Like him she’s driven by what she knows and by a deep, dark, dreadful desire to hold on to it at all costs. Well, nearly all costs.
As a trio, Dave Money and the Prudoms are a good, working unit. Jimmy and Jenny plan and get their hands dirty when it suits. Dave Money expedites, sort the logistics, handles the money, handles the legals, keeps things quiet and reasonable. He’s a middle aged looking fella early. He’s always in a smart, cost-effective suit, with a shirt from a pack of three Double Two, and a tie from a collection of five. The suits are either pale blue or dark brown. The shirts are vertical stripes. The ties are diagonally striped. He doesn’t clean his shoes enough. No one really notices Dave Money.
The Prudoms had bought the Dojo Club about two years ago. It had been a martial arts gym until but they’d converted it. They brought in tables, a Teac sound system, and two bars, one up for the young dancers and speed freaks and one down for the elderly, sedentary ale and spirit drinkers.
Among the youngsters and the wannabe youngsters (paunchy football thugs with families, and lots of time) who jigged about swilled in lager upstairs are the components of what the local press will eventually call “The Loose Lads Gang”. Many of this benighted lot already work for the Prudoms in capacities as diverse as carpark attendant, ice cream seller, deck chair hawker and bouncer but none of them have carried out the single act that will name them yet.
Jenny squeezes Jimmy’s hand as a love gesture but also a prompt.
“Dave, we’re set here mate. It’s good what we’ve got and we need to make sure that we hang onto it, we’ve got to make sure there are no cracks in us. We’re all together now and that’s how it needs to stay. But we have to look down the line and see where we all stand in five years’ time,” Jenny sips her brandy, the gangster drink.
“I love you like my brother, mate. So does Jen,” Jenny nods and takes a draw on her cigarette.
“Like brothers,” this speech has had a lot of preparation, thinks Dave Money. There’s been thinking behind this. Usually this means that Jimmy was approaching a roundabout approach to the kind of enforcement threat that he thinks was appropriate to a hardman who owns a club, an icecream van, a chippie and a garage. Jimmy has been thinking.
This, in actual fact, means that Jenny and Jimmy have been groping their way towards a plan of some sort, and this means that they desperately need verbal applause, or more likely fanatical acquiescence.
“Dave, I’m thinking of a deal, a hotel deal, a Promenade deal, something to build us up, maybe another bar, and we need you onboard going forwards.”
“Onboard” thought Dave Money. “Where the fuck do they come up with that sort of bollocks?” He listens on.
“Are you with me, Dave? Are you with us?”
Dave Money nods using the right angle, the right velocity and the right grunt to show he’s properly intimidated by the veiled threat, that he knows his place but that he loves Jimmy like a brother too.
“Fantastic mate. I’m with you all the way.” Dave toasts to the idea. All glasses are chinked, all smiles are drawn over teeth, the dawn breaks weakly in cloud and drizzle. Wails from the outgoing passenger ferry horn wash into the room over the sounds of Status Quo and the glass washer.
Dave leans back in his chair and sucks on the remains of this cigar, and despite employing all the right moves, he remains nervous about what all this was leading up to. Jimmy seems to be looking past the immediate present. He appears to be trying to plan ahead.
Ever since school Jimmy had tried to be a planner as well as a violent bastard. Dave Money thought, well hoped, that Jimmy had the capacity for more than just reaching out with his fists or the other equipment of brutality that came into reach: chair legs, molten aluminium, scissors, once or twice a spiked running shoe.
Dave Money was aware that Jimmy had also captained the football team to victories over some pretty tough opposition and he’d done so with an elegance forced into being by his undeniably intense and out of control charisma. Other lads admired, respected, in some cases even adored, Jimmy Purdom not for what he’d achieved but by what they felt he obviously would achieve in some not too far distant future. This meant that Jimmy was largely unfettered in his admiration for himself. This fed his confidence, which in turn nourished his charisma in a pointless, empty, inevitably savage cycle.
Confidence was a silly, shakeable thing in men like Jimmy Purdom who have nothing to base it on other than the eyes of less confident and easily intimidated men plus his own questionable brain chemistry. Jimmy’s tumbledown mental palace of self, with its tiny library of useful knowledge based for most part on SAS Training Fiction and truisms about getting the first punch in when street fighting, also served up eternal, holy writ: loyalty was proof in itself of group membership, and group membership was proof in itself of grace in the eyes of the adult god overlooking all things at all times. Loyalty to this god obviously proves that, no matter the tribulations of the law or clever bastards or of passing social fashions for weakness and weakening behaviour, you are a member set for final and permanent righteousness. Loyalty was all and everything and always had been.
And like other facts, this fact was rooted firmly in a chain of command and could be subject to review down that chain at any time and for any reason.
Jenny stands up, stretches into the air, yawns and looks down at Dave Money. She smiles and grabs his huge, balding head in both hands, kissing his crown with a smack of, it turns out, authority rather than affection.
“Dave, babes, you’re clever. You’re good with the details. I’ve been reading about that. Do not ever get the idea that because you can make five from two and two but only let onto four, that we won’t find out. I fucking hated my fucking brother, love. Just you remember that.”
Dave Money smiles and nods again. This pair were dangerous in all the right places. They were also friends, which was a good start. But what they never seemed to be able to understand, probably down to their constant drenching in movies and TV and New English Library novels, was that he lacked much ambition.
He’d like his own place in the town, which was where he was born, went to school and intended to die surrounded by people he’d known all his life, maybe even a wife, maybe but that wasn’t so much of a bother. He didn’t fancy an empire of concerns no matter how small and mean. It wasn’t his fault that he’d been born with a talent for accounting and not much of a moral compass. Sometimes he wished he did have more ambition or less ability with numbers and organisation.
People liked Dave Money, but he realised that this affection was more in the line of the way people liked other people’s pets or kids. Once taken out of their ownership context, to be fair, who could tell one pup from another or the next baby from the first; but they were all likeable or at least not dislikeable, and that was Dave – the Money – Bartlett. Any power he had, any fear or respect invested in him by the others was entirely due to the Prudoms and their ambitions and propensity for savagery.
Dave already owned what he reckoned would see him through. He owned a bright but dodgy little off licence called Five Star Wines on Caversham Place just off the Prom. He’d installed an Asian bloke, over from Uganda and in need of a job, and his brother to do the day-to-day stuff. What with the fags, the booze, the snacks, the papers and some bits and bobs that no one really needed to bother with the details of, Five Star Wines was a going concern. The Prudoms knew about it and were happy enough, it was another place to shuffle cash through if the need arose.
Everyone was happy. All pals together. The Queen was on her throne after 25 years of unhurried, regal upper middle-classness. Charles was lined up to follow. The politicians were doing what politicians did. A new motorway, the M5 down to God knows where, was showing the rest of the world what British engineering could do. Everyone was happy. 1977 in a seaside town where no one could afford to go on strike and, despite the damp weather, the summer was looking profitable given the general Jubilee jubilation.
The sun was well over the yardarm as Dave locked the bar shutters, turned off the light and the three of them walked downstairs to begin the day.
As they stepped out on the prom, with the breeze hitting them from a sallow sea, Jenny touched Dave Money’s shoulder and whispered:
“Remember, family doesn’t mean shit. You’re lumbered with family. All that matters was me and Jimmy. I’ve killed people who got too funny. Remember.” She kissed him on his balding head and ran-skipped after Jimmy who had quite deliberately walked on ahead.
Chapter 1 – The Happy Pea
At the Happy Pea restaurant, Les Atwater rattles some pans onto stainless steel Parry wall shelf and thinking about the season, the summer, the tourists, the breakfasts and the fucking fried eggs he decides it’s time for a smoke and goes outside.
He doesn’t go out onto the promenade, too many people to nod at, too much concrete when he wants fields and silence. He goes out to the back yard and lights up and draws in.
Les was what the kind of people who never go to places like the Happy Pea call a ‘chef patron’. Chef Les Atwater. He thinks of himself, even after 28 years in the business of food preparation and service, as a cook. A potato peeler and an egg fryer. Les got his training with the army during national service. Forced into the kitchen by King and Country was Private Atwater.
He’d learned a lot in the Army kitchens of his late teens and early twenties. He’d learnt knife skills and how to avoid feeling much pain in his hands before the nerve endings were finally burned and froze and boiled out of any ability to report back to his rapidly cooling brain.
Having been a poor (awful) student during his school days and his short time down a mine before the government called him up and made him choose between drowning in the navy or cooking in the army, the only skills Les ever learned were in those khaki kitchens. So, when he left the service – and having no desire to go back down the pit or even to return home – he had continued to cook for a living, slowly rising through the trade to the point where he could give shit to younger men.
Les didn’t hate food or cooking, he simply didn’t care about either. He’d tried once. Briefly, enthused and enraptured by a younger, studious, talented cook who worked alongside him in a reasonable place in west London in the 1960s, he’d travelled to Paris.
Unlike his companion who immersed himself in the place, Les lasted a painful, humiliating month in a kitchen on the Rue Malar just off the Rue de l’Université. Spitting distance from the Seine. It took him that long to realise that he hated the French, the Algerians, the Dahomians, the Irish and the fucking Yanks.
He hated the food, all cream and fiddling about with garnishes. He hated the wine, the lager beer and the awful, shitty music. He hated his slowness and his inability to understand even the most basic of commands because the language made no sense at all. His pal snapped onto it tout de bloody sweet.
In the meantime Les realised that he was the most stupid man in Paris, in France, in Europe. Hardworking, he never missed a shift, but thick as a pile of logs. He got into fights about nothing. He couldn’t even fall in love like all the rest of the staff, from dish pig to maître de, all seemed to be able to do it at the drop of a knife.
What finally did it for him, what decided him to return to England, was watching some African looking blokes being chucked off the Pont Saint-Michel to thrash around in the Seine by the army or police, he couldn’t really tell, one night on his way home from work.
He’d kept on walking because there was nothing else to do. Inside him, for a small second, a tinge of conscience and concern coloured up before subsiding into the grey realisation that Paris and therefore France were packed with African looking blokes, equally savage policemen, arrogant, screaming chefs, and fellow cooks who’d sabotage you at the break of dawn until the last floor tile was deck scrubbed and the lights turned off.
The next day he’d picked up his pay, said goodbye to his fellow Englishman, and made his way to the garde de norde, then Calais, then Dover, then to a breakfast job in west London that started at 6am until ten then returning a 5pm for evening service. Good, solid work. Les had kept his head down, his knives sharp, his attitude comradely.
After a few years he’d made it up the very greasy poll to second in command in a kitchen of eight staff. After a few years more he’d been offered a job at the Happy Pea restaurant on the coast. Regular customers, good tourist trade in the season. No service later 10pm clean-down. No dish more complicated than the clientele called for. He’d jumped at it. A few years later the guy who owned and ran the place decided to move to Spain and sold up to Les. That was seven years ago.
Owner, manager, head cook Les Atwater hadn’t changed much about the place or the menu. Why bother? He thought. Everything worked. Everything ticked over. The place made money, enough money to keep Les in a decent enough flat with a few bob for drinks and horses. His suppliers knew him and didn’t dislike him, they knew what he liked and what he didn’t like, they almost ran themselves with one or two bollockings every year.
Once he’d settled on three of them: one for meat, one for veg and sundries, and one for kit and cleaning, Les had never felt the need to change. His staff came and went like the waves on the unforgiving pebbled beach outside his back door. Young ones were best, it took less time to shave off the bad habits; it took fewer loud, fast, verbal crucifixions. His rules were simple and easy to understand, for example: front of house are always female; kitchen was always male. N’er the twain shall meet. That just caused problems.
Les ran his place as the army had taught him and nothing since had dissuaded him from those lessons. Everything had to be clean, in order, predictable, easy to understand and difficult to fuck up. The menu was long even if the actual choice of dishes was not. It contained variations on the same ingredients with the very occasional special added if the supplier had some good, cheap product to move. The menu represented value for money and reliability. People came back day after day, month after month and year after year because the place was clean, the sea was near, the food was quick, and menu looked big but was easy to read (and wipe clean) and the staff knew what they were doing and that anything more than smiling and nodding and presenting the bill was uncalled for and quite intrusive.
Everything about Happy Pea worked well, and Les was bored. His hobby, kite building and flying, tugged at him more and more often and with greater strength and more definite direction these days.
One of the young waitresses pushes her head around the door and stares into the yard, “Boss, the new plates are here,” she smiles.
Les looks at her to make sure she’s properly dressed. He tries to remember her name. He nods and stubs his cigarette out in the shallow, yellow metal ashtray. Because he’s been thinking about kites and smoking, he decides to be kind. “Tell him I’m on my way, tell him I won’t be long”, he says, getting up from the oil drum he’s been sitting on and shrugging off thoughts of an afternoon vicariously airborne on the shingle.
She’s called Emma, he just about remembers employing her because it happened last season. She returned in May, ready and eager to get going and earn a quid or two. Emma was one of the good ones, she was minimal management material because she just gets on with it, never chats back or questions anything about anything.
She’s attractive in a normal way: slim waisted, medium breasted, a dark black ponytail (not too long, never untidy nor beatnik) and not so much height to herself that some of the diners might feel talked down to.
Her eyes are brown, her complexion dusky in a good way, like Sophia Loren. Her lips are like Miss Loren’s as well. Her cheeks are half moons and her nose was like Montgomery Clift or maybe Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco, somewhere in that region anyway, Les wasn’t great with faces most of the time. Emma was a good worker.
Les goes back into The Happy Pea and goes through the boxes of new plates with Pete the delivery guy who shrugs as the broken or chipped ones are returned to him.
The restaurant was a squat, single-storey place built quickly out of cheap red bricks and decent if sandy coloured mortar. It can seat 50 people at 15 square tables – sometimes but very rarely it could pack 70 in.
Its front was mostly a thick glass window that gives the customers an opportunity to gaze out across the mostly grey, mostly flat, mostly calm sea. “On a good day you can’t see France”, was one of the only funnies Len makes when he rumbles out of the kitchen to shake hands and chat with a regular.
You can never see France from The Happy Pea. On good, bad or indifferent days you can see thousands of pebbles, maybe a ferry, the groyne to the right embedded in both beach and sea snaggled like a disgusting old giant’s bottom set. On the left, if you’re sitting on the far right of The Pea. A person could lean into the window so their cheeks were pressed up to it hard like a mother to the coffin of her child.
You could make out the pier with its silver spiked cupolas pointing into the seagull-sky. Then you could get back to drinking dark tea and eating your cottage pie or your acidic, salty chips and battered white fish.
Above the counter of The Pea – you can’t see it, it’s been boarded over then papered, then painted sky blue like the rest of the place – was a large hole and group of smaller ones all made by the same shotgun blast from years before, even before Les owned the place.
Sometime in the late 1940s two lads who had been demobbed from the army after fighting their way from D-Day to Paris came into the place with a view to robbing it. Their timing was appalling, so was their one and only weapon, an old double-barrelled shotgun stolen from a shed in a garden in another city.
Things went badly: one barrel load went into the neck, chest and stomach of the girl serving at the till, the other went into the ceiling as one of the lads tried to wrest the gun from the other screaming, swearing, sobbing and laughing former soldier boy. After two short, poorly attended trials with little defence to talk of, they were both locked up for life some months.
This hole was the history of The Happy Pea, all of its other years stretch out behind it with its events rolling and folding gently and repetitively into themselves. Despite surviving and remaining in the city and by the sea, the young girl at the till – she was 17 – was never the same again. Her face and neck were sludge, and even her parents and sister found being around her difficult to bear. She showed neither bravery and grace nor anxiety and tears. She dressed in black like a mourning Victorian bride, all lace and she covered her face. She was unable to talk but would occasionally create muttering, brown-grey noises that no one was sure were attempts to communicate or simply animalistic autonomic responses sent up from deep inside her. After a few years she left hospital and found a place to live quietly on her own.
Plates delivery complete, and only a few customers in place sleepily gawping at the sea and sipping strong tea, Les returns to the yard, and Emma makes her way to the kitchen with another full English breakfast order.
Quietly she speaks the order across the cramped space and hangs the ticket on the rail. Chris Bontrager was handling the pans and heat this morning. Emma fancies him, always has, since the moment she first saw him. He’s got a smile and a way about him that flies in the face of the rest of the morose atmosphere of The Pea. He’s her age or thereabouts, she doesn’t know for sure having never had the courage to get into a conversation deeper than, “Good morning, you ok? Yes, I’m fine thanks. No not much this weekend, some dancing. You?”
“Gotcha, sweetpea,” he yells back with a half-made American accent, as full of vim as ever. Chris enjoys the work, he understands it because it was easy to understand. He knows that in cooking there are beginnings, middles, ends, all of which have processes and methods and tools. This means you can either get it right or you can fuck it up. He’d learned from trial and error. He learned from Les that deviating from recipes (unless you absolutely had to because an ingredient was missing or time was short) was stupid because it was inefficient, and it usually ended up with a loss at the end of the day as the people who ate at The Happy Pea did not go in for surprises.
This was fine with Chris, most things were in fact. Life was good. He liked the work, he liked the pay, he didn’t even mind Les’s daily surliness and constant negativity. Old men did that, they were like that. He liked the days off and he liked Emma’s girlfriend who would turn up once or twice a week at the end of Em’s shift to take her away to somewhere or something exciting. She wore her hair short and her clothes always looked freshly made, not just laundered but as if they had been sewn that day. Sooner or later Chris was going to ask for her name.
Chapter 2
The last thing that anybody wanted at the Dojo Club was trouble. Trouble interfered with the darts and the drinking, and people got arrested. Getting arrested was something to do elsewhere, maybe at the football or in bodged-up burglary but not up the club.
Its ground floor entrance slits onto the street so that you have to look for it – or be tied into it – to notice it was there. To its left are the ironmongers, useful. To the right are the bookies, also useful. Across the road was the bloody massive Makins & Bean department store, which sold everything and over three floors each the size of two football pitches. If you stand outside Makins and look left, down at the end of the street was the sea. You can smell it on a summer day or when the wind was blowing off it in the afternoons in the winter. Then you can hear the gulls and the ferry horns.
Then you make your decision: into Makins for a nice cup of tea, maybe some tiffin or teacake at the posh cafe upstairs, maybe buy a bra or a smart dress shirt with ruffles, or you head into the Dojo Club for darkness, red sticky carpeted quiet, muffled darkness downstairs. Down there for a pint of bitter, and the newspapers and a smoke. All nicely nicely gentlemanly in a slightly down-at-heel way.
People, gents in grey or brown double-breasted suits, or slacks and sports shirts with waist length, Harrington-style jackets, tipped in and went back to the bookmakers never changing their expressions because the wins and the losses all balanced themselves out in the end. If you didn’t realise that, you shouldn’t be drinking downstairs at the Dojo because you were a boy, an amateur and your membership would be revoked or you’d never have got a seconder to begin with.
If you head upstairs in the Dojo, like youngsters Vince Bell and Matty Hobbs are, then you need a good reason otherwise you’re not going to make it past the bright, unassailable, yellow, iron reinforced door. The local police tried to break it down once, embarrassingly. After ten minutes of listening to the pounding and yelling, Jimmy opened the flap in the centre, winked, unlocked and in came the tumbling plod sniffing around like hunting beagles. Nothing was discovered, monies were paid, drinks were sunk and life went on as usual.
Vince and Matty are upstairs regulars, part of the Loose Lads. In their early twenties, in gainful employment for most of the year, they are basically boys in grown-up trousers and button-down shirts; marginal in every way except to the Prudoms, who often struggle to remember their names but are aware of boys’ utility. Marginal they may be – they are – but both Vince and Matty have ambitions. In their heads they are vibrant or hopeful and they are known in and out and about the city for their prowess at something or other, for their cars and boats and skills at fighting and breaking and entering and kissing and fucking and being good at being bad.
Matty’s current claims to fame are his arch, black eyebrows and medusan, sticky-out hair that his sister styles as snakes, spiky black dreadlocks, full of spray as he was full of drugs. Matty likes music not football, he spends time skimming pebbles, degrading the beach and looking out at the other countries abroad that he can’t see. If only he wasn’t scared of water. If only he wasn’t scared of a great many things and people, he would have left the city and moved to the countryside with his mum and little brother where he could have got a job at least during the summer picking fruit. He might even have gone to Spain with his mate Ian and their guitars, busking down to Barcelona and pretending to teach English to sweet looking Spanish girls. As it was, Matty was walking into the upstairs bar of the Dojo Club on Alma Road, across from the department store into a pint of bitter and a game of cards on a Tuesday morning with the drizzle glistening greasily on the window pain and in his unusual hair. And he’s feeling pretty special and full of the kind of local belonging that murders wandering longings deep inside its suffocating, dirty pillowy breasts.
Vince was pathetic. Vincent ‘Pyjama Boy’ Bell, almost impossible to describe without falling sleepwardly towards some form of pure beige-out, even looking at Vince makes some people wish for death. No, that’s going too far. Vince was one of those medium height, medium build hangers-on men – he’s 30 – who makes proper sycophants appear as highly-skilled achievers. Vince’s pale skin was bad like his voice. His dandruff was saggy like his eyes. Vince’s ambition was to be a racing driver, or a footballer or a round-the-world yachtsman or an astronaut or a heart surgeon or a test cricket player or a spy or a secret agent or a cowboy, and to all of these roles he bought turgid, rigid, conforming drabness even in his wildest dreams.
Vince got his nickname because he’s locked himself out of this dingy little flat on more than one occasion while trying to get one of his scabby cats back in for the night. While it’s obvious to everybody else in the small world that the Pyjama boy inhabits that the cats are taking the piss – they’re cats if they want to come in they’ll jump on his windowsill and tap and scream – Vince still worries. More realistically he believes that because he saved them from extinction at the hands of the local authorities or dogs or kids with fireworks and bricks or from their own bad decisions, the cats should bond with him and his weedy, reedy commands that rapidly descend into entreaties and then, inevitably to locked-out beseeching. The cats go about their business.
He loves to read cheap pornography, to collect knock-off martial arts weaponry and to practice Kung Fu. The shame here was that if only Vince had the slimmest insight into himself he would realise that he’s not just grid at martial arts, he’s actually very talented. He understands all the moves. He just doesn’t understand the ideas that underlie them. This makes him excessively useful to the Prudoms and this in turn makes him one of the Loose Lads.
Vince orders a pint of warmish, pallid bitter beer. Matty orders a vodka, ice. Vince’s order was honoured by Danny Fitch the barman, the hardman of the group. Matty was given a pint of warmish, pallid bitter beer.
“It’s half-past eleven in the morning, mate. Be serious”, says Fitch as he places the beers, in clean glasses, on beermats on the ultra-polished cherry wood bar top. He smiles at both of them and returns to making the glasses gleam and the optics shine. Fitch takes pride in his immediate surroundings wherever they happen to be. He was always immaculately turned out, all five feet six of him. He’s a very brutal man too as his face and arms, and his belly scars can swear. Like all the rest of the Loose Lads though, he’s small-time brutal. He’s hand-to-hand and box cutter Stanley knife to face or shins. He likes the sight of blood but he bloody hates cleaning up afterwards.
He went to sea when he was younger, all over the world he went – a fight and a girl in every port except his home port, there was never a girl there. The merchant navy man was Fitch, through and through. A galley slave who once saw an outbreak of food poisoning in the middle of the Pacific ocean due to poor hygiene. Men died. Men wished they had. It was a horrible few days that was Fitch’s one great life lesson. His only tattoo, aside from the one he never mentions, was a reminder of that event:
“Wash Up or Die!” it says, beneath an image of a weeping mermaid cradling a puking sailor in her arms.
“Wash Up or Die!” This was Fitch’s life lesson and he was happy with that. Make a mess for sure, spatter some blood and guts in your path but do it with a clean knife for fuck’s sake and make sure the work surface was sanitised after the event.
Elvis “Suspicious Mind” was playing and the lads settle down to drinking, cleaning and playing cribbage for buttons. The sun was pissing what passes for light this July through the single window that was embedded in the back wall opposite the hard, yellow door. Fitch holds a wine glass that no one ever uses up to that light – he has to lean into it at the far right of the bar. He frowns and picks up a cleaner cloth and starts on it again.
Elvis was replaced by Elvis, and “Mystery Train” does its best to add some warmth and charisma to the room. The telephone rings. As usual Fitch lets it ring a few times before picking up and saying, “Upstairs at the Dojo, how can I help?”
He grunts a few times, looks annoyed and tells the phone, “Look Charlie, you do not need to call ahead every fucking time, mate. Craig downstairs will alert me to your presence, the top door will be unlocked, your drink and packet of fags will be ready as usual. I know you want to be sure, Charlie but it’s getting tired, mate.”
Charlie Drumm was on his way, the rat of a man. He’ll be done up in a polo-neck shirt, a plaid jacket, dark woollen trousers, white socks and penny loafers. He’ll have his wispy dark, dyed hair pulled over his small, balding head and he’ll be smoking a roll-up. Charlie makes his money from knowing things and either telling those things to people or having other people pay him to forget that information, or more probably to save it for a more opportune moment. He gets his information in a variety of ways that all boil down to one thing: Charlie has zero charisma. No one was really aware that he’s in the room, let alone sniffing over their shoulder. He’s like human white noise, he’s like odourless smoke, poison gas, but he’s there or thereabouts.
He’s a betting man, he bets on anything that can be bet on but he never wins big because he never bets big enough. He stores his money away like his father did, but unlike Dad, what isn’t under the bed or in a box under the floor in a shed on the allotment flows down his throat. Boy can Charlie drink. He drinks with no joy in life, no songs, no hugs, no kisses or stories emerge after the booze hits. The more he drinks, the more he fades into unbeing. It’s as if Charlie Drumm drank to be forgotten.
And all of a sudden Charlie was sitting at the card players’ table with a bottle of pale ale and a small Haig whisky listening to the boys who are concentrating on totting the points up.
Elvis was replaced by Roy Orbison who was crying. Crying. Crying. Midday comes slowly around the horizon with milky cloud cover and still the drizzle continues with grease it’s picked up from the boats that leave and return all day, all day. You can’t hear this rain. It lacks romance. It was simply here and all over everything. Falling, drifting, falling, drifting, falling weak and capable of drenching all things. It hasn’t changed frequency since it began at dawn. It muffles everything in its grasp in a way that snow doesn’t. Snow silences can introduce drama into your world: good drama, play drama, bad drama, freezing death drama. Despite its nature as cold and white and crystalline, snow can make you search for contentment in warmth, you can shake snow off as you come into a bar or a friend’s house. This drizzle can never be shaken off, it was sour and sticky, it was thin despite its deep, deep, soaking reach. It doesn’t wash things away or even cover them over; blood, fingerprints, and tears mix with it and its oiliness layering up like Damascus steel, before bonding with the streets and the people.
It’s Tuesday and no mistake.
Chapter 3
The Loose Lads are up to celebrate Jimmy and Jenny’s fourth anniversary, the Linen anniversary, shroud material, down at The Happy Pea on the prom. The summer has been a dowdy one with July wet but not as wet as June, the wettest for more than a century. This had kept the punters away from the coast, they’d been flying off on package holidays to Spain and Greece, getting pissed up and still yearning for the sort of food they could have scoffed at The Happy Pea. Cod and chips and steak and chips and pie and chips and skate and chips and plaice and chips and nice calm curry and a stew with mash and ice cream and steak and kidney pud with suet and lovely.
Jimmy and Jenny also want to discuss some new thinking with the rest of the mob. Jenny has noted the fungal growth of heroin addicts on the benches and pebbles of the beach. She knows that her boys are not selling the stuff, they stick with cheap yellow sulphate and maybe a bit of weed. They have a regular customer base because there are students and bikers, there are also two working theatres with working theatre people. Trade ticks over, with the local Coppery happy enough to take a Drink and concentrate on bigger players. Jenny has convinced Jim that the best way to make the most of this emerging market was to tax the dealers. This will raise cash and enable them to move away from the pebbled beach, the pebble-dashed houses, the godforsaken Guild Hall and the shitty, shitty, shitty pub and club and the idiot Loose Lads. Jenny has plans.
“There’s no reason they need to be the opposition, love.” Jenny cooed at her Jimmy as he lay in a tepid bath, drinking a Bells whisky, smoking a slim panetella cigar, a cooling hand flannel over his eyes, one of which was blackened from a fracas earlier in the week.
Chapter 4
Jimmy Prudom was a solid man made of fat and muscle hanging off his long lost skeleton. All in a solid mass – a fatberg of a man. And he was a tall man: six feet and five inches in his socks – two metres in France. His skin looked like an iron polluted river delta viewed from space. Despite this, he was fit and healthy and ready for a fight.
It was his reputation that kept him floating on top like soap scum on bath water after soaking for far too long.
Jenny enforces the myth of fit and healthy Jim. She broadcasts it with hisses and up-in-your-face whispering campaigns. It’s all becoming just a bit wearing.
She’s long given up on trying to make him take care of himself. He thinks that’s showing weakness at his age. He thinks that’s displaying fear of death and, worse, decrepitude will topple him. He’s seen blokes beaten, stabbed, shot. He’s seen men derided publicly for a sniff of that bad weakling stink. Jenny’s had a battering ram of a husband.
“Whoever they are, they’re the opposition, Jen,” he says from beneath his steaming flannel. “You’re overthinking this whole thing, love. If they’re worth dealing with, as soon as we turn over their first boy they should come after us then we can talk. Jen, you know the drill.” He’s being threatening as he says this, flexing his thigh muscles – the last really visible muscles on his rapidly ballooning body.
Jenny sits up on her toilet seat throne and stretches her arms in the air, leaving them up there – a weight lifter holding up the weight of her lover’s lack of ambition. She sighs, puts her arms down and her hands back in her lap. She’s drawing very close to having had enough of his physical threat. She shifts her weight and coos something insubstantial at him. It’s something he can understand and feel comforted but not strengthened by. Something about him being right and his dad or mum being proud and we’ll all show the bastards. Some bollocks bullshit like that. It disappears quickly into the steam.
Her time giving him strength was coming to a close. She sort of understands this even if the actual idea refuses to fully form in her head and thus will not make its way to her heart nor her heart of hearts, that secret place that once sat in a clearing in the light. But when all’s said and done – which it was – Jenny Prudom was now head over heart for Jimmy, which was a shame but these things happen. She knows the drill, love.
As far as Jenny can see, Jimmy was entirely unaware of his own changed circumstances. He goes on like a fat drunk machine as far as she can see.
He drinks and drugs and dresses in the hardman style of years ago when he’d look up to the brutal dockers and the market sneaks and council estate razor lads and bootboys, the club druggists, the bad musicians, the bikers, the posh gunman, the skin heads at the football with the brass necks and knuckles, to his piss-little family, to the gypsy fighters, the suedehead Nazis.
To the returned service men with the skitters who did speed all day and all night and would knife you for a wrap or tell you their life story for a pint all because you were the only one who would listen since they got back from Derry or Belfast or wherever they had been in their head, soul, body and heart.
Jim’s all leather jacket and shiny slip-ons, little button-down collars and the occasional pork pie hat these days. He squeezes himself in and sweats. Jimmy wears jeans or something smart and he’s a sentimental sort. He longs for things that he’s been told were all around once upon a time. And he loves Ska music as much as he loves any music. And he loves football.
Only he doesn’t. In his heart, in his emphatic heart, he loves reading books about lost islands, dragons, fantastic adventures. Jim writes poems, and has done ever since he was a small boy. He hates the football because it makes no sense whatsoever to him even though he understands its language, syntax, grammar and he understands what others see. He can’t see it.
Make a thing that dies then watch it die
Make a love that leaves you can’t believe it leaves
But it does.
No matter how hard you want
It splits you grieve you still believe it leaves
He’d shown a mate from school some of his poems once. Didn’t get laughed at or mocked. His mate, John Farmer-Pearce, liked to criticize it but only from a sense of the meaning. He’d shown John another poem later in the year after his first visit to a youth club to look at the big lads snogging the girls.
Back to the Dancehall where real life is
Flares go up.
Boots come down.
Tongues go on and on and on and on.
And smoke gets in your eyes outside.
All the smells are baked in by the time you leave
And the smoke gets in your eyes outside.
All the girls are wonderful.
The tongues go on and on.
John Farmer-Pearce left the school and moved to the north, to the Lakes later that year when they were 14 years old. John Farmer-Pearce had a double-barrelled name, which was a unique quality at their school. He wasn’t posh though and before he left Jimmy asked him why.
“No idea mate. Probably my mum and dad couldn’t decide. They’re always fighting about something or other. You coming up to see me when we get settled in the Lakes though?” John asked, handing over a jean jacket with patches he’d bought at the open air market. Band names mostly but also the phrase, “Live Fast. Die Young” with a skull and crossbones that John thought was cool.
“Yeah, definitely,” said Jim, handing over a couple of ska records, rare so the man at the market had assured him.
That was 30 years ago. Of course he’d still never made it much further north than London; no need why would you? All the while he had kept writing poems. He kept them in a notebook in a box in a safe at the Dojo Club. He kept them way from eyes that would see his poetry as soft, dangerously so. Coup inspiringly so.
We went to walk the waters,
To swim together in the shine,
Before winter iced up hearts
In a slaughter of passing by.
The drowning pools, slash face gulls
Other legends back in time took chances.
But nobody drowned that summer,
But I was cut and the scar remains.
“The lads are downstairs, my love. Time to party,” Jenny called to Jimmy.
She stood, she stretched again so he could see the line of her body, which was still wonderful. She had been told that recently in another club in a much bigger town. In London to be exact while Jim was off at the football.
“Time to show them who’s boss”. She handed him a towel, smiled an encouraging, warrior raising grin of good confidence and left as he rose from the bathtub.
The lads were downstairs, sitting and standing in the front room, the one that overlooked the sea (“the seaside”). Each of them had a drink in his hand, all poured into glasses, no cans allowed in the house. They’d let themselves in, wiped their boots and shoes, removed their boots and shoes, wiped their socks on the backs of their legs and headed upstairs from the hallway.
Not that they had keys, simply that the front door was unlocked – a show of fearlessness rather than an indication of a nice, nostalgic neighbourhood. Just how long this would last was one of the questions impelling Jenny’s recent plan making. People had been hanging around outside the waist-high fence, sniffing about, she’d seen one flicking a fag butt into the roses before realising his mistake and spending half an hour retrieving it.
The scrawny fucker had constructed a grabbing device finally. It consisted of a kid’s bamboo fishing net, with wet bubble gum rubbed all over the inside and extended by the bamboo from another, similar net. Hilarious until she’d realised that up until then no one, no one at all had been absentminded when it came to her house. This was a bad sign.
“Fuck off while you can, you little cunt!” she’d yelled as he finally got the butt in his hand. “Fuck off and never come back!” She’d hoped that her voice hadn’t cracked.
