The Graft

  When he had been young he had been one of the lads, one of the boys. But he had never been a lover of extreme violence, or any kind of violence for that matter, even though it was an integral part of their world.

  Sure his doormen had to have reps, otherwise it was a waste of time having them. Some were armed and he knew that and appreciated it; he also knew most of them had probably purchased their iron from Carlos so he knew the man could help out if he wanted to. This was a compromising situation for Carlos and they all understood that, but he hoped that Sonny’s extreme youth would sway the man before him.

  Carlos, however, was annoyed now and saw an out. He had almost decided to give them a taste but now he was determined not to give them anything.

  ‘Look, guys, supposing I sold you some firepower tonight, right, and you shot another known associate with it?’

  They all nodded.

  Carlos opened his arms expansively to thrust his message home.

  ‘Well, suppose this person you shot had brothers and they wanted to know the score and I listened to their sob story . . .’

  He nodded at Tyrell.

  ‘No disrespect meant, mate. But suppose, after listening, I told them who I had sold the iron to and they came after you, where would that leave me?’

  Terry grinned.

  ‘Fucking dead.’

  Carlos laughed.

  ‘Precisely. So why should I break my silence to you lot? I sell the brand, it’s up to you what the fuck you do with it, right? I supply a demand, no more, no less. If I didn’t sell it to you, some other fucker would. And, I might add, at greatly inflated prices. I am not responsible for the use of any of the purchases made on my premises, and unfortunately I cannot break the confidentiality involved without fear of being seen as the Bertie Smalls of South London. Do you all get my drift?’

  Terry sighed.

  ‘He has got a point.’

  It grieved him to say so but he had to be fair. He himself wouldn’t like Carlos preaching to all and sundry who had bought what. It could cause untold fucking hag for all involved.

  Carlos knew he was on to a winner.

  ‘I never, and I repeat never, talk about any of my transactions, with anyone. If I did Old Bill would be round here so fast they would burn up the tarmac on the road. I have been banged up and still kept my own counsel as you fucking know.’

  He looked at all three of them before continuing. He had done eight months on remand for possession of firearms before getting off on a technicality over the police search through the machinations of a very expensive and eloquent barrister.

  ‘So I’m afraid I cannot under any circumstances change my business practices to suit you lot. I am sorry about the boy but these things happen. I cannot talk about anything pertaining to individual transactions, as I have explained. What I can tell you, though, is that I had no prior knowledge of anything that happened to your boy. People purchase my merchandise. After that it is up to them what the fuck they do with it.’

  It was friendly, it was open, and he had just walked away from a potentially dangerous situation.

  Carlos smiled disarmingly.

  ‘One thing I will say, though, is look closer to home. I have found in the past that that is often where you get the information you least want to hear.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  This from Terry who had never been the sharpest knife in the drawer and was still trying to work out exactly what had been said.

  ‘Just an observation, that’s all, from one brother to another.’

  Carlos smiled in Tyrell’s direction.

  He nodded, understanding what the gun dealer was trying to tell him and grateful for the help even though it was something he had actually worked out for himself by now.

  The same name was whirling inside every head in the room.

  Jude Hatcher.

  Nick looked down at the wreck of Lance Walker and sighed. The stench was unbelievable and the sight of his old adversary lying on the filthy floor didn’t affect Nick one iota.

  Lance had ripped him off, that had put paid to any kind of niceties.

  ‘You look like something from a fucking Hammer Horror.’

  Lance stared up at him with sunken eyes.

  ‘Piss off.’

  The words were slurred and it was painful for him to talk. It was his sheer hatred that was keeping him alive and they both knew that.

  ‘Fuck you, you’re a nonce.’

  Nick knelt down on his haunches and looked into Lance’s face. He was amazed at the resilience of the human spirit.

  ‘You’re as good as dead. You know that, don’t you?’

  This time Lance didn’t answer. He was lapsing, once more, into a coma.

  Nick stood up and, walking away from the bundle of dirty rags, he lit another cigarette to mask the smell. Ten minutes later he threw a bucket of water over the man to rouse him.

  ‘I am going out for a nice juicy steak and a bottle of wine. I’ll be thinking of you, lying here and dying.’

  He was smiling down at him once more. ‘You got anything to tell me? If you do, I’ll put you out of your misery and I swear that.’

  Lance started to cough.

  ‘Bollocks.’

  It was final and they both knew that.

  Nick sighed, once more, a playful, friendly sigh that reverberated around the dank concrete walls. ‘Fair enough. Bye. Lance, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, will ya’.’

  He walked away, laughing and listening to Lance Walker calling him every name under the sun.

  Gino looked at the needle Jude was offering him. He had rolled up his sleeve and even applied the tourniquet to his arm. His vein was bulging nicely and the adrenaline rush at what he was about to do was causing his heart to race.

  But it wasn’t with excitement, it was with fear.

  Now the time had come he was not at all sure it was what he wanted to do. Jude suddenly looked sinister in the half-light of the dirty front room. The skunk he had smoked was making him paranoid and the needle suddenly looked enormous in Jude’s small hand.

  His teeth were in a terrible state due to his fear of needles and dentistry yet here he was contemplating injecting himself. Where was the logic in that?

  ‘Do you want me to do it, sweetheart?’

  Jude’s voice was low and gravelly, her eyes misted over from her own large fix earlier. She looked sweeter now; her eyes had lost the haunted, edgy look associated with the need of the next fix that most addicts seemed to acquire after a while on the brown. She looked almost kind in her concern for him. His fear of her was gone suddenly.

  She was whispering, talking in reverential tones as she explained her thoughts. ‘In my hand, Gino, I have complete oblivion. I am holding the key to all the religions of the world and what they promise you. Why sit on a mountain in Nepal talking to some Lama geezer when you can experience Valhalla in my front room?’

  She was smiling at her words, ones that had been said to her too many years ago for her to remember properly. At least she wasn’t after his body which had been why she was given her first fix.

  ‘First you get the initial rush, then you feel the gradual relaxation of your body and your mind, then you slip into this other place, Gino, and it’s so nice there. There’s no bills, no worries, no nothing, except a feeling of complete and utter understanding. Once you visit that place you will want to stay there forever.’

  He was smiling at her now, it sounded so good to him.

  Oblivion is what he craved more than anything these days. The responsibility he felt over Sonny’s death weighed heavily on him at times. He should have taken better care of him, but he had abandoned him when Sonny had started to work on his own. Nothing would have induced him to do what Sonny had done to feed his mother’s habit.

  Gino’s mother had tried to stop her son becoming what she called ‘another statistic’; Jude on the other hand had encouraged her son to do whatever it took to make the money needed for h
er habit.

  It could only have been that which had caused his death, could only have been the people he had started to mix with. And he had walked away from him over it, now the guilt weighed heavily.

  Now here was Jude offering him an out.

  ‘Close the curtains on the world, son, and relax into a world of your own.’

  She pulled his arm towards her and expertly tapped the vein. It was bobbing up clearly. Still smiling, she slipped the needle under the skin.

  First she injected the heroin into his bloodstream slowly, then she retracted blood, washing it back inside the syringe to clean it out before finally pushing both blood and drug residue back into his body.

  Gino watched it all as if it was happening to someone else. Then the rush hit him and he lay back with his eyes closed.

  As he lay there Jude went to the kitchen for the washing-up bowl. She threw all the dirty crockery into the sink and brought the empty bowl back, placing it on the floor beside Gino. Not before time either. He started heaving almost immediately as his body tried to reject this foreign substance from his bloodstream.

  ‘Fight it, Gino, it’ll be worth it in the end, son.’

  He was sweating and vomiting by now. All he could hear was Jude’s laughter as she assured him it got easier and easier as you went along.

  Angela tapped gently on the master bedroom door.

  ‘Go away.’

  She wasn’t shouting now, Tammy’s voice was almost inaudible, and Angela opened the door and slipped into the room.

  This bedroom amazed her, it always did, it was bigger than the whole flat where she had lived as a child. She saw her daughter-in-law curled up on the twenty-two-foot wide bed looking so small and forlorn that Angela felt the first ever spark of pity for her.

  ‘He doesn’t mean the half of it, Tammy.’

  Tammy’s bottom lip was trembling and her blue eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Seeing her mother-in-law in the bedroom without the usual sneer on her face and speaking to her so nicely was the undoing of her.

  She burst into tears once more.

  Angela sat on the edge of the bed and gently patted her back.

  ‘There now, Tammy. Shall I get you a drink of something? Tea?’

  Tammy shook her head and slowly sat herself up. She gulped noisily before saying, between sniffs and coughs, ‘There’s brandy in the drinks cabinet over there.’

  Angela was partial to a drop of the hard so she walked over to the cabinet and poured them both a good measure. In the soft lamplight of the luxurious room he’d paid for she grudgingly admitted to herself that Tammy had a point about her husband at times. Nick, although a good man, maybe, just maybe, might not be the husband of the year. And how could he be, coming from what he had come from? Seeing what he had seen as a child and living through the experiences he had lived through?

  Her son, and she loved him dearly, had something missing, a kink in his nature that would always spoil any kind of normal life he might go after.

  His father had abused them all, taken the last little bit of confidence they had had and trodden it into the dirt with his filthy mouth and his aggression.

  She could still hear him now, beating the kids, terrifying them until, finally, Nick had fought back. On the day he had done that, life had taken on a semblance of normality for them all. Even though, by then, none of them knew what normality actually was.

  There was something missing in her son and she had always known that, and over the years the little bits she had garnered, putting two and two together mostly, had given her an insight into her son that this poor girl would never ever understand. She knew him so well, yet she could never let this frightened woman in front of her find out about any of it.

  The death of that boy had opened up a can of worms. Only Angela knew that, and she was going to tell no one. Dare not tell anyone.

  His father had laid the groundwork for her son’s life, and she would never betray him by letting it become common knowledge. Nick was strange, and finally admitting it to herself gave her a sense of relief. Her son was strange and he could be dangerous, and it was all down to a drunken Irishman whom she had married while herself in a drunken stupor.

  Could she have done more? She knew the answer to that question. And she knew that if she had done something, then this girl would not have had half the heartbreak she had endured.

  Angela’s own thoughts scandalised her even as she acknowledged the truth of them. But her daughter-in-law’s harsh sobbing had finally melted her hard old heart. She had never really liked the girl who had taken her son from her, and she over the years had been frequently harsh in her judgement of Nick’s wife as she saw their marriage slowly implode.

  But tonight, for the first time ever, Angela had felt a flicker of pity for her. Now, as she held Tammy in her arms and felt the girl’s shuddering cries, she finally admitted to herself she could get to like her.

  In a strange way she had always liked Tammy. Angela had just resented her taking part in Nick’s life. When he had started to do well for himself she had thought he would be better off with a wife who would enhance his newfound wealth and status. She knew, though, that if he had chosen a more upper-class type she herself would not have reigned long in this house, whereas as things stood Tammy had been happy to leave everything to her.

  Over the years Angela had convinced herself that Tammy was the reason her son’s marriage was crumbling. However, since the demise of that young lad she had seen a different side to Nick. She was warming daily towards Tammy and beginning to see the difficulties of her life.

  Even as she felt this disloyalty burning in her gut, the younger woman’s wrenching sobs were getting to her. Angela held her tightly, feeling the girl’s delicate bones and the slimness of her figure even after bearing two hefty boys. The worst of it was listening to the utter loneliness and desolation expressed in her tears because Angela knew that she was partly to blame for that. She had been there in the background, trying to drive a wedge between husband and wife, from day one.

  But it had turned out that they had not needed any help from her and as she had listened over the years to this poor girl begging her husband to do his duty Angela had set her heart against her. But now even she had to admit that Tammy, God love and keep her, had a point.

  Her two grandsons, as much as Angela loved them, were slightly suspect to her. The way their eyes differed in shape and colour, their different builds, the way one was curly-haired and the other had hair like silk . . . She pushed these thoughts from her mind. Nick loved them and he would never have accepted cuckoos in his nest, surely?

  ‘Come on, lovey. Drink your brandy, it’ll revive you.’

  All cried out, but still shuddering with the force of her emotion, Tammy gulped at the brandy, coughing as the rawness hit the back of her throat. The lines around her eyes were more prominent than usual, but despite that she looked very young to Angela. Devoid of make-up you could see her natural prettiness more clearly. When she was all made up it gave her a brittle quality, she looked like a doll. Now she looked like the sweet girl she really was, though she would not see that.

  ‘Did he send you up here?’

  Tammy’s voice was low and rasping from her earlier shouting and crying. It was also full of hope. If Nick had sent his mother up then it meant he cared, it meant he had come home expressly.

  Angela shook her head sadly.

  ‘No, Tammy. But I couldn’t listen to you crying any longer.’

  They were both quiet for a moment. It had been so long since they had talked like this it felt unnatural, forced.

  ‘He ain’t back then?’

  Angela shook her head once more.

  ‘He doesn’t mean the half of it, love, there’s no one else.’

  Tammy smiled cynically.

  ‘I wish I could believe that, but I know there’s someone, I can feel it inside me.’

  Angela sighed.

  ‘He loves you, you know he does. Even if there was
someone else it wouldn’t mean anything, Tammy. He thinks the world of you.’

  She opened her arms wide and gestured around the room.

  ‘Look at your home, girl, he wouldn’t give you all this if he didn’t care about you. He wouldn’t buy you the cars and the watches and everything else if he didn’t care, now would he?’

  Tammy enjoyed hearing the words even though they had a hollow ring to them. The gifts were purely because he tried to fill her needs and his own conscience with things. Yet she would give the lot up and go back to the council flat they had lived in when they were first married if it brought back the closeness between them.