Cracking Up (8 page)

Dog Sick told me that all the boys should lay low until he said different. The bizzies were obviously having a crackdown. It would be getting on top round the estate, there would be the inevitable, high profile police operations. Although the Mug Fam would be the target one now, some of our boys would suffer in the collateral damage. Dog Sick would continue to stitch up the Mug Fam with planted shooters and anonymous tip-offs until the bizzies had covered themselves in enough media glory.

In the meantime he was going to keep me well out the way because there were leaky bums everywhere. He had booked me on a flight to Malaga that evening. “You’re on a break, our kid! Don’t tell no one nothing about it, though. They’ll find out soon enough, when you get back.”

“I’m fucking skint, mate,” I said. But I didn’t really give a fuck about such minor problems, to be honest. I was always on the bones of my arse and was used to living on my wits. I could always team up with other like-minded scallies from the Scouse nation out there and graft.

He told me not to worry about a thing, he was giving us a sub of two hundred and fifty quid. Fucking brilliant! I was going to link-up with his mate out there and he’d put me up; so there was nothing to shell out for. Top one. I rushed up to my bedroom, stuffing some counterfeit clothes into a holdall and picking up my passport.

My face and ear were still aching and swelling; so I spent the rest of the day with my head immersed in a bowl of iced water, trying to minimize the damage so that I could face the customs at the airport without drawing undue attention to myself.

I wondered how I was going to break the news to my mum. I loved her to bits but, to be honest, I was getting a bit fed up staying at her house. Things were getting a bit too claustrophobic under her caring and watchful eye. I needed some space to breath and avoid awkward questions. After all I seemed to cause her nothing but trouble, anguish and grief. I thought if I frigged off for a week it would be like a holiday for her too. I scribbled a note, telling her I was off on a jolly to Blackpool for a week and left it on the kitchen table.

As the day went by, phone calls were exchanged between crew members and it was obvious that the police were becoming a top fucking nuisance, patrolling the estate in their armour-plated Volvo 850 estates. Inside were hit squads of kick-arse coppers, butched up in paramilitary clobber, bulletproof vests, tooled up with H&K sub-machine guns and Smith & Wesson .38 revolvers. What a bunch of fucking dickheads! Giving it the biggun, as usual. Chomping at the bit, cruising around, looking for some fucking huge showdown. Turning the place upside down, making sweeps. Stopping and searching, doing random vehicle checks. Groups of innocent, unemployed lads loitering on street corners and shopping parades would be collared, trawled straight down to the police station in meat wagons where they would be taken to interview rooms and cross-examined by THE FILTH with the hidden agenda of pinning unsolved crimes on them. What a fucking palaver!

John Lennon Airport, later that evening: I was queuing with all the other tourist and their many suitcases, decked out in our finest shell-suits and brand spanking new trainers. Everyone was smiling and the communal chatter was about basking in the sun and boss beaches straight out of holiday brochures. Whey hey! I thought. You’re going on holiday, son. I was buzzing. All I could think of was getting a suntan, getting away from the dismal winter weather.

Then Dog Sick arrived, at the last minute. He strolled up, grinning, handed me an envelope with the cash and flight tickets inside. Then he promptly took the kitbag off his shoulder and hung it on mine with the instruction to hand it over to his mate at the other end.

I checked in, slung my bag of snide clobber in the hold and took the mysterious kitbag on board as carry on. I’d been warned that whatever I did I wasn’t to let this bag out of my sight. I was fucking shitting myself going through customs. I didn’t know what was in the bag, of course, but I did have my usual suspicions, so I was double cacking my pants at the thought of getting a pull and missing out on spending a week in sunny Spain.

I got through customs without a hitch and, before I knew it, I was on a two-and-a-half hour flight to Malaga, hunkered down in my seat, grinning from ear to ear. The kitbag was safely jammed into the overhead locker.

The FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign was switched off and I unbuckled my seat belt, reached into the overhead storage, grabbed the bag and walked up the aisle to the lavatory. When I got inside, with the door locked behind me, I rummaged in the bag and found it contained a hidden compartment that concealed a mini-fortune in dirty cash. Thank fuck for that! I thought. For all I knew, it could have been five kilos of pure smack.

I went back to my seat and, about ten minutes later, a Polish stewardess came along with the drinks trolley. I bought a couple of dumpy tins of beer and a mini-box of Pringles. I didn’t get much change out of a tenner, she pulled my pants down good and proper, but I was feeling golden, man, looking forward to the hot sun and praying the babes out there would be hot as well.

10.

As soon as I hit the ground, I used a pay-phone in the airport to call the lad whose number Dog Sick had keyed into my mobie. Matey was a fellow Scouser and I sort of knew about him from back home. He gave me an address and I set off to God knows where. The taxi drove to the centre of Fuengirola and pulled up outside a towering block of high rise flats over-looking the Feria Ground. I spotted the lad stood by the entrance and noticed he was a big bastard with a streetwise swagger on him. He was decked out in designer shorts, Armani t-shirt and Louis Vuitton flip-flops, a nice bronzie, looking the part. He came bounding over, rolling his shoulders with a grinning kipper, we clasped hands and dipped our shoulders into each other. “Alright, I’m Rez.”

“Alright, I’m Ow-wee.” Simple as that.

He put a big arm arm around me. “Good to see you, lad. Dog Sick told me all about you. Bigged you up, man! Come up to the flat and let’s stash the kitbag.”

We went into the block and took the lift up to his apartment. He showed me to the spare bedroom and I dumped my holdall in it. When I returned to the front room Rez was sat down on the couch and he’d emptied the kitbag all over the coffee table rummaging through the contents, which included a slab of Ulster Fry, Liverpool footie tops and bottles of health supplements from Holland & Barrett. He found what he was looking for and now he was smiling happily at the stacks of notes in his hand. “You’ve found it then,” I said.

He nodded, clutching it with both hands to his chest, as if he’d just won the lottery and nothing else mattered in this fucked-up loony bin of a world but the readies. “Telling you: If it don’t make money, Ow-wee; it don’t make sense.”

I sat down while he stuffed the money back into the kit bag. “Got to stash this wonga, where it’s safe,” he said, zipping up the kit bag, taking it into his bedroom and stacking the cash in a safe bolted to the wall inside his fitted wardrobe.

“Can you fucking believe that?” Rez said, when he returned. “Customs never even looked inside that kit bag. Sixty grand in there, lad.”

Fucking hell, I thought, if only I’d known. It was almost insulting, smuggling that amount of currency through Customs for a pitiful two hundred and fifty quid. The more I thought about it, the more I copped the hump because when he had told me I was off to Spain I had a real sense of being taken care of and protected by Dog Sick. He was looking after me and making me safe from the clutches of the bizzies, wasn’t he? Nah, not really! I could have been nicked at both airports, sent down for the sake of two hundred and fifty squid. I could almost hear him laughing at me, thinking: “Fuck’s sake! What a stupid fucking cunt! Fucking idiot!”

Okay, so Customs hadn’t opened the bag for even the laziest of inspections, but that was down to daft luck.

I was feeling angry and plunging into a fit of depression when Rez chopped and lined up two fat daddy lines of devil dust with a credit card and rolled up a two hundred euro note. This was a man after my own heart. He must have liked me too because, after snorting the class As off a compact mirror, he was offering to take us out for a beer.

We set off for the nearest bar. He was cracking jokes, making me laugh, over a few pints. You know what they say, first impressions count a lot and I couldn’t help but warm up to him. The coke, the ale, the jokes. I liked him already.

Next, Rez insisted we get something to eat in a nearby Argentine steakhouse. We nose-dived into steak and chips, a few more bev-vies. He paid for it with all his own money and wouldn’t let me put my hand in my pocket.

He had finished the coke off in the restaurant’s shithouse, snorting the stuff up his nose and trying to piss at the same time. This act of multi-tasking proved far too awkward and he’d relieved himself indiscriminately on the floor. When he came out the bogs he hadn’t even zipped up his flies. “I need something for me beak,” he said.

We set off to score for some more of the marching powder. Rez was up for going to the extremes to satisfy our wants, so we went on a mission into the barrio and everything went fucking sideways in no time.

We left the steakhouse, hailed a taxi. When he told the driver where we wanted to go, matey refused to take the ride. He had to offer him double-bubble and, after a bit of banter in the local lingo, he agreed but weren’t too happy about the situation. Apparently, it was a no-go area even for the Spanish bizzies, but we only wanted to score the chisel and get out. Rez thought it would be sweet.

Pulling up outside what looked like a crumbling and condemned apartment building from a Baghdad war zone, we spotted this little Spanish cunt and he approached the motor. He had a combination Mullet-Mohawk haircut and a scorpion tattoo creeping up his neck. It didn’t seem right, the whole situation. The obvious lack of law and order should have been a big clue. Still, we tried to plod on with the deal, fronting it with as much attitude as we could muster.

The Spanish lad insisted that we get out the motor to do the bizzo, but it didn’t seem like a good idea. He stood back, smiling and pleading there wasn’t going to be any funny business. “No hay problema!” he said. “No pasa nada!”

He was just a simple drug dealer trying to make a living, not a scumbag street robber on the rip. It was a daft thing for such an obvious low-life blagger to be claiming but, like the daft cunts that we were, we took him at his word when he showed us he wasn’t desperate for our dosh by letting us see his own wad. We wanted some coke and weren’t going home without some now we’d come this far.

As soon as we stepped out the door, the rest of the rip-off squad came out of nowhere in full force, swinging bats. They were up for it and going in for the kill. We shit ourselves and tried to jump back in the taxi, but matey was already moving off, trying to save his own bacon. The gang started to smash up his motor which gave us enough time to leap in and shout at the driver to get the fuck out of there. “VAMONOS!”

Rez was bleeding badly from the head and I had suffered some injury or another in the storm of blows from the baseball bats. We were in a pretty bad way and could have done with an A&E visit, especially as Rez’s head was swelling lumps. The taxi driver, on the other hand, wanted us to go with him to the police station. He was holding us accountable for the damage to his car.

Rez went off his head. “You’re a fucking wanker!” he shouted.

He was calling him a CONO and a MARICON in Spanish, punching the back of his head-rest, yelling. “Stop the fucking motor now!”

The driver was shitting himself by now because Rez was a big unit and, suddenly, he pulled out a flick knife. He pushed a button, it clicked open and a large, shiney blade flicked out. He poked the driver’s ribs with it. That finally convinced him into going back to our block. When he pulled up, we jumped out, legged it into our building, slamming the security door behind us and locking him out. Then we took the lift up to the relative safety of Rez’s flat.

It didn’t seem to matter where I went, I was always in the thick of it.

Rez re-assured me there would be no more missions into the barrio. Fuck the local coke merchants! He was only dealing with known faces from now on.

Next day, we went to the accident and emergency unit in the local hospital with our E111 cards and made up a top lie about how we had sustained our injuries from fellow drunken Brits on a night out at the karaoke bars while singing our hearts out. After receiving the necessary stitches at the ozzie, Rez dragged me down to Mijas Costa with him, intent on showing me just how the other half lived here on the Costa Del Sol. He’d organized a trip for us to go a barbecue and meet some of his influential expat contacts.

The big fuck-off townhouse had a huge terrace with an outdoor pool attached. It was a pretty fucking tasty set-up going on, as it happens. My jaw was grazing the ground, hardly believing the top tottie before my eyes. There were beautiful birds everywhere, strutting their stuff. We mingled with Rez’s mates, swigging beers, cracking jokes and eating the best nosh the entire time I was there. All kinds of heavies were milling around the terrace with plates full of baked potatoes, coleslaw and barbecued meats, stuffing their faces.

It was a top do. The assembled company were all major coke shifters, living the dream and giving a heartfelt, fuck you two-fingered salute to the shit-stem back in the UK, having a top time with a bunch of fellow Brits living over there fronting their lucrative criminal enterprises with various legitimate business acting as fronts and smokescreens. Settled into swanky gated villas with pools and outside jacuzzis, driving fucking beautiful motors, real bird pullers, fucking young so-called models and, oh yeh, making a shitload of money. Was this not the very career I would be perfectly suited to? I kept finding myself thinking.

These were the top lads who would never have to scrimp and scrap their way through life again. They were doing fucking great, thank you very much. They’d all come a long way from the scuzzy council estates of bumfuck UK and would never have to return to that way of life again. The Brit mafiosi were well and truly smashing it in sunny Spain and making TOP TILL.