Fighting to the Death (12 page)

Maybe they’d been expecting a straight-forward bare knuckle contest, but no one had told me that before the fight. Meanwhile my opponent was still on the floor and rapidly turning purple. I looked across at Bill for some guidance. He seemed to be ignoring me. The crowd was getting more rowdy by the second.

‘Arsehole Brit.’

‘Teach that Brit bastard …’

I looked across at Bill again and he shook his head. What the hell was going on? What should I do? Did I stamp on his head or stand back and risk him recovering and coming back at me?

Just then a huge fat Farmer Giles lookalike jumped into the ring from the audience. Dozens of beer bottles followed him and the crowd was stamping its feet on the floor in anger. I looked across at Neville and Wayne and they piled in to get me. Neville got caught on his cheek by a flying bottle just as we were ducking and diving our way out of the ring. What the hell was happening? I thought I’d won fair and square but this mob was after my blood.

All three of us dipped our shoulders, rugby style, and charged past the cattle pens as the crowd poured out of the arena behind us. But there was no sign of Bill. Had they grabbed him: It was getting too hot to handle.

‘Where the fuck’s Bill?’ I asked Neville.

‘Don’t worry about Bill,’ he said as we clambered in the back of the white transit and the driver took off at high speed,
sending mud flying off the back tyres. His walkie-talkie crackled away on the dashboard as the van careered across the field outside the barn and then out through the open farm gate. Inside, I dabbed my fight wounds with a towel and tried to stem the blood flowing from the inside of my mouth. My hands were red raw once again. I spat globs of blood into the white towel.

‘What’s happened to Bill?’ I asked again.

Then the driver chipped in: ‘He’ll be alright.’

I wondered if he was having us on. We were stuck in the back of a transit van going through bandit country. I didn’t argue with him.

When we reached the airfield, the driver dumped us about a hundred yards from the aeroplane in the pitch dark so we could only just make it out in the distance. The pilot and co-pilot were leaning against the fuselage, but there was no sign of anyone else.

Neville and Wayne were well twitchy and began looking around in case we were about to be ambushed. We all knew that those crazy Paddies back in the barn had lost a bucketload of wedge by betting on their man and they might now be out for revenge.

Suddenly two pairs of blinding, fullbeam headlights appeared in the dark distance. Wayne and Neville looked at each other. That’s when Neville pulled out a shooter and started waving it around. Wayne produced a knife with a twelve-inch blade.

I stood there like a sitting duck with blood soaking through the front of my white T-shirt. Neville had claret running down the side of his face from where that bottle had hit him a few minutes earlier. He started waving his gun towards the fast-approaching cars. The headlights were virtually upon us. I stepped behind my two minders. The cars got even nearer.

‘Who the fuck is it?’ I asked.

‘Dunno,’ came Neville’s response. His gun was aimed straight at them.

I heard him flick the safety catch off his weapon.

The two cars slithered to a halt on the muddy field. The doors swung open and a familiar voice shouted: ‘Put that fuckin’ thing away.’

It was Bill and he was behaving as if we’d just come out of the local boozer and were organising a ride home.

On board I strapped in next to Wayne and Neville – the only two fellas I trusted on that entire plane. Bill stayed up front, drinking with his cronies as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

Once we got to cruising altitude, Bill wandered up to us and slung mean envelope containing £5000.

‘What happened back there?’ I asked.

‘Nothin’ special,’ said Bill with a grin.

‘Nothin’ special? It was fuckin’ hairy,’ I said.

‘Nah, that was nothin’, Son,’ added Bill.

I wasn’t convinced.

Neville, Wayne and myself had ourselves a few drinks on that plane trip home. I wouldn’t have minded changing my pants as well! But Neville and Wayne kept me laughing all the way. They knew the score because they’d worked in the illegal fight game with Bill for years. But I felt they were more on my side than his.

When we finally touched down in Essex, all Bill said to me was: ‘I’ll bell you in a few days.’ It was clear his only concern was his next fat pay packet, thanks to yours truly. He didn’t even ask me if I was alright.

Neville and Wayne were a different story. They got me in Neville’s Capri and took me to hospital to sort out a nasty
wound to the back of my head. They were good fellas and I believed I’d made friends for life.

At Queen Mary’s Hospital, in Stratford, the casualty department sewed me up a treat and the boys stuck with me throughout the night and even dropped me back at my flat. It was about three in the morning by the time I tip-toed in. Luckily Carole was asleep.

Next morning; I woke up late to find my pillow soaked in blood. My nose was the size of a balloon and my hands were red raw, as usual.

‘What happened to you?’ asked Carole.

‘Had a big tear-up at the club. Punter went a bit mad.’

‘You’re the mad one. Who’d want a job like yours?’ said Carole, dabbing at my wounds with some cotton wool soaked in hot water. If only she knew the truth.

Luckily she didn’t notice the two-inch gash inside my mouth and didn’t stumble across the five grand in cash still sitting in my inside jacket pocket.

I didn’t show up on the building site for the next couple of days. My mouth was so sore I couldn’t eat. I did a lot of thinking over that period and decided I’d never let Bill risk my life like that ever again.

A
ll the aggro with that fight in Ireland left me in a bit of state. I had to face up to a few facts: I was risking ending up on a mortuary slab for the sake of a few grand in my pocket. And if there was ever to be a next time then I had to insist Bill told me more about the fight in advance.

Of course I would have coped more easily if I wasn’t still bottling everything up and not telling a soul about my secret life as an illegal fighter. The strain of it was doing my head in. But at least I had my new mates Neville and Wayne. They tried to put my mind at rest by saying Bill was a trustworthy fella. But I was far from convinced.

But my biggest priority was not losing Carole under any circumstances. She was already putting me under pressure to stop working as a ‘doorman’ – my cover for going off training and then fighting. I told her we needed the money
for our wedding and that I’d quit as soon as we actually got married. I knew she wasn’t happy, but it was better than telling her the truth.

I needed enough dough to buy our own place, settle down and have kids. That was the dream. I so wanted a happy, stable life different to the one I’d had thanks to my wayward dad. If it meant taking a few on the chin and risking a beating then so be it. But was it really worth risking my life for?

With all the money pressures mounting, I let Bill talk me into taking on two more ‘jobs’, as he liked to call them. They were both in cages. One was in the Ipswich area of Suffolk and the other was in Birmingham. Luckily both of them were brief and victorious and I copped three-and-a-half grand for each bout. They weren’t that different from my first fight in the cage and I insisted to Bill that Wayne and Neville were alongside me so at least I felt a little bit more secure.

The Ipswich fight was in another warehouse on an industrial estate. The fight in the Midlands was held in a huge underground car park near the Bullring in the centre of Birmingham. They both lasted under a minute, thanks to my opponents being old and fat. These fights also confirmed to me that Bill was raking in a lot more dough after putting thousands of quid on me in bets, as well as splitting the ‘match fee’ with me.

The next fight was in South London and the crowd there got really out of control when I steamrollered some local fella who looked like the England footballer Rio Ferdinand. He lasted about a minute and a half. Turned out he had a kickboxing background and the home crowd thought their man would
walk it. They started banging on our van and even tried to rock it over. Neville couldn’t get the motor started. I was laughing my head off for some strange reason. After winning a tough fight, a few problems with the crowd seemed like small fry. Neville and Wayne got really wound up, while Bill, as usual, was nowhere to be found.

Secrecy was the key to all these fights. At one bout, some idiot started taking pictures with a flash. Three heavies grabbed his camera, stamped on it and then stamped on this geezer’s face for good measure. Wayne and Neville said that amongst the audience at those fights were a lot of senior Old Bill. Many of them were partial to a flutter and the big-time crims liked entertaining the cozzers. One time Wayne even recognised a judge in the audience because it was the same fells who’d sent him down a few years earlier. I also spotted a number of East End actors at some of the fights.

By the time my fifth fight came around Bill had bought himself a brand-new S-class Mercedes with his own personal driver. Meanwhile, I was still saving hard for my wedding to Carole. I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit it niggled me that Bill was making so much dough out of me. He definitely also had a couple of other fighters on his books, but refused pointblank to even discuss them. The secretive world of the cage and illegal fighting was very convenient for Bill. It meant he could avoid all sorts of other issues.

Besides the wedding money, I’d also given Mum quite a few bob. She deserved it. She still worked at the pub and was too proud to ever ask for any money, so I’d drop a little something in her biscuit tin whenever I was round at her gaff. She never asked me where it came from. Luckily, during this run of quick
fights, I didn’t suffer any bad injuries or marks to my face so neither Carole nor my mum suspected what I was up to. So far so good.

I was still determined to contribute towards our wedding. Carole wanted the full works for what she saw as the most special day of her life. I’d have been happiest with a few mates at a quiet little ceremony, but you gotta let the little lady in your life have what she wants, haven’t you?

As it happens, 9 May 1987 turned out to be a great day for all. The wedding ceremony itself was held in a massive old church that hadn’t been used for more than two years, in the middle of the old Stratford one-way system. About four hundred people turned up, including the shadowy Bill; no doubt he saw it as a necessary duty to keep me sweet.

I’d asked him along as a ‘business associate’. Bill came to the church service, but didn’t show up at the party afterwards. He didn’t bring his wife or anyone else and I only realised he was there when I spotted his Mercedes and driver slung up as we walked out of the church following the ceremony.

As we were posing for photos, Bill wandered over. I had a quick chat without bothering to introduce him to anyone. As we shook hands, he slipped me an envelope containing a couple of hundred quid. ‘Congratulations,’ was all he said before heading off through the crowd back to his Merc.

‘Who s that?’ Carole asked me a few seconds later. I lied. ‘Boss of a club where I work.’

‘Oh,’ she said.

Well, it was the nearest to the truth I could manage at the time.

The only disappointment of the day was that my Uncle Pete, who was back in England, didn’t show up because his car broke down. I would have liked him to see me on my biggest day. I owed him a lot in many ways.

Amazingly, my old man did make an appearance. Naturally, he had a new girlfriend in tow. The wedding reception went with a real swing thanks to a great mixture of people from all backgrounds. But ultimately, it was Carole’s day. I just tried to behave myself and keep a low profile.

My new father-in-law, Jim, even told the reception in his speech: ‘He’s a good boy who never stops working.’ Coming from him that was a compliment. If only he knew the truth. Shortly after the wedding, Jim even had the decency to come up to me and say how wrong he was about me and that I was ‘alright after all’.

Just as we were about to leave for our honeymoon, Mum grabbed my hand and asked me a strange question: ‘So where’s all this money coming from, Carl?’

‘Don’t worry about it, Mum.’

‘You’re not goin’ to get yourself in trouble are you?’

‘Nah,’ I tried to say it with a smile on my face, but I was worried because I didn’t want her thinking I was up to no good.

Carole and me spent the first couple of nights of our honeymoon at a hotel by the sea in Clacton before setting off for the sunshine of Corfu. Carole’s dad stumped up for the honeymoon, which was nice of him. I got quite a shock when I first saw all the topless girls on the beach but I soon got used to it!

It was a difficult time because I didn’t like hiding the truth from Carole. One side of me felt really bad about it. But I
handled it by blanking it out of my mind most of the time we were in Corfu, although Carole did catch me once or twice looking a bit thoughtful.

‘What you thinkin’ about Carl?’

‘Nothin’ special.’

What else could I say?

Once we got back to East London I tried to keep myself as busy as possible with plenty of hod-carrying work. I kept up a strict training regime, but I told myself it was for my health rather than any future fights. I even convinced myself that the £200 wedding present from Bill didn’t mean I had to commit to another fight. My ultimate goal remained a happy family and home. I’d had a good run and each fight had seemed easier than the previous one, but now I wanted to put all that behind me.

In June 1987, Carole and I bought our own flat in Keogh Road, Stratford. I’d managed to steer clear of Bill ever since the wedding. He regularly called but I told him I was doing up my new home and didn’t have time to do anything else. I had responsibilities now for the first time in my life. But in some ways I was leaving the door wide open. Something inside me stopped me from completely blowing out Bill. I didn’t want to slam that door shut just in case there came a day when I needed him again …