Hateland (43 page)

     Paul's grasp on reality continued to deteriorate. I found him harder and harder to deal with. When he wasn't drinking, you could have a semi-coherent conversation with him. But boozed-up, he became more of a nightmare than he'd ever been.

     In an attempt to help him, I got him a job in early 1996 working with me for an Irish haulage company in London's King's Cross. After leaving Raquels following the death of Leah Betts and the murder of my three one-time 'business associates', I'd gone back to driving tipper lorries. Another new start. I got Paul a job labouring in the yard. Within hours of his arrival, he was chasing the foreman with a lump of angle-iron in his hand. I calmed things down and managed to convince everyone there'd been a 'misunderstanding'.

     Next morning, I picked Paul up at six. By seven, he'd drunk half a bottle of whisky, neat. This led to further 'misunderstandings' at work. By ten, we'd both been sacked. As I'd done absolutely nothing wrong, I vented my anger at Paul as I drove him home in my car. At first, he shouted back, but then he stopped shouting and asked me to pull over. He went quiet. I thought he might have been feeling sick and wanted to puke. I found a space at the side of the road and parked.

     For a few seconds, Paul just sat there without moving. Then he started crying, really crying, sobbing desperately. I'm not good at dealing with tears, especially men's tears. Paul had cried in Belmarsh Prison - the first time I'd seen him do so since childhood - but this was different. And my reaction was different, because I didn't know what was wrong. I suppose I felt embarrassed. I said, 'Come on, Paul. What's up?'

     In a voice almost cracking with desperation, he said, 'Help me. Please help me.'

     Awkwardly, I put my arm round his shoulder. I said, 'Fuck the job. I'll get another. I'll find something for you too. Don't worry.'

     'I'm not on about that,' Paul said, 'I'm on about me. You don't know what it's like. You just don't know what it's like. Help me. Please help me.'

     I told him I'd do anything for him, but what was it he wanted me to do? He didn't say anything. He wept a little bit more, then stopped as suddenly as he'd started. He wiped the tears from his face and sat quietly for a few seconds, staring out the windscreen. I could see he was embarrassed. He said he wanted to get the tube back to south London. He opened the door and got out. He didn't say goodbye. I watched him cross the road. For a few seconds, he bobbed in and out of view, mingling with shoppers, then he disappeared.

     I began to see him very irregularly. Sometimes, I'd get a call from the police to say he'd been arrested again - and I'd have to head off to a magistrates' court. When he wasn't appearing in court, he was appearing in newspapers. On 24 March 1996, he featured once more in the
News of the World
, though not under his real name. The headline was 'Fascists target Euro '96':

A Nazi thug is planning to bring violence to the European football championships in England this summer. He told an undercover reporter, 'There's going to be some grief.' The man and his neo-Nazi group Combat 18 plan to team up with fascists from across Europe to attack black Holland fans.

Paul had never been a member of Combat 18. Even they wouldn't have let him join. And, as far as I know, he had nothing to do with any violence at the Euro '96 championships. I think he was just talking a bit of nonsense to a reporter for a few free beers. Beyond the expression of extreme views, Paul had little understanding of politics. For instance, he also expressed support for the IRA, partly because he saw northern Catholics as an oppressed minority. Politically, British Nazis line up with the Loyalist paramilitaries. It's not really possible to be a British Nazi and an IRA supporter at the same time. Unless you're Paul.

     Later that year, he got sent back to Belmarsh Prison for bashing a shopkeeper who didn't serve him fast enough. I visited him. He told me the screws had appointed him as a 'counsellor' for prisoners in danger of committing suicide. I tried not to laugh. I didn't think Paul ought to have been allowed near people thinking of topping themselves. I could only imagine him giving prisoners tips about successful exit strategies whilst eyeing their wallets. Perhaps he'd show them photos. I assumed his appointment represented a devious unofficial plan to ease prison overcrowding.

     During his stay in prison, Paul met a Palestinian man. My brother had felt strongly about the Palestinian struggle for years, even though his understanding of the conflict was hardly sophisticated. Whenever anything appeared on television about Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas, he'd start ranting, really ranting: 'Look at those Jew cunts. Grown men hiding behind tanks firing bullets at small children with stones. No wonder Hitler hated the fuckers.' His support for the Palestinians, like his support for the Provos, sprang from his sympathy for a perceived 'underdog'. No doubt his immersion over the years in Nazi anti-Jew rhetoric also played its part.

     Paul's new friend asked him if he could contact Palestinian prisoners on his behalf when he got out. The friend said he couldn't do so himself, because the Special Branch had him under surveillance. After his release, Paul began writing to Samar Alami, who'd been jailed for 20 years for terrorist offences. To avoid the prison censors, he tried to pass on letters to her through her celebrity lawyer Gareth Peirce, who over the years has represented countless prisoners accused of terrorist offences. His war effort ended up being reported in the
Mirror
on 25 February 1997. Paul was again using a false name. This time, he called himself 'Tom Halloran':

A vile neo-Nazi is attempting to recruit Britain's leading lawyers to carry out his dirty work.

     Repulsive Tom Halloran targets lawyers to gain access to convicted terrorists who he believes will be sympathetic to his own sickening causes.

     He tricked crusading solicitor Gareth Peirce into thinking he was a well-wisher of her female client, Samar Alami, jailed for 20 years for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish charity.

     His motives, however, are far more sinister. Halloran is a far-right extremist who has said, 'Adolf Hitler was too soft for our way of thinking. I'm against anyone who doesn't agree with my views.'

     Halloran, an IRA sympathiser, is intent on building contacts with terrorist organisations to further his fascist and racist causes.

Following this article, the police arrested Paul under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. They took apart his flat, searching for incriminating material. I don't know what they made of his video collection. In the end, they released him because - unusually for him - he hadn't committed any offence. However, Paul soon returned to prison for other offences. His regular stays in jail had the side effect of bringing phases of stability to his life. But every time he came out, he seemed just a little bit madder.

     Paul wasn't the only lunatic I had on my mind. Over the years, I'd often wondered what had happened to my father. No one had seen him, or heard anything of him, since he left the house in August 1976. Sometimes I fantasised about tracking him down. I suppose I'd have liked to ask him why he'd treated us so brutally. I suppose, too, on occasion, I'd have liked a chance to kick his head in.

     But most of the time I tried to forget him and to pretend I didn't care what had become of him. However, my mother, who wanted some sort of closure on his disappearance, kept prodding me to try to find out. Every now and again over the years, I'd contact the police's Missing Persons' Bureau and the Salvation Army, always without success. Then on a whim in 2001 - the 25th anniversary of his disappearance - I asked my journalist friend Gary Jones to see if he could find him. I stayed on the line as Jones tapped my father's details into his computer. Within five minutes, as I waited on the phone, Jones said he'd found him. My father was dead. He'd died four years earlier of natural causes. Jones gave his last address as a tower block opposite the cricket ground in Edgbaston, Birmingham.

     I was in a pub in London's King's Cross when Jones told me, for which I was grateful, because I needed a drink. My father was dead. And all along he'd been living just down the road from the home he'd left. I abandoned my other plans and headed instead to Birmingham. I had an irrepressible urge to see where my father had spent his last years. On the journey, I experienced a whole spectrum of feelings, including sadness, but mostly shock and rage. I felt cheated. I could never now fulfil that fantasy of confronting him.

     It was strange, and a little spooky, to stand outside my father's last front door. It stood on the tenth floor of a municipal block of flats. I knocked, but no one answered. So I went next door. An elderly West Indian man, wearing an Old-Man-River trilby hat, opened his door cautiously

     I introduced myself and asked if he'd known my father. He said he had. They'd even been mates. He said my father had lived for years in an attic flat above a shop round the corner. The flat in the tower block had belonged to the old woman who'd owned the shop. She'd become ill, and my father, who'd become good friends with her, moved into her flat to keep her company. It wasn't a romantic relationship. They were merely companions. She'd then died and my father had stayed on in the flat, living alone.

     He and the West Indian man used to go for a drink on Sundays to a pub round the corner. One Sunday, they had their lunch-time drink and headed home. My father, a heavy smoker, coughed most of the way along the street. They said goodbye at their doors. The man said he used to see my father, or hear him coughing, most days, so when he'd neither seen nor heard him by Tuesday, he called the police. They broke down the door and found my father dead in bed. His grave lay in a council cemetery a few miles away.

     I asked if my father had ever spoken about his family. He said he had. Apparently, he'd occasionally mentioned he'd been married and had children, although he hadn't gone into details. I thanked the man for his time and left. That night, I found myself standing outside the cemetery with my brother Michael. The gates had been locked for the night. Earlier that day, I'd rung the council and had been given my father's plot number. Michael and I clambered over the big iron railings. In a few minutes, we stood in front of my father's last resting place. Neither flowers, nor headstone, nor name decorated the plot. Only a number. I broke down and cried. So did Michael. We both felt devastated.

     In the past, I'd genuinely hated my father, but as I stood there over his grave, I realised I actually felt sorry for him. I'd spent so much time hating him I hadn't realised his own hatred and anger had stemmed from the fact that he'd never had much love or affection in his tormented life. He'd been buried in a pauper's grave, which an Irish-Catholic charity had supplied and paid for.

     The next day, I broke the news to my mother. She took it very badly. Over the following days, we spoke together about my father in a way that brought me a bit closer to him and made me understand better why he'd become such a vicious bastard. My mother told me things she'd never told me before. She said in Ireland during the 1930s my father's unmarried mother had become pregnant after sleeping with a married man. After abuse from locals, she became so ashamed and scared she went to the 'county home' to give birth.

     She abandoned my father there - and disappeared. She was never seen or heard of again. My father was at first brought up in the county home, where some staff subjected him to extreme cruelty and violence. His health and state of mind suffered badly. Eventually, his grandmother took him out and reared him herself. He worshipped his grandmother, but grew to hate 'normal' people, because he'd been deprived of the most basic normality (that is, the affection, care and protection of a mother and father).

     My mother said he'd been a good singer, so much so that he was known in pubs and clubs as 'Danny Boy' after his favourite song of the same name. The song in its original form had been an Irish republican anthem. He'd especially enjoyed singing it at the Royal British Legion Club in Codsall. He'd laugh to himself, because he knew the clapping audience hadn't understood the significance of the song's words.

     When my mother lay desperately ill in hospital after the birth of Michael, she'd confided in a consultant about my father's violence. The consultant suggested that in my father's mind he wasn't beating us, he was beating his own mother. He thought my father hated the fact that we had a mother who loved us. This conversation sounded a bit like the final scene from Hitchcock's classic film
Psycho
, where the psychiatrist gives an explanation of why the now straitjacketed lunatic of the tide murdered all those people and kept his mother's mummified body in the cellar.

     Paul travelled to Birmingham when I told him about our father. I drove him and my mother to the cemetery, but he refused to get out of the car. He told my mother he wouldn't stand over my father's grave unless pissing on it.

     I phoned my oldest brother Jerry on the other side of the world to break the news. He didn't say much. He lives in Brazil, still working on oil rigs. He puts most of his earnings towards a home for Rio's street children. He's lived all over the world. I think he's tried to get as far away from everything that returns him to, or reminds him of, our dismal past. He doesn't really have much to do with us. He no longer speaks to Paul or Michael, and he only speaks to me if I happen to call at my mother's when he's there on one of his flying visits. He takes what happened to us very hard, but he keeps his feelings to himself. He's been married four times. He never seems happy within himself.

     A few months after our phone call, he came to England. I took him to the cemetery, but, like Paul, he didn't want to get out of the car. Eventually, I persuaded him to come with me. We walked together towards the grave, but he stopped about ten yards away and refused to go any further. I could feel his anger.