Heavy Duty Attitude (17 page)

‘Hi Mikey,’ said Bung giving him a one-handed clenched arm shake and backslap and completely ignoring the strikers on station by the CCTV monitors, ‘how’s it going?’

‘All quiet,’ he replied giving me the evil-eyed once over.
‘They out back?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘they’re expecting you though. Go on through.’

‘That’s unusual isn’t it?’ I asked, ‘Having patch on security duty? I thought that was a striker’s job?’

 

‘It’s a lockdown,’ Bung said simply, ‘and he’s the junior patch, so he’s in charge under the sergeant at arms.’

 

Which, he seemed to think, explained everything I needed to know.

Inside, the old shop was gloomy after the bright sunshine of the drive up since only the light at the back of unit was on, and it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust. The space went a surprising way back. What would once have been the shop at the front of the building was now a bar and poolroom and I followed Bung as he walked through it towards a door outside of which lurked, or tried to in Danny’s case, two familiar young figures.

They fell aside without a word to let us pass and as we did so I glanced at Danny to give him a smile and a nod of greeting. He nodded back but I noticed with surprise how changed he seemed. Instead of his usual cheerful demeanour he looked drawn and pale, scared even.

But I didn’t have a chance to talk to him as Bung pushed open the door into a room at the rear of the building and led me through. In the dim and distant past I guess it must have been some kind of stockroom, stacked high with tins of beans and racks of canned meat, but now was serving as some kind of a meeting room.
Inside, two chipped metal-legged Formica tables had been pushed together board room style, around which were gathered a set of mostly familiar faces in varying degrees of unwelcoming scowl that checked me at the doorway.

What the hell had I walked into here, I wondered. And more to the point, was I going to walk out of it again?

Wibble nodded Bung and me towards two spare plastic stacking chairs that were empty at the far end of the table. It felt as if everyone’s eyes were following me as I reluctantly followed Bung round to the spaces left for us, which I noticed were at just about the furthest point from the door. Although, as I pulled my seat out from under the table and sat down, I tried to console myself with the thought that any idea of escape from the room was pretty academic anyway, as I would still need to get past a security crew on a war footing to exit the clubhouse.

No, I was here for good or ill I decided, as I looked around the room and met the intent states of the silent faces and took stock of my situation. It looked and felt like we had interrupted a council of war.

 

Wibble broke the silence after the scrape of our chairs on the lino flooring, asking Bung, ‘Did he speak to the cops?’

 

‘I think so,’ said Bung matter of factly, without bothering to look at me.

Wibble just shrugged, ‘OK, well, it’d be the sensible precaution to take so let’s just assume that he did shall we? I guess you’re a sensible man in that regard aren’t you?’ he said, his gaze switching to nail me in my chair.

‘I try to be as careful as I can,’ I said warily, not knowing where this was going, but not caring for it either.

 

‘Well then, let’s all be careful men too shall we?’ said Wibble, turning to address the meeting in general.

 

I thought the plate of biscuits on the table was a nice touch.
8 Business planning
To my left as I faced down the table was Wibble.

Beside him, the blue and white colours of the Rebels’ cuts were in stark contrast to those of the Menaces surrounding them, sat Stu and Gibbo, the Rebels’ national sergeant at arms. It had to be the first time any members of The Rebels had ever sat on a chair at a Brethren clubhouse I guessed, at least without being tied to it that was.

To my right, facing them on the opposite side of the table, were Thommo and beyond him, one of his Cambridge crew sidekicks whom I’d seen backing him up at the Toy Run confrontation. From where I was sitting I couldn’t see his tabs but I guessed he would be the Cambridge VP.

Opposite Bung and me at the far end of the table, and with their backs to the safely closed door was Scroat – there I guessed in his capacity as The Brethren’s sergeant at arms. That also explained Charlie’s presence outside the door. Since Scroat was Charlie’s sponsor as a first tagalong and now striker, in the way that Bung was Danny’s, wherever Scroat went, Charlie was expected to follow.

Beside him sat another Brethren whom I’d not seen before, this one with a head shaved bald that had somehow made the rolls of fat that were showing around the back of his neck above a thick gold chain all the more noticeable when I’d come in. So this had to be Toad, the third member of the triumvirate, here to represent the interests of the northern charters.

Toad was a man to be careful of. While I’d never seen him before I still knew about his fearsome, even by Brethren standards, reputation.

Ordinarily I would have assumed that he would therefore be something of a natural ally for Wibble. After all, as northern Brethren they would have a shared history, but I reminded myself, that was probably a dangerous assumption to make, given their current respective positions.

Toad, like Thommo, was one of the barons that Wibble would be having to deal with.

*
I was wrong about the meeting though.

Wibble was obviously in the chair and as he called it to order I quickly realised it wasn’t so much a council of war, it was more like some kind of a kangaroo court.
And despite it being on his home turf, equally obviously, it was Thommo who was in the dock.

Bung hadn’t been joking with his witness for the prosecution crack. He had been entirely serious.

‘Right then,’ announced Wibble looking down the table and directly at me with an expression that made me want to crap myself, ‘now that you’re here, we can begin.’

Begin what? I wondered for a moment, before Wibble pulled a rolled up newspaper from where it had been stuffed into the pocket of the jacket slung over the back of his chair and threw it across to land in front of me.

‘Recognise it?’

I hardly needed to glance at it to know what he was talking about, but just to make sure he had it folded to the page of my report. So as I suspected, that was what the silent eye treatment had been about when I walked in.

I decided I had no choice but to try to front out anything that came. ‘Of course I do,’ I said, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘I wrote it, you know that. So what?’

‘So what we want to know is, where the fuck did you get it?’ he demanded. ‘The police, like it says,’ I answered.
‘Yeah, but who?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’

There was a growl from the general direction of Scroat which Wibble quelled with a swift flick of his eyes. I never let my gaze switch for a moment. Wibble was my ticket out of here, I knew that. He was my only hope, but equally I knew, only so long as I helped myself by doing whatever it was that he wanted me to. The only trouble with that was, that I didn’t know what role he wanted me to play.

The only things I did know for sure were that none of the outlaws were used to anyone saying no to them. But equally, none of the outlaws would have anything but contempt for a grass.

‘What the fuck do you mean you can’t tell us that?’ Wibble demanded, his voice level and cool, but undeniably threatening.

For an eternal moment I didn’t say anything. He waited, unblinking, as I made up my mind. I had a choice to make, which way I was going to play it. I would have one go at this. And if I got it wrong, the chances were that life was about to get seriously unpleasant.

I risked a shrug and a shake of my head. ‘I’m sorry Wibble but I just can’t. I’m a journalist. We don’t do that. I can’t reveal my sources.’

Pins dropping would have been noisy. I had just said no to a room full of senior outlaws. This could be about to become extremely ugly extremely quickly.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Wibble’s face as I desperately searched for some sign as to whether I’d picked the right option.

 

‘You what?’ he asked quietly.

I swallowed. Was he giving me a chance to change my mind? A last chance to put a murderous djinn back in the bottle? There was no clue in his voice either way.

There was no sense in backtracking now I thought. That would be a show of weakness, it would just add the abject cowardice which I was certainly feeling to the crime of being a grass in their eyes.

So I answered him back in what I hoped would come out in as level and strong a voice as I could manage.

 

‘Look, it’s simple Wibble. We don’t snitch. Not to you. Not to anyone. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’

 

‘OK?’ Wibble asked the room without looking around.

 

Out of the periphery of my vision there were nods. I guess I probably remembered to start breathing again about then.

 

*

 

Wibble let his gaze drop and I slumped back in my chair feeling lucky to be alive and not pissing blood as Wibble’s glare turned to focus on Thommo. ‘So is this right?’ he demanded jerking his thumb in the direction of the paper.

 

Thommo just shrugged in response.

 

‘I don’t know what he’s on about. We were doing some business up that way sure but so what?’

‘You were muscling in on the goatfuckers and zombies turf like it says?’ Thommo just shrugged again. ‘I don’t know where he got that,’ he said, darting me a look of pure venom.

‘I don’t give a flying fuck where he got it, that wasn’t the question. Is it right?’

 

It looked as though Thommo had decided that offence was the best form of defence.

It was just normal business, he told them. Sure they had some business up that way but since when were the zombies’ and goatfuckers’ patches sacrosanct? And since when did The Brethren need to get anyone’s permission to work a patch anywhere?’

‘And bring all this crap down on everyone?’ Wibble demanded grimly. ‘How were we to know it would end up like this?’

‘But you know the policy,’ Wibble overrode him, ‘never to give any excuse that might let those squaw bastards in.’

 

‘How the fuck were we meant to know they’d go running to the squaws?’

It seemed a reasonable point to me but I wasn’t going to interrupt. What the hell, it wasn’t my party and God knows I didn’t owe Thommo and his bunch any favours.

Thommo was still defending himself.

 

‘You want us to push the stuff, so that’s what we were doing. That’s how you do business, you know that.’

 

But it looked as though Wibble and the others had heard enough. ‘So you started this. So you need to finish this,’ he told Thommo, ‘and soon.’

 

Then he added, ‘Or if you can’t handle it we’ll come in and do it for you. Is that what needs to happen here?’

 

‘You?’ Thommo snorted, ‘You couldn’t handle shit.’

 

‘You watch your fucking mouth,’ snarled Toad from the far side of the room in a warning tone.

 

‘So what are you going to do?’ demanded Wibble.

 

‘Now you want me to talk business is that it? In front of him?’ asked Thommo, nodding at me.

Wibble ignored him.
‘What are you going to do?’ he repeated.
‘Well, we know where the squaws’ P lives.’
Wibble looked relieved.

‘Well at least that’s something,’ he said, ‘Don’t tell us anymore, we don’t want to know, but make sure it gets done, and soon.’

 

‘And gets done right,’ added Toad for emphasis.

The meeting broke up with Thommo and his VP effectively dismissed from the office at his own clubhouse. Scroat and Stu wandered out together, I had the impression that they had separate business that they wanted to discuss.

I stayed sitting at first, waiting for my cue from Bung or Wibble. After the look Thommo had given me I wasn’t planning on going anywhere in this clubhouse on my own. Then Bung started to get up and I went to follow him. He was my lift after all and it would be a long walk back to town without him.

But as it happened, it turned out Wibble wanted a word or two anyway once the room had cleared to just us and Toad.

‘Where the hell do you think you’re going? We’ve not finished with you, not by a long way. You sit down and shut the fuck up,’ he snarled as he saw me move.

I sat back in surprise. I thought he had got what he wanted out of me so I hadn’t been expecting an assault like this.

He let me know he was angry at me for having written the story, although it wasn’t clear at first which aspects he was particularly concerned about. Certainly the way that it suggested that The Brethren had some responsibility for starting the war seemed to be a major part of the problem. It didn’t help with the PR image he was interested in I guessed, but then, I just reported the news, I didn’t make it.

‘Why not check this shit with us first?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve got a Brethren support patch on,’ he pointed at the LLH&R tab on my side, ‘more than that, you’ve got my fucking support patch on, so you’d better start thinking seriously about what that means.’

‘You spent enough time with Damage,’ Toad interjected for the first time. ‘We know that and we can see it in your book. You ought to know how it works.’
I’d heard Toad’s nickname amongst The Brethren was ‘The Terminator.’ While Scroat as sergeant at arms was in overall charge of club security, like any serious club The Brethren had some members who were more up for the wet jobs and war than others. In fact there were some who positively liked it and whenever needed would go out of their way to get involved in seeking out and taking down the club’s enemies.

And at the top of that list in The Brethren as I understood it, sat Toad’s name.

The unspoken implication in Toad’s nickname was that he was the club’s key hit man whenever there was serious trouble with another club. Even other members of the club could sound slightly nervous when they spoke about him.

‘Why do you think we make guys take so long to go through being a striker?’ asked Wibble suddenly from out of left field.

I threw my mind back to those long afternoons sitting in Long Lartin listening to Damage and gradually starting to understand how he saw the world. And I knew it wasn’t just being about being a striker. The testing never really stopped in The Brethren, there was the formal vote at the end of your first year to catch those who might kick back and slacken off after getting in, and in truth, the club could pull your patch at anytime, busting you back down to striker or even out altogether,
pour encourager les autres
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