Heavy Duty Trouble (The Brethren Trilogy) (15 page)

His response had surprised me,
Sometimes
institutions need individuals to take great actions to reinvigorate them
.

I guessed it was from the same play book as Charlie was now following.
The
old
saying about a
pples and trees sprang to mind.

*

Bung went out to get pizza, it was his turn.

It left just me and Scroat together, not a situation I relished.

Unlike my chats with Bung, Scroat and I normally just sat in silence. On one of our jail trips Bung had hit the shop at a service station and loaded up on stuff to pass our time here which was now scattered across the room, airport novels, the more rocket launchers involved the better, the current month’s Harley and custom bike mags, and a fine selection of illustrated journals for adult gentlemen from the top shelf.

Scroat was lying on his mattress, study
ing a bike write up in
American-
V
when I broke the silence.

‘So how is it going to end?’ I asked.

Scroat looked up and regarded me with his usual contempt.

‘How’s all what going to end?’

‘All this shit that we’re involved in here. All this talking between Wibble and Charlie?’

‘For Wibble?’

‘Yes,
all right
, for Wibble
,
’ I said, an answer to that would be the start
,
although obviously I had concerns closer to home that I was really focused on.

‘Well, you know as well as I do what the answer is to that one,’ he said, ‘So how do you think this ends for fuck’s sake? And they all lived happily ever after?’

With two claim
a
nts to the post of P,
I knew
this was
fundamentally
a power struggle
.
And in a power struggle you
could
onl
y have two outc
omes, either you were the winner, or you were the loser.

And if Wibble lost, he wasn’t going to have a quiet retirement. The Brethren didn’t work like that. You might retire in good standing if you were a soldier with long service and you
had served your time
, but at Wibble’s level, with what he knew and with what risk he would pose to anyone still in the club, if he ever talked, the only way out was in a box.

*

Bung came in through the door bearing the familiar
cardboard containers
which were beginning to pile up in the corner of the room.

He clocked what Scroat was reading.

‘Hey d’you know why bikes are better than broads?’

‘
Cos
they only whine when there’s something really wrong?’ offered Scroat as a
punch line
.

‘No,’ he said with a wide grin across his face, ‘it’s
cos
your bike doesn’t bitch about you reading other bike magazines.’

*

Thursday 18
th
February
2010

Outside visiting hours we had nothing to do but hide out in the room and kill time as best we could.

And to make things worse, there was no jail visit today, neither Bung nor Scroat would say why, which just left us kicking our heels inside even longer than usual.

Around seven or so that evening,
Bung was explaining to me about how he saw the split from the States while Scroat lounged over on his side of the room. There was no furniture other than the mattresses on the floor that we slept o
n
so we had pushed them up against the walls so we could prop ourselves up when we wanted to sit rather than sprawl.

‘We’
d got
tired of kicking up to the
States
,
’ he said, ‘that’s all. T
ired of being told what to do
. T
ired of getting dragged into their beefs with other clubs
. J
ust fucking tired of all their
Yank
bullshit.’

Nothing to do with the fact that
Charlie
, Wibble and the UK club already
had
the
mselves organised now
,
I wondered to myself. With their pipeline so long established the UK club didn’t
need
contacts across the rest of the Brethren
w
orld
now
to run their business. They were
talk
ing
straight to the Columbians
these days for the gear
,
and there were enough independent gangsters knocking about
if you knew where to look
that a quick flight to Tiraspol in Trans-Dniestr with a suitcase full of hard currency could probably sort you out all the ex Warsaw Pact firearms you’d ever need short of a major war.

But that wasn’t Bung’s agenda by the sound of it.

‘Without the
Yank
s we can get rid of the crap
,
’
he was saying, ‘
We can go back to being a proper bike club, not part of some wannabe international gangster mafia.’

‘Is that what you’re looking to do?’ I asked, probably sounding a bit surprised
he was talking like this in front of Scroat
, ‘
G
et out of the business end of it?’

‘
Shit yeah,’ he said
.
‘
Just look what happened as soon as we sorted stuff out with the Rebels. All of a sudden we could s
top
having to
look under our cars every time we
wanted to g
o out,
we stopped being a
target
every time we went out for a ride, and for what? All because
of some shitty war over in the US
that we’ve got nothing to do with? Sod that for a game of soldiers!
Who needs it for fuck
’
s sake?
’

‘So you
’d
get the best of both worlds?’

‘Exactly.’

This it seemed was too much for
Scroat
to put up with, as he
butted in
.

‘
Oh fucking dream on
,
it’ll never happen and you know it
,’ he objected. ‘
There’s no fucking way the club’s getting out of the business end of it and that’s that
.’

‘Says who?’ demanded Bung
.

‘Says me, for one, and says Charlie,’ retorted Scroat.

And that was it, off
they went again for round sixty-
four of their ongoing needle match about where the club was going and why that lasted for a good half hour before Scroat grumpily called it off with ‘
Fuck i
t
. P
izza time?
’

‘
Yeah
,’
said Bung,
‘
your turn.
’

It was
a
measure
,
I thought
,
of how seriously they were taking the Loki threat that they were going themselves. Normally I’d never expect to see a patch doing something as menial as fetching pizza,
that’s
what God invented strikers for after all. But
out at the safe house there were no strikers at their beck and call.

‘
OK,
OK,
I’m off,
’ Scroat said, pushing himself up from where he’d been sat on his mattress, leant against the wall
.
‘
T
he usual?
’

‘
Yeah
,’ said Bung, ‘the works’
.

I didn’t get asked of course
,
as he headed out of the door
. As far as Scroat was concerned I’d take what I was given.

*

Unsurprisingly, i
t was easier to talk when Scroat wasn’t around.

‘Have you
ever
been inside Bung?’ I asked.

He seemed surprised that I’d even had to ask the question, ‘Yeah sure, of course
,
’
h
e said matter of factly.

‘When was that?’

‘Oh ages ago, before I was in the club even, when I was a squaddie.’

‘You were in the army?’ I asked
,
although now he said it, I could see him in uniform, It made a lot of sense about him and the way he carried himself
.
‘I didn’t know that,’ and then a typical bloody civilian question, ‘Which bit?’

‘Yeah, the paras. Did a few tours
in Ulster,
Germany, the usual.
I guess it’s part of why I got into the club
,’ he continued, ‘
It’s a bit like being signed up. You, your mates. It’s the same sort of
feeling
.’

‘L
,
L
,
H and R?’

‘Yeah, that’s it exactly. You come out after your term and other than the club, there’s nothing quite like it in
c
ivvie street.’

‘You didn’t fancy staying on? In the army I mean?’

‘Nah didn’t get the chance.’

‘Discharged?’

He laughed, ‘Too right I was.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Yeah, If we weren’t out bashing the Micks, I was too much
of a handful
.’

He seemed lost in a reminiscence for a moment. ‘I thought for a while about signing up with the
F
oreign
L
egion, they’re some tough fucks, but I didn’t fancy learning French and anyway, it would have been more of the same.’

‘What were you?’

‘Lance corporal. You know it’s the lance corporals that really get things done in the army. The Ruperts do the thinking, supposedly. The sergeants turn whatever they come up with into vaguely sensible stuff that needs to get done. But then it’s us, the lance corporals, we’re the ones who actually make it happen. We’re the ones that have to encourage, if you know what I mean, the lads to get out there and do it.’

‘Encourage?’ I asked.

‘Oh it gets pretty physical at times. But we do what we need to, to get the job done; and to stop any twat fucking it up for the others.

‘Like I said, in a squad it’s like the club. You watch each other’s backs, and you don’t fight for Queen and
c
ountry, you fight because your mates are in the same shithole you are and you all look after each other. If you ain’t ever been there then you won’t understand it.’

‘So what did you go down for then Bung?’ I asked.

‘I
was
on trial for murder,’ he said flatly.

‘Murder?’

‘Yeah, I didn’t do it, but that didn’t really matter, they still refused bail, kept me inside for six months or so until the trial was over.’

‘So what happened?’ I asked, intrigued.
I mean what else do you do of an evening to pass the time other than sit there, upstairs at a meth lab with a full patch
one-percenter
and chew the fat about his murder charge?

‘We’d had a long weekender on leave and me and
my mates
hit Hamburg on the Friday. We had a great time, Rheeperbhan, the works, pissed out of our heads. The Saturday night was more of the same. We were getting well tanked up and were getting loaded in a bar when this kraut skinhead teed off on my mate Chalkie. Other that the fact that he was black and the skinheads didn’t want him in their bar, I don’t really know what it was about, and Chalkie couldn’t remember fuck all about it the next day. Anyway before we knew what was happening, Chalkie was down and a bunch of this fucker’s mates were all piling in to have a piece. I guess they hadn’t clocked we were with him, so they were a bit surprised
when we just fucking jumped on ’
em.

‘It didn’t last long. They thought they were hard but then we
were paras. We
really were hard. So then there was this guy down on the ground, bleeding out from a broken bottle in the neck and we legged it as fast as we could go in our condition before the cops arrived.’

‘But they got you?’

‘Fuck yes, I mean, how difficult was
it
to track down a handful of pissed up squaddies who’d just been in a ruck?’