Cracking Up (14 page)

She looked upon herself as a top shoplifter by trade, it was no trouble for her to get us kitted out in the latest designer labels from the various quality fashion outlets and sports shops in town at affordable prices. She had a heart of gold and would deck us out in the best clobber for the cut-price sum of a bag of nasty and a couple of rocks and the promise of a good drink later. The door swung both ways, we willingly and often laid drugs on her in times when money was short.

She had two kids, one of them in care and survived on benefits. She came from a big family but most of them had labelled her as a write-off and refused to have anything to do with her when she had informed them of her HIV-positive result. However, she had a couple of young, fit-as-you-like cousins that lived locally that gave her their support and did their best to help her out with the baby-sitting. They were always in and out the house and we couldn’t help but admire their bodily curves and perv such luscious sights while trying to cop for them.

We felt sorry for Donna because she’d lived through some really shitty times. To blot-out the memories of all the crap she’d been through she’d started out boozing and spliffing up, but then some arseholes had given her smack to have a go at. She’d gotten such a buzz, she really loved it. Getting pissed and stoned didn’t come close, so she prefered shooting up and entering the monged out zombie zone because it relieve her pain in that shitty situation. She was gutted about the absent kid and she had a social worker who didn’t give two fucks. Why should she? She was just doing a job and getting paid. Overloaded with case work and short on sympathy. It got right up the social worker’s nose if she had any roguish visitors such as me and Caspar round the house, so we had to drop by after hours when it was dark.

We’d often pop in and chill, have a chat and a good smoke. No harm in it really as she liked a bit of company and we were a welcomed distraction as she was fed-up being trapped on the dole with one kid at home, struggling with the fucking soul-destroying, nightmare of sponging and surviving off the benefits system. So she had turned to tooting a bit of rock and puffing on a weed to relieve the monotonous boredom and pressure of living in a run-down community riddled with poverty and despair.

We entered her house via the back door, there was a warm exchange of greetings but Donna was absorbed in some crappy reality show on TV in the front room and insisted we hurry up, come in and watch it with her. Cas joined her in the front room, lounging about and engaging her in conversation about the Celebrity Jungle show as a form of distraction, allowing me to sneak upstairs with the excuse that I needed to use the loo.

The gym bag slung over my shoulder felt heavy as I reached the landing. Donna’s ten year old lad, Carl, was in his bedroom, watching a DVD. He was on the Child Protection Register but we often played Grand Theft Auto or watched DVDs together. I wandered into his room, gave him a cursory hello and grabbed a chair. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the gym bag from which the handle, the grip and the trigger of the Big Mac stuck out.

“It’s a super squirter,” I joked.

“Give me a go?”

“Nah. It’s broke. Needs fixing,” I said, then changing the subject asked him what he was watching.

“Monsters Inc..”

“That’s a good un, that one,” I said, as he turned his attention back to the fillum, oblivious to the tool of murder and mayhem in the bag.

I pulled the chair up under the hatch to the loft, stepped on it and lifted the latch, stashing the Big Mac in the attic.

Back in the front room, Caspar and Donna were slurping mugs of tea and smoking a heavily loaded spliff, watching the telly. Celebrity Jungle was still on and the conversation was very enthusiastic as to the winning chances of the various celebs in camp. “Bristow, he’s got bigger tits than the birds in there”, “If that Rosemary’s fanny is as big as her gob, no wonder she can’t get a feller”, “I’d love to get me hands on that Helen’s mammary glands”.

All of a sudden some puffy singer, I think his name was Limahl, burst out crying, just like that, out of the blue, asking why everyone in the camp hated him so much and was excluding him. Celebrity paranoia had set in double bad. Fucking pathetic! All I know is that, it could have been a lot worse, he could have been stuck in the urban jungle like us lot, and we didn’t go around crying in front of everyone, for fuck’s sake.

Caspar offered me a toke on the draw but I declined, informing him that a visit to the come bag up the road was in order; I was rubbing my hands in anticipation of copping for a full-on shag from the girl with the free and easy reputation. Caspar told me it was sweet; he was going to wait for Donna’s cousin to come round. He reckoned he was on for the leg over with her. We parted company and I set off to the girl’s house to satisfy my libido. We’d meet up at his next day.

19.

The girl I was screwing was a good looker, well, good enough. I rode the fucking arse off her; she was tight, squirming and the best bunk-up I’d had in ages. Then we went to kip. It was hard getting off at first because she was snoring and farting, she also talked in her sleep, swearing her head off like she had Tourettes, which didn’t help with getting my head down. I went to kip some time after midnight. I was woken up about an hour later by something that sounded like the bedroom door being opened. Suddenly the lights went on and a big, scary and ugly-looking bloke was standing at the foot of the bed, staring at the two of us; a stray bra strewn casually over the end of the bed and lightly shit-stained knickers discarded on the floor like a trophy to mark my success in hitting the target. Go on, Ow-wee lad!

He could have easily beat the shit out of me and maybe that was the intention. I sat bolt upright, sleep and confusion clouding my brain as I struggled to comprehend what was happening. “What the fuck’s going on?” I said.

I knew the front door had been locked, and quickly came to the conclusion that this cunt must have been a key holder because he seemed to know his way around the kennel. Fuck’s sake, I thought. It’s her madman of a husband, breeching his restraining order, snarling and threatening to do us both in. “Chrissie, you’re a fucking slag!” he was bellowing at the humiliating sight of his naked missis in their conjugal bed with a strange bloke and a pussy full of crusty come. “I’M GOING TO MURDER THE PAIR OF YOU!” he screamed, and immediately went beserk.

She screamed. Shit! Fucking hell! I began to get a grip of the situation in front of me and flew out of bed in a sudden burst of adrenalised action as she sprang from the bed herself and frantically tried to cover herself up with a dressing gown while her dickhead old man went ballistic, taking his rage out on her and smashing about the place like a homicidal lunatic. He was big handy fucker, a whirlwind of human destruction, bitch smacking and bouncing her off the walls, threatening to do her in for being a DIRTY LITTLE SCRUBBER. She thought she was going to get killed and screamed the house down, it was turning really nasty.

I’d retrieved my trackie bottoms from the bedroom floor and quickly slid into them, as this feller was going to town on his missis, tossing her about like a salad. He slapped her across the face again. “You’re a dirty fucking whore!” he was shouting. “You’ve been shagging around again.”

He gave her another back-hander. “Cunt! You’d fuck anyone if they could get it up, wouldn’t you?”

He’d started to throttle her by now, she was choking and her eyes bulging out of their sockets; so I thought I’d better DO SOMETHING. “OI!” I shouted. “Get your fucking hands off her.”

“You what?” he snarled. “You cheeky little cunt, I’ll fucking rip you apart.”

He turned to face me and I could see he wasn’t happy by the way his eyes were widely manic, staring me out and working himself up, squaring up to me and ready to take the confrontation full on into a scrap. He was itching to get to grips with me, full of bad intentions and about to go bananas. Fucking hell, I felt like saying. I come up here just to be friendly to the missis and all you want to do is kick me cunt in. What’s your fucking problem? But I didn’t think it’d go down too well because he was obviously incensed that I’d had the gall to go nuts deep in his estranged missis. In fact, he didn’t like it one bit and was enraged; it was like a red rag to a bull, as the psycho punched the fuck out of me but I was not about to be had over or battered to fuck by anyone without putting up a fight, no matter how big and bad he was. It turned out that they’d split up because his bird had been shagging everyone behind his back, the fucking bitch. But the soft twat still loved her to bits and jealousy had bent his sanity out of shape. The chilling thing was: a few years later, he tried to burn the house down with his missis inside. Anyway, I managed to get in a few good digs, black his eye and kick him in the balls, but he was a fifteen stone scaffolder, a bit of a hard bastard and wasn’t about to give up that easily.

The bird was screaming. She went over to the window and screamed. You could hear her all over the street. She really screamed her lungs out. She just stood there and screamed like she was going mad. I didn’t think she was going to stop, she was giving me a fucking headache as were the blows from her feller’s huge fists. Then she leapt onto his back like a tigress, finally giving me the chance to reach under the pillow and pull out the Glock with a full clip. I cocked the slide hammer back, loading one in the chamber and pointing in his direction, issuing a warning for the bird to get the fuck out the way so I could blast her feller. I was in the middle of a fuck-off battle and wasn’t about to blink now. It wasn’t my fault his missus was a slag and allowed me to poke her dripping wet pussy. I was blazing with intense anger from the punch up, and all of a sudden he came to his senses and bolted down the stairs.

He legged it into the street, realizing he was a dead man running and there was nothing more he could do but to escape and survive the potentially lethal encounter. I got the rest of my kit on double pronto and charged after him, but wifey tried to block my way, trying to diffuse the situation before it went completely haywire. “What are you going to do with that?” she demanded, in a state of shock.

“Shut the fuck up and get out my way,” I commanded, shoving her out the way, following him into the street, clocking up and down for any sign of the fucker who’d just laid into me.

The bird had followed me into the street and was screaming at me, begging me LEAVE HIM ALONE. Lights came on up and down the street with all the commotion, curtains began to twitch as people looked on and witnessed the drama. It didn’t make the slightest difference to me and I carried on regardless, lost in a rush of adrenalin and the hunt was on, continuing to scan the street for any clue of the feller’s whereabouts.

After slowly prowling the street, looking for any sudden movement, I finally saw what I was looking for. Matey Boy leaped up from behind a car farther down the street and began sprinting, ducking behind cars as he moved down the road. I chased after him. As we ran, I pointed the weapon in his direction and took a shot at him. A loud crack rang out, a bullet winged down the street. Shit! It missed him spectacularly and smashed straight through a car windscreen, while nosey twats twitching their curtains backed away, trying to avoid stray gunfire.

“Come out, you fucking prick, I can fucking see you,” I bluffed, trying to smoke him out.

“Put the shooter away and we’ll have a straightener,” he shouted back, praying for a fair fight.

“Fuck a straightener! I’m coming to do you in,” I said, my heart was thumping loudly in my chest. Matey Boy had ducked behind a parked car, but decided to make another run for it. I fired another shot off and the bullet ripped through the flesh of his arse. He staggered before falling in the road, howling in pain and crawling in agony. When the ambo and the armed bizzies arrived he would insist he was the victim of a ballied-up home invader himself and mention sweet fuck all about the real culprit. No one on the estate would dare do the police’s dirty work for them; they might as well have signed their own death warrant. It didn’t pay to be a grass in any situation because the lads knew where to you lived. The lads would burn down your house in the middle of the night with you and your family inside.

The smell of cordite wafted in the air and the entire street seemed to have come alive now; so I spun on my heels and headed back down to the tart’s house. She was crying and screaming, insisting she was going to bubble me up to the coppers. I grabbed her by the throat and pressed the shooter up against her temple. “You’ll keep your fucking mouth shut and tell your old man to do the same. Or I’ll do the fucking both of you, you dirty little grass.”

She thought she was going to get topped and wriggled free of my grip, legging it in a blind panic back into her house. I put the safety on the burner and stuffed it down my trackies in the small of my back, then trotted calmly down the street, weaving my way to Donna’s house through the network of ginnels and alleys because it wouldn’t be safe to use the streets as Matrix units would have been summoned.

I wrapped the nine milli in a plackie bag and stashed it in her garden, burying it in a flower bed. In the distance I could hear the Matrix swopping down on the estate, pounding through the alleyways. My temples were throbbing, my heart beating wildly and sweat was dripping from every pore as I sneaked into Donna’s house.

But she had heard all the shitty goings ons and came downstairs. She was wide awake and a tad irate. “What the fucking hell’s going on, Ow-wee? What have you gone and done now?” she demanded.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I told her, as I ran past her and up the stairs, with no looking back. “Switch all the lights off and go back to bed, will you.”

There was blood on my face and clothes, so she knew something was up. She was rushing up the stairs after me.

I went straight to the bathroom. I slammed the door shut, locked it and began filling the bath with hot water. The tub of water quickly turned red as the blood fell from my face into the bath. I reached for the washcloth and a bar of soap, began cleaning the blood and gun residue off me. Donna was outside the door, knocking again and again, demanding to know what had happened. I carried on scrubbing myself up, but told her to phone Caspar and get him to bring me a change of clothes.