Cracking Up (4 page)

She hung up. Kaylee, sick of all the shady junkie stunts and goings on, had in fact moved out. She’d packed her bags and fled to her friend’s house on the other side of town, but due to his drug-infested lifestyle he had barely noticed. “Me bird’s ditched me,” he told me. “She reckons I can’t get off the gear. Fucking bollicks, man! I’ve phoned the clinic up. They’re fucking fully booked. It’s going to take two weeks just to get a lousy appointment. Fucking birds, mate, there’s no pleasing them. If they didn’t have a cunt, you’d have nothing to do with them.”

“Don’t worry, mate, she’ll be back.”

“Fucking too right she’ll be back,” he said. “She said I was too wrapped up in me-self. Don’t know what she’s gassing on about. Been watching too much fucking Jeremy Kyle, she has. That gobbie twat’s got a lot to answer for, mate. Givin these birds bright ideas. If I could get me mitts round his scrawny throat, I’d fucking throttle the cunt.”

I started building another spliff and he got busy fixing up another syringe full of liquid oblivion. He pumped it into his veins with total narcotic glee and I couldn’t help but think that maybe Kaylee had a point about smackheads being the ultimate selfish bastards.

The fix kicked in and his lids closed and the head flopped forward, his chin dropped onto his chest. He was crashed out on the couch, drooling and mumbling, in his own secluded zombie-fied zone.

I finished off the spliff, distracted by some crappy Emerdale soap opera on the telly. I smoked the loaded spliff to the end, if only to make the badly acted scenes of make-believe human drama more riveting. But it bored me shitless and I dozed off.

It was late at night and I was on the stairwell of the flats; it was dark because the landing lights had been vandalised, smashed up. I was legging it up the piss-soaked stairs and dodging the heroin needles discarded by minging bagheads. I could see the light at the top, bright as the mid-day sun, but then I heard footsteps behind me, in the dark, catching me up. My heart was pounding because I felt like I was being stalked and couldn’t move my feet fast enough. Sweat was pouring out of me and there was a heart-stopping panic as something grabbed hold of my shoulder.

I bolted upright, rubbing my eyes with sweat oozing out of every pore, my heart thumping loudly in my chest and I was hyper-ventilating. What a nightmare, fucking scary.

Bangerz was still in his deep coma and it was time to set off down the road to meet up with a proper psycho bastard, a lunatic thug, a menacing character with murderous tendencies in his mind, or to put it another way, my opo Spermy.

4.

It was getting on now, going dark outside. I walked down the balcony and made for the lift. I really didn’t feel like walking down the stairwell after that spooky dream. The doors of the lift opened to reveal an obviously hammered and slack-bladdered young girl with her trackies and knickers pulled down, relieving herself indiscriminately, spraying the floor with booze-stinking urine.

I decided I’d give the lift a miss and went down the stairwell, three flights. I could hear dogs barking behind doors, all kinds of snarling, utterly vicious and menacing mutts. They sounded close enough to bite your ears off. But that didn’t stop the robbing, the thieving carried on and possessions stolen.

All of a sudden I clocked a bird in a pair of skin-tight jeans coming up the steps towards me. I stiffened and noticed she had a tube top on and it was stuffed with a pair of chicken fillets, fake titties. She was getting closer and smiled at me, showing chipped, mankie teeth and dead fish eyes. Fuck me, I thought, a baghead whore! The prozzie’s hair was fashioned in a mullet style, dyed purple and she had thick cherry red lipstick smeared all over her face. Rotten-looking and, to top it off, all the charm of a sledgehammer. “Fancy a gobble?” she said.

As she got in my face I noticed the fucking hands and checked out the Adam’s apple. The penny dropped, this cunt had bigger balls than Lilly Savage. She was a fucking geezer-bird, a raving transvestite, touting for a bit of business. It minced past me on the stairs, the arse was cut out of its jeans and it had no knickers on. A butt-plug stuck out of its arsehole. I shuddered and nearly puked. Fucking sick trannie pleb, strutting round the flats in six-inch heels with the arse hanging out of the back of its kecks. Coming on to punters and sucking them off in the seedy stairwells of a dread council housing building. Not a class act, I reckoned.

It loomed right in my face and I felt as though a cross-dressing geek had escaped from a carnival freak show.

“Remove yourself from me fucking sight,” I barked with venom, pulled out the handgun and pointed the thing at its crotch. “Or I’ll blow your fucking balls off!”

The trannie’s face dropped because it recognized the angry, screwfaced smirk of a gang banging hood rat ready to pounce and I knew it was shitting itself. I actually thought the butt-plug was going to come rocketing out at any second. It was snivelling, begging for mercy, steaming piss staining its jeans, dribbling down and ponding around its ankles. I shook my head in disgust and shot out of there double pronto because I was on a mission, meeting Spermy for a war council. I didn’t have time for HIV-infected trannie, baghead slags.

So off I traipsed to see Spermy. I had to go past the parade of shops by the primary school. There was a chip shop there and I fancied something like a bag of batter bits. I was nearing the chippy when I saw the brightest yellow Golf GTi parked up outside. It was plotted up in a no-parking zone, looking like a fucking canary with the engine running. The back windows were tinted and the front ones were rolled down and the tracks blaring out at full volume. I recognized the tune as Tinchy Stryder’s Game Over. In the driver’s seat sat someone with his head just popping up over the steering wheel. A bobble hat pulled down over his eyebrows and wearing a hoodie over the top. He looked about thirteen and his feet must’ve just about reached the pedals. Next to him sat a similar-looking kid with the same hood rat look. This one was hanging out the passenger window, a king-size spliff dangling from his kipper, shouting invites and making lewd gestures to a bunch of giggling young girls clustered around the entrance of the offie next to the chippy.

The girls were about fifteen but were tarted up to look eighteen and over. Fit and they knew it, very sexy-looking. They weren’t dressed for the cold January weather in their micro-minis and low cut tops. They were dolled up for a night on the town, stocking up on cheap vodka to stuff in their handbags and smuggle into the boozers where they’d be topping their bar bought orange juices up. They called out to me as I was walking past, urging me to get my cock out of my pants so they could take pictures on their mobile phones. They were shouting over, messing around, having a laugh because there was a load of them. Taking the piss out of the lone bloke for the crack. “What’s innit for me?” I joked back.

“A WANK!” came the cheeky reply. “If I can find me tweezers.”

I’d unintentionally played slap, bang, wallop into her hands: They all burst out laughing hysterically and I felt like a right twat.

A paranoid shudder jerked me out my red-faced embarrassment when out of the corner of my eye I spotted a scallie coming out of the chip shop, tucking into a steaming hot portion of chips. I could smell the Sarsons wafting on the air and I was dead jealous. Our eyes locked and, all of a sudden, it twigged; he was Mug Fam. In the same instant he stiffened, full of testosterone, and swaggered towards the motor. I went towards the chippy, screwing him out. I was posturing, projecting a carpet fitter’s walk. That’s when you walk like you’ve got a roll of carpet stuffed under each arm. Game face on, giving it the biggun but inside I was doing one, shitting myself.

He was getting into the back of the motor, not taking his eyes off me. He was in the back and I couldn’t see him through the blacked out windows but he must have been telling the two blurts in the front all about me because, in an instant, they swivelled, staring out the open window and tracking me, kill-hate in their narrowed eyes, burning holes. If looks could kill, as they say.

I could see their lips moving and though I couldn’t lip read, it wasn’t hard to imagine what they were chatting about. “Ju$tu$ Crew. Walking towards the chippy.”

“What? That fucker with the black hoodie up?”

“Fuck me! Yeh! He’s slipping.”

“Hand me the fucking BITCH. I’m going to fill this cunt in.”

The rear passenger window wound down and the lead rain-maker was pointed in my direction. The old adrenalin kicked in and I legged it as fast as you fucking like. I was keeping my head down, in a half-crouch. The tunes on their stereo were rudely interrupted by a what sounded like a series of fire-crackers going off. BRRRRR! Bullets whizzed through the night air and I felt a rush of wind past my ear, the slugs thudded into the brick wall behind me and the plate glass window of the chippy shattered. It was like a glass bomb going off, showering me with splinters and shards, as the adrenalin triggered a basic survival instinct and I dived and flattened myself on the ground. There was fucking havoc and bedlam going on all around. The crowd of screaming girls dispersed in a mad panic and scrambled as they tried to get inside the offie away from danger.

There was a fuck-off shriek of tires as they slammed on the accelerator and barrelled it out of there at speed. I bounced back to my feet and ran out in the middle of the road. There were tiny pieces of glass in my hair and my trainers were crunching the shards under foot. I pulled the banger out, steadying my arm enough to get a decent aim at the arse-end of the rapidly disappearing motor and squeezed one off. I hit the car body but was well off the mugs inside. The motor turned down a side street, they booted it and were gone, out of sight.

5.

I could hear the distant whine of sirens racing towards the incident and bid a hasty retreat in case I inadvertently got rounded up in the rapid police response to the fierce gun battle and headed off to my intended location, bolting round the corner and entering the narrow, secluded walkways of the south end of the estate before, finally, arriving at Lee’s ground floor flat.

I was greeted at the door by Lee, Spermy’s little missus. She looked in a right state, a nasty-looking dark purple bruise on her forehead, red eyes where the tears had been rolling down and trembling hands. “Ryan’s not here,” she said. “You’ve just missed him. He lost the plot and stormed off, but come in anyway.”

Ryan was Spermy’s proper name. We called him Spermy because his surname was Cummings.

Leanne had been his girlfriend for a year or so, but the relationship had hardly helped him reform his character during that time. Much to her annoyance Spermy had got himself a four month stretch in nick for a section 47 assault, which wasn’t exactly conductive to strengthening their relationship. She’d written him long, loving letters begging him to change his ways and get serious. He had promised her that he’d stay out of trouble and stick to a straight path when released, but it was just too easy to get caught up in the addictive adrenalin buzz of a criminally-minded outlaw lifestyle.

She was an exotic-looking bird, looked a bit like a young Melanie Sykes. She had a nicely shaped pair of melons and a packed pinch-able arse. She had a strut that would have made Naomi Campbell jealous. I couldn’t take my eyes of her shapely curves that would have made any bloke come in his kecks when they saw them wobble. I wondered if I was in with the chance of another leg over. Now that would have rounded the day off proper nicely.

She sat down on the couch across from me, sipping a glass of white wine with Coronation Street on the telly in the background. “You’ve just got here in time,” she said. “This is the worst day of me life. I was just about to swallow a bottle of paracetamol with this.”

I sat down in an armchair. “Don’t talk stupid,” I said. “What’s going on, anyway?”

“That bastard beat me up, Ow-wee! I’m all bruises and lumps. I can’t go out looking like this! I can’t go to work like this!”

She was a nice, law-abiding girl who got the bus to work in a PPI call centre everyday. Spermy always kept her short of money and walking funny, had writ her car off and was constantly cheating behind her back with other tarts.

“What did you do?”

She looked at me all pissed-off like; she was nursing a beating, after all. “What did I do? I’ll tell you what I did! I found his sneaky phone. The sly one he uses to call his other women. He came home, caught me looking through it and shouted at me to give him it back. I WANT ME FUCKING PHONE! The prick shouted. HERE’S YOUR FUCKING PHONE, CUNT! I shouted back and threw it at him. It hit him on the head, bounced off and smashed into pieces against the wall behind him. Then he went mental.”

I was listening, but looking around the room at the same time. The whole thing had obviously turned heated and gotten totally out of hand. He’d gone on the rampage, kicking off on her and smashing about the place like a fucking looney. He’d been a human whirlwind of destruction, smashing in cavity doors and punching holes in the plasterboard walls. In the end, he’d gone completely beserk and pounced on her like a big cat escaping from a cage left open. “Then I just remember seeing blood coz I had a white top on. I remember him headbutting me and then, after that, I don’t know what happened coz I was all in a bit of a daze.”

She rolled up her sleeve to show me bruises as big as dinner plates and bite marks on her arm. He’d bitten into her like she was a piece of KFC. “I’ve put some aloe vera cream on coz it helps with scars and that. Should be all right. They’ll heal up.”

“Fuck’s sake, Lee! What are you going to do?” I asked. I felt sorry for her because she was a really top girl and didn’t deserve to be breaking down in tears with the sheer stress and strain of being caught up in a messy relationship with a moody sociopath.

“Ryan might not be the best person to have around me, but he’s the only person I’ve got at the moment,” she said, momentarily deluding herself because I could see the misery in her eyes.

But her head was done in. She couldn’t really cope with having him around her any longer. She needed to put some space between them, get herself off to her mams who lived out of town and out of harm’s way. “Besides me and him spending some time together, there’s no point in us having this flat together. It’s not doing us any good coz I’m going go to court on the twenty third of January or I’m losing the flat coz of the rent arrears. He doesn’t care. He’s not paying no interest or nothing. He seems to think that everything pays for itself and I can’t do it on me own. It’s just digging me into a hole I don’t need to be in and it’s getting deeper by the day. I just don’t want it anymore. I really don’t. Honestly, I’m just going fuck off soon otherwise coz I just don’t want it anymore. It’s not the life I wanna live.”