Heavy Duty Attitude (2 page)

‘Of course,’ he answered steadily, the smile still on his face but nowhere near to touching his eyes which were boring into mine, ‘but just because you can ask anything you like, doesn’t mean that I have to answer, does it?’

‘No,’ I quickly surrendered.

 

‘Well I didn’t really expect an answer to that one anyway, but I’ve got to try,’ I said making an effort to recover the situation.

He left me on the hook for a moment or two, his expression not changing a bit, as though he was silently and deliberately calculating whether to have a problem with what I had said, or not. But, he was also saying in his silence, he didn’t need to calculate what he would do if he decided to take it that way. We both knew what he would do, crowd and CCTV or no crowd and no CCTV.

Then he let me go.

 

‘I suppose so,’ he agreed, leaning back again and looking a little more relaxed after that demonstration of his power.

‘How are his wife and kid? Are they OK?’ I asked, partly to change the subject a bit, and partly out of genuine interest, ‘It’s been a while since I saw them.’

‘Shaz and Lucy? Oh they’re fine, they’re being looked after.’

‘Good,’ I said and meant it. I had liked Sharon; Damage’s petite and pretty wife was a talented artist, and Lucy had seemed a great kid.
‘So,’ I said, a bit more nervously but relieved that he still seemed to want to talk to me, ‘can I try asking you another question?’

‘Sure,’ he said, the smile wider now, ‘Christ, you really are a nosy bugger aren’t you? Beats me how Damage put up with you for so long.’ ‘Sorry,’ I shrugged, ‘it’s just the job, that’s what I do for a living, quiz people.’

 

‘And then you write it all down?’

‘Well, some of it anyway,’ I said, a bit more defensively than I had intended. ‘You always have to leave some stuff out as a journalist, and of course you can’t reveal your sources.’

‘Yeah, I get that and that’s good,’ he said looking up and back over my shoulder, ‘Ah here we are.’

‘There you go,’ said the full patch man-mountain of a Brethren as he arrived back at our table to serve me with a skinny latte and a couple of sugars. Not something that I had ever really expected to happen.

‘Thanks,’ I said automatically, ‘that’s great.’

 

‘’Salright,’ he shrugged and slid back onto his bench in the booth behind Wibble.

‘So,’ I said ripping open the paper spills of sugar and tipping them into the tall glass, ‘if you don’t want me to ask you questions, what can I do for you?’

As I dipped the spoon into the drink and absentmindedly watched the white milk and dark coffee swirl together as I stirred, I heard what he wanted to talk about.

And much to my surprise, for obvious reasons in some ways, but equally as the most obvious topic in others, what he wanted to discuss was Damage. And I was interested to know why.

‘Like the man said, the evil a bloke does lives on after them, the good that guys do gets buried with them.’

 

Now it was my turn to smile.

 

‘What is this?’ I asked, ‘Friends, Brethren, citizens, you come not to praise Damage, but to bury him?’

‘Something like that,’ he agreed.
‘Well then,’ I continued, in a bit of a mock declamatory tone, ‘so let it be with Damage. The noble Wibble hath told you Caesar was ambitious.’

His eyes narrowed a bit as he looked at me.
‘Are you taking the piss?’ he demanded.

‘No, I said hurriedly, ‘I’m just thinking about your quote. I was trying to remember how the rest of it went.’

I was dredging it up now, from a year sitting there at school in Mr Majewski’s English class. How did it go now I asked myself? And then I remembered that it ran something like,
if Damage was ambitious, it was a grievous fault and Damage has paid for it grievously
. It just seemed appropriate really, but possibly not one for sharing with Wibble just at this moment and bearing in mind how our conversation had started.

‘Did you tell anyone you were coming here to meet me?’ he asked from out of left field.

 

I shrugged in acknowledgement. There didn’t seem to be a need to say anything else.

‘Sensible,’ he nodded, ‘to take precautions I mean.’
I knew straight away what he was referring to.

‘So did you like it?’ I asked. I had always wondered, and I had never heard anything from the club since it had come out. For months after publication I had half expected, half dreaded the bikers turning up at my door one day to wreak retribution. Knowing what they were undoubtedly capable of, in some ways the silence had been as unnerving.

‘Personally?’ he asked.
‘Well, yes I suppose so, but I really meant the club.’
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment’s consideration, ‘I guess I did.’ ‘Even with what it was saying?’

I was conscious that the autobiography I had helped Damage to write hadn’t held back from discussing how some of The Brethren made their money and what sort of business they conducted to get it. And I was very conscious as I sat there in front of him, that Wibble had been talked about specifically. In fact, in some ways when I thought about it, Wibble had been the sole living member of The Brethren who could in any way be implicated in a crime from what Damage had told me. I had always wondered exactly why Damage had told me that when he had always been so careful about what aspects of business he had been prepared to discuss.

‘Yeah, even with that.’

I was curious now. I had never expected to have this opportunity to talk about it with someone like Wibble, who was after all, as high up in the club as you could go in this country. ‘Why?’ I asked.

His answer surprised me a bit. ‘It took us seriously I suppose,’ was his considered judgement.

‘It treated the club with respect and wasn’t full of the usual crap about biting the heads off chickens, or weird gangbang sex shit. At least it gave Damage a chance to talk straight about who we are and why.’

The way he had asked me to, I thought.

‘Oh don’t get me wrong,’ he said as he saw the expression on my face, ‘a whole lot of the guys were seriously pissed off at it, so don’t make that mistake. There were a load of them that just wanted to stomp you on principle for writing about us, but I squashed that.’

‘Well thanks for that,’ I said a bit weakly.

‘Mind you if we really hadn’t liked it, we wouldn’t need to be getting you here for a chat,’ he continued matter of factly, ‘so don’t make that mistake either.’

He pointed a finger at me and mimed shooting me in the head.

‘If you were going to be hit, we wouldn’t be meeting up like this, you’d just be dead mate. Bullet in the back of the head in a car park. Bomb under the car. There’s all sorts of ways.’

As well I knew from what Damage had told me.

‘Besides which, we live in a surveillance society you know,’ he carried on conversationally as if discussing how I might be murdered with me was the most natural thing in the world, and waved around him, ‘CCTV everywhere, and everyone you meet carrying a camera all the time.’

‘You know,’ he said turning away to gaze round the room at the crowded tables before coming back to stare at me, ‘I bet at least someone in here is filming us even now on the sly.’

‘You reckon?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, sure. Here we are, three Brethren having a meet with a civilian. It’s quite a sight if you’re some drone out with the wife and kiddies and just popped into the services for a burger and fries, and yet, look around you.’

I glanced around the room myself. Then I looked back at him. ‘So?’ ‘So, did you see how everyone is so studiously not watching us,’ he laughed quietly, ‘and failing miserably?’

He was right of course. I had felt the duck and flick away of people’s eyes, terrified to accidentally make contact, as soon as I had looked around from our table. Not surprisingly it would make sense that someone amongst the crowd had their mobile out, video running and pointed awkwardly, and they hoped discretely, in our direction to capture a wavering image of two men leant forwards together in a booth while his bodyguards watched the crowd either side. If it was me and I was a civilian, I’d have been filming it too, so I could show it to my mates.

‘Is that why you guys have become so much more relaxed about photos?’ I asked.

The time was, not so long ago, when no Brethren wanted to have their photograph taken at all and any request would be met with the brusque refusal
because we aren’t poseurs
, if the asker was lucky. But these days The Brethren, in common with some of the other big six clubs had become open to pictures, and charters all around the world had their own websites with crew pictures emblazoned on them. As ever with a lot of these things the Angels had led the way with a book of photographs becoming a best seller and had even produced a calendar featuring members, each pictured with their bike and a tasty model just to keep the punters’ interest levels up.

‘Yeah, we just have to work with it these days.’

Which I guess meant having to take it into account when doing
business
. It was definitely time to change the subject I decided, but to my surprise, Wibble got there first.

‘Hey then, let me ask you a question.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘what?’

He sort of hesitated, as if working out the best way to phrase what he wanted to say. ‘If I said I hadn’t,’ he started finally, ‘killed him, I mean. Well, would it make a difference? Would you really believe me?’ There was no hint of any emotion in the question at all. He had asked it completely flatly, as if it was a simple matter of fact query, the answer just to be filed away somewhere for information.

And I really didn’t know how to answer that one. Just how safe would an honest response be?

I had written a book about Damage. But only because Damage had been speaking to me in the months before he was killed, which I had always afterwards assumed was on the basis that he knew he was going to be hit.

Wibble was the only living member of The Brethren that Damage had in any way implicated in a crime in what he had told me, and after he had been murdered, Wibble had taken over his role as President of the Freemen, effectively the top spot in the UK Brethren.

You could never prove anything, it was all circumstantial, but there was quite a chain of events there.

And I couldn’t quite work out whether he was trying to tell me something or just being curious. Confused, I filled what could rapidly become an uncomfortable silence as he sat still and potentially deadly across the table from me, waiting for an answer, with a question of my own.

‘Well if you didn’t, who did?’

 

He nodded slowly at my response as he evaluated it. ‘Now that,’ he said at last, ‘is a very good question.’

 

‘And do you know the answer to it?’

 

‘Well,’ he said, effectively shutting the topic down again, ‘that’s another thing that you can ask, but I might not answer.’

 

‘But you know stuff don’t you?’ he asked changing tack.

‘Stuff? What do you mean?’ I replied. It wasn’t feeling exactly like a verbal fencing match, not yet at least, but it was starting to feel like a bit of a warm up to one, a wary arms length circling, sword tip to sword tip, with an on edge feeling that at any moment a sudden lunge could come.

‘Damage told you a lot didn’t he? A lot more than went into your book I mean? Not everything went in, did it?’

There didn’t seem to be any point in denying it so I shrugged. ‘Yes. I spent a hell of lot of time interviewing him, we covered a lot of ground, talked about a lot of things but when you come to do a book like that, there’s only so much you can put in. You have to edit, make decisions, leave bits out.’ ‘Makes sense,’ he nodded, ‘did you tape all of it?’

‘Yes, it’s the easiest way. Much better than just relying on making notes if the interviewee’s up for it. That way you can make sure you’ve got everything.’

‘And he didn’t mind?’
‘No, he was cool with it.’
‘I bet there’s some interesting stuff there.’

‘Could be,’ I said more warily now, unsure now as to where this was heading.

 

It was definitely time to change the subject, I thought.

 

‘So, getting back to my question, I said, ‘what can I do for you? I take it this isn’t just a social call or the start of a book club?’

‘You ride don’t you?’ he said unexpectedly, ‘Damage said you did.’ There was no getting out of that then, ‘Yes I do,’ I admitted cautiously.

I had ridden as a kid, in my early twenties I had even constructed the world’s worst chopper out of an old Z400 twin, a peanut tank and a pair of six-inch over fork extensions, rebuilding the engine in my bedroom, which had really done for the carpet. These days I still had an old Guzzi 850 sitting in the garage. It was more a toy now than the all consuming passion it had been, and one that in truth I admitted to myself, I hardly ever used, but I still had it and it was insured for the odd weekend blast when it was sunny and I felt like a breath of fresh air. Even though I was such a fair-weather biker these days, at least I understood something about riding that had given me some point of contact for talking to Damage.

‘Well then, come for a ride with us.’
I could hardly believe my ears.
‘You want me to come on a Brethren run?’ I squawked.

‘Yeah. You can tagalong at the back,’ he said dismissively, although of course that was where I would have to ride given what my status as a civilian would be on such an outing.

I was still trying to process the bizarre idea of The Brethren inviting a journalist along on one of their runs, and what’s more inviting me as someone who had written what I had about them.

‘But why do you want me?’
‘To see for yourself what we do, what we’re about.’
‘But why?’ I asked, in danger of starting to sound like a broken record. ‘PR.’
‘PR?’
‘Yeah,’ he shrugged, ‘we want to start to generate some good PR.’

It seemed from what he told me that The Brethren had decided that they wanted to polish their reputation. As a club they already did a lot of stuff for PR purposes; charity runs, bike shows and so on, but now he told me they were looking to move on from this. They wanted to open up a bit, become more public about who they were and what they did. They didn’t want to drop the mystique, and they didn’t want to be fucking poseurs, but they had decided that it was time to be less secretive than they had been in the past and it was time to actively put a positive spin on what the club was and what it did.