Jog On Fat Barry (5 page)

Chelsea was away to Wolves, and as the train hurtled us northwards toward what would be a 7-1 defeat, Murtagh Madden and me got tanked up on lager, before lobbing one of our own supporters out the window. His name was Darren Jacks, but we all called him ‘Bungalow’ because he had nothing upstairs. Anyway, Bungalow hit the sidings at seventy miles an hour and broke just about every bone in his body. And when the train stopped sometime later, and the police come aboard to arrest Madden and me, I was looking out the window at a field of rapeseed that shimmered like gold in the cold, late morning light, and wondering how my mum was going to explain away to Father Fayhee the reasons he had no altar boys to carry the cross and missal for him at mass tomorrow morning.

Mum never stopped praying during the trial. She was consumed with shame and guilt because Bungalow was from our estate and she had to face his family at least every other day. The judge said the killing of Darren had been an act of unparalleled evil, and, when he sentenced us, my mum fainted. Her head slumped against my dad’s shoulder. The judge said I was to be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure in “such a place” and under “such conditions” as the Secretary of State directed. I’d been given an open sentence. Dad told me that after the trial, mum cried for three weeks, and then stopped, just like that. She told him he was never to mention my name again. Seems she had decided I was one of the mistakes that mums make.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she told him, “he died right along with Darren Jacks.”

Mum started to die too. It was the humiliation, and it took two years, but she finally did it: willed herself to death, and my dad buried her. He said she didn’t want me at the graveside, so I had to stand by the church gates handcuffed to a screw. Said it had been her last wish, so I had to watch through the bars as they lowered her into the ground: me, her son.

“It wasn’t you lying in the fucking mud in that caravan park.”

“Did you say something, Taylor?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Only,” I hesitated for a moment, “if Jesus did die for my sins, sir, then how comes I had to lie in the mud outside that caravan in Margate for two fucking hours before the pain finally made me pass out? Can you tell me that, sir? Can you fucking answer me that?”

I walked out of HMP Pentonville a day after my twenty-fifth birthday. I’d done ten years and “Bohemian Rhapsody” was Top of the Pops. An Indian family were living in our flat in Somers Town. They said my dad had died three years earlier. He did send me a birthday card when I was eighteen, but that was the last I’d heard from him. I caught a bus to the cemetery and found him buried beside Mum. Their plot was overgrown with weeds; the headstone covered with bird shit, and there was no room left for my name to be put on it. I rented a bedsit and did what had to be done to make ends meet: mostly knocking heads together when they needed knocking. Jackie Pepper and Harry the Syrup, hearing I was tasty and being very generous, put me on their payroll. They were, and still are, proud men: respected representatives of the underworld. And they had a mission: to better the name of your common criminal. They wanted to give thieves a feeling of self-respect: wanted to present them with reasons for perfecting their profession: honour for the cat burglar; self-esteem for the purse-snatcher; a pat on the back for the smash-grabber. That’s what Jackie and Harry did. And what we, the other members of their firm: Frankie Toast, Jimmy King, Big Pat, Kelly Day, Hymie Stump the Jew, and me, Ronald Taylor, made every endeavour to copy.

On the 24th of December 1992, Kelly Day and me were sitting in the little drinker Kelly recently bought into on Holloway Road waiting for Father Fayhee to show. It was snowing and we should have been happy because everyone likes a white Christmas. But Hymie Stump had been nicked that morning, and although Kelly and me didn’t much care for the Jew, it was an unsettling experience when the filth pulled one of your own. Mind you, the Jew had no one but himself to blame. He’d set his sights on easy money and robbed one of his own. He had thought the small time jeweller from Hatton Garden wouldn’t put up a fight. Trouble was, this particular small time jeweller named Seagull, happened to have a sister who was married to a Rabbi, and the Rabbi did his nut when he discovered another Jew had been responsible. It just wasn’t the sort of thing that Jews would stand for up the Temple Fortune. Hymie had eaten forbidden fruit; shat on his own doorstep. Worse still, Colin Seagull was an asthmatic: information Hymie had been fully aware of: not that it stopped him from putting a plastic bag over Seagull’s head, or pulling out all his fingernails.

“He is good with money,” Kelly said. “But he’s always been an horrible cunt.”

I told Kelly he was right, and the Jew would spend the best part of five years regretting what he’d done:

“There’ll be no more gefilte fish for the Jew,” I declared. “And you don’t get kosher chocolate in the Scrubs.”

Agnes, the Romanian that we had liberated from the Albanians, now ran Kelly’s drinker. She also lived with him and was seven months pregnant. It was funny what love could do. Kelly was a lucky bloke. He’d found it and held onto it. Anyway, Agnes was sitting beside him practising her English by reading the tattoo Kelly just got below his left nipple for that very purpose. It was a complete page of Harold Pinter’s
The Caretaker
and Agnes read with an accent that was surprisingly good if you considered she’d only been learning English for eighteen months. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar and felt a shiver run up my back. It was still a shock every time I saw myself: it was my hair, you see. Only a week ago it had been jet-black. Then I did the job with Harry and Big Pat and it turned grey overnight. Pat had taken great pride in the belief he held that there wasn’t a shop in London he couldn’t get into as long as it had a grate or an air vent. He’d broken into hundreds of them. And when he said he had a blinder but couldn’t do it on his own, Harry and me had offered to help. Only Pat’s blinder went pear. He zigged when he should’ve zagged, and we ended up trapped in a sewage pipe. Harry ruined his new Armani jacket, and went off his nut when Pat said he should have worn a nylon parka like he had.

“Nylon parka?” Harry hissed. “Nylon parka, you lanky cunt.”

Harry set Big Pat’s coat alight with his cigarette lighter, and he roared with laughter when Pat began to shout and flap his arms about. But Harry wasn’t laughing when the blue and yellow flames leapt onto us, or when the three of us were sat in the back of a police van twenty minutes later, with Pat wincing every time the van went over a bump. His parka had melted, stuck to his skin, and was still smouldering. The copper sitting beside us said Pat looked like a burnt sausage, and a right fucking sad one at that. And he only agreed to let us go after we had given him £436, which was all the money we had. And that very night, whilst dreaming I was still in the sewage pipe with Big Pat and Harry, the stench of singed hair and sizzling skin sent me prematurely grey.

Father Fayhee arrived forty minutes late and breathless. I told him he should have phoned; said we could have collected him.

“Never mind that now,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’ve something to show you.”

He sat down breathing hard, like racehorses do. For a moment he stared at us, and Kelly looked at me, trying not to smile. Then the Father reached into his pocket and removed an envelope. He held it out. I went to take it but he wouldn’t let go.

“There’s a beastly ghoul,” Father Fayhee said. “It’s lurking in the darkness…gorging itself on the innocence of children.”

He released his grip and I took it. The envelope was open. I lifted the flap. There were three photographs inside but nothing else. The Father motioned for me to look at them and I did. They were snapshots of a girl: she was about five or six. I showed them to Kelly. He looked from them to me and shrugged.

“Sorry Father,” I said, “only… I’m not with you.”

I returned the photographs to the envelope and tried to hand it back but he wouldn’t take it.

“Oh, but you are, Ronny,” he said. “You most certainly are.”

He ordered a double brandy and waited in silence for it to arrive. When it came, he downed it in one. Then he closed his eyes. The seconds tick-tocked quietly by. Fayhee seemed to be waiting for divine inspiration, and three minutes passed before he spoke again. And when he did, it was with a voice so quiet and gentle, Kelly and me both had to lean toward him to hear it. He said there was a job that needed doing and that Kelly and me were just the men for it. And I’d be a dirty, filthy liar if I said the story he then told didn’t sadden the table. For when the Father had finished, Kelly and me just sat there, not knowing what to do, or say. We didn’t want to break the silence although broken it had to be. So I said nothing could be done because the Father didn’t have the money to pay for what he needed doing. He hammered the table with a clenched fist and smashed the brandy glass. Blood began to run down his hand. It dripped off his fingers onto the carpet. He dug around in his pockets for a handkerchief, and finding one, slowly wrapped it around the cut.

“I’m sorry,” the Father said. “I didn’t mean to do that. It’s just, what this monster did—”

Father Fayhee stopped talking, and then, the very next moment, he started crying. His shoulders rose and fell with every sob he took, and Kelly and me, who had sat there watching him, had to turn away because, well, it was a little embarrassing. But after another minute or so, the Father stopped. He blew his nose, and, suddenly brightening, said it had been a long time since Madden and me had stood beside him in St Aloysius: me carrying the cross; Madden holding the missal. He went on to say that in all the years that had passed since then, it had been his great misfortune to lay alongside many a wet fish on the streets of London. He fell silent again. The seconds ticked by. He looked at his bloodied hand.

“Their foul, putrid flesh offends my nostrils,” he grumbled, his smile slowly turning into a frown. “But that stench is as nothing compared to the bloody rankness enveloping me now.”

He asked me if I thought Jesus had wallowed in the mire a lone man. He wondered if it were my belief that Jesus had suffered in vain.

“Because you are attempting to send me, an instrument of that same Holy Father, out into the night with a flea in my ear.”

I told him I was doing nothing of the sort. It was a business matter and nothing more. But the Father wasn’t listening. He said I had to be bold. Told me to I had to search deep within myself to find that heart of oak, for it was whispered I walked in the footsteps of Hector, whatever that meant.

“Young children!” he cried, and begged us to help, saying it was somehow our responsibility; that it was up to us; that we had to confine the horror of this monster’s wicked work by casting the malevolent bastard into the dark and murky depths of some lonely canal. And then he left.

Kelly and me sat in silence for a good long while after the Father went. But I could still feel his hand on my shoulder; could still smell the brandy on his breath, and hear the words he’d whispered reverberate inside my head.