Jog On Fat Barry (6 page)

“Do it for your soul, my son. Do it… for your soul.”

Kelly eventually asked what the Father had meant when he’d said God would throw open my door to the wolf and make shipwreck my vital spark. I told him it was nothing, just church pews squeaking. Then Kelly said something that surprised me. He wondered if what the Father had said was right: that perhaps some sort of exception should be made, due to the fact that what this bloke had been up to was bang out of order.

“It chokes you up just thinking about it,” Kelly said.

And that got me thinking. I wondered if it would be wrong to kill a bloke for
honourable
reasons. Wondered if it would be out of order to do a bloke in for reasons of morality. That was something altogether different. To actually kill someone was easy. It was just the bit that came afterwards that could be difficult.

It was still snowing when Kelly and me left his drinker. Everything was white. We caught a taxi and told the driver where to go. When we arrived at The Edward, coloured Christmas lights were flickering on and off in the windows. Dawn was behind the bar—Jimmy King liked to call her “Dawn the Prawn” because her husband had a stall in Billingsgate Market and she loved a winkle. The boys were in the back office drinking. We could hear Harry the Syrup shouting as we moved toward the door, and Kelly opened it just as Harry was taking a swing at Frankie Toast. Harry’s silly looking wig slipped off his head and landed on the floor beside Big Pat. Pat kicked it across the room. Jimmy King started laughing. Harry went for Pat with a knife and Jimmy kept on laughing. Harry was hollering “You want some of this, you fucking lanky cunt?” and Pat was forced to hold him off with a barstool. Frankie told Harry he hadn’t meant to be disrespectful, it was just the Jew had gone about things the wrong way.

“That’s right!” Harry roared. “The cunt kept schtum about those diamonds thinking he’d have ‘em all to himself. But he’s one of us!”

Frankie told Harry to put the knife away. Harry spun around and would have plunged the blade into Frankie if Jackie hadn’t intervened.

“Put the knife away, Harry.” Jackie sighed.

Harry stared at Jackie for a few moments and then he lowered the knife.

“Sorry if I was out of order,” Harry said. “But it makes my heart shrivel like some earthworm scorched by the sun on a paving stone to hear anyone in the firm talk about one of our own in such a way.”

Harry put the knife away. Big Pat lowered the barstool. Frankie picked up Harry’s wig and brushed it off. Then he handed it back to Harry. Jackie glanced across the room. He saw Kelly and me standing in the door with snowflakes on our coats. He smiled, waving us over, and then started to croon, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”

Lagers can run from sweet to bitter, and from pale to black. The word itself comes from the German, Lagerbier (beer made for storage) from Lager for storehouse, and bier for beer. Most are pale, fizzy as fuck, have an alcohol volume of three to five percent, and are brewed from malted barley, hops and water at low temperatures. My lager of choice was Stella Artois. Kelly liked Budweiser, Big Pat went for Tennetts, Frankie choose Carling, Harry drank Harp, Jimmy went for Carlsberg, Jackie liked Lowenbrau (but only bottled) and Hymie never drank. In any case, Jackie stocked the lot. The Edward was his pub after all, and he could do just as he pleased. Whilst Jimmy got the drinks in, I told Jackie, Harry and the others about Father Fayhee. I said a girl had been nonced and killed on one of the estates in Somers Town, and that the Father wanted us to top the nonce but couldn’t pay for it. When I finished everyone was silent. “Merry Xmas Everybody” was playing on the jukebox in the public bar. Harry looked in a mirror and fiddled about with the position of his wig for a few moments.

“We can’t do it,” he eventually said. “There’s no money in it. It’s only right when we do it for the money, because then, if anyone asks us about it, we just pull out the money, and let it do the talking for us.”

Harry was right and everyone nodded accordingly. I said I’d told the Father time and again nothing would get done without money, because there were certain palms that had to be crossed with silver, so to speak. But all he said by way of reply was that his collection plate could only stretch so far, and what right did any of us have to expect parishioners to put up what parishioners couldn’t get.

“He made threats,” Kelly added. “Said he’d go to the police and tell them what he knew about us.”

“But he soon thought better of that,” I said, “when I told him it was true we all had our own crosses to bear, and I wondered what skeletons the police might find lurking inside his cupboards.”

Jimmy King glanced up from the paki-black he was crumbling over a king-size Rizzla paper, and said Mo Blake often declared the Father had been giving the boys’ choir more than singing lessons, even if nothing ever came of it. Big Pat said Mo Blake had just made that up because Father Fayhee caught him robbing the poor box and told the police. Jackie told Jimmy and Pat to forget about Mo Blake, he wanted to know how I had left it with the Father. I said he got fucked off and sent on his way. But then something happened. Kelly made a suggestion. He said that maybe we should do what the Father had asked us to anyway, due to the fact that what this bloke had been up to was so diabolical.

“And you have to admit,” I said. “If you did think about it, Kelly was right, it quite choked you up.”

Harry wanted to know why the Father hadn’t been to the police if it was so diabolical.

“He’d be wasting his time,” Jimmy King laughed. “There isn’t a police inspector in the country that can’t be found noncing in the potting shed on a Sunday afternoon.”

“A pocketful of lollipops is part of the uniform,” Pat chimed in.

“And then there was the other thing,” I added. “The Father only had what had been whispered to him in the confessional as evidence. He said he’d confronted the nonce, and said the stench of wickedness was all over him, but that, of itself, hadn’t been enough to satisfy the police.”

Jackie sighed. Moments later he stated it was unfortunate that the Father had nowhere else to turn to and everyone nodded.

“But I suppose that’s indicative of the world in which we all live today,” he said. “No one gives a fuck about anyone anymore.”

Again everyone nodded.

“And I’m also sorry the Father has been forced to wrestle with his conscience. I truly am. He doesn’t know which way to turn. But that is the wont of the pious and dutiful, is it not? They get lost in a desert, turn to God for guidance, God plants a seed in their heart, they seek out the fruits of that labour, telling whomever they happen to find what must be done, and expect the doing of it to be carried out, and accepted, with a childlike innocence. But we’re not the pious and dutiful, Ronny. And if the Father wants to have someone aimed out, the Father is going to pay for it just like anyone else.”

For a few moments I stared at the glass in my hand and thought about what Father Fayhee had said to Kelly and me. The words he spoke kept repeating themselves inside my head, because what he had said—so many things—were simply beyond money. They were beyond money.

The little girl the Father told us about went to the corner shop clutching fifty pence in her hand, and, twenty minutes later, the nonce had lured her onto the heath and done the deed. She dropped her bag of sweets and started crying when he ripped her knickers off. She tried to struggle as he stuffed them into his pocket for a keepsake. But the nonce had mumbled threats, and made promises, and fumbled with his zipper, and climbed on top of her, and pushed inside her, and wrapped his hands around her neck to cut off the cries. An old man walking his dog found the body. The police were clueless as usual.

“So what’s it gonna be then?” I asked. “Shall we vote on it?”

Harry the Syrup was the first to speak. He said no. Big Pat said yes. Frankie said no. Jimmy and Kelly said yes. Jackie said no, for both himself and for the Jew, and no one argued because everyone knew the Jew would have been dead against it. Like that squeak always said, “No money, no honey.” I said yes. The count stood four to four: a stalemate. I tried to think of something to say, some words of wisdom, if you like. I wondered if a particular line of reasoning might sway one of the others to change his vote, but Harry spoke before I could say anything.

“It don’t make us any richer,” he said.

“That’s true.” I said back. “But then again, it don’t make us no poorer, does it.”

Róisín O’Shea lived in one of those big houses on Lady Somerset Road in Kentish Town and was in the 5th year at Parliament Hill School for girls when I first saw her smoking a cigarette outside the San Siro cafe looking more Spanish or Italian than Irish with her raven coloured hair and cloudy blue eyes. I took her to the Vale of Health Fair on Hampstead Heath. Later we sat on a bench at the top of Parliament Hill and watched the city light up as the sun went down. She was a year older than me and had already done it. She wouldn’t say whom it was with though. We did it the first time under The Viaduct Bridge, beside the hole Dick Turpin was said to have hidden in. I found out a month later she was up the spout. It was a Friday night and I was sparring when she walked into the gym and shouted, “I’m pregnant!” across the hall. I turned to look at her and caught one on the button. I dropped to the ground; tried to catch my breath while the sweat rolled. I liked the smell of the gym, some people said it smelt like a shit-hole, but what did they know? Rosy walked over and knelt down beside me. She looked into my eyes; asked if I’d do the right thing by her. I said there was nothing I wouldn’t do. She smiled and held her hand against my face, and my insides began to do that thing they always did whenever Rosy touched me that way: those odd upside-down sensations that only she could ever make me feel.

My mum and dad did all they could to talk me out of it, but Rosy was in the family way and Irish catholic to boot. We were getting married as soon as I turned sixteen, and we were going to live in her house on Lady Somerset Road so her mum could help with the baby. To be honest, I was looking forward to it. I was going to do things differently with my kid. It wouldn’t be like it was with my mum and dad. Rosy and me had plans. The career advisor at school said he’d get me apprenticed at the Gas Board as a pipe fitter. Rosy was going to be a nurse. We’d start with the one baby, and keep on going until we had enough.