I’ve nothing. Not a penny in my pocket nor a dollar in my shoe. Nothing.
I did have though. Fancy pants car, house with a pool, garden with a swing. Yup, I did have though.
Booze I guess. Booze and bad luck. I bought into it all at a very early age.Do this job, then that job, now I do indeed have that penny in my pocket. Easy money.
Easy money at first and then that attracts them like flies. Lend a bit here, lend a bit there and when all that is said and done lend a bit more.
But they don’t always pay you back and so I learnt you have to drag them into deep waters and for that you need a fisherman.
Mine was called Bernie. Met him when he started working the door of a bar I now owned and we hit it off straight away. First sniff of trouble my way and Bernie was there and what’s the odd black eye a punter has got to do with it?
So now we go lates. Lates, if you don’t know means a drink after hours, but that always leads to two and then two becomes ten and the next thing you know you are walking out of the bar as the breakfast club are coming in. Should have just gone home sensible, home to a wife waiting for me, but nowadays I’m spending more time with Bernie than with Mary.
It was his watch I noticed first. I noticed it when he was choking someone silly for being bit mouthy in the club I now owned which was next to the bar I still did.
How does I guy like Bernie, on the wages I pay him afford a two grand watch? I should just shrug my shoulders, mind my own business and go on my own way. Except I don’t. No, I have to be the big ‘un.
“This is how it goes,” he says.
And so that is how it went. I’m in like a little fish at first, throwing my little fish pennies in the big fish pond. What do I care what the end user looks like? It might be the party girl snorting on a Saturday night, pretty little thing in a pretty little dress or it could be a drip on the spike, slumped in a dirty little flat. Not my circus, not my monkey. Certainly not my problem.
It’s about to become one.
“Boss,” says Bernie. “We have an issue.”
When did he start calling me ‘boss.’ I really can’t remember.
“Go on,” I say and he does.
Okay so I own a club and a bar, but these guys? They own the people that own the clubs and bars. And now we are into them. It would seem that Bernie isn’t quite the debt collector I thought he was and what he takes from the flat druggie, he is giving for free to the girl in the dress. Thinking with some body part other than his brain, that is what Bernie is doing. Or has been.
So how do we pay it back and how did I not see it coming? Judging by her frosty attitude, my Mary did. Not that she seems to be that these days. My Mary that is. You see I have, unfortunately also become fond of the girls in the pretty little dresses. Bad move and what’s badder is that I’ve taken a like to snorting myself.
It’s like a bad hallucination repeating itself. I’m coming in from a night on the town, blood dripping down my nose as Mary is putting the kid’s cereal down before heading out to her morning yoga class.
“Morning love,” I attempt but all I get back is a nod and a grunt.
Where the hell has her car gone? Cost a fortune on the drip that little sporty thing did. I’ll ask her later, but before I get chance I see the repo letter.
What? Nobody told me, or maybe they did but I didn’t listen. Funny enough me and Bernard do seem to be spending a lot of cash these days. Me more than him I suppose.
And so at some point we have to pay back, we have to pay me my money down and it’s come to this and I’m so far out of my depth I am bewildered. Yes, bewildered.
A mask and a gun. Now that is what too much tooting does for you, that’s what the paymasters now demand of you because I’m so far in now I can’t get out and do I see the pretty little thing in the pretty little dress by my side as we bounce in, ballies up and armed to the teeth? Do I fuck.
She’s moved on.
She is replaced by some poor old soul, a lady just doing her job, now with a six gun up her nose as we demand the cash. She gives it up and I’ll place a bet her boss isn’t going to be happy but fuck that. I ain’t bovvered.
Bernie draws a laugh as we count the cash out on the bar. We take a toot, down a little something and plan the next one. The cash on the bar will only keep the people at top happy for so long and so it goes on.
And on.
And on but it has to end somewhere and a cell seems the obvious choice. It was that or pig swill at the bosses’ farm so cell it is.
They pincered us on the motorway. All unmarked cars at first, we didn’t even see them following us until the ones with the blue lights overtook them, overtook us and pulled us in. Like a bloody film it was, guns, dogs the whole lot and us, me and Bernie carrying a ton of cash and drugs.
Seven years later I walk out with just a bag in my hand and a penny in my pocket. I walk past the bar that now has some one else’s name above the door. The club? Well now that’s a fancy two story book shop and coffee house.
I pass the building where Bernie and I did the first one and it occurs to me; where is Bernie these days? No one has seen sight nor heard sound of him for many a time. Disappeared into thin air he has. Guess the seven I took was the better result. Poor old Bernie.
I keep walking. I walk through the leafy suburbs, past our old six bedroom house, now occupied by a banker and his wife. Lucky them.
“Keep walking kid,” I tell myself and I do.
I walk past the broken down pub, the crappy little off licence, the bookies, the cash convertors, the crumbling down, just about alive gym. I keep walking past ‘tan tantastic’, the nail salon next door, the old soak café, punters with cold brews in their hand, making them last so they can stay warm, not wanting to brave the cold outside because that’s all that awaits them.
I track on, the alley filled with syringes now empty of the filth I once supplied, the crappy park where the teenagers have denied the young ‘uns of a go on the swing because they have tossed them around and around, until they hang short of the top bar. Little bastards.
I keep walking until I see the smoke from the chimney, the chimney I hope is still home.
It’s not. Mary opens the door and groans at the sight of me.
“Go away,” she growls.
“I’ve nothing,” I say, embarrassingly pitiful.
“And that became my problem when?” she asks, coldly. That’s okay, she’s entitled.
I scrape my feet’s against the cracked concrete.
“When you whizzed around in your twenty grand whip,” I say. “Do you think I got you that from selling bottles of Bud on a Friday night.” It is a cheap shot I know but it’s all I have left.
“Borrow us a fiver,” I say, hunger getting the better of me.
“If I had a fiver left do you think I’d give it to you?”
And so here we are. Here we are ladies and gents. Here we are and this is what we get. You deal, you steal and then you reel. You reel from the punches you thought you took, you reel for the friends you have lost, you reel from the pride, the pain and then the poverty.
The door slams and I wince. I’ve nowhere to go, no one to go to, and no one left to love. I’ve nothing but the the hunger in my belly and so I stoop to my lowest yet.
I bend, open the letter box and shout though it;
“Give us a biscuit.”
