I wants cash off Oggy.
Six thousand pounds to be exact.
As I sits in Oggy’s front room –
The ‘waiting room’.
The same thoughts come into my head:
Don’t fuck this up.
Don’t fuck this up.
As mantras go it’s not a great one.
Not very positive.
I likes to think of myself as a positive guy.
That’s why I grew a moustache.
Not a great moustache but there it is.
I felt it would distinguish me from the crowd.
Really.
It’s 10.27 a.m.
I look up to see Gary in the doorway. Mo’s behind as they both can’t fit in the doorway together. Mo has to talk over Gary’s shoulder:
A’right, sunshine, Oggy will see you now.
I works as a drug dealer in Fairwater.
It’s a drugs cooperative.
There’s six equal shares. Everyone grows separate and then pools the gear. Then if anyone gets arrested, no biggie. You gets done but you still get a sixth of the profits. You don’t get as much cash as independents but it takes the risks out of the game. Makes sense yeah? I’m pulling down, most weeks, about two hundred quid. I know, not exactly Pablo Escobar but it keeps me going. Just.
I grows my gear behind Stannie’s house. In a greenhouse.
I puts in fake tomatoes and no one’s any the wiser. Serious.
The price of toms has gone up recently which is a fucking blow.
Stannie is a little… shy, what with his actual job being a fence for stolen goods. If you wants it, Stannie can get it: from a labradoodle to a new passport to a mobility scooter. Serious.
After Celia (who you will meet later), left it was just me and my dad, Mark, living opposite Fairwater Fish Bar, you knows? The red-brick flats? Celia lived there till I was fourteen. If you go up the top of the road, you can see right over the city – see the Principality Stadium and down, beyond that Cardiff Bay. It’s that close.
I don’t call him Dad, I calls him Mark or ‘the old man’. My dad Mark’s ‘Mark’ is a traditional one with a ‘K’ and when him and Celia had me they thought they’d name their boy after Mark but give it a modern twist.
My ‘Marc’ is with a ‘C’.
Tha’s a modern twist in Fairwater.
Sitting in Oggy’s front room I’m thinking:
Don’t fuck this up.
Don’t fuck this up.
Like my life depends on it.
Only it’s not my life that depends on it.
It’s Mark’s.
With a ‘K’.
Oggy is a twat.
A twat with cash.
He suffers from the desire that a lot of men round here suffers with – a desire to never be a disappointment to himself.
Recently there’s been this thing about Wonga clamping down and for many it’s a nightmare – you just can’t get through the week to get food. And, believe it or not, Oggy’s rates are actually cheaper than Wonga or Tangerine or whatever the fuck company. So there is a lie that loan sharks are exploitative.
There is also a stereotype that if you can’t pay, loan sharks come round your house and fuck you up.
That bit is true.
Not Oggy personally – he couldn’t punch his way out of a Clark’s pie – but Gary and Mo would.
So I’m in Oggy’s thinking:
Don’t fuck this up and then it’s my turn.
Oggy could have afforded a proper office but made his ‘clients’ come to his house; something about lording it over your fellow man, you know?
For some reason, I thinks that’s why he’s got the heating on on a nice day.
Oggy’s taken the gangster thing to heart.
And is now playing his part.
He has a tattoo of him and Beyoncé in bed together, wrapped in silk sheets, on his neck. When he speaks the vein in his neck moves and Beyoncé starts to jiggle back and forth.
What a twat.
I goes through. Oggy’s done the back room out like a quaint pub, complete with pool table.
He waves his pool cue at a bar stool where I perches like a parrot with one leg.
Fucking shaky.
When I goes to speak – I just got to ask him why the heating’s on – Oggy stops me with an imperious wave of his cue.
–
When we was in school, Marc was in all the top sets, wasn’t you, Wendy?
Gary and Mo do the laugh-along thing, even though they must know he’s a complete cockstain too.
Remember when we went to Rachel Patterson’s party, brah?
Every time I meets Oggy it’s the same stories – or a version of them.
Wendy here had the chance to fuck the very same Rachel Patterson and you know what he did?
Dramatic pause for Gary and Mo’s benefit.
He came in his pants even before he got to stick it in her.
Did I mention he was a twat?
I gives Oggy my pitch – I’ll get straight into it as I knows you’re a busy man, blah blah fucking blah.
Oggy actually plays a few shots while he’s pretending to think about the proposal and then stops and gives it the two-hands-onthe-edge-of-the-table-lean-forward-I’m-going-to-be-earnest shit.
He gives it a second before Beyoncé starts to move her ass.
You wants me to lend you six thousand pounds so you can give it to your old man so that he can pay back a debt that he already owes me?
In a fucking nutshell.
Are you insane? I’ll be no better off.
I’ll owe you instead of the old man owing you.
But I’ll still be owed the same amount.
Can see he’s grasped the concept…
I tells him I can see he’s grasped the concept.
‘Concept’? Learn that in the top sets, did you?
Technically it won’t really make a difference to you –
Part of the thing that marks me out from the crowd, apart from a weak moustache, is that I likes to use words like ‘concept’ and ‘technically’.
You can take your concept and technically fuck yourself with it, brah. You tell your old man that if he can’t pay then he shouldn’t send his
–
his turdball of a son to try and stall for him.
The teachers at Cantonian High School are partially to blame for Oggy’s lack of linguistic skills – they really didn’t try with him.
Look, Marky-Marc, you don’t want to lend off me.
Why? Cos we’re mates?
Don’t flatter yourself, brah.
Come on, Oggy, we goes way back.
How you gonna pay it back?
I’m a drug dealer.
You’re having a laugh. Six Gs? You always did think you was more than you was.
Come on, Oggy.
Trust me on this, brah – I has made my final decision. You’ll thank me one day.
Before I can plead and beg, Oggy gives me his final word on the matter:
Now fuck off.
My old man used to have a proper job in the paint factory near Ely Bridge. I never understood what he did there but after that went tits-up, him and the old girl went tits-up and then he started to look for other sources of income. He stole all the front doors from a new housing estate near Leckwith and when someone made a joke that our place was all front doors – we had front doors leading to everywhere; bathrooms, bedrooms, the lot – someone overheard who knew the guy that owned the site – a property developer called Bunce – and they kicked the shit out of my old man.
I comes home late and there’s no door on the front of the flat. There’s no doors at all, no door to the old man’s bedroom and even though it was dark in there I can see he’s hurt – the way he’s lying on the duvet, sort of unnatural. His face looks like a cartoon, puffed-up… made me think of Jim Carrey, you know, in some kind of fucked-up film role. I don’t know exactly what happened that night, but I bet it’s one the old man plays over and over again in his mind. He has always thought of himself as a wheeler-dealer – but he’s a shit one and that’s led to his present predicament with – and my visit to – Oggy.
He’s a regular at the Ex Club and Fairwater Library.
He fucking loves it. Reading.
No shit.
Currently he’s reading The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming.
I love my father.
I also loves Fairwater – friendliest people in Cardiff and the Fairwater Fish Bar is the best. They will fry anything for you. They once deep-fried a kitten for me.
–
Sorry, did I say kitten? I meant Kit Kat.
My old man has two weeks to pay back Oggy. Then the interest piles up, then… I don’t think he can take another Jim Carrey moment. As I walks out of Oggy’s waiting room I wonders how much Wonga has tightened up.
Too much for me.
I knows I only has one alternative – and it’s a horrible one.
I decide to put a final decision off for a bit, I’ve got to go up to Stannie’s and check on the crop and on the way there I’ll decide whether I make the trek over to Cyncoed to humiliate myself in pursuit of the six grand.
And then I sees her.
Lisa.
Lisa Short loves Marc Chapps.
Always has.
She sat behind me at registration at Cantonian.
Staring at my neck. I could fucking feel her eyes on the back of my neck every day for five years.
If you sits behind someone and stare at the back of their neck every week-day for five years you will fall in love with them – it’s inevitable.
She wrote Lisa loves Marc on every exercise book she ever had and on every desk in the reg class. LS heart MC.
I even got in trouble for it!
Yeah, it’s not me, Mrs Stapleton – Marc’s a little obsessed with me, aren’t you, Marc.
In school I’d always been… aware of Lisa but had always thought she was a bit of a nutter, you knows the type. She was nothing great to look at but now she’s blossomed, while I was fantastic-looking at school but now, yeah, I’ve maybe not had as many vitamins as I should have…
A tables-turned sort of thing.
Before I’m able to say ‘Hi, Lis, been ages, good to see you, what the fuck are you in this shithole for?’ she’s up and away and into Oggy’s inner sanctum.