Dan’s been here today and, surprise, surprise, he’s “very disappointed” by the last letter I wrote. “Archie,” he said, “you and I both know you can do better than this, so come on, lad. Step up to it.”
What he doesn’t seem to understand is that I never really care too much about disappointing people; I’ve been doing it for so long I might even be better at it than memorizing songs.
Anyway, he said he wouldn’t come back if I didn’t start playing the game (he didn’t use that phrase, because none of it’s a game to him), what he actually said was, “You’ve seen the last of me if this is how you’re going to behave.”
I said, “Bye, mate. Nice knowing you.”
He looked at me with those laser eyes of his and kept on looking at me until I chucked up my hands and said, “What’s going on, man? What do you want from me?”
“You know what I want.”
I did. He thinks you have a right to know about the person who hurt you, and he reckons that deep down I want to tell you.
I don’t know what kind of planet he lives on—can’t remember where Superman comes from now—but hey, like I’ve said before, he’s not an easy bloke to argue with, so in the end I gave it up. I don’t want him to stop coming (wouldn’t tell him that) and he could be right that I do want to tell you, though it beats me why I would. Or why you’d want to hear it.
Let me warn you right off that mine is not a good story, and I’ve got no skill as a writer, but I guess you’ve got that picture already.
So here goes: I already told you my mother’s a nutjob and that we lived with my grandparents until one croaked and the other got carted off to the whacky shack. Before that happened it was their job to keep me out of the hands of social services when my ma was away. Everyone knew Ma would go mental if she came back and found I was gone, and I promise you really don’t want my ma going mental. Where did she go when she was gone? Depends. Sometimes she was in the nick for not paying her council tax, or shoplifting, disturbing the peace, that sort of thing. Other times she was taken away to places I didn’t know anything about until I was older. BJ would turn up when he felt like it, give her a beating, then stuff her in his car and drive off. Sometimes we didn’t see her for weeks and when she came back she’d be in a right state, shaking and crying and needing a fix so bad we had to give it to her. (Shit is never difficult to get hold of on our estate.)
When she wasn’t in the nick or off doing stuff for BJ—what I really mean is when she was sober and not feeling shit-scared of the world or mouthing off at it the way she sometimes did (complex woman, my ma)—she’d have a go at taking care of me. She’d buy me clothes, cook my food (terrible cook), and tell me to get on with my homework like she even knew what it was. My mates all thought she was weird, but they kind of respected her because she never got in my face about stuff and would let them treat our house like it was theirs.
I never told any of them about the clearing up me and my gran had to do after one of her bad days. Gross it was, and I didn’t talk about the low-grade smack I used to get for her from Leroy two doors down to stop her tearing herself to bits. No one needed to know about any of that, although they probably did anyway, just never mentioned it. Most of the kids had one parent or both who got rolling stoned every day—and there was none of the good stuff in our neck of the woods, I can tell you that.
Did I ever try it myself?
’Course I did. I’ve done it all, collie weed (that’s some dank-ass marijuana, that is; you can get really toked on that, know what I mean), crack, meth, black tar, all the trippy shit, you name it. First time I had some I was about six, I guess, and I remember how much it made the grown-ups laugh. I expect it was a hilarious sight watching a kid get high, although I think mostly it sent me to sleep.
My big connection to the recreationals started when I was about ten and BJ decided it was time to get me initiated into the real world, meaning his world. So next time he turned up at our place, instead of taking my ma after he’d roughed her up and helped himself to what dough she had, he took me instead.
Was I scared? You bet, but he made me feel kind of grown up, so I soon got over it, especially when he explained what I had to do.
“It’s simple,” he said. “I get the gear from the dudes I know—you don’t ever want to upset them, Archie, not if you got an urge to stay alive—and then I drive you around to make the deliveries. A kind of newspaper round, if you like, but these days we’ve moved on a bit.”
“What are we delivering?” I asked him (talk about green, but remember I was only ten).
“Stuff. You don’t need to know what it is, but it’s serious quality and it’s our job to get it to the PCs who pay top dollar for it.”
“PCs?”
“Posh C***s. They buy big, I mean seriously big, for their carousels—orgies, pimp fests—but you don’t need to know about that, cos you’re too young for it all, and it don’t involve you. You just have to make the delivery while I wait on double yellows, then I take you to the next drop-off, and same thing happens. Never, never hand anything over to the client until you’ve got the cash in your hot little hand. Understood? Whatever excuse they give for not having any on them, we’re not NatWest with the telephone banking, so you do not part with the goods until they’ve paid. If they start kicking off, you just leg it back to me, bringing the stuff, and I’ll sort it out. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“You’ll be expected to keep your mouth shut about this, so don’t go bragging to your f***wit mates and playing the big man when you get home. If you do I’ll know and I won’t be happy. And you know what happens if I’m not happy. Your old lady gets it, that’s what’ll happen, and you don’t want that now, do you?”
I began earning some decent cash almost from the get-go, and you should have seen some of the places we delivered to. These PCs lived in some serious houses all over the West End, down by the river, around the City . . . I never knew where we were half the time, or what the areas were called, I only got to know that later when I was older and able to get the Tube on my own if BJ wasn’t available. I understood by then that the dudes he worked for were based in North London—sorry, no names or exact places, info classified—and that what I was delivering was mostly chem-sex drugs, which can be crystal meth, GHB, miaow miaow, that sort of thing. Sometimes though it was cash or phones—that was more intergang stuff—and later, when I got myself a reputation as someone reliable, it was shivvies and even toolies (that’s knives and guns to you).
Yeah, I moved weapons around the country, sometimes going as far north as Manchester or even Glasgow. I slipped between the cracks like a shadow, they said, meaning no one ever really noticed me. It seemed I had a knack for keeping my head down, or looking harmless, or just plain dumb. The other kids didn’t have it so easy and a few got caught. If that happened and the PCs heard about it, all hell would break loose with the dudes because business would have to shut down for a while. But everyone knew to keep their mouths shut; if they didn’t, someone close to them would pay and they’d never snitch again.
Anyways, when I wasn’t working, believe it or not I was at school, turning up randomly after being away for a week or two, and the teachers would say, “Where you been, Archie?” “Did you bring a note from your mother?” Once or twice the head called me in for a chat, but it never really came to anything. You see, I never acted up or caused trouble like some of the others; I wasn’t violent, or disruptive, or a threat to their points system. When I was there I just kept my shit together and did the work. Otherwise I think they’d have excluded me for all my absences, but that only happened a couple of times and they always took me back.
I’m going to stop this letter now because I have to be somewhere, but I’ll give it to Dan the next time he comes so he can “clean it up,” as he puts it.
Before he leaves I’ll ask him how you are, and I expect he’ll tell me, and then I’ll wish I hadn’t brought it up. It always goes like that, but I can’t just say nothing, can I, not when I’m doing this for you even if it never ends up getting to you.