Redemption Of The Pig Man

REDEMPTION OF THE PIG-MAN ?

Danny Sears woke up, or rather he yawned into a half stupor. His tongue
felt like a well-used and abused shaggy doormat. Danny's whole body
ached like hell, when he rose kicking the filthy ragged assortment of
clothes and blankets off his squalid pit of a bed. Wobbling to his feet
he caught sight of a repulsive apparition in the cracked mirror of the
broken dresser. Staring back was a figure that looked gaunt and scruffy
as it shuddered bemusedly clawing ruefully at its nude scrotum. The
vile reflection blended in with the grubby decor of the run-down room
in the derelict squat.
The mangy form of the man gazing back was dressed in an old balaclava
helmet, which had his greasy, lank black hair sticking out through the
many holes in the woollen hat. Most of those holes had not been in the
knitting-pattern of the helmet when it was manufactured. Danny's
reflection also revealed his only other articles of night-attire. One
being a torn soiled vest that failed to hide his itching genitalia. Nor
did it conceal most of the needle scars and pustules dispersed around
the various accessible pressure points on Sears's emaciated body. On
his grime ingrained feet he wore a pair of dirty, odd socks, through
which his filthy toenails protruded.
Sears was only twenty-three years of age but that spectre of himself in
the glass appeared to him like an unkempt man of at least twice that
age. Danny Sears never normally had time to take stock of his self,
because he had a very expensive habit. Heroin was Danny's master; a
cruel demanding master that absorbed his every conscious thought and
fashioned the demons of his disturbed slumber.
When Danny at the age of twenty-one first jacked up on heroin the
pleasure he got from the narcotic was wonderful, but now he was its
slave. He had originally experimented with 'H' shortly after coming to
London, arriving there from his home in Greenside, a small pit village
in the North East of England. Danny's Father had given him six thousand
pounds of his redundancy money. Jack Sears gave his son this money
because the lad had pestered the life out of him to grant him what he
called "The chance of a start in life."
Danny was the younger of two brothers. "Aye! He's the wild one of the
two," his mother always told her friends and neighbours, or anyone else
for that matter who cared to listen when she discussed both of her
sons. Which she quite often did. "Noo wor Thomas Edward! Named after
both the grandfathers yi know! He's a different kettle o'fish all
together, quiet as they come, never misses me birthday. A real nice lad
he is. Aye, and a very thoughtful lad. That he certainly is."
Most who heard her well-aired clich?s of course knew better. Danny was
a precocious little scamp. Tommy his elder brother however was a sneaky
telltale toad of a boy who never got into bother and he would go crying
to his mother when little Danny hit or just upset him. Daniel felt the
thrash from his father's slipper on his bared arse on many an occasion,
often thanks to Thomas's snitching.
Jack and Marjorie Sears provided their two sons with a cheerful working
class home, which was both clean and well run. Jack who had been a
miner all his working life loved his family. Danny the wild one
although a rip was definitely Jack's favourite even though he was the
one who received the most punishment, likely it was because the younger
son enjoyed playing and watching football. Danny often accompanied his
father on a Saturday to St James's Park to watch Newcastle United play.
The lad also liked nothing better than to help his dad with his prize
pigs down on the allotment. Besides his other attributes the boy had
studied hard and earned a scholarship place at a top Newcastle grammar
school.
Thomas Edward was his mother's son; neighbours (behind Marjorie's back)
often said he was like the daughter his mother had always wanted. Mary
Jordan the next-door neighbour had more than once been heard to say to
her cronies. That is of course when Marjorie had left their company
"Thomas bloody Edward! They should've called the bugger Mary Jane after
both 'es grannies, if you ask me."
When Jack Sears left school at fifteen he had gone to work at Greenside
Pit, as had many generations of his family before him. After working at
the pit for several years Greenside Colliery like a lot of other
unprofitable mines closed permanently. This made it necessary for Jack
to travel farther away in the county to more productive mines so that
he could follow his conscript career in mining. After all mining was
the only kind of work he knew. Apart from which he enjoyed the banter
and camaraderie of his fellow miners. These pits to which Jack had to
travel would in their turn become victims to various government
policies or market forces. Market forces being the current jingoistic
jargon used to camouflage many of the cabinet's Machiavellian
conspiracies.
Jack's traveling seemed to take up a large part of his working day.
Since not only did he have to travel from his village to remote
collieries such as Monkwearmouth but also when he got there he had to
ride or walk several miles to and from the coal-face. Due to the travel
and the long working hours Jack saw less and less of his family. During
most of the long NUM National Miners Strike in the early eighties he
saw even less of them because he was a none striking deputy. Some of
the things he suffered and witnessed during that dispute soured Jack's
opinions. That is his opinions about his employers, the government,
even some fellow miners and certainly the coal business, the industry
he'd grown to respect over the years.
When the opportunity of voluntary early retirement, with an enhanced
golden handshake of twenty-nine thousand pounds was offered, Jack had
no hesitation of grabbing it. He decided it was a good chance of
spending more time with his family, his allotment and the prize pigs he
reared there. It would possibly even enable him the prospect of
starting up a small business or at least of giving his sons a
break.
When Marjorie Sears discussed her husband's retirement plans with her
neighbours she bragged about the fact that Jack was seriously
considering setting the lads up in business. When Marjorie left them
Mary Jordan gave her views on Marjorie's latest disclosure by mimicking
her spitefully "Aye wor Jack's go'na set wor Mary Jane up in a boutique
yi know." However the Sears Family's dreams of a family business had to
be put on hold when Danny persuaded his father to bankroll his
prospects of a career in the big city.
That sight of himself through his blood-shot eyes in the cracked mirror
was to set Danny on a new course. Compelling the young addict's drug
clouded brain to take stock of his situation. He had not lived, but
existed in London for the past two years. When he had first got there
at the age of twenty-one it had seemed that the world was his
plaything. He landed himself a job in a large city brokerage firm.
Within days of his arrival in London he was accepted by the fashionable
in-crowd who introduced him to snorting cocaine and mainlining "H".
Like so many other junkies he felt he was in complete control of his
habit. While he had money it was a habit and not a drug problem.
Black Friday in the stock markets around the world however punched a
hole in the fabric of the financial investment bubble. Fall-out from
that puncture put an end to many city employees' careers. Certainly it
blasted young Danny Sears along with many others out of their well-paid
city jobs. The money Danny's dad had given him was soon swallowed up
into the bottomless hypodermic. His newfound smart-set acquaintances
melted away as quickly as icicles in a hot oven. That's when Danny's
recreational habit became a problem.
Work was hard to find, so the clever but wayward young ex-executive had
to lower his sights. Eventually he did find himself a job of sorts, not
quite the kind of high-flying work he had come to the big city for, but
it was work for which he had received training. That position was in
the abattoir of large pork processing company, cleaning out the pigpens
and looking after their fated occupants. While working at the abattoir
Danny's craving for drugs increased the only way that he could maintain
the addiction was by deception and dishonesty. Most of this was by way
of cheating and stealing from his employers on a grand scale. Somehow
he managed to get away with this. Rather he did until the day before
sighting the defiled spectre of him self, in that cracked looking glass
in the run down squat.
On the day preceding Danny receiving that shock of seeing what he
actually looked like in that mirror, his boss had hauled him into the
office. When he got him on the carpet he read out some of the offences
Danny had perpetrated since starting work there. Luckily for the addict
the manager had only learned of some of his crimes. There is no doubt
that if he had been familiar with the full extent of Danny's criminal
misconduct he would have involved the law. He informed the young junkie
that he was dismissed immediately without pay. Telling the young man he
had only been tolerated for so long because his wretched appearance
made the pigs look good by comparison.
Dropping into the foetal position on the squalid bed it had just
vacated, the dirty bedraggled original of that gaunt reflection cried
and sobbed. Like a whipped bairn he wept long and loud, streams of salt
tasting tears trickling down his grimy pale cheeks and into his
slobbering mouth. There was no fawning mother or strong kindly father
in that forsaken squat to take away the hurt that tormented young Danny
Sears, no matter how many tears he shed. Two hours of grieving for
himself and his plight did him a power of good though, it did not
remove his craving for heroine. One thing it did do was to give him the
resolve to take the first step towards shaking the heartless anodyne
monkey off his back.
Fighting the cruel narcotic withdrawal symptoms, the sniffing young man
added up his liquid assets. He had enough for a single fix or a single
bus ticket to Newcastle. Danny found the temptation for the former
option almost overwhelming but he resisted. After having bathed and
tidied himself up, leaving what few possessions he owned at the squat,
he headed resolutely for the bus terminal. Nausea and pains were
tearing at his whole body when he rang a transferred charge call to his
parents. Jack Sears answered his son's telephone call, accepting the
reversed fee without hesitation. "Hello me bonny lad we've all missed
you" his father cried over the phone.
The Sears Family finished their twenty minutes telephone conversation,
which had included a lot of laughing and a lot of crying. Putting the
phone down Jack Sears turned to his spouse and eldest son and said.
"Well at long last me son's coming' home. Right that's it! Let's put on
a feast fit for a king. We'll have a surprise party for him. I'm go'na
kill me prize porker. Thomas ah want you ti pick 'im up from Gallowgate
Bus Station, when his bus gets in, get a taxi. Marjorie get oot them
bottles we got for Christmas. Order some best ham and tongue and a tray
of fresh cream cakes from the Co-op. We're ganna spare nee expense, waa
bairn's comin' hyem."
"But father he's a waster! Ye give 'im all that bloody money! He gans
tappy lappying off doon to the smoke! Blows all 'es brass and God knas
what else? You're welcomin' 'im back! Just as if nowt's the matter.
A've made nee mistakes. What aboot me what div ah get. Aye muggings me
staying here looking after ye 'n me Mother?" Whined Thomas petulantly,
almost breaking into tears of frustration.
Marjorie put her arm round her son's shoulders "There there, never you
mind wor Thomas Edward. You've made no mistakes, your turn will come,
he's had his chance, and he has as you quite rightly say blown it.
It'll certainly be lovely to see our Daniel and have me bairn home
again. But you'll get your opportunity son, what money's left when me
and your dad pop wa clogs will all be yours." His mother crooned,
kissing her eldest son tenderly on his forehead.
Mumbling to himself so that the other two couldn't hear him, Jack said.
"Not if I've got out ti dee with it yi wont! Yi sneaky little sod that
yi are! The man who never made a mistake never made nowt" With that a
wry smile spread across the ex-miners rugged face, as he patted the
breast pocket concealing his bankbook.

by Don Passmore ?