Richard Hanover: Private Dick, Part Three

Final part of this thing. It's 5000 words. Sorry.

VII.

We were cross-legged on gym mats, the smell of feet slowly drifting up from them. We were drinking his “good tequila” – Don Julio. Not for necking. He’d set up a desk lamp between us. Light reflected off the metal edges of the machines – it was the steelworks at night.

“My daughter’s lonely. She only comes home when she’s lonely. London’s too big.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “She told me about her business idea.”

“Oh yes,” he said. I heard the sleeping bag crinkle as he shifted his weight. “There’s a grand tradition of misjudged business ideas in our family. Which reminds me; I’ve thought of a slogan. The Gym On The Hill – you’ll be sweating when you get in.”

“It’s a family tradition,” I said.

I sipped the good tequila and tensed my jaw. I didn’t want to try bad tequila.

“What shall we do about Lorry?”

“Call the police?”

“They won’t like that. He has a son the size of him and still growing.”

“I’m getting my insurance money for the car through. I can pay you.”

“So that’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“Are there any other jobs you need looking in to.”

“None.”

“What about Danni? I could check on her and make sure she’s okay.”

“I’ll just ask her thanks,” he said.

I sat at the bus stop opposite and watched Daniel go up to Lorry’s door.

He knocked. The son answered; his tiny head.

His son went away and came back with Lorry who stepped out to fill the doorframe.

I could hear them without much trouble. Dan explained that they’d got off on the wrong foot. That they have different approaches and it’d be good if they could both co-exist.

Lorry didn’t like the word co-exist. He told Dan to fuck himself, lightly slapping his cheek with the back of his hand. Dan kept his hands down by his side.

“Go back to your community centre, you cunt,” Lorry said.

Back at the gym, we were almost through the good tequila.

“I’m going to bring him down,” I said.

“You won’t bring him down for selling anabolic steroids,” Dan said.

“I know that. I’ll get him some other way.”

“You don’t know what you’re getting involved in,” he said.

“I’m going to find out what I’m getting involved in.”

“I’m not going to pay you to get yourself killed.”

“A real detective finishes every case, regardless of whether he’s getting paid.”

“You’re not a real detective.”

VIII.

Dan paid me to be the receptionist. Free food, board, a small allowance and share options. We slept on the crash mats. I ate nettle stew and jacket potatoes with beans and cheese.

Out of boredom, I got fit. My favourite was the rowing machine. We put a map of the bay on the wall – and drew a dotted line from the docks to the tip of Mumbles pier on the other side. It’s seven kilometres across. I timed myself. My PB was fifty-three minutes. At the end of it, dripping with sweat, I imagined myself emerging from the water beneath Verdi’s, stepping up to the counter, Welsh-Italian waitresses clambering to take my order: Mint choc chip, my heart.

I was thirty-five years old and in the prime of my life. Daniel drew me up a personal training regime. I started to feel strong – to understand the pull of a body worth its name. Getting big was easy – you just needed the time. I was working the reception desk by day, training by night. I was saving money. I had enough for a train ticket to somewhere.

Daniel and I would occasionally go for a drink in the Uplands Tavern, but mostly he’d go out on his own, and come back drunk. I’d listen to his sinuses in the dark. We had a deal that, if he got laid and brought someone back, I’d get out of his way. It only happened once. At three in the morning, he rang to warn me. It was cold outside so I just shifted in to the showers. I listened to them working around the equipment: benches, running machines, the Swiss ball.

As I got physically stronger, I felt a renewed commitment to tying up the Lorry case. I rang him again. This time I left a message.

“A’ight, this is Lorry. If you’re phoning about the van then leave me your number, name and weight.”

“A’right butt, I’m phoning about the van. My name’s Gareth and I’m eighty-five kay-gees.”

He rang back the same day. He was suspicious.

“Alright Gareth. How did you get my number?”

I was chatting to a bloke down the gym – forget his name – big unit – and I was saying how I was looking for something to liven up my weekends while I wait for my licence to come through from the SIA.”

“Who did you speak to?”

“Honest to God, I don’t remember his name. Massive bloke. Says he gets his juice off you.”

“Right yeah.”

I told him I’d just arrived from Aberystwyth, where I’d been working door. I said the word Deca-Durabolin. He relaxed after that. He liked that I was just getting in to Security game. He said it show how the old school do things.

He told me that, he usually only accepts word of mouth recommendations, but if I came down to the club to meet him he might reconsider.

I had a list of key-words written on a sheet by the phone.

Look, buddy, this is how it starts, alright. Anyone who starts out, has to drive the van. We’ve all done it. Then, once we trust you, you can come in the back and get in on the action.

Two years ago, I had my private detective hair cut: a crashing dark fringe, hair swished back at the temples. It was Sunday Elvis. Tight but loose. But since then, it’d grown, down past my ears, matted in patches, receding unevenly.

On the day I was due to meet Lorry, in the showers at the gym, I cut it as short as I could with kitchen scissors. Watched the lank, clumps clog the drain. Then, with Daniel’s cut-throat, I steadily got rid of the rest of it.

It was a surprise to see the contours of my own skull.

I met Lorry at his work. Time: the biggest nightclub on the Kingsway. He told me to pretend it was a job interview. We walked, slowly, through the empty club, his shoes reflecting the spotlights. The smell of bleach and sausage meat and, faintly, cigarette smoke still leaking from the carpets.

“Used to be, we had no trouble getting boys involved. But, recently, things have started to change. Some of the shirt fillers getting prissy. Do you remember Palace down on High Street?”

“Don’t know it.”

We passed a guy setting hot dogs in a rotisserie.

“I used to work there. The big clubs on Wind Street are chains: they bring their own staff, their own training on top of the license. There’s only four clubs in town who we speak to: Barons, Escape, Euphoria and Top Banana. Down at Palace I was the fucking emperor. We did our job well – kept people safe, happy – and if someone was being a dick we got to deal with it as we saw fit. Old school.”

We walked out across the dancefloor. The space was enormous with an island booth, shaped to be a pair of lips – the DJ as its tongue. A bar ran the length of the back wall.

“We’ve got no freedom anymore. The piss-heads have more rights than us. I mean I don’t like violence, but sometimes it’s the only option. Besides, jobs have perks.

“Back in the day, we could guarantee most weekends a bit of action.

“What’s the deal with you then?”

“I’ve been up in Aberystwyth last few years.

He told me about the old days, when Swansea bouncers were like musketeers: all for one and one for all. Walkie-talkie signals that reached all the way from Barons on the High Street to Top Banana at the end of the Kingsway. It was a career. You got girls. Respect. Good hours. It was a story-telling community.

When I asked what I was in Swansea, I said: “My mate used to work the door at this club, good mate he was, got his eye gouged – can’t see out of one eye now – so I lost it, took that prick to town – and, course, the plod came looking, so I had to leave town.”

He nodded as though this was familiar.

IX.

The Vanguard. The evening began quietly. We met at the second floor, third exit of the NCP car park behind the Megabowl. There, under yellow lights, I was introduced to the boys as they arrived.

Bill. An older guy, maybe late fifties with a moustache that covered his upper lip. When I shook his hand, I saw the bones at his knuckles were built up, from breaks and rebreaks. He was, as Lorry introduced him, “old school.”

Matt. Young and bald, breasts so juicy you’d want to put them under a grill. The back of his wide neck was boiling with acne. His head seemed tiny, resting on top of him. Like a football stuck up a tree.

Then there was Lorry and his son, Lee.

“Boys, this is Gareth. He’s alright.”

They got in to the back of the van – a dull, overhead lamp flicked on. I could see them through the metal grating that divided the front seats from the back.

It was quarter past eight.

At Lorry’s instruction, I drove off, rising through the levels of the car park, looping upwards in circles. The yellow light made everything look bruised.

We popped out at the top by the train station and cruised down High Street. We passed a train of hens – at the front of them, a girl lurched along on sharp heels, leaning against the parked cars for support. She was wearing a boob tube and a veil: cans and vibrators bounced on the pavement behind her.

I glanced in the rear-view mirror. The boys were standing at the high windows, watching.

We cruised past Barons, past Monkey, down to Wind Street – Yates, Walkabout, Slug and Lettuce, all full to the windows. A man stood in the middle of the pedestrianised area with his shirt off. It was quarter past eight. He was a big lad. And looked around him as though expecting to be congratulated.

“Warm it up then boys,” Lorry said.

He told me to park up at the leisure centre. He said I should get in to the back with them.

I sat next to Lee on the bench. No-one spoke. There was just the heat rising off us.

In my head, I ran through my list of replies to difficult questions:

Sustanon two-fifty, Deca-Durabolin, Dianabol, Anavar and, sometimes, Stanozolol.

I bench four-twenty.

I prefer to inject my glutes.

They didn’t ask me any questions. Lorry pulled out an unframed rectangular mirror, slate-backed – set it down on his thighs and started chopping up coke with his credit card. The clacking sound like a conductor’s baton.

Lee watched him nervously – his small head turning back and forth on his body like a handle turning on a paneled door.

Lorry cut up five lines – claws – on the mirror. He brought out a ten, rolled it up and – bending over – took a line. He passed the mirror round. Bill the old guy, took half a line in his right nostril and the other half in his left. When Matt lent down, I saw the whiteheads on his neck wink and glisten, one of them so ready to go it wouldn’t have taken more than a breeze to pop – I could’ve blown on it myself.

Matt’s face was pink as he reemerged.

He passed it to me. It’d been a while but I managed okay.

Lee was last. His huge back arched over the mirror, mysterious shapes appeared under his T-shirt. His was a swift, clean up – athletic almost – snuffling the note around the mirror, clearing up anyone else’s spills.

“Gareth, put this on,” Lorry said and he handed me a tape.

I got out the van and went round to the driver’s seat. I pushed the mix tape in. I’ve still got it; I sometimes put it on when I need to stay awake. You can hear the influence of working the Rock/indie Fridays at Escape and even, his early years, at Funked Up in Barons.

1. Pavarotti – Nussun Dorma
2. James Brown – Soul Power
3. Prodigy – Their Law
4. Parliament – One Nation Under A Groove
5. Ramones – Blitzkrieg Bop
6. Madness – Last train to Cairo
7. Monster Magnet – Megasonic Teenage Warhead
8. Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
9. Paul Simon – You can call me Al
10. Wagner – Adagio for Strings
11. Pavarotti – Nussun Dorma

Then, as we waited, Lorry told a story. He had to tell it loudly, to speak over the music, and Matt, Lee and Bill huddled in to listen to him. I watched through the grating.

“Me and Bill were working black Sunday down when Time was called Ritzy. Wales had won the grand slam.”

Lee’s head went back, and he breathed out his nose.

“Dad,” he said.

Lorry ignored him.

“There were squaddies all over town, kicking off. First we knew, we got told someone had barred the door to the girl’s bogs. It was up on the third floor. We tried to put the boot in but it wouldn’t budge. You could hear there was something going on inside though; we listened to it while Alan took the door off its hinges. The sounds they made – what was it like Bill?”

“It was like animals,” he said.

Lee was staring at the floor; Matt was nodding.

“They were fucking this girl, right. That’s all we knew. We took the door off its ‘inges – they’d yanked the jonny machine off the wall and wedged it between the door and the sinks. By this time the back-up had arrived.”

He looked around to show that we were the back-up.

“Fuck right,” Matt said.

“And when we got inside, there were these squaddies taking turns on this girl – five of them – one each to her arms and legs, holding her up in the air, and the fifth one getting his dick wet. But what we didn’t realise, right, it was fucking Anna, the fucking perfume girl, pretty girl, nice girl – she wasn’t even drunk – and they were raping her and covering her mouth and when we got in there they just let her drop. She just fell and slipped off, they’d torn her clothes off, she was all colours, shaking on the floor – poor thing, lovely girl – and these blokes with their dicks out – girl’s third floor bogs is big, right, they like to have room – and so we all pile in, like fifteen blokes in there now – and these squaddies zipping themselves up, ready for a scrap, got Anna out with Angie from door – and then we went at it and what did you do Bill?”
Bill nodded.

Lee said: “the perfume,” in a bored voice.

“Bill took a bottle of perfume off the counter – those fucking thick glass bottles, heavy cunts, shaped like a body – and his first swing he cracks it open on the front of this prick’s face – the stink of it and the fucker can’t see a thing and his mates pile in. We were two to one. At the cubicles, at the sinks, tough boys these lads, they took a few knocks, and we used the perfume – like fucking grenades – until they were just feeling there way around on hands and knees, rolling around in the glass – flammable too, though we didn’t go that far. The place hummed. We brought Anna back in to have a look and take a couple of free kicks if she wanted to – which she didn’t.”

Matt was rocking with the breathless rhythm of it.

“Oh my God,” he said.

“No CCTV in those days. You know what fucking Bill said? What did you say Bill?”

“We came off smelling of roses,” Lee said.

Bill had a good laugh at that.

We heard the mobile ring and I started up the engine.

“Alright?” Lorry said.

“Okay.”

“Cinders please, Gareth.”

Cinderella’s was the end of the pier club, away from the rest of the bars. I took the sea front road at a clip, it was quiet, the moon paved a path out across the bay, the houses got bigger.

We got out at the car park next to the pier – the helter-skelter was dark, faded illustrations of dragons, winding down the slide.

Lorry hugged one of the door men who said “there’s some boys won’t leave quietly.” He walked us through the club – it was thinly carpeted in red with seats and tables round the edges like a cabaret club, a dance floor in the middle. It smelt sweet. There was a gender split – boys sitting down, girls dancing. It was only ten o’clock.

The lights turned our faces yellow, red, blue, then green. In a corner, a young couple were working on each other – hands and tongues testing each surface.

The speakers were loud but tinny – the sound fizzing around the room. The DJ was about my age – sweating in a V through his shirt, his face recently shaven. When the strobe light flashed you could see the slack skin at his cheeks.

As we passed the dance floor there was a pneumatic hiss and a cloud of smoke turned the girls to shapes – a single mass, struggling.

I realised how wired I was when I sang along to Lucky Star.

Outside, in the beer garden, a concrete patio built above the sea, kids were sitting on the wall smoking and drinking, holding pints in both hands.

The sound of the waves on the rocks was occasionally audible below the music. A generator huffed in a corner.

There was half a dozen lads wearing matching stag party shirts, sat around a large round table: Fourfinger, Divvy, Prang, Maplin, Dan the Stag, Wopper. They were young: singing, throwing pint glasses in to the sea. The bouncers got everyone but them back inside and closed the doors.

“We’ve asked you to leave nicely,” Lorry said.

“Fuck off is it,” one of them said, although we didn’t know who, because half of them had their backs to us.

The few of them who could see us stood up; their faces changed. The Stag, seeing his mate’s, stood up as well, still facing away from us. Matt stepped forward, turned the stag round at the shoulder and swung. He caught him plum on the jaw and you could see the bone go loose. The boy was out cold, straight out, to his knees and then on to the floor his mouth wide open, like the painting, his mates pulled back and started screaming.

Matt stood there looking at them. His neck bright red and ready to blow. They just screamed or fell to the floor or shouted at us to get an ambulance. One of them picked up a pint glass and looked terrified. The stag’s body was totally still, legs folded beneath him on the ground.

“You’ve broken his fucking jaw,” Maplin said.

The old guy, Bill, walked up to Maplin slowly, grabbed his hands and held them against his side. Then he head butted him, slowly – placing his forehead against the boy’s mouth.

“This isn’t it,” Lorry said.

X.

We were back in the van. Bill had blood coming from his forehead where the boy’s teeth had hit. Matt was clenching and unclenching his hand, saying: “you could feel it go, like a sack of marbles.”

I drove us back toward Wind Street.

In the back, they took another big line. When we came back in to town it was nearly midnight: the zoo was open. Groups of topless men prowled the pedestrianised areas. The field hospital – a couple of NHS caravans, linked by tarpaulin – was in full swing: half-chill out room, half speed dating event, the stitched-up banter of drunks on adjacent gurneys. Men who’d taken a bottle to the face and hardly noticed.

We waited for a call and they took more coke.

After a while, Lorry phoned Barons to ask if they’d had any trouble. He said it’d not been too bad.

Then Lorry started to reminisce. He said: “Bill’ll remember this. We used to go out every weekend – the clubs needed us – but it’s not like that anymore.”

“Dad, you always do this,” Lee said.

So we waited, and told stories. Occasionally, they got me round to have a line as well.

It was five guys in a van, taking coke.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

“This girl Lee’s been shagging – what’s her name?”

“Dad.”

“Come on!”

“It’s Leane.”

“That’s it. This girl Leane is so fit I’m half-tempted to kick her out of his bed and tell her she could come see where he got it from.”

After a while, Lorry decided to just start cruising. See if we could rustle something up. They got me to say stuff out the window as we passed.

“They won’t mind starting on you,” Lorry said.

Just a little fishing.

“Oh, you’re an ugly fuck.”

“The gay bar’s that way.”

And other classics…

It was on Hanover Street. A tough guy, like them, with shoulder muscles so big they were almost wings, rising up from his back.

He was walking like he was on film – the slightest bounce to his step, a little movement at the hips – almost camp. I remembered what Danni said about the London gay scene.

I kept it simple: “Oh tough guy, you’re a cunt.”

He ran toward me, tried to pull open the driver’s door, started booting the van.

The boys piled out the back. In the wing-mirror, I saw Lorry approach. A running punch that caught the bloke on the back of the head. He was massive though, this bloke and he swung for Lorry and caught him in the neck. Lorry went down hard and stayed there. Lee was distracted by watching Lorry hit the deck.

“Dad?” he said.

Matt took a swing and missed, clipping the wing mirror.

I saw Bill coming round the front of the van. The bloke hadn’t seen him. Bill just lifted his elbow up and let it come down clean on the bloke’s temple. The bloke’s head cracked against the driver’s side window as he folded at the knees.

They dragged him behind Barons. I heard the club above us and a couple of people smoking on the fire escape, chatting.

Lorry told me to reverse in to the alley, blocking it off. They left the van’s back doors open. I angled the rear-view down and watched them. I couldn’t see the bloke, just hear him, or hear things connecting with him. They were taking kicks now, mostly.

I sat there thinking about my life. I hadn’t done much with it.

I thought about my ex-wife.

I hadn’t thought about her in a while.

She was living in Barcelona, with an English guy she met out there. She’d given up her career in Pharmacy to teach English as a Foreign Language.

I was thinking that we used to come to Baron’s on a Wednesday for a funk and soul night. They would play the same hundred songs every week. When they played Superstition, we would rise out of the darkened booth and dance. She would always laugh at my body-popping. She’d let my leg slip between her thighs. I’d get a hard on and, after the song had finished, I’d ask her to wait on the dance floor with me a while until I could walk properly. That was before we were married.

And there was the sound of a china bowl cracking in the microwave.

Neither of us could cook then. I still can’t.

From the back of the van, there was the sound like a lock being forced.

It’d started as a joke, I know. I used to break in to her house just to show I could do it. Even when I had my own set of keys, I’d sometimes come in through the bathroom window just to see if she’d wake up.

And I had the posters. Shaft, Bullitt, then after that, the fiction: Raymond Chandler.

After she left me, I took out an ad in the Yellow Pages:

You can run but you can’t hide

The gang were still going to work on this guy. I listened to them grunting. It was no story – it was nothing – it was noises – it was exercise. Violence in sets. Matt in a rhythm. I wondered if they would kill him.

I’d been that way for two years. I needed to leave Swansea but I didn’t know how.

I leant out the car and yelled: “Lads, the fucking plods are coming. Get in the fucking van, we need to fuck off.”

They piled in behind me, screaming and yelling, hugging each other, blood on their bodies, the doors slammed shut. In the rear-view, framed by the cage, topless, they look like wrestlers.

I drove off – they were singing: If you’ll be my bodyguard, I will be your long lost pal.

After a while, Lorry said: “Alright Gareth the cops are gone. Take it easy.”

I slowed a little.

“They were coming,” I said. “I saw them.”

“Let’s go back to mine for a beer,” he said.

In their minds, through telling and retelling their stories they edited their own memories – smash cut, split-screen, slow mo – all the fights they’ve ever had in one slick montage.

And a voiceover, too. They were mavericks, fighting a system that would not allow them their pride. They followed their own laws, an honour code. If a man falls, his men fall with him. And when they get crossed, they get cross.

They shouted at me to stop.

“We’re going somewhere,” I yelled.

They clattered the metal.

“Fuck sake, twat,” Brian says. “Stop the fucking van and let me drive.”

He punched the metal grating.

It was Wagner now. I turned it up.

We approached a red light before Fabian Way. I knew that, if I stopped, they’d pull me from the cab. It was quiet enough and I went straight through, not speeding, but too fast for them to jump out. We passed Sainsbury’s, a car behind me beeped. They were screaming in the back. Bill opened the back doors, they were swinging back and forth.

We sped through the industrial estate – its unlit hangars – and I followed the signs for the ferry port. I slowed suddenly so the back doors swung closed. I didn’t think I had a plan until I was in the middle of carrying it out. I had seen this before in films but, still, you don’t expect to ever get the chance. A set of large chain-link gates, closed with a fat combination lock and chain. I accelerated: ploughed straight through. The lock popped off, and span out, sparked across the concrete. I turned up Pavarotti.

I turned right and headed out to where the Ferry docks. We had water on both sides of us, Port Talbot to the left and the Bay to the right. They’d opened the doors and were thinking about leaping.

“Psycho. Stop the van, now,” Lee said.

We headed toward the sea. I picked up a bit of speed and slammed on the breaks. I had my seatbelt on. There was a lot of weight in the back and they crashed forward against the grating. The sound they made: all that muscle tenderizing. The back doors slammed closed too.

We skidded first toward the wall on one side, then toward the sea. We came to a stop not far from the end of the pier. The engine died. They were still dazed in the back. I looked behind me. They were lying on top of each other. Some blood on the grating.

I started the van back up and put her in full lock to the right. I started reversing, slowly, using my wing mirrors.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

They would have liked the narrative, I thought.

They would have put it in their voice over.

This guy we didn’t know was our driver one night, out at the docks – should never have trusted him – but we got out just in time. They won’t find his body washing up in the bay, because we didn’t leave enough of him to find.

I backed towards the edge, a sheet of steel on the ground where they lower the ferry’s car docking ramp. I slowed as I got nearer the edge. Lee was up now and moving to open the doors again.

I let one back wheel slip off the edge, then the other. The van bumped down. There was the sound of the metal scraping on the chassis. I put on the handbrake. Lee almost fell out in to the sea but didn’t.

I grabbed the tape from the deck, killed the engine, got out. I threw the keys in the sea and started to run.

They would try and come after me. But they would have a hard time getting out of the van. I thought that they could probably climb over the roof as long it didn’t upset the weight of the van and pull them all in. They were big guys.

I was running with my new body – and all the blood available to me. It was a personal best. I was over the fence in to the grounds of the BP steel works and I found a set of stairs around the outside of a cooling tower and I climbed up and up and up until I got to the top and I had all of Swansea before me, the van still visible in the docks beneath and I knew, looking out, with the most glorious feeling, that I would never ever come back.