THE VOW, or writing fiction by willing fact.

He always said that if something went wrong, meaning he died or something, I could tell of the vow. He knew that I wanted to write about it after reading a book I gave him about Jack Kerouac and his sidekick, Dean. He saw himself as Dean, the self-detonating spirit of continuous explosion, the loose cannon firing off at random all over America and Europe.
I did feel awful for a while after we made the vow, but, knowing how little else there was in either of our lives at the time, it felt right to go along with it.
The vow was simple. He wanted to assassinate someone high up in politics and I wanted to write about it afterwards. One set the pace for the other until both ran in tandem, at which time we got lucky and the vow was fulfilled in all but writing.
‘One day,’ he would always say, ‘I’ll pack my bags and you’ll have your story.’
Shrugging, I never replied, maybe to keep him bubbling on whichever latest idea he had in mind. But by God did he hate authority! In all the squats we lived at, he must have kicked in twenty or thirty tellies in. If he wasn’t kicking one in, his head was glued to an ads paper to get another one in.
To let you in on the background of this remarkable man, this twirp who never belonged anywhere but the place he needed to go, he came from near Manchester.
‘I hail from Hale,’ he would shout to anyone with a suit on who was interviewing him for another dead end commission-only sales rep job. ‘But I’d slit your throat for a tenner,’ he’d add, just as the suit had managed to force a smile for the first pun.
The suit would stand up from behind his desk, shocked, speechless, waiting for Danny to excuse himself before this became ugly.
We used to go to interviews together and play good rep/bad rep. It worked every time.
Once Danny had shouted his mouth off and walked away, I would still be there, seated. It was only a matter of time before the quivering suit, who I would reassure over his dealing of the situation with ‘that loony’, offered me the job.
It was so easy and for a while provided the basis for our double-act. All we did was reply to the same ads in the paper, arrange an appointment ten minutes apart, dress up, go down the pub to sink a couple (Danny had to be on top form before an interview) and arrive about the same time.
The suit, ‘a bit pushed for time’, might want to kill two reps with one schpeel, being in sales, so we’d hover in and give false names and addresses while the suit filled us in with a job description and company policy. It would go no further than when the suit asked where Danny came from, and if he didn’t ask that one, he would just blow up at any given moment, shouting obscenities, pointing fingers and grinding teeth at the quibbling suit glued to his seat. As soon as Danny had gone, I would start the next day. Being telesales, the application forms were never checked so I signed in as Jack Hughes or Hugh Jasolle or someone else we’d thought up earlier.
The next day I’d be in that office bright and breezy with hair gelled and suit polished, my laces tied to stranglehold anyone who dared cross my path.
At lunch, I would look ultra-willing and purposeful and stay behind while all else went for a bite to eat. This allowed me time enough to go through their desks with gloves on and take anything of value, the smaller the better. Once done, I could stroll past returning colleagues with a nod and meet up with Danny in the pub.
With him would be Round Robin, sobre as a samurai, to relieve us of the varied bits of plastic and other goodies from the raid. He was called Round Robin because he was fat and his first name was Robin, and it was Robin who gave us 40 percent of the value of the items he would buy in his whiparound of friends’ shops and stalls who, perhaps dubiously, had not invested in electronic credit readers yet. Any cash that went to us would always be split down the middle and spent in a whirl of drink and drugs, commencing there and usually ending up in a meaningless pub brawl late that night with the obligatory pilgrimage to the kebab shop to fill up before bedding down somewhere.
Don’t get me wrong, though. This swiping and raping of telesales firms was karmic justice to us, enacted for the sole purpose of self-advancement, which was also the firms’ and employees’ only rulebook.
Danny and I started out selling space for a pharmaceutical magazine, that’s how we met, and when we realised that we were being pushed into stealing from already crisis-struck firms, promising major exposure in a magazine that never even existed, and for minute commissions, we made a deal to go one better in the sleaze of tiptoe, white-collar robbery.
You may be thinking that we’d be found out by the law or bump into an old ‘colleague’, but as soon as we smelt our own demise around the corner, we moved to another county, and if someone was stupid enough to confront us, Danny, huge, strapping and angry as a rat for its status, would pummel his face into the floor of whichever pub, bar, club, street we were in. When red replaced white on the poor man’s face, Danny would cease the attack.
Me? I went along with him that it was more than necessary for our own well being to beat these man senseless.
‘Those CCTV cameras are coming, you know,’ he’d say. ‘There won’t be any more fun times like this when they’re around. We have to enjoy ourselves as much as we can while we can,’ to which I’d always agree.
If it hadn’t been for Danny, I wouldn’t have this to write, to remember how it was back then in the early eighties. But there again, if I hadn’t met Danny, I wouldn’t be the out-of-work writer I am today.
We once went for a job at McDonalds and set about our first-day duties of sweeping up, putting Big Mac sauce in the burger, pulling strips of cheese off a block and cleaning surfaces. I could see the strain of normalisation getting to Danny almost immediately, even when he was on the other side of the kitchen, so when he went up to the boss with a broom in his right hand, I feared the worst. Dave held his left hand up and counted four fingers on it. Then, the boss pointed one finger and wagged it towards the changing-room doors. A murmur of girly laughter came from that vicinity but it was quickly wiped away by the stern look on the black manager’s face as he shouted, ‘Get back to work!’
Instead of towing the line, I walked over to the changing-room doors and ran up the stairs, where Danny was busy relieving the hung coats and jackets of their material worth, shaking each one down for a tinkle.
‘Give us a hand, then,’ he said. His face, as always when robbing for small change, was stiff and urgent. I took one wall while he made his way across the other. ‘Finished?’ he squealed. ‘Right. Let’s get changed and scram.’
My heart was racing. General Mugabi would by now have noticed me away from my post.
‘Take your McDonalds outfit with you,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked, almost laughing at how silly an idea this sounded.
‘Just take it, alright!’
At this moment, I suddenly realised that Danny was always going to be one step ahead of me, the law and his victim. In fact, Danny was one step ahead of everyone; one gigantic dinosaur-step ahead.
When we reached ground level, I gave my notice in by word and glided out of the front doors with Danny. We had been working at McDonalds for precisely two hours and ten minutes. The high street clock said so, and as we skipped and jumped down the pavement, past Comet and Barclays, Ryman’s and Smiths, the world was a bright and new place again.
‘What did you say to the boss?’ I asked him.
Dave turned and smiled at me. ‘I asked if I could have a word and he asked, quite rudely, how many, so I told him ‘I want to leave; that’s four’, so he sacked me.’
I laughed out loud and clasped his shoulder with my hand. ‘You’re a funny bugger, you know,’ I said. He knew it.
We’d been hanging out for about two years and it was by this time that I remember weighing up the pros and cons of sticking around with him. On one hand, I knew that I needed more material if I wanted to be the writer I hoped to be, and on the other, I was quite satisfied that I had more material than I could possibly handle already.
‘The clothes’ll come in handy for when we need some spare change,’ he said, jangling his pockets and winking.
‘I get it! There’s a McDonalds everywhere, so wherever we go, we can hit a changing-room! Brilliant!’
These were the 1980’s. People were still not in the habit of doing as we did. We were the washed-up wave of post-punk flotsam; angry, misunderstood, misrepresented and homeless.
For a few years, we must have done fifty or sixty branches throughout the UK, strolling in, picking pockets and strolling out again. The uniforms changed in 1992 so we were forced to hang up our shirts. Our illustrious career as McDonalds staff-thiefs netted us a good few grand, during which we arrived in a town, did our dirty deeds, and once the town held no more fizz for us we would piss on it one last time and leave like desert dogs, intent on finding new bones to chew on.
We epitomised all that was wrong with the new world, but we could already see that we’d be squeezed out of it before long, and felt compelled to squeeze it for as much as it was worth before it caught up with us. The new world was a sanitised place that stunk of cleanly dealt hypocrisy and we wanted no part in it. Looking back, we were as much a part of the new shitebox mentality as all the suited gits who knew how to play the game. The only difference was that they owned houses now and we didn’t. That’s why we had to smash and grab; we just didn’t want to be dressed in commercial costumes and have to wake up like an alarm clock and wipe people’s arses for what were the best years of our lives.
I managed to retain my McDonalds uniform and always get a tingle down my spine when I look at it. For about five seconds, I am as I was back then; an ignorant, useless, sceptical loser on a cocktail of drugs, lies and laughs with a new girl on my back every month without fail.
Danny and I were inseparable. We had completely different pasts and personalities but our passions and pastimes were the same. I blamed my waywardness on my parents and so did he, although we never spoke of them. They were the enemy.
Though never deemed psychotic by any of our acquaintances, the one crime we both yearned to commit was murder. Even our motives were the same. Our victim had to be in the press (so we could look at his face in contempt), in the wrong (so we could have a reason for killing him) and in the clear (so we could enjoy the thought of killing him in retribution for his legal crimes). Down the pub, we’d spend hours quizzing each other on which global bigwig needed killing the most, how we’d get to him and how we’d do away with his body. Our subjects changed from week to week but their personality traits were always the same; powerful, manipulative and, above all, corrupt.
I should have realised by the look in Danny’s eye that he meant every word. This was no pub game for young Danny.
‘I’d like to knock him down and scrunch his head until it cracked. Then I’d kick it around until it was like a squashed tomato and then I’d burn him to cinders in a disused warehouse,’ he’d say with one hand tight on a Benson and the other under the table clenched, each word spoken with an eloquence of meaning only true warriors with hearts of steel possess.
The friends we collected throughout our travels would ask Danny to do the most despicable things for them and he obliged. He was their Godfather, the one who could play God to their sickest whims. Payment for such heinous acts as car-scratching, robbery, GBH and house-torching would show itself by way of booze at the pub and then drugs back chez whosoever we stumbled across.
We’d take a bedsit if it was to our liking or a squat if it had leccy and water. The two were much the same but for the fact that we wouldn’t need to sign on to reclaim the rent if we were squatting. For this reason, we preferred squatting. Being on the dole meant we were traceable and that wasn’t something we could afford.
With digs secured, we’d find the town’s biggest shopping centre and browse near the checkout girls to see which of them, if any, might be up for a scam. Once we’d sat them down in the nearest available pub after waiting for them to clock off, we’d tell them the plan.
One of us would come to the supermarket and place tons of smoked salmon, fillet steak and razors underneath ten or so cheap, large items like bog roll, cereals and kitchen towel.
At the checkout, the girl would only ring through the cheap stuff and leave the expensive stuff at the bottom, allowing us to stroll out with the goodies and sell the stuff at whichever pub took it, which wasn’t difficult at the time. In three days, after which we’d have to find another supermarket or town centre shop, we could easily amass £400 doing this. We’d give the girls £100 of this money and they’d usually fuck us for showing them some real dangerfun, which was our expression to those who wanted to know how we could afford rounds of lager and JD chasers. We must have stolen well over 10,000 Gillette Mach 3 blades and £10,000’s worth of salmon in our time together.
Our other big scam involved much more sinister doings and the Post Office was the venue. I’m not at all proud of what we did, but as Danny said, ‘life goes on’.
Just like the supermarkets, we watched to see which of the cashiers looked easily swayed by a scam and waited for them to knock off at five-thirty. As many of the staff were either holiday workers or temporary fill-ins from the Jobcentre on £2.13 an hour, the youngsters were the prime pickings. As most of the swayable ones were blokes similar to us, they were easy to get down the pub and persuade. Generally, when we told them they could easily skip off to Greece for two weeks with the proceeds, they were sold on the idea within the first pint.
What with the severity of the Post Office scam, it would always be our swansong from a town, slipping away the same day with all the money and letting the youngsters hang for all we cared. Post Offices being in the centre of town, we knew we could never go to the pubs we frequented without the high possibility of undercover police intervention.
The scam involved OAP pension books. Luckily, we knew that there were many such pension books stored at the Post Office for those old dears too dotty to remember bringing them in. Our chosen clerk would have done his homework by studying which pensioners came in late over the period of about a month and appear nonchalant when either Danny or I strolled over to his till at two minutes past nine on a given Thursday morning. He’d cash the sixteen pensioners fortnightly cheques that he’d given to us the night before and that would be that. We had told the clerk to tell his bosses that we had said we were despatching the money to the pensioners personally, which would presumably get him off. Whatever happened to him, we were off in a shot, back on British Rail dodging ticket collectors or giving them tall stories, wondering where next to live.
With no computers logging times of transactions, the foolish clerk assumed he had every chance of getting off. All he had to do was slip the stubs back into someone else’s cubby-hole and dip his hand into the neighbouring till and all would be even for him at the end of his shift.
The thought of him waiting at the said bus stop, his backpack strapped around him, hope draining slowly from his cheeks as time slipped by and it began to sink in was worth a chuckle in the buffet carriage on many occasions.
We knew the pensioners were reimbursed the week after and, in light of this, we never did Post Office scams during the colder months, an exclusion clause I brought in for fear of the oldsters’ bones seizing up for lack of heating.
No surveillance cameras meant the world was our oyster.
‘We’ll hit London when we’re good and ready,’ Danny used to say. ‘And when we do, we’ll have it for every penny!’
I knew he had a secret aversion to London, though. We both knew it was too wised up to our amateur antics, that there were many like us up there, and that we feared it. Somehow, I knew that this would be the place where everything would come to pass for us, and it did.
We’d just done a Post Office scam in Brighton and, for some reason, Danny decided at the train station that this was the time to hit London.
We arrived at three in the afternoon and went straight to Leicester Square. By seven, with our funds dwindled so drastically that we could hardly talk to each other, all seemed lost before we’d even started scamming.
In the Crystal Rooms, where we’d already lost £150 each, we resented London with the new understanding that it was just too damn tough for us. There were CCTV cameras at all angles and black suited Arabs watching everywhere for dodgy customers. The machines didn’t pay like the ones elsewhere and when Danny began to get upset with a particularly stingy one, we were duly thrown out. Danny did nothing in response. He just stood there as if his whole life had passed him by in a flash. If that had been in Hereford or even Liverpool, he’d have beaten both bouncers up in the space of a minute, but here in London he was lacklustre and motionless, a different person to the one I had always known.
We strolled off and played more machines in a small sidestreet arcade when a man appeared between me and my machine. He was a coloured gentleman who came with an overpowering air of prosperity. He smelt of expensive clothes and after-shave and I was sure he was nothing more than a gay man looking for kicks.
‘You see that girl over there?’ he said, pointing to a pretty but lost looking girl over by the exit.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Well, excuse me for my forwardness, but I would like to pay you to have sex with her at my hotel.’
Since our funds had dwindled to an all-time low, the idea struck me as a Godsend. ‘Sounds OK to me but I’ll have to ask my mate first.’
‘No need! No need!’ the man said quickly, hoping to hurry me off without Danny.
‘He’s over there,’ I said, pointing to the red-faced boy kicking the Kiss pinball machine.
‘Well, OK, but I’d prefer if you came alone,’ he replied, noticeably uncomfortable by Danny’s appearance.
‘We do everything together.’
I traipsed over to Danny and the coloured gent was quick to follow.
‘You see that girl by the door?’ I said. Danny nodded. ‘Well, this bloke wants me to go back to his hotel and shag her. What do you reckon?’
Danny shuffled about to reinvent himself as my pimp. ‘How much?’ he asked, pushing me to one side to face the coloured gent.
‘Fifty pounds,’ said the gent.
Danny rolled his eyes. ‘A hundred and fifty and he’s yours. But I come too.’
The gent agreed in a withdrawn way and led us over to where the girl was standing. As we got close up, I realised that she was older than I had first thought. She was a pretty girl, her body tight and slender.
‘This is Laura,’ said the gent.
Danny and I greeted her. ‘Hello, Laura.’
‘Hiya, boys,’ she replied, stubbing out a cigarette on the floor.
‘Shall we go, then?’ said the gent, now shaking with excitement.
Laura moved to be by my side while Danny and the gent went ahead. Danny began to play his new role of pimp to a fine art taking short steps with his hands in his pockets, firstly checking to see if we were being followed by heavies and then, once sure the coast was clear, providing a hearty chuckle to a pleasantry made by the gent which neither Laura or I heard.
‘I like you a lot,’ she said. ‘I picked you out from about fifty blokes. Took me an hour to decide.’
‘I’m flattered,’ I replied. And I was.
As we walked along St Martin’s Lane, I felt her hand brush over my crotch. She giggled when she felt my erection and looked over to me. I smiled sternly without feeling at a loss and guided her hand back to my crotch. Her hand stroked my penis for the rest of the walk back to the hotel behind Danny and the gent, whose bodies hid Laura’s furtive gestures from passers by.
By the time we reached the hotel, Laura had such a tight grip on my penis that I thought I’d blow the whole deal by coming there and then on the pavement in my kecks, so it was a relief to see the coloured gent climb the steps up to the hotel.
Danny smirked when he saw how swanky it was, and as the gent went to find his key at reception, he came over to us.
He winked at Laura to let go of me and then took me to one side, away from earshot. ‘Just follow my instructions, stud,’ he whispered.
The gent came back to join us just as Danny pinched Laura’s arse playfully.
With card key inserted, the gent pressed for ‘penthouse’ in the lift. Laura, with her hands protected from sight once again, returned back to my crotch and started to sigh in my ear as the lift murmurred. The gent rubbed his hands together and collected sweat from his right palm, rolled it up and threw it away.
The doors opened onto a vast, palatial living room. The gent invited us in with his new hands and gestured towards the 180 degree view of the river, the City, the West End etc. We strolled in and Laura started pulling my trousers off. I fell over. They laughed.
When I regained balance, sans culottes, the gent filled us in on his desires for the night.
‘I am here in London on business and will leave tomorrow. I intend to have some fun before I go.’ He paused, only to resume with a newly lit smile. ‘My idea of fun,’ he said, ‘is watching young couples have sex in whichever city I visit. So I engaged Laura from a top model agency to find me a boy she found her type and Roger over there, he’s my video director. He’ll record you fucking Laura for me. Is that OK?’
‘Fine by us!’ hollered Danny, pouring himself a sneaky JD on the rocks over by the City landscape. ‘Right, Tim?’ he said to me.
‘I’m on it,’ I said, looking to Laura, who was playing with her sex staring at me from below, having assumed position without delay.
The gent took his jacket off and guided us to the TV area. It was the largest TV I had ever seen.
‘Now, you two lovebirds go and lie on the rug,’ he said.
We were now totally naked and so I guided her over and down onto the warm rug.
‘Roger,’ announced the gent. ‘Set the camera to where they are.’ The gent, now very shaky, went and kneeled and started praying to some God in a foreign language in front of the TV screen. Then he got up and made himself comfortable on the huge sofa behind us. He had a grandstand view of proceedings.
‘Give this to Timmy,’ he said to Roger, passing him a silky mask. Roger did so. ‘Put it on your face and please don’t take it off,’ he said to me sheepishly. I did so and it fitted perfectly.
I looked down to Laura who pulled me towards her sex.
‘Roger,’ said the gent. ‘The angle is perfect. Now, Timmy, I want you to make slow, passionate love to Laura. I would like the whole operation to last about fifteen minutes so, please, mind how you go and enjoy it. Roger, you can start filming, thank you.’
‘Yeah, take it nice and easy,’ shouted Danny from somewhere. I couldn’t see him, but I knew by his voice that he had a plan fixed already.
Laura’s legs were wide apart, her sex pulsating, her hands around my waist, pushing me inside her.
‘Give me your cock, Tim,’ she murmured, momentarily looking up to herself on the TV screen. ‘Fuck me, Tim, now, Timmy, come on.’
I obliged by sliding my phallus deep and hard inside her temple. Laura squirmed but made no fuss, adjusting her sex to accommodate mine there. We kissed and I thought of coming, so I exited and went down to her sex. She obliged by rolling around, providing us with an effortless sixty-nine. As Laura took the whole of my penis in one slow, measured gulp and cupped my balls in her right hand, I plunged my tongue inside her cunt and reached high and mighty to level with her. This became too good to withstand after a few minutes, so I hurriedly rolled her around again on the rug and kissed her without entering. I peered up to the screen for help in stopping the urge to come immediately as I knew I would if I went in there and then, but Laura pulled me back down to her.
‘Slowly, Tim,’ she whispered. ’Come on, you can do it.’
As I entered again, it felt good and stable, so I heaved in and out of her with sharp, meaningful stabs plunging further into her temple of lost souls, this time thinking about Arsenal and what Danny had up his sleeve.
Laura now wanted me to come, it seemed. ‘Come on, Tim. Come inside me. Come all over me. I want you.’
We were writhing hard now, the final furlong in a one-mile chase. We both wanted it to be a photo-finish of ecstacy as we kissed with open mouths and penetrating tongues. The speed at which I went at her reached its maximum and I murmured to her that I was coming.
As we kissed more slowly, I juddered inside her with my pelvis and injected the first spray of sperm. She juddered to find ways of receiving me more welcomingly as saliva exchanged from one quivering mouth to another.
All thoughts of the coloured gent, the camera, Roger and Danny were as far as could be. The main thing was, Laura and I were loving this.
She began to tighten the walls of her sex in ways I’d never thought possible, and as my penis drained, I eased it out and back in again. As she played to hang on to it, I would intermittently rub it around her clitoris with my hand as she murmured between throbbing kisses.
As I looked up to piece together where I was and what I was doing, I could see that the coloured gent’s face had turned red. He looked like he’d eaten a hot chilli for the first time, frozen on the sofa, not knowing where to go to get rid of the feelings welling up inside him. I was staring at him by this time and Laura was trying to get up from underneath me.
This was when the gent started pulling his trousers down to reveal the most pathetic erection. He scurried over to where we were and knelt to our side, quickly checking for the camera’s positioning on the TV. And then he began to wank, looking at himself on the screen only inches from his face.
‘Oh Allah, oh Allah!’ he shouted in aggressive prayer. ‘Please give me a yellow canary! Please give me a yellow canary!’
Then he paused, as if he’d switched channels in his brain. To the screen, he wanked harder and harder, but it seemed his erection was wavering and he became annoyed. He looked over to Laura and I for sexual inspiration, but his face crumbled.
‘Get her!’ he shouted at me. ‘Go on, get her. Kill her! Go on, do it now! She’s worthless! Kill her womb!’
‘I can’t do that, mister,’ I replied, waiting for him to lunge at me so that I could push him away and get out of the place.
Just then, I could see Danny out of the corner of my eye returning from wherever he’d been. He had a large piece of wood, probably a table leg knowing him, and he approached at speed towards Roger, who was too busy filming to see him coming.
Whack! Danny smashed him over the head with the length of wood. Laura’s eyes quivered under me. She was in the middle of coming, having chosen to absorb the madness with my penis over her clit. ‘Come on, Tim. You’re gorgeous,’ she said, urging me to go down on her one last time. I refrained as I was busy watching Roger’s head swoop down onto the floor with the force of the hit from the back.
The coloured gent was also coming as the whack resounded. On hearing the blow, he came into his handkerchief and sighed, quivering, totally unaware that he was next on Danny’s little list. When it dawned on him, it was too late. Danny stood over the gent and stared down at him without mercy, the gent’s hand trembling with the open handkerchief lost in motion.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked meekly to Danny.
‘Beating you to a pulp,’ replied Danny, casually and as if there was nothing more to it. ‘What do you think?’
‘Why, though? Why hurt me? I’m a poor, crazy man who cannot stand the sight of women. You don’t want to hurt me,’ he whimpered.’
But Danny was having none of it. ‘Yes I do,’ he said, and he began beating the gent senseless.
Laura was still coming underneath me, far away in a sphere of drugged inertia, and as the blows took the gent away from us and over towards the sofa, Danny pummelled him harder and harder until the whimpering stopped. Blood trickled from the old man’s ears, nostrils and mouth. He was as dead as they come.
Laura, now aware of what had happened in the last two minutes, lay silent as a lamb under me.
‘You finished, are you?’ asked Danny of me. ‘Come on, we’ve got to scram. Move it!’ he said, patting me on the bum with his length of wood, blooded and sticky with hairs from two men’s heads.
‘Stop that!’ I said, jerking up with a huge grin.
‘I’ve got three hundred quid in my pocket,’ he said with the same smile. He poked his face in the video-camera and smiled sardonically. ‘This one’s for you, you big tosser,’ he said into it. He laughed and then spat a thick globule of mucus over the lens, revealing on screen the most hideous scene as he turned the camera to where the gent lay on the floor by the sofa, drenched in blood.
Laura lay motionless with her mouth open. Was she too dead? Maybe an overdose, I thought, and shook her. She came to quick enough and I urged her up. We sat up together, looking at each other for a while, but she was well gone on something really strong.
‘Oi!’ shouted Danny. ‘Get your fucking kecks on, will you? We’re out of here!’
But his whole expression had changed. It was a vision of doom that beheld him now. One look at Danny told me this was the last stop on our ride of small-time grifting. He was still as a statue with one hand holding the gent’s wallet and the other holding the jacket.
I offered a nervous titter and asked him, ‘what’s up with you?’ but he was somewhere else entirely. Then, as if hit with another brainwave, he helped me get dressed and hurried me up.
‘Nothing’s up.’
The lift proved a difficulty because we needed the key, which was in the gent’s pocket, so Danny went over to the sofa and rolled him over. Fiddling in his blooded pockets down at the ankles of the gent, Danny appeared shameless and businesslike. The phone rang but we left it ringing.
On reaching ground floor, I remembered that I’d forgotten to remember to take the video-cassette.
We glided past the concierge but he called us back.
‘I’ve tried calling Monsieur’s apartment but he doesn’t seem to be answering,’ said the man behind the desk.
Danny walked up to him and placed his now washed hands on his desk. ‘That man is sick. Do you know what he wanted us to do?’
The concierge spluttered theatrically, but offered no riposte.
We left and Danny turned back into old Danny again.
‘Do you reckon I killed him?’ he asked.
‘Which one?’ I asked.
‘Whichever.’
‘Probably killed both of them, Danny.’
‘I hope so,’ he said.
‘You don’t want a reputation for killing people, mate,’ I said, but Danny wasn’t listening.
‘Don’t worry about it. Look at this and you’ll see what I mean,’ he said, passing me an identity card with a photo of the gent on it.
‘So?’ I said, unimpressed.
‘Look harder.’
‘So he’s a secretary at the UN. What’s the big deal?’
‘He’s, or he was, the secretary general of the United Nations. That’s the most powerful job in the world, OK?’ When Danny said that, his face lit up. ‘We’ve hit the top mark here, boyo! If I did kill him, I’ve just fulfilled my greatest dream. And you’ve got your book!’ He was so elated by this brilliant twist of fate. The UN to Danny was the greediest of all, the peacekeeper that invented wars for fun and authorized mass murder on a daily basis, marginalizing small countries to long-term poverty within years of contact. As far as taking scalps was concerned, this was the pick of the bunch.
‘Can you believe our luck?’ he said as we skipped down a Soho road. At around eleven-thirty, it was too late for a pub and the arcades were closed. We both wanted to get out of London and resigned to go back down to Godalming, where we knew of a vacant flat, and have a good kip.
‘You know, if he is dead, which he is, they’ll never publish what happened, will they?’ he asked. ‘I mean, they’re not going to hang the UN secretary general out to dry in front of the world, are they? It wouldn’t be right, would it?’
I had to agree with him.
‘So,’ he continued. ‘It’ll be swept under the carpet and forgotten about, won’t it?’ Who was he trying to convince?
It sounded too easy to me. ‘Won’t they want to jail us for killing him, though? And what about Roger and Laura. I didn’t see them getting up, did you?’ Although Laura had sat up for a while, I couldn’t help her up again after that.
‘It’ll be the biggest cover-up since JFK!’ shouted Danny, in earshot of two coppers up ahead. They turned round but Danny didn’t notice. He barely cared in the slightest about authority. It couldn’t touch him, it was a needless ghost in his mind.
‘The last thing the UN’ll want is for the British press to get hold of this. It’s perfect! They’ll just send him back to the States in a bodybag and have announced dead at his home in Vermont or wherever with his family,’ he went on.
‘Yeah, but the police’ll get it first, won’t they?’ I said, half in asking.
‘Sure they will,’ replied Danny as we sidled past the filth. ‘But when the UN find out, that’ll be that. End of story. Case dismissed. They won’t let it leak. Not in a million years.’
We kept toddling along the street, me unsure and Danny convinced.
‘I mean, the headlines tomorrow aren’t going to say - Top Gun at UN assassinated with his trousers down in swanky hotel with whore - are they?’ he went on.
As is the way with karmic justice, the underbelly of the dark side took a grip upon us and sent us down the wrong road.
For some stupid reason, we turned around and went back down the road we’d just come from. Neither of us knew why we’d done it. It just happened.
Danny went for a piss in Soho Square and there, he found a transvestite giving a fat Chinese man in a suit a blow-job.
While Danny was pissing, the trannie turned to him and wiped the man’s hot cum off his face.
He approached Danny slowly, but Danny couldn’t do much, being in the middle of a piss.
‘Piss off,’ he told the trannie, but he just hissed back at him. ‘Fuck off, you dirty slag!’ he shouted at it, but it kept on goading him from a distance.
Just then, the trannie let out a high-pitched squeal and went to grab Danny’s bum just as he was doing his zip up.
But Danny didn’t know how to deal with this squealing bum-pinching transvestite, so he ran back to where I was, back on the street of the square. Danny couldn’t see them for the bushes, but the two coppers from before were running over to me from another angle. The trannie was in the middle of a huge scream, chasing Danny towards me.
Danny reached me at the precise same time as the filth. By the time Danny had yelled, ‘Let’s get out of here!’ the filth had pounced on us and pushed us to the ground.
The trannie loomed over us and told the filth that Danny had propositioned her in the square, to which Danny almost laughed.
‘You were in there giving that blow-job to the chink bloke, you dirty old slag.’ But the trannie started crying, and the coppers hadn’t liked the way Danny had spoken to him at all.
‘And what were you doing in the square?’ asked one of the filth.
‘I was having a quick slash,’ Danny replied, by which time they had already made their minds up as to who would be taken in.
‘That’s an illegal offence, sir,’ said the filth.
‘Yeah,’ replied Danny. ‘And prostitution’s OK, is it?’
Before we were frogmarched back to the copshop, the Vietnamese trannie was allowed to come up to face Danny. She/he/it had tears mixed with traces of sperm pouring down its face, and the filth just stood there waiting.
It took hold of Danny’s balls and tugged them hard, right in front of the filth! ‘That’s for calling me a slag,’ it said, and walked off into the night.
If only we hadn’t walked back down the same road as before, none of this would have happened and we’d be catching a bus to Putney to hitch from there down the A3.
I hadn’t noticed, but the trannie had snatched the money from Danny’s back pocket while it was squeezing on his balls with the other hand. Ingenious stuff.
Danny got rid of the gent’s ID card by flicking it into the bushes through the fence whilst the coppers were laughing under their breath, and then we were taken away. It was the devil’s recompense, we thought, and the trannie was far more hardcore than we’d ever be. We knew this. It was obvious.
We also knew that the two coppers would get a little nifty each on their next crawl. It made perfect sense.
Once we got down the nick, formalities were given and then an almighty noise came through on one of the officer’s walkie-talkie.
‘Mass carnage here, over, assistance required, over,’ came through, and the officer switched it to ear-piece mode.
And there we were, standing with plastic cuffs on, watching as this copper in front of us stood there listening to what we’d done from an officer inside the penthouse of carnage. He was probably being given our exact details when he finally interrupted and said, ‘It’s OK. They’re at the station, over,’ and turned back to us.
Danny held a smug grin to a minimum whilst I looked into space between the two officers. They shunted us off to separate cells and asked us the usual questions a few hours later. We provided almost the same story; everything but our meeting the coloured gentleman, (we had a code about this which was simple; tell them everything we’d done that day apart from the stuff we’d done wrong). We were finally allowed to go at four-thirty, just as light was appearing.
‘I knew it,’ said Danny, lazily kicking at a coke can on our way back to Waterloo station. ‘Scotland Yard won’t be able to take this shit any further unless the concierge goes to the press, and I don’t think he’ll be doing that in a hurry.’ Danny was right, because the concierge was later bumped off by the CIA after it was feared he would cave in and talk. As for Roger and Laura, they were both dead; he of a brain haemorrage and she from a methamphetamine heart attack. I felt sorry for Laura because, under the circumstances, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
By six-thirty, we were back in our squatted two-bedroom flat in Godalming and fell fast asleep.
When we woke up at four in the afternoon, Danny was quick to search for evidence of his killing on the news. He sat twiddling the ancient portable telly, searching for news.
‘Don’t worry, Danny,’ I said. ‘Let’s go get hammered down the Cyder House. I’m sure it’ll be on the six o’clock news.’
When we got back for the news after several handgrenades, we waited and waited but there was nothing on the killing. I went to turn it off but Danny insisted.
‘Don’t!’ he screamed. ‘It might be a muted story on Thames News Headlines. Switch to ITV!’
I did as he asked but all Thames News Headlines had on offer was a stabbing in Clapham, a robbery in Harlseden, a rape in Wapping and tips on how to get the most from your cherry tomatoes (the bright side of the day’s news). Danny put his foot through the screen the moment the weatherman came on and then miraculously forgot about the whole episode by traipsing back down to the pub to boast about his killing.
Danny went missing three days later and I’ve never seen him again to this day.