Heavy Duty Attitude (12 page)

‘You saw the cops are here?’ It was more a statement than a question, ‘They’re with the guys in the pool room out the back.’

‘Well I saw the car outside, yes. What are they doing here?’
‘Oh, they want to talk to us,’ he told me.

‘I didn’t know you were talking to the cops,’ I said, momentarily surprised. Keeping shtum whenever the old bill were around was the inviolable rule number one of outlaw biker life. He didn’t like that.

‘We aren’t, and don’t you ever fucking suggest that we are or I’ll have your guts for garters,’ he snapped.

 

‘So what are you saying to them then?’ I asked, ‘I can’t believe that they’re just all sitting round in silence down there.’

 

He shrugged, ‘The usual. That we don’t know what they want to talk to us for. That we didn’t see anything. All the normal shit.

 

‘I just don’t know why they bother,’ he continued, ‘they must know by now that it’s all they’re ever going to get out of us.’

‘Going through the motions?’ I suggested, and he grunted something dismissive and unintelligible. ‘Or is it tea and sympathy? Victim support perhaps? Are they here to offer you counselling?’
‘Yeah, right,’ he said standing up and walking to the door, ‘cos we’re all just so fucking traumatised, but it’s our fucking tea they’re drinking. It’s OK though, they’ll get bored and fuck off soon enough.

‘Hang around, get a drink in the bar downstairs if you want,’ he instructed as he left, ‘while I go and find out what they’re up to. I’ll be free soon, then we can talk.’

*

So there I was, hanging around at a loose end in The Brethren’s London clubhouse, while I supposed they were all preparing to go to the mattress, helping the police with their enquiries, or not more likely, and potentially expecting another attack at any moment.

Was it just me, I wondered, or were there times when other people just asked themselves, how did I come to be here? What weird set of choices over the years had led me to be here, now, doing this?

Well, whatever, I thought, I’m here now so I’d better just deal with it.

From the hallway I had come straight up the stairs to see Wibble, but through the other open doorway off the hall I had seen that on this side of the pair of joined-up terraces the house had been knocked through so what had been the front and back rooms were now a bar with a full sized snooker table, leading through to the lean-to kitchen which was out at the back.

Taking a drink from The Brethren bar while no one was around seemed a bit too much like trying my luck I thought, but a cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt. I guessed they would have a kettle about the place, so I wandered downstairs after him, being very conscious of the support patch peeping out, I hoped visibly enough, from under my arm as I walked down the stairs.

Walking into the bar area I found that actually it wasn’t empty. Danny the boy was there. He had all the chairs stacked up against a wall and had a broom out which he was pushing inexpertly around the floor. ‘Hey,’ I said as I walked in, ‘you still here then?’

 

‘Oh, hi there,’ he said looking up and greeting me with a slightly uncertain smile, ‘yeah they’re still letting me hang around. Isn’t that great?’

Hmm, I thought, that’s not exactly what I would call it, but hey, who was I to judge? He was a skinny kid, and his fresh face looked a little lost against the backdrop of The Brethren’s bar with its members’ wall of photos of fallen brothers, and adornment of Brethren patch themed plaques on the wall commemorating visits to or from charters around the world. But like before, he also looked determined to hold his end up. Even if, at the moment, his end involved nothing more than sweeping the floor for the guys.

‘Whoa,’ he exclaimed, straightening up, the broom in one hand, and peering closely at my jacket, ‘is that one of Wibble’s support badges?’ There was a tone of awe and respect in his voice as I walked past him and into the kitchen in search of mugs and instant. ‘Wow, that’s seriously cool.’

While I waited for the kettle to boil I found an assortment of mugs in a cupboard over the sink. Even in an office like mine back at the rag, I knew people could get pretty touchy about someone else using their mug. Getting filled in by one of The Brethren for using his favourite mug really didn’t appeal so I called over my shoulder to where Danny was back on with his desultory cleaning to ask if he knew which ones were safe.

‘Sorry, I don’t know,’ he confessed, appearing at the door.

‘Probably not this one then?’ I said holding up a mug for him to see which was emblazoned with the slogan
If you value your life as much as I value this mug, don’t fuck with it!

He laughed, ‘Probably not.’

Stuck at the back of the cupboard there were half a dozen or so mugs printed with The Brethren logo. I guessed they wouldn’t be anyone in particular’s so decided that one of these would be the safest choice.

But he was wrong about my badge I thought, as I poured the boiling water in and stirred. It wasn’t cool. It was dangerous. And I decided, as I walked back into the bar area, I wanted him to see that.

But whatever I said as I lounged around talking with him as I sipped my coffee and looked around the bar, checking out the selection of tunes on the jukebox which were much as I expected,
Lynyrd Skynyrd, Motörhead, Blue Oyster Cult, Pistols,
it was no good. There was simply no getting through to him.

What’s said in here, stays in here
proclaimed a sign above the bar.

And in here, I thought, I would have to be pretty careful about what I said. Support patch or not, I would need to watch my mouth for fear of who might be around, who might overhear, and what they might do about anything I said which they didn’t like.

I picked up on where I’d left off speaking to him before. I tried to get him to tell me why he was here, not just because I wanted to hear it, but somehow, I felt, that if I coaxed him into articulating it, it might help him think it through. To think about what he was getting involved with and where it might all lead.

And I cringed inwardly whenever he came back to my book. Every time he spoke about it, he just made me feel more and more guilty that I had been a part of glamorising this life, that I was partly responsible for this kid being here. If he ever sat down later and looked back at how and why he had got involved, I knew that I would have had a bit part to play, and it wasn’t a feeling I was comfortable with.

I tried, as circumspectly as I could in the circumstances to warn him off, to talk him out of it. I kept bringing him back to the events of the last weekend, the serious nature of what he might be getting himself hooked up in.

But it was no good. Too late I realised that the kid saw it as some kind of test of manhood, that knowing The Brethren was a lucky, once in a lifetime chance to join something special and to potentially be an insider, and that a biker war would be a chance to prove himself.

There was no helping him. All I did was get to know him better. In the end I just gave him my card.
‘Listen kid, if you ever want to talk, give me a call.’
I never thought he would.

*

Wibble appeared in the bar after about half an hour as I heard the security door being buzzed open to let the cops out and a somewhat sarcastic ‘Do call again officer,’ floating in from behind him in the hallway.

‘So, how did it go then?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘A complete waste of fucking time,’ he said disgustedly.
‘Yours or theirs?’
He laughed, ‘Both I reckon. Come on.’

He pushed at the back door which opened out onto the yard by the side of the old terraced house. There were three Brethren bikes parked up, probably because they were safer there than in the street outside I guessed, and the inevitable striker lounging around looking bored on sentry duty.

‘Walk with me,’ Wibble instructed as he pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his padded work shirt.
He wanted to smoke so he was going outside. It seemed strange that after all they did and stood for, the smoking ban would have that sort of an effect on The Brethren in their own clubhouse, but there you go.

‘Fag?’ he offered, as we stepped round the corner and onto a scrappy piece of lawn that had once been the two houses’ gardens, at the end of which The Brethren had built a quite impressive brick barbeque area.

‘No thanks,’ I replied as we sat down opposite each other at one of the old wooden trestle tables, the sort of thing you see in pub beer gardens, which dotted the lawn.

‘No, of course I forget,’ he said casually, sticking one into his mouth and thrusting the rest of the pack back into his pocket to swap them for a Zippo lighter, ‘you gave them up didn’t you, about 20 years or so ago wasn’t it?’

That stopped me in my tracks cold. I’d never spoken to Wibble, or anyone else in The Brethren about my smoking habits as far as I could remember. I’d never told him or any of them anything much about me really, but here, as we sat outside, he casually reeled off my complete unauthorised biography and CV as I sat in stunned silence. He gave me names, addresses, friends, relatives, schools, qualifications and jobs, as he smoked. He had the lot, and covered just about everything bar my bloody bank balance and inside leg measurement, although it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had known those too.

When he reached my sister’s name and address I had had enough. ‘What’s this about Wibble?’ I demanded. ‘Are you threatening me?’

He didn’t move a muscle, he just sat there opposite me and exhaled a long stream of smoke. Then he slowly and deliberately stubbed out his cigarette, crushing it firmly against the scarred surface of the plastic ashtray on the table top.

‘Me threaten?’ he said with a grin, ‘No, you don’t get it do you? I just always like to know a bit about people I’m dealing with.

‘You ask people a load of questions in your job right? You told me that. Well sometimes we ask questions as well, so we know where we stand with people. Like whether they were the best man at a copper’s wedding…’

Ouch, that one hurt, I winced. They had been digging, seriously digging, into my past to find that out. How many people would know that about me, I wondered?

‘So we can know how far we can trust them.’
‘That was what, twenty odd years ago?’ I protested, ‘I haven’t seen the guy in what ten, and what’s it got to do with anything anyway?’

‘Yeah we know,’ he nodded slowly, ‘Like we know when you go to see your little mate over at SOCA.’

 

By now I was seriously pissed off.

‘I’m a fucking journalist Wibble. I write about crime. You know that. So of course I speak to coppers from time to time. Who the hell else am I going to speak to? What the fuck else did you think I did when you asked me along on your little trip?’ I demanded.

‘Hey,’ he said reaching over and pinning one of my wrists to the table as he stared at me, ‘calm down. It’s no problem. It’s just that I know. And now you know I know.’

But whatever he was saying, the subtext was obvious. He simply wanted me to know how much he knew about both me and mine.

 

‘So what’s the deal here then, Wibble?’ I demanded. ‘I’m a journalist, doing my job, like you seemed to want me to.

‘To do that I talk to people, people on both sides of the law. You’ve been happy to talk to me, you’ve seen what I’ve written. If you don’t like it, or you don’t like me knowing some shit then it’s in your hands isn’t it? Either don’t talk to me at all or don’t tell me what you don’t want to.’

‘OK…’ he began but for once I rode over him.

‘But I’ll tell you this for free, if I find stuff out, from talking to you, or your guys, or some other gang or even God help me the cops or uncle Tom Cobbly, then if it’s a story I’m going to print it, and if that’s what you’re worried about, then be worried.

‘But if you think I’m here to go running back to the cops as some kind of spy then you can…’

 

‘Oh?’ he raised a warning eyebrow at me.

I’d been about to tell him he could fuck off, but then some semblance of sense finally caught up with my mouth and shut it down before I said something that I would regret. Mainly due to the broken bones it would lead to.

I was quite keen on carrying on using my own teeth for a while yet. ‘No,’ he said casually, as if ignoring my outburst, ‘you’re not a cop or working for them. I knew that when we started and everything we’ve got,’ and what would that be I wondered, ‘says you're still clean.

‘But even if you’re not a snitch, you still need to realise the risk that we are taking just by letting you be around, particularly at a time like this. It’s just a fact of life.

‘You’re speaking to people, you’re making notes, you’re writing stuff. It builds a picture you know? It can’t help but broadcast some shit that we’ve never been used to being out there for Joe Public to see.’

‘And,’ I joined in; I could follow his train of argument clearly for him so that he could be sure I understood what he was saying, ‘some of the guys will be worried about some specifics that I might come across, even if I’m not looking for them? Already or in the future. Is that it?’

It was an old problem, and one that I’d often touched on before when speaking to guys in the clubs or on other parts of my crime beat for the paper. The photo or the interview which shows someone was somewhere just before an unfortunate incident, something innocent at the time that could be a serious problem for them later. It was a risk they were conscious that they were running in letting someone like me hang around.

And I was also acutely aware it was a risk I ran in being around them, although for slightly different reasons.
Three can keep a secret,
was an old outlaw biker saying,
if two of them are dead,
which seemed to about wrap it up for both victims and any inconvenient witnesses who might be around.

‘Well that’s the way it is,’ he agreed.
‘So I’m embedded now am I?’

He smiled at the reference and pulled out his packet of cigarettes again, this time he plonked the packet on the table once he’d taken one out, ‘Well, you could see it that way.’

‘The quid pro quo is that I get to see, and write, what’s safe. Your sanction in essence is that you know where I, and my family and friends live if I stray too far or you think I’m grassing you up. Is that it?’