Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (6 page)

He led us
out across the countryside and down into town. But then instead of stopping, we headed out again, across the bridge and up the hill to turn right at the roundabout and down onto the fast sweeping dual carriageway heading east towards the city. Wondering where we were headed, Billy and I settled into the usual staggered formation to give ourselves some roadway behind him as we cruised at a steady eighty-five to ninety along the outside lane.

We parked up behind a rough looking pub in the terraced backstreets
down where the shipyards used to be. We took off our lids and gloves and Billy as the most junior was delegated to stand watch over the bikes while I followed Gyppo inside.

It was one of those old fashioned working men
’s pubs. All dark wood, scuffed lino, yellow stained ceilings, Guinness mirrors, frosted glass windows, cardboard hangings of KP nuts and pork scratchings and ripped vinyl upholstery.

It was also quiet as we walked in, our eyes adjusting to the relative gloom of the interior against the glare of the day outside.

Gyppo hadn’t said anything to warn me, so the sight of The Brethren patches bent over the pool table and sat on stools at the bar gave me a start. I just hoped that I hadn’t shown it as the door swung shut behind us.

But Gyppo was advancing into the room with a friendly
‘Hey Doggie!’ to the guy with the shaved tattooed head and spade beard just standing up from his shot at the pool table and looking round.

A smile spread across the guy
’s face, ‘Hey, Gyppo, how’s it going?’ he said, sticking out a hand for Gyppo to shake.

‘
OK mate, thanks,’ as the handshake transmuted into a short backslapping bear hug at The Brethren guy’s lead.

‘
And you?’

‘
Good, good. You here to see Dazza?’

‘
Yeah. Is he about?’

‘
Yeah. I think he’s next door.’ The outlaw nodded his head, indicating the door through to the lounge bar as his eyes wandered back to the table.

‘
Cheers. See yah soon.’

‘
No problem,’ he said bending back down to look for his next shot.

It was as though I didn
’t really exist. I tagged along invisibly behind Gyppo as he headed across the bar. I guess I would speak when I was spoken to.

The lounge bar boasted dark and intricately patterned carpets and a series of banquet type booths
, although I noticed that despite the upholstery fabric, the phantom seat slasher had been at work here as well.

Spreading his arms out wide in greeting Gyppo approached a figure at one of the tables who had looked up to check us out as we had opened the door
, and was getting up to greet us, both arms outstretched.

Even without his name tag on his cut off and his VP title I had realised immediately that this
had to be Dazza.

He was
about six foot tall, aged thirty or so I guessed, with a dark stubbled broad face and high forehead. His hair was black, swept back long at the back down to his shoulders, but cut short and spiky on top. He had a barrel chest and thick, tattooed, and well-muscled dark-haired arms showed beneath his cut off and the tartan lumberjack shirt rolled up to his elbows.

His voice in growling a welcome to Gyppo was deep and measured. He had presence.

As they disengaged from their hug and we stood before him, Gyppo introduced me. ‘Dazza, this is Damage. He’s working for me now.’

I stuck out my hand silently and without a word he took it in a firm dry handshake.

Then with a gesture he indicated that we should take a seat.

So then I found out where Gyppo sourced his stuff.

*

I was his
right-hand man. So I spent more and more time with him. And that inevitably meant I spent more and more time with Sharon as well.

We spent any number of evenings together, the three or sometimes four of us if Billy was there. Smoking joints, listening to music, drinking beer, getting quietly
peacefully wasted together until one evening merged pretty much into the next.

There were other girls hanging around the gang of course, and Billy went after them like mad, but I never did. I had chances
of course, some of them made that pretty clear. And you would have thought that would have been something I would have jumped to take advantage of. But somehow I was never interested.

And the reason was
Sharon.

I didn
’t understand our relationship, or wasn’t even certain that we actually had one at that stage. She was Gyppo’s girl. They were together. Any idiot could see that. There was a depth of feeling and intimacy there between them that I could only ever stand outside of, I could not hope to break it, or break into it, even if I had wanted to, which I didn’t.

They were Gyppo and Sharon, my friends
. They were happy together and I was happy for them.

But still I ached for her.

I wished that she would look at me in the same way that she looked at him.

*

With more of us in the club dealing in a small way, we all started to need to have some space for business that we would have to be able to defend from anyone who wanted to muscle in on our turf. It was this as much as anything that led us to patch up. With patches that identified us as a club we could mark out our area, we could let people know who they were messing with if they started to deal in our territory.

And so
within about a year and a half of my first starting to ride with the gang, we became The Reivers MC, named for the cattle rustling robber clans that had made Northumberland and the borders such a badland of fortified houses and pillaging raids for centuries.

Tiny and Gyppo went to see
Dazza first to check out with The Brethren. After all, as the existing senior club in the region we had to respect their position in setting up a new patch club. But this wasn’t a problem. Dazza as both VP and acting P, while the P was on remand, was an enthusiastic supporter. And after all, why shouldn’t he be? It wasn’t as if a local stand alone patch club out in the sticks were ever going to be any kind of a threat to The Brethren.

Quite the reverse in fact, particularly for
Dazza. He was already dealing with Gyppo, me and Billy, as well as a few others. The better we were able to move stuff, the more stuff of his we moved. And the more of us that were dealing, the more of us he would come to supply. After all, The Brethren in the city with whom we had good relations were the obvious place for any of our guys to get stuff to sell. And if you were getting stuff from The Brethren, really you were getting it from Dazza.

All in all I guess
that Dazza saw this as a great opportunity to build himself a support club out our way to expand his business.

Looking back I wonder if he had even then been playing the longer game.
How far ahead had he been thinking?

Patching up gave us an increased feeling of solidarity. Before as a relatively loose
riding gang, particularly one spread over such a wide area, people drifted in and out, you were never quite sure who was fully in, and who was out. Now it was clear. If you were in you belonged, you had the colours and the club tattoo. If you weren’t, you didn’t.

I was in.

And with pride in the colours came an addiction to respect. It was all about belonging.

As a group we had always generated a reaction when people saw us together. But now with the patch it stepped up to a whole new level of response. Of fear. Of wariness. Of respect.

We were a mix of ordinary guys; some of us worked out on farms, a lot were self-employed as mechanics, drivers or in the building trade, and a few like me and Billy and Gyppo basically made a living from dealing. But I could feel it when I was out in my colours. The different way people treated you. Wearing the colours we weren’t just some scumbag bikers. We were part of The Reivers, to be treated as such.

We all came to just accept it as our due, for the dues we had paid.

So then we came to expect it as a matter of right. And if you didn’t show it we wanted to know why and what you were trying to prove. We weren’t just individuals now that we had our patches, we were representatives of the club. We had to protect the club’s honour, and to be seen to do so, otherwise any punk might try it on.

Any so any trouble now called for an all out response, on behalf of the colours.

And for Gyppo, me, Billy, and any of the others who were dealing it had another advantage too. As we went on we built up a network of other small time dealers we supplied to. And very few people were stupid enough to try and rip off or burn a patched club member over a drugs deal. If you were dealing with a Reiver, you paid your bills. In cash. In good notes. Or you paid the price.

We offered our customers security too in a way. The more stuff they sold, the more dosh we made. So as and when anyone tried to muscle in on their pitches or tried to tax them, they knew they could turn to us for help in sorting these problems for them. It just made good business sense both in keeping the market clear for moving gear and in increasing the dealers
’ reliance on us.

So we staked out our territory and defend
ed it against anyone who came onto it. We had to show that we had to be treated with respect as otherwise some other club might think they were tougher than we were and try to take it over. So whenever anyone tried anything, whenever another club pushed, we pushed back hard to show we meant business until eventually things settled down as our reputation spread.

Because o
f course we weren’t alone. Others were patching up at the same time.

Luckily we
didn’t have too much hassle. Other than a few beefs in the early days, we were broadly friendly with most of the other clubs around us, partly because of our geography in that our respective turfs were easy to define, and had little overlap when it came to places for dealing, a case of good fences making for good neighbours. For example, we had always got on well with Gut’s gang over in Cumbria so when they patched up as The Fellmen MC, we partied long into the night with them. But there was a natural border, we went across the moors and up as far as the Edgeside café overlooking the steep drop down onto the floor of the valley below. They had the rolling countryside beneath, west into the lakes. The café was sort of neutral, sort of shared, ground as, set high up on the edge of the hills at the end of some of the most magnificent twisty roads in the country, it was the natural meeting place for riders across the north and packed every Saturday and Sunday with rows of bikes parked outside.

Gut ran
a breaker’s called the Boneyard, that also sold chrome custom accessories for your bike and exotic chopper parts imported from the states that you would otherwise only see in occasional copies of
Easyrider
. The first time I visited there was a chopped Harley in the window; all springer forks, ape-hangers, twisted chrome sissy bar, coffin tank and an iron cross tail light. I thought it looked impossibly cool. Gyppo just scoffed at its impracticality for scratching round bends.

‘
Ride a hard-tail like that and you’ll be bleeding from your arse after a few hundred miles.’

Inside
, beside the racks of engines and rows of wheels there were black T-shirts emblazoned with skulls and the slogan ‘Live to ride, ride to live’. Gut was a complete mountain of a man, sat behind the counter of his shop, and when he sold you something the top half of his body rotated to the till next to him, while his enormous beer gut remained still, resting slumped on the counter.

P
utting on a bike show seemed a natural way to party together and so that August the first Roof of England Bike show, our joint event at some rough ground on the moor just behind Edgeside, was born.

It was a
bakingly hot summer’s day of brilliant strong sunshine and blue skies where the beer in the August heat doesn’t seem to have the usual effect. But then a sudden thunderstorm broke at about half past four, sending everyone screaming to the beer tent as the heavens opened and for an hour the tent roof drummed as a torrent fell; before the skies cleared again and the ground began to steam in the renewed sunshine.

Sharon
didn’t always come on club runs. Sometimes she preferred to stay at home and paint. But she was here for this one, a vision in a long floating hippy cotton dress that she had matched with a set of jeans underneath for the ride up.

By six or seven I was already
very drunk. I didn’t know where Gyppo had got to. Out of it somewhere I guessed.

Then
I spotted Sharon. She was on her own, sat on a groundsheet to keep dry. She looked pensive, curled over, her knees clutched in her arms and drawn up to her chest, her head resting on her knees as her dress tented around her as she watched the crowd circulating around the gleaming chrome and glinting paintwork of the bikes on display.

She smiled as, ever the clown, I collapsed onto the ground next to her, beer bottle in hand. And then she
made the mistake of asking me how I was.