Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (7 page)

I don
’t know why I did it. Even now, I don’t know why after all that time I actually said something.

Was it just the drink talking? Or was it just that
I was drunk enough for it to be able to sound like a joke if needs be? I don’t know.

I told her I loved her.

She told me that of course she knew that.

‘
You’re very sweet.’ She smiled at me, shaking her head. ‘You know I like you a lot. But you know I have to look after Gyppo.’

A
nd so she stood up, turned and walked away across the field to find Gyppo, imprinting another image of her in my mind, as she delicately stepped across the sodden ground, her skirt lifted slightly to keep it clear of the glutinous mud, her hair outlined in flaming gold by the long rays of the setting sun.

I c
rashed out dead drunk and stoned in the field that night where I fell beside the bonfire. I’d pitched a tent somewhere but was too wrecked to find it. I have a vague memory of someone spreading a blanket over me in the dark. I assumed it was Sharon. It seemed the sort of thing she would do.

*

I never mentioned it again.

And neither did she.

Looking back, the next five years were a whirl of drugs, drink and dealing.

We worked for
Dazza. He was our wholesaler, the senior partner, and we, our little team of me and Billy, led by Gyppo, dealt into the town and the valley as the juniors.

The amount of stuff we were supplying grew. There was more whizz now, acid started to become more popular with the rave kids and we were into E as well that came across from
Holland on the ferry.

But we were also suffering the drug dealers curse. With so much stuff around that
’s available to use, there’s so much that you just can get used to using. Billy, Gyppo and I had increasingly large personal habits, alternating whizz to get up and downers and blow to get down again. And as time went by our using got increasingly wild.

Sharon
smoked, but she never did whizz. I think she tried it once and scared herself.

But
increasingly as the years went by and the money rolled in, Gyppo was using everything he could get hold of that didn’t mean sticking a needle in his arm. The club was very tight on that. If we caught a member at it we’d break the spike off in his arm and kick him out. We didn’t want any junkies in the club. And so far, Gyppo had managed to hold off from scag although given the highs of his whizz habit and the lows it would produce I was starting to wonder whether he was smoking it to kill the pain.

I knew
Sharon was becoming more and more worried about him. She and I stayed close, even after that evening. She told me a number of times that she was worried he was getting out of control. That he was using as much as he was dealing. That she was afraid he was going to hurt himself. Or someone else.

Crank makes you paranoid. Him and me both
, I guess.

I don
’t think Sharon ever said anything to him about what I had said. And for the next three or four years after that night there was no change in our relationship. We rode, dealt, drank, smoked and fought together.

Through all of it
Sharon watched Gyppo. She worried about him, we both did, but she was always there for him, except for that one last time.

She neve
r nagged or whined, or tried to hold him back from doing anything that he wanted to do, however crazy or wild, not once. She rode pillion, never complaining as the speed madness took hold, or how stoned he was when riding. Her life was his. But occasionally, just occasionally, when he pushed it too far, when he came to the edge of going over the line, whether it was on the bike or drink or drugs, you could see the silent pain in her eyes and the clench of her fists curling into tight white balls.

We just couldn
’t stop you see. Gyppo and I shared the urge to roll the dice one more time, to double the stakes again each time we lost to see if we could win it all back, to ratchet up the odds just one more notch.

We always had to keep going. Until we went too far.

Meanwhile in the outside world, bike gangs were getting more serious. You only had to look at Canada, Australia or the Nordic bike wars to see that. The cops started to talk about all of us as some kind of Mafia, all into organised crime, international drug smuggling, all kinds of bullshit. At the same time, the big six were building internationally, extending their existing networks around the world by taking over local clubs. But even while this consolidation was going on there was still room for the independents, there was still a mix of local clubs like us and The Fellmen, as well as the international brands with their national charters like The Rebels and The Brethren.

But we could never stand still. There was always some pressure som
ewhere and as the clubs to the south of us started to merge into The Hangmen covering all of Lancashire and South Cumbria and Dead Men Riding down in Yorkshire it became clear that we northern independent clubs had a choice to make. We would either combine into a regional club, or risk being picked off one by one by the expanding clubs eager for territory.

So
in 1989, five years after first patching up, Tiny and Gyppo went for another ride to see Dazza. And this time I went along too.

*

We in The Reivers took the lead, but the merger message we brought to the other clubs made sense. There was survival in amalgamation into a regional club that would have the muscle to stand up to The Hangmen or Dead Men Riding if they looked to move North, in a way that we as individual clubs wouldn’t.

We had known the other clubs
for years, other really than Butcher’s boys who by and large had kept themselves to themselves, so talks went quickly.

At the time I remember
wondering if it wasn’t it a mistake on Dazza’s part, letting The Legion amalgamate, allowing a weaker group of clubs to come together to become stronger, to become numerically superior to The Brethren locally?

After all
, the rules for staying top club locally seemed simple and self-evident enough. All Dazza had to do was to keep all the other clubs in the region weaker than The Brethren and preferably dependent on them in some way which was one way in which Dazza’s control of the local whizz supply came in handy. Other than that, all he needed to do was to prevent any small club linking up with one of the rival big six clubs, thereby letting another big club that could become a champion or rallying point or alternative protector of the smaller clubs get a foothold in the region.

But
then I supposed that if it ever came to a war, Dazza had the rest of the world-wide Brethren’s resources to call on if he ever needed to and even a strong regional club like The Legion would think awfully long and hard before mounting a challenge like that.

But in hindsight, even then
Dazza was thinking ahead.

He
was just brilliant throughout it all. He worked hard for us, smoothing the way. He was the P of the north-east charter now for real, ever since the old P had gone down; and having him on side meant having The Brethren onside. He even hosted the first meeting we had with Butcher’s boys, The Iron Horsemen MC, out of Sunderland.

It was strange that he and Butcher did so much together. Normally Geo
rdies and Maccams hated each other but Dazza seemed to have a strong relationship with Butcher, although at the time, again being a Maccam, Dazza wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of bringing him into the north-east charter. It was almost as though Dazza had been already using Butcher’s boys as one of his private support clubs. My guess at the time was that they handled his distribution on Wearside.

Now w
ith The Iron Horsemen to the south in Wearside, we had a complete band across the region and around The Brethren’s city stamping ground.

Gut
’s Fellmen covered northern Cumbria across the lakes and up to the Scottish border, while to the south they rubbed up against The Hangmen in disputes over territory in the south lakes.

We Reivers centred around
the valley and up into the hills and dales of the North Pennines.

The Devil
’s Henchmen MC under Popeye, a wiry, crop-haired ex-marine who ran a fishing boat out of Craister covered northern Northumberland, but were mainly based along the North Sea coast.

Hadrian
’s Wall was the spine that ran through our territory, and so we became The Legion MC. Our territory became the Empire. Our colours became the imperial colours of purple and gold. Our patch was a grinning skull facing out, and wearing a purple plumed centurion’s helmet, with the crenellated wall running behind him. And instead of charters, we had cohorts, based on the amalgamated clubs Westmorland, Borders, Northumberland and Wearside.

We chose our Roof of England bike
show that August to unveil our new colours.

The Legion
patching party at the end of the bike show was an even wilder rerun of that first Reivers one.

Dazza
and the guys from The Brethren were there of course, it was almost as if they were our sponsors in a way. As the only one of the big six clubs with a presence in the region we could hardly amalgamate patch clubs in the area without clearing it with them. We didn’t exactly need their permission but it was a show of respect as before. If we had patched up without consulting them, it would be seen as an unacceptable affront to their authority, a deliberate insult if you like, and they would have to act to keep face. At the same time they knew that we would not want to lose face by having to ask for their permission like some little kid at school. So, it was a little game that we all played to observe the niceties and keep the peace. Like I say, good fences, and good manners, keep good neighbours. So as before, we asked their blessing.

And
Dazza of course was happy to give it.

We took a group photo of the new club, standing and kneeling proudly in two smiling rows in our new colours. I
’ve still got a copy at home although I don’t put it up, it upsets Sharon too much. But there’s a framed one in the clubhouse bar that I look at every so often.

Gyppo
looks particularly wild eyed and out of it with a manic grin. He was already speeding crazily by the time the photo was taken. Tiny had to threaten to clobber him to get him to crouch down long enough in the front for the camera.

As he loaded on the crank still further that evening, h
e became dangerously unstable, not knowing where he was, what he was doing or what he was saying half the time; prone to flying into fits of uncontrollable rage.

And worse still
, earlier that day of all days, after months of getting to the end of her tether with him, Sharon had finally snapped. She had walked out, leaving him a note in the flat.

‘
Fuck it Gyppo, sort yourself out. Gone to my mum’s to think it over
.
Love Sharon.’

Gyppo
’s response naturally had been to get completely loaded on uppers and come charging out to the party to hit the vodka hard. By the late evening he was in a mean funk, a human time bomb just waiting to go off.

Things had obviously been getting to a head with
Sharon over the past few weeks, I had noticed a sudden change in him, he seemed more distant, wary, withdrawn. As I say, the crank makes you paranoid, and this was when I really started to wonder if he was chasing the dragon.

T
hat night he exploded.

I had been standing with Gut and
Sprog by the bonfire when it happened. Gyppo just launched himself at me from the darkness. The first I knew was when I felt a crashing blow from behind that knocked me flying to the floor, my head cracking down on one of the stones around the fire.

As I went down Gyppo was all over me with his boots and fists, screaming wildly that it was all my fault, that I was a scumbag
who had stolen Sharon, that he was going to kill me. I heard shouts from the others around me as Gut grabbed him by the arms to pull him off as he tried to stomp my head with his boots, and I managed to roll away from the intense heat of the fire and just out of range of his flailing kicks before Sprog, who was our club’s punch out artist, knocked the raving Gyppo to the ground where the pair fell on him, pinning him down.

Tiny,
Billy, Dazza and Butcher had arrived by the time I was scrambling to my feet.

‘
What the fuck was that about?’ asked Tiny, looking at me darkly.

‘
Fucked if I know. He’s just gone nuts,’ I said, running my hands over my head to check the damage, feeling warm blood and smelling singed hair.

Gyppo
was bucking and writhing, held down on the ground by four or five guys now, but still raging and ranting about me.

‘
Are you shagging his bird?’

‘
No of course I’m not. We’re mates. I wouldn’t do that to Gyppo and neither would she.’

‘
He seems to think you are.’