screaming down the phone to Mick.
‘I’ll get you, you bastards, you see if I don’t!’
Mick laughed, said goodbye very sweetly and hung up on him.
‘If he’d been nice,’ he said, ‘I’d have told him where I was going to leave it. But no, the silly bugger had to threaten me, didn’t he? Well now he’s gonna have to look for it.' I thought that Pete was going to bust something, the way he was laughing.
Mick parked the car up in an old garage behind some flats off York Way.
'Find that, you bastard,' he said as he walked away taking with him the bloke's cassettes and mobile phone. 'Might as well use it till the batteries run out,' he said, stuffing the phone into his jacket.
We arrived for my first visit to Max's and joined five boys who were sitting at a corner table. Mick introduced me to them. There was Alan, not so big then. Wivva complaining that the barber had sliced open a couple of zits when he gave him his skinhead cut earlier that day. Trev, who was off to join the Army next week, and Mark and Steven.
Steven delighted in telling everyone that the Old Bill were on his arse again for kicking his old man in the bollocks.
'I'm not worried though,' he said, 'I'll stay at my gran's for a few days and they'll forget all about me.' Then he said, 'I've got to get some dosh though, I don't want my gran to be out of pocket because of me, poor old girl's only got her pension.'
Wivva's grandad was a war hero, won the George or is it Military Cross or something at Tripoli, lost a leg in the process. Wivva was fascinated with the stories that he used to tell him about those days and ever since has wanted to be in the SAS.
He used to massage his grandad's back and shoulders for him when his war wounds started to act up. That graduated to 'jacking him off because grandad said that it was good for the pain. Wivva never knew that it was wrong, he never even suspected.
Until his mum caught him wanking himself in his bed one morning. She kicked him all over the house screaming, 'dirty bastard dirty bastard!' at him. He was so confused, poor fucker, that he went straight to his grandad. When he told him, the old bastard had a heart-attack. He died a month later.
Wivva had learned in the worst way possible that he had been abused. And even worse, his grandad had been his abuser. But he couldn't make sense of it. So he took all of his anger out on everyone else, especially nonces. Wivva loved his grandad and for some weird reason still does. We never question that.
He still lived with his mum and dad, but often after he'd finished work (he was an apprentice painter and decorator) he came to spend his nights with us.
Alan was most definitely one of a kind. Built like a brick shithouse no one, but no one got up his nose. I swear he could break your back just by looking at you; he was every inch a tough guy. He worked for a demolition firm, just right for him that was.
Alan never talked about his past but we all knew about him because we had read it in the papers. He was one of a load of boys that had been screwed by the headmaster at a special residential school. He hated nonces so much that it hurt. He lived with his invalid grandma and often said that she drove him fucking mental with her 'Do this love' and 'Do that love'. He put up with it because it was rent free and quite frankly, because no one else in his family wanted him.
Just like me every one of them had been sexually abused and not one of us had got any justice at all. We were all bloody angry at the way that we had been treated, angry at a system that didn't seem to care, the police for doing nothing, the social services for giving us no choices, our families for letting us down, but most of all, almost murderously angry at the type of people who had used us. It's for that last reason that we chose to do what we did during the long weekend nights.
Mick explained what was going to happen and said that as I was the new boy, I could sit back and
Massimo Carlotto, Anthony Shugaar