With Love and Squalor Read Online Free PDF

by the police. That wasn’t in the plan. Guess they had to take the train or a taxi. Fuck knows how they were supposed to move the stuff without the car.
     
    I didn’t get to find out what happened till I heard it from Bart Wilson back in his torture chamber.
     
    Pinky and Jamie-Ray had interrupted the game. Pulled out guns and aimed them right at the croupier. Course they knew Jamie-Ray right off. He’d been dealing the cards and spinning wheels alongside me for six months. Smiling and taking their money.
     
    Unfortunately Bart was there with his cousins watching the way the cards were falling.
     
    On any one day, there might be one security guy up there. With Bart and his cousins, that made six. 
     
    Jamie-Ray must’ve panicked. Started shooting up the place.
     
    Pinky had to so the same.
     
    So now Bart doesn’t have any cousins.
     
    Bad news for us is he’s the youngest of seven brothers. Worse, he’s the runt of the litter.
     
     
     
    Me and Pinky have always been close. We share things. A football team, friends and our mum and dad. Things she used to do to get out of shit, she was worse than me.
     
    Been called Pinky ever since her conjunctivitis.
     
    Our parents are just regular folk. They could never have expected us to come out the way we did. 
     
    When they mixed their genes together, threw in their X’s and Y’s we’re what came out of the mix.
     
    There were three of us to begin with. Me and Pinky and Josh. We all had it. Congenital Pain Insensitivity. Can’t never get hurt. Feel sensations but nothing else. None of us cried when they cut our feet for the Guthrie test Guess they must have suspected we were different soon as we were born.
     
    Sounds like a blessing, right? Never getting sore.
     
    Wasn’t so good for Josh. He fell asleep by the fire one night. Was only five. Somehow he caught light. By the time my parents got to him all they could do was save the house. If he could’ve felt the pain he’d a woken himself up. Put himself out.
     
    Only consolation, he never felt a thing.
     
    Guess that just made Pinks and me closer. Did as many things as a girl and a boy can do together, apart from the sex stuff of course. She’s had Jamie-Ray for that this past year. I tried to warn her off, but she wasn’t having it.
     
    Must’ve fallen for all that muscle and the Aussie twang.
     
    Asked him once what he did over there.
     
     “This and that,” he told me.
     
    And why he’d come over in such a hurry.
     
    “Pissed my bosses off by taking a lot of their money.” He didn’t look to sorry about what he’d done. “They weren’t going to give up till I was floating upside down under the Harbour Bridge.”
     
     “So where’s the money?” I asked him. If he was so rich, how come he was living with Pinky in a ex-council flat in need of more repairs than a stock car?
     
    “When I get word things are cool, we’ll go and pick it up.” I didn’t like the way he said we. “Show Pinky the cities and the outback then we’ll settle somewhere fine. You’ll come and visit.”
     
    Halle-bloody-lulia.
     
     
     
    Eventually word came from Oz that things were calm.
     
    Jamie-Ray and Pinky, they were all set for leaving as soon as they could. Only problem was they’d spent all they had on a camper van that broke down on them on the Edgeware Road. A mechanic friend of Pinky’s said there was nothing to be done.
     
    They were stony-broke.
     
    And that’s when Jamie-Ray came up with his plan.
     
     
     
    Soon as I opened the door I knew something was up. For a start, something was blocking way in. For another there was no stink of Brylcream.
     
    My mouth still wasn’t fit for talking. As it turned out, that was the first lucky break I’d had in a while.
     
    The shots came from the bedroom.
     
    My instinct was to run like hell, but I managed to get over that pretty quick.
     
    Instead I sprinted to the kitchen, picked out a couple of the biggest knives and ran