Heavy Duty Attitude (18 page)

‘So they can prove themselves? So you know you can trust them?’ I ventured.

‘So they can handle themselves and won’t rat us out you mean?’ I nodded.

‘Yeah well sure, it’s partly that,’ said Toad, ‘we can’t have no wimps in the club. But it ain’t just that. It’s also a whole lot more. It’s to make sure they’re sure. That they’ve tested themselves and made sure they want to commit…’

‘And also,’ Wibble continued, ‘to see that they are prepared to work hard enough at it to make it. This is something where you only get out of it if you put everything, and I mean everything, into it.’

‘Heart and soul,’ confirmed Toad seriously.

‘It’s about LLH&R,’ he said, holding up his clenched fist so I could see the ancient green stain of the letters jail tattooed across his broad knuckles, ‘If you don’t get that about us you don’t get shit.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed Wibble, ‘and you’re now wearing a tab that says you support that, so like I said, you’d better start thinking seriously about what that means.’

‘LLH&R,’ growled Toad with emphasis.
Screw Bob and his
my boys
I thought, the patronising shit.
Meanwhile, Wibble was still preaching the word according to The Brethren.

‘You’ve gotta keep working, you can never stop showing your loyalty to the club; no one’s safe from being busted back down to prospect, or even booted out of the club altogether.

‘Nobody has a God-given right to the colours, no one, not him,’ he said nodding at Toad, ‘not me, nobody. Anyone who can’t cut it can lose them at anytime.’

‘No one?’
‘No one, not even me.’

‘Well, maybe not Bubba,’ joked Toad who seemed to think that their point had been made and was now sitting back to watch Wibble’s show.

Bubba was the club’s international P back at the mother charter in Detroit, legendary founder of the club back in the late sixties as a roughhouse bunch of bar room brawlers and all round biking bad asses, and still going strong and still firmly in position as P almost half a century later.

‘Maybe so,’ conceded Wibble reluctantly, ‘but it’d be a brave man who tried to take Bubba’s patch off him.’

‘I’d like to see someone try that stunt.’
‘It’d be worth watching.’

‘And you’re not printing any of this shit here today. You understand that right don’tcha?’ said Toad levelly, turning back to me.

The underlying threat was unmistakable.
I nodded. Oh yes. I got the picture.

As I walked out, the two kids were still on slouched sentry duty outside the door. I caught Danny’s reluctant eye as I went past but he didn’t speak.

I stood by the bar waiting for Bung to finish chatting to Scroat about something so we could go, and to kill time I looked around.
There was definitely something wrong with Danny I decided. I stared at him carefully again and I was sure I hadn’t been wrong about what I’d noticed before. The kid was definitely looking shaken.

Ah well, I thought to myself, perhaps he’s seeing sense at last and getting out.

Still, I couldn’t let him be my problem now, not with what was going down here. Sorry kid I thought, but you’re on your own from here on in. I could see all of this going badly wrong if I wasn’t careful, and even if I was, who was to say it couldn’t still get ugly?

From now on I just needed to make sure I was looking after number one if I was to make sure I was going to get out of this OK.

Other than its somewhat open plan nature due to the type of building, the clubhouse followed much the same interior decor approach as the London one and the North East one I’d visited when I first met Damage. There was a memorial wall where photographs of fallen Brethren took pride of place at the far end of the bar, while the walls elsewhere were covered in plaques and framed souvenirs of runs, parties and shows, and the ceiling was shrouded in a huge Confederate flag.

The bar was brick built with the words Brethren MC worked in relief under an inset cast stone plaque of the patch. There were the usual ‘what you see and hear in here, stays in here’ notices hanging from the optics and at the far end of the bar a display of support materials for sale, from
Support Your Local Brethren
T-shirts and caps, to a selection of
ACAB
and
Fuck the rules!
style stickers with which to adorn your lid, bike or whatever.

But most striking and affecting of all as I waited was a framed handwritten poem about membership, comparing and contrasting, which hung at the side of the memorial wall. I didn’t have my notebook with me at the time so I didn’t get a chance to write it down, even if I’d thought it was an appropriate moment to do so, but the sentiments have stayed with me ever since; as it demanded that the reader ask themselves to think if they were someone who just belonged to the club; or someone who contributed to the club.

It made me ask questions about myself.

Was I the type of person who would just be pleased to be identified as something for my own sake? Or would it only mean something to me if it meant being part of a community, a family, with tight bonds, where brother would help brother without question or hesitation?
LLH&R, as they said.

Where would I stand if I was put to the test I wondered?
Friday 21 August 2009

The text gave me the address of a phone box in Feltham and a time to be there which was just as darkness was falling. I didn’t recognise the sender’s number but then that wasn’t too surprising if it was from someone paranoid enough to want to play spy crap in West London. Disguising the source of a call from being traced was easy these days if you wanted to, it was just the cost of a fresh pay as you go that could then easily be dumped once you had used it. But why did he want to ring me at a call box I wondered? That was odd.

It did occur to me that it might be a ruse, a call designed to lure me into some kind of an ambush. But then the people I was most scared of just at the moment all knew where I lived anyway so why would they bother? Briefly the plot of that thriller about someone trapped in a phone box by a sniper reared its head. Now who’s being paranoid, I thought.

I considered calling Bob to ask his advice about it but the memory of our last conversation still rankled, particularly in view of my most recent dealings with Wibble and The Brethren and besides which, it was too small a thing. Why the hell should I tell Bob everything or worse still, go running to him for advice about every move in my life?

No, deciding whether to go and answer the phone or not was something I felt I ought to be able to handle on my own these days.

The call box stood on its own at a street corner to the side of an Indian owned late night Spar shop. It was an old fashioned red one, stinking of old fashioned piss. I got there ten minutes early. It gave me time to check out the area a bit. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. No cars parked with a couple of goons casually sitting waiting, no battered white transits waiting to disgorge a hammer wielding horde.

It was just a quiet street in a rundown suburb.

 

The phone rang a minute or two after I’d ensconced myself inside and extracted a small reporter’s notepad and pen from my backpack.

‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Is that Iain?’

It was the nervousness in the voice that got me. Oh shit, I thought as I recognised it.

‘Hi Danny, yes it’s me.’
‘Are you alone?’

That rankled, but mainly because of my irritation with myself that I had felt as though I might want my hand holding by Bob in order to go to a phone box.

‘Danny, I’m in a fucking phone box. How many people do you think are going to be in here with me? Of course I’m on my own.’

 

‘But you came alone?’ he insisted, ‘No guys, no cops?’

 

‘No,’ I sighed, ‘No guys, no cops. It’s just me here Danny. So what’s up? What do you want to talk about, and why all this cloak and dagger.’ ‘You know you said to give you a call if I wanted to talk.’

‘Yes I did, Danny. But funnily enough I’ve got a perfectly good telephone at home and a working mobile so what I’m a bit puzzled about is what I’m doing in a phone box? What are we doing here?’

‘I couldn’t call you on those.’
‘Why, you think they’re bugged?’ I joked.
‘Yes,’ he said with a disarming simplicity.
‘Who by Danny? The cops?’
‘Them, or the others.’

‘What others?’ I asked before I worked out who he was talking about. ‘Do you mean The Brethren? Come off it, these are bikers for fuck’s sake. I know they’re tough but they’re not the CIA.’

‘No, I’m serious, you don’t know what it’s like. They use detectives to check things out…’

 

Well I knew that was true from my little chat with Wibble about my long dead smoking history.

 

‘…guys who can find things out. They can hack mobile phones, all sorts, so you just can’t be sure what’s secure.’

 

‘Like the News of the Screws thing?’ I asked since it was back in the papers again.

‘Yeah.’
Well I could be in exalted company then if my mobile had been hacked by the same sorts of guys who had gone after the phones of the Royals, MPs and god knew how many celebs for tabloid fodder.

‘But now you want to talk?’
‘Yes, sorta…’

There was a time when I would have welcomed a conversation with Danny. A time, not so long ago when I would have seen him as a strong potential personal interest story, a source of information, a different viewpoint on the phenomenon of The Brethren from my own; and I think being charitable to myself about my motives for a moment, as someone that I wanted to talk to, to warn off if possible, to help him avoid some of the life choices Damage had made while it wasn’t too late.

But that was then. This was now.

And now I knew I probably didn’t sound too sympathetic at this stage. My last meeting with Wibble, put together with my last conversation with Bob, had shaken me more than I’d thought. From being independent and above the fray, it now felt like I had slipped through a crack and was rapidly becoming trapped between two large rocks that were beginning to grind together. And it wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

But I still didn’t really know what it was that Danny wanted to talk about. If it was just how he was feeling, well, I was sorry, but that time had passed and he was on his own on that one. But it could be something more I know. I realised that Danny had gone from being star struck to shit scared between the last two times I’d seen him. Which meant what, I wondered?

But almost immediately I answered my own question. He had to have seen something, heard something, learnt something that had changed him almost overnight. And that something had to have been serious to have had such an effect on him.

And if it was something that serious, then given the sort of shit that was going down at the moment and the potential this situation had for spiralling way out of control, then I guessed it was something that I was going to want to know about.

So it was with a slightly more positive tone that I said, ‘Well come on now Danny, make up your mind. Either you do want to or you don’t. And if we’ve got this far I’m guessing you want to, am I right?’

There was silence at the other end of the line.
Make an assumptive close I decided. ‘So how do you want to do this Danny? Do you want to talk on the phone or do you want to meet up?’

He wanted to meet up. Well that was good.

And once he had decided it was as though he had screwed up his nerves and just wanted to get on with it before he changed his mind. He was instant, it had to be now, must be this evening. I had to come, he could show me, well tell me, what was going on. But it had to be tonight, now in fact. He named a café out towards the airport by Staines, well away from Wembley and the clubhouse, I noted. I was to be there in half an hour. And I was to come alone.

The café was empty when I got there. I ordered a mug of coffee from the woman in the frayed white apron lounging behind the counter. It’s not often you get asked if you want Nescafé these days.

Other than a pair of shell suited youngsters who came in a couple of minutes later and made a beeline for the fruit machine in the corner, there was no one else around. Danny arrived after a few minutes just as I was sweeping up the gritty mess I’d spilled onto the tacky surface of the table whist trying to fill a teaspoon from one of those glass jars with a metal spout on top that was sitting on the table inside which until the vital moment the sugar had seemed to have set into one solid lump.

He had obviously been waiting for me to pitch up to make sure I had come on my own, and then had kept an eye out for a while to see if anyone came in after me.

Danny was crapping himself about being here. I could see that. His eyes swept the room, checking out the woman behind the counter and the swaggering oiks hitting the hold keys on the flashing bandit in the corner as he slipped quickly in through the door and parked himself across the table from me. He was wearing a hoodie, which he kept up so that as he sat facing me, no one looking in from outside would be able to see his head or face.

Paranoid was the word, I decided. Was he on the edge of a nervous breakdown?

 

I left him there as I organised and paid for another mug of coffee and brought it back to the table.

 

‘Watch the sugar jar,’ I warned as he reached for it and indicated the table in front of me, ‘it can be a bit of a mess…’

‘Unhuh,’ he grunted, upending the dispenser over his mug to dump a slew of crystals directly into the swirling brown and white scum of his mug. ‘So,’ I said, after I’d left him to take the first slurp from his steaming mug as I used my teaspoon to scoop out a few dark spots of undissolved granules, ‘what is it that you can show me?’

He lifted his head and his eyes peered out at me from under his hood. ‘Like I said on the phone, I can’t show you. It’s too dangerous.’

 

‘So what are we doing here then?’ I cajoled.

‘I can tell you about it,’ he said in a low voice. Despite the frantic beeping of the fruit machine that seemed to be absorbing the pair in the corner’s combined IQ he evidently didn’t want to run the risk of being overheard.

‘Tell me? About what?’

 

I sat back in my chair and picked up my coffee. ‘Alright then, I’m here, I’m all ears, so what do you want to tell me?’