Heavy Duty Attitude (6 page)
At first I tried to include the other kid in my questions as well, but all I got was a glowering look and occasional grunts so eventually I thought, well screw you chum, and concentrated on Danny.
I felt uneasy at how proud as punch he seemed to feel to be there. A bit of guilt perhaps that I was a little bit to blame, that I’d helped to glamorise The Brethren, although God knows it wasn’t as if they were famous or infamous enough before I’d come along, after all they had a string of newspaper headlines stretching back since the early seventies in this country that had given them their public reputation.
I asked him anything and everything I could think of. Why was he here? How had he first met The Brethren and got involved? What did he think about The Brethren now he’d met them? What did he think about their reputation? What did he think he was getting himself involved with? Did he think it was worth the risks? What did his family think?
I suppose I was asking him the questions I would want him to ask himself before it was too late. Before he got too committed to something from which as far as I could see it was very difficult to back out of later.
With a heavy heart I realised that whatever I was saying, I wasn’t getting through to him. And as I looked up from where we were sitting on the grass to see Bung bearing purposefully down on us, I realised I had run out of time.
‘Hey yeah, will do. Listen, but like with all the questions, you are working here aren’t you? Writing I mean? That’s what this is all about right? Isn’t it?’
I could see how his mind was working. None of my question had done any good at all, had raised no doubts. The only thing he was thinking about was that he might end up being in a book about The Brethren and wasn’t that going to be just cool.
That was the only time that the other lad decided to get involved. He could see it as well and he didn’t like it.
‘That’s not what it’s about. It’s not about being a poseur,’ he dismissed the prospect with barely concealed hostility and contempt, ‘and you don’t talk to anyone about the club without the club’s say so. Club business is club business you understand? Because if you don’t get that then you’re never gonna make it.’
He must have seen the look on my face.
‘No, not that sort of
sort you out
. Protection I mean.’
I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I didn’t much like the sound of it.
It seemed as though I was free to come and go as I liked around the site, but given what had happened with Thommo, straying too far from Bung and the Freemen didn’t seem too smart a move. Still it wasn’t as if we were joined at the hip so I had a chance to think as we took a stroll round the site.
Bring a sleeping bag Wibble had instructed me when he’d given me the details of the run, so I had, just so as not to piss him off. So it gave me an excuse to head back over to where they were all parked up although what I really wanted to do was surreptitiously check out the situation by the bikes again. Of course, there were strikers on guard. If they had been told I wasn’t to leave, there was no way I was going to be getting my bike back out the gates, and anyway, there were strikers on them as well under the control of a quiet watchful pair of patches, collecting the ticket money from the faithful as they arrived and stuffing it into plastic carrier bags that every so often would be collected by a posse of full patches and carried off back to the members only tent.
‘The ones behind the beer tent?’
‘Yeah, it’s all TA gear, Widget and his lads have borrowed it for the weekend.’
There was a fence around the rest of the site facing onto the road and hedges and smaller fences elsewhere. Even if I gave Bung the slip, I’d be seen if I tried climbing over any of them during the day so if I wanted out, I resigned myself to the fact that it looked like the best bet might be to wait for dark anyway.
While Bung stopped to meet and greet a posse of bikers from some support club that he seemed to know and want to chat to, I took the chance to wander out of sight for a moment and whip out my mobile.
‘Nah, you’ll be safe enough I’d think,’ he said, ‘It’s the Brethren’s main public event of the year, a big money spinner and a shop window for them. They aren’t going to want to compromise all that with a murder. Not when they could do it any other time. Why have the hassle?’
‘OK?’ asked Bung as he caught up with me as I chatted with the guy at the next stand about his charity which involved getting disadvantaged kids to build ratty but working bikes.
But as it happened, as the afternoon wore on, despite my misgivings, I did start to feel safe enough in the Freemen’s company to unwind a bit and begin to enjoy myself.
The sun was shining. People, by which I meant The Brethren and their cohorts, were, in the noticeable absence of the Cambridge crew who it seemed had taken themselves and their grudge off to a beer tent on the other side of the field, relaxed and friendly.
I supposed there must have been some underlying issue with Thommo’s charter that the Freemen had thought might lead to trouble, but now that seemed to be off the agenda they just seemed determined to bask in the crowd’s attention and have a good time.
There’d been no mention of The Brethren in connection with the local punch-up between Capricorn MC and Dead Men Riding MC or any suggestion of a link that anyone had made to me so far, so I didn’t think it had anything to do with that, although I supposed perhaps Thommo and his boys were under a bit of pressure from the rest of the club over it. It was clear that part of the reputation of a senior club like The Brethren rested on the expectation that they would keep the more junior clubs on their turf under control. After all, no one wanted any unnecessary trouble since trouble was bad for business, and a war, even between two junior clubs was trouble since it could lead to all clubs, senior and junior, coming under the spotlight. So I guessed The Brethren would be looking to Thommo and his boys to get this thing under control which might explain the obvious needle between Wibble, as president of the Freemen, and Wibble as the local charter P.
‘Spliff?’ Bung asked.
‘You want to roll up here?’
‘Nah,’ he said, before adding in best Blue Peter fashion, ‘here’s some I made earlier,’ surprising me when he flipped open a pack of cigarettes from his cut’s pocket to reveal half a dozen or so tailor-mades and a handful of twisted doobie tips, and tugged one out.
He cupped his hands around his lighter as he flicked the wheel with his thumb and sucked in a deep breath to draw it into life. They were huge hands I noticed as I watched the performance, darkly tanned with the blurred and faded blue-green of old tattoos dark against the skin under the hair on the back, the fingers encrusted with a selection of heavy and ornate silver skull and patch themed rings that probably did well as an impromptu set of knuckledusters when needed.
Then he all but disappeared in a huge puff of acrid white smoke as he exhaled and took a second toke. He looked around the field approvingly as he held it in for a moment, giving an air of complete contentment.
‘Lovely,’ he said as he exhaled slowly and proffered it to me. I had to take it. There was nothing for it but to do what I had to do.
I’d smoked a lot at uni, In my day it was resin, eighths of hash, gritty but soft and crumbly Leb black, or rock hard nodules of Moroccan red that needed to be melted with a match before you could sprinkle it onto the baccy; or so our little league dealers told us. Grass was a rarity and anything else was an occasional experiment as and when it presented itself. That was how I had first actually spoken to any of The Brethren, when a trio of them were selling ten quid wraps of speed outside the doors of a Motörhead gig at uni. Not that I remembered much after that other than borrowing a fiver from a mate to roll up and heading straight to the bogs to do the lot. It was evil fucking stuff I have to say.
But I’d been a reasonably regular stoner as and when I could catch it, right up until I’d had a bad trip while under the influence; panic attack, hallucinations, shit it shook me up. And then I left uni and suddenly I wasn’t around the people I knew who could get it and so I just sort of stopped. It wasn’t that I gave up as such; it was just that I wasn’t bothered. And then I’d given up smoking period.
And much to my surprise I’d beaten the habit, at least other than the odd guilty fag or café-crème once in a blue moon and nowadays I didn’t even smoke ordinary smokes really anymore, let alone joints.
‘Jeeeezus!’ I swallowed a cough as I concentrated on keeping the smoke down to get the full hit, even as the harsh hotness of the raw weed caught at the back of my throat. Then I let it out again in a long stream as a definite buzz hit me. ‘What the fuck are you smoking?’
Bung just grinned as I spluttered and gasped while I handed back the joint. ‘It’s good shit isn’t it? Our local Cong’s sensei special.’
‘I can see why they call it skunk,’ I said, ‘Christ it stinks.’
The Cong were the growers, I knew that already from Damage. Cannabis farming had become something of a Vietnamese gang speciality with rented houses gutted to make way for intensive cultivation under hot lights by trafficked peasants using stolen electricity until the smell, the heat or the occasional fire when someone got careless with the wiring gave them away.
But with the plants cropping in batches every few months and continuous cycles of batches coming through, the occasional lost crop was just a cost of doing business as far as they were concerned, while intensive cultivation was inexorably raising the strength of the weed’s THC.
What the Cong didn’t have was the distribution networks to retail the gear or the muscle to control dealing territory which was where other operators, like the bike clubs, and others, were a natural fit.
And if you were dealing in the shit and had a taste for it the way Bung obviously did, naturally you would keep some of the best stuff for your own personal use.
Whether it was the strength of it, or whether it was just that I was now so unused to it after all these years, after only a couple of tokes I realised that Christ, I was actually pretty bloody stoned already.
As we went inside and a path opened up in front of Bung towards the bar I slipstreamed in behind pulling out my wallet as I did so, it was my shout I reckoned; I had a brief moment of clarity. Probably one of the last for the day if I’m honest looking back.
Advice or no advice, thanks to taking that first spliff, it was pretty bloody clear by now that I wasn’t going to be leaving. I would be staying the night with The Brethren and if I was going to be under Bung’s protection from whatever Cambridge’s beef was, then I needed to stick to him and keep him onside.
So for the rest of the day and into the evening I tagged along with Bung, meeting the other Freemen and those of The Brethren who were attaching themselves to Wibble’s crew. As the day wore on I was introduced to a generally friendly parade of names that I tried to keep track of, from the Bills, Steves, and Mikes of various descriptions, to the Smurf, Gollum and Viking.
It was a tricky balance to try and pull off. As a reporter my natural instinct was to observe, learn and record. But as the beers flowed and the spliffs circulated during the afternoon that ambition became more and more impossible, while I also knew that having notes taken about them wasn’t exactly a favourite activity as far as most Brethren were concerned and so if I was too obtrusive I ran the risk of changing the atmosphere fast in the wrong direction.
And since it seemed as though my health and safety depended on these guys’ goodwill, discretion very rapidly took the part of valour and I stuffed the notebook away early doors, promising myself that I’d write up some notes when I crashed for the night.
As a result, looking at the scrawls in my notebook it was true when I wrote at about midnight:
As it is, all I have are some very fragmentary notes and increasingly fractured memories of the night.
Cambridge crew are keeping themselves to themselves, but Bung and the other Brethren, with me tagging right along after them, are mingling with visiting clubs. Patch, side patch, MCCs. Come to show their colours and/or pay their respects? Even a women’s patch club, The Psyclesluts MC. Very scary crop haired women with ears that looked as if they’d been in a nail factory accident.
Why should the guys have all the fun?
Seems they’ve all read
Heavy Duty People
. Bung at pains to tell me that he’d nicked it, not bought it. Long surprising discussion with two Brethren, nicknamed Eric and Ernie, about twentieth century English novelists, a dismissal of D H Lawrence as really just an Edwardian writer and an appreciation of the oeuvre of Virginia Woolf. Astonishingly well read but then a real surprise. Open University English degree. BA Hons, the both of them. On the road and inside, Eric explained,
Not a lot to do inside but read
. Ernie:
He waited ’til he got out to graduate y’know, so he could go up on stage with his colours under his gown.