Kevin, without knowing it, used an Ed McBain title. As he greeted the ‘E’ crew with ‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.’
He was tripping out, had sampled some crack cocaine and gone into orbit, shouting: ‘I can see fucking Indians. And they’re all bus conductors.’
He trailed off in a line of giggles. When the crew had taken their first victim, they had also ‘confiscated’: a) a mountain of dope; b) weapons; c) heavy cash.
Kevin, sampling all these like a vulture on assignment, roared: ‘I love LA!’
Albert, worried, had asked: ‘Is it dangerous?’ Meaning the drugs, and got a nasty clip round the earhole.
‘Dope is risky for those who’re fucked up to start. See me, it’s recreational, like, that’s why they call them that.’
‘Call them what?’
He dealt Albert another clip and answered: ‘Recreational drugs, you moron. What is it, you gone deaf? Listen to that monkey’s shit. Wake up fella, it’s the nineties ending.’
He set up another line of the white.
Patrick Hamilton wrote: ‘Those whom God deserted are given a room and a gas fire in Earls Court.’
If homelessness is the final rung of the downward spiral, then a bedsit may be the rehearsal for desperation. In a bedsit in Balham, a man carefully pinned a large poster of the England cricket team to his wall. He stood back and surveyed it, said:
‘To you who are about to die — here is my salute.’
And he swallowed deep, then spat at the poster. As the saliva dribbled down the team, he half turned, then in one motion launched a knife with ferocity. It clattered against the wall, didn’t hold, fell into the line. He took a wild kick at it, screaming:
‘You useless piece of shit.’
The knife had come from Man of War magazine. Monthly, it catered for would-be mercenaries, Tories and psychos. Their mail-order section featured all the weapons necessary for a minor bloodbath. The ‘throwing knife’ was guaranteed to hit and pierce with ‘deadly accuracy’. The man dropped to the floor and began his morning regime of harsh exercises, shouted:
‘Gimme one hundred, mister.’
As he pumped, the letters on his right arm, burned tattoo-blue against the skin: SHANNON. Not his real name, but the character from Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War. Unlike the fictional character, he didn’t smoke, drink, drug. The demons in his mind provided all the stimulation he would ever need. Words hammered through his head as he pounded the floor:
Gimmie a little country or gimmie rock ’n’ roll but launch me to Armageddon I will smote the heathers upon the playing fields of Eton and low I will lay their false Gods of sporting legend I will I will I am I am the fucking wrath of the nineties. The new age of devastation.