19: KEVIN THE BASTARD

  Several weeks slipped by with very little to distinguish one day from the last.
   Kevin had supposed that, like owning a bar or running a brothel, the main drawback with his being a drug dealer would be that he would tend to consume the wares himself to such an extent that the business would go into deficit. He was reassured to discover that, although there seemed to be few moments during the day when he did not have either a joint or cigarette papers in his hands, both Darren and Karen outdid him in cannabis consumption to such a degree that his own intake seemed positively miserly in comparison. With careful husbanding, the skunk buds Darren had brought back from Amsterdam lasted them nearly three days; they reluctantly parted with small portions of it to a tiny elite of favoured customers on the first day, then decided to keep the rest for themselves and let the plebs consume slate.
  The three of them would sit slumped in the living room all day and half the night, taking it in turns to deal with whoever came along, skinning up, playing video games for hours on end, listening to rave music, and watching telly or violent videos. Occasionally Darren would put some porn videos on, but his mother disapproved of this. "Turn that filth off," she'd say, "this is a respectable house," reminding Kevin of Betsy, and so instead they'd watch something in which someone's ear got bitten off or someone got stabbed in the head. Darren's mum actually stayed pretty much out of their way, keeping to her own room for much of the time and taking little part in the day to day running of the concern beyond chopping up resin for them on the kitchen sideboard and nagging Darren to chase up unpaid ticks. Darren's grandfather, too, stayed out of their hair most of the time, spending most of the day up in his room or out at the pub. Occasionally he would come and sit in an armchair for a while with a vicious expression on his face. "Fucking Bob Hope," he would mutter disgustedly. Kevin at first thought he was nursing some insane grievance against the comedian of that name, but it turned out to be rhyming slang for dope, of which he disapproved. "You can't take your alcohol, that's your trouble," he would sneer. When Darren pressed him to have a toke, however, he would grudgingly accept and then hog the joint shamelessly and sit there cackling loudly and reminiscing about fights and shags he had had and leering over at the blushing Karen.
  Darren's father wasn't in the picture, for what reason Kevin never found out, but other members of his extended family would sometimes come to visit, most often Darren's kid brother's girlfriend, who would bring with her Darren's kid brother's two children. Kevin always particularly enjoyed those afternoons and felt warm and cosy, feeling that the living room presented a happy picture of cheerful domesticity, with the two girls playing with their babies, changing nappies and exchanging gossip and skinning up for him and Darren with skillful, long-nailed fingers as the menfolk vied to outdo each other at Sonic the Hedgehog.
  After some initial mutual reserve Kevin and Karen got on well together. For the first day or so she had regarded him with the fearful and hostile look of a wild animal cornered by an enemy, so much so that Kevin began to think she might prove dangerous to him in some way; unlike him she was, he felt, an animal who would know how to fight for survival. But as time went on and it became clear he wasn't about to tell Darren about the true contents of the letter she seemed to thaw towards him.
  On the second day they were left alone together when Darren went to get a takeaway.
  "Darren's good to me, isn't he?" she had said. "All I want to do from now on is make him happy. We've both lost so much time through that stupid amnesia, I just want to make up for it." She had looked at him sidelong as if to gauge his reaction.
  Kevin had sought to reassure her, perhaps somewhat ineptly. "Amnesia's a funny thing," he said. "I mean, for example, Darren's always going on about me and him being in that cell and me reading him that letter, but I can't remember any of it. I was drunk at the time."
  Karen frowned. Kevin feared for a moment that his attempted reassurance might in fact have come across as a veiled threat.
  "It's a funny thing about that letter," Karen said ingenuously. "I can't remember writing it. It must have been after I was knocked down and before I was put in hospital. I was wandering round in a daze for nearly a week before someone took me in, not knowing who I was or what I was doing. They said I was hallucinating when they found me, and telling people loads of strange lies about things. I don't remember it meself. It must have been then I wrote the letter."
  So that settled that. This agreed upon fiction cleared the air between them once and for all. They sealed it with a joint and when Darren came back with supper they were talking and laughing together as if they'd been friends since birth.
  Indeed, over the coming weeks Kevin came to think that Karen was at times perhaps a little too friendly towards him. In point of fact, he sometimes thought she was coming on to him. It wasn't so much things that were said as certain looks she sometimes gave him. She had a nice line in looks of smouldering significance, particularly when they had to brush past each other on the narrow stairs or in the cramped kitchen. Then there were the mornings. Kevin, rather to his surprise, was invariably the first one of the three up in the morning. Karen would usually be next, and two or three mornings or early afternoons a week she would come down in a state of partial undress, in T-shirt and knickers or jeans and a bra, on a couple of occasions just wrapped in a bath towel. She would affect surprise at finding Kevin up already and then bump past him in the kitchen like that or sit next to him on the couch watching telly. Kevin liked to think of himself as a mature and urbane sort of a repressed lecher, and if this had just been healthy, prelapsarian unselfconsciousness it wouldn't have disconcerted him or caused any undue stirrings. But on those occasions the smoulderingly significant looks would come out in force, pouting stares of frank sexuality that increased in their significant smouldering until Kevin looked away; also, she seemed to bump him in the kitchen rather more than was necessary, and sit next to him on the couch unusually close. When Darren came down he would tell her to get dressed, not for Kevin's sake but in case a customer came round. Physically she was something of a sexbomb in miniature, with a face that flitted engagingly between knowingness and artlessness, innocence and naughtiness, and shapely convexities fore and aft. Her behaviour disturbed Kevin in more ways than one. She spent the greater part of her time making up to Darren and treating Kevin as a friend, and those occasional other looks, assuming they weren't all in his own febrile mind anyway, were, he told himself, nothing more than playful flirtation. Still, he began to be nervous lest Darren should get it into his head that they were getting on with each other a little too well. At first Darren had been pleased they got on so well, but there had been a couple of incidents lately when Kevin and Karen had been messing around together, one a little matter of a playful tussle for control of the Sega joystick, and once when Kevin had given her an insane weed-fuelled fit of giggles for about an hour by doing a stupid voice, when Kevin thought he had detected a look of mild annoyance and slight concern on Darren's face. Needless to say, Kevin had done nothing to encourage anything more than friendliness from Karen. He was, after all, Darren's trusty lieutenant.
  In his role as lieutenant, Kevin thought he had let Darren down badly only twice, on both occasions when everyone else had gone out and he had been left to hold the fort on his own. The first fuck-up was when, spying a uniformed figure approaching through the yard, who turned out to be a man who had come to read the electricity meter, Kevin had panicked prematurely and concealed the stash in the bottom of the nappy sack. It had taken them a long and disgusting hour to rescue everything and wipe the shit off the packaging.
  The second time was when John the Buddhist had come round again. It was by now a week after the Wednesday on which he had promised, and failed, to pay off his tab, and Darren had warned Kevin specifically against extending him any more credit.
  The Buddhist had come in carrying a carry-cot containing a baby.
  "Do me a tenner's, lad," he said. "I'll be back in an hour to pay off everything." He laid the cot down on the floor. "I'm leaving me kid here as guarantee."
  Kevin looked at the cot in disbelief. "I can't do that," he said.
  "Look, I've seen Darren, he said it was all right."
  This was patently a lie. "I can't give you anything unless Darren tells me personally," said Kevin.
  "One fucking hour," the Buddhist raged, "I'll be back in one fucking hour to pay off the lot. I'm leaving me fucking kid here, djer think I'm going to abandon me own fucking son?"
  Cravenly, Kevin caved in and gave him the weed.
  "You don't have to leave the baby," he said.
  "No, no, that's me guarantee," said the Buddhist as he went.
  Kevin looked down at the carry-cot and suspected he would get shouted at for this. He tucked the baby away in a discreet corner behind an armchair and hoped no-one would notice it.
  As it chanced, Darren's younger brother's girlfriend came back with the others and in the general profusion of babies the tiny hostage did indeed pass unremarked. Kevin decided to keep quiet about what he had done and hope the Buddhist returned before anyone realized. But the hours passed without sign of the Buddhist. Finally, just as Darren's younger brother's girlfriend and her brood were leaving, Darren's mother spotted the foundling. Kevin sheepishly admitted what had transpired. Disgustedly, Darren picked up the infant and stormed round to the Buddhist's place, ordering Kevin to accompany him. The Buddhist wasn't at home but his woman was there and mildly happy to get her offspring back; they swapped the baby for a Sega cartridge.
  Half an hour later the Buddhist appeared at Darren's house in a fury, carrying the baby and demanding they take that back and return him his video game. Eventually Darren drove him off at machete-point.
  Debt collecting was Kevin's least favourite part of a drug dealer's routine. A couple of times a week Darren would take Kevin with him to knock on the doors of those who owed them money. Occasionally things would turn nasty and there would be confrontation scenes like the one the Buddhist specialized in. Kevin wasn't much help to Darren on these occasions, although he personally thought he did a good line in lurking sinisterly in the background. His air of menace, he felt, was the worse for being undefined and metaphysical, like a villain in a Pinter play. Sometimes they tried a nice guy - nasty guy routine, often with good results, but whenever Kevin felt the situation was potentially fraught with peril he tended to overdo the niceness to an extent that undermined Darren's bluster; Darren would yell something of the order of 'Give me my money or I'll break your fucking arms,' and Kevin would, in effect, tut and roll his eyes humorously and say, 'Don't mind Mr. Grumpy.' In one instance where the defaulter lived with his grandmother, a sweet and innocent old lady, Kevin ended up smilingly trading pleasantries with her over tea and scones while in the next room Darren and the debtor exchanged threats and obscenities and hurled furniture about. There must, he felt, be a more civilized way to seek remuneration. Perhaps, in the first instance, a standard letter to be sent out to longstanding non-payers. 'Dear Sir, it has come to our attention that payment of your account is overdue to the amount of xxx. Please take steps to rectify this situation immediately or we will be forced to place the matter in the hands of several large gentlemen with baseball bats. We look forward to a speedy settlement and your continued custom in the future. Yours Sincerely, Darren, Karen & Kevin Ltd., purveyors of dodgy slate to the carriage trade since 1995.'
  Kevin was never sure exactly how much money he himself was making out of the business. From time to time Darren would hand him some notes and tell him they were his share of the profits. He reckoned they probably came to around forty or fifty pounds a week. On top of this there was his dole, and of course there was all the weed he smoked. All he knew was that, while he never seemed to save any money or have much to spare, every time he reached into his pocket there was enough for cigs and skins and the takeaways everyone in the house lived on (for about the only time anyone used the kitchen apart from to make tea and toast was when Darren's mum would microwave the resin to expand it so the deals looked bigger).
  Kevin occasionally felt a small pang of conscience about his new way of life, when people would come in and trade such things as stolen car stereos for drugs, or when dealing to schoolkids. (He had always known the playground pusher was a myth, and so it was: the kids came to you without any pushing necessary.) But he told himself that, as with the arms trade, if they didn't get it here they'd get it somewhere else. Besides, he reminded himself sternly, he was a bastard now anyway.
  For Kevin, sitting on the couch with Darren and Karen staring at the TV screen with a spliff in his hand, had of late taken to spending a great deal of time brooding. He had been brooding upon what he had come to think of as the sorry shitpool that was his life, and in particular the great wrong that had been done him with regard to Ingrid.
  His infatuation with Rose he had forgotten about the day after leaving the camp. He now looked back on it with mystification and could only theoretically recall his state of mind at the time. Losing Ingrid, however, had left a wound that would not heal.
  At first, after emerging from the numbness that had settled on him that terrible night, he had wanted only to die. His one thought had been to skunk himself into oblivion from getting up until going to bed. He had given up feeling and wanting, had more or less given up thinking about anything beyond the moment at hand and the next joint. He had been indifferent to his surroundings: palace or pigsty was all the same to him now. He had, he thought, finally given up the struggle. He would never want anything again for the rest of his life, except what he could not have: the life he had been promised with her. Forbes had been right, he decided, that last night in Amsterdam: resignation was the key. Go with the flow. Learn helplessness. Don't fight the conveyor belt. The universe was a vast machine designed to torment the individual; the best thing was not to play the game of yearning and desire. The best thing was not to care at all about anything or anyone including yourself. That was the great lesson of existence. That was what God would have told his children if he existed and could speak and gave a shit about them. Best to want nothing apart from regular meals and a roof over your head and a plentiful supply of drugs, and not to be surprised if even that fell through.
  Now, however, he wanted something. He wanted revenge on the world. It had been too cruel, the way she had been given to him so unexpectedly, dropped from the sky into his life and then just as arbitrarily snatched away again. A cruel jest, of a piece with the rest of his life. Well, he had had enough of playing the patsy, of being the passive butt of cosmic jokes. No more Mr. Nice Guy, he decided, no more mild-mannered janitor. From now on he was out to get everything he wanted by whatever means necessary and no-one was going to stand in his way. From now on the best of everything was good enough for him. He was going to take this world and shake it until its fruit fell to him like apples from a tree. From now on, he was going to assume a new incarnation: Kevin Kilroy - Bastard.
  He would build up Darren's humble operation into a vast criminal empire with tentacles reaching into every area of vice and larceny. With his college education and university study of gangster movies, he reckoned he was ideally suited to being a Mr. Big. The criminals who worked with him would call him The Professor, at first jocularly but then with an increasing respect for his decisions. 'Got a job planned. It's watertight. The Professor planned it out.' At first his role would merely be that of Darren's consigliere, but ultimately Darren and his family would be pushed aside and he alone would be running the show, a real life Moriarty sitting at the centre of a web of corruption. And along with a reputation for meticulous planning and criminal genius, he would gain a reputation for being a ruthless bastard who crushed everyone in his path. 'Kevin Kilroy?' they would say. 'He's a right bastard, he is. Don't mess with his mob.'
  By this point his base of operations had moved from Darren's front room to the office of a seedy club in Soho. Along the way he had acquired an East End accent and a vicuna coat and surrounded himself with a mob of huge and brutal henchmen, the worst villains this side of the river, who would hang on his every word and laugh loudly at his jokes. He would have one very short henchmen, practically a dwarf, who would run errands for him and light his cigars and whom he would poke viciously in the chest when he didn't get things right. He would poke people a lot, he decided, not just when they'd done things wrong but whenever he felt like it, and jab his finger at them when he was giving orders. He would say things like, 'I want it done now,' (jab) 'and I want it done right,' (poke). 'I don't want you coming back tomorrow,' (jab) 'and telling me it's all gone pear-shaped. Got it?' (Big emphatic poke). 'All wight, my boys, go to it.' (Little slap on the cheek).
  On second thoughts the dwarf wouldn't light his cigars, though, because he'd have a bird to do it, or possibly two birds who'd have to fight each other for the privilege. He'd have another and very well-endowed bird to follow him round with an ashtray balanced on her tits, a bird to massage his shoulders soothingly when he got angry at people, and a bird with a very nice arse whose specific function would be to bend down to get things out of filing cabinets and to be goosed boisterously in front of people who came to visit him on business. Besides these birds for business hours he'd also keep a couple of flashy molls whose job it would be to drape themselves over him in nightclubs and beg him to come home and fuck them while he was talking to his cronies.
  'We're bored, K.K.,' they would pout. 'Let's go home to bed.'
  'Fack off, you silly slags, I'm talking about the footbawl, enni?"
  There would be a steady changeover of birds. ''Ere,' he would say to his top moll after sex one day, in a post-coital mood of thoughtfulness, ''ow long we been going out now?'
  'Two years, K.K.,' she would say, breathless and starry eyed, thinking he was about to propose to her.
  'Long as that, eh? Well, we'd better do samfin abaht it, then, hadn't we, gel?'
  'Really, K.K.?'
  'Yeah. Fack off, you cheap tart, I'm sick of the sight of you. Bladdy 'ell, I don't even keep socks that long.'
  Then one day while he was planning his expansion into Europe a newspaper item would catch his eye.
  'It says 'ere there's a bunch of lefties in Amsterdam disrupting the drug trade. Can't have that, can we, my boys, it's bad for business, innit? I want this Red Ingrid brought before me in chains. Go to it, my boys.'
  So Ingrid would be brought before him in chains.
  'I am very disappointed, Kevin,' she would say. 'I did not think you were the sort of person who would run a vast criminal empire. As Brecht says-'
  'Shat it, you silly tart!'
  But then they would forgive each other passionately and pledge their undying devotion and he would devote his days to good deeds.


  One day Kevin met a real Mr. Big. He was even known as Mr. Big, although mainly because his real name was Mr. Bigelow. From what Kevin could gather he didn't seem to be an actual drug baron, but was perhaps on his way to becoming a baronet.
  Kevin met him because of several unfortunate hitches in the normal smooth running of business that occurred about this time. Primarily there was the matter of the Naylor brothers. The Naylor brothers were a family of five huge, shambling, pithecanthroid trolls who made Darren's brothers look like Kenneth Tynan by comparison. They had dealed weed and speed from a nearby pub since time immemorial and now, with Darren's brothers out of the way, had decided that the drugs concession for the neighbourhood should belong exclusively to them. They said as much to Darren in a club one night, emphasizing their position with picturesque threats. For the next few days the house was on a war footing. Darren spent all his time making weighted clubs out of cricket bats and some good big pieces of lumber he had found on a skip, fulminating against the Naylors and making plans for their destruction. Most of these plans seemed to consist of him and Kevin marching round to their place with a good big piece of lumber each, yelling, "Come on then, you fuckers," and giving the Naylors six of the best apiece. He made Kevin start carrying a monkey wrench in his pocket to defend himself with in case the Naylors should waylay him in an alley one day when he was on his own. It was at about this time that Kevin began to think a change of career might be in order.
  This feeling was reinforced when, several days later, the police raided the house. Luckily, Darren's mum had divined what was coming through some psychic antennae of hers that had picked up on a suspicious-looking man sitting in a strange car in the courtyard, and by the time the police entered Darren's younger brother's girlfriend had already smuggled all the drugs round to her place in her pram. After a week's prudent suspension of trading, Darren's mum sounded the all clear and business resumed again. Police searches came a couple of times a year, rarely finding anything, but as it was only a couple of months since their last roust, and coming as it did so close on the heels of the Naylors' threats, there was a suspicion in the family that the Naylors might have set them up for the bust. The suspicion alone sent Darren ballistic, and Kevin found himself trying on one of the motorcycle crash helmets Darren had got hold of and being invited to choose his favourite piece of lumber before Darren's mum stepped in and told them not to be so stupid.
  One day soon after that Darren went to his regular supplier to get some more weed and found that, in a daring coup, the Naylor brothers had bought up all his stock and thus virtually cornered the market. It was the same story at his fallback outlets. It took him the whole day to locate an alternative source. On his return he declared that this could not go on. Once again he started laying his armoury out on the living room floor while once again Kevin frantically tried to tell him of other ways in which they could drive the Naylors out of business that were more in accordance with free market principles, such as underpricing them or giving away complimentary Rizlas and roach material or giving customers free cheese crackers and sherry or installing a courtesy creche and nappy-changing facility.
  Once again Darren's mum intervened, and this time she had the solution. They would start buying from Mr. Big. He always had a good supply of drugs. More importantly, he also had the necessary muscle to cool off the Naylors. It was even said that he had contacts in the police who gave him advance warning of impending busts, although this was possibly just mouth on his part. His prices were slightly more expensive but it would be worth it in the long run.
  Two days later Kevin accompanied Darren to a quiet respectable terraced street and the house of a man called Tony, there to meet Mr. Big and seal a pact with him. Mr. Big himself lived in a big house in the country but never let anyone as declasse as Darren and Kevin go there. Tony was a hard man about town and Mr. Big's general factotum. He was short but very wide, almost square-shaped like the Mr. Man character Mr. Strong. Also like Mr. Strong he seemed to have a thing for eggs. He took them into his kitchen and let them watch him cook and eat five fried egg sandwiches in as many minutes. The yolk oozed out and dribbled into his beard. Tony had a very unfortunate beard, Kevin decided. It was a strange triangular goatee which Kevin thought made him look as though he had taken rather too long over a job of cunnilingus with unfortunate consequences. He decided not to tell Tony this.
  Tony had a nice house, far nicer than Darren's, but then most places outside the developing world were. Similarly to Darren's, though, it was strewn with dummies and Fisher-Price toys and teddy bears and other evidence of a young child that wasn't there at the moment. After he had finished eating eggs he took them into the living room to show them the new widescreen television he had just bought and demonstrate its amazing stereophonic effects. "It's fucking brilliant with helicopters," he said.
  Presently there was an engine sound outside; Tony twitched a curtain aside. "It's him," he said. Kevin looked out and saw a man in a dark suit getting out of a green Morris 1000 van. "He won't bring his Merc round here," explained Tony. "Says it looks too shady." Not quite the image he had expected, but Kevin was quietly impressed by this display of paranoia.
  Preparing for this moment, Kevin had decided that Mr. Big should either be fat and wheezy and Italian, or pockmarked and ponytailed and South American, or else very small and wizened and go around in an electric wheelchair with a baby crocodile on his lap. At the very least he should have one milk-white eye and a hideous network of scars on his face and a bald head. Kevin would have settled for a metal claw in place of a hand. Anyone who had been blessed with a name like Mr. Big had a clear duty to play up to it. Boringly, Mr. Big was a medium sized man of around forty, sleek and well-dressed but quite nondescript apart from a wide irregularly-shaped mouth and slightly hyperthyroidal eyes. He did have an air of intensity and energy and, more interestingly, his first act after punching Tony on his right-angled shoulder and nodding briefly to Kevin and Darren was to lead the way into the kitchen, dump a generous amount of cocaine on the table, and cut four fat lines with a Sainsbury's Reward Card, which was a bit more fucking like it.
  "Get stuck in," he said.
  Darren and Tony bent down to the coke and got stuck in.
  "Not during Ramadan," said Kevin.
  Mr. Big nodded and seemed to understand.
  "Sensible lad," he said after hoovering his own line and Kevin's. He spoke rapidfire and staccato. "Don't get a taste for what you can't afford, right? My theory, there's no problem with drugs, there's only a problem with people who can't afford drugs. You know what the only civilized government drugs policy would be? Means testing. Hardworking business and professional people, no-one's got a moral right to tell them how they can and can't unwind. If the aristocracy and rock stars want to kill themselves with smack, good luck to them. But if there's some little shit knocking over houses to pay for his habit, he deserves to go down. So what they should do is, if they catch you with drugs, they check your bank balance. If you can prove you paid for the stuff legitimately, you go free. If you've no visible means of support and you've obviously been on the rob, down you go and good riddance. Morally it should all be legal."
  "If it was legal you'd be out of business," said Kevin.
  "And that's exactly why it'll never fucking happen," said Mr. Big. "Never fucking happen. Not even the cannabis. Know why? All the top politicians are on the payroll of the big drug gangs. Think they're gonna let the stuff be legalized? Fucking wake up and face North, kid. They've got the top brass of both political parties in their pocket and newspaper editors too."
  "Surely that can't be true," said Kevin.
  Mr. Big paused in the act of lighting a cigarette to give Kevin a laser-like glare. "You calling me a liar?"
  "By no means," said Kevin hastily.
  Mr. Big pointed at Kevin. "Ex-student, right?"
  "Yes."
  Mr. Big nodded. "Got a few of your lot working for me one way or another. First time away from home, your parents' money burning a hole in your arse pocket, one taste of smoke and you go off the rails. Read a few books and start wondering about the meaning of it all. Next thing you know you're living in a shitty squat yearning for a well-stocked larder like your Mum's. Stay on the nice side of the fence, that's the meaning of it all. Nice house and money in your pocket, that's the point of the daily struggle. Never will be anything else. And you're gonna be sorry in a few years time when the fence is electrified. Know what I'm saying? The fucking fence is gonna be electrified, 'cos those of us on the nice side of it are sick of losers like you two coming round ripping off our car stereos." He looked Kevin up and down and shook his head. "Look at your hands, you're a fucking Oil of Ulay advert. What are you doing with him? Not that he's ever done a stroke of work, but you've got fucking nancy boy hands. Can you play the piano?"
  "No."
  "Pity. I'm looking for someone to teach me daughter. The last one we had, his hands started wandering, started practising his fingering on her. I got Tony to break his fucking fingers for him. Mind you, she led him on. Headstrong girl, I worry about her. She's getting hold of drugs from somewhere, I'm not fucking happy about it."
  "Not from us, Mr. Bigelow," said Darren.
  "No, everyone in the business knows better, it'll be some little shit at school, I'm having Tony look into it. I'm sending her to a public school next year, mind you they're all at it too, I don't know what the country's coming to." Mr. Big abruptly snatched up a spoon, performed a brief percussion solo on some pots and pans, and flung it down again. "About time you lot came to me," he said. "I'll sort you out with whatever you need, and you won't have any more trouble with the Naylors. Tony runs all the bouncers in town, he'll sort them out. Small time fucking cavemen. I hate these amateur pricks that get territorial. Too many fucking Martin fucking Scorsese movies, know what I mean? There's enough money in this business for everyone. We're sat right on the biggest fucking goldstrike since the Klondike. But what would you two know? I bet you smoke more than you sell, right? Pig-druggies, the pair of you. I've got rich off people like you. If you got off your arses and ran it like a proper fucking business you could make some real money. You could move up the ladder one day and have people working for you who'll go to jail instead of you and a legit business on the side and a big house like mine in a nice neighbourhood and a nice car. Your own fucking car, Darren, you thieving prick. Tell you what, come round my way looking for wheels and I'll chop your fucking hands off. I don't care what you do to your own neighbourhood but stay out of mine."
  "You're quite bourgeouis for a drug dealer, aren't you?" said Kevin.
  "There's nothing bourgeouis about disapproving of urban breakdown. People like you two and the losers you sell to are ruining what used to be respectable working-class neighbourhoods. There's no fucking discipline any more. I worry about this country, I really do. There's a whole generation of young people of all classes who don't want to do anything apart from drug themselves into a stupor all day."
  "Bollocks," said Kevin. Mr. Big did the laser glare again. "You just said yourself you can take drugs to relax and still function at a job."
  "Can do, but it rarely works out that way in practice because no-one's got any fucking self-discipline and-"
  "I think if anything drugs are a symptom rather than a cause of a more general, er, malaise or disaffection or-"
  "Malaise my hairy northern arse, it's laziness pure and simple."
  "Anyway I think you're exaggerating the extent of the-"
  "I'm exaggerating to make a fucking point. Me fucking point is..."
  Soon Kevin found himself bogged down in a lengthy, rapid-paced, and altogether fractured and confused debate revolving around drugs, inner city decline, upward and downward mobility and the fin-de-siecle malaise or failure to get off their arses of modern youth of all walks of life. Half the time Mr. Big sounded like a Daily Mail editorial and more down on drugs than Ingrid. He constantly changed tack and contradicted earlier positions. To Grace Slick's dictum that you should never argue with a German when you're tired Kevin now added one of his own that you should never argue with someone on coke unless you were on it too. Whenever Mr. Big was stuck for an answer or lost the thread of an argument he would point at Kevin and go, "Shut up, I'm right and you're wrong." Whenever Kevin said "Bollocks," Mr. Big would give him the laser look and wriggle his top lip in a way that bared his teeth. Kevin decided he must learn to emulate all these traits. Several times Mr. Big called Kevin a no-mark and a loser and a useless druggy layabout and Kevin reflected he could have taught Desmond a thing or two about lowering the morale of his staff.
  Darren and Tony quickly sloped off to watch Apocalypse Now on Tony's new telly. Kevin had to admit that, even out in the kitchen, the helicopter sounds were uncanny. This caused Mr. Big to blow his cool badly at one point by suddenly rushing to the kitchen window and looking nervously up towards the sky.
  "It's on the telly," said Kevin.
  "...I was looking to see if it was gonna rain, actually, smart-arse," said Mr. Big gruffly after a lame pause.
  Once Mr. Big dumped some more cocaine on the table, then paused and shovelled it back in the envelope with a defiant look at Kevin.
  "See, that's the difference between me and you," he said. "I want some more but I'm not gonna have any. Self-discipline. Willpower. That's the key to success."
  Kevin said bollocks again.
  "Anyway the main problem isn't drugs or malaise but the fact that there aren't enough jobs any more," Kevin said a while later.
  "Look, I didn't come here to talk about the state of the nation, I came here to deal some fucking narcotics," said Mr. Big.
  They went into the other room and Mr. Big arranged with Darren about the volume of drugs that were to be supplied. They would not ordinarily meet Mr. Big again but would collect the stuff from Tony.
  "Get back on the other side of the fence while you can," Mr. Big advised Kevin before he left. "You're not cut out for this life. You won't be able to take prison, for one thing."

  But far from discouraging him from a life of crime, Mr. Big had added fuel to Kevin's fantasies. In fact, by the time he was back sitting on Darren's couch he had firmly decided to model himself on Mr. Big. Rather than crudely poking his subordinates in the chest, he decided, it would be far more cruel to talk coked-up bollocks by the yard and force them to listen to and agree with it. He would also have an adolescent daughter when he was a crime lord, buy one full grown if need be, merely for the sake of having his henchmen beat up her suitors and people who gave her drugs. He would buy her a pony and arrange for her to win gymkhanas by the simple expedient of having the heads cut off the other competitors' animals.
  And Mr. Big was right. They could be making real money in this business if only they went at it more efficiently and had some self-discipline. Tomorrow he and Darren must get their heads together and start to make their plans. In the meantime, another spliff would help him to scheme.
  Several more weeks passed.



Chapter 20
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