Jog On Fat Barry (11 page)

He looked at me and smiled. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him do that.

“How do you think you’d like being an electrician?” he asked.

I sniffed the fingers of my left hand, and then I sniffed the fingers of my right hand.

“I think that’d be sound as a pound, Dad,” I said. “Just sound.”

cannon fodder

Don’t ration water if you’re stranded in the desert: get it inside you; drink the fucking lot. That’s what I did. Now the water was gone. Madden had been smiling, sitting beside me: couldn’t walk any further.

“It’s all good, mate,” he said.

Then Madden slumped forward, leaving me alone. The sun was still climbing. Heat waves shimmered on the dunes. In an hour or so the temperature would reach 150º F. I thought about that Bedouin at the wadi who said the border was only two clicks away. He’d sent us into a valley of death, and at three clicks we knew we were fucked. But at least Madden died happy, having put a bullet in the cunt before we left.

About 60% of me consisted of water: muscle was 75%, blood was 83%, body fat 25%, bone 22%, and so on. I was losing it quickly: already down 2%. Dehydration was becoming noticeable. My heart and respiration rates were climbing; blood pressure and plasma volume were falling. My temperature was up; I wasn’t sweating. As soon as my water volume went down another 5%, headaches would kick in: lethargy would follow, and my limbs would tingle. At 10-15%, my muscles would go spastic; skin would shrivel; my vision would become blurred. I’d start to see things; my mouth would dry out; my lips would crack; my tongue would swell, until it too cracked. The lining of my nose would dry up, crack, and bleed. Of course, I knew all this because they printed it in the standard issue manual. I took out the Browning M1911, cocked it, and looked at Madden: his face was in the sand, and he’d been right: a man could only walk so far in the desert.

The drab light of a winter morning stole into the room through white moth-eaten curtains that had long ago turned yellow. The window itself had been sealed shut in the spring of 1971. Madden remembered it like yesterday: he was ten and his father was driving six-inch nails into the frame. A man on the radio was saying Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education and Science, had put an end to free school milk for the over-sevens, and Madden could remember his father pausing between hammer blows to tell him Thatcher would be the Prime Minister one day.

“Mad bitch is what she is,” Mr. Madden had said. “And mad bitch she’ll forever be.”

Madden hadn’t understood what all the fuss was about. It was only milk, after all. And if someone truly needed a bottle, they could just pinch it off someone’s doorstep, and that would be the end of it.

Those six-inch nails had rusted away years ago, and Mr. Madden had been rotting in the ground for just as long.

Wind whistled into the room through a cracked windowpane and made smoke from a cigarette swirl above the ashtray it was sitting in. Tits and arses wallpapered all four walls: a thousand Page Three girls carefully extracted from different issues of
The Sun
. A toilet flushed. Moments later the floorboards began to creak under the strain of someone walking on them. Madden tossed
Playboy
magazine onto the table and reached for his cigarette; his bloodstained apron fastened over a black woollen jumper: the apron had slivers of bone stuck to it, and both sleeves of his jumper were bunched up about his elbows. He also wore black tracksuit pants tucked into white Wellington boots. Madden filled an electric kettle at the sink. He switched it on and then smoked his cigarette while the kettle slowly came to a boil. Madden was forty-five.

A muezzin was calling worshippers to prayer at the new mosque by the bus depot: his voice was faint and distant, but there was enough of it to be heard. Madden tossed two teabags into a teapot as the kettle came to a rumble and switched itself off. He filled the pot with water and then sat at the table. He closed his eyes: started to doze. A brown rat scampered over his boots. A few moments later the floorboards started to creak again and Pencil entered the room. Like Madden, Pencil was also wearing a bloodied apron fastened over a black woollen jumper. His sleeves were bunched up about his elbows, and his black tracksuit pants were also tucked into white Wellington boots. Pencil crossed the floor and held his right hand against the teapot: the winged insignia of the Parachute Regiment was tattooed on his forearm, but the colours had faded, as had the triangle of words framing it:
War
,
Famine
, and
Pestilence
.

Pencil filled two mugs from the pot. He added milk, then sugar, and carried the two mugs to the table. He put one in front of Madden and sat down with the other. He reached across the table; picked up the
Playboy
magazine; scratched his shaved head; eyeballed the centrefold. Pencil was forty-four.

“I bet you didn’t know that she became a singer,” he said nodding at the magazine, “Miss April 1981. Sang in the Eurovision Song Contest. Came seventh and got a speaking part in
EastEnders
. ‘Cup of tea, please.’ That’s what she said. Not long after that she was in
The Daily Mirror
with George Michael. Had her photo taken with him: hiding under the table in a Chinese restaurant. Apparently they’d been at it for months. Of course, that was just before George turned bandit, you know, back when he was still Greek.”

Madden slowly opened his eyes and saw the mug sitting in front of him. He sucked on his cigarette. He could hear the muezzin still busy calling worshippers to prayer and he glanced at Pencil.

“I hate that fucking noise,” he grumbled.

When Adolf Hitler kick-started the Third Reich in 1933, the future wasn’t looking too bright for the racial minorities, political opponents, and social outcasts living in the Fatherland. In the first twelve years of Third Reich, 11,000,000 of them were systematically exterminated, and you can only imagine how bad things
might
have turned out had the Germans
not
lost the war. There’s nothing I wouldn’t have given for an opportunity to kill Hitler in ‘33. Had I been living then, I’d have given up my life in a moment, just to take his. And it would’ve been taken slowly, inflicting as much pain as was humanly possible. Of course, I’m not particularly fond of your Jew, or your pikey, your poofter, or your Bolshevik. I care not for the God you worship, the place you hang your hat, the dirtbox you get up, or the politics you follow. But Hitler brought Fascism, chaos, and terror. The Wehrmacht marched into Poland, WWII began, and sixty-two million people lost their lives. My granddad withered away to nothing in Burma, Pencil’s was fried to a crisp at the Second Battle of El Alamein, and Madden’s drowned in his own blood on a beach at Normandy. They all gave up their lives, and did so willingly, because they, the thousands before them, and thousands yet to come, were born to that very purpose. They sacrificed their right to life for the rights of many, and cannon fodder is the blood that flows through their veins.

Madden learnt how to make sausages while he was in the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment of the French Legionnaires. He quickly discovered his instinctive dexterity extended beyond the taking of human life during those dark skirmishes that he and his fellow
Soldats du rang
revelled in. Madden became exceedingly adept in the field: made Romagnolos and Morcelas, Pinkelwursts, and Boudin Blancs, Salpicaos and Boerewors, Kishkes and Lap Cheongs. Wherever it was that the boys happened to find themselves, Madden went to work, substituting pork or beef or lamb or veal or turkey or rabbit with whatever was at hand. As long as the creature’s back faced the sun, Madden didn’t give two fucks about how many legs it had. He discovered a hundred alternatives for oatmeal and rice, breadcrumbs and eggs, coriander and chives, garlic and chilli peppers. He even made one sausage that was so hot, the steam would whistle out your ears when you bit into it, and soldiers with more than twenty years experience under their belts ended up rolling about on the floor and beating their fists against the ground after just one bite.

Nine months after we got back from the Gulf,
DogEatDog
opened for business in the small shop on Upper Street near Angel station that Mr. Madden had bequeathed to his son. We—Madden, Pencil and me—pooled our resources for the start-up money and began doing business: restaurant trade only. Banksy airbrushed the second-hand delivery van we had for eight ounces of hash: although it took him three months to do so. Of course, back then Banksy wasn’t the darling of the art world that he is today. He lived in a council flat, was on the dole, always off his nut on puff, and never really finished anything he started. But when the van was done, Maurice and Charlie Saatchi happened to see it making a delivery one day, and were so inspired by what they saw, they introduced Banksy to the art world, and the rest is history.

Sugar began to work for
DogEatDog
in the summer of ‘93. Pencil had been in Mogadishu—part of the SAS counter-terrorism unit advising the UN after a number of Pakistani soldiers got killed in an ambush—and we needed another driver. So Sugar stepped in to fill the gap. Madden had known Sugar for years. They shared something in common as teenagers: manslaughter. Both had done time together, and both had worked in prison kitchens. Sugar was a natural. He had a nose for meat, found it working in butcher shops before his conviction, and held onto it when Her Majesty’s Pleasure ended his incarceration nine years later. When Pencil finally came back in October—Task Force Ranger having gone pear-shape—he found Sugar well and truly ensconced in the kitchen. Our new man was standing alongside Madden; armed with his own tricks of the trade; immersed up to his elbows in sausage meat. He even convinced us to open our doors to the public a week before Christmas.

All that Pencil would say about Mogadishu was, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” I had no clue what he meant back then, and guess I never will now he’s gone. But eighteen US soldiers were killed, and seventy-three wounded. Fuck knows how many Somalis died. Still, Pencil thought Sugar was an odd mark. He said he’d memorize stuff that wasn’t worth knowing: like how fast light travelled, or that snails with lungs belonged to the
Pulmonata
group, while those without belonged to the
Paraphyletic
. He even told Pencil he’d never meant to kill the man he did time for.

“That man, his death, see… it was an accident,” Sugar had said. “I was in the back of the shop fucking the goose, when—”

“You what?” Pencil asked.

“Fucking the goose, it’s what I did. And not just geese, I’d fuck the lot: chickens, turkeys, ducks, rabbits: whatever. When a customer was out of order, I mean, you know, rude like, for no reason, I’d say, ‘Hang about, missus, I’ll just take your bird out back to wrap it up for you,’ and then I’d Harry Monk up it.”

Sugar passed Pencil a box of Merquezes before continuing.

“But one day this woman came into the shop, South African she was, and we know what they’re like, all, ‘I want this’ and ‘Give me that.’ So I took her goose out back, and had just started giving it one, when she changed her mind: wanted a turkey instead, and tried to tell me so. But I don’t hear her because I’m up the goose. Next thing I know her husband’s beside me, shouting and screaming in Afrikaans. Then we’re fighting, and he’s stumbling, and banging his head, and I’m up for manslaughter on Her blooming Majesty’s!”