Eric Bristow Read Free Page A

right mess, stitches everywhere. He was lucky to survive. All I could think when I heard about this was that this was no coincidence, that whoever that guy was, yes, we had definitely picked on the wrong bloke.
    Less than a week later, another one of our lot got done, so there were three down. If you’ve ever seen the Shane Meadows film
Dead Man’s Shoes
, in which a paratrooper returns home to exact revenge on the tormentors of his younger brother and picks them off one by one, you’ll know what it was like. A few of the lads were scared because they didn’t know who they were up against, or who this bloke was in the grand scheme of things, and more terrifyingly for them they didn’t know when and who he was going to strike at next. Unfortunately their fear didn’t rub off on me. I know no fear, that’s my problem. Pull a gun on me and I won’t give a damn. I have no idea whether any of the others got taken out.
    I was getting good at darts by then, I was earning money from it, I had a great life, was having fun and all of a sudden I could see the world opening up for me. I didn’t need the hassle that came with being in a gang. I was on enough money to have a decent life; I didn’t have to rob cars or houses to survive. Suddenly I remember thinking: I’m legal, I’m legit. So I left the gang behind; those days were over. Or so I thought.
    *
    After making the decision to leave the gang I also left home and went to live with a mate called Eddie. He had a flat about two streets away from where I lived with my mum and dad. I wanted to move out because, as with most youngsters, I craved independence and being able to do my own thing. I’ve always been like that.
    So I was with Eddie and we were having a whale of a time, going out, pulling women every weekend and bringing them back to the flat. Everything was going fine until he committed the cardinal sin: he went to a pub nearby that wasn’t our local and glassed some geezer in a fight, cutting him badly and leaving him scarred for life. I found out about this, and I also found out who he’d glassed and said to him: ‘Eddie, you’ve messed with the wrong family there, mate.’
    The guy he’d glassed was a big-time gangster with a big-time crew who were a nutty lot you didn’t mess around with, so I made the decision to move back home right away. I didn’t even hang around to take all my stuff with me; I left a lot of it there. Three or four days later I still hadn’t gone round to collect my stuff, and that’s when the dad of this bloke who’d been glassed came round to Eddie’s flat with three of the bloke’s brothers. You had to get up four flights of stairs to get to the flat. There were two flats to each floor; and Eddie’s was at the top. Eddie was in when they came and he heard them kick in the front door downstairs. Luckily for him the flat opposite his was vacant. This meant the door had been left open, so Eddie grabbed a hammer – it was probably my hammer that I normally took everywhere with me as protection – and went in. All that was left in there was a big old wardrobe that was part of the fixtures and fittings. Eddie climbed into it and shut the door, but not completely or he would have been locked inside, and he waited. He heard these blokes go into his flat, open the window and throw all his belongings and personal possessions out on to some spiked railings four floors below. He later told me: ‘I was worried my heartbeat would give me away. I felt sure they’d hear it because it was really hammering against my chest and going bang, bang, bang.’
    When they’d thrown everything out of his window on to the spikes they went into the vacant flat, and as if by a miracle they didn’t check the wardrobe. If they had they would have found Eddie with hammer in hand and his heart going nineteen to the dozen. I’ve no doubt he would’ve followed the rest of his belongings on to the spiked railings below and probably wouldn’t be here