Immediate Action Read Free Page A

working at McDonald's in Catford, which had just opened. Life there was very fast and furious.
        I was sweeping and mopping the floors every fifteen minutes. I could have a coffee break, but I had to buy all my own food. There was no way I could fiddle anything because it was all too well organized.
        I hated it. The money was crap, too, but marginally better than the dole-and besides, the McDonald's was nearer to home than the dole office.
        I started to get into disappearing for a while. A bloke and I did his aunty's gas meter and traveled to France on day passes, telling the ferries our parents were at the other end to collect us. On the way back we even stole a life Jacket and tried to sell it to a shop in Dover.
        I had no consideration whatsoever for my parents.
        Sometimes I'd come back at four in the morning and my mum would be flapping. Sometimes we'd have the police coming around, but there was nothing they could do apart from give me a big fearsome bollocking. I thought I was the bee's knees because there was a police car outside the house.
        I started going off the rails good style, sinking as low as tipping over Portaloos so I could snatch the occupants' handbags. One day three of us were coming out of a basement flat we'd just burgled in Dulwich when we were challenged by the police. We got cornered near the railway station by a handler and his dog.
        As soon as the police gripped me, I was scared. I bluffed in the van because the other two weren't showing any fear. But as soon as we got separated at the station, I wanted to show the police that I was flapping. I wanted them to take pity on me; I wanted them to see that I wasn't that bad, just easily led.
        The station was a turn-of-the-century place with high ceilings, thickly painted walls, and polished floors. As I sat waiting in the interview room, I could hear the squeak of boots in the corridor outside.
        I wanted so badly for somebody to come in; I wanted the police to know that I wasn't bad; I'd fucked up, but it was the other two's fault.
        My heart was pumping. I wanted my mum. It was the same horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that I'd had running home from Maxwell's Laundry.
        I had visions of ending up in Borstal or prison or being the new young meat in an overcrowded remand wing. I'd always looked up to the local characters who'd been in prison, and I thought they were really hard.
        Now I knew that they must have hated it, too. All their stuff about "being inside" must have been hollow bravado; it wasn't glamorous, and it wasn't exciting. It was horrible.
        When my parents came up to the police station and I saw the shame and disappointment in my mums eyes, I thought: Is this it? Is this what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life? Having a cell door slammed behind me, was bad enough; it was claustrophobic and lonely in there, and I was very scared. But I'd never seen Mum like that before, and I felt terrible.
        I decided I was going to change. Alone in the interview room I said to myself: "Right, what am I going to do? I'm going to start getting myself sorted out."
        There had been one brief spell at school when I'd really got into English. I did a project on Captain Scott and got an A. I thought it was really great, but then I just dropped it. I got into history for a short while and enjoyed making a model of an Anglo-Saxon village.
        Maybe I could make a go of it. I didn't want to land up as just another local nutter who thought he was dead cool because he had a Mark III Cortina and a gold chain around his neck.
        So what was I going to do? There was no way I could get a decent job in South London. Academically I wasn't qualified, and certainly I didn't have the aptitude to work in a factory.
        In the back of my mind there had always been ideas about the army.
        When my uncle Bert had lived upstairs,