One Night Out Stealing Read Free Page A

awkward because there was no more to say, nor reason for Benny to keep filling his glass, which is why Jube wised up and positioned his jug out of Benny’s reach; and he too turned his back to Benny, so for all they knew – if it wasn’t for the drone of his voice – Benny mighta dropped dead. The drone soon dropped out of hearing, and Jube figured out loud to Sonny that getting a free glass at every table was Benny’s real go.
    They drift over, drift elsewhere. Benny here. Benny gone. Then it was Hitman Peters, going from table to table, did anyone want someone hit, that’s my job, as well I waste people. When everyone knew Hitman was fucked in the head – oh, but weren’t half ofem? He’d take out someone for keeps for a grand; might even do it for less, specially on a Wednesday. Break someone’s legs, wrap a Softball bat round the cunt’s knees, how I do it, for as low as a hundred. And little huddles all over of dudes planning sumpin, plotting some job, inventing some impossible idea – All roads lead from Tavistocks to jail, don’t they know that, Jube? Sonny, there you go thinking again. Always thinking thinking, you’ll drive yaself crazy.
    Night must’ve fallen outside. Wasn’t visible from where Sonny and Jube stood, their watches told them, so did the clock above the servery that was it twenty past six of a not-quite spring evening, and seven was when these doors closed, since they opened three hours earlier at eight and the law said eleven hours’ trading only, even with this lot who’d drink till the cows came home.
    A hum was about the place as dudes and a handful of sheilas staggered and rocked from all the day down to drinking, and popping pills out in the toilets or smoking joints right at the tables in tight clusters of mainly young wildbloods fresh outta jail, who really thought they were sumpin else smoking so boldly out in the open like that.
    Near everyone humming from the state of being drunk, what it did to em that nothin else does, not anything in and of this life; not even love does it to em, gives em that same sense of soaring immortality and hazy happiness; a kind of confidence hard to believe – that wasn’t there to start with – and yet sumpin about the confidence that said it wasn’t altogether true, or not so that you’d charge outta here go start chatting as an equal to somestraight strangers, or haul it out on the morrow like a charm, a qualification of personal quality, an asset to approach life the better with. You, each and every, just felt real good, but yet not so good you felt it was gonna last. So there was the fear, some of it desperate, that the feeling was gonna go. Wear off. And so they gulped, and they tossed back pills and sucked hard on joints, and always the cigarettes . And the talk poured from near every mouth like pus from a mass social wound.
    A figure with a helmet under its arm burst in through the front doors: WHO PISSED ON ME BIKE! And it went quieter in an instant. And the fulla asked again: COME ON, WHO PISSED ON ME BIKE? Then laughter broke out. Though not from the fulla with the helmet and the outraged face. Then someone, looked like Corky Wiringi, walked over to the guy, who no-one seemed to know so must be he was a stranger didn’t know what he’d brought his outrage into, and it’d gone so quiet everyone could hear Corky say, What if it was me, man? Just as they could see the guy shove Corky, which meant he was definitely a stranger, and a pretty unlucky one at that. Corky hit him.
    The fight seemed a quick one-hit affair typical of Corky. But Matty got excited by it, as Matty was wont to do, and he went over and stuck his nose in. So Corky punched the nose. And Matty’s face turned instant scarlet, and his mates didn’t like that so they hurtled over, and the fight rapidly spread like a stone dropped in a pond as dudes ran to it, specially the young wildbloods, but plenty of older guys too, who Sonny thought should know better, yet