Playfair

By Jamie Tuck

Contains strong language, violence and scenes of a mildly sexual nature.

Playfair - two boys in a boat load of trouble.

It's the hottest July anyone in the northern fishing town of North Shields has ever known.

And when the school gates are unlocked for summer, best friends Ted Berry and Wedge are released into the weary sun-beaten town for six full weeks of menace, mischief and mayhem.

Boredom soon pulls them down into a derelict dry dock where they find a fishing boat that's never had so much as a sniff of a fish. It's full of drugs and is a European crime family's main delivery system to Britain's eastern coastline. The boat was stolen by the local hard man, fisherman Wade Talbot - who also blew its skipper's head apart with a distress flare.

Bez and Wedge sink into a dark world where they will have to fight for their young lives against players who never play fair.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jamie Tuck
• Release date: Apr 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301908608

Book preview

Addison / PF FOR EBOOK / 257

Para las ninas

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Welcome to Rotterdam

Some time later

Wednesday

Walkin On Sunshine

‘Ah Christ! Man! Jesus fuckin Christ!’

Billy ‘Hash’ Brown stands braced with the hose in his hands, the jet of water blasting into the red mush of human meat and hair, shattered bone and blood.

‘That’s fuckin mingin!’

He’s alone on the stolen boat’s little wooden deck, like the cleaner on a scaffold after a clumsy execution.

The brains that had exploded from the young lad’s head stick together and try to cling to the thin slats like a dropped strawberry mousse, resisting the water blast before, finally, sliding across the deck and over the side of the boat and into the flat North Sea.

‘Mingin.’

Somewhere inside Hash’s own head, there’s surprise that the kid’s oxygenated brains weren’t grey like in the films.

Blue, even.

He looks away.

‘Man,’ he gags. ‘Ah fuck. Man. Ah man.’

The pressure from the hose rocks the boat a little, sending ever-widening ripples out into the otherwise calm water. All the way home to North Shields. One hundred and seventy six nautical miles to the west of this wet nowhere.

There’s only one other living human being in any direction between here and where the hot yellow sky meets the sea.

And two dead ones.

‘Fuck,’ Hash groans. ‘Me.’

More pieces of the boy’s exploded head scurry away from the water jet and wash over the side.

‘Ah man, ah man. I’m sorry son. I’m so fuckin sorry. Ah man. I didn’t, I didn’t?’

A chunk of skull won’t budge.

It’s the hippy kid’s fontanelle - his crown, the part his adoring mother had smoothed and protected when he was a baby, her youngest son at her breast.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Hash mutters, turning his face away from the mess. ‘Jesus fuckin Christ. That fuckin psycho. I didn’t know he’d? How?’

It wasn’t an accident.

‘Billy!’ a hard man’s voice shouts from high overhead, aboard a second boat.

The one they’d both arrived here on.

Kirrin.

Except Kirrin really is more ship than boat. A top-of-the-range fish-seeking missile. The little boat Hash is now washing clean of murder rocks gently in her shadow.

Hash turns and creaks his head back on his neck to look up, high overhead to the deck of the huge deep sea trawler. But all he can see is a man-shape cut from the ferocious yellow sky. He knows who it is though, he brought him here; Talbot, Wade Talbot.

Kirrin’s Skipper.

‘Stop fuckin around man,’ he barks. ‘Hurry up!’

Fisherman.

Father-in-law.

Killer.

The two boats rock slightly from the power of the hose. Tethered by a thick rope, side-by-side and alone in the Dogger bank fishing grounds in the open expanse of sea that separates eastern Britain from western Europe. Hash cuffs his hand over his eyes and again looks up Kirrin’s sheet metal wall, but the shape and its voice have gone.

‘Fuckin psycho,’ he mutters.

He returns to his duties, pointing the jet of water at the big chunk of skull, it looks like the top of a cracked coconut. It resists and then begins to roll, tumbling over, showing the red insides then the brown hair on top, the red insides then the hair - red and brown, meat and hair - until it skitters over the side and into the sparkling silver sea.

‘Ah man! Mingin!’

Billy watches it float on top of the water, hair-side up to the burning sunshine like the kid it was part of had been for a cooling dive and was about to break the surface and smile.

Fish rise from the deep, feeding off the tasty underside, moving it from side to side in little jerks.

‘Ah, man!’

He turns away, gagging on something his body thought it had long since digested - a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, eaten at four o’clock this morning when he and Talbot had left the dock alone aboard Kirrin. A canny bag o’ Tudor for the journey. Hash isn’t keen on eating before these trips, not trusting nor liking the sea.

Hash leans against the rail, the hose pumping aimlessly over the side and into the sea.

‘Fuck,’ he sighs. ‘Me.’

He rubs his brow with the back of his hand.

And, for the first time since the two boats met on the high seas eleven minutes ago, he tunes into his surroundings. Ears freed from the heavy blast and splash of the industrial-strength hose.

A radio on the deck is playing Walking On Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. A radio station somewhere obviously reaches this far.

It’s crackly but loud.

I’m walking on sunshine, woh-oh, I’m walking on sunshine, woh-oh. I’m walking on sun-shine, woh-oh-oh - and don’t it feel good!

‘Aye,’ Hash mutters, leaning against the rail and looking at the mess floating on the sea. ‘Feels fuckin grrrreat. Just ask this poor cunt.’

A smaller fragment of skull flips over on itself as Hash turns and points the hose at what’s left of the kid’s exploded head. It skitters overboard and into the sea.

Hey, alright now, and don’t it feel good! Hey . . .

‘Fuck off!’ Hash says, and boots the radio over the side into the bloody water.

Sploosh.

Katrina joins the house band from the Titanic under the waves.

‘Stupid fuckin Yank.’

‘Billy!’ Talbot screams from above.

Up on Kirrin’s deck, Talbot pulls on the fire hose.

‘Pack it in! Y’fuckin talkin to y’self man.’

Talbot yanks it out of Hash’s hands. It whips up and blasts him from crotch to chin with a hard jet of water.

‘Fuck’s sake, man!’

Hash grabs his balls. There’s a lot of power in that hose, he feels a sickness down where the wires from his nuts are plugged into his guts.

‘That’ll fuckin do, kidda, that’ll do,’ Talbot barks down from the rail. ‘Christ. You’re a right fuckin woman.’

Talbot pulls the writhing spurting hose up over the side of Kirrin’s deck like a chopped anaconda.

‘We need to get movin. You know the plan, kidda, right?’

Most of the meat and skull fragments and brains have gone overboard and Hash stands in a shallow film of bloodied water.

Holding his balls.

‘Aye,’ Hash looks out across the vast sparkling cornea towards home.

North Shields.

Two urban words that spell ‘paradise’ to Billy ‘Hash’ Brown.

‘I keep headin west then drop anchor when I see land. I get it. I get it. It’s okay. I’ve got it.’

‘Okay right, undo that rope. Just keep headin west kidda, just keep headin fuckin west. Do y’hear? The Tyne is directly west of here, even a spastic like you can’t fuckin miss it. West. Got it?’

‘West,’ Hash says, as he works at the stiff knot in the rope that joins the two boats, releasing the small boat from the big trawler like a duckling set adrift of her mama.

‘Fuckin west, I got it the first time.’

The little boat drifts out of Kirrin’s shadow.

And sun spills from the sky onto the little boat’s deck and onto the back of Hash’s virgin white neck like molten steel from a blast furnace.

Talbot disappears and Kirrin’s engines roar into life.

The big trawler growls away towards home, the gap between them widening fast.

Hash shuffles around into the wheelhouse and starts the engine. It coughs then fires and farts. A lawnmower next to Talbot’s Bentley.

‘Fuckin shitbox!’

He pulls on the little black lollipop that is the throttle, feeling for the power. This the first time he’d ever skippered a boat. Billy Hash Brown had never found his sea legs - never looked for them, to be honest. He wasn’t here for the fish.

Hash focuses as hard as he can on the little black earth in the bowl screwed onto the wheel house’s cheap Formica dashboard, to make sure the white W is on top of the arrow. It isn’t. It’s on top of a big E. His head starts to ache.

‘Jesus fuckin Christ,’ he says.

He turns the wheel.

Kirrin has already steamed far away, shrunk to the size of a toy boat in a bath, her twin engines daring the Royal Navy to a race.

Hash pulls the lever down hard and the stolen boat’s engine starts to moan then grows to a grumble before settling on the sound of a broken tractor heading up a hill.

‘Ah man, this is gonna take for fuckin ever!’

He spins the wheel round and around until the W kisses the arrow - 270 degrees.

West.

And Hash is alone, utterly alone.

Nobody around for mile after wet nautical mile.

Only ghosts for company.

‘Fuck!’

He needs to stop the thoughts forming. He reaches for his brown Kappa tracksuit top and shuffles around in the pockets. He pulls out a green packet of tobacco and his cigarette papers. Trying not to take his eyes off that W in the compass. He wrestles the cigarette together and reaches for his lighter.

It always gives him a snigger. A woman in a bikini becomes naked when you turn it upside down.

He exhales the smoke - ‘Jesus-fuckin-Christ’ - attached to his favourite phrase.

And almost relaxes, his left ear right next to the plastic speaker for the CB radio. He checks the W is where it should be and looks out at the twinkling, calm water. He puts the cigarette back to his lips for a second drag and . . .

‘ZZZZZzzzzzzZAAA’

. . . . a LOUD blast of static, right into his fucking skull.

‘Fuck me!’

It throws him back into the wheelhouse’s starboard window.

Then comes the voice.

‘FREDRIK? zzzz FREDRIK? zzzzzzZZ.’

‘Ah?’ Hash almost cries. ‘What the . . . fuck?’

He puts his hands on top of his head.

It sounds like the Klingons, on the other side of the sun - a woman with a smoker’s throat. A worried mother, trying to reach her son.

Her dead son.

‘Fffff . . . ?’ Hash says.

The sweat freezes on his back and neck and snaps off in tiny icicles.

‘zzzzz Fredrik, waar bent u zzzzzz Fredrik? Fredrik? zzzzzz.’

‘What the?’ Hash drops his hands to his side.

‘I?’

He leans back against the door and looks at the radio’s red eyes.

‘Fredrik?’ it continues. ‘Ontmoette u Talbot?’

Hash lifts his hands and grabs the door frame like he’s about to do a chin up . . .

‘Fredrik . . .’

And boots the radio from its housing.

‘Jesus fuckin Christ!’ he shouts, just the rattling boat’s engine now for company.

He grabs the wheel tight and stands and stares at the black bowl of water with the floating compass inside, keeping the W over the arrow - 270 degrees.

‘Jesus fuckin . . .’

He puts the cigarette back to his lips.

And goes west.

Thursday

‘BASTARDS!’

Ted Berry whips his eyes to Wedge . .

‘You FUCKING . . . little . .’

. . . drops them back to his exercise book, closed on his desk.

‘. . . BASTARDS!’

The freshly demented teacher slams the wooden bat against the blackboard.

Bang.

Face red like the man spreading the bars of his cage. A prison guard with his truncheon, finally breaking under years of strain.

Bang.

Released into violence.

‘Shit the fuckin bed,’ Berry gasps. ‘We’re dead.’

They'd had it coming, had it coming a long time. But it was a shock just the same; soft-arsed, boy-loving Mr Fenwick - man oh man, he’s lost it, gone, left the map.

This the first time he’d sworn in class.

‘I ffknnn . . .’

Ever.

‘. . . HATE you lit-tle . .’

And with such foul abandon.

‘ . . . cuh-unts.’

The word comes out like ‘currants’.

‘WHO?’ Mr Fenwick screams and scans, chalk dust settling in his jazz beard. His audience nailed to desks at the elbow.

Three columns of fear.

‘EH?’

Mr Fenwick stands before the class in his rolled up shirt sleeves. An executioner, a waste paper basket on his desk for the collection of heads.

The rounders bat his axe, held now in both hands.

‘WHO?’

The teacher whacks the blackboard hard with the bat.

Bang!

‘WHO?’

Bang!

‘WAS?

Bang!

‘IT?’

Berry's guilty pen twitches, held in a rare position – switched on, humming - poised for learning, for the first time ever in an English class. A little late in the day to be showing an interest – this the very last English lesson of the school year.

Frankland High School closes today at 3:45pm, freeing all its 967 teenage inmates for a six week parole.

The Summer Holidays.

Mr Fenwick’s battered wooden empire sits beyond the main school building, a Portakabin hut dropped by a crane on a spare bit of a grass between the school hall and the gym. Too cold in winter, too hot in summer – such is life at a northern comprehensive; too many pupils, not enough classrooms.

Berry turns his face to the window. Arthur the caretaker is out there in the firestorm cutting the grass. He sits bare chested, shorts sticking to the municipal tractor’s red plastic seat as he drives its spinning blades over the football field, perfuming the air with the sweet green smell of fresh cut grass, the oversized lawnmower sounding like a huge metal insect.

He flicks his cigarette butt to the blades.

This just happened:

‘Quick, he’s fuckin comin,’ - chair legs screeching - the English teacher bouncing like Bambi towards the wooden shed holding a rounders bat and a tennis ball, happy he’d survived to the end of another school year - throwing open the door - a vacuum of hot air and suppressed laughter - then; sucked into the trap.

‘Right class, no work today, who fancies a game of round . . .’

The waste paper basket they’d balanced overhead between the half-closed door and the frame had spun and hung for a fraction, adjusting, before - clump - swallowing Mr Fenwick’s head whole. The class exploded into laughter, even the swots and the girls couldn’t resist; Ned Kelly - sure as shite - standing there on the torn lino.

‘Cunts,’ the teacher finally articulates the Australian term of endearment.

His teeth grind.

Bang!

He smashes the bat into the blackboard.

‘CUNTS!’

It was the dog shit that did it.

‘CUNTS!’

It was Wedge’s idea to scoop up the steaming turd and mix it in with the pencil shavings, snot rags and chewing gum that usually lived inside the bin.

Bang!

A stinking monster of a shit to be proud of, laid fresh at the extent of her leash by a guilty-looking hound. Mr Fenwick’s beloved beagle; Karma. Tied up outside in the shade.

Bang!

Bad Karma.

‘ANSWER ME!’

He looks, seeks, pleads to Nathan Boyle and Jo Mole, king and queen of the front row. Swots, one of the handful here keen to actually learn English prose. They look back in horror, not sure of whom they’re most scared. Normally an easy equation - Bez and Wedge. Not today though, their mild-mannered teacher’s been replaced by Captain fucking Caveman.

And he’s armed.

Fenwick’s nose twitches to his shoulder, face curling away from the still warm turd dribbling down the front of his beige shirt like a platoon of slugs.

‘Oh Jesus Christ! Come on. Class? Who was it? Please tell me. Who was it? Just tell me who it was? Eh? TELL ME who it fucking was!’

Bang!

Bang!

BANG!

Thirty-two faces stare back.

‘NOW!’

And, for the first time – ever – Mr Fenwick can read them.

Ted Berry turns his face back from the window.

‘Fuck,’ he mumbles.

Mr Fenwick snaps his head to the right, brain cells twisting and aligning like frayed copper fibres seeking a connection, reaching out into the void; from the weird pumpkin head of Jason Wujkowski, sitting at the front desk next to the window.

‘Woo-fuckin-cow-shkee?’ he whispers - no teacher ever got Wedge’s name right.

To . .

. . . Mr Fenwick’s eyes flick left a millimetre.

The circuit completes.

‘Berry? BERRY!’

Ignition.

‘CUNTS!’

Berry tips his face down to his Work In Progress (he'd been grinding ‘SHAKESPEARE SUCKETH COCK’ deep into his wooden desk since well before Christmas).

‘YOOO? ARRRRAAAA!’

Nine months, eight half-hour lessons a week of stupid questions and comments – ‘sir, sir, was Bill Shakey a bender?’ ‘sir, sir was Dylan Thomas in the Magic Roundabout?’ - giggling and farting from these two little fuckers long ago dragged to the front row from their natural berth at the rear – ‘sir, sir, sir?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Wedge splutters. ‘I was the last one in.’

‘The last one in?’ Mr Fenwick points the bat at Wedge’s ample head, then the door. ‘YOU! Were the last one in!’

‘Ehm? I mean,’ he lies. ‘It wasn’t me. The. The, y’know. The poop and that.’

Mr Fenwick stares to the back and closes his eyes.

‘Aaaaagh!’

The tractor rattles by.

‘Aaagh!’

The teacher wrenches himself one hundred and eighty degrees to face the blackboard, spilling pencil shavings, chewing gum and a slug of Karma shit onto the torn, badly-fitted linoleum as he goes.

‘Aagh!’

Imminent summer freedom and the fact he’s had these two little cunts demoted out of his class next year – their last at Frankland Community High - coaxes Mr Fenwick back up the pacifist’s path.

He takes in and holds a chest of air.

‘Agh,’ he sighs, deflating.

Wedge twitches against Berry’s shoulder, shakes, snorts, splutters.

Stops.

Silent.

Berry turns and looks at his fat head in true horror.

Always the same story. No escape. Whenever a teacher blew a gasket, Wedge was somewhere in view - pulling spastic faces or making fart noises with his armpit, drowning Berry in spasms of his own laughter. Hours and hours added to his school sentence, serving detention after school for laughing in a teacher’s face.

‘Fuck!’

Berry looks down, trying to lock his chest. He studies the art, the majestic curl of that beautiful S in ‘Sucketh’ - carved in Ye Olde Worlde letters. Ground into the wooden desk with a dozen Bics borrowed from girls with fluffy, lime-green pencil cases, an ambitious project way superior to the scrawls of previous generations, it really is a work of some distinc . . .

‘Fuuuuuck!’ he whispers, trying not to breathe.

The sheer weight of his creative genius won’t flatten the fizz. His neck grips hold of purple reins, pulling tight on muscles concealed in the pink valleys of his brain like a horse breaker. He squeezes and pushes the laughter bubbles back down his spine. He follows up with a well worn mantra.

‘Wedge, don’t laugh!,’ he says. ‘Wedge! Don’t! I’ll piss me fuckin pants!’

Mr Fenwick can’t hear them. He sighs, sags and improvises, working a theme he performs at drama class every Wednesday evening in white gloves - a mime. He reaches into the blackboard’s gutter for the chalk. His Thai Rolex wobbles loose around the ginger freckles of his wrist.

He sags.

The armpits of his beige shirt wet pools in sand.

He sighs.

‘Right.’

Mr Fenwick exhales and lifts the chalk, creased shirt hanging out from one side of his trousers.

‘Right, OK. Rightio! Class? Rightio, we’ll . . ?’

He’s still got the rounders bat in his other hand.

Rounders. A good, unisex English summer schoolgame. Americans had made the bat bigger and used a heavier ball and renamed it ‘baseball’. Fucking Yanks - the Brits invented everything.

‘Wedge,’ Berry hisses. ‘Don’t man. Just fuckin don’t! We’re gonna get away with it man.’

They both turn to look at the teacher.

Mr Fenwick had left home with his shirt tucked into his underwear, probably by his mother.

‘Right, OK. Rightio!’

On his way to the hut, he’d pulled at his shirt – probably to get some air up his back in the heat. But his bright yellow Y-fronts refused to let go of the shirt and have been pulled up his back into full view.

The elastic in the waist of his kecks is now taut as a rubber band.

There’s also signs of a stain.

‘Ah,’ Berry breathes out, seeing the future. ‘For fuck’s sakes man.’

Wedge’s face begins to peel back for laughter. A hand rising to point, just in case anyone has missed it.

Mr Fenwick's treacherous wrist creeps from the blackboard, sneaks behind his back and down to deal with this moist pressing irritation. He lifts a hip slightly then firmly buries his chalk fingers into the arsehole of his worn out corduroys.

‘Fuckinhell!’

The teacher pulls his uncomfortable underpants away from his anus, freeing his Y-front elastic from his shirt with a crisp elastic smack.

It cracks around the silent shed like a snapped ruler.

Fatal, fatal mistake . . .

Wedge bursts, falls forward, whine-barking like a crushed puppy.

‘Nyaaa!’

Not so much a laugh as a scream.

For Berry, there’s a fraction of clarity, the final nanosecond of life you get after a shotgun has been discharged in your face.

‘Wahaaaah hah!’

He throws his hand over his mouth and squeaks, unravels; snot bursting through the gaps between his fingers. He tries to force the laugh back down his throat, gripping it like a long suppressed turd - but the turtle’s out now and swimming.

The class erupts with them. A teenage tidal wave of humiliation crashing into Mr Fenwick, English teacher of Class 4b.

‘You ffffffffffknnn . . .’

Mr Fenwick begins a new mime, one he didn’t even know he knew, deep-set in DNA.

‘. . . cuuuu . .’

A heavy ache across the lino slats.

A girl screams.

' . . . nnntts!'

The wooden bat is the exact same size and weight as a policeman’s truncheon.

‘FUCKING . . . !’

The teacher swings it at Berry’s head.

‘CUNTS!’

He ducks

It smacks Wedge in the temple - sending his king-sized cranium into the window. The pane cracks, a spider’s web expanding up and out from the point of impact.

Berry collapses onto the desk and covers his head in defence of the next, imminent blow. Mr Fenwick is close by, he can smell him; the bleach-like odour of the frequent, squalid masturbator.

Wedge is at Berrys left shoulder, choking down air. His hands at his throat, breath rasping from his mouth like a nipped balloon.

The familiar death rattle of the chronic asthmatic.

‘Jesus!’ Berry jerks up, forgetting the teacher.

He pushes him back by the shoulders.

‘Where’s y’hooter? Wedge! Y’fuckin inhaler?’

Wedge leans forward and puts a hand in his pocket. He pulls out a white box with a blue stripe – 20 Regal Kingsize cigarettes – and slaps them onto the desk.

‘Y’hooter, fuckwit.’

He slides from his seat, screeching the desk across the lino.

Dying.

The inhaler now in his hand – fags and inhaler, Wedge’s life and death, always in the same pocket.

Mr Fenwick; soft-as-shite easy-target Mr Fenwick is now a sandcastle; teenage waves hitting him, the stares of hated pupils pulling him down and washing him away.

Just a wet hole remains.

‘I’m sor, I didn’t mean. I’m so, sorry.’

Berry pulls the blue lid off the prison-grey inhaler, shakes it and puts it to Wedge’s mouth.

‘Open y’fuckin mouth!’

He does as he’s told, wheezing.

‘Breathe!’

Wedge gasps a blast of the magic gas as Berry pushes the canister down and the medicine squirts out.

He splutters.

Again.

He’s alive.

Saved.

‘Fuckin . . .’

Berry jerks to his feet sending his chair to the floor.

‘Y’bearded fuckin turd!’

Mr Fenwick stands alone, mouthing words, whining, dancing, trying to move his batting arm as if to point, searching for the power which has now washed away.

He opens his mouth.

Closes it.

Squeaks.

Speaks.

‘Look,’ he points the bat. ‘Now, let’s all calm down. You. You? You can’t speak to a . . ‘

Mr Fenwick looks at the crack in the window pane, sees his career.

The class hyenas look out across the Serengeti.

Mr Fenwick isn’t staying.

He drops the bat and turns for the door, rattles the thin piece of wood from its frame, takes three steps down to the ash path and is away, feet puffing dust toward his tied hound and her empty bowels. Soon his green Mini, a classic,