I've written an ending to the start of the short story I had begun, partly for kicks but mainly because Supermikhail requested that I did :-
FIRECRACKER
“Sweep the bloody floor quicker, man, or I’ll have you picking pint pots off the tables at three a – m for the next six weeks. We have a very important guest tonight and if you don’t finish that you won’t be able to finish the next bloody job I have got for you.”
I had been working at The Terracotta Penguin for about three months, and due to the particularly lengthy criminal record I was carrying around with me, I couldn’t really afford to be picky about the type or nature of work I took on. So I swept floors, picked up glasses and occasionally, if so required, pulled pints and sprung the lids off bottles in this establishment. Not to my tastes, you understand. The beer was too fizzy, the lager too weak, and I didn’t recognise the colour of any of the bottled beverages. Sickly sweet and flavoured with various dental products, so far as I could tell, and surprisingly popular with the half-formed bleached blonde males that chose to drink and think by the bar.
Martin Kemp (of Spandau Ballet fame) was due to arrive that night at eight o’clock for a special celebrity showing. In conversation it appeared that none of the rest of the staff actually knew that Mr Kemp had a metal plate in his head, but due to my extra years and youth taking place around the eighties this was of course, for me, common knowledge. Or I say common knowledge, rather it was in my circles, or maybe it was due to the fact that Ray, the default escape driver, was a ridiculous looking dyed in the wool new-romantic and couldn’t shut his trap about these odd looking popsters on the telly. Gold, my arse - Silver, at best.
Anyhow, I digress, for really the important point is that I was working in this pub right slap bang in the middle of town, Martin Kemp (of The Krays fame) was coming in that night, and my boss was, for want of a better turn of phrase, a prize tosser. And I couldn’t afford to do anything naughty to him, because it would cost me my job. So I needed to be a bit clever about it, and as I was a man of keen humour and no small intellect (despite my criminal leanings) it will need to be clever. Not too clever, because that would be a waste of my time and if I am being honest the boss did not strike me as the equivalent of a Bank of England, or a high security deposit box facility. In fact, I doubt he even had a metaphorical fucking bike lock on his brain. But besides, it would not do to carry anything out like this without a touch of class and wit.
Now, I remember I was sweeping the floor like no-bodies business, almost scratching a groove in the surface, dancing and hopping across the dance floor and by the side of the bar, collecting the dust and the fag-ends into a nice neat pile, all in double time. But all the time I am thinking, about what I can do. I wanted a night to remember for Martin and the Boss, preferably with both of them looking like a tool.
Did I tell you I never liked Spandau Ballet? Anyway. It was later, I recall, and I was pulling a selection of various shaped glasses out of the glass washer, which were hot to the touch but my hands had been spattered with so much welding slag over the years that I didn’t bother about it anymore. Sometimes I would pull roasting dishes out of the oven with my bare hands, and it was okay, for about five minutes until the heat made its way to the functioning nerves and I had to run them under some cool water for fifteen. But I still obviously maintained a sort of dumb stubbornness that I didn’t feel heat.
I never took the important lessons to heart. Like the burnt hand, I maintained a presumption of being fire-proof. In reality the only way to avoid being burnt is to not play with hot things – much like a useful tactic to avoid being jailed is by not being a criminal. Or if you don’t want to lose your job, you stay nice to the boss.
I just want to take you back to a time when things were easier, and I was at a point where luck was well on my side. I had a beautiful girlfriend, who had given me a beautiful son, and I was earning a lot of money as a safe-cracker.
The types of safes I was ‘cracking’ were old ones, generally iron with some carbon. You just had to have the suitable kit to distribute enough energy in to heat up the iron, which would bring out the carbon locally in a structurally (dis)advantageous way, and I generally aimed to make a nice y-shaped anomaly through the depth of the door, or the side of the box. Then you leave it to cool a touch, and hit it as hard and fast as you can with a 4lb lump hammer. ‘Crack’. You get a hole, reach inside, and take whatever you can. With a little metallurgical nous and a lot of oxyacetylene, I was becoming a wealthy man.
And the guys I worked with, they were the best. There was Ray, the escape driver – who I have already mentioned. To be honest he never took the revs over 2000, thanks to Gary, the brains behind the targets. He was so good finding out and timing the assaults on the private houses, small shops and pawnbrokers that fit within our target market that the lack of attention we received for our work was almost insulting. And then there was Lucy, a petite locksmith who jumped horses in her spare time. She would go on to represent Great Britain at some level, Gary told me later – after we had all gone our separate ways. If it wasn’t for Lucy we wouldn’t have been able to slip in and out of all those places quite so easily - I’ve not seen anyone pop a lock quite so instinctively as her.
So what went wrong? Well, as much as I sometimes think it was greed, I don’t think it was. We never pushed anything too far, never went for the high value prizes and always stuck within the realms of comfort. Gary would tell us exactly what locks were in the venue, what model the safe was, when it would be empty and if we didn’t have the wherewithal to achieve the goal, we stepped away. Likewise for similar reasons I don’t think it was bravado, beyond the obvious risks associated with the lifestyle we had chosen.
I just think we ran out of luck, used it all up in our youth. It was a silent early morning and we had just emptied the cash and some small jewellery out of a local pawnbroker on the outskirts of Dusseldorf. We had all walked around the corner and I bounced off the huge frame of one of two police officers catching an early morning coffee and bagel before knocking off the night shift. Ray was sat fast asleep in the driver’s seat of our shiny new red VW Corrado, a few yards up the road. I apologised profusely in English with a German accent, for some unknown reason, and we laughed between us and shared awkward, fractured smalltalk as I tried to mop the cream cheese off his vest. They asked us what we were doing up at 5am in this area (there were no local nightspots) and we told them we were looking for our hotel. There were, apparently, no hotels in the area, but rather than act suspiciously they laughed at our general idiocy. “Idiot English!” – being insulted like this has never been as funny. But then it unravelled, as it emerged that we had bumped in to one of about three dozen germans who were educated in the sport of show-jumping, and he recognised Lucy pretty much straight away. Her lockpicks fell out of her pocket as she tried to withdraw a pen to sign an autograph, the suspicion was raised. It then became more than clear that I was carrying a cylinder of highly flammable substance in my backpack, and a simple investigation of Gary’s bag unveiled a number of recently stolen items.
From that day, to now, I do not think I have ever had a single lucky break. My girlfriend couldn’t take me being inside, and my son was generally ashamed of me, although he tried not to show it. And it continued on that day in the bar, I never got to implement my plan or even meet Martin Kemp. I don’t even remember what my plan was - I was sacked that afternoon after the boss saw me taking money from the till. But I have my friends back, we are warm most nights, and the Salvation Army are good enough to feed us once every couple of days.
I’m just waiting for my luck to come back to me, and then I can get back to where I belong.
I've tweaked it a bit at the start, interested to know if anybody wants to offer any thoughts.
Looking at that 'Splendiferous' piece of writing, it is a shame that writing does get such short shrift on these forums, from reading the start it seems very accomplished. I struggle, admittedly, reading directly from the screen and maintaining concentration (which is possibly a reason to take any criticism I might offer with a certain pinch of salt), but the first few paragraphs are really very good.
I know I couldn't have produced anything approaching that when I was 16. Oh well, thanks for bringing it up, I will definitely read that through to the end. I'll probably print it out though first.
E: Title, some errors - Thanks Supermikhail ...
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