Trilogy Collection. Julie Shaw
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Название: Trilogy Collection
Автор: Julie Shaw
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007577118
isbn:
‘How long’s that gonna be?’ asked Billy. ‘It could take a long time for them to realise, couldn’t it?’
‘Why would they do something so fucking stupid anyway?’ June wanted to know. ‘I mean, how could you miss seven and a half’s grand’s worth of cheques?’
‘I was thinking about that too,’ Jock said. ‘Might be decimalisation. Might be that they’re old books and they’re going to get new decimal ones printed –’
‘That wouldn’t make any difference, you silly sod,’ June corrected him. ‘A pound is still a pound and a fiver’s still a fiver. More likely they just changed the look of them anyway. They do that now and again, don’t they?’
‘Yeah, but where does that leave us?’ asked Steven. ‘Does that mean we can even use them?’
‘Sure it means we can use them,’ Jock reassured him. ‘If we get our skates on, that is. As of now, they’re still in use – they must be; they’re no different to the ones we’ve always had, are they? No, they’re fine, I’m sure of it.’ He scanned the group. ‘Don’t you think?’
Everyone agreed. ‘But what about once we use them to buy gear?’ Maureen asked. ‘What then? When the shop trades them in won’t they know straight away? They’ve got serial numbers on them, haven’t they? Won’t they see from the figures? They have lists, don’t they, of dodgy ones? Won’t they suss us straight away?’
But Jock was confident. If they didn’t realise the cheques were missing straight away, chances were that by the time the loan company got to hear of it, it would be much too late for them to actually do anything about it. They’d be long spent, long gone, no real way of tracing them. And with the bundles having gone missing while still intact, it might even be that they didn’t even have a record in the first place, because the serial numbers would be logged against a borrower’s name only when the cheques were handed out to them. No, they all agreed, it was watertight in that respect, and a buzz of excitement began building. Chances were, they all agreed, that they were obsolete books anyway – forgotten precisely because they were soon to be replaced.
‘And even if they realise and get two of the books back,’ Jock finished, grinning. ‘They’re not having that one.’ He nodded towards June’s handbag. ‘Two and a half fucking grand!’ He raised his glass.
After blowing all the family allowance on cider and whiskey, June had held a planning meeting round at her house that evening. Maureen and Steven had come round, as had Billy and Moira from next door, Barbara and Joe from across the road and their neighbours, Doreen and John. It had turned out to be something of a party. But a party with a purpose, a plan of action having been decided. As the men had done the hard work – and having found the cheques in the first place, it would now be down to the women to convert the cheques into cash. And the best way to do this, everyone agreed, would be for the women to share the cheques out and shop with them individually, buying booze – bottles of spirits, vodka, whiskey, rum and so on – which they could then tout round the pubs at half price.
And even at half price, they’d soon make a fortune – even with just the one book of cheques. Then they’d pool it before splitting the proceeds. After that, the cash would be their own to do with as they pleased.
A brilliant plan, they all agreed, put together in a happy, drunken haze. What could possibly go wrong?
‘C’mon McKellan! Let’s have you, you lazy little fucker!’ shouted Mr Downey as he banged on Vinnie’s bed posts with his keys.
Vinnie groaned. ‘Aw, fuck off,’ he mumbled, conscious of the light spilling in on him, of the biscuity morning smell of sweaty male teenage bodies, of the others – lucky buggers – still all snoring. He turned in his bed to face the wall and found himself nose to crotch with Suzi Quatro. A much nicer prospect all round.
‘What was that?’ Downey barked at him. ‘What was that, ginger nut?’
‘I meant fuck off, sir,’ Vinnie corrected, pulling the rough grey borstal blanket over his head.
Like everything else about Redditch, the blanket was rough; rough as hell. Where approved school had been all about trying to educate lads like Vinnie, borstal had a different approach – the ‘short sharp shock’ method – the goal being to teach them a lesson they’d never forget, and so keep them away from adult prisons. In reality, though Vinnie’d not yet seen much of adult prisons, he’d certainly heard about them, and what he’d heard was that, in adult prison, you got to do what you wanted. Yeah, you were locked up, and yeah, you had to work to join privileges, but, outside of that you could do your own thing and chill – not have some tit banging on at you at all hours. No, to his mind, being here was far worse.
Downey, one of the officers – or screws, as the boys called them – was having none of his whining, much less his half-awake attempt at humour. He never did. Because he was a cunt. He ripped the blanket back, pulling off the sheet at the same time, exposing Vinnie, shivering in his vest and underpants. ‘It’s 5.00 a.m., lad,’ he pointed out. ‘You know the drill. If you’d used your fucking tiny brain yesterday, you’d have had another hour in bed, wouldn’t you? And then I wouldn’t be here witnessing your equally tiny fucking cock shrivelling up in your filthy skidders, would I?’
With no other options open to him, Vinnie levered himself up and sprang from his bed, flexing and unflexing his fingers. He made a fist out of one of them and thought just how much he’d love to turn round and slam it right into Downey’s hairy old-man knackers. He unballed it. ‘Get out, then while I get dressed,’ he said instead, feeling the draught snake round his ankles. ‘Or do you wanna watch me take a piss as well?’
‘Two minutes, you cheeky cunt,’ Downey snorted as he left the room. ‘Or I’ll be back here to drag you out, got it?’
It was the hill and the medicine ball for Vinnie this morning, the legacy of yesterday’s little ‘incident’ in the canteen. He groaned as he threw aside his grey prison garb and reached for PE shorts and T-shirt.
It was a far worse punishment, to his mind, than getting a good hiding. He would rather take a cricket bat across the arse any day rather than the pointless business of trudging up and down a bastard hill for an hour, carrying a fuck-off leather ball that weighed a ton.
Not only that, but he was still expected to do the usual two-mile run with the other lads straight afterwards. And all of it happened before breakfast. And if he or any of the others were late getting back from their run, they would miss their morning feast – (and it would bloody feel like one, after that lot) of porridge with jam and bread. No excuses. They were late back, they got nothing. They would simply have to wait till lunch-time, which meant the fat lads, the ones who loved their food the most, had the most to lose if they didn’t make it.
And they often didn’t. The regime at Redditch was tough as well as rough. Set in the middle of remote woodland, inside a huge, barbed-wire topped perimeter fence, it put Vinnie in mind of a concentration camp. You could run a long way – their daily two-mile run took place inside it – and know you were getting nowhere at all. It really was like you’d been snatched from the normal world. Designed to put off would-be serial offenders from going back into law breaking, it ran СКАЧАТЬ