Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon Read Online Free

of my going’s typical of those two wankers. They only get me on a package in and out, because that way it’s cheaper even though it includes the bill for the hotel I’m not going to use. So I have to join the un-legislative club of package creeps all the way from Euston to Luton to Palma, including, as the song says, all the stops along the way: hanging around with them at the air terminal, hanging around with them at Luton, hanging around with them at forty thousand feet, hanging around with them at Palma Airport waiting for the luggage to come spewing out onto the bit of fun-fair.
    But it’s in the air they get on my tits most, and the group that gets on them more than any other is a family I haven’t been able to get away from since the air terminal. There are nine of the bastards: a couple of kids, fathered by two mid-thirty Dagenham workers, real-life brothers; they are swaggering would-be hardcases using the fashionable manufactured folk-dialogue of the East End, hairstyles courtesy whichever North London footballer’s salon happens to be nearest, decked out in expensive machine-made holiday clobber butwear their eiderdown-like windcheaters with the Ford emblem on the breast-zip pockets and the ceremonial racing stripes rippling down each of the arms. They look for all the world like T.U.C. 1975 equivalents of the Few, the major difference being the swift skinniness of their eyes, darting this way and that with the tense paranoia of those that observe others, eyeballs with a view to discover who’s for and who’s against. Their wives are anonymous but noisy late beneficiaries of their husbands’ collective hundred-pound-a-week wills, all crimplene, hairstyles ten years behind those of their husbands. Enlarging the group are the brothers’ parents, the woman past the age of caring, desperately rowdy, her husband trying to stretch himself back to be a brother to his sons by wearing the same kind of clobber and all that does for him is to accentuate the impression he gives of regretting that the present difference hadn’t started to spiral about 1935. And topping off this familial layer-cake is the inevitable and definitive Old Dad. Hogarth and Leonardo couldn’t have cross-hatched a better model. From the nose back everything about his face recedes and sinks into the depression of his hand-stitched mouth only to sweep out again to the bone of a Punch -like chin. But the support his mouth lacks tooth-wise doesn’t stop his endless jaw-bone solo. Not that any of the other generations of his family are paying much attention, they’re too busy leading off in their own directions. And it’s just my bleeding luck to get surrounded by the whole lot of them. My seat number places me next to a porthole and in the middle seat there’s one of the brats and the aisle seat is taken by one of the sons of Daghenam. Across the aisle is number two son, number two brat, and the middle-aged father. Behind me is mum and the two wives, and in front of me old dad has been sent to Coventry by the numbering of the seats. One of the three is empty but the wall seat’s been takenby a young girl of around fourteen, airline logic having placed her parents about ten rows down. The old dad starts by saying to the young girl:
    “Do you mind if I sit down next to you, young lady?” The dirty old bugger’s question is quite irrelevant because she’s got no choice. She shakes her head and number one son’s who’s stacking the old dad’s coat while the old dad creaks down next to the girl, his eyes venal and his tongue peeping through the recession in his lips. “Watch his left hand, darling,” the number one Dagenham son says to the young girl, who takes no notice of him or the old dad. He looks at me and gives me a swift deadpan wink and I give him a slow deadpan turning away of the head and I hear him sniff as I look out onto the wet tarmac and as he sits down there is an echo of his disdain in the crackle of his windcheater as