The Wolves of London Read Online Free

know. I’m not a fucking scrubber.’
    ‘I never said you were. Forget it if you’re not bothered.’
    She stared at me sullenly for a moment, then gave an abrupt nod. ‘Go on then.’
    I remember little about the rest of the evening, though I do know that an hour or so later Michelle and I were shagging in a cubicle in the women’s toilets. My abiding memory of that encounter was the wet floor, the stink of puke which clogged up one of the sinks, and having to constantly change position in the tiny cubicle because cold, sharp edges kept jabbing me in the buttocks, legs and back. Ultimately our desperate rutting became more a war of attrition than an expression of mutual desire, both of us wanting it to be over but determined to see it through to the bitter end. When it was over we went our separate ways, disheartened and battle-weary, neither of us expressing any inclination to see each other again.
    Just over a week later, on New Year’s Day 1994, Glenn Dass and a couple of his mates jumped me outside the local chippy. I rolled into a ball as they kicked me repeatedly in the spine and stamped on my ribs and head, before rolling me, barely conscious, off the road and down a steep railway embankment choked with weeds and nettles. It was a bitterly cold night and I might well have died if an old geezer hadn’t walked past with a Jack Russell half an hour later. The dog sniffed me out and started barking, and the old boy phoned an ambulance. I was admitted to hospital with three broken ribs, a cracked vertebra, a fractured wrist and various head injuries. The worst part of the experience was not the beating itself, but waking up in a hospital bed a few hours later. Everything had swollen and stiffened up, and despite the heavy-duty painkillers I’d been prescribed, each tiny movement sent an eye-watering jolt of agony through me. Just blinking and breathing were bad enough, but when I tried to chew or swallow it felt as if rusty gears were grinding into life inside my body, each one connected to a cluster of exposed nerve endings. And as for moving my bowels… well, let’s just say it was probably the closest to the torment of childbirth that a man is ever likely to get.
    There was never any possibility of Michelle and I getting married, not even when she burst into The King’s Head two months later – just after my seventeenth birthday – screaming the odds and telling me that I was ‘gonna fucking pay’ for getting her up the duff. I was in no mood for a row; the cuts and bruises were only just starting to fade, and I was still moving gingerly. But for the next month or so I refused to accept that the child was mine – until my appointment finally came through for a DNA test, which confirmed what I felt (at the time) was the awful truth.
    Glenn was back on the scene by then, and to his credit he stuck by Michelle, despite the fact that she was carrying another man’s child. I think partly because he’d proved his physical dominance over me, and partly because I hadn’t grassed him up, which in his eyes was like me admitting that I’d been out of order and deserved the beating, it helped him come to terms with the fact that I’d violated his ‘property’. It even enabled him to put aside any resentment he might have felt towards Candice and, despite his limitations, become a pretty decent stepdad for her.
    In the almost two decades since that New Year’s Day encounter, he and I had never seen eye to eye, though I suppose we’d tolerated each other well enough when we’d been thrown together in family situations. Even so, the fact that he’d once bested me, regardless that he’d caught me by surprise and had been backed up by his mates, was clearly still a big thing for him. It was almost instinctive the way he adopted a cocky, swaggering manner whenever we met, the way a slightly contemptuous arrogance would creep into his voice. Many times I’d felt the urge to tell him to grow the fuck up and move