We present an extract from All Them Dogs, the debut novel by by Djamel White.
Things are different since Tony Ward landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow. After five years keeping quiet across the way, Tony is keen to reinstate himself, and when the opportunity arises to work side by side with Darren 'Flute' Walsh, a top enforcer of notorious crime boss Angus Lavelle, it feels like a no brainer. Biting off more than he can chew has never bothered Tony Ward, but Flute Walsh is not the meek, quiet boy Tony remembers from school. Brooding, stoic, and unpredictably dangerous, Tony finds himself drawn to his new associate in more ways than one...
First thing you always notice going into a stranger's gaff is the smell. Damp and smoky, that sickly-sweet smell of a spoonful of gear. It paints a picture. Once you’ve seen one gaff you’ve seen them all.
I let the Opel roll into the spot in front of the apartment building. One of Finto’s fellas coming up short on his dividends, we’d been told.
Made-in-Turkey Finto Maher, with the hairline to his eyebrows and the gnashers like he had the back side of a train ticket stuffed into his mouth. Rough c**t, but weren’t we all?
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Listen: D'Jamel White talks to Ray D'Arcy
Flute there, stony and quiet in the passenger seat as usual. I was starting to think that he was just an odd bastard with not much more to him. Didn’t stop me following his lead, though. Not that I enjoyed being told what to do. I was Wardy. Tony bleeding Ward. Lethal weapon forged in 1997 with a rap sheet that’d put them all to shame. Wild card just waiting for my time in the sun. Let someone else do the thinking. The things you tell yourself.
I knocked the engine off. The Opel was a boxy little hatcher with a baby-blue paint job. A Corsa-A GSI. They don’t make them like this any more, and I don’t mean the engines. I couldn’t give a rat’s about what’s under the hood, I’m talking about the way this yoke looked. All them straight lines. Cars of its like today look like bubbles. They lack character. The Opel used to be my ma’s, but really it’d been mine before it was ever mine. Once I started stealing the keys it wasn’t long before she let me have it altogether. First thing I ever owned, and it had been waiting patiently for me in Kenny Boyle’s driveway all those years I was away in England.
Flute got out first. This area was the council’s abandoned child. They were coming to the rescue all too late, building reams of new gaffs for foreigners to clash with poor Irish locals who’d been left here the whole time listening to the screech of hot motors in the early hours of the morning. What stood was apartments and low-roofed houses, blocky and different-coloured. Big black streaks of damp down the cream-coloured sections. These buildings were meant to look cheerful, to convince the people who moved in back then that this was a place where they’d be looked after.
The December air was baltic, but my flash new Arc’teryx jacket did well to keep it out. Flute had the fur from the hood of his Canada Goose parka pulled in close to his head. I told him earlier he looked a fucking eejit in it. Paired with those all-black Air Max Pluses, he cut the same shape as half the young fellas who dealt for chaps like the one we were about to meet, and the ones who like to let on that they did. Outstraight, everyone wanted to look like a real-one but it didn’t take much to find out who was only a spoofer these days. Flute would tower over any of those little wannabes anyway, the size of him. The parka was too short for him nearly. I would have sized him up by one, brought him somewhere to take in the extra length so it landed just right on the thighs. His wide shoulders meant his sleeves came up a bit short for my liking too. I wasn’t jealous of big lads for that reason. At least I could stay looking sharp no bother to me.
The grey aul day did the place no favours, but it gave a sheen to Flute’s blue eyes – like a husky, or one of those pitbulls with the grey-blue coats. One of those dogs that stare at you without so much as a tail wag. The sort that’d make you think twice about reaching your hand out. They were something else to look at, all the same. Gorgeous animals.
I stretched my arms and legs in anticipation. I could feel the buzz around my joints. I followed Flute up the outside staircase to the front door of one of the terraced gaffs, doing a little chicken dance with my arms to loosen up my shoulders. The gaff had another apartment underneath it that wouldn’t get any sun on a good day. I’d been in a few gaffs like that in the past, not needing to really know if the sun was up or not so long as there was enough supplies to go around. Back then I was only a messer.
Flute knocked on the door. No answer. It was freezing. 'He’s deffo still in bed,’ I said. I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets. I saw us both there in the glass, the size difference between us. I thought of that old cartoon, Pinky and the Brain. I straightened up to look bigger. I wasn’t a short-arse or anything, but he sure made me look like one. Not far over the way a group of four or five teenagers were watching us and making no effort to hide it. I could hear them muttering to each other. Flute knocked again. Then he tried the handle of the door and lo and behold, the f**king thing opened. ‘F**k off, no way,’ I said, and followed him into the house. The hoods came down.
‘Smells like a bando,’ I said. The walls inside had the same black damp streaks. I’d seen people selling out of bandos keeping the place in better nick honestly. Sometimes you might know someone in a bit of debt and you might take over their gaff to operate out of, and I’d seen plenty of those places go to shite like this one. But this was this fella’s own home. A gaff he got off the council likely for nothing, him raking in the cash, dealing for Finto, and here’s his place in absolute bits. When I got a gaff of my own it’d be a palace, out straight.
Flute bent down to give the dog a scratch before thinking better of it and straightened back up. He stepped over it and we both walked down to the door at the end of the hall. The dog scuttled along behind us. The kitchen we came into was cramped and barely fit both the table and the counter. The scales were there on the table, and a bag of whatever it was he was using for a cutting agent. If he was diluting what Finto was already diluting, then God help the poor f**kers getting sold it. And God help this fella when Finto found out. Bleedin’ triple-distilled. Muck.
There was a glass door painted with bird scutter that went out to a little balcony littered with hard-boiled dog shite. Plates smeared with dried ketchup and half-eaten potato waffles and cigarette ash were stacked on the counter. A box of cereal half bleached white by the sun sat on the windowsill.
‘What sort of reprobates has Finto got working for him?’I asked.
‘That’s Finto for you,’ said Flute, looking into a kitchen drawer. ‘I’ll be telling Lavelle.’
The big man, Lavelle, who Finto answered to. For once maybe, I would not have liked to be in Finto’s position.
I picked up a jumper from the seat of one of the kitchen chairs and held it up to look at it. ‘BALENCIAGA’ right across the front of it. I waved it at Flute.
‘Dya want this?’ I said.
‘Yeah, to wipe me h**e with.’
I tossed it onto the floor. The dog went around me to give it a sniff, its little claws tapping on the lino.
The stairs in the hall went up to a square landing with barely enough room for one of us to stand. We opened one of the doors and it was a child’s bedroom.
Here was in a f**king state too. Toys all over the shop, wooden crib with a few slats missing from it and no child in there to be seen unless it had died and was hidden under all the shite. But you’d smell that, surely. Next door we found the fella we came for, snoozing there in the bed, one and a half empty flagons of cider on the floor. I’m thinking, lightweight. The child in a nappy sleeping beside him. Flute knocked loudly on the open door. The fella rolled around a bit but didn’t wake up. He walked over and poked him on the forehead.
‘Fff**k off,’ went your man. The wince off of Flute said his breath was bad-out.
Flute gave him a shake. Soon as his hands touched him his eyes jerked open.
He screamed, like proper went AHHH and all, and that had me snorting. He jolted upright in the bed, the child beside him rolling right off and hitting the carpet with a thunk. Straight away it started bawling.
‘Shut him up, Patsy, would you,’ said Flute.
‘For the love of bleedin’ God,’ moaned the fella, sitting up in the bed. ‘Me fuckin’ heart, Darren.’
I noticed the gold chain on his bare chest. It had bits of diamond in it. Then his scalded-red eyes, as far back into the skull as they could go. Something I couldn’t read tattooed on his neck.
‘You’re late, Patsy,’ was all Flute said.
‘So he sends you? F**k sake, he could have rang me.’
The child was still screaming. Patsy leaned over the side of the bed and scooped him up in a pair of arms covered with shite-looking tattoos. On one arm, a naked, wall-eyed bint with massive t**s in that old-school prison style. The other was scribbled with playing cards, dice on fire, a lion that looked more like my ma’s expression after we’d leave p**s on the toilet seat. He bounced the little fella up and down on the bed.
‘Give it over, Lucian,’ he said, his hand like a garden trowel slapping its little back.
So that’s what the curling writing on his neck tattoo said: Lucian.
I said, ‘His name’s Lucian? What is he, a bleedin’ vampire?’
‘Wasn’t my f**kin’ idea,’ Patsy grumbled. ‘Who’s this fella, Darren?’
‘He’s with me,’ said Flute.
‘That doesn’t tell me who the f**k he is, does it?’ said Patsy.
He scowled at me. I was giving it loads back and I was f**king loving it, big sneering head on me.
‘Those lads yours outside?’ I asked, thinking of that group of teenies I’d seen standing across the road on our way in.
‘And what?’
‘What’s the oldest you have working for you?’
‘I don’t bleeding know. What’s it to you, working for the social, are you?’
‘Takes me back, is all.’
I didn’t say anything else after. I would have been around their age when I worked for Philly, by the looks of them. Started at sixteen, worked my way up quick, and then s**t hit the fan and I had to cool the jets over in England for a bit. Philly’d never live in a state like this. He knew to be careful with how he spent his money, because of the Criminal Assets crowd and all that, but he at least had some f**king pride of place. He loved his aftershave. He used to send me in with cash to Brown Thomas to pick up bottles of Kilian and Armani and Hugo Boss and he’d always let me choose one to have a spray off before I went back out onto the road, smelling like bleedin’ Hollywood. The whole side wall of Patsy’s room was nearly floor to ceiling with shoe boxes. He’d a few runners sitting on top of their boxes wrapped in cling-film to keep them fresh, definitely worth a few bob. And that chain on his neck too, I’d say a good snoop would turn out more than enough reason for someone to want to keep their door locked.
Patsy nodded towards his bedside locker.
‘It’s in the side drawer there.’
Flute opened the drawer. He looked at it for a second and then pulled out a watch.
‘That’s fake,’ said Patsy, too quick to be believed. ‘The other drawer.’
Flute dropped the watch back into the drawer. The thunk of it hitting the bottom made Patsy wince. He opened the second drawer and pulled out a rake of notes.
‘No envelopes?’
‘I wasn’t anywhere to get any,’ said Patsy. Like he wasn’t himself down at the post office once a week to draw his dole.
Flute looked at him but said nothing. He started counting it.
‘And you’d want to be locking your f**king door behind you and all.’
Patsy grunted something. The kid had stopped screaming. Now it was looking at us with a limp finger in its mouth, as if to say are you going to help me here or what? Look at the state of me, give me a bath. The social would have him before long.
All Them Dogs is published by John Murray
