Swarfegan
"How's your chimichanga?" I asked, as nonchalantly as I could muster.
"It tastes like a dead dog," The Man replied. "How's your... your thing?"
"Thing" was a good description of whatever was on my plate. Hell knew what it was supposed to be.
"It's very nice, thank you," I lied without any conviction whatsoever for, in truth, the tortillas (presuming them to be tortillas) were, in taste and texture, like crispy fried discs of toilet paper, smothered in what could have been refried beans or could just as easily have been puréed silverfish and woodlice mixed with wallpaper paste.
The Man - I didn't know his name or indeed anything about him other than that he was a panjandrum of the first water - had called me up on the telephone an hour earlier. At the time I had been irritated by the shrill ringing (curse Alexander Graham Bell-end!) but, looking back on it, The Man had probably saved me the price of a new TV by ringing when he did. ITV, in their infinite wisdom, had seen fit to broadcast Alan Titchmarsh's End of Term Party. I had watched aghast as Myleene Klass had twerked in A.T.'s smug, sweaty face. Unable to take it anymore, I'd whipped out my pistol and had it trained on Titmarsh's forehead, jiggling about in the middle of the screen. Then the phone rang.
"Shaun Swarfegan?"
"Who wants to know?"
"I do, Gaylord. I think you may be able to do a job for us," said The Man. Confident. Relaxed.
"I don't know what you mean..."
"Oh come now. Meet me at Mama Ramirez's Moustache in one hour."
The phone went dead. Coming to, as if from a reverie, I stuffed some Café Crème cigars and a spare pair of pants in my briefcase and made a swift exit. Alan had had a lucky escape.
So here we were in the lousiest Tex-Mex restaurant east of the Rio Grande. The Man sipped at his mezcal then belched with the self-assurance of a man who knows his worm is hooked. Or his hook is wormed. Or something.
"So will you do it?"
The Man dabbed daintily at his lips with the apron of a passing waiter. I hesitated.
"Half the cash up front?"
"And the other half upon completion. As per," his voice trailed away, as if bored by the drift of the conversation. There was contempt in his eyes. I was well aware that within the organisation The Man represented I had been given the nickname of "The Spanner". Sure, I was a tool. But I had my uses. What gave this fellow the right to look at me like I was a pubic hair in his guacamole?
Damn him! The truth was I needed him and his job much more than he needed me and he knew it. He pushed a sad-looking, less than bulging envelope across the table towards me. I picked it up with the eagerness of a teenage Velociraptor seizing a TV remote when left home alone against the better judgement of its parents. I slipped the readies inside my briefcase, left the spare pants in part payment for my grub, nodded ungraciously at The Man and exited stage left. And so it was that I agreed to liquidate Little Mix.
You may be wondering why they asked me, a brown corded, monobrowed fool, to carry out such a task for them. Well you see, my gentle yet oh so stupid reader, I had form. Back in the cold winter of 2010 The Man had approached me at the behest of the people of Liverpool and asked me to bump off Sonia. It appeared that the funsize, Stock Aitken Waterman-produced song thrush had disgraced that fair city once too often. The money was just too good to turn down and I was at a low ebb. After weeks of tedious but necessary Sam Spadework I approached her, undercover of shell suit, at her sparsely attended gig in the stinking bowels of a cheap motel. She must have thought I was an ardent fan and sang her next song straight at me: 'You'll Never Stop Me Loving You'. Well, maybe I could...
It is not for me to pontificate about the moral rectitude of the jobs I am asked to do. "Right and wrong" is a parlour game for those who are jammy enough to keep their heads above water. For people who don't have expensive little peccadilloes.
I'd undertaken my first job for the organisation in an attempt to impress my girlfriend Ladene but also to prove her wrong. She said I'd become staid and boring and my glory days were far behind me: Regional Finalist in the Farm Foods Employee of the Year Competition 1995; playing the rear end of the pantomime stick insect in the Codnor Players production of 'Sweet Bird of Youth'; that Nobel Prize...
I hoped that a little professional killing might keep us together but instead it tore us apart. She found my activities shady, sordid and sickening. I kidded myself that she still felt something for me, that she loved the schlinger but not the schlong but NO! She packed her nest of occasional briefcases and exited, pursued by some bloke called Darren. Oh Ladene! Ladene! Ladene! LADENE!!!
When I started in the killing game I was overly concerned with what kind of image I should try to project. I was a big fan of Italian Westerns, particularly those of Sergio Corbucci, and had the romantic and frankly stupid notion that I could be the "Django of South East Derbyshire" as I hoped the Derby Evening Telegraph might dub me. As I dragged my coffin to the Sonia gig, I rather fancied myself as the epitome of cool but I looked a proper knob. I know that now.
Unfortunately there were so few punters at the gig and those present were so underwhelmed by Sonia's musical mewling that you could hear a pin drop. You could certainly hear a tarpaulin being removed from on top of a machine gun. Subtle, it wasn't.
So I'd learned to diversify and nowadays dispatched each new victim in the manner and using the means which seemed appropriate. It seemed to me that Little Mix were positively crying out to be hacked to pieces by some kind of Japanese sword so I duly turned up on the day of their concert at Belper's internationally renowned River Gardens with my trusty katana tucked away underneath my trench coat.
There were loads of people around, kids mainly, but my eye was drawn to a lady of mature years in the plumb centre of the crowd who was dancing ecstatically, as if she had chewed her way through a two pound bag of peyote buttons. From the rear she reminded me of Maggie's ma in the Bob Dylan song: "She's sixty-eight but she says she's fifty-four". The revellers around her had cleared some space to allow her to flounce as freely as she wished and appeared to be in awe of this crazy, free-spirited harridan.
As the miming of Little Mix reached a crescendo, the wizened old crone lost herself completely in the music and shook her vile booty with such abandon that her party briefcase dropped from her shoulder to the floor and scattered its contents all over the place: a hairbrush; an industrial-sized sack of mint imperials; a copy of The People's Friend magazine; and some golden love balls which rolled around drunkenly for a while before coming to rest at my feet.
Ever the gentleman, I carefully picked up said balls with my pocket skankerchief, walked up behind the lady and placed my hand on her shoulder.
"Excuse me," I half-shouted above the din of manufactured Muzak. "I think you've dropped your... Hello Mum!"
Wow, how this altered the complexion of things...
B.R. 16/11/2013
"It tastes like a dead dog," The Man replied. "How's your... your thing?"
"Thing" was a good description of whatever was on my plate. Hell knew what it was supposed to be.
"It's very nice, thank you," I lied without any conviction whatsoever for, in truth, the tortillas (presuming them to be tortillas) were, in taste and texture, like crispy fried discs of toilet paper, smothered in what could have been refried beans or could just as easily have been puréed silverfish and woodlice mixed with wallpaper paste.
The Man - I didn't know his name or indeed anything about him other than that he was a panjandrum of the first water - had called me up on the telephone an hour earlier. At the time I had been irritated by the shrill ringing (curse Alexander Graham Bell-end!) but, looking back on it, The Man had probably saved me the price of a new TV by ringing when he did. ITV, in their infinite wisdom, had seen fit to broadcast Alan Titchmarsh's End of Term Party. I had watched aghast as Myleene Klass had twerked in A.T.'s smug, sweaty face. Unable to take it anymore, I'd whipped out my pistol and had it trained on Titmarsh's forehead, jiggling about in the middle of the screen. Then the phone rang.
"Shaun Swarfegan?"
"Who wants to know?"
"I do, Gaylord. I think you may be able to do a job for us," said The Man. Confident. Relaxed.
"I don't know what you mean..."
"Oh come now. Meet me at Mama Ramirez's Moustache in one hour."
The phone went dead. Coming to, as if from a reverie, I stuffed some Café Crème cigars and a spare pair of pants in my briefcase and made a swift exit. Alan had had a lucky escape.
So here we were in the lousiest Tex-Mex restaurant east of the Rio Grande. The Man sipped at his mezcal then belched with the self-assurance of a man who knows his worm is hooked. Or his hook is wormed. Or something.
"So will you do it?"
The Man dabbed daintily at his lips with the apron of a passing waiter. I hesitated.
"Half the cash up front?"
"And the other half upon completion. As per," his voice trailed away, as if bored by the drift of the conversation. There was contempt in his eyes. I was well aware that within the organisation The Man represented I had been given the nickname of "The Spanner". Sure, I was a tool. But I had my uses. What gave this fellow the right to look at me like I was a pubic hair in his guacamole?
Damn him! The truth was I needed him and his job much more than he needed me and he knew it. He pushed a sad-looking, less than bulging envelope across the table towards me. I picked it up with the eagerness of a teenage Velociraptor seizing a TV remote when left home alone against the better judgement of its parents. I slipped the readies inside my briefcase, left the spare pants in part payment for my grub, nodded ungraciously at The Man and exited stage left. And so it was that I agreed to liquidate Little Mix.
You may be wondering why they asked me, a brown corded, monobrowed fool, to carry out such a task for them. Well you see, my gentle yet oh so stupid reader, I had form. Back in the cold winter of 2010 The Man had approached me at the behest of the people of Liverpool and asked me to bump off Sonia. It appeared that the funsize, Stock Aitken Waterman-produced song thrush had disgraced that fair city once too often. The money was just too good to turn down and I was at a low ebb. After weeks of tedious but necessary Sam Spadework I approached her, undercover of shell suit, at her sparsely attended gig in the stinking bowels of a cheap motel. She must have thought I was an ardent fan and sang her next song straight at me: 'You'll Never Stop Me Loving You'. Well, maybe I could...
It is not for me to pontificate about the moral rectitude of the jobs I am asked to do. "Right and wrong" is a parlour game for those who are jammy enough to keep their heads above water. For people who don't have expensive little peccadilloes.
I'd undertaken my first job for the organisation in an attempt to impress my girlfriend Ladene but also to prove her wrong. She said I'd become staid and boring and my glory days were far behind me: Regional Finalist in the Farm Foods Employee of the Year Competition 1995; playing the rear end of the pantomime stick insect in the Codnor Players production of 'Sweet Bird of Youth'; that Nobel Prize...
I hoped that a little professional killing might keep us together but instead it tore us apart. She found my activities shady, sordid and sickening. I kidded myself that she still felt something for me, that she loved the schlinger but not the schlong but NO! She packed her nest of occasional briefcases and exited, pursued by some bloke called Darren. Oh Ladene! Ladene! Ladene! LADENE!!!
When I started in the killing game I was overly concerned with what kind of image I should try to project. I was a big fan of Italian Westerns, particularly those of Sergio Corbucci, and had the romantic and frankly stupid notion that I could be the "Django of South East Derbyshire" as I hoped the Derby Evening Telegraph might dub me. As I dragged my coffin to the Sonia gig, I rather fancied myself as the epitome of cool but I looked a proper knob. I know that now.
Unfortunately there were so few punters at the gig and those present were so underwhelmed by Sonia's musical mewling that you could hear a pin drop. You could certainly hear a tarpaulin being removed from on top of a machine gun. Subtle, it wasn't.
So I'd learned to diversify and nowadays dispatched each new victim in the manner and using the means which seemed appropriate. It seemed to me that Little Mix were positively crying out to be hacked to pieces by some kind of Japanese sword so I duly turned up on the day of their concert at Belper's internationally renowned River Gardens with my trusty katana tucked away underneath my trench coat.
There were loads of people around, kids mainly, but my eye was drawn to a lady of mature years in the plumb centre of the crowd who was dancing ecstatically, as if she had chewed her way through a two pound bag of peyote buttons. From the rear she reminded me of Maggie's ma in the Bob Dylan song: "She's sixty-eight but she says she's fifty-four". The revellers around her had cleared some space to allow her to flounce as freely as she wished and appeared to be in awe of this crazy, free-spirited harridan.
As the miming of Little Mix reached a crescendo, the wizened old crone lost herself completely in the music and shook her vile booty with such abandon that her party briefcase dropped from her shoulder to the floor and scattered its contents all over the place: a hairbrush; an industrial-sized sack of mint imperials; a copy of The People's Friend magazine; and some golden love balls which rolled around drunkenly for a while before coming to rest at my feet.
Ever the gentleman, I carefully picked up said balls with my pocket skankerchief, walked up behind the lady and placed my hand on her shoulder.
"Excuse me," I half-shouted above the din of manufactured Muzak. "I think you've dropped your... Hello Mum!"
Wow, how this altered the complexion of things...
B.R. 16/11/2013
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