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Part One
I wants cash off Oggy.
Six thousand pounds to be exact.
As I sits in Oggy’s front room –
The ‘waiting room’.
The same thoughts come into my head:
Don’t fuck this up.
Don’t fuck this up.
As mantras go it’s not a great one.
Not very positive.
I likes to think of myself as a positive guy.
That’s why I grew a moustache.
Not a great moustache but there it is.
I felt it would distinguish me from the crowd.
Really.
It’s 10.27 a.m.
I look up to see Gary in the doorway. Mo’s behind as they both can’t fit in the doorway together. Mo has to talk over Gary’s shoulder:
A’right, sunshine, Oggy will see you now.
I works as a drug dealer in Fairwater.
It’s a drugs cooperative.
There’s six equal shares. Everyone grows separate and then pools the gear. Then if anyone gets arrested, no biggie. You gets done but you still get a sixth of the profits. You don’t get as much cash as independents but it takes the risks out of the game. Makes sense yeah? I’m pulling down, most weeks, about two hundred quid. I know, not exactly Pablo Escobar but it keeps me going. Just.
I grows my gear behind Stannie’s house. In a greenhouse.
I puts in fake tomatoes and no one’s any the wiser. Serious.
The price of toms has gone up recently which is a fucking blow.
Stannie is a little… shy, what with his actual job being a fence for stolen goods. If you wants it, Stannie can get it: from a labradoodle to a new passport to a mobility scooter. Serious.
After Celia (who you will meet later), left it was just me and my dad, Mark, living opposite Fairwater Fish Bar, you knows? The red-brick flats? Celia lived there till I was fourteen. If you go up the top of the road, you can see right over the city – see the Principality Stadium and down, beyond that Cardiff Bay. It’s that close.
I don’t call him Dad, I calls him Mark or ‘the old man’. My dad Mark’s ‘Mark’ is a traditional one with a ‘K’ and when him and Celia had me they thought they’d name their boy after Mark but give it a modern twist.
My ‘Marc’ is with a ‘C’.
Tha’s a modern twist in Fairwater.
Sitting in Oggy’s front room I’m thinking:
Don’t fuck this up.
Don’t fuck this up.
Like my life depends on it.
Only it’s not my life that depends on it.
It’s Mark’s.
With a ‘K’.
Oggy is a twat.
A twat with cash.
He suffers from the desire that a lot of men round here suffers with – a desire to never be a disappointment to himself.
Recently there’s been this thing about Wonga clamping down and for many it’s a nightmare – you just can’t get through the week to get food. And, believe it or not, Oggy’s rates are actually cheaper than Wonga or Tangerine or whatever the fuck company. So there is a lie that loan sharks are exploitative.
There is also a stereotype that if you can’t pay, loan sharks come round your house and fuck you up.
That bit is true.
Not Oggy personally – he couldn’t punch his way out of a Clark’s pie – but Gary and Mo would.
So I’m in Oggy’s thinking:
Don’t fuck this up and then it’s my turn.
Oggy could have afforded a proper office but made his ‘clients’ come to his house; something about lording it over your fellow man, you know?
For some reason, I thinks that’s why he’s got the heating on on a nice day.
Oggy’s taken the gangster thing to heart.
And is now playing his part.
He has a tattoo of him and Beyoncé in bed together, wrapped in silk sheets, on his neck. When he speaks the vein in his neck moves and Beyoncé starts to jiggle back and forth.
What a twat.
I goes through. Oggy’s done the back room out like a quaint pub, complete with pool table.
He waves his pool cue at a bar stool where I perches like a parrot with one leg.
Fucking shaky.
When I goes to speak – I just got to ask him why the heating’s on – Oggy stops me with an imperious wave of his cue.
How’s it going, Wendy?
–
When we was in school, Marc was in all the top sets, wasn’t you, Wendy?
Gary and Mo do the laugh-along thing, even though they must know he’s a complete cockstain too.
Remember when we went to Rachel Patterson’s party, brah?
Every time I meets Oggy it’s the same stories – or a version of them.
Wendy here had the chance to fuck the very same Rachel Patterson and you know what he did?
Dramatic pause for Gary and Mo’s benefit.
He came in his pants even before he got to stick it in her.
Did I mention he was a twat?
I gives Oggy my pitch – I’ll get straight into it as I knows you’re a busy man, blah blah fucking blah.
Oggy ac...
