‘Shall I drink your health before

The gun-butt raps upon the door.’

I put down the sheets, drained the coffee and said, ‘Memorise! Kiss my ass.’

The Doc was saying, ‘I keep breaking out in spots… spots like Croydon, Norwood, and bloody Brixton.’

The pub was packed and he was in full flight. What they call a two-fisted drinker and he drank in a similar fashion. A big man, six feet two inches, near 240 pounds and a lot of it was muscle. He kept his head shaved to the skull and it all added to his bull appearance. But startlingly blue eyes, a broken nose and full mouth. He was dressed in a white tracksuit and of course, the Doc Martens, polished to a frenzied spit. I met him in prison, he’d been in and out of Pentonville more times than the postman. I’d been convicted of GBH… which was OK… if they wanted to call it grievous bodily harm, I wasn’t arguing the toss. A mugger had hopped on my back down in Waterloo and I’d tried to kill the fucker. In fact, I was sure I had done as I gave it my best shot. I hadn’t done good in the nick, I couldn’t get the rhythm… and would you want to. In fights all the time, I could learn the words but I couldn’t catch the melody. That’s when I met the Doc and he showed me the score. Why a huge Irishman became my solution is one of those odd events that defy analysis. Our friendship continued in the straight world and we went into business together.

He’d taken advantage of the Open University to attain his ‘O’ Levels and went all the way through to take a B.A. in Literature. It demonstrated, he said, not so much how smart he was as the length of time he’d been inside. I reckoned if anyone knew the MacNeice dude, it was him. Our business brought in a lotta cash but fuck, he needed it. The man loved to spend.

This evening, he’d thrown an impromptu party in our local as his team had bought a new player. Fuck knows, they needed to. What he’d done was put a grand behind the bar and ya-hoo, it was open season… party time. He’d once said to me, ‘They don’t trust an educated Irishman, it’s like an uppity nigger.’