‘I’m telling you man, she was a munter,’ Kevin Kinane announced when the subject of his brother’s ex came up in conversation again.
‘No she wasn’t,’ Peter protested weakly from a seat in the corner of the bar. Joe Kinane was watching it all with detached amusement, his other son Chris, the quiet one, sitting next to him. Palmer, Vince and some of our more established faces were all enjoying the sledging.
‘She had a canny pair of tits on her,’ conceded Kevin, ignoring his younger brother. ‘If you could have transplanted them onto a skinny bird, Keira Knightley maybe, then they would have looked good, but on her, well, they were a waste of a nice pair of puppies, if you ask me.’
‘Oi!’ warned Peter, ‘I am in the room!’
‘BOBFOC,’ said Palmer quietly.
Peter rounded on him and demanded, ‘What’s that supposed to fuckin’ mean?’
Palmer shrugged, ‘body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch.’ He then repeated the word, ‘BOBFOC’, to ensure Peter took in his meaning. Peter Kinane looked like he was about to start throwing punches.
His elder brother Kevin was gleeful. ‘He’s been upstairs in his room for weeks now, wank-stalking his ex on Facebook.’
‘No I fucking haven’t!’ replied Peter Kinane, seriously flustered now.
‘I caught you looking at her pictures on your laptop the other day, admit it man.’
‘So what,’ said Peter, ‘I was only bloody looking. It’s not a crime is it?’
‘No Peter, to be fair it’s not,’ I assured him because I was thankful for the distraction of this banter and when his face brightened a little I added, ‘it’s just a bit pathetic.’
‘Hey, howay man, don’t you start an’ all,’ he told me.
‘How long’s it been Peter? Since the break up?’ asked Palmer rhetorically, ‘three weeks? Oh well, never mind eh, because three weeks is the critical point.’
‘How’s that like?’ asked Peter, as Palmer reeled him in.
‘Well, if she really wasn’t shagging someone else behind your back when she dumped you…’
‘She wasn’t,’ Peter assured him.
‘She will be by now.’
‘Fuck off! Will she shite. She’s not like that.’
‘Yes she is Pete,’ said Vince, playing along with it.
‘They all are,’ announced Palmer solemnly, playing the wind-up to perfection, ‘you might think your lass is made of sugar and spice and all things nice but right now, even as I speak and you’re fretting about her, some big, hairy-bollocked bloke is up to his nuts in her.’
Peter launched himself at Palmer then, knocking the table between them to the ground, upending our beers in the process. We were creased up and we carried on laughing as an enraged Peter Kinane chased Palmer round the room, throwing haymaker punches that my bodyguard would have dodged easily if he hadn’t been laughing so hard himself.
In the end Peter managed to connect with one and Palmer was knocked off his feet. I’d never seen that before. Peter moved in to give Palmer a proper kicking and we all jumped in to restrain him, but Palmer was back on his feet already and he hit Peter Kinane with a supreme upper cut that rocked the younger man back on his heels and followed it with a martial-arts-style kick to the belly.
They both had venomous looks in their eyes now, so I shouted, ‘Pack it in, you two fairies!’ as the rest of the lads grabbed them and pulled them apart.
Palmer swore at Peter Kinane and I shouted at him, ‘shut the fuck up Palmer! You deserved that smack in the mouth, so take it like a man!’ and he gave me a sheepish look that seemed to acknowledge I might be right. Then I turned to the younger man, who was red in the face and panting, like he didn’t know how to even begin to quell his rage.
‘Calm down Peter,’ I told Kinane junior, ‘it’s just banter. Learn to dish it out and take it, if you want to stay up late with the grown-ups.’
‘Aye, aye, alright,’ he said, brushing away the arms that were restraining him. He took a moment to calm himself, ‘but he knows he was out of order. If he had said that about your lass, you’d have bloody punched him.’
Everybody went quiet then and Peter Kinane instantly realised he was out of order for daring to equate a lass he had been shagging for three months to my long-term partner, the daughter of the legendary Bobby Mahoney. I could see in his face he immediately recognised that fact and was worried.
‘No I wouldn’t,’ I assured him solemnly, ‘I’d just have him killed.’ And everybody fell about again.
My mobile rang then and someone said ‘saved by the bell’. The tension broke and everyone started to get their crap together and move away. I took the call.
‘I found him,’ said Sharp, ‘the man you’ve been looking for.’
14
‘Benwell’s not the smartest part of Newcastle,’ admitted Kinane, with something like under-statement, as he drove the car along one of its side streets with boarded-up shop fronts, ‘but it’s not as bad as they say.’
‘Bits of it I wouldn’t walk around on my own,’ I said, and he grunted a begrudging agreement to that, ‘loads of druggies and alkies who’d rob you and give you a serious kicking for the spite of it, there’s dog shit everywhere, the lasses are all pregnant by the time they’re thirteen and none of them ever know who the father is,’ he grunted at that too, ‘and then… there’s the rough part.’
‘Fuck off,’ but he was laughing when he said that.
‘And unfortunately for Jinky, that’s the bit he lives in.’
I remembered Jinky from the very early years of my involvement with Bobby’s crew, when I was just a nipper, long before I officially joined the firm. I was little more than an errand boy. I was handy for certain low-risk, low-consequence jobs and didn’t cost much. They were a source of pocket money and made me feel like I belonged somewhere when my ma was usually working at two, or even three, jobs at a time, some of them in Bobby Mahoney’s pubs, and my older brother didn’t want to look after me.
Unsupervised, I took to hanging round anywhere I reckoned I could make myself useful to Bobby or his main men. Some of them, as you might expect, were horrible to me. The last thing they wanted was a runty kid cramping their style. Others tolerated my presence and some were pretty decent. I knew that if I kept my mouth shut and did what was asked of me, I’d occasionally get some extra grub or some cash. Nobody in Bobby’s crew was ever broke. They were always flush with money and they liked to spend it, or even give it away, to show how minted they were. Some weeks I’d take home almost as much as my mum. I’d give most of it to her and when she asked how I’d got it I’d say, ‘running errands for Bobby’ and she’d snap, ‘make sure that’s all you’re doing’. But she never stopped me from going there and I think I knew why. My mother was honest all of her bloody life and look where it got her. She never had jack shit. The husband ran off and left her in the lurch, with two boys to bring up on her own and Our young’un was a bloody tearaway. He was uncontrollable at that age and she’d already credited me with having more sense than him, even then. I think, in the end, she didn’t have the energy left to argue with me about hanging around with Bobby Mahoney’s crew. Maybe she just thought I’d be safer if I was with them than on the streets on my own or as part of a gang. The older kids didn’t bother to pick a fight with me because they knew I was in with Bobby. He never tolerated drugs either, which was something my mother and he could agree upon.
‘Jinky’ Smith’s real name was Jimmy Smith and he shared the same name as a legendary footballer from the seventies. The real Jimmy Smith was a flair player with bags of style on the pitch who was called ‘Jinky’ off it. That sense of style seemed to sum our Jimmy Smith up, so he got landed with the same nickname and it stuck, long after the player had left St James’ Park.