Debt, page 3
And per their standards, Ailee was a woman. For me to get in the way of things would be misunderstood.
And my family would become a target.
I needed to get Ailee out of this place.
And I needed to get my mother out.
I flung Morty off the wall and down the steps. He stumbled and landed on his knees, choking. “I’ll fuckin kill you,” he said. “I’ll put you in your grave, Logan Graves.”
He pulled a second package out of his pocket, flung it on top of the steps. “Address is there. Tonigh’. No fail. Or Ailee gets sumffing coming to ’er.”
He got up and left.
I stared at the two brown packages. The first one had split, and a wild mixture of prescription drugs mixed in with more illicit ones lay spread on the floor.
Ailee was at school. I needed to get to her. I was sweating. Morty might make an example out of her anyway, just to teach me a lesson. So I wanted to rush to her school and pick her up.
I went inside to check on mum. She was ill today, on the couch in the sitting room with a half-empty bottle of liquor on the floor and Kleenex spread everywhere. “Everything OK, Logan?” she mumbled.
“Everything’s fine, mum. Just going out for a bit.”
She didn’t even acknowledge.
I didn’t own a gun. It’s hard to come by those in England, not without doing very special favors for people like Morty. I didn’t know if our crew would be on his side or mine. It began to dawn on me how little friends I really had there. We were all one crew, and loyalties ran thin in the crew. All they thought about was sex and money and drugs. Morty introduced that. Before him, it was only booze. But his peddling made him The Man. And he started throwing cash around like it was candy.
The boys liked him.
The girls liked him (many of them thirteen).
I realized, as I walked, then ran, to Ailee’s school, that I had been moving away from Morty for some months already, about as long as my dad had been dead. That I had been moving away from the entire crowd. And then, as I ran now, chest heaving, I started having other thoughts—that this whole bloody town was what I had been distancing myself from.
I wanted to get away, just to get the fuck away from it, go live in one of those bloody manors where butlers serve you wine and you don’t have to worry about your best ‘friend’ raping your thirteen year old sister.
This town took my dad’s life. Dad was not an honorable man. But this whole goddamned town was dishonorable, and it rotted you from within.
I reached Ailee’s school, panting, looking around for her. Some kids played netball behind a fence. Some boys were smoking outside, school ties undone, shirts untucked.
And that’s when I saw him. Not Morty, another guy from our crew. His name was Nate Ramsford. Big dude. Huge shoulders. And one helluva fighter.
My first reaction was panic, but the look on Nate’s face was not a threatening one, it was a concerned one.
When he saw me, he looked around then ran toward me. “You gotta leave,” he said. His eyes darted behind the school fence. “Where is she?”
I realized Nate was here to help me. “I don’t know. I just got here.”
Nate looked around, dark skin glowing under the sun. “Look, it’s not good. Here.” He pulled some cash out from his pocket.
“What—”
“Take it, Logan. Just take it. Morty’s got the crew ready. Look...” Nate looked around. “Look, Logan...” He stared at our feet. “She’s got no chance, mate. She’s...”
I ran.
I ran behind the fence and into the school and asked the girls where Ailee was.
No one had seen her.
Nate followed me, asked around as well.
One by one we asked each girl, each boy.
And then, one of the smokers: “’ey, you there.” I turned my head to face the kid, so did Nate. “You lookin for Ailee?”
“Yeah, where is she?”
“What’s it to ya?” the smoker-boy said.
I pulled out some cash from my pocket, gave him ten quid. Smoke Boy just looked at it, then up at me again. I pulled out another ten, gave it to him. He kept his hand open. Which is when Nate’s mighty hand wrapped itself around the boy’s throat and he shoved him against the fence.
Smoker Boy’s cigarette fell out of his mouth, scraping past Nate’s wrist. But Nate held on.
The boy couldn’t even talk. He rolled his eyes in the direction of a wall to our left.
Nate nodded, and I charged.
Nate charged behind me.
In the distance, I heard Smoker Boy saying, “You fuckin bugger! Fuck you, ya fuckin bollocks!”
I turned around a wall. And there she was. There she was. Kissing a boy, a young boy, romantically, not one of Morty’s crowd, her boyfriend maybe, and the boy’s hand was inching down her belly.
Nate stopped.
I stopped.
She had her hand around the boy’s wrist, and he seemed to be tugging down.
“Uh-uh,” I heard her say in between kisses.
And the boy’s hand kept going lower.
“Uh-uh.” Kiss, kiss, kiss. “Uh-uh. No, I’m not ready for that.” Kiss, kiss, kiss.
I saw her knuckles going white as she gripped his wrist harder, which is when he wrested it from her grip, yanked it away and then shoved his hand under her—
I went for him.
He was a young kid, so I didn’t lose my cool. But I shouldered him off her hard enough for him to fall to the ground.
The poor kid didn’t even try fight us, skinny runt that he was. His eyes went wide, his skin went pale, and then he fled in horror, stumbling as he got up to run.
I looked over at Ailee. She was straightening her skirt, wiping her lips. Looking down.
“You OK?” I asked.
She nodded.
“C’m’ere.” I put her under my arms and held her. And my world shattered when she began to cry.
Nate was staring at us, nervous. “We gotta go, mate.”
Ailee was under my arm when Nate and I turned the corner.
And then we saw Morty.
He was there, with a crew of five other guys, standing at the opposite end of the street. Two of them had crowbars in their hands, leaning against Morty’s yellow bad-boy car.
Morty, most likely, would be packing a gun. He did a lot of favors.
It was too late to turn back. They had seen us already.
Morty smiled, his ginger hair glowing on a rare day of sunlight.
One of the boys slapped the crowbar against his palm.
I was locked, uncertain what to do. I could maybe take one of them down. Nate could take one as well, maybe. I looked around for weapons, a stick, something.
I had a switchblade in my pocket, and I would use it if I needed to. But all that would do is end me up in prison. And then, what of Ailee and my mother? Besides, switchblades don’t do well against crowbars.
Which is when the miracle happened. A miracle which had my heart pumping in my throat and had me squeezing Ailee’s neck so hard she began to push away against my waist.
Morty and his crew simply got into the car, and they drove off. Gone. Nothing. Just a big show to let us know who’s boss. The wheels spun as he turned a curve. We heard the engine’s roars become softer as it moved away into the distance.
Morty smiled at me as he drove by, just smiling, smiling, smiling...like he knew something.
Nate and I looked at each other, relieved, confused, stunned. “Just a show,” Nate said.
I nodded, but I was still on high-alert. Miracles had never happened to me before, and I wasn’t going to start believing in them now.
But maybe that had been all he wanted. A big warning. That package still lay on my front steps. I could still deliver it. The message was clear. Do it, and Ailee is safe. Don’t, and...
I still wasn’t convinced, and while Nate and Ailee laughed on the way home, my mind still lingered on the six guys in total lingering outside of Morty’s car. All that show for nothing?
And then another thought began to impress itself into my mind. It came out of nowhere, and the more I rejected it, the more it seemed to knock heavy at my heart, scraping away like some old claw of a corpse.
No, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.
But he would.
And then it dawned on me, like some deathly flash of painful red light.
Sometimes you just know things. They come to you out of nowhere. There’s no explanation, like the sudden appearance of someone in your mind just before they die. It’s happened rarely to me, and this is one of the times it happened.
Morty hadn’t been at the school to threaten me.
He’d been at the school to check on me.
He’d been there to check if I had left my mom alone.
I just knew it.
I didn’t want to scare Ailee.
I didn’t want to leave her alone with Nate. It’s not that I didn’t trust him. He was the only one I trusted. But to divide us... If I was wrong (I had no evidence for what I was feeling, and maybe this is where I slipped up—if only I had moved faster...) If I was wrong, and Morty had planned on splitting me and Nate up all along, it would be a bad move to leave him and Ailee now to check on something I had no proof for.
It’s funny how the mind requires proof when the only proof needed is what you feel deep down in your gut.
So I walked faster, faster, faster, pulling Ailee along. She kept asking what was wrong, if everything was OK, why did I look worried?
I could see in Nate’s eyes that he suddenly understood my fear, because he started walking faster as well. Eventually, he began running. He didn’t need to tell me why. He began running and then Ailee said, “Logue, is everything OK? Logue, is mum OK?” At which point we both ran, my sister and I. We ran as fast as she could and when she couldn’t run we walked fast and then she ran again.
But we weren’t fast enough.
And I had been right. I had been right all along.
The windows of our crappy house had been smashed. The door hung on one hinge. The one pot plant that we had on the porch (old and withered) lay smashed on the floor. The brown paper bags were gone.
Ailee began to scream. I held her back while Nate went inside to check things out.
Her screaming became even louder. “Mummy! Mummy! Let me go, Logan. Let me go!”
But I couldn’t. Already I had formed a vision in my mind of what was inside. And I was too afraid to show my mind the evidence it demanded, evidence it didn’t need, because it already knew.
Nate stepped back outside, shook his head mournfully at me.
Ailee’s screams were a shrill pierce in my ear.
I lifted her up and crushed her in my arms. “I want to go inside, you idiot!” She hit her little fists against my shoulders, kicked her feet against my legs.
Nate shook his head more forcefully, looking over at Ailee who had her back turned to him.
His message was clear: Don’t let her inside. Whatever you do, don’t let your little sister inside.
-3-
Nate came over and grabbed Ailee for me. She continued to scream and to kick him. Nate said to her, “It’s OK, Ails. It’s OK. Best you not look at that stuff. It’s OK. We’re gonna take care of you.”
By now she was weeping furiously. The truth had hit her like it had hit me already minutes before.
But nothing could prepare me for what I would see when I walked inside.
What Morty had done here had not been a message. It had been a slaughter. Payback.
But what I wasn’t prepared for, what finally sent the little food I had eaten that day out of my stomach was the message on the wall, a message written in my mother’s blood which, the more I looked around, the more that blood seemed to be everywhere.
In my mother’s blood, written in big, capital letters on the wall, were five words, five words I will never forget:
ALL DEBTS MUST BE PAID.
-4-
It was a rough time for Ailee. She had lost her dad only a few months earlier. And now she had lost her mother.
She never did see the carnage inside. I think that’s why she hated me for so long after that day. Maybe if I had let her see it she could finally put an end to it in her mind.
But, no, I couldn’t. The image still haunts me in my dreams sometimes, and it haunts me every time I walk into the fighting cage.
It was a rough time for Ailee. Rough.
I called up an aunt of mine who had always hated my father and I told her what had just happened.
She blamed me, told me it was because I ran with the wrong crowd, that it was my fault. Then she blamed her sister, my mother, ‘for marrying that stupid man!’
I didn’t tell her it seems my dad had run with that crowd before me. “I’m taking Ailee!” she threatened. “I’m taking her out of your filthy hands!”
I was hoping that was what she’d say, and I was hoping she’d think it was her idea.
I settled at Nate’s place deep in East London. If I had lived in the slums, Nate lived in the gutters. But there was a couch there, and his grandmother cooked food with a smile. I made a point of not eating much. Nate didn’t have parents to bring in money either.
Ailee went over to live with Aunt Sophie in Wales, kicking and screaming. She blamed me for sending her away, told me I didn’t love her, that she hated me, that I was abandoning her. She blamed a lot of people. It wasn’t her fault. She needed an outlet, and I was happy to be that for her. She was safe now, and that was all I cared about.
It took months for her to start speaking to me again, and that’s only because I called her every day, every day, and insisted on talking to her. Aunt Sophie tried to get in the way, but I steamrolled through that. I’m persistent when it comes to the people I care about, and nobody, nobody, gets in the way of that. I’m glad I did because, fortunately, young minds heal faster than older ones. And Ailee eventually forgot (or buried?) what had happened to mum and to dad. She started living the life of a normal girl. Her past was gone. She had left the dumps, and had a chance of making something for herself in a safer environment.
And after that healing process, after she no longer needed an outlet and she realized I was on her side, after we had slowly built our relationship up again over a long distance to the point where she was actually happy to hear my voice again, she asked me to come be with her, to join her in Wales.
Truth is, I was broke. And Aunt Sophie would never take me in after I had ‘destroyed our family’s life.’
I had a place to stay, for now. But I couldn’t impose on Nate’s grandmother’s hospitality for much longer. They were good people, but they were poor people, like we were.
I fixed up some things around the house for his grandmother. I’m good with my hands. She had a fence that had been cut through and I took some materials from the site I was working at and repaired it for her. Their toilet wouldn’t flush properly either, a simple matter of replacing the lift chain. I wasn’t much of a cook, but one day I tried to make them steaks with mashed potatoes. Nate’s grandmother couldn’t sit still, and before the stove was even hot, she shoved me away and did it herself. She’s a proud woman.
It was at one of the construction sites I was working at that I discovered the underworld of street fighting. And how much it pays.
I did my first fight at eighteen. I made five hundred pounds on that fight. Five hundred. I don’t think I’d ever seen five hundred quid in one pair of hands in all my life. I opened an account in my sister’s name and put some money in there for her. I paid Nate the money he had given me. He refused to take it. I insisted, and then he told me he didn’t want it “because it was drug money.” The look in his eyes said how he felt about it. The same type of money that lead to your father’s death, and your mother’s death.
So I took the equivalent of what he gave me and found one of those anti-drug websites that does events and talks and distributes flyers and all that kind of shit for kids, and I donated it to them. Debt paid.
The money I was making was illicit. I couldn’t use it to get a mortgage for a house and move up to Wales and be with my sister. And there’s no fighting in Wales. Fights happen in London, Frankfurt, Moscow, and the States. Paris has a few, but the French are a hard crowd to please. Lisbon has fights, but they don’t pay well. Same for Madrid, and a lot of the Eastern Bloc countries.
The States fights paid the most, even with their weaker currency.
It wasn’t long before I was on a plane to New York, USA. A place called Bushwick, to be precise, in some old warehouse that stank of piss and sweat and dust mixed together. We don’t have agents as such in the underground fight scene, but there’s no better name for the guys who make the deals and take the cuts. I had hooked up with a guy called István, from Hungary. He was a dog hungry for money, but he was as honest a dog as you could find in this business, or so I had thought. Money has a scent, and sometimes that scent is stronger than the will to do the right thing. But István’s betrayal would only come later.
The warehouse in Bushwick was packed. Packed. It was in the middle of nowhere and the turn-out looked like something out of a prizefight.
I wasn’t the big name. The big name was a big German dude called Juergen Kaiser. He was fighting a guy who went by the name B.A. Yes, he was black, yes, he was big, and yes, he wore a gold chains around his neck.
Kaiser was not the German’s real name either. No one uses real names in these fights. He had a big fat Nazi sign on his chest as a tattoo.
I’m sorry to say that B.A. was pulverized by Kaiser. It was expected. Kaiser was about as close as you can get to a champion in the underworld of dogfighting. That’s the unofficial name for what we do.
My own bout was one of the early ones. I was the underdog. The dude I was fighting (a little chubby, Italian) was a well-known local. Corleone, he called himself. I took him in the first round.
It didn’t make me popular with the local Italians, but it made me popular with the organizers. I was nineteen at the time, four years ago.
