London Calling - James Craig [35]
‘This is great,’ Dom had laughed, as he won another game, taking a couple of quid off Carlyle in the process. ‘If marbles are all they can fight with, we’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. They are really, truly fucked.’
Sitting in Silver’s new bachelor pad, enviously eyeing his stroke mags and watching his new twenty-inch Philips television, Carlyle wondered where the money to pay for all this luxury had come from. It certainly wasn’t from playing marbles, or even from police overtime payments. Carlyle himself was still living with his parents in Fulham, and couldn’t afford to buy as much as an outside toilet anywhere within two hundred miles of London. Renting wasn’t much easier. Dom’s place seemed way, way out of his league. Covering the top floor of a Victorian house, Carlyle reckoned that the flat must have cost him twenty grand, maybe more. That was a hell of a lot of money for a twenty-something kid. For sure, no one would give you a mortgage for that amount on a constable’s salary.
‘Stupid buggers. They should have seen the writing on the wall long ago.’ Dom stood in the doorway, wearing a Van Morrison Wavelength tour T-shirt, as he waved a large spliff in the direction of the television. It struck Carlyle that Dom was turning into a right old hippy bastard. What ever happened to punk? It was almost as if The Clash, still struggling along in name only, had never happened,
The smell was good, but Carlyle declined Dom’s offer of a toke. Dope wasn’t really his thing; invariably it would give him a splitting headache and make him puke. He liked his drugs to get him going, rather than slow him down.
Carlyle watched the embers glow as Dom took another greedy drag. Back in television land, one of the union leaders appeared on the screen and started talking about ‘dignity’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘the need to keep fighting’. The man looked haggard, and so haunted that you almost expected him to burst into tears at any minute.
‘Idiots!’ Dominic snarled. ‘Donkeys leading lions.’
‘If the lions really were lions,’ Carlyle asked, ‘would they really allow themselves to be led by donkeys?’
‘Smart-arse.’ Dom took another puff.
Carlyle shrugged.
Dom failed to blow a smoke ring and coughed. ‘Seriously though,’ he said through the haze, ‘that’s a bloody good question, Johnny boy … now shift up.’
Carlyle moved to one end of the sofa and Dom flopped down beside him. For the next few minutes, Dom stared at the television screen intently, without saying a word. Eventually the news bulletin moved on to other stories. Apparently, Nelson Mandela had refused a deal from the South African government which would see him released from jail in return for renouncing armed struggle.
‘Bad move, Nelson, old son,’ Dom remarked airily.
‘If he does a deal with them, it will damage his credibilty,’ Carlyle said earnestly.
‘Credibility’s overrated,’ said Dom sharply. ‘He’s been in jail for what … twenty years? He’s old … what, in his sixties?’
‘Something like that.’
Dom pointed the spliff at the screen. ‘Now he should get out while he’s got the chance. Once he’s out, Botha and his boys are finished. Even that bitch Thatcher won’t be able to stop him.’ He clenched his fist: ‘Nelson! You’re a lion! It’s time to roar!’
Dominic’s political stance was at least as surprising as his property ownership, since Carlyle had never previously heard him speak of anything other than football and girls. Even if it was the dope talking, which Carlyle was sure it was, he sounded nothing like the Dom he thought that he knew. He certainly sounded nothing like a copper. Carlyle wondered for a minute if he might suddenly whip a pile of newspapers from behind the sofa and try to sell him a copy