"The Three Rabbits, half eight, in the snug," I says.

All right, it ain't strictly an office as such, but like I says, it's me place of business and it does very nicely thank you.

Geezer says he'll be there, and puts the phone down.

One. Two. Three.

Time for business.

The Rabbits is a s.h.i.t-hole. I'll give you that. But that's part of the beauty of the place. Always quiet. Never no disturbances, or nothing. And in the snug, there's normally just me and No-Arms Maurice, if his old girl's let him out. Lost both his arms in a run-in with Harry the Hatchet. Harry's sister done a bit of waitin tables in a Greasy Spoon on the Old Kent Road, and Maurice took a bit of a fancy to her. Used to slap her a.r.s.e as she went by his table. No harm meant. Just Harry never see it like that. Called Maurice over to his butchers one night. It was a Friday. I think. Took both his arms off at the shoulder with a fire axe.

Seemed a bit harsh at the time.

But Maurice ain't here tonight. It's just me. And this weedy lookin geezer at the bar what's looked round soon as I've come in.

"Mr Splinters?" he says, desperate look on his face.

I mean, I pretty much look the part, but I suppose he's gotta be sure.

I stare him down. One. Two. Three.

"Yes," I says. And I say, "Take a seat, Mr ..."

"Briscoe. Tommy Briscoe." And he holds out his sweaty palm for me to shake. Which I do. Business is business, as they say.

We sit in the corner, opposite the door. Standard procedure. And I go through the particulars with him.

Turns out it's his boss needs doin. Some row about money, or something. Same old s.h.i.t. I get one of me contracts out me pocket, flatten it out a bit, and hand it over to him. He's a bit confused, at first. Asks me what it is. I says it's a contract, you know, between me and him. So things is done proper. He nods, and feels in his pocket for a pen. Pulls out a pencil. See, that's no good, a pencil. Gotta be black ink, for legal purposes and all that. My mate Terry told me. He went to college and everything. Woodwork, I think, but he knows his stuff with fillin forms and stuff.

I go up to the bar and call round for Eddie.

"Eddie?" I says. "You gotta pen?"

I can see through the other bar Eddie's servin a punter.

"Be a minute, Charlie," he shouts back.

"All right, Eddie," I says. "No problem, mate."

When Eddie's sorted me out with a pen, I goes back and gets down to the matter at hand. His name's Mr Hammond. Not the geezer in front of me, he's Briscoe, like I said. The geezer what needs sortin, that's Hammond. Won't say his first name, just says him as Mr Hammond.

Computers or something, something to do with the buildin trade, that's what he says he works in, this Briscoe geezer. Says this Hammond's been st.i.tchin him up with overtime money and stuff. There's other things, but I start losin the will to f.u.c.kin live when punters start goin into their personal s.h.i.t and that, their reasons, you know. Long and short of it, they want a job done. That's all it comes down to at the end of the day.

"So what do you want me to do?" I says to the geezer.

"What do you mean?" he says.

"Well, you know, it's all about degrees, ain't it, mate."

He nods, like he understands what I'm getting at.

"I got a price list here, if you wanna gander."

I get me "menu", as I like to call it, out me other pocket. It's a bit screwed up and the writing's a bit smudged where I've had me hand in me pocket, but it'll do.

I hand it over to him. It's me basic list, but I can get as creative as they want, for the right money, if you know what I mean.

He puts down the contract what he's been holdin and has a close look at me list. Up and down. Got a face on him like a kid in a sweet shop.

"What's this?" he says, showin me the list, his face all screwed up. "Andycappin?"

"Andycappin. You know, break their legs, feet, toes, whatever you want. Andycappin."

"Oh," he says. "Handicapping."

"That's right," I says. "Andycappin," I take me list off him and start reading it out. "Andycappin, neecappin, kidnappin."

I tell him the kidnappin thing ain't their kids and that. I don't do none of that s.h.i.t. I got me morals. I'm dead serious when I say that to him. I ain't no perv or nothing.

"They're me Level Ones," I says. "Then it's up a level to your basic shootin and your stabbin."

I look dead in his eyes. Hold him there.

"So, what'll it be?" I says.

He's gone all quiet. He's thinkin hard on whether he really wants what he thinks he wants. They all go like this when I show em the list. I ain't got no truck with timewasters, see, so I lay it on pretty thick at this stage.

But, to his credit, he comes up smilin.

"I want him gone, Mr Splinters. Taken out. I'm prepared to pay whatever it takes."

That's what I like to hear.

I nudge the contract across the table towards him.

"Have a read of that, and sign at the bottom, please, mate."

He gives it a quick once-over and asks me for the pen.

"Don't you wanna read the small print, you know, acquaint yourself with all the particulars?" I says.

And he don't. He takes the pen and he signs and he shakes me hand and he's off.

Never even read the small print.

Briscoe tipped me off this Hammond geezer worked late at the office on a Thursday. In the industrial park on the outside of town. So here I am. Behind a stack of pallets. Waitin. All blacked up, I am. Not like Al Jolson or nothing, I mean, just me clothes. The only light's from the office, so when that goes out it'll be dark as f.u.c.k out here.

I got me shooter down the front of me trousers. Don't even know what it is, you know, the make or nothing. Never been interested. Got it second-hand off Twinkles MacKenzie from the bookies. I never give him nothing for it, but I slice him off a wedge whenever it comes into play, like. Got a silencer and everything. Never let me down yet, it hasn't.

The light in the office goes out. Pitch black. Door opens. Door shuts. Locks up. Here he comes. I wait till he's just pa.s.sed before I make me move. Then I jump him. Before he knows it, he's got his face in the dust and me knee in his back. I pull the shooter out the front of me trousers. Touch it to where the back of his head meets his neck, pointin up a bit.

Phht. Phht. Job done.

I'm just gettin up when I see something move from behind another load of pallets to me left. A shadow in the dark. Comes straight for me, holdin out his hand. That Briscoe bloke. The f.u.c.kin idiot. Wanted to see his boss go down in a right load of bullets like off the Westerns. Right made up, he is.

"Mr Splinters, this is the happiest day of my life. You've no idea how-"

He's stopped. Cos I'm pointin the gun in his face. He's proper s.h.i.ttin it. To be expected, I suppose. Given his situation.

One. Two. Three.

"Did you not read the small print, Mr Briscoe?" I says, knowin he knows I know he never.

He shakes his head. Slow and scared. I move the shooter to the middle of his forehead.

I know this one off by heart. Thought it up meself when I was talkin the whole deal over with Ronnie one night in The Rabbits.

"In the event of the punter that's you turnin up to have a gander at the contracted party that's me doin the business, the contracted party that's me again is beholden unto himself to do the punter in by any means necessary. That's you again, I'm afraid, Mr Briscoe."

I stuck this one in the small print as a safeguard, if you like. Happens more often than you think. Matrimonial cases, normally. Want to see their cheatin other half get what's comin to em. But I can't have no witnesses, see. Gotta look after meself. No other c.u.n.t's goin to.

That's the thing with the small print. The thing this Briscoe bloke ain't counted on. All them words at the bottom that are too little to see, if you don't keep your eyes peeled, it's them little words what's gonna f.u.c.k you up. Cos they're too easy to overlook. That's what it is. We don't pay enough attention. We just wanna go on our merry little way, thinkin everything's gonna be all right. But it ain't.

It's like when you're born. You come bouncin out, eyes full of wonder. You've chose your mum and you've chose your dad. You've read the contract: go to school get a job get married two kids, one boy, one girl. And you live happily ever after.

Piece of p.i.s.s.

But you never bothered to read the small print. The dad that beat the c.r.a.p out of you if you ever dared open your f.u.c.kin mouth. Small print. Gettin beat to s.h.i.t every day at school for bein a f.u.c.kin moron and watchin your old man beatin the s.h.i.t out of your mum and you not bein able to do a f.u.c.kin thing about it. Small print. The sound of her cryin and screamin through your bedroom wall breakin your heart as you lay awake at night. Small print.

Your nan, your dear old nan, the only person you loved in the whole world, peggin it on your thirteenth birthday. Small print. The tears you shed that day. Small print. The gettin laid off at the factory and never gettin a proper job ever again. Small print. The wife that left you for the plumber downstairs. Small print. The kids. The kids you never had. f.u.c.kin small print.

One. Two. Three. Deep breath.

Phht. Phht.

Briscoe crumbles to the ground, blood spillin out a hole between his eyes.

Small print.

EAST OF SUEZ, WEST OF CHARING CROSS ROAD.

John Lawton.

UNHAPPINESS DOES NOT fall on a man from the sky like a branch struck by lightning, it is more like rising damp. It creeps up day by day, unfelt or ignored until it is too late. And if it's true that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, then the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts in Tolstoy's equation, because George Horsfield was unhappy in a way that could only be described as commonplace. He had married young and he had not married well. In 1948 he had answered the call to arms. At the age of eighteen he hadn't much choice. National Service the Draft the only occasion in its thousand-year history that England had had peacetime conscription. It was considered a necessary precaution in a world in which, to quote the US Secretary of State, England had lost an empire and not yet found a role. Not that England knew this England's att.i.tude was that we had crushed old Adolf and we'd be b.u.g.g.e.red if we'd now lose an empire it would take more than little brown men in loincloths ... OK, so we lost India ... or Johnny Arab with a couple of petrol bombs or those Bolshy Jews in their d.a.m.n kibbutzes OK, so we'd cut and run in Palestine, but dammit man, one has to draw the line somewhere. And the line was east of Suez, somewhere east of Suez, anywhere east of Suez a sort of moveable feast really.

George had expected to do his two years square-bashing or polishing coal. Instead, to both his surprise and pleasure, he was considered officer material by the War Office Selection Board. Not too short in the leg, no dropped aitches, a pa.s.sing knowledge of the proper use of a knife and fork and no pretensions to be an intellectual. He was offered a short-service commission, rapidly trained at Eaton Hall in Cheshire a beggarman's Sandhurst and put back on the parade ground not as a private but as 2nd Lt H. G. Horsfield RAOC.

Why RAOC? Because the light of ambition had flickered in George's poorly exercised mind he meant to turn this short-service commission into a career and he had worked out that promotion was faster in the technical corps than in the infantry regiments and he had chosen the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the "suppliers", whose most dangerous activity was that they supplied some of the chaps who took apart unexploded bombs, but, that allowed for, an outfit in which one was unlikely to get blown up, shot at or otherwise injured in anything resembling combat.

George's efforts notwithstanding, England did lose an empire, and the bits it didn't lose England gave away with bad grace. By the end of the next decade a British Prime Minister could stand up in front of an audience of white South Africans, until that moment regarded as our "kith and kin", and inform them that "a wind of change is blowing through the continent". He meant "the black man will take charge", but as ever with Mr Macmillan, it was too subtle a remark to be effective. Like his "you've never had it so good" it was much quoted and little understood.

George did not have it so good. In fact the fifties were little else but a disappointment to him. He seemed to be festering in the backwaters of England Nottingham, Bicester postings only relieved, if at all, by interludes in the backwater of Europe known as Belgium. The second pip on his shoulder grew so slowly it was tempting to force it under a bucket like rhubarb. It was 1953 before the pip bore fruit. Just in time for the coronation.

They gave him a few years to get used to his promotion he boxed the compa.s.s of obscure English bases then Lt Horsfield was delighted with the prospect of a posting to Libya, at least until he got there. He had thought of it in terms of the campaigns of the Second World War that he'd followed with newspaper clippings, a large cork board and drawing pins when he was a boy Monty, the eccentric, lisping Englishman, versus Rommel, the old Desert Fox, the romantic, halfway-decent German. Benghazi, Tobruk, El Alamein the first land victory of the war. The first real action since the Battle of Britain.

There was plenty of evidence of the war around Fort Kasala (known to the British as 595 Ordnance Depot, but built by the Italians during their brief, barmy empire in Africa). Mostly it was sc.r.a.p metal. Bits of tanks and artillery half-buried in the sand. A sort of modern version of the legs of Ozymandias. And the fort itself looked as though it had taken a bit of a bashing in its time. But the action had long since settled down to the slow-motion favoured by camels and even more so by donkeys. It took less than a week for it to dawn on George that he had once more drawn the short straw. There was only one word for the Kingdom of Libya boring. A realm of sand and camel s.h.i.t.

He found he could get through a day's paperwork by about eleven in the morning. He found that his clerk-corporal could get through it by ten, and since it was received wisdom in Her Majesty's Forces that the devil made work for idle hands, he enquired politely of Corporal Ollerenshaw, "What do you do with the rest of the day?"

Ollerenshaw, not having bothered either to stand or salute on the arrival of an officer, was still behind his desk. He held up the book he had been reading Teach Yourself Italian.

"Come sta?"

"Sorry, Corporal, I don't quite ..."

"It means, 'How are you?' sir. In Italian. I'm studying for my O level exam in Italian."

"Really?"

"Yes, sir. I do a couple of exams a year. Helps to pa.s.s the time. I've got Maths, English, History, Physics, Biology, French, German and Russian this year I'll take Italian and Art History."

"Good Lord, how long have you been here?"

"Four years sir. I think it was a curse from the bad fairy at my christening. I would either sleep for a century until kissed by a prince or get four years in f.u.c.kin' Libya. Scuse my French, sir."

Ollerenshaw rooted around in his desk drawer and took out two books Teach Yourself Russian and a Russian-English, English-Russian Dictionary.

"Why don't you give it a whirl, sir, it's better than goin' bonkers or s.h.a.ggin' camels."

George took the books and for a week or more they sat unopened on his desk.

It was hearing Ollerenshaw through the part.i.tion "Una bottiglia di vino rosso, per favore" "Mia moglie vorrebbe gli spaghetti alle vongole" that finally prompted him to open them. The alphabet was a surprise, so odd it might as well have been Greek, and as he read on he realized it was Greek and he learnt the story of how two Orthodox priests from Greece had created the world's first artificial alphabet for a previously illiterate culture by adapting their own to the needs of the Russian language. And from that moment George was hooked.