Free Fighting to the Death by Carl Merritt Page A

and two other kids stepped out of the gate and heard it sliding shut behind us. I thought to myself ‘Well, you’re on your tod now. No more nice gentle screws to tuck you up at night. Back to the real world.’ I couldn’t wait. I shivered, not from the cold but, as my mum would say, ‘Because someone just walked over your grave, Son.’
    I was five-feet-eleven-inches of pure muscle from all that time spent in the borstal gym. I’d been capable of growing abeard since the age of fourteen. I was a man in everything but actual age.
    The year had started badly with that iron bar attack at the Pigeons that wrecked my boxing career, then I’d got banged up for beating up that bastard Terry. Now I was determined to start my life all over again. There was no turning back.
    The few decent screws back at Rochester had told me it was the air you first noticed when you got out. ‘Air doesn’t have to smell of disinfectant,’ they said. ‘You think this is normal … wait till you smell real air again.’ At the time I hadn’t given it much thought but now I was out I remembered every word.
    The same dark blue transit with the blacked-out windows that had delivered me to the hell hole was waiting to take us boys back to East London. No one said much in the van as we drove through Kent and then into the Dartford Tunnel. The bright florescent lighting in the tunnel made me squint. I was so relieved when we finally drove up into the grim grey of the East End. The screws pushed us out just by Bow Station.
    Over to one side, near where the steps led up from Bow Underground Station, an old boy in a brown plastic apron was opening up a flower stall. As the van pulled away, I strolled over to him but he ignored me.
    ‘Got any daffs?’ I asked him.
    ‘Over there.’
    They were at the far end of the stall, high up at the back. I reached across and took down a bunch. They were still wet, and bound tightly together with elastic bands.
    ‘Fifty pence,’ the old boy said.
    I fingered the coins: some of them had been taken off me when I’d been nicked. I was just about to hand over the moneywhen I heard my name being called. I turned round to see Uncle Pete and two of his heavyweight mates in a white Cortina. Uncle Pete looks a lot like my dad. He’s four years younger, a big rock-’ n’ -roller and six feet tall. Still works out every day.
    ‘Forget the flowers, Son,’ he said in his strong East End twang. ‘You’re comin’ home with me.’
    I certainly wasn’t going to have a ruck with him so I jumped in the back of his Dagenham Dustbin.
    While we drove across London to Pete’s home in Croydon, South London, he and his mates talked about the doorman game and how someone with my skills would fit in perfectly. Uncle Pete had been running a crew of doormen for a few years down at some nightclubs in Croydon.
    That night I kipped at Uncle Pete and Aunt Marge’s house. ‘You’re here till further notice, Son,’ he said. I knew I was going to enjoy myself and, to be honest about it, I knew I needed a fresh start. Maybe this cage wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
    A couple of nights later, me, my mum and brothers John and Ian steamed into a few bevvies at Uncle Pete’s local boozer. Ian and John ended up having to carry Mum and me back to Pete’s house but no one was complaining. After what we’d been through, a few drinks were perfectly natural.
    I had a nasty dream that night about being attacked in borstal and I was sweating heavily when I opened my eyes and saw the sun peeping through the window. I suppose I still expected some lousy screw to waltz in and start barking orders at me and kick the shit out of the end of my bed.
    I’d survived all those months in borstal without even touching a ciggie but the deadly weed went and hooked mewithin days of getting out. And life inside Rochester had made me grow up quickly. I’d probably seen more than most blokes twice my age. But I knew I now had to do something with my