CHAPTER ONE of THE CRACK AND THE SNOW

Where Basil comes in a blaze of glory, but goes in a puff of smoke!

The drugs king sits

On his arrogant throne,

Away and above and apart.

Even children are twisted to serve him,

And greed has corrupted

What once was a heart.

Raven’s Child

John Denver and Joe Henry

ONE:

Where Basil comes in a blaze of glory,

and goes in a puff of smoke.

Death.

An inconsequential little word, isn’t it? Three consonants and two vowels, and running to a paltry two syllables in length �" nothing special or mystical in that. What it represents, however, conjures up a whole host of fears, phantasms, bugbears, and oppressive monomania in the mind of every living creature that can be termed as being even remotely compos mentis �" however brave they purport to be. They dread having to sally forth into a prolonged and bloody battle with the great usurper of life �" he whose skeletal countenance humanity sees only in the enigmatic concealment of his cowl, and who is known as the dreaded Grim Reaper �" for the unimpeachable and universal fact that bare mortal flesh is no defence against his scalpel-sharp scythe and glacial heart. They know beyond certainty that in every case �" bar none �" there can be only one outcome: the slicing of the delicate thread which tethers mortals, none too securely, to the land of the living, and the ultimate cessation of their far too brief encounter with sentience.

No-one deserves to be swindled out of that great God-given gift of Life by the skeletal conman, and be forced to pass from their precarious place in nature into the land of eternity. Especially when one considers that the enjoyment of this hiatus from non-existence only lasts a mere celestial femtosecond, and the end result is to give themselves to ever-tormenting flames and sulphuric fumes.

But �" and here’s the most sickening and dispiriting factor in the whole sorrowful situation of being in the state called ‘Life’ �" they all must face that blackguard envoy of extinction and succumb to his all-vanquishing weapon; they all must end up as cadaverous examples of the embalmer’s craft, literally gutted and pickled in formaldehyde, like some macabre kipper for an ogre’s breakfast. To cut a long story short, every living organism that ever was, every organism that is, and every organism there ever will be, simply must snuff it: rich man, poor man, single cell amoeba... it makes no odds. Its happening is as inexorable as time itself �" and just as inescapable.

When that horrible happening eventually comes to pass, however, everyone would like it to be in as pleasant a location as possible, with loved ones around to hold their trembling hand and mop their fevered brow as they take their fearful first step into, as old Bill Shakespeare had it, ‘the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. They would like it to be as quick as possible, with no puddles of blood and guts, no soul tainting shame of how or why they met their demise, and definitely little or no pain.

But above all, with some semblance of dignity.

Unfortunately for Liam Brush (who, rather predictably and regrettably sported the moniker of ‘Basil’) that preferred option was simply not on the agenda. For the poor unfortunate fellow’s five foot four form lay tethered to mortality by a single strand of waning thread. But his gossamer link to life was seemingly empowered with the strength of Superman’s jockstrap, for it stubbornly refused to rupture �" even though his spleen had already done so, and despite his dearest wish that it would do just that.

He lay, a bedraggled and beaten man, on a flea-ridden blanketless bed, the piss-stained mattress of which had virtually no springs left �" most of which did remain wormed their rusty way into Basil’s yielding flesh. But this pain, though considerable, was nothing compared with that afforded by his other injuries: a few full-blooded clouts with a baseball bat had seen both his kneecaps turn into bonemeal; the tendons of his left arm had been severed by a slash or two from a six inch flick-knife; and more than a few not so gentle slaps from a callous hand or four had made his nose resemble the Millennium Dome. The bestial beating that had engendered these injuries had also caused internal bleeding that should have done for him long since.

But when to those trifles you add the facts that a size 10 Doc Marten boot (complete with foot, leg, arse and so on of a twenty-stone hardman) was doing an Irish Jig on his larynx, and a hypodermic needle filled with an opaque fluid was stuck into the crook of his right arm (the plunger of which said hypo was ready to be sunk), and you will begin to comprehend that if Basil marked down today in his diary of ‘Days To Remember’ it would be for all the wrong reasons.

The aforementioned diary would probably be posthumous, for his appointment with Death was imminent, sure as eggs is eggs.

As for death with dignity? Get real!

There were faces, though. But these were very different from the buoying phizzogs of kith and kin, whose bravely borne smiles of comfort and love provide spiritual succour in such times of trial. No, siree, they were the scarred, battered and belligerent faces plonked firmly atop the somewhat squat and rather rotund frames of two of Scotland’s foremost hard men: the forty year old McAllistair twins, Shuggie and Hector.

“I’ll no ask again. Where the friggin’ hell did you put the suitcase, scumbucket?” The wearer of the Bovver Boot �" Shuggie �" barked out the question in a Glaswegian accent. The voice was a gravely rasp because of his liking for the cheapest and roughest brands of Scotland’s national drink and the strongest and most potent of cancer sticks. His face, like that of his brother’s, reflected his long and on the main unsuccessful days as a pugilist in bareknuckle boxing bouts: a common ‘sporting’ feature of Scotland’s criminal underworld.

“I’ve got nothing! It’s all a mistake,” pleaded Basil in his whining North East of Scotland intonation.

“Too right it’s a mistake �" and you made it, big time.”

Basil had seen a mere twenty eight typical Scottish summers pass him by, but that brevity was hard to accept because he looked as old as Methuselah’s great grandfather’s older brother �" and felt even older. And although he would have liked to have done, he couldn’t put the decrepit appearance down to gammy genes. The blame rested firmly at his own door; a door that was writ large with the stigmatising legend ‘Drug Addict’. Basil had succumbed to the addictive power of numerous illegal stimulants �" amphetamine and cocaine being his tipple of choice, though he also became rather fond of ‘spice’ and ‘skunk’ �" during his days in Bon Accord Prison on the outskirts of the granite city of Aberdeen.

Since the legendary Clink Prison came and went (leaving only its encapsulating colloquial nickname behind), many people have asserted that prisons (which, generally speaking, are overcrowded, underfunded, and understaffed Victorian edifices which should have been razed to the ground decades ago) are merely proofing grounds for felons. State funded yet unsanctioned Colleges of Crime where immoral talents are honed to perfection and ‘Graduates’ are awarded an unofficial BA (Bloody Animal), MA (Maniacal Arsehole), or even BSc (Brutal Serial Creep).

While there may be more than a grain of truth in that doctrine, the notion that ‘clean’ inmates contract drug habits �" and often the accompanying diseases like AIDS and hepatitis of all flavours �" whilst residing at ‘Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ is a tragic certainty. Basil knew it to be ever thus for he was that soldier, albeit free of disease �" which was more luck than design. He went in a common or garden petty thief of the lowest standing, and came out a pill-popping, reefer-puffing, syringe-squirting druggie of the highest order. A man more to be pitied than pilloried. Yet pilloried he and most of his self-destructive ilk are.

Lately, though, he had been leading the precarious existence of a recovering addict: he had managed to come off the dreadful substances through months of hard work and huge slices of cold turkey with not even the occasional splash of heroin gravy for comfort. For this he owed a massive thumbs up to the care and attention of all at Bluegrass (an expensive private clinic he had attended regularly); an old school friend who paid the bills for his stays there (ensuring that he although he was indebted to Bluegrass he wasn’t in debt to them); the devotion of his lovely younger sister, Alice; and the fact that his broken-hearted but supportive mother, Brenda, had never disowned or shunned him �" even though most of his supposed ‘best pals’ had.

But above all those factors, Basil had the power of his own mind to thank. An energy, which had been lying dormant in his doped-up skull, was restored to vivacity by the immense desire he held to again be a proper father to his estranged daughter, Melanie. And to perhaps even revert to the loving, caring and devoted husband he used to be to her mother, Geraldine.

Geraldine, unhappily, was now his ex-wife. Estrangement and then divorce had been the only avenues open to her. She couldn’t stand the violent rages brought on by the alien tinctures that continually swirled their pernicious way through Basil’s befouled body. But he still loved her with all his heart �" and probably vice versa, if Geraldine were truthful with herself. Basil had been granted visitation rights to lovely little Melanie, although they were restricted to once a month �" and then only if he came drug-free, alcohol-free, and as smartly dressed as possible. Happily, his visits were becoming more and more frequent as his health improved and his habits receded into the annals of his personal history.

Those elements had helped him set sail on his epic voyage of self-discovery with the belief that some day, some glorious day, he and his family would again be united. So far it had been a truly metamorphosing journey, cleansing him body and soul. He had cast off from the jetty of agony and self-doubt a human being that barely merited the ‘human’ part, had battled across a drug-infested ocean, and finally nestled into the embracing harbour of relative health, haleness and self-satisfaction. He promised himself that never again would he let any of them down.

However, the ravages of the multitudinous narcotics he had sniffed, injected, smoked and popped had ensured that nothing remained of the good looks his mother had been so proud of just a few short years ago. The years spent ‘chasing the dragon’ had turned his former sparkling teeth into blackened stumps; the cocaine and heroin he had snorted had long since caused irreparable damage to his nasal passages, making his nostrils one large cavern; and if you joined up the hypodermic needle dots on his arms you would end up with visions of Hell à la Hieronymous Bosch!

But now his gaunt, haggard face also carried numerous bruises, lumps, and abrasions �" courtesy of the swift kicking dealt out by the McAllistair twins, who were so hard they made Bad, Bad Leroy Brown seem like the love child of Julian Clary and Kenneth Williams on a particularly camp day.

The suitcase requested for by his two unwelcome and uninvited visitors had come into Basil’s possession one rainy September evening when he mistook it for his own whilst leaving the Jolly Roger public house in the harbour district of Faithlie, his home town. The dock area was so seedy that even Jack the Ripper would have thought twice about frequenting it.

As he had made his merry way from the pub (alcohol being the one addictive substance he hadn’t managed to kick �" not that he even wanted to, for the anodyne effect was worth its weight in hangovers) two men tried to stop him leaving. Assuming that they were two of the many men from whom he had borrowed money with no intention of paying back, he had just legged it out of there as fast as his drunken pins could carry him. It wasn’t very fast �" more a lolloping, zigzagging, mad cow stumble than a Usain Bolt sprint.

But despite the lack of speed (in a kinematics definition as well as an alpha-methylphenethylamine one), and with a degree of nous that belied his inebriated condition, he managed to lose the men in the myriad stygian labyrinthine alleys and lanes that criss-crossed the dock area like varicose veins on the margarine legs of one of the harbour’s porky prostitutes.

The suitcase looked like any other dollop of Taiwanese trash: skitter brown genuine-imitation-leather with a rather dishevelled handle �" exactly the same as Basil’s. Mistaking it for their own would be an easy error for anyone to make, but for a sozzled Basil, the mistake had been a doddle.

Although the case itself was as much a clone as the late and lamented Dolly the Sheep, the contents proved to be slightly out of the ordinary. to say the least. Instead of the off-white shirts, moth-eaten shiny black suit, and scuffed pair of brown brogues that Basil had packed when he had been released from the caring cloisters of Bluegrass that same day, he found a mere quarter of a million quid in random serial numbered used notes of different denominations.

After the initial disbelief and fear (he knew that his back-up bottle of methadone �" and ergo affixed label with his name and blasted address! �" was in the suitcase he had left behind, and would inevitably lead the men straight to his bedsit), Basil thought that all his birthdays, Christmases and even the odd Bar Mitzvah or two had come at once �" and he wasn’t even Jewish! He knew that all he needed to do was scarper across any of the seven seas to one of the four corners of the earth and lose himself amongst the nameless, faceless people tanning themselves in sunnier climes and he was safe and set for life. He could even send for his wife and daughter once he was settled, and introduce them to the paradise he had always wanted to provide for them.

Unfortunately for Basil, sentimentality proved his downfall. Instead of visiting one of his criminal cronies and procuring for himself a forged passport, like any self-respecting villain would have done, he visited his mother and deposited the said suitcase in her custody �" a fact that was beyond her ken �" before going back to the vermin infested hovel he had no option but to call home to get his own one. Why? Simply because it was the one he had used when he and his beloved Geraldine went on honeymoon to Lanzarote, and then again when Geraldine and their beloved daughter, Melanie, had holidayed in Crete. God, that seemed like a lifetime ago to Basil.

He wasn’t to know that to go home for that little piece of yesterday would be to walk right smack into the two aforementioned ‘heavies’. They had been quicker off the mark than he had envisaged, and had started using his body as a football as soon as he set foot in his flat. They hadn’t even reached half-time.

“Tell us now and make it easy on yersel’,” Hector advised Basil. This wasn’t an offer of a reprieve, nor a promise of some badly needed medical aid. It was merely an opportunity to die soon: a caring sort of bloke was Hector. “If you tell us, I promise no’ to let Shuggie loose on you. His temper is wicked, no’ like mine.” Hector’s smile of friendliness was as real as his acrylic teeth. “So where is it?”

“I haven’t got it, I swear,” pleaded Basil.

“Don’t you swear at me, snotter!” hissed Shuggie through Stonehenge teeth �" all his own but half the allocated adult quota. He pressed down harder with his great muckle Dr. Marten’s, making Basil wheeze. “We seen you take it from the Jolly Roger ourselves, s**t for brains! Remember? We’ve even got the suitcase you left behind. Thanks for that, by the way, wee man. We wouldn’t have known who you was if it wasn’t for that. Cretin. You deserve all you get for being as thick as shite in the neck of a bottle.”

“But... it wasn’t me. I… haven’t got it,” gasped Basil.

“Tell you what, pal,” said Hector, in the benevolent voice of favourite Aunt Myra dolling out the custard creams during the family’s annual visit to her cottage in the Cotswolds. “If you tell us where the cash is, Shuggie won’t inject this speed into you. Deal or no deal? Waddaya say?”

“I haven’t got...”

Hector’s sudden change of facial expression showed that Aunt Myra’s surname must be Hindley.

“So be it.” He nodded to Shuggie who slowly depressed the plunger of the needle, injecting one millilitre of the super strength amphetamine into Basil, who started to groan with an inexplicable mixture of pain and pleasure as the drug surged through his bloodstream and burst like a hundred hypernovae into his brain, his heart, his lungs…

“No! Please! I’m clean for the first time in months.”

“I think the operative word is were clean, you wee scrot!” sneered Hector, smiling at his victim’s distress.

“Operative?” snorted Shuggie. “What sort of word is that?”

“Dunno,” admitted the twin. “I heard some twat on the Jerry Springer Show say it once �" it sounds the dog’s bollocks.”

A few seconds later, the room began to dip and sway like a rubber dinghy in wilds of the North Sea, the walls began to contract and bulge, a million insects of the lepidopteron kind invaded Basil’s groaning stomach, and Hector and Shuggie sprouted an extra head each, both of which immediately exploded into a cash cascade, showering the room with quarter of a million quid. Of course, neither Shuggie nor Hector saw any of this fascinating spectacle because it was all in Basil’s seriously doped-up brain.

“I... haven’t got... it...” Basil forced out each word through agonised lungs that were seemingly being incinerated by an infernal conflagration straight from Tartarus itself.

The reason for his difficulty in breathing was that the twins had deliberately tainted the speed with a 50-50 mix of methyl fentanyl, a substance that overwhelms the self-preserving receptors in the brain, causing the user to slowly stop breathing in a particularly painful manner, akin to breathing in WWI mustard gas via a nebuliser.

And that was only for starters.

The Glaswegian hadn’t injected a lethal dose because they wanted answers to their questions �" they knew that dead men were crap at spilling the beans. The quantity they had administered was not sufficient to kill Basil; just enough to make him nauseous, to convince him that death was just literally a breath away. And to tell them the truth.

“You ain’t?” said Hector, seeming to believe Basil.

“No. I... I swear,” he panted.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Hector smiled, and said to his brother, “He ain’t got it, Shuggie.”

“You don’t believe him?”

Hector smiled down at the badly damaged young man and said, “Of course I do. We’ve already searched here, so we know it isn’t here.”

Basil thanked his good God �" who had turned into a monkey and was at that very second swinging from the bare lightbulb on the ceiling scratching his unmentionable spherical objects. His praise to his simian saviour was rather premature, for Hector continued with: “You haven’t got it �" which means you offloaded it someplace, tart. And you are going to tell us exactly where that place is, like a good wee man. Aren’t you?”

Basil didn’t answer, he was becoming too spaced out to communicate orally, so Hector �" nice polite chap that he was �" asked the question again. Only this time he used that well known lie detector: a swift kick in the bollocks �" with the steel capped working boots of a navvy, not the soft leather Dr. Marten’s of a ‘bovver boy’ wally.

The mangled man whimpered in pain and raised his legs up to protect his nether regions. He soon stopped that when the movement ground the splintered ends of his shattered kneecaps together, causing a pain that was infinitely more acute.

Hector was correct with his assumption: his prisoner had plonked it in as safe a place as possible. Basil dared not tell them where that place was, because to do so would cause him more pain that he was already in. It would be of a different type of suffering �" the emotional kind. Basil loved his mother; he hated himself for the torture his habit had caused her over the past few years. But to send two hulking hardmen to her house to get a suitcase from her loft was something he simply would not do, even if it meant at the expense of his life. He could only imagine what they would do to her �" and it was unimaginable (if you get the drift).

No, on the whole, death was preferable. At least this way he knew, in his own mind, that he would be meeting his monkey... maker... with a semblance of dignity �" arising from the realisation that he was saving his mother from possibly meeting the same end as he was about to.

Hector set about his nutcracking again, but was stopped when he saw a smile of contentment spread over Basil’s bruised and bulging face. “What the s**t are you smirking at?” He looked at his brother. “What the hell’s tickling him?”

“Dunno. No’ yer boots anyway.” Shuggie laughed at his own inept joke. “Geddit? No’ yer boo... never mind!”

Hector got close to Basil’s face and screamed into it. “What the friggin’ hell are you smirking at, bollock breath?”

Through the drug-induced miasma that enshrouded his mind like smog in Olde London Town, Basil managed to say, slowly but clearly: “I’m smiling... because I... I have quarter a million quid... of yours! And... no way in the world can you... get it. You are stuffed, my sons. Well and truly... stuffed!” Basil gave out a laugh that sounded like the demonic cackle of the insane inmates at historic Bethlehem Asylum in the bad old days of yore.

“Tell me where it is, arsehole!” shouted Hector, pulling Basil’s hair and twisting his head round so far he could kiss his arse goodbye.

“Suck… my… shite!” wheezed Basil, tears of pain flowing down his cheeks.

Hector’s prided self-control went completely AWOL, and for the first time since he broke his homicide duck two decades ago he went totally apeshit. “Then there’s no reason for you to still be alive �" is there, my son!” He pushed his twin out of the way, grabbed the hypodermic needle and pressed the plunger down, injecting the remaining nine millilitres of the elixir of death into Basil.

Although the vein burst, spewing blood and the lethally tainted narcotic everywhere, enough of the drug made its unwelcome way into Basil’s bloodstream to have immediate effect: his eyes dilated, rolled in their orbs, and started to exude scarlet tears; his abused body jerked and convulsed in a spectacular dance macabre, and his heart virtually exploded in his chest, sending the drug gushing through every fibril in his form, contaminating his entire body with its pernicious toxin in a matter of seconds.

After an eternal ten seconds in which he regretted every wrong turn he had taken during his entire life, bemoaned the fact that he would never see his beloved wife, daughter, sister and mother again, Liam ‘Basil’ Brush gave a mighty groan and an even mightier fart as he actually saw the Grim Reaper’s relentless scythe hack through his hereto stubborn thread. He slumped, smiling like the martyr he had made of himself, into the arms of The Reaper, in the knowledge that he had paid for his mother’s safety with his own life.

Basil was content that he had managed to salvage a soupcon of eternal dignity from his sordid demise �" and that his thunderous fart had, happily. left his killer some actual shite to suck!

“Jesus H. Christ,” shouted Shuggie. “Did you have to kill him?” His concern was not for the dearly departed Basil but for his own safety. “We’ll no’ get the money back noo. And the Big Boss’ll kill us!”

Hector walked over to the room’s single grimy window and gazed at the dreich autumnal sky, deep in thought. “Well, he annoyed me,” was his calm and indurated explanation. Still thinking �" a thing he wasn’t best equipped to do �" he approached the room’s cooker (a twenty year old Baby Belling supplied by the then DHSS) and looked with revulsion at a pot of rancid Scotch Broth which looked as though it were the first thing the cooker had ever prepared, and said, “S**t! I should’ve told him I’d make him eat this gloop �" that would’ve made him tell us!”

“What’re we gonna do now?” asked a concerned Shuggie. Although as hard as hobnailed boots, he shat bricks whenever he thought of the legendary wrath of ‘The Big Boss’, whoever he was. No-one really knew. They just knew not to cross him.

“Put your brain out of neutral for once and tell me this: what would you do with hot loot you didn’t want anyone to get?” Shuggie shrugged his ignorance, so Hector continued with: “What I would do is leave it in a safe place �" like at the home of someone I thought no-one knew.”

“Like who?”

“Like a sister...”

“Wot? I ain’t got one �" ‘ave you?”

Hector rolled his eyes. “Since I’m your brother and you don’t, no, of course I haven’t, you plank! But he has! Or a wife, a brother, a...”

Finally cottoning on, Shuggie grabbed the initiative, and continued with, “A mother?”

Hector nodded and said, menacingly, “Exactly. Exactly! And once we destroy any evidence of us being here, we’ll pay them a visit.”

After ordering his brother to get a petrol can from their car, Hector opened the Baby Belling’s plug. Rewiring it incorrectly �" and thus dangerously �" he replaced the cover, then reinserted it in the socket. From the petrol can his brother handed him, Hector slopped a pint or so of the foul smelling flammable liquid over the wall around the socket, before clicking on the switch with the leg of a wooden kitchen chair.

Frustrated at the lack of a spark from the plug (well, he wasn’t to know that the credit had been used up), he withdrew a box of Bryant and May’s finest spunks from his pocket, striking one. The Lucifer’s flame made Hector’s visage glow as red as the demonic countenance of the eponymous infernal infidel himself. He threw the match onto the petrol-soaked wall and, as the red fingers of flame shot up and licked the tinder-dry ceiling, the evil twins beat a hurried exit from the flat.

The newly deceased Basil began to gently roast in his own juices, like the sacrificial lamb he had made of himself, totally unaware that this last act of beautiful benevolence had been a waste of bloody time!

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Author's Note

Be kind - and I may be kind in kind!