"Stand still!" ordered Billy.  I couldn't decide whether to offer him my shoulder or my backside. "If you don¹t keep still I can't shoot, I'm not wasting any more pellets..."

Billy was shooting Hammond and I again. It wasn't so bad, the bruises were gone in a few days and really, being shot through denim or the tough, almost moleskin like fabric of my Donkey Jacket, wasn¹t what one would imagine being shot, in a traditional sense, was like at all.

The £7.99 that my Donkey Jacket cost was easily the best I'd ever spent. The Army and Navy store in Dale End, Birmingham had shit piles of them and whilst finishing the last two years at my school, it was the   item to be seen in. It was basically a Navy's coat. The kind of thing a railway worker would wear while repairing tracks, or whatever it is they do out there. Only ours didn't have the orange fluorescent piece around the shoulders associated with said labourers. Ours were plain black all over and always worn with the bottom of the four buttons undone. Underneath, we wore sweatshirts (with the exception of Hammond who undoubtedly was wearing a t-shirt from his extensive Punk Rock collection), second-hand stripped college scarves and Wrangler jeans. They were sturdier than the catalogue jeans other kids wore and took the pellets better.

There were four of us. Billy, the undisputed Leader of the Pack, aged 16. Delmonte, aged 18, the occasional member of the gang. Hammond, the largest of the ensemble was also 16 and joined Billy in nearly all lessons at school, with the exception of Billy's remedial reading class. I was a full school year younger than the both of them, a good foot shorter than Hammond and a good kicking less hard than Billy.

Billy was `our leader' more than probably because his elder brother, Strangler, was without doubt the coolest person that had, at this point in our young lives, entered our tiny world. He went to gigs in Birmingham and was rumoured to have seen The Clash! Like his younger sibling, Billy, he had the perfect hair for `spiking'. Unlike my unruly thatch. Strangler was softly spoken and carried himself with the air of a man that always had somewhere better to be... and a Ford Capri Mk II to get there in.

Hammond liked to think he was the personification of Punk. I quietly disagreed. GBH and Crass were crap in my young opinion and Siouxsie, or `Souxie' as his home made bum flap screamed out in white emulsion, was turning into something I didn¹t understand or agree with. Hammond was massive though, no doubt about it. The opponents who faced him on Sunday afternoon rugby matches must've wished they were home helping their Mothers peel potatoes. Even though it took five or six alarm clocks to wake him each morning, all carefully timed to go off a minute or two apart, he was, at the soul of the boy, a sweetheart. Picture Shrek as a teenager.

Delmonte lived with his 80 odd year old Grandmother. She wasn't really his Grandmother. But the only family member, albeit adoptive family, that could stand him in her home. There was a constant air of sadness about Delmonte, born out of a life of dejection I suppose. I'd always considered him thick until I discovered that he was rolling a little something extra into his Golden Virginia. He worked in a dye casting factory in the city centre. His £45 a week seemed like an inheritance to us.

Gran Bay, as we referred to his Grandmother, was almost blind, most certainly working on less than 20% of her hearing and the witness to some of our most unruly behaviour. She had no idea we were drinking alcohol and smoking pot in her house and it mattered not at all how loud we had the stereo. She thought me `trustworthy', `Billy was as sly as a fox', Hammond was a `giant fool' and her Grandson? Who knew what she made of him as he gyrated in front of her to another of the Gibson Brothers hits, tripping on acid and making all the moves of a present day lap dancer. Whenever Billy attempted such behaviour in front of Gran Bay Delmonte would plead,

"C'mon Bill, leave her alone you cunt, she's nearly a fuckin' hundred! How would you like to have survived two world wars to have the piss took out of you?"

How indeed..... Winter nights of rain and wind were spent indoors at 100 Elforth Lane, Gran Bay's house. Billy's divorced Mother wouldn't have any of us at her house. In turn, Hammond and I didn¹t want, or more to the point, didn't trust Billy in either of our homes. So Gran Bay's it was. Not that there was an open invite to Delmonte's, far from it. The Kid could whine like no other....

"Fuck off you lot. It's always Gran Bays with you. What about your shit holes? I don¹t want you around there. Yer all cunts. I¹m staying in."

This usually disbanded the group for the evening, only to bang on number 100's door again the next night. Summer nights were a completely different matter. We had The Gun for Summer nights. I don't remember how it started or when for that matter. All I know is that Strangler gave Billy an old pellet gun he no longer had a use for. We all unanimously agreed it was probably because he'd moved up to a sawn off shot gun. Billy loved that pellet gun. The windows at the Old Farm felt his love for it, as did any passing freight trains, especially the ones carrying shiny new cars. Eventually so did mine and Hammond's legs, arses, backs, shoulders, arms, shins, calves, knees and very occasionally, the backs of our heads. Crack!

Even though Hammond and I were never allowed to touch the gun, let alone fire the nasty little bastard, we were always glad to know it was with us. We were shot at the golf course, on top of the train bridges, in the rotting hay stack at the Old Farm, on the Green outside the Free Church, in the Gardens of Remembrance, outside the chip shop, anywhere Billy thought he could get a clear shot at one of us.

"Right, both of you cunts.... lift up the bottom of yer Donkeys and let me shoot you in the arses." A pale, red headed, plump kid that lived with his family down the hill from our village, Ginge, who desperately wanted to be accepted into Billy's clique made the harrowing mistake of obtaining his Donkey Jacket resplendent with the fluorescent shoulders. He turned up at the golf course one Saturday morning, approaching us with a great big grin on his milky freckled face, fluorescent shoulders screaming out 'shoot me'. Hammond and I were pissing ourselves. Billy came on all serious, told us to stop laughing, from the side of his mouth, as Ginge approached us. For a minute Billy could have you fooled. Like all of a sudden he'd decided that Donkey Jackets with the fluorescent strip were now the cool item and Ginge was way ahead of us. Poor kid. Billy began asking Ginge, with absurd enthusiasm, where he got his jacket from.

"It's fucking brilliant! You look ace! Gi'sa try..." Billy was smaller in every way than any of us, but made from the kind of material they made truck tyres out of, Ginge was the couldn't be cool in a million fuckin' years fat kid of the piece, no two ways about it. The very idea of Billy wanting to try on any of Ginge's wardrobe, let alone this beacon, was ridiculous. Still, beaming like the idiot he was, Ginge removed his Donkey and handed it to Billy. Billy grinned his terrible grin. Dropping the garment to the sodden field below our boots, he raised the barrel of the pellet gun and shot Ginge's ample midriff at point blank range repeatedly. Simultaneously grinding the Donkey Jacket under foot.

"Billy.... pleeaasse...... don't. Fuck! Don't, please, Ow! C'mon..." Ginge made no attempt to escape the gunfire and it was his arms that caught the worst of it. The day was cold, sunny but cold, and underneath the Donkey all he, or his Mom, had chosen for him to wear was a flimsy out of shape orange t-shirt that looked like it had more than likely belonged to his even larger elder Brother, Big Ginge. Each crack of the pellet gun was echoed by the tiny smack of the pellet itself making contact with Ginge's smarting arms. The flabby tops of which rippled with each hit. Billy was loving it. Ginge probably wasn't. Why he didn't make good his escape I don't know. He held his ground struggling to get a hold of his orange topped Donkey Jacket from under the grip of Billy's Monkey boots. Jeez... it's been a while since I thought about Monkey boots. Cheaper than Doc Martin's and maybe just that bit cooler, depending on which side of the tracks you were from.

On our side of the tracks at this particular moment in time Ginge was no better off for his choice in footwear. However, Billy had reached the inevitable moment of the re-load, having emptied the gun into Ginge's considerable girth. As Billy went for the box of pellets in his Donkey pocket Ginge made a grab for the now shit sodden apparel under foot. Even in the moment I pondered to myself Why stick around to rescue the jacket? To take all the cruelty that Billy was so keen to hand out in order to rescue the very garment that had caused the punishing in the first place? With hindsight, the humiliation of being repeatedly shot by Billy was nothing in Ginge's world compared to the beating that he would receive from his Dad had he dared go home without the new coat that he had made such a fuss of owning.

It transpired, some weeks later, that Ginge's family hadn't been able to afford the £7.99 that Billy, Hammond and I had to obtain our Donkey Jackets. Instead, Ginge's Dad knew a man that worked on the railways and had managed to get his son the jacket free of any charge, above a pint for the railway man next time they saw each other in the pub. Ginge wore that Donkey Jacket, making no attempt to remove the orange plastic, until the time he left school almost a full year from the day his Dad had bargained it for him.

Saturday mornings, at what used to be the golf course, were great. Somehow, even though we did exactly the same things on Saturday mornings as we did during the week day evenings, it was as if whatever happened on those mornings were being carved into time. Events that took place on those mornings would become legend.

I say `what used to be the golf course' because where we hung about was a hilly field that ran along side the new runway extension at Birmingham airport. The developers had dug out the sand pits and lush greens and replaced them with tarmac I suppose, or whatever those great big fucking things needed to drop out of the sky onto. We'd never actually seen exactly what it was the golf course had made way for, because high fences and unnatural landscape changes kept us out. Those pits and greens had been ours. To lie on our backs at night on those soft carpets that were the putting greens and gaze up at a clear sky... magical. Only the stars, or the back of his Dad's hand, seemed to have to power to soften Billy's cruel streak.

The abandoned section of the golf course that the developers hadn't required was now our domain. We could write `Fuck Off' in 20 foot high letters in the snow during the winter, for all the departing airline passengers to see. Set fire to anything that took our fancies. Smoke pot, drop our dung from bridges and of course, be shot at by our dear friend Billy.

Seems odd thinking of all this, over 20 years later. It's a place I don't go anymore. With the exception of Hammond, they are people I don't see anymore. I heard Billy married a policewoman and moved to Oslo. Strangler hung himself, a Father of three, on his 40th Birthday. Delmonte also perished at his own hands, although not in quite so intended circumstances. And Ginge? Who knows. I¹ll wager you one thing though. I think it'd be a safe bet to assume he never wore another orange garment from that day to this.

Check out more pieces on LeftLion by Miles


 

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