The Don

Andy Rivers

It was the carriage thing that did it I think.

I’ve been to a lot of funerals in my time, in fact they start to increase as you get older, but never a Cockney gangster style one. They proper go to town like. The usual wannabe’s, groupies and gawpers were on the streets. The bizzies with their cameras and the press with their cliché’s and made-up shit were also well represented but I wasn’t fazed. Lisa held my hand and the lads stayed in front of us as we followed Ron’s coffin through the streets of Peckham to the Nunhead cemetery where the rest of his family, including Lisa’s dad, were buried.

I knew it’d be over the top ‘cos there’s a whole industry around this shit now. I knew there’d be loads of new ‘mates’ who’d want a picture for the ‘tell-all’ book about their ‘lifelong friendship’ with the man who’d ruled this part of London for so many years.

I was prepared for all of that, had steeled myself not to react and lamp any fucker that openly took the piss in that way…and then the plastic gangster had appeared in front of a posse of tabloid muckrakers. You know the one, pops up every now and then on those channel 5 ‘hard man’ shows wearing his suit, flashing the gold and telling made-up stories of never having lost a fight.

‘Yeah, me and Ron Carter went back years. Lifelong friendship, he was like the father I never ‘ad. I ‘elped him build his business and he always told me I’d run it one day.’

Then he’d made a big show of kissing the carriage that Ron’s coffin was in and bowing before it while the snappers did their work. The gasps, hisses and general seething from all of Ron’s genuine mates and associates around me told me that he really wasn’t well-liked.

‘He’s not even from round here the mug.’

‘Absolute facking liberty…’

I was still keeping out of it. Ron’s mates would deal with attention seeking prick, I could tell by their faces his card was marked.’

And then Lisa squeezed my hand hard and I looked at her. Tears streaming down her face as she stared at him.

‘Uncle Ron hated that dickhead Billy. He tried to rob him when he was in the hospice.’

I was a bit perturbed I didn’t know about that but now that I did…well, Ron was an uncle to me an all and if anyone was ‘the son he never had’ it was fucking me. He’d told me often enough. I looked at Tel, Ron’s oldest mate and he was giving the fucker daggers. Then he looked at me.

‘Dave Holder Billy. He’s a facking chancer.’

This bloke was obviously trying to build some sort of public persona as a hardman so the only way to burst that little bubble, and to put him back in his place, was to show the public he really wasn’t a hardman. I turned to Lisa, kissed her gently and said to the lads.

‘Peter, Billy, stay by your mam.’