Hound Dog Read online

  ‘I’ll come too,’ says Gay Elvis, ‘I’ve taken some time off work until my lip goes down, so I’m free.’

  ‘What do you want to come for?’

  ‘I’m curious as to where our funding is coming from.’

  ‘You’re better off not knowing, believe me, but if you want to tag along, then fair enough. Fatlad, pick me up at ten o’clock. We’ve got an appointment in Esher at twelve.’

  ‘Are you going to pay for petrol?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll pay for the fucking petrol. Anyway, what have you lads planned for the rest of the day?’

  ‘I’m staying round his until my lip goes down,’ says the Gayboy, ‘I don’t want the kids to see it.’

  ‘Aye,’ says the Fatman, ‘we’re going to watch the new Elvis Comeback Special DVD. Check out all the extras. You can come round and watch it if you like.’

  ‘No thanks, got better things to do with my time than watch that old wanker. There’s business to take care of.’

  ‘Such as?’ asks Gay Elvis.

  ‘Oh, just stuff.’

  And I leave them there in the pub to nurse their empty glasses, while I walk out into the fine sunshine. I have a theory regarding the mystery of Gay Elvis’s sudden change of attitude towards me. There’s only one way to prove it. I phone his wife.

  She picks up. ‘Hi, Jen,’ I say, ‘it’s me.’

  ‘Oh fuck. What do you want?’

  ‘Are you at home?’

  ‘Could be, why?’

  ‘Well, I was wondering if we could talk, and stuff. Can I come over?’

  A pause.

  ‘OK, but you’ve got to be fucking well out of here before the kids come home from school.’

  ‘Sure, not a problem. See you in a bit, bye.’ But she’s already hung up on me.

  Chapter 4

  ‘So you told him then?’ I ask her a couple of hours later.

  ‘Yeah, I told him.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This morning. I just couldn’t resist it. He looked so fucking pathetic, with his big swollen lip, ranting on about how it was all your fault because you couldn’t keep your dick to yourself. So I told him where else you’ve put it.’

  ‘Well, thanks a lot. Now he’s really off with me.’

  ‘Like I give a flying fuck, my dear.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Jen, you’re evil, you know that don’t you?’

  ‘Ah, go burn some kids, you sick piece of shit.’

  It’s bliss, lying here next to Jen, in my state of well-earned flaccidity. Most of the time. I’m never at rest, either, because I’m too aroused, I want some drugs, or I really want to kill someone. But now, here on Gay Elvis’s bed, his just-fucked wife lying beside me, and his underwear drying on the radiator, I’m happy.

  I like Jen, as much as I like anybody, because she’s rotten like me. You can tell when she fucks you that she’s just using you, that she has no interest at all in how you feel. But being used by her feels a hell of a lot better than any of the considerate fucks I’ve ever had. I reckon it’s because we’re both parasites. We cancel each other out, and that happens to make for some great sex. Jen’s probably the most evil person I’ve ever met without a criminal record. With Gay Elvis she did all the groundwork for me. By the time I got to him, she’d already stripped him of any sense of self-worth he may have once had. God knows why she married him. He’s a skinny ugly fucker who minces about and looks like he’s got AIDS. Jen, on the other hand, is beautiful, although she’ll be fifty in a few years and her figure’s not what it once was. But she’s still a looker with a great mane of red hair, and a furry bush to match. She never shaves it, and it feels good to rest my head on it sometimes. Jen’s one of the few women I’ve ever bothered to go down on, and I expect her big lovely bush has a lot to do with it.

  I know I’m not the only fella who’s been screwing Jen since they married. God knows how many others there have been. I like to think it’s at least fifty but it’s more likely ten. The whole thing with Gaylord puzzles me. Maybe she shacked up with him because she just wanted a good father for her kids, because he is one, I’ll give him that. They’ve got three kids, though one of them’s mine. One girl, one boy, then the bastard, who’s also a boy. In a cruel twist of fate, their son looks like their mum, so when he’s older he’ll be good-looking, but at the moment he’s just the school ginger cunt, while their daughter looks like her Gaydad, so she resembles a midget version of Larry Grayson with pigtails. My kid’s perfect though. He’s got blond curly hair like I used to when I was a lad, and he’s got his mum’s eyes. I suppose if I could ever say I’ve cared for anybody, it would be the kid. But I can’t say that because I can’t care about anybody else except myself. You see, I’ve been clinically diagnosed as a psychopath. I’m not joking, I really have. Well, to be precise the results of the test were inconclusive, but there’s the possibility I could be one, and I reckon that I am. They tested me for it the second time I was in the nick, because they wanted to know how come I set a building on fire, even though I knew there were kids in it. They all got out OK, but they could have fried. Anyway, they gave me this test, and afterwards the prison shrink explained to me what they were looking for. You see, a psychopath isn’t a loony like people think when they hear that word, and they’re not necessarily going to be a serial killer or anything. They could just be something low-key like a small-time con artist or a shifty businessman. Or maybe just a cunt who screws people’s lives up, like me. The bottom line is, a psychopath is someone who doesn’t have a conscience. You’re just not born with one. It’s a malfunction in the brain, a physical thing. Nothing you can do about it. When the shrink told me about it in more detail, a lot of the time it was like he was just describing me. You could say it was a moment of enlightenment for me, almost religious, with the shrink being like this guru who was explaining the reason for my life being the way it was. For instance, one of the things he said was that a psychopath has no feelings for anybody else, they just fake it. Well, I’ve been faking my feelings for other people my whole life. Can’t think of a single nice thing I’ve ever said to anybody I’ve actually meant. Another thing, psychopaths don’t feel guilt. Again, that’s never been something I’ve ever had a problem with, so that’s another point in favour of me being one.

  Also, he said psychopaths are very deceitful, which I am. And not only that, they have problems with self-control, and that’s me all over, what with my constant wanking and the charlie. So, the shoe fits, and that means I’m a psychopath doesn’t it?

  Well, they wouldn’t diagnose me as being one. The thing is, I’m a very angry person. I don’t know why, and the shrink couldn’t work it out either, but there was something eating away at me, and still is. At first they thought it might be because my dad fiddled with my sister so much that she killed herself. But I really don’t have a problem with my dad, one way or the other. He’s been dead for years anyway. But they said if I really was a psychopath, I probably wouldn’t let whatever that one thing is that I’m angry about bother me so much, because they’re emotionally too shallow. I’m not buying it though. I reckon I am one. I’m just a special new type that’s very angry. I mean I’ve got to be, haven’t I. Otherwise I wouldn’t be trying to cook little kiddies in burning buildings.

  ‘OK,’ says Jen, breaking my reverie, ‘fuck off now, the kids will be home soon.’ She throws my clothes at me and pulls up her tights. I obediently start getting dressed.

  ‘So, I guess I’ll see you soon then,’ I say.

  ‘Dunno, maybe.’ She pulls down on her blouse and finds a pair of shoes. ‘Look, show yourself out will you, I’ve got things to do.’ Jen’s on the phone when I leave, being a damn sight more polite to whoever it is than she’s ever been to me.

  Due to a lack of my own transport, it looks like I’ll be riding home on the number 47 bus. It’s quite a walk to the station, but I don’t mind. It’s a beautiful day, with the sun making the stones of old buildings glow so bright it almost hurts to look at th
em, and after giving Jen such a good hammering, I’m able to walk through the centre of Cambridge without getting quite such a hard-on for a change. It’s funny, the things I find myself thinking about when I don’t need to fiddle. It’s not stuff I really want to bother myself with, but it just comes to me, whether I want it to or not. Like that psychopath thing, I haven’t thought about that in ages, but there it was, in my head all of a sudden. And now, not half an hour later, I’m walking through Cambridge, and instead of fantasising about locations in which the various American tourists that I pass might possibly have sex, like I normally would be, I’m thinking about even more stuff that happened years back. I’m thinking about the first time I met Eddie. Christ, that changed everything. It made me into Elvis for a start.

  I was only nineteen the first time I was in the nick. I’d fallen in with some bad boys and had been doing some serious thieving when I done got caught and sent down. Now I thought I was hard, but in the nick I was well out of my league. And with my curly blond hair and angelic features, well – to put it bluntly, I was raped. More than once. Fortunately, being the top-drawer psychopath I undoubtedly am, I wouldn’t say it affected my self-esteem that much, but it fucking hurt.

  Then I started sharing a cell with Eddie. We got to know each other quickly, and he seemed keen to be my friend. He was in for dubious business practices, the nature of which I would not know for some time. Eddie was about twenty years older than me, and my first impressions of him were that he was posh, polite, kind and very intelligent. He tried to get me reading, and lent me books by French writers I couldn‘t understand. He said they’d help me find myself. I remember one was about people catching the plague, and another was about a bloke who always felt nauseous. Anyway, when I finally felt that I could trust him enough, I told Eddie about the attacks. He gave me a priceless piece of advice. ‘Listen, my dear boy.’ he said, ‘everybody loves an entertainer. If you can put on a bit of a show for the lads, then they’ll most likely leave you alone.’

  ‘What sort of thing were you thinking of?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a lot of the guys in here love Elvis. If you can do a few Elvis numbers the way Elvis does them, I believe that they’ll love you for it. Just don’t get cute and sing “Jailhouse Rock” and you will certainly be a shining star.’

  He was right. The last time a load of them had been out of the nick, Elvis was still King. Most of them wouldn’t even recognise a Beatle if they stepped on one. So I decided to do as he said, and practised and practised until I got it down pat. Then one day in the rec yard, I blacked up my hair and greased it into a quiff, did the thing with the lip, and sung ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Love Me Tender’. Jesus, they fucking loved it. From then on, every day in the rec yard, they’d crowd around me, and they’d all shout, ‘Do Elvis! Do Elvis!’ Sure enough, they left me alone after that, and I was the most popular guy in the block, after the drug dealer. Unfortunately for me, it turned out that Eddie was really a fairy who had a thing about Elvis, and I got buggered pretty much every night from that point on while he made me sing ‘Hound Dog’. No one would ever do anything about it, even though it kept the entire block up, because Eddie was effectively running the gaff. I still have dreams about it sometimes.

  So that’s how I learned how to do Elvis. That was in the early seventies, and by the time I got out, Elvis had turned into a big gutbucket. Not too long after that he was dead, and then there was a big demand for Elvis acts. So in between my two stretches in the nick, I started up doing Elvis professionally, although it wasn’t my business then, I mostly did it through an agency. Of course, no one wanted to see a young sexy Elvis act, they just wanted fat on-drugs Vegas Elvis, so that’s what I became. I don’t care really, but I can’t say that it’s ever been as good as it was in the prison rec yard all those years ago. I don’t know, it meant something then.

  I wait for the bus. The sun bakes me through the glass of the large shelter, until it finally arrives. I let it take me through the fields, and down country roads, the smell of cow shit in the air. It’s early evening by the time I get to my front door, and the local kids in their hoods and baseball caps are hanging around outside, waiting for me on their bicycles. I tell them not to hang around outside and always phone ahead, but they never listen. Doesn’t really matter, there are no police cars cruising around out here. That’s why I moved here, I guess, it’s quiet, and so there’s less to get me aggravated. Anyway, I let them in and we do some business. I sell them an eighth of the skunk I buy from this hippy I know from a few villages down. He grows it in his house. It’s like a jungle in there. Anyway, he grows it, I sell it and we split the proceeds. It’s not something I enjoy, especially as I have to put up with scummy kids hanging round my door at all hours. But there’s no way I’d be able to live off what I make with Elvis, all that just goes up my nose, and to be honest with you, proper work and me have never really gone together. But I’m supplying to half the kids on the estate here, so I make a bit of bread, and a lot of the time the kids are buying it for their parents as much as themselves. I don’t do anything harder, because I’m too old to do too much more time in the nick, even though I could make a load of cash from it round here.

  So I have to stay up for nearly all of the night, making myself available for business like I do most nights. To while away the time, I do some charlie and sort myself out a couple of times while I think about Jen. Thoughts of Eddie keep me awake, and when I finally drop off as the sun rises, he’s already waiting for me in my dreams.

  Chapter 5

  I think you could probably say that I’m in a really bad mood. Sitting here in the back seat of the fatmobile, listening to Fats and Gayboy discuss what must have been a truly scintillating experience, that is, watching all seven fucking hours of the new Elvis ’68 Comeback Special DVD, I feel even closer to murder than I normally do. At least I can comfort myself that for one of those seven hours I was giving the Gaylord’s wife a good seeing to. By God, I wish I was there now instead of stuck in this car with these two idiots, listening to them analysing every one of Elvis’s costume changes while Fatty steers with his knees. I try to comfort myself with the possibility that I’ve knocked Jen up again, but to be realistic at her age it’s unlikely.

  The pair of them are even more Elvis-mad than usual at the moment. It’s because it’s meant to be the fiftieth anniversary of rock ’n’ roll which, we are now being told, was invented by Elvis in Sun Studios in Memphis on 5 July, 1954. That’s funny, because they always used to say it was invented by wife-beatin’ Ike Turner when he recorded a song called ‘Rocket 88’, in the same studio, three years earlier. The problem with that of course, is that it means that rock ’n’ roll was the idea of a violent, coke-snorting, sex-addicted psycho. But I guess making Elvis the inventor of rock ’n’ roll is more convenient, seeing as he’s white and never beat up Tina Turner.

  Meanwhile, I’m uneasy about the whole situation here. I mean, the Fatman actually offered me a lift. He never normally does favours for anyone because he’s such a lazy fat oaf, but here he is driving me at a moment’s notice and I didn’t even have to ask. Something’s definitely up with all this but I don’t know what it is. Right now, they’ve started singing ‘If I Can Dream’, the song Elvis does at the end of the Comeback Special, at the top of their voices. I find myself unlocking the door and fingering the handle, and have to use all my will power not to open it and throw myself onto the motorway. At the song’s climax Gay Elvis takes the female backing singers’ part, and screeches in a high operatic voice, ‘Please let my dream come true riiiiiight noooow!!!’

  God help me. I can’t hold it in any longer. ‘Gay Elvis,’ I say, ‘you truly are a gaylord. You are lord of all the gays. Other gays bow down before you in awe and say, “Surely no man could be more gay, he is our lord and master.” In fact you have a government post as Minister of Gay Affairs at the Home Office. You tried out for the Village People but didn’t get in because you were
too gay. You own a box set of the complete works of Gloria Gay-nor, you want to move to Para-gay, you—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, knock off the gay stuff!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m sick of this constant abuse. My name’s not Gay Elvis, it’s Derek, so would you please be so kind as to call me that and knock off all the fucking gay stuff!’

  ‘Yeah, and I don’t want to be called Fat Elvis any more either,’ says Fat Elvis. ‘It was funny about five years ago, but we’re both kind of sick of it now.’

  ‘Hmmph. If that’s the way you feel.’

  ‘Yeah, it is, sorry.’

  We sit in sullen silence for a few minutes, until they start talking about fucking Elvis again. Then, I don’t know why but I get the horn. I know I won’t have a chance to do anything about it before I meet Eddie, by which point I’ll be rubbing up against his antique chair legs in frustration. This could be something of a problem. I want to just whip it out in the back of the fatmobile and be done with it, but I can’t see any tissue.

  After what seems an eternity of Elvis analysis and ball-ache, we finally arrive on the outskirts of Esher. It’s funny that Eddie should end up here, but then he’s always had class, and it’s certainly a classy neighbourhood. I just wonder if anybody here realises that Eddie’s linked to one of London’s major crime families. He’s a millionaire of course, made a fortune running discos and strip clubs in the seventies and eighties, then cleaned up again with lap-dancing clubs in the nineties, but other than his irrational and perverted love of Elvis, he’s very cultural. At least I think he is. I don’t have the education to be able to tell the good stuff from the bad, so when he tells me something is the height of good taste, I’ve always tended to believe him.

  The fatmobile drives up to a pair of enormous gates, through which we can see what looks like the fucking Parthenon about a mile off. There are various signs, warning of armed response, dogs and general nastiness. And by the gate, there’s an intercom. As I’m in the back seat I have no choice but to let Fatty speak into it. And I swear I will kill him, because he has to fuck about and pretend to be Elvis.