The Hackman Blues

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Jack Dunphy is in the building game. To hear some of them tell it, he is the game. Leastways he used to be, all over southeast London. What’s known as a ‘plastic paddy’. Third or fourth generation down the pike and as English as toast. But could shovel the brogue as the occasion demanded. A flash git too. Liked to show he’d the dosh. Word was, he’d married a game-show hostess and hit the top of some minor B list. A name among the ‘could-’ave-beens’.

Hard bastard. Odd stories surfaced of punters getting done with baseball bats and the blow-torch. Anyway, not a fella to fuck with. I knew him for years on a vague basis. The, ‘How you doing?’ dance. Bags of brief enthusiasm and no follow-up. If you never met again, how much would you be hurting? Like that.

So, I was a little surprised when he offered to buy me a drink. The local bookie got married and there was a knees-up in the backroom of the Greyhound. My sometimes pub next to the Oval tube station. I was standing at the bar while a karaoke merchant mutilated ‘That Loving Feeling’.

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