Camper Van Woman: The Bing Bong Hoolihan Books, #1

By JP Maxwell

How did it all go wrong for Bing Hoolihan? 52 and over the hill, she clawed her way to a very decent career in British Intelligence, over the jagged rocks of white male privilege, Brexit and Covid, working to the shiny, new future always just beyond her grasp. Decorated and respected, her only problem was that she never knew her place.

So it wasn't PTSD or the danger of the job that made her quit spooking. It was the betrayal of her managers who wanted her to go far, but not too far up the ranks. She buys a camper van and pisses off out of it, but her past just won't let go of her, in every way. A sting job in the Calais Jungle flushes out a notorious people trafficker, the kind of work they wouldn't let her do in the Circus, but then a clear and present threat comes through the MI6 system, a database she hacks with impunity. The threat is V and she rides superbikes dressed as a nun and likes to spray VX nerve agents around public gatherings. V wants to destroy Bing in every way, inside and out. It becomes a battle of wits, minds and lethal weapons.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Babyface Books
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215447772

Book preview

Contents

- ​#1 TOUGH CROWD AT THE BOMBDIE, 2nd July 1981

- ​#2 THE DAM, Saturday 14th July 2024

- ​#3 BLUE SKIES OVER. Monday 27th May 2024

- ​#4 THE BURNING OF THE RIALTO, 4th July 1981

- ​#5 AVE MARIA, Tuesday 6th August 2024

- ​#6 SUPERGRANBY CREW, Wednesday 17th June 1986

- ​#7 ROAD REPORT (A), Monday 12th August 2024

- ​#8 IN BUSINESS, Wednesday 14th September 1988

- ​#9 ROAD REPORT (B), Monday 12th August 2024

- ​#10 24c ABERCROMBY SQUARE, Wednesday 13th December 1989

- ​#11 SARDINES, Monday 12th August 2024

- ​#12 AN ERUPTION OF CORRUPTION, Wednesday 3rd September 2024

- ​#13 PRIMO AMORE , Tuesday 3rd July 1990

- ​#14 NOT OUR FIRST RODEO, Wednesday 17th September 2024

- ​#15 COPING IN COPENHAGEN, Wednesday 12th July, 1990

- ​#16 WELCOME BACK TO THE JUNGLE, Thursday 19th September 2024

- ​#17 RECRUITMENT DAY Thursday 13th July, 1990

- ​#18 KIDDAS’ REUNION, Friday 20th September 2024

- ​#19 DOING TIME IN SOLITARY

- ​#20 APRES SKI, Wednesday 2nd October 2024

- ​#21 THE CIRCUS, Tuesday 8th October 2024

- ​#22 GHOSTS, Tuesday 8th October 2024

- ​#23 PLAYING TENNIS IN A REVOLVING DOOR, 1997

- ​#24 LAST STAND AT THE BOMBDIE, Tuesday 8th October 2024

For Mary and Don, a Dingle girl and a Walton boy

#1 TOUGH CROWD AT THE BOMBDIE, 2nd July 1981

What interests a 9 year old stray in foster care? The Ramones, The New York Dolls, Venom, Siouxie Sioux. Picking pockets to give money to older, middle class teenagers in exchange for bifters, cool company and approval. Milky and ginger, she’s beanpole tall for her age, but still mini enough to be a postpunk mascot. Fishing bags and coats for cash, wallets and purses in record shops, on buses, on trains, down St John’s Market, down Church Street in town, the rich pick n mix outside of Woolworths and Marks & Spencers, plenty of cod for the catch, cap’n. Who said there was no money in Liverpool?

Mildred sees her birth family every day on Granby. Big old fambo too, but they haven’t got anything, not even their marbles. No jobs for whites, so defo nothing for Blacks and Irish. Dole goes on weed, on ale, on smack. They’re too out of it to even recognise her. She hates it, particularly the smack, but it fascinates her at the same time. What’s so good about it? Is it better than Space Invaders?

Mildred likes walking. She hangs in Central Library, reading, reading more and reading better, not a second wasted as she educates herself. Readers and staff question any stray kids why they’re not in school, but for some reason they leave her alone, as if she’s got the pox. Maybe they can smell the Toxteth on her. No bother. She reads and she watches and she reads and she waits.

She watches punks sitting outside the dirty steps of The Probe on Mathew Street. They give her Juicy Fruit chewies and the ends of their ciggies. Some of them like their smack too. They also like Mildred; they see her and hear her, unlike the rest of society. Cutie pie. She likes the tag, but that’s not the truth. The truth is she has rage, rage like no kid her age should have. Rage beats her fear down, protects her from the bad people around her, most of whom are in her family; foster and birth. All in L8, Toxteth, Dingle. Upper Parly, Lodge, Granby, Grove, Mulgrave, Park Road. She keeps the hours she spends back there to sleeping if possible. Food she can blag on the streets with her ‘cute’ face. She knows people. In milliseconds, she knows how to spot and assess a kind person, a nonce, 99% of them male, 88% white male. Beg, rob, slash or avoid. This instinct keeps her safe, along with that rage that no-one can see, and you don’t want to see in one so young.

But you’re going to see it, in not too many paragraphs from now.

Princes Avenue, midnight. Grand terraces loom over Mildred as she plods home, finally. Built for richer, far more bourgeoise types over a century earlier, left to rot and repurposed for the swelling Caribbean community that joined the Blacks and Irish long settled here in L8, ignored since the 1700s. There are plenty of more salacious and violent crimes than neglect, but that one bites harder into the generations than most.

Sultry night in late June. Panda pig mobile tails her walking home. She stops, it stops. Flat-nosed copper pulls down the passenger window.

‘Oi.’

She carries on walking.

‘Pssst.’

She stops. Pssst yourself, knobhead.

‘Eh kid. Come over here, you.’

Mildred bounces over to the car, making a crap impression of innocence. Whatever he sees, he doesn’t see cute.

Flat Nose shows her a black and white mugshot of a grinning young man. Round, soft, mixed race face, big hair.

‘Know this lad?’

She shakes her head. Of course she knows him. It’s George. Knots in her belly.

‘Seen him about?’

Flat Nose waggles a pound note over the picture. She smiles back at him and shakes her head.

‘Bit late for you, isn’t it? Why aren’t you at home in bed?’

Mildred shrugs. If they really cared about that, she’d be in the back of the car and on her way back to the Coopers right now. But here she is, still on the pavement, kicking dogshit around.

‘Aren’t you going to ask my name?’ she asks, ‘Where I live?’

Flat Nose just leers at her. He taps the photo and holds up a five pound note. Ooh, look at this. Mildred shakes her head. He sucks his teeth.

‘Tell him that we’re coming for him. Be a good white girl.’

If they’re coming for him then why ask her if she’s seen him? Stupid people think others are stupid and don’t think they’re stupid themselves.

He winds up his window and the car moves off. Mildred moves too. It is getting late, even for nocturnal kittens. The street is still, without a stirring soul. No, not still, simmering, waiting to explode. Beneath the quiet is rage, the same rage she feels. Coming soon.

***

Mildred walks down the endless row of houses that is Granby Street. She should love the people here; Somalis, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Ghanaian, Nigerian Igbo, Guyanese, Liberian, Surinamese, Jamaican, Antiguan, Trinidadian, Bajan, Irish, Welsh, Polish, Italian, Scouse. They represent her, they look after their own, even the ones that don’t look like her. They repel threats from criminal gangs trying to exploit them, young and old. They reject the worst criminals of all; the Fascists in power (Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Out! Out! Out!), they reject Ken Oxford’s henchmen in blue, suppressing them because of their scowling, mongrel faces and mocking them for the same reason, forcing them towards becoming an underclass when over the last century many were invited here by the British Government to do the jobs the English couldn’t or wouldn’t, joining the others who built the docks, the warehouses, the railway. Real stories from real history, not the bunkum in the books. Toxteth, a welcome bosom; if you really don’t belong, you belong here. Them Bizzies, always telling you who they think who you are, always prowling, always picking fights they know they’ll win, just for their own power trip. Cops are crims.

So there is a cause and effect and even this 9 year old is aware of it. Especially aware. The problem is, even among the good intentions around here, even among the excellent people suffering hard times, there are those who want to do a lot more than just survive or even fight back. There are those who see the current situation as an opportunity. She can see that and, again, she’s just a kid. So what’s she to do?

Steer clear and wait until it blows over. Do what she does well. Be alone, be invisible. Exist in the cracks.

She swerves down the back alley as coming through the front door of the Coopers could mean a beating or worse, if the old man is still up. Him and his fishwife wife aren’t interested in a 9 year old Ginger urchin who doesn’t know her real Dad and whose Mum is a dead dancer who became a smackhead. They just want her Child Benefit money and occasionally old Barry ‘Crazy Horse’ Cooper wants to bounce her around the living room to prove to himself that he’s a big man after a bellyful of Country and Western and Paddy whiskey. He loves his dog.

That’s why she stays low maintenance and why she has to sneak into her own home. She’s running out of reasons to come back here, although the last time she ran away properly, social services grabbed her and things got nasty when she was dropped off. See? No choices.

She hangs around the rickety wooden back gate, staring up at the dark roof against the bruised Summer night sky. The lights are out but George, her 19 year old foster brother and the subject of that copper’s mugshot is up in his room, gazing up at the cosmos with his recycled, telephoto lens. Does he ever take any pictures? Well, no, but someone has his picture.

Footsteps behind her, a hand clasps around her mouth, dread quickly filling her up from the pit of her stomach.

The lad chuckles. He steps back and whacks her across the head with a rolled-up newspaper, the local rag.

‘Conan! Shush.’

He unfurls it, jabbing the front page headline: THREE POLICEMEN BEATEN IN TOXTETH.

Conan, 14; half rice, half chips multi-ethnic in that uniquely Toxteth way. Cousin from her real family, from the side she doesn’t know anything about, roots unknown, dark brown eyes to her emerald. Looks and acts twice his age, centre of gravity like a pitbull and the brute strength to go with it. He’s been hanging around this alley for a couple of weeks now, which is about as long as Mildred has known him since he’s only just out of borstal. Loner, like herself.

‘What?’ she mutters.

‘I’m famous!’

‘Shush. You’ll wake…’

‘Yanno. Yanno. Do us a favour, go and get your George down here will you. Something I got to ask him.’

‘He’s not my George.’

‘Yanno, yanno. Go on then, Milly.’

‘Give me a pound.’

‘No.’

‘Ten bob then, Conan. Go on, you’ve got cash. I know you have.’

‘How’s about I don’t make a racket and wake-up old Crazy Horse in there?’

Milly thinks about.

‘No flies on you.’

‘No flies on me.’

***

George’s moon face expands with terror as Conan lays it down for him. He looks fair ready to piss his pants.

‘What about that thing?’ says Conan, looking up and down the ginnel, ‘And all the other things. You’ve a big debt, fat as your arse.’

‘You said I had a week to pay up,’ bleats George. Conan has his much larger and older customer backed up against a wall. Mildred chews and watches.

‘Was it not a good thing? Thai stick. Best thing there is. As it always is.’

‘I don’t dispute that, Conan. But I bought it on the understanding that you would wait until my next giro arrived and then I could pay in instalments. It hasn’t yet. Thing on tick, remember?’

Conan remembers and nods but vices up to George, tighter. George winces. He doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand either, but she likes it. Violence, like heroin, stimulates a deep curiosity within her.

She can just about tolerate George, but Conan is her blood. And something about the way he is calling the shots appeals to her. The boy is sharp, maybe the sharpest of them all around here. A criminal prodigy back from the blue. Proper, not half-arsed and thick as two short planks like some of them round here. If Conan is famous for battering some bizzies, then why was George’s face on that photo that Flat Nose showed her? Does he know what’s coming to him?

‘Look, we were down the bombdie, weren’t we?’ says George.

‘Yanno.’

‘And I asked you for a quarter on tick. Okay, on top on everything else I owe you. But you was sweet on it.’

‘Yanno George but you see, things have changed, old son.’

‘In a week?’ squeaks George. Mildred does like him, but he’s so weak, and weak men have no chance around here. He’s even worse around Crazy Horse. Pitching, scrapping, stuttering. Kids in care have to be stronger, like her. She should feel sorry for him. She can’t. She wants Conan to smash him right now, in front of her. She feels bad for wanting this.

‘After you got your weed and cleared off. Bizzies landed, blues and twos. Everywhere. Bullying, intimidating, leaning on good people. Government agents in L8, like. FBI shit.’ He shows the headline to George.

‘What?’ It dawns on George, fast, ‘Oh man, what have you done?’

‘They were about to bust Femi. Femi knows stuff. Femi was carrying for me. So it was me, but not because I’m even arsed about the Defence Committee. It won’t make no difference to round here.’

‘But you’re only a kid. Three policemen, filled in? For fuck’s sake. How? Not that I doubt you. Wow, you’re a hero, lad.’

Conan smiles. Mildred’s never seen this side to him. He enjoys showing it. He shadow boxes.

‘Bizzies aren’t arsed about a bit of ganja, but they’d use it as an excuse to lock us up again and that’s not happening no more. I got plans. Anywiz, big fella,’ George tries to edge away, like he knows what’s coming, ‘Look, I don’t want to shake you down. You’re practically a brother to my favourite cousin here. But times are tough, lad. Need the dough to lie low.’

‘But I just can’t mate. Not yet. Can I do anything for you?’

Conan sucks his teeth. And there it is.

‘Maybe. Thing is. Suppose you already have.’

A vein pulses in George’s neck. Conan jabs the paper headline again.

‘What?’

‘They kinda think it was you, big fella. They looking for you.’

George gapes like a fish. Holy guacamole.

‘What? How the frigging hell is that? We look nothing like one another. Not even close. Did you tell them it was me?’

Fire in Conan’s snarl. ‘You calling me a grass, George?’

The pitch in George’s voice raises several octaves. ‘No.’

‘Good lad. Just checking.’

Conan shrugs and stares back up at George. It unnerves him. Mildred can’t see the play, but she’s trying to work it out. The air has left George.

‘What do you want me to do, Conan? This is mad.’

‘That’s more like it, Georgy Porgie.’

‘I told you, I’m skint, like. But I can’t do this. They’ll bang me up.’

Conan nods and slaps the paper across George’s chest.

‘And what a hero you’ll be.’

‘But people know it was you.’

‘And people will know what you did to protect me. Look, I need the heat off me. People saw you there. That’s enough. I’ll wipe your debt if you take this for me.’

George breathes hard. He chooses the path of least resistance and aggro.

‘Alright, Conan.’

‘Sound.’

George looks like he’s got some words stuck in his throat, as if he can’t quite fathom how a 14 year old is getting this over him.

‘Even though you’ve gone back on your own terms.’

Conan pins George against the wall, arms pumped, biceps like tennis balls, taught and tawny. For a mad moment, Mildred thinks about fetching Crazy Horse. Probably not a good idea all round.

‘Listen, you eight foot fucking melt. I don’t care what you think. I don’t even care about bully bizzies and what they doing round here. Just be there tomoz. Mulgrave Bombdie, 8pm.’

‘Fucking hell, Conan. Okay lad. Okay.’

Conan jams into him, harder.

‘What time?’ George splutters.

‘Am I a parrot? 8pm. Fucking 8pm.’

Conan drops him down and winks at Mildred. George nods and takes Conan’s silence as his cue to scurry back indoors. He moves quickly for a big man. Conan smirks.

‘Fatty bell whiff.’

Mildred shakes her head. She stops herself from laughing. It isn’t right to laugh at this.

‘He’s okay, cuz.’

‘Suppose.’

Conan lights up a blunt and offers some to her.

‘I’m only nine. I only smoke ciggies.’

‘Sensible sensimilia. Never let me catch you doing drugs. Real drugs like smack. Weed don’t count.’

‘Yeah. I mean no.’

Conan smiles and flips a fifty pence coin at her.

‘Lad’s a melt, so he’s getting a chance to make a name for hisself off me. And as for his old fella, alky will get his too. High time my family started looking after its own. Disgrace what tis. Need to get you properly fed. Look atcha. White as a sheet, stick insect.’

Mildred looks him up and down. She bursts with hope. Dangerous, radiant, beautiful hope.

‘Conan?’

He pinches her cheek.

‘It’s a promise. All gonna change and we gonna be on the right side of it.’

Conan taps his temple with a stubby forefinger and winks at her, then he struts off down the alley like he’s the new Boy King of Granby, which right now Mildred is nearly 100% sure that he is.

***

‘Proper filled they were. It was too easy. They was fat and slow.’

Conan stands in the middle of a large circle of much older lads and men, holding court, shadow boxing his recreation of the events as Mildred hangs by him, on his every word. It’s a league of tribes here with everything in-between, all united under Toxteth.

Mrs Valerie Burke, a ruddy-faced 40 year old mother hen of one of the largest Irish families off Park Road, joins them. Community face, community leader. As official as it gets around here. Her sleeves are rolled up and she’s ready for battle. She scans Conan, still gesticulating like he’s the cock of the North.

‘Who’s this kid?’ she says. Voices pipe.

Conan here battered three coppers the other night. We saw it. They dragged Femi Armstrong into the back of a wagon after saying he’d nicked a bike. Then he went after the van, kicking the back door. It stopped and these three horrible honks jump out like they’re going to fucking kill him but you never seen anything like it. Like Bruce frigging Lee. It was mazin.

Mrs Burke shakes her head.

No it’s all true, Val. Lad’s a hero. Tell the Defence Committee about him.

Conan frowns and shuffles, suddenly edgy:

‘It was George what did it mainly. George Cooper.’

Mrs Burke strokes his face.

‘My arse George did. Nice lad, but no fighter. You did us proud, son. You’ve struck a blow. We need you with us.’

Conan acts dumb, not very well: ‘What’s a Defence Committee? What’s going on round here tonight? No bizzies coming, I hope?’

Something’s just dawned on him, but all eyes are on Mrs Burke now. She climbs up above the small crowd in order to be seen properly, Trotsky-style.

‘Can I just remind everyone that there’s a bigger picture here.’

Maybe Conan’s blow against tyranny happened that way, maybe it didn’t. But the effect is that nearly a hundred people have gathered here tonight in a crater left by the Luftwaffe just over 40 years previously, emboldened by the idea that someone, anyone could hit back, even a 14 year old kid. Conan eyeballs Mildred from the L-shaped seat of his Raleigh Chopper. He suddenly looks like he really doesn’t want to be here.

George meanders up to them, hands stuffed in pockets, his lanky, diminished stride betraying his nervousness as a member of the Defence Committee. Conan nods at him and they shake hands, a small roll of notes passing between them.

Conan clutches it in his fist, wary of eyes on them. ‘What’s this, you prick?’

George shuffles on his feet. ‘Money owed. I can’t do this, lad. I want to go to college.’

‘You’re doing it. You promised. Don’t make a show of me.’

Mrs Burke frowns at the stand off, sniffing something is off, but there is other business happening here tonight and there’s no ignoring it. Conan looks like he wants to scatter George’s teeth over the loose bricks, but he is aware of the company all around them.

‘I’m fourteen, you big ballbag. I don’t want to go back to juvey. Peddle back on this and I’ll fucking stab you.’

Shushes from the throng.

Everyone else is focused upon the distant sirens, wailing into the Liverpool evening from all directions. Nervous muttering. Mrs Burke hold up her hands like she is conducting the Philharmonic. A fragile calm descends. George looks over his shoulder, but he can barely move for the crowd that has assembled behind him. Mildred bites her lip and exchanges faces with Conan. Big melt didn’t think this through. Conan whispers in her ear.

‘Don’t worry. Got insurance. Paid the alky a visit after you’d gone to bed.’

Mrs Burke stands on the higher ground like Lenin.

‘Now we’re expecting them to hit back. Their reputation has been hurt and bullies don’t like that. But we’re all here together to show them that we’ve had enough. For over two hundred years, this community has had to put up with open harassment, abuse and discrimination. It stops now. Tonight, tomorrow and for however long it takes. And we’re not the only people out on the streets waiting for them. They have no idea.’

Cheers and applause. Mildred feels a surge of energy coarse up her spine. More people join, not just men, but women, pensioners, kids even younger than her. Everyone’s had enough. The sirens grow louder and a powerful, invisible energy floats around the crowd like a divine wind. She turns around, looking for a reaction from her new hero Conan. But the Chopper has gone and so has her cousin. Where’s he at?

George is trying to back away, but Femi Armstrong and a couple of other lads block his path, like they’re following orders from a younger kid, but age doesn’t matter as far as Conan Costigan is concerned.

Squad cars and black mariahs stream up Mulgrave Street, galumphing across the wasteground and into the bombdie. The locals form a line, linking at the arm. Cohorts of coppers clutching riot shields and batons spill out of each van like Roman Centurions, forming a line themselves. They stand off in an impromptu urban battlefield.

Mrs Valerie Burke steps out front.

‘I’ve called the Echo, Granada Reports and the BBC. They’ll be here any minute.’

A hot silence. Then one officer emerges, striding up the hill without any protection; Flat Nose. Mildred glares at him. They’re the real problem, they’re the cause of all this. And ‘they’ are perfectly represented by him.

‘Don’t think so, love. If they wanted to be here, they’d be here now. So it’s just us chickens, Irish.’ He approaches the community line, smiling at the hotch potch of people who have turned up. ‘Fucking league of nations and a few spazzes. We’ll make short work of this.’ Mrs Valerie Burke eyeballs him, but he ignores her. ‘George Cooper. Step forward,’ orders Flat Nose, ‘We know you’re here, son. We know what you did. Your dear old pops tipped us off. 8pm at the Mulgrave Bombdie.’

George’s jaw has dropped. Mildred spots Crazy Horse limping up the hill behind George, clutching a bottle of cheap brandy.

Her foster brother begins to shake. Mildred begins to rage. George’s bottom lip quivers.

‘I don’t know what you’re on about. I’m a peaceful protestor. I’m a member of the Defence Committee. This is my civil right.’

‘Blah, blah. Get in the van, son.’

‘Eh?’

The coppers smack their batons against their shields. A truck rolls up, CS gas canisters at the ready. Flat Nose cuffs George and pulls him down the hill, collar first. People seethe, but only stand and watch. For now. Flat Nose can’t hide a smirk.

‘Go home, everyone. Don’t make it any worse. The situation is in hand.’

Mildred hasn’t moved from her spot. Her fists ball. Her ‘brother’ might be a melt, but this isn’t right.

‘No,’ she grunts.

Flat Nose is directly below her, pulling along poor George who really doesn’t want to go in the back of that big, blue van. Bad things happen in the back of big, blue vans. She scans the ground and quickly finds what she is looking for.

She picks up the brick and launches it like a shot put at the Police Officer’s back. It hits him square between his shoulder blades, taking him down. The aftermath happens in a split second but Mildred sees it in slow motion. The coppers charge, pushing back the locals who were already retreating, batons swinging at random. Mildred remains fixed to the same spot, curious as to why they haven’t come after her. Like many times before in her short life, she is invisible.

***

Mildred is really unsure about returning to Granby now.  What kind of man betrays his own son? Well, they’re not really related either, are they? The old man used to take welfare payments for George until he got too old, then he kept the lad around as a skivvy and a drinking buddy. Tears should be stinging her eyes right now, but she never did them, even as a baby.  Crazy Horse took whatever reward was on offer and now he’s in there, enjoying it. 

She stands in the alley, same place and time as the previous night, looking up at George’s room.

Nothing. But the sound of some old Country Music. Crazy Horse’s Country Music. Hank Williams, God of the Opry.

‘I’m going to call you Bing Bong.’ Conan is behind her, again, ‘That was amazing, kidda. I was proper choked. My cousin. Bing Bong Hoolihan bricks a Bizzie. Them’s the headlines. We in business.’

‘Bastard,’ she hears herself say, shoving Conan. He takes it. ‘You told the police it was George when it was you.’

‘I didn’t. Swear down. But Crazy Horse did.’

She shoves him again, but it’s like trying to shove a mountain. ‘You told Dad about the reward.’

‘It was business, kidda. We got to understand that, otherwise we’re going down with the rest of them. And he’s not your Dad. Never was, never will be.’

The tears come hard, fast and altogether unexpected. Mildred collapses in a heap. She should hate Conan for threatening George, but she hates herself for liking it. Conan sets his bike against the wall and joins her on the ground, hugging her, stroking her curly, red thatch of a head.

‘Heard you nailed the twat good style too. He’s gone into intensive care. Bing Bong strong!’ Conan guns his biceps but she rains snotty tears. An invisible hand chokes her. ‘Easy now. We’re heroes you know, both of us. A family of two, both fugitives from the law.’

Crazy Horse appears at the window of George’s bedroom. He leers down at them, eyes like Japanese flags, sallow and jaundiced. Mildred spots him and snaps out of it.

‘Don’t mind him,’ says Conan.

‘You don’t know him.’

Conan nods and stares back up at Crazy Horse. He cracks his knuckles.

‘I know him alright. Back in a min.’

‘What… Conan don’t. He’ll batter me.’

‘His battering days are over.’

He shimmies past her, through the yard and into the house. Crash, bang, wallop. She imagines a scene like the sixties Batman TV series where the caped crusader (Conan) beats up the evil, alcoholic Penguin (Crazy Horse) and his entire entourage, ably assisted by Robin (herself). A thud and a scream,