Losing It

by Roger Granelli

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Losing It is set in the world of Baldock, local drug dealer and hard man of the Welsh Valleys. When one of his drug-runners, TJ, starts taking his own cut, it proves to be a big mistake. Baldock¿s reaction is explosive and violent.



Baldock¿s life is not straight forward. At home sits his dependent, wheelchair-bound father, a WWII veteran who has no idea about his son¿s drug empire. This taut father and son relationship is the backdrop to Baldock¿s increasingly desperate need to find and deal with TJ. Looking for TJ, Baldock neglects his father¿s needs with incendiary results that will change his life forever.

Release date: December 13, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 96

Sample

Chapter One

As Baldock made his plans he tried to keep a clear head. Revenge was worth waiting for – a dish best served up cold. He’d read that in a book once. Baldock wanted to get even with TJ, and it was necessary to get even with TJ, but he had to maintain his cool, no matter how hard this was. People would be watching. His reputation was on the line.

Baldock liked his revenge hot and sudden – he’d lost it many times in the past, using his fists before his brain started up. When he found out what TJ had been doing he’d wanted to wring the little runt’s neck, but instead he took a deep breath. Baldock took lots of deep breaths, and told himself to take it easy. There was no rush. In a way he almost admired TJ for having the bottle to rip him off. The little sod must have been desperate.

Baldock had his empire to consider, built up over ten years without the police ever getting a sniff. They’d picked up plenty of TJs over the years but none of them had led back to him. No one talked in this neck of the woods. Baldock was The Man now, and had been for some time. He liked to think of his world as an empire, a place where there was order, created by himself, a world where he was boss, number one. He had respect and fear. He had attention. Baldock had most of what he wanted in his life. Most, but not all. Karen had made sure of that.

Baldock stood by the bedroom window of his terraced house, looking out on the street, lost in his thoughts, until his father’s husk of a voice interrupted them.

‘You’re like a bloody statue,’ the old man said, ‘standing there all the time. Worse than your mother ever was.’

Baldock turned round to look at the man swamped in bedclothes, propped up with pillows, once powerfully built, now all bones and cough. His father’s eyes were still full of life though, and they flashed angrily at him now.

‘You haven’t eaten your food,’ Baldock said.

‘Don’t want it. Rabbit food, that is.’

‘You know what the doc said. It’s what you’re supposed to have.’

‘What does it matter what I eat now? It’s as stupid as trying to getting me to stop smoking. I’ve lived long enough, I reckon.’

‘Don’t start that again. You got a good few years yet. I’ll make you a pot of tea. You never say no to that.’

Baldock tried to rearrange his father’s pillows.

‘Don’t fuss, mun. For a big, hard lump, you’re like an old woman sometimes.’

Baldock gave up and took his father’s tray. He bent down close to the old man. His father smelt of a lifetime of smoking, and his face showed a lifetime of work. Old work, the type unknown by people Baldock’s age. His father was marked up with old mining scars, lining his face and hands like blue tattoos. Baldock knew they were all over his body as well. He could just about remember, when he was a young kid, the old man coming home covered in dust sometimes because he couldn’t be bothered to use the pit baths, and his mother washing him in the bath – the old-fashioned way, the way his father liked. That was a long time ago. The last pit in his area had closed before Baldock had left school, and he was only a few years off forty now.

‘It’s your birthday next week, Dad,’ Baldock said. ‘Eighty-two.’

‘I know how old I am. It’s my body that’s worn out, not my head. Aye, I’m eighty-two and you’re thirty-bloody-eight and still looking out the sodding window.’

Baldock smiled. He liked the old man’s temper. It had lost some of its bite and could no longer be backed up by fists, but it was still there. Baldock had inherited it. This brought him round to TJ again. He could see the silly little sod showing off down the ’Bush, until he realised what he’d done and got scared. Very scared.

‘I’ll bring up the tea in a minute,’ Baldock said. ‘Oh, there’s boxing on the telly.’

‘Boxing, be buggered. That’s not what I’d call it.’

The old man snatched up the TV remote and pointed it at the television, which Baldock had mounted on the wall. His father had been a. . .