Comedians of Violence

Eventually the feeling of nausea overwhelmed the scalpels of pain slashing through his cortex and coursing down his spine like tumbling razors.  Tony Tinkomat staggered like a drunken sailor before his groping hands found the sign post beside the road.  He held onto the post and spat.  The sockets of his eyes ached as he tried to see the ragged weeds growing at the base.  His nausea alternated between rolling waves and gripping spasms.  He spat again, trying to rid himself of the sulphurous acid at the back of his throat which coated his tongue and burned the lining of his mouth.  His guts were wrenching and cramping, but he could not throw up.  Only vaguely was he aware of traffic passing on the road, and even if he had looked up he would not have been able to see properly.  His eyes were full of tears, but that was not what blinded him.  It was the sizzling pain now arcing from his spinal cord to his optic nerve.

There was no thought in Tony Tinkomat's mind.  Not really, not like we normally recognise thought as a familiar jumble of images linked by fragments of language.  If Tony Tinkomat had been able to think, he would have remembered why he was holding onto a sign post in the middle of Dartmoor with the desperation a drowning man holds onto the debris from a shipwreck.  He would have recalled why he was running and what he was running away from, and that may have given him the courage to bear the hellish churning of his internal organs and the lacerating pain.

Tinkomat was not a particularly intelligent man.  Half Greek and half Irish, his body was layered with bulky muscles bloated from past steroid abuse.  In twenty five years he and his twin brother Charlie had carved out reputations with the North London Police as two real losers.  Petty theft, burglary, extortion with menaces, GBH and finally armed robbery.  If the brothers dreamed at all they dreamed of hitting the big time in crime, the same as the Krays years before them.  Maybe it was because they, like the Krays, were twins.  Whatever the reasons, aggression had always got them what they wanted, even from their earliest schooldays.  Together the two of them were formidable as they kept themselves supplied with plenty of spending money, new trainers and portable electronics from their hapless young victims.  The Tinkomat twins were not bad looking boys, but sex, too, was more fun when it was taken rather than freely given.  All the other kids feared the Tinkomats, and this fed back into the twins' unexceptional intellect as “respect”.  In adolescence they encountered other North London gangs, so they armed themselves.  And over a period of time coshes became knives, knives grew into machetes and cutlasses before finally giving way to guns.  The Tinkomats were in and out of young offenders' units before beginning their prison careers.  Strangely, they were never in prison together or at the same time.  While one was in, the other was out.

Therefore, on a social scale of values, it was difficult to imagine either Tony or Charlie being anything but magnets of negatives.  Not nice, unpleasant, worthless, despicable, nasty, repellent, disagreeable and violent.  However, the Tinkomat twins were not psychopaths as some argued the Krays had been.  Their father, himself an alcoholic and petty criminal, had taught them, because their council flat was a battleground where only the fittest survived.  Those who could bite hardest or were quicker to grab a weapon when the fights broke out were likely to suffer less pain and fewer injuries.  And if the flat was a battleground, the estate was a war zone.  In a war zone rage is a useful emotion, terror and intimidation profitable tools.

So perhaps the Tinkomat twins were not really stupid.  Because they learned their lessons early and, on a small scale, were quite successful.  If they had spent their lives on the old council estate, no doubt in time they would have been respected and honoured by the other miserable residents.  It was only when the twins sloshed out into what is risibly supposed to be normal society that they automatically clashed with other values, values as strange to them as theirs were repulsive to their new neighbours.

Thus Tony Tinkomat was certainly intelligent enough to remember what demons he was fleeing as he desperately hugged the sign post on a lonely road in Dartmoor.  An astrophysicist or precocious polymath would have had equal difficulties under the same circumstances.  In fact Tony Tinkomat had done extremely well to get as far as he had come.  His last organised thoughts had been single-minded tenacity bracketed with flickers of rage.  He had to escape from That Place, and he was prepared to die rather than return.  The pain and nausea, however, were considerably worse than what he imagined death to be.  Slowly, inevitably, he was weakening, and so was his grip on the sign post.  His thoughts weren't organised enough to realise it, but in a very few moments his body was going to take him back to That Place.  With each step back the pain would slowly decrease to a mere tingle as he walked through the open gates and returned to his little two room chalet.