Chapter Eight Razor
Chapter Eight
Razor
Friday and Saturday were the usual shitstorm.
Restaurant heaving. Club rammed. My gear flowing out the doors as if I were handing out sweets on Halloween. Money rolled in faster than we could rinse it at the Velvet Lounge, which meant Monday had my name on laundry duty again. Standard.
Normally after a weekend comprising a couple of bust-ups, two evacuations, and one idiot threatening the bar staff over a tab, I’d crash all Sunday and let the world burn without me.
Tyler had handled most of the aggro. I’d only stepped in when some punter got grabby with one of our girls.
I don’t like men who think that because they’ve spent a few quid on overpriced vodka, it bought them the right to put their hands on women without asking.
Obvious reasons, innit. So I sorted that one myself.
And that bloke won’t be touching anyone, including himself, for a good long while now.
But, yeah, sleep didn’t happen.
Not with that big fuck-off bag of Pretty Poison crystals sitting in my Wick apartment, humming through the walls as if it had a heartbeat. Couldn’t take my eyes off it. Couldn’t shut my head up.
Or if I was honest, it was the vigil playing on my mind.
And on Sunday morning, I stood on my balcony in nothing but boxers, fag between my fingers, looking out over the canal, wondering why I’d agreed to it.
Early-morning quiet stretched across Hackney Wick in a way that felt wrong on a Sunday.
I tried to psyche myself up, the same way I did before walking into a fight knowing I was gonna take some hits.
Cause Lennon inviting me…? That was a test. I knew it.
An open door he didn’t have to offer. But stepping into that church meant facing every single person I’d left behind when I traded the estate for nicer walls and a view of the canal.
I flicked the cigarette butt out into the air, watched the ember fall into water as dark as tar, and went inside to get dressed. In black. Easy choice. It was mostly what I owned anyway. From black hoodie and jeans to black shirt and jeans. No thinking required.
Then, I got in the car and drove.
Hackney grew familiar the deeper I went. The estates, the barbershops, the chicken shops that never closed. All those places I’d walked past a thousand times with Lennon at my side and Levi half a step behind. Roads that should’ve felt small but now felt too big.
St John’s rose ahead of me, lit from below by those old yellow floodlights making the stone glow as if the whole place breathed.
Big arched windows. A tower watching over Mare Street.
The wide stretch of lawn where kids used to race their battered bikes and aunties would park themselves on benches for half the afternoon, gossiping and keeping watch.
I used to cut through here on the way home from school.
The place always looked too holy for boys like me.
Today, it looked worse.
Cars lined the pavement shoulder to shoulder. People crowded the steps. Warm, trembling gospel chords spilt out of the open doors, carrying on the thick summer air.
My stomach twisted.
But I’d come this far.
I killed the engine and thought about wrapping myself in the leather, but it was sweltering hot, so I left it and walked towards the one place holding the one person I didn’t know how to face:
Levi.
A knot of lads I half-recognised hunched on the church steps, vapes glowing blue in the sun, tracksuits hanging off them the same way they had when we were all kids. One of them straightened when I hit the path.
“No fucking way. Razor?”
My shoulders squared before I got control of them.
Hearing it here, outside this church, on this day, scraped violently under my ribs.
I’d driven over in Richie mode without even meaning to.
Lennon and Levi did that to me. Dragged out the version of me before everything went sideways.
They’d never really called me Razor. Not properly.
Not like the rest of the world did once I started running gear.
Hard thing, carrying a name given to you on a playground at eleven when you’ve built another one on the bones of it.
Hearing Razor where Richie used to stand…Yeah. It reminded me there were two versions of me walking around in the same skin. And I wasn’t sure which one was winning anymore.
The lads gave me the once-over. Jeans that actually fit, boots that hadn’t seen a puddle in months, car keys in my hand instead of stuffed into a sock.
One jerked his chin at the road. “Nice motor. You doing alright for yourself.”
That old prickle crept up my neck. Not shame.
Nor even pride. Something in between. Being seen by the wrong people in the wrong way.
They knew what I did. Some of them had links to the line, or links to the ones linked to it.
Didn’t matter. I never flaunted it. Flaunting was for the ones who wanted disciples.
Flash cars, flashy chains. Recruit the next kid hungry for a shortcut.
Never been my style.
And if I was honest, standing here, maybe the problem was I’d never been enough of Razor to live this life clean. There was still too much Richie clinging on, trying to breathe.
“Just working,” I said, shrugging it off.
“Man says just working,” another snorted. “Wish my nine-to-five looked like yours.” He shifted his vape to the other hand, leant in slightly. “You hear about Darren, yeah? Court date’s set. They’re saying crown, not mags. Man’s finished. Ain’t seeing daylight for time.”
My gut sank.
“Yeah,” I said, voice flat. “I heard.”
“Man’s fucked. Could use someone with… connections.” His eyes lingered on my keys again, then on the door behind me. “Need to pay a right good barrister to get him out.”
Tristan’s face flashed across my brain uninvited. White shirt, courtroom eyes, the cut of his mouth when he was trying not to care.
“Ain’t that simple,” I muttered. “Nothing’s simple in court.”
“Never stopped you before, Razor.”
The name again, soft and sharp. I had to bite down on the instinct to walk back to the car and get the fuck out. Instead, I forced my feet forward, towards the doors, the music, the picture of the boy I’d failed.
Inside, gospel hummed low through the church.
Soft, cracked around the edges. Someone sang His Eye Is on the Sparrow, voice shaking as if she’d cried all the way there.
People swayed, humming along, shoulders touching.
The air smelt of candlewax, damp coats, old wood, and the familiar spice of Caribbean cooking someone had brought for after.
British-Jamaican families didn’t do quiet grief. It filled the room. Saturated it.
I stayed at the back, the same as I had when Lennon’s mum dragged us in as kids.
Said the saints needed eyes on boys like us.
I never believed it, but Lennon had. He’d lean into me in the pews, pretending he wasn’t scared of God, the dark, or losing his little brother to the roads.
Then he got older and stopped leaning. Stopped pretending. Wanted me to do the same.
Too late for all that now.
My gaze drifted to the front, and there he was. Levi’s face blown up on a poster board. Smiling, bright, wearing the chain I’d got him off my first real street wage. The one he never took off and told everyone he’d bought it.
The grief sank deeper. Darker.
“Oi, move over.”
I jerked my head to the side to find Keeley, hip cocked, baby on her arm, attitude intact despite the red rims around her eyes.
She shoved Maisie at me and I barely got an arm under the kid before she latched onto my face, grabbing my nose with a sticky fist from whatever she’d been chewing on. Drool slipped down my shirt.
“What you doing here?” I whispered.
“Amara invited me.” Keeley nodded towards the front pews.
Lennon and Amara stood by the front row, holding one baby each, little heads bobbing as they rocked them gently. Levi’s nephews. Facing the uncle they’d never got to meet.
Keeley shrugged. “Said there’d be free food.”
Jesus Christ.
I wasn’t prepped for this. Not any of it.
She leant in again, whispering. “You see him?”
I kept my eyes forward, bouncing the baby on my lap. “Yeah.”
Keeley studied me with those big eyes of hers, still soft in ways the world hadn’t beaten out of her yet.
Fifteen when she had Maisie, sixteen now and not so sweet as it should be.
She’d had her childhood cut ten years short.
Raised half by the streets and half by our mother too wrapped in her own demons to raise anyone.
She wore clothes and makeup making her look older, tougher, as if she belonged in a sixth-form common room or a uni bar, not retaking GCSEs when she could find the time.
But underneath all that armour, she was still a kid.
A kid whose baby daddy was staring down a stretch in prison. Adult prison.
“He look scared?” Keeley looked straight ahead as she asked, as if she couldn’t bear to really know.
I swallowed. Darren’s face behind the glass, hard and cocky around the edges, had haunted me all night. That flicker underneath. The bit that knew this wasn’t a youth wing he’d swagger through. This was grown-man time.
“Everyone looks scared in there.” I made a face at Maisie as she pulled on my nose. “Even when they’re fronting.”
Keeley chewed her lip, mascara flaked at the corners of her eyes. “His mum can’t afford no proper brief. Not one of them posh ones, anyway. The ones who get you deals and stuff.”
Tristan’s voice drifted back then. Explaining some section-something of fucking SOCPA as if the law was a puzzle he could solve with enough coffee.
“Plea deals aren’t really a thing,” I heard myself say, then quickly, “But I’ll sort something.”
Keeley’s head whipped round. “You always say that, Rich.” It came out half-hope, half-accusation. “You ain’t God. You can’t fix court. Nor him keeping his big mouth shut.”