Read Billy Rags for Free Online Page B

Always on their pits whenever there’s a chance, hoping their nap will carry them closer to the gate and farther away from the subsequent awakening. But that kind of sleeping is easier during the day, when it’s light, because you can see what it is you want to shut out, but at night, in the dark, when there’s nothing to look at, it’s harder to sleep because the imaginary outside images are brighter in your mind than the grey realities of the day.
    The mistake most cons make is to try and fight the pictures in their minds, to black them out with sleep. But that never works. It’s better to approach the problem from the opposite direction, to make the pictures even brighter, bring them into sharper focus, move around in them, stage manage them, make them work for you as an alternative reality, tire out your mind by trying to make the unreal real and giving the shadows form.
    This is what I used to do. I’d pick on an event, just something at random, then I’d start with the time of day the event took place, remember the light, the colour, the temperature. Then the location, and the same with that, down to the last detail. Then the people who were involved, colour eyes, colour hair, colour clothes, style, cigarettes, drinks. Then I’d tie everything together and move through the same scene from the beginning to end, saying all that was said and acting all that was done in my mind, endlessly going back to the beginning to make sure I’d got it all right. And not always events on the outside. Sometimes I’d take the characters I mixed with every day and go through them, head to toe, mannerisms, histories, conversations, and check them out against my memory the next day, to see how well my mind was working, to make sure the nick wasn’t softening up my brain. That way I knew my outside memories could still be trusted.
    For instance, I’d take Benny Beauty.
    Benny.
    The hair; black, jet black, a bit gyppo, especially with the style, too-long Tony Curtis, greased inches thick, freezing the dandruff, the fore-peak always stuck to his forehead, the tops of his ears thrusting up behind the motionless convokes. And the brass ring on his left ear lobe, the colour of the wax inside. And his eyebrows, jet black again but flecked with grey, almost off-white, at the edges. His eyes, black-blue, sleepy lidded, the bags underneath bulbous and wrinkled. The nose, flat and shiny, lips fat and skin-cracked pursing forward above the cleft chin, almost Cypriot in its depth and darkness. The heavy hands, muscular, like the rest of his body, just on the verge of being too fat. His movements slow, always relaxed, almost tired.
    He’d nailed a man called Cecil Foster to a tree in Epping Forest, Benny had. On orders, of course. The brief had been to show Foster’s backers that Benny’s backers were only good for a laugh for so long. But the method had been left to Benny himself. So Benny and two of his free-lancers had sorted Foster out of his club in Meard Street on a Saturday night and taken him up the A11 to the forest and given him the message Benny’s way. They’d left him far enough into the forest for him not to be found for a couple of days.
    The case had made all the nationals. Someone had grassed on Benny and normally Benny’s backers would have been able to get him off but this time someone on the law advised them against so they’d given Benny away and stayed out of it themselves. I know how glad Benny’s backers must have been when he got maximum security.
    Or I’d take somebody like Ray Crompton. Ray was more difficult than Benny. When you first thought about Ray you saw a face without features, hair without colour, a body with only two dimensions. But when you concentrated, really pulled everything together in your mind, you realised that after all there was something that gave you a hint of some kind of personality, and that something was his mouth, and