The Continuing Story of Wet Blanket Ron – Part 9

The Continuing Story of Wet Blanket Ron – Part 9 by Chris Green

Having discovered he is fictional, and his social media followers having discovered he has discovered he is fictional, Wet Blanket Ron now needs to be creative if he is to continue his existence. As things stand, he is dead on the page, which, of course, means that he is dead. Ron does not want to be dead. Even given his catalogue of misfortune, he holds the view that it is better to be alive. If only marginally. He needs a new narrative.

As he sees it, he will need to re-establish contact with his creator. The principal problem here seems to be that he has lost touch with his creator and cannot lay his hands on his contact details. This is a Waiting for Godot situation. He could, of course, like Vladimir and Estragon, continue waiting, clinging to the hope that Godot will eventually arrive and that his creator will come calling. But surely he has already waited too long. Seven years is a long time, and it is seven years since he last had an outing on the page. 

Little does he know it, but independently of this, his creator finds himself at a temporary loss for new ideas for his short fiction and is also thinking perhaps it might be time Wet Blanket Ron reappeared. His readers have noticed their favourite character’s absence. In the cultural desert that is taking over the literary world and social media platforms, WBR is greatly missed. His return is long overdue.

Regular readers of the Continuing Story of Wet Blanket Ron will be aware that Ron was, at least originally, based on a ne’er-do-well of the author’s acquaintance called Dale Loveless. Now, as it happens, Dale is wondering why his friend Chris has not been in touch with him for the last seven years. He has not called around or phoned once during this time, which is a pity because in the past Chris had often cheered him up. Occasionally he had taken him out for a slap-up-meal at The Goat and Bicycle and once or twice slipped him a few quid to get him through a sticky patch. He vaguely suspected that there was a trade-off and that his woeful experiences were being used in Chris’s fiction, but he had always felt this was a small price to pay. But should he feel this way? Lately, he had felt cheated.

……………………………………………………….

Has Chris by some sorcery detected that he was missing his company, Dale wonders, when a few days later, as he is resting up having dislocated his shoulder falling from a stepladder on his cash-in-hand job for Vince Rambo, he gets the call he had been waiting for. 

‘I thought I might pop round later to see how you are getting on, Dale, old mate,’ Chris says, as if no time at all had passed. ‘You still at the flat in Tokers End?’

Dale intimates that he has moved nine or ten times since the basement bedsit Chris is referring to. He now lives at 13 Little Back Street, above the 24-hour slot machine place. 

Undeterred by the grim location, Chris says he will swing by at 7 with a bottle of decent scotch and they can catch up with what has been going on. 

Quite a lot has been going on and none of it good. In the middle of Dale’s reports of evictions, beatings up, hospitalisations, prison sentences, and COVID infections (8 times), and plain bad luck, Dale’s phone rings. He goes off to a corner of the room to retrieve it and take the call. 

‘That was someone called Ron Smoot,’ he says when he sits back down. ‘Bit weird, really. He was asking if I had your number. I didn’t know what to say. I told him I would have a look and get back to him. I thought I had better check with you first. Ron Smoot? That’s Wet Blanket Ron, isn’t it? I thought he was a fictional character.’

‘Yes, he is, and I agree it must appear a little unusual. But these slippages in reality happen sometimes, trust me! But the thing is writers tend to welcome the unexpected. Depend on surprises. ……. Look, Dale! Leave it a day or two. You don’t want to sound too eager, but you have my permission to give him my details, and I will be able to take it from there. It could work out rather well, but perhaps not so well for Ron.’

……………………………………………………….

‘I’m back, love,’ Ron calls out, plonking his heavy rucksack down. ‘Boy, am I glad to be home!’

Tiffany doesn’t get up to greet him. She doesn’t so much as look up from her tablet. She wishes Ron could have stayed away longer, but appreciates that prison sentences have to come to an end, and had his wrongful conviction appeal stood, Ron would have been out a lot sooner. But thankfully the judge threw it out and he had to serve nine of his eighteen months, giving her space to get organised. She is not planning on staying around. She will leave Ron to sort things out here, the debts that have accumulated during his incarceration and the squabble with the landlord. She is already packed. Marco will be around with the van shortly. Tiffany is off to sunnier climes.

Ron should have anticipated what was waiting for him. After all, Tiffany had not visited him once in the time he was in Wandsworth or replied to his emails and letters. He should not have been so optimistic about her fidelity. In essence, this followed the same pattern as the others. Heather, Honey, Cadence, and Lara. All of them had walked out on him. Even his casual relationships misfired. Tracy turned out to be a transvestite and Tiffany turned out to be a transexual. At least Tiffany was a woman and not a fella, but he ought to have realised by now that optimism has no place in the life and loves of Wet Blanket Ron. 

As Ron discovers the scale of the debts Tiffany has left him with, he realises that only drastic action is going to get him out of hock. Fortunately, he has a wealth of experience of being in this predicament. He has been up against it with astonishing regularity since God was a lad. He hoped he had moved on and wouldn’t need to go there again, but needs must. He will need to seek out some of his underworld contacts to see if there’s anything they need a helping hand with, but it’s unlikely these people will give him an easy assignment. They will realise how desperate he is. Anything they offer him will be risky, dangerous, and foolhardy, but what choice does he have? Nothing legal is going to be of much help in this situation. 

Miles Highman is certain to have a scam that he needs someone prepared to serve as a potential fall guy should anything go wrong. It will be dangerous, but Miles pays well. And Nolan Rocco must be out of Belmarsh by now. He will have some pitch that will pay cash in hand. No one can duck and dive and slip and slide better than Nolan Rocco. Or he could once again attempt the improbable for Billy Hats. No number for Billy would be risk free, but it would be a serious earner. 

The odds would be against coming him out of any of these well, but he has got to sort his life out, PDQ. Perhaps he can utilise the cryptocurrency tuition that Riddley Bro, the Criminology lecturer and embezzler he was with in Wandsworth, gave him. Riddley took him through the basics of the cyber economy so he would be all right on the outside. He explained, this was how things were done in the world of crime these days. The main obstacle is that he doesn’t even have a laptop. All the kit disappeared along with Tiffany in Marco’s van. But if Riddley had managed to smuggle one into Wandsworth and access a blockchain network, he shouldn’t let a small obstacle like that thwart him. He would get one, somehow. Riddley, of course, was so skilled he probably used an old Nokia and got results. 

Charlie Lemo is the most techy villain he’s worked for, and one of the few that he parted on good terms, with; perhaps because his association with him had been slight. He imagines Charlie ought to be able to set him up with something that would do the job and get him started with crypto. Even if he would have to delay payment for a while. The thing is, Charlie lives up north. Liverpool 8. Not somewhere you always hear good reports about. But as he’s been banged up for an eternity, and with Tiffany gone to top it, Ron feels it would be good to get away from his flat in Downmarket Street for a spell to regroup. Liverpool 8 can’t be as bad as its reputation. Probably misunderstood. Cosmopolitan. Up and coming. It’s probably in the process of becoming gentrified. 

Sadly, Tiffany seems to have pranged the Dacia. It doesn’t take Honest John to spot that the thing’s not going anywhere, anytime soon. There are bits hanging off. Ron calls Charlie back to explain his predicament. Unexpectedly, Charlie says he would be happy to drop by Downmarket Street so long as Ron can put him up with the comforts he might be looking for away from home for a couple of days. Ron is taken aback. What makes him so keen? What might Charlie be running from? Is he a wanted man? Nor is he sure what comforts Charlie might be referring to. He doesn’t pursue the enquiry in case it is a deal breaker. He keeps shtum. After all, he can guarantee very little. 

Charlie says he will bring his workhorse, along with Satan. Ron doesn’t like the sound of either, but Charlie explains that his workhorse is simply the Dell he uses to run a Bitcoin node, and Satan is an XL Bully dog he keeps for protection. Ron desperately wants to feel something is going right for once, so he doesn’t question why Charlie needs an illegal attack dog for protection. Wandsworth has opened his eyes to the ways of the world. It seems security in all spheres is key to survival these days. Everyone is out to get you. Although this is something he realised years ago, he had clung to the hope that he was wrong. Unwisely perhaps. Wet Blanket Ron was after all Wet Blanket Ron. This reputation had to be earned.

Perhaps the name Charlie Lemo should have offered a clue, charlie and lemo both being slang terms for cocaine, but Ron has never before made the connection. He has had limited experience of the smart set, so he hasn’t been around cocaine too much. Charlie’s arrival clears this up. Charlie has brought kilos of the stuff. He is hoping to lie low in Backwater Street from rival Liverpool gangs for a few days until the heat dies down. Ron takes this to mean the product does not belong to Charlie. Charlie assures him that there is no risk, but if there is, there’s not much he can do about it. And he has brought his kit along with a spare unregistered machine for him. If Charlie can get him established in crypto trading, so that he can pay off his debts, any risk he is taking having him here will be worth it.

After a couple of lines and a bevy or two, Charlie loosens up and shares details about his life. He tells him his real name is Tarquin. Charlie Lemo, he says, is a nom de plume. Tarquin is not a handle that would not work well on the streets of Liverpool 8, nor would an ordinary pit bull be a sufficient deterrent to some of Toxteth’s more seasoned malefactors. But while he is here in Slumpton, he would be quite happy for Ron to address him as Tarquin.

Ron spends a day reacquainting himself with what Riddley Bro taught him in Wandsworth. The problem now seems to be that he can go no further with the exercise, as he lacks capital to invest in crypto. He reasons that he could sell a little of Charlie’s coke. He wouldn’t be greedy. But the income on perhaps twenty grams could get him started on the road to his financial recovery. The quantities are so large that Charlie is not going to notice a little going missing. He seems preoccupied anyway, so that evening Ron helps himself to a few grams and makes his way along to R3Hab nightclub to look for a likely client for his wares. Unfortunately, the laid-back dude in the Ted Baker linen suit hanging around outside R3Hab that he picks turns out to be Detective Sergeant Nasser of the Drug Squad on a routine undercover operation to flush out dealers in the area.

‘Ronald Smoot of 44 Downmarket Street,’ he says, going through Ron’s sparsely populated wallet. ‘Haven’t we come across you before, Ron? The name seems familiar.’

He radios the details through to Control.

‘I thought I recognised the name.’ he says. ‘Control tells me you’ve just been released from prison. Wandsworth. Habitual offender they tell me. Couldn’t wait to get back inside, eh, Ron? Now, let’s go and see what you’ve got back at Downmarket Street to help you on your way. You’ll be a looking at a little longer this time if my hunch is right.’
……………………………………………………….

‘I need a holding cell for a couple of hours, Constable. For Ron Smoot here,’ DS Nasser says. ‘What have we got?’

‘We’re a bit full tonight, Sarge. A lot of stuff kicked off today. I’ll have to put him in with Dale Loveless. Cell 4. Violent assault earlier this evening on that writer who does the quirky stories about silent trumpets, invisible kettles, and talking cats. …… But Cell 4 should be all right. I think Loveless has calmed down now.’

‘I’m sure they’ll get on like a house on fire, Constable. ….. Keys!’

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