Jacqui Rose - Taken

He’d sat there for countless hours, his head filled with painful memories, but as the sun had begun to rise over the grey houses of the East End, he’d put his keys into the ignition and driven away; away from his past and away from his pain. Alfie Jennings never laid eyes on his father again.

Alfie didn’t know why he loved this street so much – after all it was full of nancy boys and tourists and he wasn’t partial to either – but it was where he felt at home. Over time Alfie had secured other properties in London; flats in Docklands, shops in East Ham, and he’d bought a large eight-bedroom family home in Essex for his wife Janine and his daughter Emmie, but it was always this street he came back to, although he never allowed his family to come. At home he was Alfie the husband, Alfie the father; but here in his own apartment he was just Alfie the man.

Although Janine hadn’t been to the flat it hadn’t been for want of trying; she never missed an opportunity to nag his earhole off to ask to stay. ‘Why can’t we come up West with you, Alfie? It’d make a nice change for me. Oh come on Alf, what do you say?’

His wife had looked at him over the large breakfast table with egg yolk spilling down her chin. He wondered what had ever possessed him to marry her. When he’d first met her she was a tiny pretty thing who found it hard to say boo to a sparrow, let alone a goose. Fast forward twenty-two years and she’d morphed into something unrecognisable; a fat nagging moaning bitch of a wife who’d too much to say about everything.

One thing Alfie had never done was raise a hand to her; he wasn’t sure why, because he’d no problem using violence on anyone else, whether it was a mouth full of knuckles to a man who owed him money or a slap round the face to a brass who’d given him too much cheek: as long as it wasn’t his family it didn’t matter.

The thought had crossed his mind that the reason he didn’t hit Janine – though god knows every time he was with her more than an hour, he longed to put his fist in her mouth – was because he’d watched his own father beat the shit out of his mother on a daily basis.

Living with Alfie Senior had eventually become too much for Annabel Jennings, and Alfie had come home from school one day to discover her lifeless body in the outhouse at the bottom of the garden, lying in a pool of blood, still clutching the garden shears she’d used to stab herself in the neck with.

Alfie had sat with his mother until the next morning holding her cold hand, sometimes screaming, sometimes crying silently; hoping a miracle would bring her back to life.

As soon as his father had come home and the doctor had been called, Alfie had gone out and battered senseless the first kid he’d come across.

Alfie couldn’t remember how many diets his wife had been on and none of them ever seemed to work; if anything, with each coming year she’d got bigger, though ironically, her tits, the part of her body he’d been most drawn to, were the one part of her body that’d lost weight. Now they were sagging, empty sacks and when she lay on her back in bed, they’d hang over each side of her body, almost touching the mattress.

‘Why don’t you touch me any more?’ Janine would complain. ‘I bet you’ve got some skinny tart up Soho and that’s why you don’t want me to come up.’

Most of the time Alfie was able to convince his wife there was no one else and his lack of sexual interest in her was down to tiredness, but sometimes words didn’t cut it, and he was forced to show her with actions. Shagging his wife was like shagging the Mersey Tunnel Alfie thought – large, cold and passionless.

When he did fuck her, he always struggled just to get semi-erect, which Alfie thought said a lot about his wife; even with the oldest and ugliest of old brasses he’d no problem getting a boner, but Janine Jennings, with her big fat mouth and her just as big fat pussy, had a flaccid effect on his poor penis.

Alfie had kept the black sign of the club for nostalgia and as a reminder not to allow himself to fail. The fear of failure was a legacy from his father who had constantly told him he’d never make it; that he’d amount to nothing. So each day when he went into the club and put the key in the imposing door, it was his vindication to himself he’d proved those words wrong.

He’d had the club since he was twenty-three and had given it a facelift, renaming it Annabel’s Whispers, though everyone called it Whispers Comedy Club or Whispers for short; but to Alfie it would always be Annabel’s Whispers – named after his gently spoken mother. Having her name there was a way of keeping his mother alive to him – it was important to Alfie because he couldn’t remember her face any longer, causing him to feel a deep sense of shame and sadness. When he tried to remember, all he could see was the blood, and all he could hear were his childhood screams.

Whispers had evolved over time and it’d become useful for his other businesses. It was a place where he could hold his meetings with the biggest faces in London, a place he stored the countless numbers of stolen goods which came in and out of his possession and a place to launder money, but for all Alfie felt he had achieved, the one thing he was proudest of was the public face of Whispers. He’d turned it from just a drinking bar into a successful comedy and nightclub. He regularly attracted the biggest acts in the business; sometimes pulling in favours from the cigar-smoking promoters and sometimes resorting to what he knew worked best; bribery and threats. Whatever it took, Alfie made sure Whispers was the place to be.

Often Alfie took to the stage himself, supporting the acts but securing the biggest laughs; it was one of the perks to being him, being a face, being someone everyone was scared of; even if he wasn’t funny, they were all too damn scared of him not to laugh.

Not that he wanted it to be that way. He longed for the applause and laughter to be genuine; he really did love doing stand-up, but his problem was the nerves.

‘You’re all wound up and tight like an Irish nun’s fanny. What you need to do is relax, Alf – enjoy it instead of bleeding worrying about what everyone else will think and being terrified you’ll be crap,’ Janine would say to him constantly.

‘Thank you bleeding Oprah. When I want your flipping input, Janine, I’ll ask for it – until then, keep your big fat mush shut.’

Annoyed, he’d storm off, slamming the front door behind him because what she said always hit a nerve. It was true he worried about what people would think of him and it was true the word failure loomed large in his head. And the more he worried about it, the worse it got; moments before he was due to go on stage with the solitary spotlight hitting down on him as the audience looked up in anticipation, the nerves would get the better of him; his palms and brow would begin to sweat, the well-rehearsed lines would disappear from his mind, leaving only panic and dread in their wake.

He wished he could confide in his friends but he knew he could never admit it to anyone; he’d a reputation to keep and it wouldn’t do for people to know that the great Alfie Jennings, the man so many men had feared, was crippled with stage fright. He’d be a laughing stock, and the fear of that was nearly as great as his nerves. He’d secretly gone to a hypnotherapist in Harley Street and paid through the fucking nose to try to conquer his fear but it hadn’t helped, nothing seemed to.

Up until five years ago Alfie’s hideaway flat had been above his foundling club, but when he’d started branching out into other business he’d decided to buy the penthouse across the road and it was now his second home. Not that the penthouse had been for sale – the owners had no intention of moving out until Alfie had sent round three of his henchmen with a stark warning and an offer. Six months later, he’d moved in.