Listen.  Money is awkward.  Start paying Fat Cheques into your dull everyday highstreet current account, the thing is: people ask questions.  Bank managers, auditors, fraud squad.  The thing with money is, if you're earning it, you're on a system.  Name on a screen.  Printed in a register.  Code numbers and pins and National Databases.

This job, that's never a good thing.

This job, the thing is: Tax Returns.  National Insurance Donations.

This job, the thing is: with enough false I.D. you can set up anything at all.  You can be anyone.  You can send all your cash wherever the fuck you want, then dribble it back to yourself in nice, freshly laundered wads.

To achieve this you will need:

A false passport, NI number, driving license and utility bill.

An Internet Connection.

The phone number or email address of an astute Bank Manager in Panama, the Bahamas, Guatemala, the Cayman Islands, or etceterah etceterah.

$10,000 as a deposit.

Enough cash to pay foreign government transfer fees and conversion commissions.

A lot of time.

A lot of patience.

A basic disregard for financial law.

This thing with money, listen.  What you do is: you go professional.  You go exotic.  You set up a Lending Corporation overseas using false identification.  You go legit, a businessman, a motherfucking international jetsetting yuppie.

All without leaving London.

The place you choose, that'll be some poverty-stricken paradise where the smiling rum-swigging locals don't pay income tax.  That'll be some wonder-world of palm trees and sun and sand and white beaches, where you can rake in all the cash you want and not pay a penny to the Chancellor. 

And yes, foreign governments like you to pay a little for the privilege, but still, but still.

What you do next is, you go legit in London too. 

My name is Michael Point, I'm the Chief Executive Officer of a small fashion design company.  Seriously. 

As the CEO of an ambitious young fashion design studio, I have to borrow a lot of money in order to stay afloat.

This is what I will tell Them, if they ever ask.  "Them" is the Tax Man.  The Auditors.  The Bank Managers.  Them.

Listen, me and money: it's an open relationship.

As the CEO of an ambitious young fashion design studio, I have high costs.  At present my company is trying to court some of the larger highstreet outlets to retail my amusing yet surreal T-shirts, and that's an expensive business.  That's executive lunches, smart suits, company cars, departmental gifts, yadda yadda yadda.

All this cash, my fledgling company (which will fold by the end of the year, to be replaced by Some Other Business) needs to borrow from somewhere.  The banks won't touch me with a bargepole, on account of my businessplan being basically bullshit.

Lucky for me there's a wealthy lending corporation in Panama, the Bahamas, Guatemala, the Cayman Islands, or etceterah etceterah.

This is me borrowing money from myself.  This is me making unclean digital funds into shiny drycleaned steam-pressed Wonga.  This is how I cover my expenses.

The thing with this job is, it's easy when you know how.

**

Want to know more?  Want to hear my seedy little story?  Want to get all smug and smiley about roughing-it with a Gen-yoo-ine Criminal Scumbag?

'Course you do.   GO HERE. 

To construct your very own homemade silencer, you will need:

A square yard of strong and flexible matting: fibreglass for preference...

A foot of ¼ inch car brake line.

A powerful epoxy resin, with the mashed-up-horse hardener.

A drill rod or cut dowel to fit the inside dimension of the barrel.  Snugly.  This is important.

A foot of 1½ inch PVC piping with a pair of end caps.

Six small wood screws.

A couple of sandpaper sheets.

Two quarter-inch-or-smaller-diameter drill bits.

Razorblades, elastic bands, masking tape, rubber gloves, a spare afternoon and somewhere private.

This is all in books.  This is all over the Internet like acne.

Borrowed wisdom.

Here's one I made earlier.

Good for four hundred rounds, give or take, and your upstairs-downstairs neighbours needn't know a thing.  This tall bastard, his brains look like clay mixed with cat food.

I always think of spitting, times like this.  A glob of saliva hitting a hard surface.  A hand slapping a book on a desk.  Bubblegum popping.

Spwk-spwk-spwk-spwk.

That's what your silencer does.

This is not like in the films.  This is not like the popular Hollywood impression that a muffled weapon makes the same noise as an industrial crop-sprayer.

Ffft-ffft-ffft-ffft.

This noise is what could affectionately be called: wrong.

Disposal of a Corpus Delicti, if you want to know, isn't as easy as you'd think.  The stink of decomposing meat is the biggest problem.  Time, forensic traces, bone-digging dogs, dental records, hair fragments.

Throw a body in a lake and the decomposition of its cells will fill its stomach and lungs with gas, bringing it to the surface.  You have to stab it once over each pec and twice in the guts.  Like letting air out of a tyre.

Same for burial.  Most shallow-graves don't work for shit because the body swells like a mini hillock.  Like midget subduction.  Bonsai volcanoes.

Throw a body in the sea and piece-by-piece its bits will come loose.  You've got to make sure it's weighted all over, bound head-to-foot, or there'll be fingers and toes washed up on the beach.

Cue fingerprints, DNA testing, undernail skin-fragment analysis.

If you have enough time, and no visitors, doing it piece-by-piece down the plughole is best.  For this you'll need:

A standard hacksaw, with two or three replacement blades.

A mallet, for ball joints and thick bone..

Two dozen large freezer bags, sealable.

A large freezer.

Five or six 2 litre bottles of industrial-strength bleach, to cleanse your pipes after every discharge.

A powerful food processor, with replacement blades. 

A lot of replacement blades.

A lot of patience.

Rubber or plastic sheets, to prevent drips and sprays.

More replacement blades.

Approximately two weeks.

Right now, Sally puts down her coffee and waits for the percolator to stop with a silence more shocking than any noise, and asks me: so, how you doing?

I tell her not-too-bad.  I tell her I got a new job in Pest Control, and it's going okay.  I say, 'you?'

She says she's been taken-on by a consultancy firm specialising in Problem Solving and the hours are pretty rough.

We both grin.  Our little joke.

This is the conversation we have every time.  Some days I tell her I got a new job as a troubleshooter.  Some days a cleaner, specialising in stain-removal.  Some days I'm a gamekeeper.

In the past I've been an undertaker and a waste-disposal operative.  I've been a Resources Redistribution Manager.

Some weeks, I work in Personnel.

All our murderous little euphemisms.  All our little jokes.

Sally steals a piece of bacon from the edge of my plate, prying it out of the eggyolk setting like mustard cement.  Already it's putting me in mind of bright sauce and monosodium glutamate and microwave curry sinking into the carpet as its owner thrashes and gurgles and just-won't-sodding die.

That's a-whole-nother-story.

Move on.

She puts the bacon between her teeth and nibbles, sort of ladylike despite the grease, despite the haystack hair, and she asks me again about The Plan. 

 'How close are you?' she wants to know.

She loves hearing about The Plan.

Most guys, this trade, they have a plan without a capital "P".  Mostly it's a vague thing – a sketchy idea of what and where and when and how.  Maybe they'll quit and open a bar.  Maybe they'll retire and spend their days playing golf.  Maybe they'll drink themselves silly and die of cirrhosis.

Also, sclerosis of the liver.

Also, pulmonary tuberculosis.

I don't drink.

Most guys, it never comes-off.  They tell themselves "I'll do it tomorrow," and they take One More Job.  They tell themselves, "when I get around to it."

These guys, you see them around.  Small men in pubs.  Faces like a ploughed field, skin like leather.  Cigarettes and cheap beer, eyes like mummified Pharaohs, resenting everything and everyone.

Tutankhamen thought he'd live forever too.

Sally does not have a plan.

Mine is written in concrete.

In the inside pocket of my jacket is a piece of paper.  It's folded six times into a rectangle and sealed with sellotape.  On the paper is a number.  I haven't looked at it in about six months, but I know it off by heart.

I wrote the number two years ago, with the blue biro from the cheap desk-organiser next to the computer in my flat.  This number, all you need to know about it is: it's big.  All you need to know about it is, it has a bunch of zeroes and a pound sign.

This is the magic number.  This is my Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Borrowed wisdom.  Days and days on the Internet.  Daytime teevee.  A place in the sun.  Moving on.  Making notes, tapping a calculator.

Working out the price of Getting-the-fuck-Out.

Let me tell you: Golden beaches and waving palms.  Real estate prices in Mexico, St Lucia, Antigua, Bali. 

Let me tell you: the cost of living in Mombassa, Cancun, Dubai, the Algarve.  Flights, taxes, visas. 

Let me tell you: Melbourne, maybe, Aukland, Pretoria, Rabat, Tobego, Honolulu.

That's the plan. 

Remember the Golden Rule?

It's. All. About. The. Money.

This is why.

I never had family holidays.  I never squeezed aboard a baggage-class human cigar with wings.  I never had two weeks in the sun, paddling in rock pools, eating paella, lying on beaches, building sandcastles.  I never left the UK. 

And I.

Hate.

It here.

I'm up to my ears in my own shit.  Stick a pin in the roadmap and there's blood there, see it, oozing from the hole, filling-up the motorways and the suburbs and the countryside, spilling down the white-fucking-cliffs of Dover, lapping at the edge of Hadrian's wall, funnelling down the Severn bridge like a tsunami to drown Wales, waves pounding the Midlands, sucking through the New Forest, filling the Lakes, souring the Home counties, great gouts of arterial slime mixed with broken bullets and heroin; rippling, pooling, crashing down on the last dry spot.  London.  An Island in a sea that I made, all alone, and it's sinking. 

Even captive animals learn to shit in the same corner, so they don't have to wade in their own filth.

My mother refused to leave this grey little land. 

I was the one who found her dead.

So fuck those old men who never chased their plan.  Fuck those mercenary wankers who didn't know when to quit.  Fuck state pensions and reduced bus fares and queuing for benefits and Getting By.  I have the magic number, to cover every cost, and then I'm gone.

Fuck everything else.

Sally likes this story.

It's All About The Money