Breakdown, page 5
He nods. ‘I’ll try an’ save you anyways. Like I said, you can trust me.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘But you need to know, I’ll be trying to save myself too.’
He turns and looks at me.
‘Just letting you know. I’m not “spoil”. I don’t belong to anyone. I’m getting out of here one way or another, whatever it takes. Whether I owe you for Kaylem or not. I told you I’m trouble, and I’m not joking. Kaylem is a dead man. I’ll get my own back on him. You just watch. And from the moment you hauled me out of the river you got yourself into it too. So expect more.’
I turn on my heel.
I don’t know why I’m so angry.
I stomp back inside. It’s not just because I’ve landed here.
It’s Tarquin.
It’s entirely irrational. Which just makes it worse. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt so angry with anyone ever before.
10
I do eventually get to sleep. That is, I slip in and out of consciousness a bit. Not really sleep. Just a shutting down of everything.
I’m grateful. I can’t think any more. Don’t want to think any more. I want to turn it all off. Maybe dream of being in that other place with Nan.
Lenny doesn’t let me rest for long, though. That’s the thing about little kids, they don’t let you do anything. I swear they must know better, but they just pull on your sleeve and yank at your hand and just when you’re dropping off and you’re so very nearly there, where you know it’s going to be so lovely, and birds are singing by a waterfall and you’re holding a huge chunk of bread and about to sink your teeth right into it, they wake you up.
Lenny shakes me. He’s got hold of a few bits of glowing wood and a broken old bottle with more oil in it and a fresh rag wick. He lights it.
‘You can read it to me now,’ he says and shoves his tattered book under my nose.
‘No, I can’t,’ I say. ‘I can’t read.’
‘Yes, you can. I know you can. I saw you read that street sign down by the dock.’
Trust kids. ‘Even if I can read, I’m not reading to you.’
His face falls. All the sparkle goes out of his eyes. Back comes the guilt.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘but only once and that’s it – and when I’ve had enough I’m stopping.’
He smiles immediately and pushes the book onto my lap. I open it up. He cuddles up close. This time I don’t push him away.
‘OK,’ I clear my throat. ‘Once upon a time –’
‘Where does it say that?’ he asks.
I point at the picture. ‘Once upon a very annoying time,’ I say.
‘Read what’s there,’ he says.
‘I’m not going to read anything if you keep on interrupting me.’
‘OK.’
‘Once upon a time there was a farm.’ I stop. There really is a little farm in the book. I stop and peer at the picture. There’s a mountain in the background and the same little cosy cottage with a farmyard in front of it. Well, a kind of farmyard – looks more like a garden and a pond with wild ducks swimming on it. And there’re the roses around the door.
‘Look.’
Lenny puts a grubby finger on one window. There’s a girl looking out of it. The girl who looks like me.
‘Go on,’ says Lenny, turning the page for me.
There is a picture across both pages. It’s a close-up of the farmyard and all the things are labelled. One little farm cottage. Two stone outhouses for storing logs. Three cottagers – an older girl, an older boy and a little kid. The boy and the girl are my age and they’re smiling. The little boy is jumping up in the air with his arms flung skywards.
‘That’s me,’ says Lenny and this time he plonks his finger down right on top of the little kid. I can see this isn’t the first time he’s done that. The kid in the picture has dirty marks all round him, like Lenny’s been sitting here and pointing himself out to himself in that faraway place for a long time. He’s pretty nearly rubbed the kid’s face clean off the page. He’s pointed out the girl too. She’s none too clean either.
‘That’s me and that’s you.’ He points down on the girl.
I don’t ask, ‘So who the hell is that?’ about the last cottager. Instead I quickly move on to the four berry bushes and the five wild rabbits and the six apple trees and the seven fishes in the brook and the eight ducks in the pond and the nine birds on the roof and then I look around for ten. But there isn’t any ten.
Lenny gets this shiny look in his eyes. ‘Turn over the page,’ he whispers. ‘This is the best bit.’
I flip the page and the whole double spread is full of tens. There are ten bees buzzing away and all over it is written stuff like: ten bees visiting ten cherry trees, and ten bees calling at ten bramble bushes and ten bees pollinating ten vegetable plots and ten bees collecting honey from ten wild meadows filled with foxgloves and buttercups and harebells and moon daisies, where ten woolly sheep graze while ten lambs frolic and ten hens lay ten eggs each in ten henhouses … And in the middle of the page are ten big old beehives.
I’ve never seen a bee before. I can’t tell if they look like the pictures or not. I saw a couple of wasps once, but we don’t get many of them either. There must be bees somewhere though because we still sometimes get apples in London. Not many and mostly they’re shrivelled, but Nan said: ‘Where there’s apples there’s bees. And it shows they’re coming.’
There isn’t much else in Lenny’s picture book, so I start telling him a tale of my own. There’s only so long you can go on saying three birds and two bunnies and counting them up and imagining those bees really existing before you get bored. I turn back to the first page to where the girl who looks like me is.
‘Once upon a time this girl fell in a river –’ I start.
Lenny gasps.
‘You don’t like that story?’ I ask.
‘What happened?’ he whispers.
‘Are you sure you want to hear it?’
‘It’s about you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And me?’
‘OK.’
‘And the secret place?’
‘I suppose so.’
So I carry on. And the tales of abundance start to flow. I tell him all about how he and I go to this place, our secret place, our hidden valley … a place where a stream forever trickles its pure waters through a glade ripe with hazelnuts and blackberries; where a tiny crofter’s cottage stands empty, its woodshed full of hewn logs, its gardens brimming over with wild spinach; where grouse and pheasant are plenty and the mountain pools hold huge perch … and how we sit on little chairs every night in front of a little fireside and eat from bone-china plates and tell stories … and only I know the way there, and only I can show him …
And just when his eyes are as round as saucers, I make him close them, and I pull Nan’s key out of my coat pocket and I put it in his hand. I close his fingers around the key.
‘And that’s the key to the front door – the one that is covered in roses.’
He opens his eyes. He stares at the key in his hand. He turns it over, peers at its plastic-photo key ring and gasps.
‘It is,’ he whispers. His eyes are full of magic. His finger traces the mountain frozen in the plastic, the croft and the pond with the duck on it. The word SCOTLAND in tiny silver letters.
And a dreamy look mists up his whole face – as if he’s already there in that other place. He lifts his head and looks at me.
‘Will there be real food there?’ he says.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean real food, not book food?’
‘There’ll be bread and soup and roast duck,’ I say, ‘and blackberry crumble.’ Nan told me that. She told me how she stayed at a bed and breakfast in the Scottish Borders and they had bread and soup and blackberry crumble.
‘No,’ he says, ‘like dog meat.’
I frown. ‘Is that real food?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s what we get here, dog meat and potatoes and a few things the gangs bring in.’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘There’ll be real food in Scotland, but you are going to love the book food better.’
‘I know,’ he says. His little face is all grave. He nods wisely to himself like he knows all about the book food.
‘And I get to feed the ducks, don’t I?’
‘If you want,’ I say. ‘As long as you don’t make pets of them.’
‘Because we’re going to eat them?’
‘Yes we are,’ I say.
I close the book up. The wick on the lamp is blowing sootily. I feel tired. Every bone in my body has had it.
‘Could we just keep one of them? If it had ducklings?’
I look at him. ‘I’m not doing any deal on the ducks,’ I say.
‘I could go without my roast duck to make up?’
I sigh. ‘OK,’ I say and I close my eyes. ‘But only if it has ducklings.’
11
I
wake to the sound of tin lids banging and the smell. The sound sends a shiver into me. What’s gonna happen now? I’ve got this really bad feeling I’m about to find out what Careem’s ‘something else’ is.
Whatever it is, I tell myself, I’ll get away. And if I don’t, he’ll pay for it.
I’m all curled up inside Nan’s coat and I want to stay there. Desperately I push my nose deep into its folds, try to smell her, try not to think of last night. The coat smells of old rags and wood smoke. The river has washed Nan right away.
‘Oh Nan,’ I whisper.
A hand shakes me. A voice wakes me. Someone pulls back the edge of my coat.
‘Hey, Miss, they’re back,’ whispers Lenny.
And I can tell from his voice it’s not good.
‘We need to get down to the racetrack,’ he says.
I roll over and stand up. I brush my hair back. I wipe my face with the sleeve of the coat. So hungry, so dirty.
‘Water?’ I ask Lenny. I’m thirsty. I don’t trust the water but I need to drink. And I’m going to wash. I don’t want to look like them.
It’s morning, though there’s no sun yet. Think about escaping. Remember? Lenny fetches me a glass bottle full of water. I let it stand for as long as I can so the sediment settles. I stretch the hem of my T-shirt over the bottle mouth and drink. I only drink the first third of the bottle. Even that tastes stale. I use some to wash my hands. I pour the rest into my cupped palms and wash my face. Lenny watches wide-eyed.
‘You’re so pretty, Miss.’
I comb my hair with my fingers.
‘You’re prettier than all those things in the book world.’
‘C’mon,’ I say.
In the pale light we set out for the stadium. We don’t get any further than the first aisle before Tarquin appears.
‘I’ll take over now.’ He ruffles Lenny’s hair. His smile is wide, his lips full.
When he draws level with me I hiss, ‘I need to get out.’
He laughs and shakes his head.
‘You need to get Lenny out too,’ I add. ‘Get him to some other place.’
‘Once you’re here, there ain’t no other place.’
‘Says who?’
He shakes his head. ‘We all belong to Careem.’
I’m the one who laughs then.
‘I wouldn’t laugh,’ says Tarquin.
By the time we get to the stadium track, the fire has been rekindled. Through the pale light, people drag fuel over and pile it by the flames. Boards and planks and sawn timber and old window frames and furniture and seating. They stack them in ragged piles. They break the boards up. They fold them, stamp on them, twist the sheets back on themselves until the ply splinters and gives.
Alongside the fire, on the ground, is a row of metal bowls. And women. They’re hardly more than girls, though they look old. One of them has a tiny sickly baby tied to her front. They’re setting up little stalls, like something’s going to get traded. They fill the bowls with water from a few huge jerry cans. They light fires between three stones and heat up the bowls. There’s a silence about them, a heaviness that scares the hell out of me.
The gangers come in banging the pan lids again. And Tarquin darts over to join them. A deafening stream, they march into the centre of the arena like some returning army. They kick up turf and beat the pan lids like drums. Everyone falls quiet.
And then comes Careem. He’s still got that long black coat on. He walks in at his own pace, looking about him, noticing everything. All swagger. A little girl scuttles into his path – a woman grabs her up, smiles a scared ‘Sorry’.
I remember his words again. His unspoken threat.
‘And make sure I’m happy when I see the shoes.’
A trembling starts up under my ribcage. Let him be happy about the shoes. I can’t make out if he’s happy or not.
‘It’s not about keeping others happy,’ Nan would say. ‘It’s about showing them you’re dangerous. Trust in fear. Not smiles, Melissa. It’ll keep you safer.’
She’s right. And I am dangerous. And in ways he won’t expect. I breathe in and try to relax.
Everyone stops what they’re doing and clears a path for him. As he strides past they bow their heads. He gives nothing away. Just puts on his own little show.
Fleetingly I wonder how Tarquin did get the shoes. Did he do it alone? What did he do to the traders? I don’t care about them, anyway. I learned a long time ago – you got to put yourself first.
Careem makes his way casually down to the centre of the arena. He’s got the strut down to perfection. He winks at a few girls, favourites maybe, wags a finger at someone, who goes bone-white. He holds his hand up to stop encroachers. They immediately back off. He accepts a gift from a gang member without a nod or thanks.
He makes out like he isn’t looking at anything. But he is. You can see he’s as sharp as they come. Sizing everything up. And nobody seems to notice he’s doing it. Nobody except the two guys closest to him. Nailey and Kaylem, maybe.
And Tarquin.
I see Tarquin following just behind. I watch him too. His eyes are everywhere but his face doesn’t give anything away. In the rear a group of ten or fifteen gangers are lugging loot into the arena.
Careem sits down on a huge armchair under an awning. The gangers wait with their load, near the fire. People crowd forward. I stagger as they shove me aside. Must be about a hundred of them, maybe more, all pushing forward. Must take a lot to feed them.
Careem raises a forefinger, brings it down. The gangers tip everything at his feet: three dead dogs land with a thump. A full shopping trolley tips over. Potatoes, mushrooms, jars of homemade goods, something like a sack of flour spills into the mud. A cart covered with a plastic sheet, an old suitcase with a broken zip – clothes maybe. The girls press forward. One woman steps up, takes charge.
Above the clamour I hear her shrill voice as she points to people. ‘You count the potatoes. You get that sack up. You clean this one.’ She toes one of the dead dogs.
I’ve never seen anyone skin a creature so quick. They pounce on it and get its head and paws off before you can look away. They dice it up and share it out and quarrel about the tail.
‘Now that one.’ She points at the second dog. ‘Then dress the last one for the chiefs.’
While some of them start on the second dog, others go through the contents of the shopping trolley. Dividing it up with razor-sharp precision. Careem still makes like he isn’t watching, but he is. He’s watching all right. So are Kaylem and Nailey.
Everyone knows Kaylem and Nailey are watching. Nobody likes them. You can tell. Specially Kaylem. Everybody gives him a wide berth. I hold my breath. I haven’t seen the shoes. I don’t know what to think. But I know Tarquin got some. Where are they?
‘Listen up,’ says Careem. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t have to. Everyone is suddenly listening.
‘There’s only three dogs today because of her.’ He points at me in a bored way.
There are murmurs of disappointment. A shuffling noise, angry muttering. Some of them shout: ‘Chuck her to the dogs … that’s what Careem should do. Throw her to the dogs … How’s three going to feed anyone? … After the crew have had their fill?’
Careem laughs. ‘You’re a bloodthirsty lot,’ he says. ‘But don’t worry, she’ll pay. She’s for the Governor General.’
The mob falls silent. My blood freezes.
The Governor General.
Nan warned me about the General. Kept me hidden. Showed me how to wind a scarf around my head, hide my face. ‘Those poor girls,’ she said. ‘The General is evil. He ravages the beautiful. Like Aristaeus in the Greek myths, he desires what is not his. Aristaeus was the keeper of the bees, but he deserted his hives to chase another man’s wife. The Gods punished him and the bees died. The General also desires what is not his – young girls – and because of him the bees won’t come back.’
There’s a murmur of approval and shouts of: ‘Too good for her’, ‘Get a good price’ and ‘Careem!’
Careem waves a lazy hand. Some of them are still grumbling. Two youngers stagger forward hauling in a swag of something. I eye it anxiously, hoping it’s the shoes. They drag it right up near the fire. Careem motions them to stop, then ignores them and their burden.
Instead he waves Kaylem forward. He points at the bloody carcass of the third dog.
There it lies skinned, yet still intact. Its eyes glassy and staring. Kaylem picks it up, slits it from gizzard to pap and scoops its entrails and organs out. He cuts something off from between the dog’s back legs, holds it up with a lewd gesture, thrusts it up and down. Then laughs. He spits the dead animal right from anus to jaw and slings it between two iron poles over the fire.
Kaylem doesn’t look at Careem, but when he’s done with the dog, he jerks his head. A smile lingers in his eyes and then he sniffs his fingers.
‘You turn it,’ Kaylem orders a younger ganger.
The boy wraps his scarf around his hand, drags the end of his jacket over it, grabs hold of the iron pole and starts turning the dog over the fire.
