Baghlan Boy

by Michael Crowley

  Martin smiled across the hall, choosing a table away from the officers. Atherton slapped his lawyer’s palm briskly and tugged his arm. They talked about Paul Scholes’ recent retirement and United’s chances without him. Atherton enquired about his lawyer’s wife and daughter, and his legal representative moved the discussion on to the case.

  ‘The CPS has found a witness. Out of nowhere. Any ideas?’

  ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘They can put you in the car as it left the house.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean I was still in it when we hit the van.’

  Martin breathed in and summoned his patience. ‘Then we’ll need a law-abiding citizen to say you were with them when it did.’

  Atherton’s eyes were baffled. Then they stared hard at Martin. ‘That witness will be the old cunt from across the road. From behind a curtain. He’s responsible for my ASBO. Fucker.’

  ‘We’re going for an ID parade. So, we’ll see if he turns up for it.’

  Atherton’s voice slowed. ‘When?’

  ‘Next Monday.’

  ‘Sweet. It’s a day out of here. Where?’

  ‘Longsight.’

  Atherton bumped his fist against Mart’s and was on his feet with purpose.

  Whatever the weather, the protocol was to walk back to one’s wing in perfected slowness, yet Atherton made his way with some energy. He was cheerful and helpful throughout his servery duties during dinner. He worded-up Mr Scully. ‘Some of these new lads, they never say thanks. A little bit of manners, Mr Scully – that’s all we ask.’ When everyone was locked up, he helped Scully empty the food bins into the waste buckets.

  ‘Eh, Mr Scully. How much for a phone then?’

  Scully’s ladle missed a stroke. ‘No good asking me, lad.’

  ‘It’s a good income for you, boss. People pay a lot of money for phones. Atif’s leaving the wing, I’ll help you get rid of that shitty Honda you got. Get an Audi or something.’

  ‘It’s a Saab I’m after. Leather seats, walnut dash.’

  Atherton wiped his hand and dipped it into his whites’ pocket and then offered it to Scully. Shaking it, he took the cigarette paper from Atherton’s palm with a phone number on.

  Nineteen

  Lancashire

  Khalid had brought Farood to an amusement arcade. Outside the door, close against the glass, was a twenty-year-old man in a sagging overcoat shifting his weight from trainer to trainer, chewing severely – Khalid looked at him twice before he realised he was a doorman. The arcade was an empty room of winking machines apart from two school boys at the back punching buttons and arguing. Khalid sent Farood over to evict them. One snarled, ‘Fuck off, terrorist.’ He grabbed the boy’s throat with one hand and pulled him up on his toes. The other boy ran for the door. The eyes of the boy in his hand began to close. He put him down and dragged him by his hood to the door. Behind him, silently, a fifty-year-old man appeared. He was wiry, wearing a moustache, reminding Farood of his uncle in Pol-e-Khomri. Except, he thought, because he is a Punjabi, he will hide what he is thinking. The man opened his arms, and his eyes were a question. Khalid pushed out his chest and widened his stance like a cowboy. The old man’s gestures indicated he wasn’t ready for a fight. He was not a man who fights with people; this was not his way.

  ‘What do you want, Khalid?’

  ‘I have an answer for you.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘The Afghan I told you about.’

  ‘This is your insurance? The boy from Baghlan?’

  The old man swung an arm behind his back and withdrew a machete. His expression didn’t change. Khalid took a step back. He looked to Farood for a lead, but Farood was motionless. Then Khalid turned to him purposefully, withdrawing from inside Farood’s jacket pocket a handgun. Khalid gripped it with both hands, taking aim as if the old man was standing at the end of a shooting range. He kept the old man in his sights for so long Farood wondered if it was just a threat. The old man shook his head and smiled; Khalid fired into the old man’s shoulder, then lowered the gun slowly and left the arcade with Farood behind him.

  In the car nothing was said for a while until Khalid said calmly, ‘I gave you the gun for a reason. If you had just pointed it at him – he might have dropped the weapon.’

  ‘What did you tell him about me?’ replied Farood.

  ‘Quiet. And never speak of that man again.’

  *

  All kinds of objects were weapons in the prison. Even a pencil was useful, but a biro would do for an eyeball. Take the tap off your sink, place it in a sock. Empty as many sugar sachets as you could muster into the boiling kettle to tip on someone special from the balcony. Use your own bodily functions saved up in a milk carton for an officer’s face – a female officer with lovely long hair. A metal spoon is a prize, an extension of your hand. The blade is a miniature scimitar carving a curved wound to leave an altogether better scar. First it has to be sharpened, and Farood had been grinding his up and down the bars of his window. If an officer looked in through the flap, his back was guarding his work. He lashed with it at a pillowcase and it went clean through the cotton and into the foam. It was ready. He ran it under a tap.

  He waited until it was almost dinnertime, until he was about to be summoned to fetch the food trolley with Barker, then he began drawing the edge of the spoon down the inside of his wrists. He made three cuts on each wrist, long and shallow and productive. He cut from his hands towards his elbows. He clenched his teeth around the neckline of his tunic. When he breathed in, he could smell his blood. The intensifying pain spread from his arms to his whole upper body. He remembered a whipping his brother had once given him.

  Karam had been in Baghlan with their father. By a traffic light for a three-lane highway, they’d watched the Taliban’s religious police cane a young man without a beard, long after he crumpled to his knees. When they got home, Karam had chased him through the village with a length of sapling. ‘Why didn’t you say your prayers today? You didn’t, don’t lie to me.’ His brother had perfected the impervious blank stare. When he’d stopped running at the top of the village, arms folded over his face, Karam whipped at his arms until they bled.

  The Farood in the prison cell smiled, lay down and closed his eyes.

  He heard the movement of bolts begin to echo along the balcony. Standing up, he created a line of blood drops from the door to his bed and sat back down. His door swung open; it was Robertson, diligent enough to look in. First the radio call for assistance, then the tourniquets and the hand towels, then other prisoners locked up and the escort to the gate. Farood was taken to the local hospital in the back of a car. He was handcuffed to Robertson with Farood’s bracelet compassionately loose on his request. The prison had a healthcare wing but it only prescribed paracetamol, and only when the agency nurse was there. Healthcare wasn’t really for people who were unwell; it was for prisoners who would be injured if they were on the other wings – sex offenders. Any time officers’ or prisoners’ blood was spilled, they went to the local hospital, where they were begrudgingly treated.

  Farood was behind a curtain with Robertson in front of him.

  ‘You could’ve spoken to me.’

  ‘And said what? That I don’t want to spend the next fifteen years in prison?’

  ‘Lots of people go through what you’re going through. And I’ve taken a few of them to this hospital.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘They found a way to live through the next however many years.’

  A nurse entered the cubicle. There was no eye contact; she noticed the towels over his arms and put her head back between the curtains. ‘Staff nurse – he’s cut his wrists.’ She hurriedly unwrapped the hand towels tugging the wounds. She adopted a cheery tone. ‘He knows what he’s doing, doesn’t he? Along the arm rather than across. Except, these are not even deep en
ough to need stitches.’

  Robertson smiled genuinely. ‘He’s a bit of an amateur, this one.’

  The nurse shook a canister. ‘This may sting a bit.’ She sprayed one forearm yellow.

  The curtain swished back and a male nurse handed Robertson a clipboard. With one arm still handcuffed to Farood, he put it on his lap and manoeuvred a biro. ‘Farood, remind me of your date of birth again.’

  ‘The one the Home Office gave me was January 1st ’92. But I was born in the summer.’

  ‘We better go with the official one.’

  The nurse sprayed the other forearm and dabbed randomly with cotton wool. Robertson uncuffed himself from Farood and secured the bracelet round the frame of the bed.

  ‘How many birthdays do you have?’ she asked.

  ‘Two. The Home Office one and the one when I was born. But I’m not sure exactly when that was.’

  ‘Didn’t your parents get you something every year?’

  ‘No.’

  The nurse left. He was alone and might not be again. With his free hand he produced a sachet of shower gel from inside his sock. He tore it open with his teeth and spread the gel around his loosely cuffed hand and wrist. He left some blood on the bracelet and the floor, but his hand was out. Where is Robertson?

  The nurse came back with a tray and a sachet of dressings. She wasn’t fazed that both of the prisoner’s hands were uncuffed. ‘Sit down,’ she ordered.

  He did. Robertson was heavyset. He rolled around on the ground with prisoners all the time. But Farood believed he was manageable, if he got the first blow in.

  The nurse began to turn a bandage around one arm when he heard Robertson’s voice approaching. A voice Farood was destined to hear every day until it retired. He stood up.

  ‘Sit down, will you!’

  Farood reached a hand around the nurse’s mouth and turned her into his shoulder. Robertson’s silhouette was the other side of the curtain; it hesitated. He leaned heavily on the nurse, tightening his grip on her as he swung round his left leg in the arc of a roundhouse kick, through the curtain at Robertson’s head. Except it wasn’t Robertson’s head; it belonged to the male nurse on the floor – out cold under the curtain rail. Robertson was at a coffee machine fifty metres away, and closing. He looked unstoppable.

  Farood showed him the scissors from the tray, showed them pointed at the nurse’s throat. ‘You want me to open up her neck like a goat?’

  The possibility halted Robertson – he raised his palms in surrender. Farood began dragging the nurse back through the double doors to the exit. He released his grip when he saw daylight and ran. Robertson wasn’t giving chase. That was not the protocol and he had mess to clean up, handcuffs to retrieve.

  In the town centre it took Farood a few minutes to calm himself, to realise nobody was looking in his direction. He looked at his reflection in a bookmaker’s window – trainers, jogging bottoms, a sweatshirt – no different to any other lad in town. Except soon the police would know who they were looking for and what he was wearing. Behind him was a museum. At reception he made a point of picking up a leaflet. The woman behind the desk, small and demure, smiled at him. He nodded. In a glass case – the uniform of a Victorian soldier, a blood-red jacket to hide wounds, a sword and a musket, and a sheepskin drum.

  ‘Are you alright?’ asked the receptionist.

  Blood was dripping down his arm onto the tiled floor.

  ‘Do you need a bandage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you come with me, I have a first aid kit.’

  He nodded and followed her to the kitchen.

  ‘Roll up your sleeve… How did you do this…? Do you want me to ring someone?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘You should go to the hospital.’

  She bandaged both arms, then held his hands and looked into his eyes.

  ‘Someone sliced me. Miss, can I use your toilet?’

  Inside the cubicle he pulled the cellophane-wrapped phone from within his anus. More blood. He washed his hands and left. From an alley behind the museum he rang Atherton’s uncle Vinnie, the number stored in the phone.

  ‘Vinnie?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Roodie.’

  ‘You on the out, mate?’

  ‘I’m in the town centre.’

  ‘You need to sit tight, mate. See that park opposite the jail? I’ll be there in an hour and a half or so.’

  ‘By the jail? Are you fucking joking?’

  ‘They’re not looking for you yet. Not for a good while. Hide behind a fucking tree or summat.’

  Farood walked the two miles back to the jail and took up the highest point in the park opposite. He then clambered into a rhododendron bush to wait for Vinnie, though he needn’t have bothered to conceal himself. Robertson would have telephoned through the abscond, but it was doubtful whether the local police would open the email for a few hours. If he was seen by a passing officer, they might well wave, but they were unlikely to mention it after lunch. The town was familiar with escaped prisoners. The last one had been apprehended in McDonald’s. Deprived of his daily intake for months, he too had fled A&E to straddle the counter for a Big Mac Meal but failed to get past the outlet’s security guard. Vinnie knew that plod would not be looking for Roodie, but they would make the local plod aware of wherever they thought Roodie was going that night. He knew this because he had picked up umpteen escapees from the park and he had planned accordingly. He finished his tea and fishfinger sandwich before driving north at a leisurely pace for almost two hours.

  ‘Yo, Roodie, where the fuck are yer?’

  Roodie was still in his rhododendron, answering his phone with a bad smell clinging on to it. Sometimes when Vinnie picked people up there was a girl in the back of the car for the escapee to have sex with whilst they were on the outside lane of the M6. Or there’d be a case of alcohol and a pouch of powder. None of this was required in Farood’s case.

  Twenty

  Lancashire

  Atherton got on his bell. Prisoners were only supposed to press their bells in an emergency. An emergency such as: they were going to kill themselves and had made a start with a wardrobe screw into the throat. Not an emergency such as, ‘Why isn’t Top Gear on?’ or, ‘Do you know when I’m out, boss?’ The bells rang into the wing office and officers would immediately flick a switch to kill them, leaving a flashing light the size of a bunion. They’d always finish the banana, the pork pie or the football pages before they answered the bell, on one occasion to find a corpse, for which the governor was sacked and became suicidal himself. Atherton knew the officers, knew who had sex with whom on nightshift. If he got on his bell Robertson would arrive rather than Scully, but he would take his time, because Atherton didn’t have emergencies.

  ‘You called.’

  ‘Do you know when I’m leaving for this ID parade, Mr Robbo?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think they’ll start without you.’

  Robertson started to close the door, but there was something else; there was always something else with Atherton.

  ‘Eh, boss, what did the governor say about you losing Roodie in the hospital?’

  ‘He’s putting me forward for an award.’

  Atherton laughed lazily. ‘Fuck-up of the year. Do you know what, though, boss, I can make it right for you, make you look good.’

  ‘Put in a word with the governor for me?’

  ‘You’ll be in Prison Service News, boss.’

  ‘For what?’ asked Robertson, stepping back into the cell, his voice now easier.

  ‘Question is, Mr Robbo, what are you gonna give me… if I give you the name of the officer bringing phones into this jail? And who he’s selling them to?’

  Robertson shut the door behind him. ‘Tell me how you know this?’

  ‘Because Ati
f the terrorist tried to sell one to me for stupid money and when I told him to fuck off, he said it was Scully’s fault for charging so much in the first place. That’s how I know.’

  Robertson looked around Atherton’s cell. He picked up a library book. Pablo Escobar, The world’s most powerful criminal. There was a twinge in his shoulder. He said nothing and left.

  An hour later Atherton was in a sweatbox again. One of eight coffins with a seat and a wire grill inside a transit van. He’d been in and out of them since he was eleven and like a lot of places – cells, interview rooms – they seemed to be getting smaller. The windows were blacked out and he was in the care of two private security staff that were deaf to all toilet requests, or slurs regarding their mothers. Although he couldn’t see out, Atherton knew the journey to Longsight police station and Manchester Crown Court like a dozing underground commuter. He knew the extent of time on the M6, the M61, the M602 and the slow, stuttering miles thereafter broken by traffic lights and cyclical roadworks. As soon as they were beyond the gates, Atherton lifted himself to a squat and pulled a clingfilm-wrapped Nokia from his anus. Some lads reputedly managed more than one phone but were never allowed to forget it. Atherton sent a text to Vinnie. It’s on today. Then he typed ok but left it hanging in the outbox.