The Baby and Fly Pie

by Melvin Burgess

Then I was frightened again. ‘What’ll we do? What’ll we do?’ I begged.

  Sham said, ‘Kill him.’

  There was a horrible silence.

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Shiner in a surprised voice.

  Jane looked at Sham, a curious little look. ‘Would you do that?’ she asked him.

  Sham said, ‘You leave me alone with him for ten minutes and see.’

  I knew what he meant. Shiner was a brute. I’d never thought about it because it seemed the only way he could be, but now that he was trussed up and helpless on the floor in front of me I could have done anything to him.

  ‘This is a bad start,’ said Jane. ‘We have to make the best of it. We stick to our plan. We wait till it’s late then we head off into town. Right?’

  That wasn’t the plan, of course. She said that for Shiner’s benefit.

  ‘I say kill him,’ said Sham. ‘He’ll tell, won’t he?’

  He and Jane began to argue over it. Jane’s wasn’t a good plan because the workmen would find him the next morning and let him loose. They’d call the police; Shiner would tell the gangs. At the least he’d tell Mother and the news would be out that Jane, Fly Pie and Sly Sham had the seventeen million-pound baby. But killing someone … It went on all the time, we knew that. But we were kids. None of us had done it. Sham argued it out, but in the end even he wasn’t ready for that; not yet.

  The waiting was worse now. We had hours to go. After a bit, Shiner began to talk but we couldn’t listen to what he had to say so we gagged him up with the sacks.

  It was very late when we finally felt safe to set off. The baby had fallen asleep. Jane smoothed another strip of tape over her mouth to be on the safe side, and she woke up and struggled but it was too late to take it off then. We checked that Shiner was tied up tight and gagged. I don’t think we were too careful making sure he wasn’t tied too tight. Then we stepped out into the wind.

  That business with Shiner was bad luck but it gave us a boost. He was the most famous of the Big Boys. If we could beat him, we could do anything. We were on our way!

  There was a bit of a moon and some way off we could see the street lamps and little lights in the yards of the Tip office buildings. We left the boxes rumbling around the yard and got out onto the Tip proper. It was weird. I’d never seen the Tip like that before. It was always busy – kids working for the Mothers, all the others who live on it and off it; the workmen, the tourists who come to see the people who live off rubbish. But when we crept out that night there was nothing. Just cold and darkness and the wind flinging rubbish along the ground. After ten minutes we heard a noise behind us – bang, bang, bang, it went.

  ‘Shiner,’ said Sham in a disgusted voice. He’d somehow got over to the door and he was banging at it with his feet to get attention.

  It was hard going in the dark. Jane was crippled in her high heels, so she knocked them off with a piece of metal. But she was still hobbling along because the shoes were bent. She looked so funny, like a duck. We laughed but I didn’t realise till later what it must have been like for her. She had to tie some cardboard round her to keep warm because she was wearing almost nothing. Then we made our way onto the dirt road that led up from the dump towards the landfill where they bury the old rubbish. Up there, where everything was bulldozed flat, the going was a lot easier.

  The road took us higher and higher. Soon we could look over our shoulders and see the city spread out behind us – orange and white and pearly pink lights that blurred into a smoggy haze in the distance. They looked pretty like that. Above us was a little moon and a few stars, sliding in and out behind the clouds. The wind was big up there and it carried the smells of London to us – smoke and traffic fumes, the Tip – all the smells of fifteen million people living in a rabbit hutch.

  Right on the top, where the old valley is filled in, it’s a flat desert of rutted clay with bits of iron or wire or plastic sticking out of the ground. They reckon one day they’re going to cover it with earth and make a garden. They can do anything if they want to. From up there we could see the other city – the squatters’ city. It lay spread out below us, a thin spangle of lights. It was still a long way off.

  Jane was hobbling along in those shoes, with the cold wind flicking that little dress. She clutched the baby to her breast and she was muttering away to herself as if she was in a dream. Sometimes she bent down to croon something to the baby, but I don’t know who the rest of it was for. I wondered how long it was since she’d been sold on – how many nights, how many customers?

  Jane stopped. The wind was hard, whistling past our ears and past the bits of iron and things sticking out of the clay. The baby was grunting in her arms.

  ‘She’s had that tape on long enough,’ Jane said. ‘She’s going to be our baby sister, like I said.’ No one said anything. Jane reached down and ripped the tape off.

  The baby stared at her. You could see even in that light how pale she was where the tape had been. She just stared up at Jane, suddenly wide awake, hurt. Then a big black hole opened in the middle of her face. And she screamed – and she screamed and screamed and screamed. It was so loud it seemed to split the air.

  ‘Give her the bottle,’ demanded Sham, looking all around as if he expected the dead to jump out of the ground.

  ‘Let her cry it out,’ said Jane calmly.

  ‘No, no, they’ll hear!’ I shouted. It was such a noise, you felt you’d do anything to stop that noise. But Jane just put the baby on her shoulder and patted her back.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘There, that’s better.’ I was sure every living soul in the two cities must have heard it. She was choking and sobbing and wailing and beating and thrashing about – all the tears that had been stuck behind the tape came tumbling out. Every now and then she’d run out of air and bend herself right back screaming silently, and you thought she’d break her back. Then she’d suck up an enormous breath and it’d start all over again.

  ‘Someone’ll hear!’ cried Sham. When the baby heard his voice, she turned and put out her arms to him. She wanted Sham. Jane handed her over and the baby buried her head on Sham’s shoulder and sobbed harder than ever.

  Sham started to walk up and down. ‘There, there, there, there …’ he murmured, while the baby held onto his neck and screamed. Jane watched him. She was jealous, I think.

  ‘You’re her little father,’ she said to Sham. ‘You were the first one to care for her after what they did.’

  Sham looked frightened but he kept on patting her and walking up and down, up and down. It went on for ages. Then at last the baby began to hiccup and cough. Slowly she began to settle down and then she fell asleep suddenly, on Sham’s shoulder.

  ‘There,’ said Jane. She was proud of him! Sham looked at her and down to the baby, but you could never guess what he was thinking. The baby slept most of the time after that, even though she was jogged about in our arms. But every now and then she woke up and screamed suddenly as if she was lost, and then we scurried on fast.

  Halfway down the hill from the landfill was a tall fence. On the other side the squatter city began. We call it Santy, but the people who live there have another name for it. Most of the toilets are just holes in the ground and they hardly ever get cleaned out. Some people can’t even be bothered to go there, and do it behind their shacks or even in the streets if it’s dark. That’s how it gets its nickname – Shitty City.

  People come from all over the world to live in London but this is as far as most of them get. It’s bigger than most proper cities, except London, of course. The new people live far out, away from the fence. They build tents or shacks or benders, or live in vans and cars. They settle down and wait for the good times to come. They go tramping off into London to look for them. And sometimes, the good times do come. But for most of them there’s nothing to do and not enough to eat and they’re cold and wet in the winter. But they always stay, even though they might have been better off where they came from. For some reason, it’s
better to be poor on the edge of London than better off anywhere else.

  Here by the fence it had been settled for a long time and people had things sorted – decent houses and latrines and so on. The shacks went right up to the fence – some of them even used the fence as a wall of their house. On the other side was nothing. People are always trying to set up on the other side of the fence but every morning they get beaten off by guards with dogs and guns. One day, the government wants to build proper houses or offices there, and once the squatters get settled it’s hard to move them on.

  We climbed over the fence, handing the baby up from one to the other, and began picking our way through the crowded muddle of shacks, sheds and tents. It smelt of smoke and damp rubbish. It was dark – just one or two little lamps hung by people’s doors. They’d put grit and gravel on the tracks to keep the wet down but it was trodden to mud anyway. Some of the places were shops with big shutters up on the windows and outside one I found balls of screwed up newspaper and I could smell what that place sold – fish and chips! I remembered – I was starving! I picked up some of the paper and poked about inside for scraps. Jane was cross.

  ‘Put it down, dirty,’ she snapped, slapping the paper out of my hand. I stared at her. It wasn’t dirty, it was all wrapped up. It tasted good.

  ‘We don’t need other people’s scraps, not now,’ she insisted.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

  Sham said, ‘We eat what we can.’ He bent down and began to go through the paper bundles himself, looking at her out of the corner of his eye to see what she did. He wanted to show her she wasn’t the boss, not as far as he was concerned. I picked mine back up and began licking up the little scraps of batter and chips.

  Jane watched for a second, then she shrugged. ‘All right – just for now.’ She was hungry too and she joined in with us – all three of us rustling through the paper balls outside the dark shop, like a bunch of dogs. The baby was asleep, wrapped in the sack the gunman had her in, but she cried briefly as Jane bent down. Then we heard someone moving inside the shop and we ran off.

  We ran into a man hurrying along the muddy track. He stopped to stare at us – especially at Jane. She’d thrown away her cardboard wrapping when we got into Santy. It was a cold night and there she was wearing a tiny party dress and holding a baby.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ he demanded.

  ‘We lost our mum,’ said Jane, looking him straight in the face. ‘We’re new here,’ she added.

  The man pointed away. ‘You belong over there in the camps,’ he said. That’s what the people who were established called the edges of the squatter city. ‘This land’s taken, there’s no more room. If you’re new, you go that way. Do you get me?’ He pointed away and said again, angrily, ‘This land is taken.’

  ‘We’re only looking,’ complained Jane.

  ‘No one wants new people, not round here,’ said the man again. He stared at us and then walked off, disappearing into the black night quickly. Jane pulled a face after him.

  ‘No one wants new people round here,’ she mimicked and we sniggered. But the man must have heard.

  ‘You’d better leave quick. There’s a Squad out tonight, looking for kids like you,’ he snapped.

  That shut us up. We heard him walking away through the mud and gravel. We peered about. So many dark corners …

  ‘I thought they never had Squads in Santy,’ said Sham.

  ‘He’s just scaring us,’ said Jane. ‘Wants to get us out.’

  ‘They have Squads everywhere,’ I whined.

  ‘Don’t be daft. Who’d pay ’em?’ demanded Jane briskly. She pushed us forward, deeper into the squatter city.

  We went on our way more quietly than ever. I could have strangled that baby. She kept waking up and squealing. Sham disappeared quick round some corner when she woke up and I followed him, even though Jane looked at me in disgust. She wouldn’t put that tape back, even though we begged her to – even though she must have been as scared as the rest of us.

  We walked for ages. You couldn’t see where you were. People had built their homes higgledy-piggledy, one next to the other, and the streets curled and ran to and fro – you couldn’t keep in the same direction if you wanted to. Sometimes we came out on top of a hill and we could see by the moonlight which way was in and which way was out, but most of the time we were just lost.

  We were still wandering around when it got light. In the end we found a little row of shops and sat down on the steps to wait for them to open. Me and Sham did, anyway. Jane got up after a couple of minutes and began to hobble up and down in her bent duck’s shoes

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’m bloody freezing, that’s what’s the matter,’ she hissed.

  ‘You didn’t say,’ I said. Then I saw how she was limping as she trotted up and down. Those broken shoes had blistered her feet but she hadn’t said a word. ‘Couldn’t you find a blanket or something on the way?’ I asked her. You could always pick up something like that on the streets or the Tip.

  ‘There wasn’t any,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing round here.’

  I thought it had been too dark, or that she hadn’t looked hard enough. There’s always something. We took it in turns with my coat.

  Sham had put the baby down next to him. He curled up round her in his big brown coat and went to sleep.

  Jane stopped hopping about to look at him. ‘Look at him, isn’t it sweet? Who’d have thought he knew about babies …’

  After a bit I got scared and I said to Jane, ‘Shouldn’t we be hiding?’

  She wrapped her arms about herself and shook her head. ‘No one’s going to think three kids have a baby like that. We just have to face it out, Davey.’

  I sat a while watching Sham and the baby while Jane trotted up and down. Then I think I must have gone to sleep too because the next thing I knew the shop was open and Jane was talking on the steps to a woman.

  I thought – the day’s begun. They’d be finding Shiner about now.

  *

  ‘We only want to buy something – we’ve been waiting,’ Jane was saying. ‘We’ve been out all night …’

  The shopkeeper was looking at Jane in her skimpy little dress and those ridiculous broken shoes. She didn’t seem to like the idea of us buying things in her shop. She turned away and began opening the shutters.

  ‘We need some clothes – a coat and things,’ said Jane. ‘We’ve got money, haven’t we?’ she appealed to us.

  ‘Oh, yeah, we can pay,’ I said. Sham still lay on the wooden steps cradling the baby. He looked sulky.

  ‘We don’t need to spend money on clothes,’ he said.

  ‘Sham, I’m freezing cold, I can’t go around like this,’ Jane begged.

  ‘We can find throwouts,’ said Sham.

  The woman snorted. ‘No one throws anything away here,’ she said sourly.

  ‘Sham,’ pleaded Jane. She crouched down to him. ‘We’re going to have to spend a lot more before we’re through,’ she hissed. He was embarrassing her. Sham turned away. The baby began to sniffle and the woman looked at her. Sham hid her away in the folds of his coat.

  ‘We ought to go,’ he said. But Jane wasn’t budging and finally he fished around in his coat and brought out ten pounds.

  I was watching. I saw something else tucked away in there.

  ‘You’ll need more than that,’ said the woman scornfully. She went back into the shop. Jane stood up painfully. ‘We’ll need food, too. We’re not on the Tip now, Sham. Out here you have to buy things.’ She hobbled after the woman into the shop.

  I leaned forward. ‘What happened to the gun, Sham?’ I asked, glancing down at his coat. I’d seen something heavy and awkward under his coat. That man had a gun. Where was it now?

  He looked coolly at me. ‘We’ll need it,’ he said. ‘Someone’s got to protect us.’ He nodded at the shop after Jane. ‘She won’t.’

  I didn’t say any more about it just then.
I was about to follow Jane into the shop but Sham held my arm.

  ‘She’s wrong,’ he said. ‘She’s wrong, and you know it.’

  I pulled away. I didn’t want to think about it.

  ‘She’s wrong,’ insisted Sham. ‘Listen. We can do it together. Fifty-fifty. Together …’

  ‘She’s my sister,’ I said. I began to move off.

  ‘I’m not asking you to dump her,’ urged Sham. ‘You can come back for her when we’ve got the money. Seventeen million. You think. Think about that. You can get her anything you want. You can rescue her. I can do it but I need your help. She hasn’t got what it takes …’

  I could hear Jane talking to the shop woman. Sham was right, of course. This wasn’t Jane’s thing but it was just what Sham was good at. He knew how people were, how to make them do what he wanted, how to get what he wanted. I was surprised by the way my sister had handled Sham, but that didn’t change the facts.

  ‘She didn’t even make it to be a housewife,’ said Sham.

  But – she was my sister. Where did it leave her if I walked off right now with Sham and the baby and left her in her broken shoes and her prossie clothes? You didn’t do that to your own sister.

  I wasn’t ready to dump her. Not yet. And I wasn’t ready to trust Sly Sham, either.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t think about it too long,’ advised Sham. He let go of my arm and sat down on the steps as I followed Jane inside.

  We had a terrible job getting the money out of him. The woman wanted seventy pounds for a pair of patched trousers, an old coat and a pair of second-hand boots! They were awful old things, too – we could pick up better stuff than that any day on the Tips. Jane threw in her posh little dress as well and got the price down to fifty. Sham didn’t like it but even he could see we couldn’t let her wander round looking like she did. He didn’t care about her being cold, but she was attracting attention. She looked like – what she was.

  We bought bread and biscuits, some more milk which the woman warmed up for us and a few other things, like dummies for the baby. They really worked later on and I wished we’d had them before. Jane told the woman we’d been booted out of our house in London and that we’d got separated from our parents on the journey over to Santy.