by Steven Gould
“Is the bellman from the Villa Blanca still around?”
“Oh, yes. Mateo buys drinks in the bars for my relatives. He’s been letting Rodrigo use his car in the afternoon to drive around the girls.”
“¡Estúpido! Did no one tell him?” I wanted to go slap Rodrigo around. This stung. I thought he was my friend.
Sam shrugged. “Tell him what? Anything Rodrigo knows Mateo can find out from anyone. Someone tells Rodrigo don’t talk to Mateo and suddenly Rodrigo does have a secret. Leave well enough alone. It won’t last. Rodrigo’s mother is forbidding it—he doesn’t have his license—and she told him she’ll have cousin Paco arrest him if he doesn’t listen.”
“He never listens,” I said. “What about Alejandra? I’m worried.”
Consuelo sighed. “She misses her family. And she broke up with her boyfriend, the Dominican.”
“I could—”
“What?” Sam said. “You could show up and give them a reason to bother her?”
I dropped off the tailgate and kicked a rock. It flew over the edge of the hilltop, then crashed through the mesquite and cholla. My big toe throbbed and I tried not to limp as I stepped back to the tailgate.
“Right. What about you guys? You think this is safe?” I waved my hand around at the empty hillside. The highway was seven miles south of us and the dirt road running out to the hilltop was clearly visible and empty, a thin straight line that didn’t bend until it hit the bottom of the ridge.
Sam shrugged. “As safe as it gets without no contact.”
Consuelo shook her finger at me. “You are not a jaguar to live alone and solitary. It is unhealthy.” She reached out and plucked at a hole in my jeans. “More like a coyote. But even coyotes keep together, eh?”
“Okay. I’ll go howl at the moon. Maybe go through the trash cans.”
Sam tapped his plastic fork against the Styrofoam container. “This didn’t come from any trash can. Where did it come from?”
“Huh? Oh, Café Naz in the East End.” At his blank look I added, “London.”
“Ah.” He mouth worked for a moment but nothing came out. Finally he said, “Not bad. Not bad at all.” He poked a finger toward my upper torso. “You look healthy. Whatcha doing for exercise?”
“Karate. A dojo in—well, maybe I shouldn’t say where.”
“Right. Not if you go there regular. And income? You got enough money?”
I looked away. “No worries. Don’t have to worry about the rent. I’m saying my prayers and washing behind my ears and brushing my teeth, Papa.” Teeth. I didn’t want any more X-rays compared if I could help it. “I’m even doing my lessons. I’m up to Second Form, uh, tenth grade in the science and I’m starting precalculus.”
“What is that, four grade levels ahead?”
I shrugged. “Whatever.” I tried to be indifferent but it was nice to have someone make a fuss. Quite nice.
It made me afraid for them.
I waited thirty minutes after they left, watching the dust trail of the pickup all the way to the highway before I jumped away to the Hole.
Jumped to Embankment Station at the curvy underground part, not the aboveground platform, in a nook, behind a crowd of tourists, and someone started screaming.
Someone was shouting, “MOVE! MOVE YOUR BLOODY ASS!” The two women tourists in front of me were holding their hands above their head, cameras dangling, and one of them was screaming. Over their shoulder I saw someone running up the platform holding a big, oddly shaped gun—one I’d seen before.
He fired and something smacked into the wall on both sides of my nook and suddenly the two women tourists were thrown into me. I heard the breath leave their lungs and they stopped screaming, but they were spasming and I smelled ozone. I wasn’t pinned—though the women were jammed across the opening of the nook there was still room behind me—and I jumped.
“Wait!” I yelled. I don’t know why or to whom, but the sound echoed in the wash of the Empty Quarter. I jumped immediately to Charing Cross platform and stepped onto the northern train heading back toward the Thames and Embankment Station.
Nobody screamed and nobody shot at me but my eyes were wide open.
It took maybe three minutes for the train to reach the other station, but he was gone. There were transport police on the platform. They’d gotten the women out of the nook and seated on a bench. The cable was still there, taut between two areas of broken blue tile, so I guess they wiggled back into the nook and ducked under it. I didn’t get off the train and as it left, we passed more transport police in the tunnel itself, flashlights waving as they searched.
I got off at Waterloo and took the Jubilee line back to Green Park, then took the Piccadilly line over to Knightsbridge. I wasn’t even late for class, though it seemed as if I should be.
The next one was closer.
Elephant and Castle Tube stop and he was more careful than the last guy. He followed me and didn’t attack until we were in the twisty stair up to street level. He was firing up the stairs and I heard something mechanical click right before he shot, so I was bending forward and looking back. The cable tore overhead and tangled in the handrail above me and I was standing in desert sand before the next one arrived.
Right, then.
The first one was clearly not just coincidence. They were watching the Tube stations.
I jumped back into London, on the other side of the Thames, to South Kensington Station. It was only one stop away from Knightsbridge but I didn’t get on the train. I wandered between platforms—there are three different lines at that station—keeping my eye on everyone else. It was busy but when I stayed on the Piccadilly platform through three different train arrivals, the faces had all recycled.
I took the stairs up to the eastbound platform then took the passage under Cromwell Road over to the Natural History Museum. I spent an hour there, wandering back and forth between the whales and the dinosaurs, checking everybody who came near. All random faces. Finally, I walked up Brompton Avenue to Knightsbridge, picked up my laundry and a bite of falafel, and hopped a cross-city westbound bus.
The falafel was fresh, warm, crisp, and it sat in my stomach like a dead weight. How many of them were there? How many stations could they watch? Were they going to force me out of London like they’d forced me out of San Diego and Huatulco?
What the hell do they want?
Somewhere past Ealing Common, when the bus was mostly empty, I jumped back to my Hole.
I got my hair bleached. Bought a reversible jacket and three hats. Bought some dark-framed glasses with clear glass. Still used the subway, but I was very, very careful. Never jumped to a station. Never left from a station. Tried to choose a new arrival point every single day, but never near my departure point for that day.
I definitely stopped jumping into the cinemas without paying.
I passed my ikkyu, upper brown belt, test. Sensei Patel said my kata didn’t suck nearly so bad now. I’d actually tagged Sensei Martin in the ribs with a front kick during the sparring test.
And I made a friend.
SEVEN
Punches and Pimples
Henry Langsford was an upper-class twit with a sense of humor. We’d tested for ikkyu together and he always gave me a hard time about the Americanisms in my language and my accent. His father was a second secretary at the British embassy in Amman so Henry was at a boarding school in London. “But all they have at school is boxing. I do that, too, but I’ve received dispensation for this.”
He was long and thin, pushing six-two, even though he was my age. He could reach me with a kick long before I could strike him, but I was faster. But the boxing was something. I tried to stay away from his hands. I’d go outside for a kidney or sweep his foot, midkick.
Henry suggested a cuppa. “Won’t be in trouble until half past nine and ’tis only seven stops up the Piccadilly line. You for it?”
I had a dozen excuses on my tongue. Instead I said, “Why not?”
We hit Exp
resso Bar on the north side of Beauchamp Place. He got tea, I took a double-shot latte loaded with sugar.
“No wonder you’re so short. Stunted your growth, you did, with that caffeine. How do you sleep?”
It was actually midday still, for me, but I said, “Maybe that’s why I’m faster than you.”
We walked back to Brompton Road and into Hyde Park and wandered a bit, tending east.
We talked about travel, places we’d lived. We’d both been to Thailand, both been to Spain, but him in the south, Cádiz and Seville, and me in the north, Barcelona and Zaragoza. I talked about the “colonies” and Mexico. He talked about Kenya and Norway and family vacations in Normandy. That led to speaking in French and he was oh-so-superior about his accent—my County Durham origins corrupted the purity of my pronunciation, but my vocabulary was bigger.
“Et où est votre maison, mon petit ami?”
“Little? I’m not ducking through doorways. And I lives in an ’ole in the ground.”
“What? Like a Hobbit?”
“Very like an ’obbit.”
“A basement flat?”
“You could say that. On the west side.” Of America.
He considered this. “Your feet are a bit hairy.”
“So, your home would be in Rivendell, eh?”
“Huh? Oh, right. Elves.” He chuckled and looked at his watch. “Oi. Bugger me—I’m going to be talking to the Head if I don’t get a move on.”
We were close to Hyde Park Corner Station and he dashed for it, his long legs flashing. “Kick you in class,” he called over his shoulder.
“In your dreams!”
A cuppa after became a regular thing, and when I turned sixteen the dojo went up to Birmingham to participate in a tournament. Henry and I roomed together, under the supervision of Sensei Patel.
“You never talk about your folks,” Henry asked, on the train up.
It came out of left field, that, and surprised me. I blinked. “Bugger, something in me eye.” After a deep breath I said, “Whatcha want to know? Dad teaches computers. Mum teaches kids their Voltaire and Beaumarchais and Diderot, in the original. Awfully boring if you ask me, but they’re all right.” I was tired; I woke and slept on Pacific Coast time and here I was floundering around at 9.00 A.M., Greenwich zero. It felt like two in the bloody morning.
“Seems like they’re pretty handy with the ready,” Henry said. “Dad’s always on about the fees at the dojo, but in that proud sort of way. Nothing but the best for mine, don’tcha know. You don’t seem to have any problem.”
I shook my head. “Well, that’s not their money—that’s me own.”
“Rich grandmother?”
“Distant uncle.” Uncle Truck. Armored T. Truck.
I was eliminated in the second round of brown belt kumite by a college-aged brown belt from Coventry, and then Sensei Patel and another instructor protested.
“What?” I said, as Sensei walked past me to the judges’ table. “He beat me fair and square!” He’d scored to my face with a lightning-fast roundhouse kick.
The judges listened to Sensei Patel, then called my opponent over. There were some heated words and then the referee came back on the floor and announced I’d won, by forfeit.
My opponent gave me a murderous look and left.
Sensei Patel explained. “Saw Mr. Wickes, there, take his shodan test five years ago. I’ve seen it before in these big regional tourneys. People dropping a belt level so they have a better chance of placing. Like a third-year college student retaking his A-levels. What’s the point?”
Huh.
I made it through two more rounds and then was eliminated by a kid from Paddington who didn’t even block my attacks. He’d just strike at the same time, leaning this way or that to avoid my hand or foot. Three quick points and out.
“Could learn a lot from that ’un,” Henry said. Henry hadn’t made it past the first round.
We watched the Paddington karateka go on to take first, so I couldn’t feel too inferior.
Sensei Patel required all of us to participate in the kata competition and I was surprised to take second in the brown belt category. “See?” Sensei said. “Look what happens if you apply yourself a bit.” He ruffled my head. The trophy was half as tall as me. It would be a bear on the train.
“A monument. That’s what it is,” said Henry. “A monument to your greatness.”
“To perseverance,” Sensei suggested.
After, Sensei checked in with us before he went out to eat with some of the judges and his sensei, over from Okinawa. “You lot all right by yourselves?”
“Of course, Sensei.”
“See you after at the hotel, then. No later than ten, right? There’s a dance, if you want, or there’s the cinema over on Broad Street, right?”
“Right, Sensei.”
We changed, dropped our gis and the “monument” in the hotel. Henry was now calling it a “monument to your perverseness.” We found a pub where the food wouldn’t be “too healthy.” Henry’s choice. “S’all we get in dining hall. Veggies, veggies, veggies. With a salad.”
Fish and chips were duly ordered and destroyed.
“But this greasy food is going to have me all out in spots, you know,” Henry complained after, not a crumb left on his plate.
“And that would change things exactly how?” I was having a bit of trouble with pimples myself but Henry’s was a spectacular case, a patchwork of trouble spots that he called his map of Africa. “Anyway,” I said, “if you’re still getting pimples with all the veggies they’re shoveling down you in hall, then I don’t see how a few chips are going to make it worse.”
Henry swiped my last chip. “Look who’s drowning his troubles,” he said, jerking his head toward the adjoining bar.
It was Wickes, the disqualified black belt from Coventry. He was sitting in a booth with a half-full pint and two empty mugs. He glanced up and our eyes met. I dropped my eyes and turned back to Henry. “Oi. Guess Mr. Wickes is past eighteen, then.”
“Why do that? Lie about your rank. What’s he get out of it?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he has a trophy shelf to impress the gels.” I glanced sideways briefly, just a flick of the eyes. “He’s still looking at us.”
“Umm. Well, it’s going to be some time before I’m ready for pudding. Let’s see what’s going at the cinema.”
“Suits.”
We’d already paid but Henry put down a tip for the barmaid, saying, “Buy yourself one.” She laughed at him and I was teasing Henry about it as we cut across the park toward Broad Street.
Wickes was there before us. “Think it was funny, do you?”
I stopped dead. The green was bright enough, from all the lights at the arcade, but there wasn’t anyone near us. “I wasn’t laughing at you, mate.”
“I’m not your mate.”
“Right,” said Henry. “Not our mate. Don’t even know each other.” Henry tugged my arm and pulled me away. “Let’s go this way, why don’t we?” He turned away and I went with him, my back tingling, but it was Henry he kicked first and I swear I heard something break.
I wanted to check Henry but Wickes was turning toward me and I already knew how fast the bugger was. I blocked and blocked but his kicks were very strong and they hurt my arms or crashed through, anyway, only partially absorbed by my blocks. I tagged him once, good, with a front thrust kick that pushed him back clutching his side.
“Well, that’s better than you did in the match,” he said. His grin got nasty. “Guess I won’t hold—”
I stepped back into zenkutsudachi and executed a gedanbarai, a low block.
He laughed at me. I was still ten feet away, but he began to lift his hands as I stepped forward and punched, face high.
I jumped the interval and my fist smashed into his mouth.
He flew back and didn’t get up.
Henry was sitting up clutching his side, his eyes wide. I checked Wickes—he had a pulse, he was breathing, he wa
s bleeding from the mouth, and his eyes were blinking. I pinched his thigh, hard, and he yelped. “Feel that, do you? That’s good enough for me.” I went back to Henry and helped him up. “You okay, mate?”
“No. I think he broke a rib. And maybe I’m concussed.”
I looked at him. “Why do you think that?”
“I blacked out there for a moment, when you hit him. I think. Saw it start, saw it finish—”
“What’s my name? What’s the date? Who’s the prime minister?”
“Griff. It’s Saturday the eighteenth. Tony Sodding Blair.”
“Well, maybe you blinked. Should we find a bobby for Mr. Wickes?”
Henry surveyed the spreading blood on Wickes’s chin. “No. I think he’s got his.”
I supported him back to the hotel and found Dr. Kolnick. The doctor was one of the senior members of the dojo, a third-degree black belt. I think his specialty was cardiology, but he’d spent so much time in the martial arts that he was good for the odd sprain and contusion.
Dr. Kolnick clucked his tongue and took Henry off to City Hospital and had him X-rayed, “to make sure we don’t have a broken rib about to poke you in the lung.” When the diagnosis turned out to be a hairline crack, he taped Henry up good. He also disinfected my hand. I had a gash below the knuckles I hadn’t even noticed.
“Teeth, probably,” the doctor said.
Teeth.
We caught our train back in the morning. Henry was stiff and I was sympathetic and tired and pissed off. “I don’t think we should’ve turned our backs to him.”
“Sod off,” said Henry.
It felt weird, that trip. Except for the punch (and what a punch it was!) I didn’t jump once. I arrived in Birmingham by train, walked around, and took the train back to London.
It felt … weird. It felt … normal.
Maybe normal was what I needed. Maybe I just needed to be in one place, where I only moved around like other people. Hmph. I could just see trying to rent a place. How old are you, kid? Where’s your parents? Tell me another.
There was a fuss from Henry’s parents about the cracked rib but they and Henry’s headmaster ended up with the impression it had happened at the tournament itself and, as Henry said, “Better all around, that.”