Mr Richardson wasn’t going to get up at all.
Tim sank down to the floor and forgot about being a grownup. He cried.
* * * *
After a long time, he mopped his eyes. It was no good crying over spilled milk (Mum). He screwed up his face, trying to think. That was the trouble with not being clever. It took him a long time to know what to do. Usually, he asked Mum, but this time, he couldn’t. And eventually, he worked it out.
It was a good job he had the trolley. Mr Richardson was heavy. He wheeled him into the kiln room, and, grunting slightly with the effort, he slid Mr Richardson into the kiln. A leg flopped out, and then another. Tim stood there, perplexed. He bent Mr Richardson’s leg and then the other, and wedged it against the kiln wall. He had to try several times before Mr Richardson was safely folded in.
But now, there was no room for the pots. They were all big, heavy ones. “We’ll start you off on the basic stuff,” Mrs Richardson had said.
Tim screwed his face up as he thought. When the idea came, it scared him as much as when he’d thought about doing the firing on his own. He wished, now, that he’d just gone home, but it was too late for that. Look before you leap (Mum). But he didn’t have time to hide his face and wait for the idea to go away.
There was just space in the kiln for one shelf of small pots. Very carefully, he set the supports. Bits of Mr Richardson kept getting in the way, and he had to remember that Mr Richardson wouldn’t be there all the time to prop up the shelf. It was an hour before he’d got it right and he was confident that shelf would stay in position by itself. Then, his tongue clamped between his teeth, he picked up the long-stemmed cups, one at a time, and placed them on the shelf. He felt as though he hadn’t breathed in all the time he was doing it, and when the last one was in place, he had to sit down for a while.
Then he swung the heavy door of the kiln shut, and turned the wheel to seal it. Everything was ready. He turned on the gas, lit the gas wand - he wasn’t even a bit scared of it now - and slipped it into the ports where the burners were waiting to be lit. Whoof! The kiln ignited.
He went into Mrs Richardson’s office to phone Mum. He was going to be out all night and he didn’t want her to worry. “Will you get a lift back?” Mum asked.
“Yes.” Tim didn’t like telling lies, but he knew the early bus would get him home safely. All he needed to do now was wait. He sat on the floor watching the temperature gauge. It was going to take a long time. After a while, the smell of something cooking began to fill the room and Tim realized he was hungry. He went to his locker to find the sandwiches that Mum had made for him that morning.
* * * *
Anthony didn’t come home all weekend. Molly hadn’t expected him to. When she went into work on Tuesday morning, she expected to find him there with the details of the divorce all worked out. She was going to fight him. She wanted every penny that he owed to her to secure a future for their son, and she wanted what he owed her for other children, the ones he would never agree to and now she would never have.
His car was in the car park when she arrived, but there was no sign of him.
Puzzled, she went into the pottery. Tim was already there, down on his hands and knees scrubbing the work room floor. “There’s no need to do that,” she said. “Just mopping it is fine.” He muttered something, and she realized that he was rigid with tension. She looked round the room and saw at once that a jug was shattered on the floor.
“Don’t worry if you’ve . . .” and then she saw that the long-stemmed cups were missing.
Her eyes went back to Tim’s. He dropped his gaze.
“Tim,” she said. “What have you done?”
He didn’t answer, but the way his eyes moved towards the kiln room told her all she needed to know. She ran through, hoping that she was wrong, but when she got there, she saw the kiln door closed. She touched it. It was still warm. “Oh, my God, Tim!” Anger fought with guilt. She should never have let him think he could do this. She should never have left him alone in the pottery. She’d have to start from scratch, the commission would be delayed . . .
She checked the temperature than spun the handle and dragged open the door of the kiln.
And what she saw silenced her.
She was aware of Tim, a silent presence in the entrance behind her, but all she could see were the cups. She’d never seen such a quality in a glaze. The colour had the deep translucence she had been dreaming of. Scarcely breathing, she lifted one out and held it to the light as she turned it in her hands. They were the best things she had ever done.
“Tim,” she said. “What did you do?” For there had to have been something in the firing that gave it this extra quality, a quality she had never planned because she didn’t know it existed.
Then she noticed that there was ash in the bottom of the kiln. She leaned forward and studied it. It wasn’t just ash. There were lumps of charred . . .
“What’s this?” she said, straightening up.
His face flooded red. “Just . . . stuff.”
There was a pool of metal on the floor, something melted beyond recognition, something about the size of a man’s watch . . . Her eyes met Tim’s. His face was wretched with guilt. She remembered him scrubbing the workroom floor, his face tense with effort.
She looked at the pots again and found herself wondering what the effect would have been of very high levels of carbon in the kiln during the firing, carbon from—
“Fine,” she said slowly. “I’ll get rid of it.”
* * * *
No one ever found out what had happened to Anthony Richardson. The investigation into his disappearance went on for several weeks. His car was found in the car park at his office. His secretary said that he had left shortly after six. As far as she knew, he was going home.
His wife told them that her husband had been having an affair and that they were planning to divorce. His mistress told them the same thing, but both women had alibis for the evening he had last been seen.
No one really asked Tim any questions at all. No one knew that Mr Richardson had visited the pottery before he went home, no one knew Tim had stayed late, apart from his mother, and no one asked her. Tim was pleased about that. He didn’t like telling lies. He knew the best lies were the ones you never had to tell because nobody ever asked you the question.
And the long-stemmed cups that he’d fired were the best things that the pottery had ever produced. But Mrs Richardson decided to keep them. “These are special,” she said. “I’m going to give them to the people I think should have them.” To Tim’s surprise, she gave one to Mr Richardson’s lawyer, Olivia. “For drinking a toast when the baby’s born.”
And she picked out one for herself and one for him.
“Let’s celebrate you becoming my assistant,” she said. “Champagne, Tim?”
<
* * * *
TWENTY DOLLAR FUTURE
John Rickards
It is night when the ghosts come for Abdi. He stands, as he has taken to doing, on the low pile of rubble behind their house. From the top of the mound of stones he can see the stars above mirrored by the waves on the distant sea, as if the edge of town is the edge of the world and there is nothing beyond it but the void. He stands there when the ghosts come so that he will not wake his sisters. So that if they do wake, they will not see him cry.
His mother, reaching out to him as she calls his name. Sometimes in her soft voice, a voice he only knows from dreams he was so young the last time he heard it for real. Sometimes she calls to him in the dying screams she let out giving birth to little Aisha, his youngest sister.
Yusuf and his parents, all burnt and broken. Black, staring holes where Yusuf’s eyes were. Everything pinched and cracked just as it was when they found them. Yusuf s father was a big man, but this had not mattered to the militia.
Abdi’s own father, blood soaking his shirt around the bullet wounds. Wordlessly mouthing something he cannot understand, some
word forever frozen on his lips.
Other faces, people he never knew. Never had the time to know. Seen briefly through windshields or walking in the street. No names, but accusing faces. Blood, bullet wounds. Rape and murder. People say it is the way of things, but these ghosts ask Abdi why they died, why they suffered. They plead with him and paw at him, afraid and confused.
His father again, this time as he was before it all went so wrong. Standing tall and wise as he always did, working to provide for their family. He stands at the base of the rubble and holds out the twenty-dollar bill for Abdi to take.
Abdi knows all too well what the money means. He cannot forget the first time his father gave it to him.
* * * *
“Take this to Jama,” he said, pressing it into Abdi’s hand. “He will know what it is for.” The money would have taken his father almost two weeks to earn. He must have arranged something very important with Jama, a trader, and Abdi was thrilled to be entrusted in this way at twelve years of age, even if all he had to do was take the money across the town. He took it and wedged it deep into one pocket.
“Good boy,” his father said and patted him on the head. Abdi trotted out of the door, into the dusty African sunshine.
His good feeling lasted until he ran into the militia. Half a dozen of them, lounging by a burned-out building with walls pock-marked by gunfire. He didn’t recognize them, men of another clan, and he felt fear clench his throat and his heart pounded in his ears.
“Hey, boy,” one of them said as Abdi tried to pass by on the far side of the street. “This is a checkpoint. You think you can walk through here without permission? There is a tax for walking this street. Security costs money. Keeping the streets safe costs money.”
“Of course,” Abdi said. This was the same militia bullshit he had heard so many times. “But I do not have any. I’m sorry. I am just going to take a message to Jama in the market. I have no money.”
The militia man scowled, and his friends gathered around Abdi. “You are not willing to pay for security and safety? Who would not pay for this? Maybe you are a thief or a criminal. Maybe we should arrest you. Maybe you do not want the people here to be safe and secure.”
“No, no. I’m just poor. Please.”
“Let’s check this ‘poor’ boy. I don’t believe him and I don’t like him.” The man leaned in close and stared hard at Abdi. His breath reeked.
Abdi struggled, but the militia held him pinned while their leader checked through his pockets. The man yelled in triumph when he found the twenty dollars and waved it in Abdi’s face.
“You filthy liar! You try to keep this from us? The rich boy does not want to pay his taxes?”
The blow came out of nowhere. The man slammed the butt of his Kalashnikov into Abdi’s chin. Pain seared through his head and he could taste blood and dust as he dropped to the floor. The kicks the man followed up with hammered into his ribcage, but he could hardly feel them. His head swam with agony and he could do nothing more than lie there until the man picked him up and threw him across the street.
As he crawled away, trying to wheeze as quietly as possible, all he could think about was that his father’s money was gone. He had failed his family, and perhaps now they would face hunger and hardship.
* * * *
“Their militia are nothing but pigs,” Hassan said. He was a friend of Abdi’s, at thirteen, a year older than him. Two years before, his father and three other members of his family had died in a fire at a refugee centre. “They should be taught that they cannot act that way.”
It was Hassan’s idea to take the money back. They would steal the money back from another trader, one from the same clan as the militia, and then everything would be equal. Hassan’s older brother, Osman, who had been a member of their own militia, would help them. Bring them guns and knives even though Hassan thought they could do it without any fighting, so long as they were quiet.
Osman looked up from flicking stones into the dust and nodded. “This is right,” he said, with a voice like flat rock. “We don’t make a sound, and we can take what we want. And if they do find us, we will be able to fight them.”
And Abdi again agreed, because he couldn’t face going home to his father and admitting that he’d failed him.
Hassan laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “That is good! Maybe we will even find something for ourselves there.”
Abdi knew then that some people value children as fighters for their ferocity and bravery. But he also knows, now, that children do not think like men or plan like men.
When the three of them reached the trader’s home and climbed in through a window, they were thinking many things. Imagining what might lie within. Worried, perhaps, that the trader would be less rich than they thought. Abdi certainly was. This could all be for nothing. But none of them expected to find his guards in the building.
Osman had not even reached the stairs when a burst of AK-47 fire cut him to pieces, the bullets shredding his body like paper. As he fell, he turned towards Abdi with a look, it seemed, of surprise and shock. He said nothing. Made no sound at all. His brother Hassan, though, screamed with horror and anguish. The guards fired again and bullets crashed into the walls around the two boys.
They chased Hassan and Abdi into a small room at the back of the building. Hassan, sobbing the whole time, turned and fired wildly through the doorway behind them. Abdi heard someone scream in pain, and someone else yell for them to cover the back. He scrambled through the narrow window.
“Hassan! Come on!” he hissed. But he did not wait for him. Instead, he ran away into the bushes before the guards could come around the outside of the building. Only once he was safe, out of sight in the dry scrub, did he hunker down and turn to look for his friend.
Hassan was still half in, half out of the opening when they caught him. Abdi heard them shouting and silently willed his brother to move faster, to break free, to run. Then he heard the gunshots and he buried his face in the dirt. When he looked back, Hassan was hanging limp, his blood washing the stones.
He stayed, staring wide-eyed at the scene, for a moment. Then he ran from the house. There were tears in his eyes and his heart was wedged like a stone in his throat.
Abdi still didn’t know if the guards saw him running and recognized him. Or if Hassan was only wounded when they shot him and they hurt him so he would give up their names. It didn’t matter in the end, not really.
His father was dead by the time he returned home.
He found him executed, shot three times in the doorway to their home, punished for what they had done. Abdi’s world ended at that moment. He felt as though everything he had or loved or dreamed was suddenly gone, and he was empty. His sisters were hiding in a closet. The men who did it arrived in a car, they said. Abdi’s father would not let them into the house, even though they had guns and he did not. So they killed him where he stood.
Little Aisha clutched his hand. “Is father hurt?” she said. “When will he be better?”
Abdi could do nothing but stare at the man lying dead on the floor. His father. The man who had raised him for so many years on his own. All gone.
“Abdi?” Aisha said, voice choking. “Why won’t he stand up?”
His other sisters, Hamdi and Habiba, led her away as the tears began.
The next morning, the leader of their militia, Osman’s former commander, came to the house. He told Abdi that he would need to earn money to support his family, but that the clan would not fail them, so long as he did not fail the clan. He would join the men on the road-blocks. He would carry a Kalashnikov and protect their people. He would shoot their enemies and the rewards would be shared by all.
Or he and his sisters would starve.
* * * *
They are all there now. Abdi’s father. Hassan. Osman. And, at the back, another man. One he knows he will never see in this life. A kind, tall man, standing with his arms around his wife and three children, all healthy and strong. That
they are all smiling is no comfort to Abdi, for he knows that the man is himself in a future he can no longer have. That his actions have destroyed everything he might have been as well as everything he was.
So Abdi stands there in the night, the ghosts all around him. And he does not fight them and he does not run from them. He stands there, a twelve-year-old man, a soldier and a killer, wishing that his father would speak to him and tell him that this is not his fault. That he does not blame him. That his life will change and he will never have to touch a gun again. That he could somehow give his father back that twenty dollars and stop any of this happening.
Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Page 32