by David Mathew
The doors opened and two male students – a black boy in a wheelchair and a white boy in a perm – came out. With a slight bow and a theatrical flourish, Tommy indicated that Shyleen was free to proceed him into the soup-smelling box. Standing by the buttons, Tommy asked Shyleen, ‘Where to?’
‘The eighth.’
Tommy pressed 3 and then 8.
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying,’ said Shyleen, ‘but we’ve had a burglary – we’ve all promised to question any visitors.’
‘Oh?’
‘If you don’t mind, of course.’
Tommy faced her. ‘I’m a thief, is that it?’ he asked, a smirk decorating his features.
‘We’ve promised to question any visitors,’ Shyleen repeated. She hoped that she didn’t sound as nervous as she felt.
‘Well go on then. Question away.’
Shyleen took a breath. ‘Do you mind telling me who you’re here to see?’ she said.
‘The name’s Flowers. Joseph Flowers – Joe to his friends. A little game going, see?’
‘A game?’
‘Texas Hold’em… Poker. Is that okay with the welcoming committee and the sentry box?’
Shyleen shrugged. ‘Sure. What room does he have?’
‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a visitor too.’
Shyleen stiffened. ‘What makes you say that?’
Tommy smirked. ‘You’d never pass for male in a thousand years,’ he told her. ‘Block B is a male-only establishment. So perhaps you might say where you’re going. For reasons of security, like.’
‘To see my boyfriend.’
‘The name being?’
‘Wafiq,’ Shyleen plucked from the air.
‘Oh Wafiq. Like Yasser’s uncle.’
‘…Who’s Yasser?’
‘Never mind, Miss.’ The doors opened at the third floor. Tommy took a step out onto the corridor, the smile he wore both victorious and oleaginous. ‘Don’t play poker yourself.’
‘I won’t.’
‘No poker face, see, Miss. There’s no such thing as a male-only block on this campus. That’s just me chatten the bollocks. And if you’re going to follow people from their home to a hand of cards – this is just a tip – have the good sense not to park outside their fucking camp… Tell the boy I’m disappointed, and so will Maggie be, I’d guess. We’d asked for a pro.’
The lift doors closed.
9.
‘He’s in there gambling. He’s playing poker.’
Yasser nodded.
‘And he knows it’s you in the car.’
Yasser flinched.
‘It’s time to go home, Yass. The Pikey’s winning or losing, but he’s not doing anything wrong. We might as well call it a night. Besides, I’m hungry and I’ve work in the morning.’
Yasser did not need to tell her how much she’d changed her tune. He was busy trying to plan what to say to Maggie the next time he saw her.
‘This is all going tits up,’ he said.
‘Drive me home, James,’ Shyleen answered in her poshest voice. She ran her fingers through her hair; a second later she expressed disgust at the harvest that they’d gathered. ‘My hair’s falling out already,’ she said. ‘I haven’t even started my treatment!’
Yasser drove Shyleen back to his parents’ house and let her in. Shyleen and her parents left ten minutes later (Shyleen declined the offer of a fifth cup of tea), and Yasser announced that he was turning in for the night. In his room he sulked and brooded; he lay on top of the duvet, with flies buzzing in his brain. He had not undressed. He tried to talk himself out of going back to the camp, to talk to Maggie; the urge to drive, however, was upon him, despite the hour. Tommy the Brazilian would be tied up with his poker game for hours: so Yasser decided. This was his overwhelming impression of card showdowns: that they lasted for ages. Maggie would be asleep, or at least in bed. Would her father be present? Why wouldn’t he be? It was where he lived, after all…
Yasser sighed and sat up. He could hear his father snoring in the next room. Clutching his car keys, he crept across the landing and down the stairs. He unlocked the front door, and the air outside was cold and smelt of diesel.
10.
Yasser may have paid visits to the camp in the course of his investigation, but they had made him no friend of the dog called Excalibur. As Yasser walked the driveway, having left the car in the lane outside, he fantasised that he’d be able to creep along without awakening the hound that slept chained to its master’s caravan near the entrance. He was wrong. His assumption was loudly incorrect. Yasser could not help kicking up gravel – he’d banked on this much as inevitable – but he’d imagined it preferable to the noise of his engine waking up the camp’s residents at this hour. Excalibur, however, had but one important task to perform: to protect the camp; and Yasser had scarcely set foot on the travellers’ land before its highpitched barking began to shred the fabric of the night. Yasser flinched – and ran.
He ran as fast as he could towards Maggie’s home. Behind him, straining against its shackles, the dog all but throttled itself as it yapped and snapped out at the invisible intruders: Yasser had already sprinted past.
Some of the caravans and trailers had lights on within. But were they switched on now, or had they been illuminated before the dog’s protestations?
No way of knowing.
Yasser ran until he felt distanced and nauseous. Up ahead was Maggie’s caravan, with the blue painted moon on the side the same size as the pollution-pastelled mauve one overhead, to the rear of the camp. Yasser ran. Two moons drawing him on: a duel of orbits. No shouts. No bellows from behind… Piece of piss… make it…
And this was when the bullet hit him on the left side of his forehead.
Yasser was knocked to the right. Although his momentum carried him for a few more strides, the blow to his temple had been considerable and his knees and thighs weakened. Stumbling like a drunk, Yasser tried to yell Maggie’s name; he collapsed to his knees. Not only could he sense blood pooling down the left side of his face, he could smell it too; the aroma was stronger than that of paint, chip fat and diesel, which perfumed the camp customarily, Yasser had long since discovered.
The stars that he saw were not in the oxblood sky; they were in Yasser’s head, leaking out for him to see. The word concussion echoed around his skull on a sound like bird wings flapping. The problem was, right at this moment Yasser did not know what concussion meant – not the word and not the condition. He was aware that he’d been shot, but he was too busy reeling from the pain to be aware of anything else. The fact that he had heard no gun report – no bang – seemed irrelevant: he’d been shot in the head and he would die on these filthy wankers’ soil; this was all that he was sure of.
He fell forward. Yet… he tried to think; and yet… His hands splayed out before him, to soften contact with the road. And yet: he had heard something. Not a gun… Yasser fell onto his front, the palms of his hands scraped and scratched on the road’s surface. A sound of something metal as it had hit the tarmac… Something dropped. Something thrown?
Breathing huskily, shallowly, Yasser educated himself at speed. If someone had shot him, there must be a shooter. Behind him.
Turn around.
‘Get up, you cont,’ a voice demanded, close to the soles of the expensive trainers that had made this entire escapade seem such a tickle. ‘Get up!’
Yasser’s right foot took a kick.
‘I won’t tell you again, boy,’ the voice impatient.
I’m not dead. I can roll over. If he’s talking to me, I’m not dead.
The pain in Yasser’s temple had turned effervescent, but Yasser had preferred the solid blast. Pain was information. A solid blast of pain he could read. This fizzing he didn’t know wh
at to do with.
As he rolled over onto his back, the voice spoke again, almost merrily, triumphantly.
‘Helluva focken shot, eh son? Trew it like the dagger guy at the circus: you know the girl on the wheel, in her spangling focken gymslip.’
And the cunt started laughing.
Yasser objected to his assailant’s merriment even more than to the assault itself. Sitting up in one movement, he waited out his vision as it swam through uncertainties, blurred lines and milky haloes to solid objects; and in a few seconds he squinted to see who had addressed him.
The light was only so-so. Moonlight helped, naturally, and there were patches of orange illumination spilling from makeshift streetlamps and from caravans. It was far from perfect. Nonetheless, Yasser recognised the man who was speaking.
‘Max.’
‘Helluva shot, eh?’
Yasser dared to prod his wound with a cautious forefinger. He inspected the tip: an apple core of blood, nothing more. The blood streaming over the hillock of his cheek had been in his imagination.
‘The fuck d’you do that for?’ Yasser asked.
‘He comes rattling onto our land and asks a bollocks question like that! Maybe you’d like to ask your girlfriend that question.’
Yasser examined the state of his palms. ‘Maggie’s not my girlfriend,’ he said.
‘I don’t mean Maggie. I mean the Paki girl in the car with you. Chasing Tommy as the man does an honest evening’s work, if you don’t mind.’
‘He’s playing cards. Jesus. That hurt, Max.’
‘The sting’s your pride. Now get up, y’cont.’
Yasser struggled to his feet. ‘He phoned you.’
‘Of course he phoned me. Are you under the impression that we’re still in the seventeenth focken century and don’t own a phone? Or is it the Pikey Telekinesis you’ll be chatten?’
‘What was it? What did you throw?’ Yasser asked, rubbing his head.
The man called Max was the third man who had met Yasser on the latter’s first visit to the camp. Max, Tommy and Maggie’s father had stood near Yasser’s car and tapped tools into their palms.
What had it been this time?
Max held out his right arm. In his fist was a spanner.
‘Devil of a focken shot!’
‘There was no need,’ Yasser complained.
‘He said you’d be coming.’
‘The cunt’s a psychic. There was no need.’
Max shrugged. ‘Uninvited on a man’s land? I’d say there was a need… Now tell me what you had in mind with Maggie.’
‘Surely that’s between me and her,’ said Yasser.
‘She and I,’ said Max. ‘And I won’t ask you one more time. Evan a man like me gets hungry for his bed eventually.’
Yasser smiled. ‘What was the question?’
Max stepped forward. ‘Don’t play me for a cont, son,’ he warned.
Some more lights twinkled on around them, and suddenly Yasser felt more scared than he had in a long time. The dog had ceased barking, he noted.
They were waiting for me.
Now they emerge from their caravans.
However, nothing of the sort occurred. Fingering the place where the chucked spanner had struck his head, Yasser turned on his expensive heels and continued to walk towards Maggie’s caravan. An instant of worry about the car flashed briefly (it would surely be trashed) but he ignored it. He moseyed on and Max said nothing.
But the cunt was laughing. Like a man with a bellyful of gas, he was laughing, a jolly, mirthful Santa for the tourists – the wanker. His laughs were like bullets into Yasser’s arse. Not even into his back: straight into his muscular butt.
Nerves awash with adrenalin, Yasser knocked on Maggie’s door, and it opened in less than five seconds. I’ve been expecting you, Yasser anticipated Maggie to say; but he didn’t hear this.
‘What the hell are you up to, Yasser?’ Maggie’s father asked, tying up the belt on his dressing-gown.
11.
Responding to a silent cue that Yasser did not intercept (a dart of Maggie’s eyes, perhaps), Maggie’s father had dressed and taken his leave of the caravan straight away. Or nearly: he had taken the precaution of informing Yasser that he was an inconsiderate twat before he’d pulled a leather coat on over his dressing-gown. He’d completed the look with a long red scarf and a pair of muddied wellies. The door had slammed; and though he had not said where he was going, Yasser had guessed that the destination would be Max’s. They would want to review tonight’s welcoming procedures.
Now, Yasser was alone with Maggie. The lights were on and two windows were ajar, and yet it felt close, cramped and hot – closer, more cramped and hotter than it usually did.
‘Would you want some tea?’ Maggie asked him. She was filling the kettle.
Despite the fact that Yasser knew Maggie’s tea to be on the verge of undrinkable – a wholly discredited brew – the offer at least felt like an invitation to a normal party. A mug of the foul stuff would at least seem friendly.
Yasser nodded his head. As he had on a score of occasions, he sat down near the table, but on this occasion the back of one chair had been reclined and was strewn with a sleeping bag, a pillow and a couple of ratty grey Fire Brigade blankets. Evidently this was where Maggie’s father laid his head of an evening. Partly out of respect, partly for a reason that Yasser failed to decode, he made sure that he did not sit on the bedclothes.
He watched Maggie as she prepared their tea. She was dressed in a purple dressing-gown of her own, cinched tightly at the waist. Her hair was a bedraggled nest of snoozy vipers, and about her was a faint aroma of curdled perfume; as she poured steaming water into two cups, Yasser attempted to deduce if she was wearing anything under the dressing-gown. She certainly had nothing on her slightly sooty feet… And perhaps it was an after effect of the hormonal tug that contact with his cousin customarily provided him with, but Yasser experienced the thrill of a horny recognition of Maggie’s rough diamond appeal. Unless it was relief, pure and simple: a half-hearted erotic reaction to having made it here tonight.
Then again, it might be brain damage.
Whatever the impetus, as Yasser allowed himself to relax, he was conscious of the inspissation in his boxers.
Maggie handed him a mug. ‘You’re gonna have a shiner,’ she told him. She pointed to the left side of her brow. ‘A black eye.’
Yasser knew what a shiner was. All he could do was nod his head, and Maggie sat on the opposite side of the table.
‘Nice of you to call,’ she said softly; she sipped her tea.
Having nothing to offer of his own, Yasser sipped as well. The wound to his temple throbbed on the offbeat to the pulse in his groin.
Maggie wanted to talk, however. She test drove another elicitation. ‘You were bacon bushed, boy,’ she said, grinning.
It worked.
‘I was what?’
‘It’s an old joke. Soldiers in the jungle somewhere, and they’re warned: Don’t go to the bacon bush, lads. But boys will be boys, as you well know; and two go out to find the bacon bush. And of course it grabs em and drags em in, never to be seen again. So two more venture out to rescue the first two – and they’re grabbed and pulled in. Munch munch. And so it goes… until the squad commander enlists some sort of local expert, who says: No. That ain’t a bacon bush. That’s an ‘ambush.’
Yasser wrinkled his nose. ‘Yeah.’
‘A ham bush, you see…’
Yasser nodded. ‘Yeah, I get it, Maggie. What the fuck’s going on?’
‘You’re asking me?’
‘Yeah, I’m asking you, because I’ve got doubts going through me like shit through a sieve.’
‘Nice image; thanks.’
‘I’m serious. I’m not getting anywhere finding your child, and what’s wo
rse is I can’t get any – enthusiasm from anyone, yourself included.’
‘I’m paying you, aren’t I?’
Yasser looked away. Once more the cat had lost his tongue. Balanced against the deadening notion of there being nothing more to do (his penis had shrunk), the action of sipping a vile beverage seemed delightful. It was something to achieve. And in fact… didn’t it taste somewhat better anyway? Could it be that he was getting used to the flavour?
‘Is this different tea?’ he eventually asked.
‘No. Yasser, I don’t know why you’re here, unless it’s just to see me.’
‘Then maybe that’s it.’ Yasser shrugged. ‘What time’s Tommy likely to be home?’
‘He’s my neighbour. I don’t control him.’
‘But based on previous experience.’
Maggie copied Yasser’s shrug. ‘Four, five… Depends if he’s winning. Depends how angry he gets if he’s losing.’
‘What does that mean?’ He gets angry?’
‘Well, what do you think?’ Maggie replied, a little sharply. ‘You’ve seen him.’
‘I thought it was a pose. Largely.’
‘Well it isn’t, largely or small-ly, I can assure you of that. I’ve seen him do damage, Yasser. Don’t make him a friend, whatever you do.’
Yasser smiled. ‘Not much chance of that.’
‘Well, no; not after your shenanigans tonight, for which he’ll want words, by the way… Who was the girl?’
‘My cousin.’
‘And your cousin’s been given the gift of a name, presumably.’
‘Shyleen.’
‘Pretty name. Pretty girl?’
Yasser nodded. ‘She’s all right, yeah.’
‘Kissing cousins, are you?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘And you’d like to make that twice a thrice, don’t tell me.’ Maggie’s eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘It’s all got you going tonight, be honest. You don’t think I saw what you boasted in your pants a moment ago but I did. So you’re either dreaming of her or me. Tell the truth.’