“You liked that, didn’t you?” He scowled playfully and nodded at her.
“Yeah. It was brilliant.”
Jack stood up. His huge tanned body filled the room. As he took off his T-shirt, he caught Mia staring. He still had a good body. Beer hadn’t destroyed him yet. She licked her lips. He pouted and winked.
“Do you remember that night we met?” he asked staring into her big baby-blues.
“How could I forget?” She sipped slowly, seductively.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah… I loved watching you roll about in the mud, stealing all those points for us. They didn’t know what hit ‘em.”
“How you touched me.”
“And how you touched me,” she repeated his words slowly, in low husky tones.
“It was wild.”
“We can still be wild,” she said creeping towards him and resting her hand on his torso.
He flushed. He wanted her, more than ever, no, he needed her to persuade him.
“We need to do something drastic, don’t you think, to escape. We have to escape this place.” She ran her finger along his torso and up his chest, “We’re not dead yet. But we will be if we stay here.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I mean we’re still free from any real responsibility, like having kids,” she continued. “We can still do whatever we want.”
Jack laughed glumly, despite himself.
“Anything we want, to an extremely limited extent,” she joked. “Besides we haven’t got anything to lose, have we?”
Jack picked up a clean T-shirt off the laundry pile. He stared at it with sad eyes.
“I suppose all our clothes are looking a bit sorry for themselves now aren’t they?” She tugged on the damp and worn-out top she was wearing.
It was Jack’s.
“We need to get to Canada.”
“Canada, ay?” he repeated her word carefully, thoughtfully, as he flopped back down on the sofa and rubbed an unopened can over his forehead.
“Yes, Canada!”
“You know that’s £500,000 a head.” He clicked the can open and began gulping it down. “Where would we get that kind of money?”
“I don’t know…” She paused and sipped, gazing at the wall behind Jack’s head. “But what I do know is we have to go! We have to get the Hell outta here. This country wasn’t made for what… 200 million people and counting?”
“150.”
“Bull-shit. They’ve been saying that for years… Maybe we can do something with this.”
She pulled a gun from her purse. She had a huge smile on her face.
“My Ruger 9mm.” She was flashing her eyebrows up and down.
“Mia!” Jack said.
“What…” She smirked, eyebrows raised.
“You know what.”
“Oh come on! Wake up will you. We need to do something. It’s like you’re living in cloud cuckoo land.”
“Where’d you get it from?”
“A girl at work.”
“Which girl at work?”
“Don’t have a hissy fit, I trust her, all the girls bought one off her.”
“Did they now?”
“Yeah and we tested them too.”
“Really…”
“It’s not like I’ve used it… yet. But you know how hard it is to find our food and water rations, and I really don’t want to end up in the queues at the food banks. You don’t know what it’s like down there. I swear that stuff’s glowing.” She looked at the Geiger counter on the kitchen sideboard. “At least the stores still have some quality control… but… I guess it’s solved the obesity crisis though, ay?”
Jack laughed, beer sprayed out his mouth. Mia put the gun back in her purse.
“Jack, I want us to go.” She put her hand on his thigh. “I want us to find a way out.” She ran her hand up his thigh. “We have too. If we stay here, we’re dead, one way or another.”
At that moment there was a loud crack outside. They stared at the window, more gunshots, more screaming.
“See!” she said wide-eyed, her cheeks were glowing. Sweat was beading on her brow. She was coming alive. The alcohol was really beginning to work.
Jack tipped more beer down his throat as he imagined travelling to Canada. He actually liked the sound of it. He’d heard that Canada still had fresh air, a relatively smallish population, and a self-sustaining supply network.
“But it’s £500,000 a head. Canada’s borders are militia’d up. We ain’t getting in.”
“So are ours!”
“Yeah now,” he tried to soothe her with a soft, calm tone. “Now they’ve got guards patrolling. Canada’s had a shoot to kill policy since this all started. Besides £500,000’s just for starters, how’ll we survive once we get there? Canada’s expensive. Really expensive!”
“Like the compounds?”
“Worse.”
“How do you know for sure? Believe everything you read do you? Stop looking for problems,” she scowled.
He drank.
“OK fine,” he returned. “How are we going to get our hands on a million then? Tell me that?” He gulped down more. “Don’t you think everyone round here dreams of escaping?”
“No, I don’t. I really don’t. How can they? I mean really, what a thing to say!”
“OK then, whatever. Get me another, please.” He crushed the empty can in his hand.
Mia walked over to the fridge, staring up at the ceiling, head tilting one way then the other. She pulled on the fridge-door while scratching her cheek. She chucked a can at Jack and topped up her glass before sitting silently by the window, observing the streets below.
“We are going to get the money. We are going to escape,” she said over and over in a whisper to herself.
Jack knew it, he was willing it. While her back was turned, he allowed himself a smile.
The car battery began sparking, the tele blinked.
The train descended into the tunnel. Lights flashing. Darkness transforming into light. The young man just asked the question they grudgingly wanted to hear.
“Do you know him?” Jack asked.
The Hoodie and Mia were staring at each other mutely. An indistinct feeling rose in Jack’s pit. This really was happening. In the moments of darkness, he felt it. Jack knew, somehow. She was seeing him. She was hearing him.
“Mi? What are you thinking?”
Who knew their words would come to this?
The tele stopped blinking. The sparks died. Jack felt as though he had just woken-up, like the lenses of his eyes had been cleansed. He leant back and stared into space. His timeless-spirit was beginning to sense something he hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. A certain clarity of thought. He looked to Mia.
Two
“Filth,” the word was ringing in Ashley's ears as he paced about in his tiny bedroom. “Filth, filth, filth” the word was haunting him, tearing him down, along with the image of that idiot Preston. Shut the fuck up! Ashley ground his teeth and blinked to erase the visions filling his mind. He dropped down onto the edge of his bed and glared at his reflection in the dusty mirror. That fucking moron. Fuck. Ashley pulled his cap down, veiling his face in shadow. He peered beneath the rim staring up into the vacuum of his own eyes, scrutinising every inch, losing himself further.
Outside he could hear the military choosing healthy specimens out of the crowds that gathered every morning. He rubbed his face with his hand. The people were being shoved into the vans. All of them hoping to be chosen to work in the fields that day. Actually hoping to do the work of machines. A multitude of desperate voices calling: “Me, me, me,” hands up, pushing their way to the front. The overly-keen unwanted suffering rifle butts to their heads. Who knew they would work harder with a gun in their back for a pittance and a bowl of cereal. ‘Idiots’, Ashley thought as shots were fired into the air. Then there was screaming, more shouting, more gunshots, silence. He knew the routine. He’d been out there loads of times. His
Mother had forced him to ever since he was old enough to haul sacks. Bitch. There was no real school out here these days anymore anyway. It was all a pointless joke for the ones who weren’t totally backwards. He shuddered as he remembered the fields. Never ever again.
He looked down at his shitty-looking phone, he sighed. New electronics were a luxury. He only had this one because he bought it off one of the other dealers. If it weren’t for the compounds needing to communicate with each other, it would be almost entirely useless. But right now, he needed a distraction.
“Music on, volume twenty,” he ordered and chucked the phone onto the desk right in front of him.
Rap music filled the air. Sounds vibrated, bouncing off the walls and rippled through him. Yet, all he could hear was the tap, tap, tapping of the butterfly knife, as he practised continually revealing and concealing the blade. Silver glistened at the corner of his eyes. Every so often the blade twisted at just the right angle to blind him momentarily. A sun-ray caught, trapped, bounced, and diverted, passed from vision to non-existence, born to die. Just like us. The knife became an extension of his arm. The superficial boundaries separating the animate and inanimate blurred and disappeared. Something, he imagined, resembling the silhouette of a smirk lifted, fleetingly and almost imperceptibly, from the corner of his mouth as he fantasised about penetrating Preston’s stupid, dumbass chest slowly and carefully with the blade, his blood falling out in waves as he extracted it. But, even that thought couldn’t cheer him up for long, and just as soon the smile emerged, it dropped into oblivion, as if it had never been at all. Ashley scowled. That fucking twat. He’s ruined everything.
Nothing held the same appeal anymore: drugs, fights, petty crime, sex. His life seemed unreal, a figment of someone else’s ideas. Who was he? What was he? Thoughts bubbled from the recesses of his mind like methane emerging and expanding from the bottom of a frozen lake, as if eternally lying in wait, poised to poison the air above, forevermore, and he was most definitely poisoned now. There was no turning back. His world had shifted on its axis, only by a degree or so, but just enough to cast new light on his surroundings. Colours, textures, smells, everything was altered, nothing was sacred. His thoughts allowed him to escape his body and look down upon himself, his family, friends, home, the Estate, observing it all from the outside, as if he were an alien; and what he saw disturbed him. Abject despair. This was no home, he had no actual friends, no real family. What was family anyway? Just a word, a meaningless word, attached to some sort of false significance. Rivers of blood, are we not all merely bodies of water, he wondered? Not even islands? What are we becoming? And who does his so-called family pretend to love? Besides, what is love anyway? Love. He laughed glumly. It was just another meaningless word trying so pitifully to contain an emotion he had no real concept of, not really, that was so blatantly clear to him now. No one really knew him, no one saw him. All they ever saw was an image of him, like the reflection in the mirror, once removed from real sense, true feeling, the absolute. And what did he see? Residual self-images, an enigma, everyone’s alone, but no one was as alone as him.
Realisation precipitated a sudden loss of balance, intense vertigo. He felt as though he had been hurled into an abyss, causing him to awaken from the most profound dream as if rising from a coma that had lasted his entire life. His unhappiness knew no bounds. Freedom and escape were the only things worth anything, and, it seemed, the only things he couldn’t have. Escape from this city, these people, himself. Everything was hollow, fake, another form of entrapment and all of it was pulling him down into the depths of himself. The dregs of society laid bare, and oh how he saw it all now.
He began flicking the knife faster and faster and faster as he stared at his mirror-image. His reflection became a symbol of his imprisonment. Deeper and deeper meaning shone his misery back through the ghostly impression of his reality; stuck in a box, in a box, in a box. Nailed into place every night, a victim of circumstance, and no one even knew the reason why. An unknown face stared back at him, revealing distant and hidden despairs. He couldn’t quite tell which version of him was real. He glanced down at his hands. They felt like clouds, a thin vapour which could be lost in the faintest breeze. They no longer belonged to him. He was already dead. The knife could, at any moment, become disentangled and slide right through him, signifying nothing. What the fuck was going on? Why me? He blinked and shuddered. I have to get out of here. Thoughts fizzed in his mind like bubbles in a shaken coke bottle.
Last week was supposed to be a pre-run, a mission to ease them in slowly, something simple to give the gang confidence in Ashley’s meticulous planning. But Preston… that total… He often imagined Preston’s Mother had been bitten by a Zika-mosquito when she was pregnant with him, but that thought was no solace to him now. Ashley squeezed the knife handles together as the memory of Preston’s stupid voice echoed through his mind in short bursting hallucinations. Crimson drops slid down the metallic surface and fell onto the carpet, drying instantly in the heat of the day. Visions of the boys running away empty-handed permeated his mind. Running away to the stolen car. Everything had been going to plan, all until that knob-head Preston lost his nerve, like the pussy he always knew he was. What was worse, Ashley had caressed the cash-box with the tips of his fingers as he pointed his replica Glock in the face of the shop assistant; but: “filth….” The ringing still pierced him now. Marc and Dwayne legged it. Ashley had no choice but to follow.
In the car, Ashley gaped through the back window scanning every inch of the road as they skidded away.
“Where are they?” he yelled, almost foaming at the mouth.
“What?” Preston stuttered, turning round to look at Ashley.
“Where the fuck are the patrols?”
“Down the street.”
“Where?” Ashley demanded.
“On foot.”
“You’re an arsehole, Preston. There ain’t no soldiers, not here, not now, not ever.”
“You’re the arsehole, Gash.” Preston pulled off his balaclava as Marc steered around a corner. “There were fucking patrols.”
“Where the fuck are they now then?” Ashley pointed the replica at the back of Preston’s head.
He had to bite his tongue until he drew blood not to smash Preston’s head in with the gun.
“You’re lucky that thing ain’t real,” Preston warned.
“Why? What would a pussy like you do?” Ashley said as he began forcefully and slowly tapping the back of Preston’s skull with the gun.
“You’re a fucking psycho, Gash,” Marc bellowed. “Put that thing down.”
Fuck them, Ashley thought as he leapt up and paced about in his tiny bedroom. How he wished he had acquired the real gun before that night. He would already be gone. They would be dead. Shit. A nuclear energy was boiling away inside him. His body was seething. His skin could almost slide off of his bones. How was he going to convince them now? No one would listen to him. He knew that without Preston they had the intelligence and muscle to pull the next job off, the real job, the only job that mattered. Time was running out.
Three
Someone was knocking at the front door. Ashley shouted at his phone: “music off.” He stood up and pressed his ear against the bedroom door. He heard muffled voices, spasmodic laughter. The sounds grew longer, more sarcastic. There was another voice. It was higher pitched, younger. He couldn’t quite place it. There was a stomping which grew louder. His door flew open, nearly smacking him in the face.
“You’re supposed to knock, dickhead,” he spat, twisting his face into a look of vengeance, teeth on display.
He was still holding the knife, ready for the fight.
“Whoa bad boy,” his sister mocked, widening her eyes, putting her hands up, and stepping away from him. “Calm down, Psycho.”
“Idiots,” he muttered, turning away from her, dropping his arms and shoulders.
He closed up the knife and smashed it down onto his desk, then fell back onto
his bed. He slumped forwards, leaning into his knees and glared up at her. She laughed at him viciously, infecting his other brain-dead sisters down the hallway. The mocking sounds reverberated through him. What did he ever do to deserve them? He bit his tongue and breathed deeply through his nose. You’ll be gone soon, he kept telling himself. Stay calm.
“You have a visitor,” she smirked, hanging on the door and swinging into the room.
“Who?” he barked, scowling at her.
Her gross perfume was making him sick. Someone, with obviously no sense of smell, was concocting it somewhere in the Estate for idiots like her. He was surprised she wasn’t covered in a hideous rash, like some of the others. Why did he have to suffer like this? He pursed his lips.
“You’ll see,” she said mysteriously, sauntering off down the hallway.
He listened. There were hushed snippets of conversations. Laughter. Moments later a pretty young blonde girl appeared in his doorway. She was dressed in a black overcoat, it hung open. Underneath he could see a pristine school uniform.
“Oh,” he said in surprise. “What’re you doing here?”
Cold sweat oozed from his pores. He lost track of his thoughts. He pulled off his cap and fanned his face, looking wildly about the room. He leant forward and slipped the knife into a drawer.
“Come in gal,” he said replacing his cap. “And take that thing off.”
He stepped towards her and took her gently by the hand, pulling her in, and closed the door. He hung the overcoat on the back of the door. A mute power emanated from her. She intrigued him. It was a far cry from everyone else he knew. He fell on the bed and looked up at her.
“What you up to gal?” he asked. “Why’d you come here for? Had enough of Elise and the pinheads, eh?”
“Er… No,” she answered timidly, rolling her foot about on its ball and staring at the carpet. “I just wanted to see you, that’s all.”
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