Bad Traffic

by Simon Lewis

  It was only a duck. It looked at her with beady eyes, then screeched again. More were approaching, geese too, and they took up the refrain, calling her stupid, calling her mad, telling her about the corpses up the road. She shouted at them to stop, then threw up into the rushes. Ducks hurried to investigate the spatters of vomit.

  She dropped to her hands and knees and her fingers sank in cold mud. Those poor people. She imagined being curled up in total darkness with panic prickling as the air grows thinner. A feeling like your lungs being pinched, and that grip growing harder, and you bang on the metal walls for help, suck hard but no air comes, your mouth wide open with chest heaving and still no air, scratch at the metal and the sound echoes, rasping, your eyes bulging, lungs burning and still nothing to breathe. Get me out get me out get me out.

  An instinct to hide joined a sense that she must punish herself. She crawled into the reed bed, the stiff stems crackling as she pushed them aside. Her hands splashed in murky water. Ducks waddled towards her, quacking away, patient, monstrous. This was ridiculous. Cruelly her distress had been robbed of dignity. It occurred to her to get out of the reeds, but she did not want views, she did not want to see the quaint village – the sight would be as mean as the ducks.

  She was so alone. Everything had gone wrong. She couldn’t be here any more. She had to be home. An image rose of her stolid and reassuring father, a man who knew what to do in a crisis. She fumbled out her mobile and called him with trembling fingers. The ducks mocked her as the phone rang and rang at its own unhurried, infuriating pace. Her breathing had still not settled and she cried out between gasps, ‘Baba bang wo… Daddy help me, please, help me. Pick up please, help me, pick up, daddy help me.’

  Her quacking, she felt, was only adding to the general uproar. She was a duck, too, a stupid creature, lost far from shore.

  ‘Daddy, help me, help me. Help.’

  Her hand was wrenched back. She dropped the phone and it splashed into the water. Black Fort picked it up. He took the battery out and put it in his pocket. He held tissues out towards her.

  ‘Look at you, you’re filthy. We’ve got to clean you up.’

  She hurried away, thrashing through the reeds, and he waded after her.

  ‘Hey babe, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Come on.’

  His soft voice, so reasonable and persuasive, was comfortingly familiar. But something awful had happened and she wasn’t sure if she really knew him any more.

  ‘Babe, this isn’t helping.’

  She stumbled onto the village green. The bus was approaching. She waved at it.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry you freaked out. Let’s sort this out. What do you think is going to happen? Come on. You’re my girl. You’re angry, you’re confused – at least give me a chance to explain. Let me take you home. Come on.’

  The bus stopped and the door opened. He stood by the war memorial, hands open, palm uppermost. She backed away.

  ‘You’re my girl. I’m your man. Talk to me.’

  She crossed the road towards the bus.

  ‘Where are you going to go in that? You don’t even know where it’s headed.’

  He pointed at his car, parked by the pond.

  ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’ There was no hint of pleading or desperation in his voice or on his face. His tones had a numbing effect. He sounded so fair and practical. Was she just being silly again? The last time she had jumped to conclusions, she had made a dumb mistake.

  The bus driver scowled at her. ‘I can’t sit around all day.’

  Black Fort, strolling across the road towards her, called, ‘You look a state. And look at me. I’m covered in shit. Let’s clean up together. I got more tissues in the car. At least let me take you home.’

  The bus driver said, ‘How about you have your tiff on your own time?’

  Black Fort said to her, ‘Give me the chance to explain. Just a chance.’ He held out a hand.

  ‘You getting on, or not?’ said the driver. His passengers looked at her with annoyance.

  What did she think she was going to do – just head off into nowhere, on her own? She didn’t have anywhere to go and she didn’t have anyone else. He slid a match into his mouth. The familiar gesture served more than his words to sway her.

  ‘Come on, babe.’

  She grasped his hand and he squeezed gently. The bus door closed with a whoosh of compressed air and the bus lumbered off. She took his tissues and began to wipe her face as he led her away.

  ‘Who were you calling?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘Yeah, that would really help – get the Chinese police involved.’ He pointed at her chin. ‘You’ve missed a bit. Actually, you’ve missed a lot. Look at my shoes. They might be ruined. Have you got wet? I’ve got soggy feet.’

  The ducks were waddling after her again. He shooed them away. ‘They just want to get fed. I owe them a favour, though maybe I wouldn’t have found you if it wasn’t for their racket. I’ll throw them some breadcrumbs tomorrow. You really scared me, you know. I thought you’d lost it.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it when we’re cleaner, okay?’

  He opened the car door for her, and climbed into the driver’s seat. She took the bottle of water out of the side door and rinsed it round her mouth to wash out the taste of vomit.

  ‘You silly thing. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.’

  He shook his head, as if at an errant child, then punched her in the face. Her head snapped against the side windscreen. Dazed, she tasted coppery blood in her mouth. Watery sick dribbled down her chin. She blinked and groaned, ‘What?’

  He slid behind her and got an arm around her neck and pulled her back. A man came out of the ditch and opened her door. He grabbed her arm and rolled up her sleeve. A hypodermic needle glimmered. Her eyes widened. The arm was pinned.

  ‘Don’t fight it,’ hissed Black Fort.

  His arm around her neck was choking her. Her feet lashed in the footwell. She felt a jab on the inside of her elbow, and she gasped and shuddered as a wave of numbness crashed over her and she filled up with white noise. Her heavy head drooped.

  She was swimming in a drowsy dreamland. The vehicle was moving and she seemed to be flowing with it. Lights blossomed and swirled. Now he was talking on a mobile. The words seemed to drift towards her from a great distance.

  ‘I’ve got the girl. Kevin, stop panicking – it’s fine. Get the container in the barn but leave it on the flatbed. I’ll straighten it with the snakeheads. They won’t kick up a fuss, this shit happens all the time. Nobody is calling anything off. Everything is fine.’

  It was all coming to her as if she were a mildly interested observer of herself. She knew she should be feeling something, but she didn’t feel anything. Her body was made of hot jelly. It occurred to her that she had been probably been given heroin and she was pleased to have worked that out. The numbness was coming in waves, higher and higher, she would soon be subsumed. He kept barking into the phone.

  ‘No, no, Kevin, you listen. We need an earth mover. And twenty bags of lime. From different suppliers, no big orders. Yes, a digger. No paperwork and you pay cash, see if you can blag it off a mate of a mate, have a story set, I don’t know, you’re putting in a patio or something. We rip up the ground behind the house, it won’t take a couple of hours, chuck them in, lime it, done. It’s a morning. In a couple of weeks, we concrete it over. No drama Kevin, it’s fine. Tell the others, and don’t let anyone leave.’

  A wave took her and she knew she was not going to stay awake for the next one. She groaned.

  He turned to her and started talking. She knew that he was talking to her because his eyes were looking at her. They were large eyes and a shade too pale. She had always liked that.

  ‘You know something that could put me away for life. Fifteen, twenty counts of manslaughter. I can’t have you holding that over me. Sorry, babe.’

  He talked on, but she could no longer make
out what he was saying. A comfortable stillness settled, then her senses dimmed to nothing.

  (73

  Wei Wei woke. Her blackout had been a dreamless pit, and she had not yet fully crawled out of it. Her mind was slow and memory hazy.

  She lay on a mattress, facing faded wallpaper. Over the regular pattern of repeated flowers a second design of random blotches of mould was imposing itself, and soon the mould would win. Her attention groped outwards. The thin mattress had no sheet or pillow. It lay on a wooden floor and there was no other furniture in the drab room.

  She knew she was in a lot of trouble and ought to do something about it. But mental effort was a terrible strain – she was pulling a dead weight that wanted to drag her back to the pit. First, it was necessary to be aware that she had been drugged. She knew all about strange states brought on by chemicals, the trick was to know when the drug was talking. Just because she did not feel alarm did not mean the situation did not merit it.

  Black Fort lay behind her, spooning, and she grew aware of his murmuring voice. He seemed to be talking half to himself.

  ‘That – what you saw – that wasn’t anybody’s fault. These things happen. It was just bad luck. Teething trouble. Too many of them maybe… customs delays… whatever.’

  His hands dabbled in her hair.

  ‘It’s a headache to sort out, but once the route is in place the money rolls in. There is so much money in it. More than drugs, more than girls. There’s money in it like you wouldn’t believe. I can’t tell you how excited I am. I’m going to be big-time. Premier league.’

  Often she had lain with him in the dark and listened to his dreams and ambitions, stated in a low and level tone, just like this. She mumbled his name. He started to kiss her neck. He always started around there or along the jaw, a preliminary circling before tackling the lips.

  ‘I wanted to tell you. I wasn’t excited just for me. For both of us. I had so many plans.’

  She said, ‘Love you.’

  ‘I love you too. Love your skin, love the way you move, your eyes, tits, everything. So it’s such a pity I have to do this.’ He ran a hand across her breasts. ‘Tell me your Hotmail password.’

  ‘What?’

  His fingers tapped out the syllables on her cheek as he said, ‘Tell me your password.’

  She felt him slipping off her trainers and socks. The mould on the wallpaper came into focus. She had always been quick to feel disgust and it came now. Fear and despair followed. Emotions were beginning to return, she was re-inhabiting herself.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You can’t just disappear. Not with that influential daddy. I don’t want some Chinese cop fretting, making calls, kicking off investigations. I figure on sending Daddy emails from your account. Sorry I didn’t ring, my phone is playing up, weather is this, my marks are this, the food is rubbish. I like emailing, it’s cheaper, let’s do it like this from now on. Only need a couple of months, I’d say – long enough to cover all traces, but you know what? I really don’t think he’ll ever notice.’

  He wrapped tape around her ankles.

  ‘I won’t help you. You want to kill me.’

  He whispered into her ear. ‘I don’t own a gambling club. It’s something else. There are girls there. These girls, they do okay, but first they need persuading. They need to be broken.’

  He bit down hard on her earlobe and she cried out.

  ‘I know a lot of ways to persuade people. You’ll agree to whatever I want. You’ll give me your password.’

  The pain blew through her befuddlement.

  She said. ‘I won’t help. I won’t help. Please, just let me go. Let me go and I won’t say anything. I promise. Why? Please. Darling. Baby. No.’

  He taped her wrists together behind her back and ran tape from there to her ankles. She was trussed up like a fowl. ‘You know the first thing we do when we break someone?’

  He slid a gag over her mouth and fixed it carefully.

  ‘We give them time think about it.’ He planted a kiss on her nose and left the room.

  (74

  As the drug wore off, the pain in her jaw grew bothersome. Despair stole over her but she pulled herself out of it by trying to think practically. There was no give in the tape, but she discovered it was possible to shift herself by small degrees if she lay on her side and wriggled. She slid off the mattress and experimented, moving around the room, and gritting her teeth when she banged her head or shoulder. The only break in the wall was a plug socket and she could not think of any way to make it serve her. There were no useful splinters jutting out of the floor or the skirting board.

  It occurred to her that there was a great deal she needed to think about, primarily what she could say to make him change his mind. But these musings led to others, distressing or irrelevant, such as how this could happen, what could have made him like this, how ridiculous she was. The situation could not be as simple as it looked. It was impossible to accept, for so many reasons. How could she fall for such a man? How could her instinct be so wrong? How could a man who had loved her do this? So in her mind it grew many complications. He had gone temporarily mad, was being manipulated or blackmailed, had been replaced by an evil twin or doppelganger. Perhaps this was some kind of test.

  As the hours stretched on, her mind ran over and over the same territory, and she grew irritated with herself. She was tired and thirsty. Her mental and physical labours began to look pointless. There was only waiting and discomfort. Subtle signs convinced her that a rat was in the room, and she began to listen out for it. She drifted into troubled sleep. When she woke the gag was like gravel in her dry mouth and the pain in her jaw insistent.

  A moth settled low on the wall and it was interesting to watch. There was something like a silver dust on its wings, she had not noticed that about moths before. She passed into a light-headed state of acceptance and clarity. He was a cold-hearted killer and she a silly little girl. She’d lived under a set of foolish illusions and was now paying a price. What shit she talked, believed, did. It was a shame that she was not to be given a chance to redeem herself. She had made a mess of a great many things.

  She believed she heard voices and engines outside. She seemed to hear a man call, ‘Chinky dinkies! Let’s be having you.’ It was incredible that there were real people, just out there beyond the window. She must be clever and find some way to use this. She forced her way towards the window and made as much noise as she could by banging her head and knees against the wall. But the vehicles departed, and she was left alone to her well of fear and pain, tired and defeated.

  Her thoughts grew impossible to control. Sometimes she wanted to giggle. The fact that the password he was after was his own name, for example, could be seen as drily amusing. She thought about her mother and her father and listed in her head all the things that she wanted to do. It struck her that many interesting thoughts had occurred to her and maybe this was just one of them. There were more rats now, though they were cunning enough to stay out of view.

  Aches and pains and the rage in her throat made it impossible to complete a thought, though many were begun. Each minute was tediously the same, a cycle of pain, despair, hope, worry, thirst, exhausting and unstoppable. She wet herself, and was annoyed that she had not done so away from the mattress. She began to black out, for a few minutes at a stretch. Waking, and realising where she was, was awful, each time worse than the last. Once she thrashed furiously, and banged her head on the wall, first by accident, then deliberately.

  She watched the wallpaper darken. Another night was coming, perhaps her third. She slipped from nightmare to reality and back again. The floor was thronged with rats, a great sea of them writhed, if she slept they would gnaw her. Her stupefied gaze took in a slither of moon, mocking shadows, a phone smeared with blood, a curlicue of hanging wallpaper, a pair of basketball shoes. Her eyes closed and coloured shapes ebbed and flowed. Her eyes opened, and the shoes were still there. Black Fort helped her up, slipped down her gag
and poured water between her flaking lips.

  (75

  Wei Wei leaned against the wall with her mouth open, and water splashed over her chin. When she began to choke, instinct brought forth effort, and she coughed and swallowed. Her stomach tightened as the water hit it, and it was a surprise to her that her body still had the strength to manage that response.

  He held her head steady as she drank. That soothing trickle was like a thread sewing her back together again. As her senses gathered, she grew aware of moonlight filtering through the window, and saw in its pale glow a dragon-shaped pendant of green jade. She knew it well, had often rubbed it. His face above held no expression, and she observed the familiar line of the jaw and the birthmark. Her eyes were always drawn to that mark – it made his face more interesting. She had tried to make him see and he never understood. His skin was soft and clear. She wondered at her own mind, that it could bring up these irrelevancies, and reminded herself that he was not her lover but her torturer.

  Hot fluid touched her lips and a metal spoon tinked against her teeth. Perhaps he was trying to poison her. She clamped her mouth shut and wrenched her head away and the liquid dribbled down her neck.

  ‘It’s soup,’ he said, and showed her the polystyrene cup. She licked her lips and tasted tomato. Patiently he tried again and this time she let the spoon enter and tip. Creamy smoothness filled her mouth.

  ‘Okay, here it comes again. Open. Careful. Slowly. There we go.’

  Her spirits stirred. He spoonfed her so tenderly that the intoxicating thought grew that things were back to how they were – perhaps, after all, he was the man she knew. It was such a delicious hypothesis that she did not dare test it until the cup was finished.