Kid Alone

by Simon Mason

  KHALID BALOCH: Gun?! Gun now, is it? All this is bullshit, man. I want that lawyer you talked about.

  DI SINGH: Okay, Khalid. By the time the lawyer’s here we’ll have got the forensics from the gun Pyotor had at the storage facility. If it was yours, we’ll know.

  [Silence]

  DI SINGH: If you withhold this information now, you’re putting yourself in a very difficult position. I won’t be able to help you.

  [Silence]

  DI SINGH: Think of your family, Khalid. Think of Sajid.

  KHALID BALOCH [weeps]: This is such bullshit, man. Got the shop trashed, yeah? Got beat up, right? Now I get hit with this. All right, he stole a gun. You picking on me for having a gun when I’m getting burglared all the time, when what you should be thinking of is why that weirdo kid wanted it.

  DI SINGH: When you found out he’d taken it, you challenged him, didn’t you, and he threatened to go to the police?

  KHALID BALOCH: You don’t understand nothing. He was so weird, that kid.

  DI SINGH: What did you say to him, then? Did you tell him to meet you somewhere?

  KHALID BALOCH: Nah, man.

  DI SINGH: Did you tell him to meet you at your storage facility?

  KHALID BALOCH: Nah, man. I swear.

  DI SINGH: What goes on at your storage facility, Khalid? Do you run storage for dealers in the city?

  [Silence]

  DI SINGH: We have a warrant, and we’re going in today. Before we find whatever’s in there, you should tell me what the situation is.

  [Silence]

  DI SINGH: All right, Khalid. We’ll find out for ourselves. In the meantime I want you to tell me what happened at your storage facility that night.

  KHALID BALOCH [holds head, weeps again]: Nothing! Nothing, I swear. It’s all bullshit. You don’t understand. All this burglaring. Abbu gets his leg broke. I’m getting all these phone calls. I got all this going on, and I can’t do it no more, I can’t … [Weeps, bangs desk]

  DI SINGH: Take it easy, Khalid.

  KHALID BALOCH: How many times the shop’s been done? Four, five times the last two months. What are the police even for? I can’t even get them on the phone, then there’s like thirty of them busting up my shop. You think that’s one of them coincidences?

  DI SINGH: Khalid, calm down! What are you saying?

  KHALID BALOCH: I’m saying about Sajid, I’m saying about Abbu, I’m saying about working! Man, I’m working hours I didn’t even know they had. And look at me here with my face all out. You don’t even know what it’s like to be broke. I can’t go on. It’s just bullshit. [Weeps, noise of desk being kicked]

  DI SINGH: Calm down now.

  KHALID BALOCH [stands, screams]: You think I’m not calm?

  DI SINGH: Enough. We’re going to take a break.

  KHALID BALOCH: You think I don’t know what calm is? I can see. I got eyes. It’s not me you should be on at! It’s him! That weirdo kid. You should be asking yourself what did he want the gun for, that’s what you should be asking. What weirdo stuff did he want it for? If it wasn’t for him, none of this would’ve happened! [Weeps, then silence]

  Location: kitchen, Flat 12 Eastwick Gardens: stale, early-morningish.

  Interviewer: Garvie’s mother: grim in her badly fitting dressing gown, tired.

  Interviewee: Garvie Smith: disheveled in shorts and T-shirt, braced for the worst.

  GARVIE’S MOTHER: I talked to Uncle Len when I got back from my shift last night. He told me what happened.

  GARVIE SMITH: Right. I just want to say—

  GARVIE’S MOTHER: So you were kept at the police station all yesterday afternoon?

  GARVIE SMITH: Yeah, but—

  GARVIE’S MOTHER: And you missed your exam completely?

  GARVIE SMITH: Yes.

  GARVIE’S MOTHER: [long silence, deep and unreadable]

  GARVIE SMITH: [equally long silence, wary]

  GARVIE’S MOTHER: And now you think I’m going to grill you as usual?

  GARVIE SMITH: Yes, that too.

  GARVIE’S MOTHER: Well, I’m not.

  She got to her feet and went over to the window and looked out at the sky, still pale and unripe-looking so early in the morning, and after a while she put a hand up to her face and brushed below her eyes with her fingertips. Garvie stayed where he was, watching her.

  “I can explain,” he began at last, and fell silent.

  “I know you can,” she said. “And I can tell you why you’re wrong. And then you can tell me how I’m being unfair. We’ve done it so many times I can probably tell you word for word what we’ll say, you and me both.” She turned from the window and shook her head. “Forget it, Garvie.”

  She came back to the table and sat down opposite him and looked at him carefully, her face very close, her eyes sad and damp.

  “I don’t think we need to do that bit anymore,” she said quietly.

  This was different. He hadn’t seen her like this before, so quiet and tired, as if all her usual spirit had been beaten out of her. It was hard to look at her, and hard not to look. He dropped his eyes and took a breath.

  “Look at me, Garvie,” she said, and he made himself look at her again.

  “Whatever it is you’ve been doing, it’s not what you should have been doing. But I’m done with telling you what to do. Get this now.”

  She was silent a moment and, looking at her, for almost the first time in his life he could not tell what she was going to say.

  “I’m asking you,” she said.

  Garvie just stared.

  She put her hand across the table and took hold of his. “I’m begging you. Please. Please, Garvie, do this for me. God knows there are all sorts of sensible reasons why you should do it anyway, but you know them all already. Do it because if you don’t, I’m telling you, you’re going to make me so unhappy. Okay?”

  It was a shocking moment, unlike other moments; it hardly seemed connected to their ordinary life. Garvie wanted to tell her to stop it, to shout at him as usual, to tell him what she was going to do to him if he didn’t get his shit together. But he didn’t say anything, wasn’t sure he could.

  She squeezed his hand.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she went on, “this overtime I’ve been doing, it means a bit more money coming in. I was thinking, maybe when the exams are over we could go away for a few days. Have a little holiday. We haven’t done that for a long time. You can decide where we go.”

  Still he said nothing. He had nothing to say to this. She blurred as he looked at her.

  “Of course,” she said softly, “maybe you wouldn’t want to go with me. That’s okay. I could give you some money so you could go with a friend. It’s not much to offer but it’s a treat.”

  Garvie took a breath, managed to nod.

  “Okay, then. Enough. I’ve said my piece. You get ready for school now.”

  He got to his feet and stood there, looking at her wet, defeated face.

  “Mum,” he said in a whisper.

  “It’s okay. You go on.”

  “Mum.”

  He couldn’t say anything else.

  “Go on,” she said again, but he came the other way around the table and hugged her silently.

  “Enough,” she said at last. “You’ll be late.”

  And finally he went.

  The day was fine. It got hotter; by late afternoon the whole illuminated summer package was on display, even in Five Mile. Sunshine and trees, breezes and flowers. At four o’clock the sun shone strongly on the highway and the car plant, on street and shops. It shone on the stacks of newspapers outside Jamal’s convenience store advertising the new headline of the local evening edition: DAWN RAID ENDS IN CHAOS. It shone too on Top Pitch at the Academy, where Garvie Smith lay on the thick green turf, smoking gloomily with Felix and Smudge.

  Smudge said, “No point in fretting now. It’s gone, mate. Get over it. Wasn’t your fault DI Psycho-Killer kept you in interrogation all afternoon.”

>   “I wasn’t interrogated, Smudge.”

  “Threw you in the dungeon, whatever. What does Queen Bitch expect? As excuses go, I think it’s pretty safe. I’m sorry, Miss Perkins, I was wrongfully detained by the police, my lawyers are acting on my behalf, I’ll let you know how the case develops.”

  Garvie ignored him. Miss Perkins had not in fact been impressed by his reason for missing his Eng lit exam. He didn’t think about that, however. He thought about walking to school that morning past Jamal’s and seeing the corrugated sheet of metal across the doorway, the squares of cardboard taped to the broken windows, the handwritten sign that said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. He’d seen Sajid’s face at an upper window gazing out at nothing, and a few minutes later he’d had a call from Singh. Very brief, very uptight. There had been an altercation at the police center, Singh said: Khalid had resisted detention and was currently in the hospital. Simultaneously the police had entered his storage facility in East Field industrial estate and found it full of secondhand toys, which Khalid had been collecting on behalf of a charity providing for homeless children in the Middle East.

  “He’d been scared to tell us because he’d heard of a friend who worked with the charity before, who’d been investigated under the Antiterrorism Act.”

  Unfortunately, Singh had added, Dowell had now instigated an investigation into Khalid on exactly the same grounds. Headlines had already appeared on the internet: MURDER SUSPECT A TERRORIST. In the meantime Jamal had confirmed that Khalid was at home on the night of the eighth, and Khalid was officially no longer a suspect, nor even helping police with their inquiries. Many papers still ran stories on the mystery of Pyotor Gimpel’s extra math tutoring, for which no tutor could be found. Hundreds of responses had been received to the official appeal for information, though none had yet proved useful.

  Singh had concluded his call to Garvie with an instruction: “Do not attempt to contact me again about this matter. Ever.”

  It was a mess. Worse, it felt like his mess. He remembered what his mother had said: that whatever he had been doing was not what he should have been doing.

  “We did warn you,” Smudge said. “You can always tell them by their eyes, the nutters.”

  Garvie sighed. He thought about his encounter with Dowell the previous afternoon. It had given the policeman enormous satisfaction. He’d left Garvie to stew for an hour or so before summoning him into his office to give him the benefit of his wisdom. He had seen it all before; naturally, he knew exactly what advice to give to a young man without aims, confused and troublesome, like Garvie. To hear him talk you’d think he’d been on earth for centuries, vampirelike, all-seeing, all-knowing: There was nothing in human nature that surprised him anymore. Smudge was right: The man was obviously a nutter. A useful one, though. He’d made it very clear that if Garvie persisted with the Gimpel case he, Dowell, would personally make sure Garvie was taken by secret-service jet to an unknown army base on a foreign island thousands of miles away and interrogated for the rest of his active adulthood at the public expense.

  Garvie sighed again. None of this was what really upset him.

  He lit another Benson & Hedges, lay on his back staring blankly at the blameless blue sky, and thought about his mother.

  This was what really upset him.

  She was putting her trust in him. He remembered, in unwelcome detail, their conversation in the kitchen, her badly fitting dressing gown, her wet face, the way she looked at him, the way she took hold of his hand. She was putting so much trust in him she was letting him decide for himself what to do.

  Smudge was telling Felix how he’d aced Eng lit, and Felix was saying he didn’t think Smudge could even spell Eng lit, let alone tell him what it stood for, and, tuning out their voices, Garvie lay there thinking about trust. You can’t put trust in a mathematical formula, Singh had said. It was true that trust seemed a lot more complicated than it used to. Singh didn’t trust him. Alex didn’t trust Zuza. What about Sajid and Pyotor—what bond of trust had existed between them? He concentrated. Could his mother trust him? For her sake, could he drop all the Pyotor stuff and pass some exams instead? That’s what he wanted to do. It was just that … as soon as he began to think about Pyotor he felt something tantalizingly close, a detail he couldn’t quite get hold of, the key to the whole problem. If only he could get hold of it, everything would fall into place; then someone else could do the rest, even Singh. He knew what the detail was. The violin. Or not exactly the violin: the space where the violin should be, the emptiness in the hands of a boy who sat on a bench in a school playground looking at Garvie with that familiar impassive expression.

  A boy sitting on a bench. His mother sitting at the table. Two images in his mind.

  He flicked his cigarette butt across the grass. Enough was enough. He would forget about Pyotor, forget about Khalid and Sajid, forget about Alex and Blinkie, forget about Zuzana too, in other words go home now, straightaway, at once, and put in the smallest effective effort necessary to pass three exams. As soon as he had thought this he felt better and got to his feet.

  And that was when he heard his name called.

  She came up the slope of grass with sunlight in her hair, smiling as she came.

  Smudge waved. He said in a low voice to the others, “Zuza’s been getting a bit friendly, boys, but it’s cool, it’s okay, I’m handling it. You know I’m not going to let Alex down, right? The important thing’s for me not to encourage her.”

  “Babe,” he called as Zuzana reached the top of the slope, “I’ve got to dig that whole slinky thing you’ve got going there. It’s powerful, girl. I mean, I don’t know if I’m strong enough to handle it.”

  “Hello, Smudge. Hello, Felix.” She looked at Garvie. “It’s good I find you here. I thought maybe I had to walk over to the little children’s playground.”

  “We’re here,” Smudge said. “Here we are. Garvie’s with us.”

  Still smiling, she took Garvie to one side. “I have heard from Bogdana. We can go now to see the things the police have returned. Come.”

  Garvie shook his head and she frowned at him.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “But they have things to show us. His clothes. His bag. They do not want to keep them, but if we go now we can see them before they are thrown away.”

  He hesitated.

  “They have his phone, though something has happened to it.”

  “What?”

  “I do not know. We must look.”

  He hesitated again. “Do they have the violin case?”

  “Yes, that too.”

  She smiled at him. She leaned in toward him and took his cigarette from between his fingers and took a drag herself, squinting at him through the smoke, and gave it back. Her face was close to his; it seemed very precise in the bright sunshine, her lips crisply shaped, her eyes dark, her skin pale against her black bobbed hair. Her chin was so neat and pure he didn’t know whether it would break rocks or shatter if he touched it with a fingertip. He imagined himself touching it. She pointed it at him.

  “Come. It is the right thing to do. For Pyotor. But we should go now or everything will be lost.”

  Behind him Smudge was saying something, but he wasn’t listening. For a moment he fought against himself, and they all stood watching him.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said, and they went down the slope together.

  They got off the bus at the stop by the tower blocks and walked westward across The Plain into a street lined with old trees and tall terraced houses, their front doors encrusted with buzzers and numbers, their small front gardens concreted over, overflowing with stringy city weeds and multicolored wheelie bins.

  Garvie had said nothing since they left the Academy. Now he turned to Zuzana and said, “You’re going to do the talking, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  They walked on. “They must be feeling bad,” he said after a while.
<
br />   If she was surprised at this unexpected touch of concern, she didn’t show it. “They are the same. They need our sympathy.”

  “Yeah, course. What can you say, though, about something like that?”

  “I can give them our good thoughts. I can tell them again how sorry we are for their loss, what a good boy Pyotor was, how hard it must be for them, and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. What I meant was, what will you say in Polish?”

  Now she was surprised. She looked at him blankly.

  “I want to hear what it sounds like.”

  “You are a strange boy,” she said.

  “Yeah, well. Humor me.”

  So, as they walked under the dusty plane trees, through the litter and weeds, she began to speak—Bar-zum me sheh-gram sto-vo-du—and an expression came into his face as if the language or the way she spoke the language both soothed and mystified him—though when, after a few minutes, she stopped, he said nothing at all, gave no sign that he’d even been listening, and she shook her head at him in silent bewilderment as they went on together, crossed into a third road, Strawberry Rise, and arrived at last at the Gimpels’ flat.

  Pyotor’s grandfather met them in the hallway. He nodded at Garvie and they followed him silently up the stairs to the second floor, their footsteps echoing on the bare boards. All the way up there was a smell of old rain and pets. At the door of the flat, Bogdana stood waiting. To Zuzana she seemed smaller than before, dark-faced. It was clear that she had been weeping. Without saying anything, she turned from them and moved away slowly, unsmiling, through the cluttered, curtained living room to her chair, and turned back to face them, where they stood awkwardly together in the half-light of the dim room, and there was a moment when no one seemed to know what to do.

  Making a great effort, Bogdana smiled hesitantly at Garvie and said, “Dziękuję za przybycie.”

  Zuzana opened her mouth to answer, but Garvie stepped forward and said, “Bardzo mi przykro z powodu Twojej straty, Dana.” He briefly put his hand over his heart.

  There was a moment’s astonishment, not least from Zuzana.