by SJ Bradley
‘My phone.’ Scrabbling through the gritty darkness inside his rucksack. It had a depth he’d forgotten existed. ‘Got my charger in here somewhere.’ Fanzines obscuring things with bent bat-wing covers; these had been new once, and not long ago, either.
‘Sam.’ A reluctance in her voice.
Guest tumbler on the table. Wet edges, leaving a ring on the letter he’d been writing. Flores. Suddenly, inexplicably, he was thinking of her, and of a summer spent at home, aged seven. Panzo had said they could go to a seaside and stay in a youth hostel to keep it cheap. But Flores had said no, and Samhain had felt the things he’d been promised slip away. Playing Outrun in the arcades. Flying a box kite on the cliff top. Chips salty enough to shrivel your cheeks. He had cried tears that had hurt him with their sourness, and hadn’t understood why. ‘You and me don’t need a man in our lives,’ she’d said.
It was one of those times when she’d sounded less certain. And, maybe sensing a crack, a crack he could get his finger inside and pull wide, Samhain had kept on about it. He had been old enough to think he could talk her around. By mentioning the things he knew she liked. A day to herself, as promised by Panzo. Evenings in the real ale pubs all the way along the main street. Where she and Panzo could go and have a few drinks, while Samhain stayed at the youth hostel, looking after himself, like he always did at home.
Samhain had kept on washing away at his campaign, and thought he was seeing her weaken. He followed at her heels up the stairs, up into her bedroom, talking about it. One last reason, he’d thought, one more reason to go, and then she’ll cave. Getting away from the estate for a few days was his strongest sluice yet: he was just about to deploy it, expecting her to say, ‘Well, alright then, we’ll go,’ when she’d turned, grabbed him by the shirt, and slapped him hard in the face. ‘I don’t want to hear about this again,’ she’d hissed.
At last, his hand was on it. The curved, heavy black plastic, the three prongs.
‘Sam,’ she said again. ‘I’m sorry about your mum.’
He plugged it in. Boxy screen and buttons glowed the colour of sickening larvae. ‘What’s there to be sorry about? Don’t worry about it.’ The numbers were mostly worn blank with use.
Texts from Roxy, days old.
Come and meet me from work?
Then:
Never mind. I’m at Matty’s now. Probably better if you don’t come.
Then:
Memory full. Messages waiting. Open text message folder to select messages to delete?
‘Big thing to get your head around.’ She was standing on the bed, shaking towels out of the window. ‘Unless you already knew about it?’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘No?’ She turned, knelt on the bed, rolling the towels into tight cylinders. ‘Here, girl.’ The cat let itself be propped forward, while she wedged a towel behind its back. ‘She’s big, alright. How many do you think she’s got in there?’
He touched the cat’s tum softly, the way he’d seen Mart do it, and felt around. ‘Three?’ he said. ‘No, four. Definitely four.’
‘Look, my friend goes to these meetings sometimes. It’s a sort of – support group. For the women affected.’
‘Women?’ Mama Cat had her claws out, sharp. Resting them on the back of his hand, as though experimenting with the idea of hurting him.
‘Yeah, mostly.’
‘I don’t know, Mart.’ He drew his hand away. Somewhere around the cat’s shoulder, their hands touched. Her skin was papery. Thin, from being washed too many times. ‘Who goes to it?’
‘My friend. Her friends. I don’t really know them. It’s sort of – half support group, half information and political campaigning. They could tell you more about your father.’
‘He’s not my father.’
‘Well. Ok. But you could go and meet them, at least. Aren’t you even a little bit curious?’
News spread fast, that was one thing Samhain did know, in their tiny, interconnected world of gigs and political protest. Keeping a secret was almost impossible, and this one – about being fathered by a cop – was something he could hardly even admit to himself. He was afraid that if he thought it too loudly, even, somebody might figure it out. ‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll find out for you.’
‘I’m not going if it’s at the club.’
‘Why not?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’ Turned back to his Nokia, looking at a backlit folder of memories.
Sure, what time?
And:
Are you in now?
And:
You about? Get down to Sainsbury’s big bin. They’re throwing out some good salads.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
‘What if it was at somebody’s house – would you go then?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Thing is, I’m not as bothered, Mart. Didn’t know my dad growing up, don’t know him now. I don’t need to know anything about him. He was obviously a dick, and that’s all I need to know.’
‘Sam... oh, hey! I can feel one of them moving. Quick, give me your hand.’
The full scrape of her skin, palm barked by disinfectant, and then something tiny under the fur, wriggling. Penny sized paws kneading against the belly. Mama Cat slanted in discomfort.
It was there, right under his hand. Life. Fighting to get out. ‘Wow, Mart. That’s amazing.’
‘Didn’t I tell you?’ In a moment, in those dark eyes, a gleam like stars. ‘Listen, Sam–’
The door opened with a bang, jolting the end of the bed.
They all three looked up: Him. Marta. The cat.
‘Whoops.’ Roxy was framed in the doorway, hand on hip. From the way she was standing, he could tell there was something he was meant to notice about her. ‘Didn’t mean to open it that hard.’ There was a lot of wear in those clothes, as though she’d come home in the same ones she’d been wearing yesterday, and probably the few days before that, too. Hair sticking up all directions.
‘Hello, Marta,’ she said.
8.
‘Here’s a little thing for you,’ Frankie said, handing him a glass. ‘Drank half a bottle of this yesterday, and lived. Cheers.’
Brandy, old. With a snakeskin of dried pink lipstick on the rim. ‘Frankie, that’s gross.’ Samhain was making stew on the one working gas ring, in a pot the size of a truck wheel. The other rings were all gummed and stopped up: when the heat rose, it brought with it a smell like warm corpses.
Frankie looked through the open door into the bar. A Roxy shaped zoetrope paced across the bar arch, staring angrily into her phone. She was wearing the look of a thousand fighting men on a hillside. ‘Listen, mate. Tell you something.’ He lowered his voice. ‘They’re not worth the trouble. Look how much bother you’re in with this one.’
‘I haven’t even done anything.’
‘I know.’ Frankie laughed softly. ‘Maybe not. But let me tell you. The only way to not get involved with a girl is not to get involved with her. See? You can’t go cuddling or–’ He screwed up his face, waving his glass in the air. Made a pinchy-grabby motion with his free hand. ‘–anything with them, anything at all, and definitely not sex. It leads to all sorts of trouble. Guarantee you they take it the wrong way. So take my advice, lad. You want a hassle-free life, don’t go sticking your knob in things.’ He drained off his glass.
‘But I like–’
‘No!’ Frankie’s words snapped around the hallway like a pop-gun. ‘I don’t want to know what you like and what you don’t like. Look, if you really must get into it with a girl, at least always use a condom. You’ll be in even more trouble otherwise. Sometimes they say they’re on the pill when they’re not, or even...’ Frankie scratched his crotch, and pulled a face. ‘You see? Look, a boy like you, you need a firm hand. You’ve got all these girls throwing themselves at you, God knows why, I suppose they find you attractive for whatever reason, and it’s hard to say no, right? But no good can ever come of it. Listen to this, rig
ht. When I was your age – and I’ve never told you this before, so listen carefully – I had these two girls on the go, this smart little blonde one with a mind like a sewer, though you’d never think it to look at her, looked like butter wouldn’t melt she did, and then this gorgeous one from Yemen, Sophia she was called, beautiful dark-eyed thing with lips like a bouncy castle, you know what I mean?
‘Anyway, the one of them lived in Derby and the other one here in Bradford. I thought to myself, I’m onto a good thing here. Got these two girls on the go and neither one of them knows about the other, and they’ll never find out, neither. Well. They soon did though, didn’t they?’
‘How?’
‘Well, they only both went and turned up to see me play in Sheffield, didn’t they, when I was playing with Ivor Cutler Heights? Sophia turns up and she says, Frankie, I wanted to surprise you, aren’t you pleased to see me? Well, it was a surprise all right. I went off to get the guitar cabs out of the van and while I was out there, Emma turned up as well.
‘So there they both were, while I was out there bringing in the drum stands and the guitar heads and all the rest of it. You can’t stop women from talking, that’s one of the other bits. They like a good yap. You can’t stop them from talking, and you can’t stop the angry ones from putting their keys through every single one of your drum skins. When they tell you having a girlfriend is expensive, that’s what they’re talking about. Because having one girlfriend costs one amount, and having two costs you more than twice that, know what I mean?’ He lifted his glass, and went towards the bar in search of another. ‘Anyway, so the last bit of it is, everybody was supposed to be using my drum kit. Three other bands, including this Crust D-Beat band from Sweden. Well, they couldn’t use it after that. Whole gig cancelled, and everybody mad with Frankie, not just the girls. An entire gig, all ruined by me and my stupid cock. Needless to say, they kicked me out of the band. Ended up going home on the National Express by myself.’
‘Bloody hell, Frankie.’
‘Yeah, well. If you ever want to read about it, Sophia did a whole article about it in her fanzine. It was her best-selling issue ever.’ Frankie lifted a bottle off the bar, and started pouring. ‘So, all I’m saying is, if you’ve got to have two of them on the go at once, right, at least be careful how you go about it. Don’t end up like old Frankie here – banned from every venue in Sheffield.’
Roxy stared out of the window, looking as though she were trying to cause David’s car to explode with her eyes.
Samhain rattled amongst the bottles behind the bar. Most were syrupy-sour; the whisky and vodka were both nearly empty – he looked around them, and found a bottle of dark rum. This, and the stew, went down him like a damp firework. He’d thrown half a bottle of oregano in the pot, yet all he could taste was twigs.
Every time he made stew, he had a fantasy that it would turn out like the one he’d eaten in Genoa in 2001. The nineteen-year-old Samhain, all in black, arriving in Italy with a bust card in his back pocket, and the idea that anything was possible. He had arrived hoping for a protest like the one he’d read about from G7, the previous year – where protestors had trapped delegates from the World Bank inside their meeting rooms.
He joined groups who had set up in a school building. The air smelled of garlic and tinned tomatoes; dogs ran around trailing string leads, drooling happily on their bandana collars, making pals of all new arrivals. Sam heard snatches of languages he didn’t even know existed. Hard-sounding vowels, a music of slippery consonants. The main hall sang and muttered with groups, planning in constant circles. Every classroom was full of people and their bags. Samhain had looked around at it all, and had known himself to be more at home here than anywhere.
A woman with a loose vest and no bra had a map of the centre of Genoa, a blurred thing that looked like a photocopy of a photocopy. Too small for them all to see it at once, so they passed it around the circle.
‘You’re new?’ said a man, with a sympathetic smile behind his whiskers. ‘Here. Wear this when we go out.’ He gave Sam a scarf for covering his face, and a pair of cheap swimming goggles. ‘You’ll need them, if the police use gas. Which they probably will. You’ve got a passport?’ Sam nodded. ‘Leave it here,’ the man said. ‘They can’t charge you if they don’t know who you are.’
They protested the next day, and Samhain somehow got separated from his group. He walked out into a street of thousands: you couldn’t even see the buildings. It took him a moment to take it in. Banners stretching street-side to street-side. From the stairs, all he could see were head tops, millions of them, bobbling in a hirsute ocean. No space, not anywhere, just arms and shoulders and faces and whistles, all crushed together by force of their sheer number. He looked at it all for a minute, then looked around for his new friend; to say, ‘Did you know it would be like this?’
Samhain had never seen a protest like this, a sea of a city. He looked around for the bearded man, but the stairs were empty. His friend, along with the rest of his group, had already vanished into the crowd. Everybody was in green: he had no hope of finding them again.
He went down the stairs, and was thrust into a crush of warm and wiry bodies. All around him started the Samba band. Timbales thundering in front and to either side, cowbells hammering every off-beat. Somebody gave him a whistle and a cowbell; he put the whistle in his pocket, and hit the bell every offbeat.
‘Just joined?’ The woman beside him beat her drum with good humour, and spoke to him without missing a beat. ‘Just follow us. To the city square – where we’ll stop.’ She paused, and joined the syncopated rat-at-at-at tum-tum fill. ‘And bring the city to a standstill. At least, that’s the plan.’
It was a little disappointing to miss the action he’d planned, but Samhain liked this nearly as much. The vibrancy and hilarity of it. The idea of stopping, not with weapons and banners, but with maracas and cabasas. He thought: nobody arrests a man carrying two musical instruments. ‘Great,’ he said.
Elbows. Ribs. Everything so close to him. A squashed pit, like being at a gig in the club. There was a pause, while the music stopped, and applause rose around. Then he heard the tap and snap of the drums starting, and almost without thinking, put the whistle in his mouth.
‘Here,’ the woman said, holding out a spliff. Her face was lined, aged, but he had a feeling she was probably no older than thirty. ‘There must be millions of us here. They can’t ignore us this time.’
She joined a bloom of song. Women’s voices: ‘This land, is our land. It belongs to you, it belongs to me.’ People dancing in whatever spot they could find, matching the melody to the samba rhythm. He was caught up, and started to sing too, with tears in his eyes.
‘This your first time?’ she said. A hand on his arm, softer than expected. ‘I know, boy. I know. What’s your name?’
Hours moving at the pace of penned cows. Still singing but trapped, stuck on all sides by the weight of their own protest. The band weren’t able to get to the crossroads when they were supposed to: they were still shuffling the streets by late afternoon, when the trouble started.
Crowd bucking in waves. Bodies thrown against one another like mussels in a pan. The singing had stopped, and in its place, screams. Samhain got up somehow, and saw a line of shining black helmets. The crowd was being crushed – pushed back into itself, trying to go back the way it had come.
A drum in his back. He could feel metal at his spine, the wing-nut pressing his vertebrae. He could have drawn it from that feeling.
‘Where are we supposed to go?’ she was screaming. ‘Where are we supposed to go?’
‘Get on my back,’ he said.
He ducked down, and the woman climbed on his shoulders. She was much heavier than his travelling bag, and he couldn’t see a thing. There was somebody standing right in front of him, with his back pressed right up against Samhain’s chest. He had his nose in the man in front’s hair, breathing in a smell like undipped sheep.
She was saying someth
ing to him, but he couldn’t hear what it was, and then the crowd suddenly gave way, and his lungs filled with what felt like glass dust. He was coughing, eyes shut and streaming, clutching for something to lean on, not wanting to fall and knock her off. Couldn’t see a thing and didn’t know where he was; the air around him was full of the sound of hacking. People gasping for breath. He fell to his knees, and landed with his hands on something sharp. Just before she fell off his shoulders, she sprayed a stream of warm piss all down his back.
Somebody grabbed his shirt, using the back of it to drag him to his feet. Rough voices in Italian – a grip from which he couldn’t struggle free. He spent what he thought was probably two days, and two nights, in a cell. Sometimes a cell and sometimes an interview room, which was slightly larger. In both rooms they bruised him. Once, in the interview room, an officer barrowed him off the chair from behind, and Samhain’s face hit the desk on the way down. While his eyes were closed, two men beat him with steel bars.
In the quiet moments, a tall, good-looking young officer with neat hair and tanned, Scandinavian-looking skin, kept on saying: ‘We know you were with Martine,’ and ‘Come on, you might as well tell us. Who else was in your group? What was your action plan when you came here?’
Back in the cell, Samhain ached whichever way he lay. Breathing hurt like a hundred grazed and open wounds inside. He knew it was a waiting game. Once they realised he knew nothing, they’d let him go.
Yet he was struck by the cop’s persistence. The guy asked the same question a hundred different ways. By the end of it, Samhain started to think – maybe I do know a Martine.
They let him go on what he thought was the second day.
He stepped out of the police station into drizzle and half-light. It was early morning, and they were already sweeping the streets. A street bug made its way towards him, with kerb brushes the size of tractor tyres. Mist landed on his hood in a light rain, and he thought: aw hell, I’ve missed everything.